The Long Descent (31 page)

One of the consequences of the Enlightenment's revolution in myth is our habit of producing rational plans for social improvement — a habit that spawned the torrent of peak oil solutions on the market today. Since Voltaire's time, the idea that building a better social mousetrap will cause the world to beat a path to one's door has pervaded our civilization. The irony, of course, is that neither in Voltaire's time nor in ours has social change actually happened that way. The triumph of the Enlightenment itself did not happen because the social ideas circulated by its proponents were that much better than those of their rivals. It happened because the core mythic narrative of the Enlightenment, the myth of progress, proved to be more emotionally powerful than its rivals.

The resulting mismatch between our rationalist assumptions and the myths and symbols that still shape our behavior defines a faultline running through the middle of the modern mind. On the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster. The language of rational self-interest and dispassionate scientific analysis itself has been incorporated into exactly the sort of mythic narrative it attempts to dismiss from serious consideration.

The crux of the problem, as I've suggested throughout this book, is that human thought is mythic by its very nature. We think with myths as inevitably as we see with eyes and eat with mouths. Thus, any attempt to bring about significant social change must start from the mythic level, with an emotionally powerful and symbolically meaningful narrative, or it will go nowhere. The founders of the Enlightenment recognized this and brought about one of the great intellectual revolutions of Western history by harnessing the power of myth in the service of their project. The very nature of their legacy, though, has made it much harder for others to recognize the role of myth in social change.

Thus it's not accidental that the great storytellers of recent history, the figures who catalyzed massive changes in the world by the creative use of myth, have mostly come from the fringes of the Western cultural mainstream. Two examples are particularly worth citing here. The first is Mohandas Gandhi, who broke the grip of the British Empire on India by retelling the myth of European colonialism so powerfully that even the colonial powers fell under the spell of his story. He accomplished this by drawing on his own Hindu culture, as well as his Western education, to pose a challenge to the reigning narratives of the West that Western people had no way to counter. On the other side of the scale, but no less powerfully, Adolf Hitler came out of the crawlspaces of Vienna's urban underclass with a corrupted version of Central European occult traditions, and he turned them into a myth that mesmerized an entire nation and plunged the planet into the most catastrophic war in its history. In rational terms, the story of either man's achievements seems preposterous — another measure of the limits of reason and its failure to plumb the depths of human motivation.

If something constructive is to be done about peak oil and the rest of the predicament of industrial society, in other words, yet another round of reasonable plans will not do the trick. The powers that must be harnessed are those of myth, magic, and the irrational. What remains to be seen is whether these will be harnessed by a new Gandhi…or a new Hitler.

The City of Progress

All these issues can be phrased in a more forthright way, if we start with the admission that the present situation is ultimately a religious crisis. As the aspect of human life that links it back (in Latin,
re-ligere,
the root of the word
religion
) to its roots in the realm of ultimate concern, religion undergirds and defines every other aspect of a culture. When events bring a civilization's most basic assumptions into question, it's high time to look to the religious dimension of that civilization for the ultimate cause.

Mind you, the last few centuries of intellectual history make statements about religion remarkably easy to misunderstand. Like those people who use the word “superstition” only for those folk beliefs they don't hold themselves, many people in the contemporary industrial world use the word “religion” purely for those belief systems that they don't consider absolutely true. Equally, they insist that nothing can qualify as a religion unless it contains a set of beliefs (for example, the real existence of gods and the possibility of personal survival after physical death) that are specifically excluded from the religion most people in the industrial world follow today. This odd habit of thought has its roots in the complicated compromise between Protestant piety and nascent scientific materialism in 17th century Britain, but it remains firmly fixed in place today, and it makes clarity a real challenge in talking about the spiritual dimension of peak oil.

When I suggest that our current predicament has its roots in a religious crisis, then, I don't mean to say Christianity has much to do with the matter. In most of the Western world, Christianity in its historic forms sank to the status of a minority religion several centuries ago. The illusion that it remained a majority faith rose because a newer faith took over its outward forms, in much the same way that a hermit crab takes over the cast-off shell of a snail and pulls it along behind it through the sand. That newer faith is the religion of progress, the established church and dogmatic faith of the modern industrial world.

Cultural critic Christopher Lasch, in his scathing study
The
True and Only Heaven,
anatomized the way that the faith in progress eclipsed older religious traditions in the modern Western world, but even he didn't take the argument as far as it can go. As I've suggested elsewhere in this book, to speak of progress as a religion is not to indulge in metaphor. Progress has its own creation myth, rooted in popular distortions of Darwin's theory of natural selection that twisted the messy, aimless realities of biological evolution until it fit the mythic image of a linear ascent from primeval pond scum to the American suburban middle class. It has its saints, its martyrs, and its hagiographies, ringing endless changes on the theme of the visionary genius disproving the entrenched errors of the past. It has its priests and teachers, of whom the late Carl Sagan is probably the best known. Sagan, in fact, was arguably one of the most innovative theologians of the last century, with his mythic “We are star-stuff ” narrative that fused 19th century positivist philosophy with the latest theories out of astrophysics and evolutionary biology.
⁷
Finally, of course, it has its own heaven, a grand vision of perpetual improvement toward a Promethean future among the stars.

It's impossible to make sense of the predicament of the industrial world, it seems to me, without recognizing the sheer intellectual and emotional power of this vision. The religious revolution that made faith in progress the defining religious idiom of the modern world happened, in large part, because the progressive myth proved more emotionally appealing to more people than the narratives of Christianity it replaced. It's one thing to expect people to anchor their hopes for a better world in the unknowable territory on the far side of death and trust completely in the evidence of things not seen; it's quite another to encourage them to re-imagine the world they know in the light of technological and social changes going on right in front of them, trace the trajectory of those changes right on out to the stars, and embrace the changes themselves as vehicles of redemption and proofs of the imminence of a better world.

What the mythic power of the vision made it all but impossible to grasp, though, was that the progress of the last three hundred years, while very real, was the product of two temporary and self-limiting sets of circumstances.
⁸
One of these unfolded from the wars of conquest and colonization that gave European nations control of most of the planet in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, enabling them to prosper mightily at the expense of the world's other peoples, just as previous empires did in their times. The second and far greater circumstance was the discovery that fossil fuels could be used in place of wind, water, and muscle to power human technologies. From the perspective of the myth of progress, these things were simply side effects of the Western world's embrace of a true doctrine of nature. The possibility that they were the causes of progress, not its effects, was unthinkable.

The weakness of the religion of progress, though, forms a precise mirror to its strengths. A religion that claims to justify itself by works rather than faith stands or falls by its ability to make good on its promises, and for the last few decades the promises of the religion of progress have been wearing noticeably thin. Despite a flurry of media ceremonies parading new technological advances before the faithful like so many saints' relics, most people in the industrial world have begun to notice the steady erosion in standards of living, public health, and the quality of products for sale since the energy crises of the 1970s. Compare the lifestyle that was possible in the United States on a single working-class income in 1970, let's say, with the lifestyle possible in the same country on a single working-class income today, and it becomes very hard to cling to the assurance that the future will inevitably be better than the past.

While the religion of progress is a relatively new thing, the predicament of a faith that fails to make good on its promises is not. One of the fundamental documents of the civilization that industrial society replaced, Augustine of Hippo's
The City of God,
maps out that predicament with the brutal clarity only the eyes of a triumphant doctrinal opponent can manage. A few years before Augustine set pen to parchment, the Visigothic king Alaric tossed the most basic assumptions of the Roman world into history's rubbish heap when his horsemen swept across southern Europe to the gates of Rome and sacked the city of the Caesars. The empire's Pagan population, then still close to a majority, argued that the gods had deserted Rome because Rome had deserted her gods.

Augustine's response launched shockwaves in the Western zeitgeist that have not entirely faded even today. In place of the
pax deorum,
the Roman Pagan concept of a pact between humanity and divinity that guaranteed the blessing of the gods on human society, Augustine argued that it was a fatal mistake to conflate the world of social life in historical time with the world of spiritual truth in eternity. The hard line of division he drew between two cities, the City of Man doomed to perish and the City of God destined to reign forever, put a full stop at the end of the long and by no means inglorious history of classical Pagan civil religion, and it defined a new religious consciousness that was able to cope, as classical Paganism could not, with the implosion of the ancient world and the coming of the Dark Ages.

Augustine's distinction is typical, in many ways, of religious consciousness in ages of decline, just as the confident belief that ultimate truths stand guarantor to current social arrangements is typical of religious consciousness in ages of progress; the
pax pro-gressus
of the last few centuries mirrors not only the emotional tone but a surprising amount of the rhetoric of the
pax deorum
of ancient Rome. To the extent that anything like the medieval Christianity that Augustine played so large a role in founding survives in today's Christian churches, it might conceivably become a significant social as well as religious resource as industrial civilization slides down the slope into its own dark ages. Yet there are many other possibilities. History never repeats itself exactly, and, as the industrial age draws toward its end, the prospect of a revival of some traditional Western faith must be balanced against the opportunities open to faiths from other cultures as well as newly created visions of destiny.

The Next Spirituality

It may be prophetic that science fiction — that cracked but not always clouded mirror of our imagined futures — so often makes religion central to narratives about a world after industrial civilization. That fashion was set in a big way by Walter M. Miller's 1959 bestseller
A Canticle for Leibowitz,
which leapt past the then-popular–genre of nuclear holocaust novels to envision a centuries-long reprise of the Dark Ages, complete with Catholic monks guarding the knowledge of the past. Miller's book covered quite a bit of philosophical and theological ground, but among its core themes was the argument that religion — specifically, of course, Catholic Christianity — was the wellspring of humanity's better possibilities, and it would be more important than ever once progress betrayed the hopes of its votaries.

In the hothouse environment of mid-20th century science fiction, a retort from the opposition was not long in arriving. It came from Edgar Pangborn, whose award-winning 1964 novel
Davy
was in large part a counterblast aimed at Miller's vision. In Pangborn's future history, the collapse of industrial civilization was followed by the slow rise of a neomedieval society shackled to superstition and ignorance by the Holy Murcan Church. Like
A Canticle
for –Leibowitz, Davy
covered quite a bit of intellectual ground. –Pangborn's invented Murcan religion was at least as much a scathing satire on the American Protestant religiosity of his own time as it was an attempt to imagine a religion of the future. Central to Pangborn's vision, though, was the argument that religion — any religion — was the zenith of human folly, an arrogant claim to privileged knowledge about the unknowable that inevitably lashed out violently against those too sane to accept its pretensions.