The Long Descent (26 page)

Imagine for a moment that the deindustrial age turns out much more severe than we have reason to expect, and nearly all mathematical knowledge gets lost. A thousand years from now, a surviving slide rule ends up in the hands of a scholar who has laboriously learned how to read ancient numbers and has learned all the arithmetic known in her time. A few minutes of fiddling would show her how the C and D scales can be used to multiply and divide numbers, and a few more would reveal that the A scale shows the squares of corresponding numbers on the D scale. Once she realizes that each scale shows a different mathematical operation, the device itself becomes a mathematical Rosetta stone that can teach her all about fractions, decimals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, reciprocals, and logarithms, because all the mathematical relationships are right there in plain sight.

If our imaginary scholar gets an ancient pocket calculator instead, none of this happens, because the algorithms that make a calculator work are hidden away in its circuitry. Even if the thing still works, it's a black box that spits out numbers, and the relationships between the numbers would have to be worked out the hard way, by trial and error. For that matter, how would our future scholar realize that the calculator was a calculator rather than, say, a remote control or some other enigmatic ancient relic?

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke unknowingly pointed out one of the potential long-term weaknesses of our present technology in his famous Third Law: “Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
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What makes one technology more or less advanced than another is a subtler question than it may appear at first glance, but Clarke's point remains valid: once a technology becomes complicated enough that it loses transparency, it can be very hard to recognize the technology for what it is — and very easy to turn it into a stage property for ritual use. A number of today's technologies have already become ritual props in industrial society's mostly unacknowledged ceremonial life, and that process could accelerate drastically as education levels decline and technologies become rare.

The effects of Clarke's law thus have to be dealt with if the technologies we pass on to the deindustrial future are going to be of value to anyone. For that matter, all four of the principles suggested by the humble slide rule — durability, independence, repli-cability, and transparency — make good criteria for any technology meant to outlast the industrial age. Too many of the technologies currently being touted as answers to peak oil fail one or more of these tests, and many fail all four. As the world begins to move beyond debating the fact of fossil fuel depletion and starts tackling the challenges of planning for a difficult future, a careful study of potential technologies in something like the terms I've outlined may be a good place to start.
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Scores of other technologies, skills, and traditions of high value to a low-energy future can be found with a little searching. Consider the haybox or fireless cooker, a container full of insulating material with a well in the center to hold a pot of food. Hay-boxes were a standard piece of kitchen equipment in the industrial world a century ago; if your great-grandmother lived in Europe or North America she very likely had one. She brought food to a boil, popped it into the haybox, and left it there to cook by residual heat, saving most of the fuel she would have needed to cook the same dish on the stove.
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Haybox technology could make a future of energy shortages much more livable, but only if it's brought out of museums and put back into circulation before knowledge about it is lost.

Technological Triage

As the previous section suggests, one of the main blind spots that has to be overcome in facing the deindustrial future is the habit of thinking of technology in the singular, as though it's all of a piece. Like so many common mistakes, this one gets its strength from the fact that it's not entirely mistaken. Among the dominant features of modern industrial society, as Lewis Mumford pointed out,
¹¹
is the way that most technologies depend on other technologies, forming an intricate web of interconnections.

One of the most widely cited apocalyptic writers of my teen years, Roberto Vacca, argued in his 1973 book
The Coming Dark
Age
that this extreme interdependence would turn out to be the Achilles' heel of industrial society. His argument was that too much interconnection among unstable systems would lead to cascading systems failures and the collapse of industrial civilization. Although his ideas impressed the likes of Isaac Asimov (who contributed an introduction to the book), in retrospect it's clear that Vacca was embarrassingly wrong. Like so many others at that time, Vacca put the cart before the horse; the rising tide of interdependence and interconnection he saw moving through the industrial world was a reaction to improvements in information processing, not a force in its own right, and further developments along the same lines — especially the explosive growth in computer technology — proved more than adequate to keep the process moving.

Still, Vacca was right to see the web of interconnections that unites today's industrial technology as a critical vulnerability. It's just that the vulnerability comes into play further along the arc of catabolic collapse. Many of today's technologies depend so completely on the support of an intact industrial system that they cannot operate without it. Many more could operate without it, at least in theory, but have been designed in a way that maximizes their dependence on other technologies and will have to be reengi-neered in a hurry as the fabric of the industrial system comes apart. A third class of technologies are largely or wholly independent of the system, and will likely carry on without a hitch while industrial society comes apart around them.

These three classes of technologies — the wholly dependent, the somewhat dependent, and the independent — have an uncomfortable similarity to the three categories used by battlefield medics in the process known as triage. Triage — the word comes from French and means “trying” or “testing” — is a care-rationing process used when the number of wounded overwhelms the people and resources available to treat them. Incoming wounded are sorted into three classes. The first consists of those who will die even if they get care. The second consists of those who will survive even if they receive no care. The third consists of those who will live if they get help, but will die without it. In a triage situation, all available resources go to the third category. When the need for care outruns available time and resources, this harsh but necessary logic maximizes the number of survivors.

The coming of deindustrial society will require us to approach technologies in much the same way. Technological triage requires more complex judgments than the battlefield variety, however. Not all technologies are of equal value for human survival; it won't do us any good to preserve video game technology, let's say, if by doing so we lose the ability to grow food. Some technologies necessarily depend on other technologies — firearms, for example, presuppose a certain level of metalworking ability. Finally, technological triage involves four categories, not three. There will be technologies that can't be saved no matter what we do, technologies that are certain to be saved even if we do nothing, and technologies that will be saved if we act and lost if we do not; there will also be technologies that have gone out of existence, but could be brought back and put into use if action is taken now.

Another difference, of course, is that we can begin the triage process on current and past technologies right now — and it's important that this process start soon. The more work people put into understanding the issues and sorting through potential technologies in advance, the less wasted effort and missed opportunities there are likely to be. In the case of technologies that have to be brought back from the heap of discarded tools our civilization has left behind it, starting now — when information and, in many cases, working examples of old technologies can still be located — could easily make the difference between success and failure.

The differences outlined earlier in this chapter between the slide rule and the pocket calculator offer a starting point for carrying out triage on today's technologies, but more precise issues need to be addressed as well. What sort of questions, then, need to be asked when wounded technologies start showing up at our imaginary triage station? The following list might do as a starting point for discussion.

1. How long can it be fueled and maintained in a deindustrializing
world?
The imminence of peak oil makes this point obvious, but there are twists that many people in the peak oil community may not have recognized. Declining production and rising costs of petroleum cut into the supply of lubricants, solvents, and plastics as well as fuels; and anything that needs any of these things in order to operate must either be adapted for an alternative source or land in history's junkyard. These same factors affect the whole supply chain for fuel, maintenance supplies, and spare parts, among many other things.

2. How long can it be manufactured or replaced in a deindustrializ-ing
world?
This represents a much higher threshold than the previous question, since the capacity to manufacture complex technologies — for example, most of today's digital electronics — will likely be lost sooner than the inputs needed to keep them running. A whole class of technologies — call it “legacy tech” — falls between the two thresholds; these are machines that can be kept running for years or decades after they can no longer be made. The struggle to control various items of legacy tech may become a fruitful source of conflict as the deindus-trial age proceeds down the curve of catabolic collapse.

3. How long will it be useful in a deindustrializing world?
Many of the technologies we have today aren't useful even now — I defy anyone to give me a meaningful definition of “useful” that includes, say, dancing mechanical Santa Claus dolls — but many more have value only because they provide services to other technologies that will not be viable in an age of limits. When rising fuel costs, for example, bring down the curtain on the age of mass air travel, whole constellations of technologies currently needed to keep airlines and airports running will lose their reason for existence. Unless they have other uses, saving them would be pointless.

4.
How long will it take to become useful in a deindustrializing world?
The flip side of question 3 is that many technologies that survive today only as hobbies or museum pieces are likely to become valuable and even essential at some point along the curve of catabolic collapse. Consider the technologies needed to build, rig, and sail square-rigged wooden ships. Right now, they survive only in relic form, preserved by our society's fascination with its own past, but a century or two from now they could easily become the foundation of maritime trade networks like the ones that linked the continents in 1800. Steps taken now or in the near future to keep this “outdated” maritime technology viable on the downslope of Hubbert's peak could pay off big later on.

5. How broad a set of human needs and other technologies can be
supported by it?
Some technologies fill narrow niches, some fill broad ones. Organic agriculture can be used to produce food, herbal medicines, oil crops for fuel and lubricants, and a dizzying assortment of raw materials for craft and small-scale industry. This puts it in a different category from, say, lens grinding, which can make lenses and not much else. Both have value in their own contexts, but might reasonably be given different priorities in times of resource scarcity.

6. How crucial a set of human needs and other technologies can be supported
by it?
Some needs and technologies are more important than others. The basic human essentials of food, drink, shelter, and safety outrank most other considerations. Technologies that provide these efficiently belong at the top of the triage list. This is another reason why organic agriculture deserves special attention in sorting out potential technologies for the dein-dustrial age — it can provide the raw materials for most of the core necessities. Beyond the basics, priority lists differ, as indeed they should. If it's necessary to choose one or the other, is the capacity to print books more or less important than the capacity to treat illnesses that herbs won't cure? Such questions need to be taken seriously as people begin the process of deciding what to save.

7. What commitments follow from investing in it?
All technologies — without exception — have consequences and entail commitments. By investing in automobile technology nearly to the exclusion of all other transportation choices, for example, the United States and several of its allies committed themselves to maintaining the flow of cheap, abundant oil at all costs — a commitment that has landed them in a no-win situation in Iraq and made their national interests hostage to centuries-old religious and ethnic quarrels in a dozen different corners of the globe. Few other technologies entail commitments so disastrous, but every choice of technology closes some doors as it opens others. As we consider different models for the deindus-trializing societies of the near future and the fully deindustrial-ized cultures further off, attention to the implied commitments of proposed technologies might keep us out of a variety of blind alleys.

All this implies, of course, that technologies exist to meet human needs, and not vice versa. The habit of mind that subordinates human values to the needs of technology is one of the strangest outgrowths of the mythic narrative of progress, and it needs to be outgrown as soon as possible. It's crucial to realize that in some cases — when a job doesn't actually need to be done, or when technological means aren't the best way to do it — the best technology for the purpose is no technology at all. We'll return to this theme in the last chapter of this book.