The Long Descent (22 page)

Compare the farmer to a corporate marketing assistant or a factory worker in an injection-casting plant, and the differences become clear. The marketing assistant provides a service — helping to create and manage marketing plans for a corporation — that has no value outside the money economy. If she wanted to barter with a farmer for food, she probably wouldn't get far offering to help manage his corporate identity via a media campaign! The factory worker is in a slightly better position. If the money economy comes unglued, the factory owners might pay him in castings, and he could then try to barter these for the goods and services he needs (exactly this arrangement was common in the former Soviet Union during the economic collapse of the early 1990s). Still, he depends on the factory and its owners to provide him with a workplace and some form of pay; in a volatile, crumbling economy, his situation is a precarious one.

In the deindustrial age, then, the farmer's economic model is the more viable, because it can do without the mediation of the money economy. Other professions that produce necessary goods and services will be in the same comfortable position because people will continue to need food, clothing, shoes, tools, and the like and will trade for them using whatever means are available. Except in the most difficult times, they will also be willing to trade for other things that aren't quite necessities; someone who can brew good beer, for example, will be able to count on a lively market for his product even in the most apocalyptic times.

Healing arts form another set of essential professions, but they also belong on the list of essential skills everyone needs to master. Access to those skills has an immediate payoff as well, because the medical system we have now does not have to wait for catabolic collapse to go under; it's already broken beyond repair. Especially in the United States, but not only here, economic forces long ago turned the theoretical triumphs of scientific medicine into a real-world fiasco. For many years now, medical care has been the leading cause of death in the United States — add together the annual death toll from iatrogenic (physician-caused) illnesses, nosoco–mial (hospital-transmitted) infections, drug side effects and interactions, risky but heavily advertised elective surgeries such as stomach stapling, and simple malpractice, and the resulting figure soars well above the annual toll for heart disease, or cancer, or anything else.
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Many people are already voting with their feet by abandoning conventional medicine for various alternative and traditional forms of medicine. Even when these don't work — and of course some of them don't — placebos are at least less likely to cause harm than the toxic drugs and invasive surgeries that form the mainstay of today's conventional medicine. Many alternative health care systems, on the other hand, treat common illnesses quite effectively.

Another factor, though, makes alternative methods much better suited to the coming deindustrial age. Today's medical system, with its global supply chains, complex technologies, and centralized facilities, is among industrial civilization's most voracious users of energy and natural resources; almost without exception, alternative medical treatments use much less of both. Many of the most effective alternative systems — herbalism and acupuncture come to mind — evolved long before the industrial system came into being and use very modest amounts of sustainable resources to treat illnesses. In an age of energy scarcity and hard ecological limits, systems like these are the wave of the future.

Still, in the absence of effective public health measures, even the best health care — alternative or otherwise — will have its limits. No medicine can take the place of adequate sanitation, pure water, clean and wholesome food, or the other foundations of public health so many of us take for granted nowadays. All these things will be in short supply in the deindustrial future, and so illness and death will be a constant and familiar presence. Learning to live with that reality will also be an essential skill in the twilight of the industrial age. We will no longer be able to afford the fantasy that death is something that only happens to other people — and in the process of coming to terms with our own mortality, we may just learn something essential about being human.

Since the twilight of the money economy will be a gradual process, it won't necessarily be useful or even possible for individuals to make the transition to a deindustrial career in a single leap. What can and must be tackled right now is the learning curve demanded by any of these skilled trades. It's not enough to line your shelves with books about organic farming, for example; you need to start buying tools, digging garden beds, and growing your own crops, and you need to do this as soon as possible, because mastering the craft of organic farming takes time. The same is true if you decide to take up sewing, brewing, or any other useful trade: you need to get the tools and start learning the craft, so you'll have your Plan B firmly in place as the money economy begins to fold out from under you.

Skilled trades for local exchange are part of the picture, but another part is just as essential — the reinvention of the household economy. Not so long ago, a large fraction of all economic value came from the household sector. Many of us still remember grandmothers who always had jars of homemade jelly in the cupboard and crochet hooks dancing in their hands, and grandfathers whose garages were as full of tools as their gardens were of ripe tomatoes. The marketing campaigns that squeezed the last traces of the household economy out of existence stigmatized these activities as hobbies (and dowdy hobbies at that) but they were once a good deal more — and in a world on the brink of deindustrialization, they desperately need to be revived.

People have different opportunities and talents, and one size emphatically does not fit all. For those who have access to garden space, though, a household garden is probably the top priority here. It's not necessary to grow all your own food, or even a large proportion of it, for a garden to have a significant impact on your quality of life. In North America, at least, bulk crops such as grains and beans will likely be available on the market for many years to come. Fruits, vegetables, and animal foods — that is, sources of vitamins, minerals, and protein — are another matter. A vegetable garden, a couple of fruit trees, and perhaps a rabbit hutch, a chicken coop, or a small aquaculture tank for carp or tilapia may mean the difference between malnutrition and health.

Whether or not you have access to garden space, consider taking up a useful handicraft or two. Aunt Edna's habit of knitting cardigans for all and sundry may have seemed quaint in the heyday of the industrial economy, but when central heating prices itself out of existence and transport costs shatter the supply chain that fills stores in the industrial world with the products of overseas sweatshops, warm clothing you can make with your own hands has obvious value, and it may also be a useful item of barter. The same is true of many other skills, from soapmaking and herbal medicine to the handyman skills that allow plumbing, furniture, and small appliances to be repaired at home.

Another response to human wants and needs outside the money economy will be vital during the deindustrial age, and it needs to be revived and practiced as soon as possible. This is the art of doing without. The industrial economy has trained all of us to think that the only possible thing to do with a desire is fulfill it, preferably by spending money on some consumer product or other. The contracting economy of the deindustrial age will offer very little leeway for this sort of self-indulgent thinking. On the far side of Hubbert's peak, your capacity to survive will largely be measured by the number of things you can do without. It's hardly an accident, either, that the world's spiritual traditions also affirm the value of being unattached to material things.

Among the things we will have to learn to do without — perhaps the most important — is not a material thing at all, but a habit: the deliberate cultivation of uselessness that goes nowadays by the name of “leisure.” Only a society flush with cheap energy could convince itself that the highest goal of human life is to sit around doing nothing, and even so, it takes the nonstop blare of the media to distract us from the fact that sitting around doing nothing is the dullest of all human activities. Our grandparents' generation and their ancestors knew as much, which is why the leisure activities of a century ago focused on creative activities rather than indolence, and it's why Aunt Edna knitted all those cardigans long after the industrial economy made home production of clothing unnecessary. The twilight of industrial society, like the fall of other civilizations before it, will doubtless be accompanied by plenty of tumult and shouting, but the real story — the signal behind all that noise — will be a much fainter sound: the soft clatter of Aunt Edna's knitting needles, beginning to knit the fabric of a new and more sustainable world.

Rebuilding Civil Society

The political dimension of catabolic collapse demands a response as well, but the nature of that response is far from political in the usual sense of the word. Over the last half century, the political systems of the United States and its close allies have wedged themselves into the impossible position of trying to sustain two unsustainable things: a global empire, and the extravagant standards of living that the now-departing age of empire fooled North Americans into seeing as their birthright. Like the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, the petroleum-fueled prosperity of the 20th century fostered a culture of entitlement in which most citizens believed that they deserved to get whatever they wanted without having to pay the full price for it. One consequence of this cultural shift has been the collapse of democratic politics in North America.

It's popular these days to blame this consequence on the machinations of some nefarious elite group or other, but the real responsibility lies elsewhere. Democracy takes work. Casting a ballot in elections once every year or so is not enough to keep it going, though even this minimal investment of time and effort is apparently too much for something like three-fifths of adults in the United States. What makes a democratic system operate is personal involvement in the political process on the part of most citizens. Precinct organizations and caucuses, town meetings, and other political activities at the local level formed the indispensable foundation of democratic politics in the days when the United States and Canada were not yet elective oligarchies.
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These activities drew on a broader base of local community organizations — churches, civic societies, fraternal orders such as the Freemasons and the Grange, and many others — that rarely engaged in explicit political discussion or activism, but taught skills and made connections that inevitably found their way into a political context. These institutions of civil society created a context in which individuals could orient their lives to the politics of the day and act in ways that could influence policy all the way up to the national level. People who wrestled with the nuts and bolts of the democratic process in community organizations needed no further education when time came for the precinct caucuses that chose candidates and party platforms.

It's often claimed by modern writers that these institutions of civil society thrived as they did because people didn't have anything else to do with their time,
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but this says more about our own fantasies about the past than it does about historical reality. Most people a century ago worked longer hours than we do today, and the popular media of their time was less technologically complex but no less widely distributed or eagerly sought than ours. The difference lay, rather, in prevailing attitudes. Alexis de Tocque–ville famously described early 19th century America as a land of associations, where the needs of society were met, not by government programs or aristocratic largesse, but by voluntary organizations of common people.
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The civil society of pre-imperial America thrived because people recognized that the social and personal benefits they wanted could only be bought with the coin of their own time and money.

One example worth remembering is the way that fraternal orders, rather than government bureaucracies, provided the social safety net of 19th century North America. The Odd Fellows, a fraternal order founded originally in Britain, launched this practice shortly after its arrival on the American continent in 1819. Odd Fellows lodges in Britain had the useful habit of taking up collections for members in need, especially to cover the living costs of those who had fallen sick — remember, this was long before employers offered sick pay — and to pay the burial costs of those who died. In the North American branch of the order, this quickly evolved into a system of weekly assessments and defined benefits.

The way it worked was simple enough. Each member paid weekly dues — 25 cents a week (roughly the equivalent of $20 a week today) was average — and the money went into a common fund. When a member in good standing became too sick to work, he received regular sick pay and, in most lodges, visits from a physician who received a fixed monthly sum from the lodge in exchange for providing care to all its members. When a member died, his funeral costs were covered by the lodge, and his dependents could count on the support of the lodge in hard cash as well as the less tangible currency of the international Odd Fellows network. By 1900, as a result of this system, Odd Fellowship was the largest fraternal order in the world. In that same year more than two thousand North American fraternal orders had copied this model, and nearly half of all adult Americans and Canadians (counting both genders and all ethnic groups, by the way) belonged to at least one fraternal order.
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This effective and sustainable system, though, depended on the willingness of large numbers of people to support their local lodges by attending meetings and paying weekly dues. Equivalent systems throughout civil society had the same requirements, and, with the coming of empire, these turned into a fatal vulnerability. As the profits of empire made it possible for governments to buy the loyalty of the middle class with unearned largesse, the old system of voluntary organizations lost its support base and withered on the vine. With it perished the local politics of precinct caucuses and town meetings. When participation in the political system stopped being seen as an opportunity to be heard, and turned into an annoyance to be shirked, democracy mutated into today's system of elective oligarchy.