The Long Descent (19 page)

The same factors also make it hard to support the popular notion that stockpiling precious metals or other valuables will make the stockpilers exempt from the consequences of decline and fall. This strategy has been attempted over and over again in recorded history; the one thing that can be said about it is that it consistently doesn't work. Every few years, for example, archeologists in Britain dig up another cache of gold and silver hidden away by some wealthy landowner in Roman Britain as the empire fell apart.
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Such caches are usually not far from the ruins of a Roman villa that shows signs of having been sacked and looted by the barbarian raiders that ended Roman civilization in Britain.

As a working rule, if your value consists of what you've stockpiled, you can assume that an unlimited number of other people will be eager to remove you from the stockpile so they can enjoy it themselves. However many you kill, there will always be more — and eventually your ammo will run out. Of course, it's also more than a little relevant that you can't eat gold or silver — or do much else constructive with them. The fetishism that makes precious metals precious in our present society may not survive the sort of prolonged brush with ecological reality that the limits to growth will most likely bring.

The temptation to rely on stockpiles of food, technology, weapons, or precious metals to get through the impact of an age of decline is, among other things, a natural product of modern ways of thinking. For two centuries, as a result of the vast energy resources we've extracted from the Earth, machines and their products have been cheaper than skilled human beings. The result is a habit of valuing things over skills and, ultimately, a “prosthetic society” in which we're taught to neglect our innate abilities and then pay for technological replacements. We use day planners instead of training our memories, buy bread machines instead of learning to bake, watch television instead of using our imaginations. So many people have come to think that the best way to deal with anything is to buy enough of the right product that it's natural that they attempt to deal with the twilight of industrial society in the same way — natural, but fatal.

Once the fragile legal frameworks that give the concept of “ownership” its current meaning break down, stockpiles of wealth or weaponry become an invitation to seizure by governments as well as less officially sanctioned thieves. Those whose value consists of things they can do and teach, on the other hand, give everyone a reason to leave them unharmed. This latter strategy, unrealistic as it looks from the modern world's viewpoint, has worked consistently in the past. The success and survival of Christian monks in Dark Age Europe is paralleled by that of Buddhist monks in the bitter wars of the
Sengoku jidai
period of medieval Japan, Taoist priests and hermits in the repeated disintegrations of imperial China, and many other people who have embraced strategies based on the value of knowledge in past ages of collapse. Even in the pirate havens of the 16th century Caribbean, among the most brutal and lawless societies in recorded history, physicians, shipwrights, and other skilled craftspeople led charmed lives, because everybody knew their own lives might depend on access to those skills at some point in the future.

Finally, even collapse events with extreme depopulation, historically speaking, leave five to ten percent of the former population. To put that in perspective, if you live in a town of 100,000 people, there will be 5,000 to 10,000 people still living there after the dust finally settles two hundred years from now. Your children, their children, and the grandchildren of their grandchildren will have no trouble finding mates of their own. Thus the entire survivalist strategy depends on a mistaken assessment of the challenges ahead, and it directs energy where it's not needed while missing the places where effort can have constructive results.

Lifeboat Communities

One of the ironies of the current predicament of industrial society is that many of the people who recognize the problems with each of the previous approaches turn to a third option that combines most of the problems of both. For decades now, one of the most frequently repeated proposals for doing something about the predicament of industrial society has been building lifeboat communities: isolated, self-sufficient settlements stocked with the resources and technology to survive the end of the industrial age. Such 1970s classics as Roberto Vacca's
The Coming Dark Age
discuss such communities in detail, and these discussions have been picked up and expanded substantially over the last decade or so.

Now, to some extent, this sort of thinking is simply a variety of Survivalism Lite, with more emphasis on organic gardening than automatic weapons. One of the advantages of survivalism, though, is that it can be pursued on a very modest budget. Probably more than half the adults in North America today can afford to fit themselves out with a few firearms, some outdoor gear, a stock of stored food, and a cabin in the woods that can do double duty as a deer camp during hunting season. Plans for lifeboat communities in circulation these days are on a much more grandiose scale. –Vacca's book, for example, suggests lifeboat communities on the scale of large villages, with multiple buildings, plenty of arable land for food crops, and stockpiles of useful technology. Others resemble nothing so much as an upper middle class suburb tucked incongruously away in some isolated mountain valley.

The historical model Vacca uses for his communities are the monasteries of the Middle Ages. This is potentially a valuable parallel, because monasteries have accomplished something very like Vacca's prescription in the twilight years of several civilizations.
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During and long after the fall of the Roman Empire, Christian monasteries served as living time capsules in which many of the treasures of classical culture stayed safe through the centuries. Buddhist monasteries filled the same function in Japan's feudal age, and Buddhist and Taoist monasteries took turns doing the same thing through China's repeated cycles of imperial boom and bust. It's by no means impossible that some similar project could salvage the best of modern civilization as a legacy for future ages.

Yet monasticism accomplished these things because it drew on motivations very different from the ones that drive today's lifeboat community projects. The Christian monasteries that preserved classical culture through the last set of dark ages were not staffed by people trying to maintain some semblance of a middle-class Roman lifestyle while the world fell apart around them. Quite the opposite — the monks and nuns who copied old texts, taught at abbey schools, and kept the lamps of Western civilization burning, voluntarily embraced a lifestyle even more impoverished and restricted than that of the peasants among whom they lived. The same point is equally true of the Buddhist and Taoist monastics who accomplished the same vital task in other places and times. Arguably, it's precisely this willingness to embrace extreme poverty for the sake of higher goals that frees up the time and effort needed for the economically unproductive activities needed to keep the heritage of a civilization alive.

While the monastic model is still often cited in talk about lifeboat communities, a less challenging set of cultural narratives provides the unstated framework for most of these projects. In North America, from colonial times on, groups of disaffected people from all corners of the religious, political, and intellectual continuum have set out to build communities in the wilderness to prepare for the coming of a new world.
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A direct line of cultural continuity runs from the Rosicrucian communes of colonial Pennsylvania straight through to the Transcendentalists, the Mormons, and every other band of dreamers who convinced themselves that a better world could be reached by the simple expedient of following Huck Finn's example of heading out into the Territories and building it themselves.

This model had its most recent workout during the backwash of the 1960s. Many people alive today remember what happened when large numbers of white, middle-class young people left the urban centers where the counterculture had its roots and tried to build a new society in communes scattered across rural North America.
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It was a grand experiment but, on the whole, a failed one, and the root cause of its failure is instructive.

That root cause in most cases was a fundamental lack of recognition that rural life involves a great deal of very hard work. Of the many thousands of young communards who headed back to the land, few understood how much sheer muscular effort it takes to grow one's own food and provide the other necessities of life; even fewer had the most basic skills needed to tackle that technically complex and demanding task. Subsistence farming is a more than a full-time job; it requires firm command of a range of technical skills most middle-class people these days have never encountered, much less had the opportunity to learn. A little pottering around in garden beds with a copy of a half-read book in one hand doesn't even begin to do the trick.

Critiques of industrial society have proliferated in recent years, but few of them deal with the fact that life in an industrial economy powered by abundant fossil fuels really is much easier than subsistence farming in nonindustrial conditions. When this awkward reality collided head on with the 1960s' idyllic fantasies of living the good life in the lap of nature, the fantasies came out much the worse for wear. In the aftermath of the collision, some of the communes of the 1960s figured out ways to batten off the larger society through welfare, drug dealing, or some other sideline, while most simply let out a few bubbles and sank once the first bright rush of idealistic enthusiasm wore off. By the middle years of the 1970s, most of the enthusiastic communards of the previous decade or so had returned to middle-class lives in the world they had once tried to abandon.

Potential lifeboat communities in a world perched unsteadily on the brink of peak oil will have to cope with the same mismatch between popular fantasies of rural life and the laborious realities of subsistence farming. Anyone who seriously wants to pursue the goal of rural self-sufficiency needs to leave any desire for a modern middle-class lifestyle at the door. The highest standard of living one can expect a rural lifeboat community to provide is that of a peasant farmer in the nonindustrial world, and that will be within reach only if the participants are as competent at the art of subsistence farming as farmers in the nonindustrial world generally are.

Given competent training and a high tolerance for hard physical labor, day in and day out, a group of healthy adults can keep themselves and their dependents adequately fed, clothed, housed, and equipped with necessary tools, with a little left over for barter or sale. For thousands of years this has been the standard human lifestyle over most of the world, and once the brief era of fossil-fueled–extravagance we call modern industrial civilization is over, it will likely be the standard human lifestyle once again. Compared to the ease, comfort, opportunity, and abundance of a modern middle-class lifestyle, though, it is a very hard life. It has to be remembered, furthermore, that the decline of the industrial world is likely to be a slow and uneven process, with periods up to several decades long when it may well look as though the crisis is over and the warnings inaccurate. When these periods arrive, it will most likely be even harder to keep pursuing a rural subsistence lifestyle when the much easier lifestyles of the industrial world are still available.

As a result, the lifeboat community project faces a miniature version of the same social trap that has paralyzed political responses to peak oil. The land, buildings, and equipment needed to launch a lifeboat community of any size cost money — upward of a million dollars would be a good starting budget for such a project — and the people who commit themselves to the project must be willing to give up their careers in today's world in order to devote their time to building a new society that may not be needed for decades or centuries to come. The costs involved have to be paid up front by the people involved, while the benefits come only later and are shared by all. Thus it's not surprising that, despite all the talk about lifeboat communities, few of them have gotten past the talking stage.

Seeing Other Options

In one sense, the difficulty with all three of the alternatives surveyed so far in this chapter — awakening the political system in time to solve the crisis; holing up with guns and food in a fortified enclave; and building lifeboat communities to weather the fall of the modern world — is that they aren't actually responses to our predicament; they're existing cultural narratives looking for problems to solve. Visit the nearest multiscreen movie theater and you may just find all three of them playing this afternoon. Go through the door on the left and you can watch the movie about the lone visionary who recognizes an imminent crisis that no one else can see and then finally manages to get the authorities to pay attention in time. Through the door on the right, there's the movie about the small band of heavily armed heroes blazing away at mindless, faceless hordes in some apocalyptic setting. Up the stairs in the middle, you can find the movie about the community of plucky survivors thrown together by some world-ending catastrophe who struggle through the aftermath and rebuild a clone of today's society from the ground up. Endlessly repeated in popular entertainment, these narratives have a powerful presence in the collective imagination of the industrial world, and it's important to be aware of the gravitational attraction they exert on our thinking.

The core assumption common to all three proposals is that there's no middle ground between preserving the modern industrial system intact and a rapid descent into primal chaos. Both of the mythic narratives discussed over the last two chapters, the myth of progress just as much as the myth of apocalypse, feed into this assumption. Its popularity, however, doesn't make it anything like as reasonable as it seems. There's a wide middle ground between contemporary society and a Road Warrior struggle of all against all. It's in that middle ground that the most likely futures of the industrial world will take shape, and aiming for a constructive response to the futures of the middle ground is in all probability the best strategy we have.