PROGRESS VS. APOCALYPSE THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES JOHN MICHAEL GREER about the author John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, a peak-oil theorist, and the author of more than 20 books on a wide range of subjects. His recent books include The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World, The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered, and Apocalypse Not. Greer lives in Cumberland, Maryland. “Progress vs. Apocalypse” by John Michael Greer was adapted from The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; © 2008 by John Michael Greer, used by permission of the author and New Society Publishers. This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012). The Energy Reader is copyright © 2012 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. For other excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit energy-reality.org or contact Post Carbon Institute. Photo: NASA Post Carbon Institute | 613 4th Street, Suite 208 | Santa Rosa, California 95404 USA The myth of progress and the myth of apocalypse have deep roots in the collective imagination of the modernPull quote world, here and lorem few peopleipsum seem to be able to think aboutdolor the sit futureamet without following one story or the other. Both are inappropriate for the futures we are actually likely to encounter. iscussions about peak oil and the predicament threshold of human intelligence. Ever since our ancestors Dof industrial society constantly revolve around first became fully human, knowledge gathered over the two completely different, and in fact opposite, sets of generations made it possible for each culture to go fur- assumptions and beliefs about the future. Most people ther, become wiser, and accomplish more than the ones insist that no matter what problems crop up before us, that came before it. With the coming of the scientific modern science, technology, and raw human ingenu- revolution three hundred years ago, the slow triumph of ity will inevitably win out and make the world of the reason over nature shifted into overdrive and has been future better than the world of today. A sizeable minor- accelerating ever since. Eventually, once the last vestiges ity of people, however, insist that no matter what we of primitive superstition and ignorance are cast aside, our do, some overwhelming catastrophe will soon bring species will leap upward from the surface of its home civilization suddenly crashing down into mass death planet and embrace its destiny among the stars. and a Road Warrior future. Conversely, the myth of apocalypse suggests that human These competing narratives reflect the hidden presence history is a tragic blind alley. People once lived in har- of myth. Many people nowadays think only primitive mony with their world, each other, and themselves, but people believe in myths, but myths dominate the think- that golden age ended with a disastrous wrong turning ing of every society, including our own. Myths are the and things have gone downhill ever since. The rise of stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. vast, unnatural cities governed by bloated governmental Human beings think with stories as inevitably as they bureaucracies, inhabited by people who have abandoned see with eyes and walk with feet, and the most impor- spiritual values for a wholly material existence, marks tant of those stories—the ones that define the nature of the point of no return. Sometime soon the whole rick- the world for those who tell them—are myths. ety structure will come crashing down, overwhelmed by sudden catastrophe, and billions of people will die According to the myth of progress, all of human history is as civilization comes apart and rampaging hordes scour a grand tale of human improvement. From the primitive the landscape. Only those who abandon a corrupt and ignorance and savagery of our cave-dwelling ancestors, doomed society and return to the old, true ways of liv- people climbed step by step up the ladder of progress, ing will survive to build a better world. following in the wake of the evolutionary drive that raised us up from primeval slime and brought us to the Both these myths have deep roots in the collective 1 Greer Progress vs. Apocalypse imagination of the modern world, and very few people even invented the steam turbine two centuries before seem to be able to think about the future at all without the birth of Christ; without fossil fuels it was a useless following one story or the other. It would be hard to curiosity. Human resourcefulness and ingenuity? It’s find any two narratives less appropriate, though, for as arrogant as it is silly to insist that people in past ages the futures we are actually likely to encounter. Both of weren’t as resourceful and ingenious as we are. them rely on assumptions about the world that won’t stand up to critical examination. Fossil fuel energy, and only fossil fuel energy, made it possible to break with the old agrarian pattern and The faith in progress, for example, rests on the unstated construct the industrial world. Unless some new energy assumption that limits don’t apply to us, since the for- source as abundant as fossil fuels comes online before ward momentum of human progress automatically today’s extravagant lifestyles finish burning through the trumps everything else. If we want limitless supplies of resources that made the industrial age possible, we will energy badly enough, the logic seems to be, the world find ourselves back in the same world our ancestors will give it to us. Of course the world did give it to us— knew, with the additional burdens of a huge surplus in the form of unimaginably huge deposits of fossil fuels population and an impoverished planetary biosphere stored up over hundreds of millions of years through to contend with. Combine these constraints with the photosynthesis—and we wasted it in a few centuries plain hard reality that the fossil fuels that made indus- of fantastic extravagance. The lifestyles we believe are trialism possible won’t be there anymore, and the myth normal are entirely the product of that extravagance. of perpetual progress becomes a mirage. Nor is the past quite so much of a linear story of prog- Believers in apocalypse, for their part, insist that the end ress as the folklore of the industrial age would have it. of industrial civilization will be sudden, catastrophic, The lives of peasants, priests, soldiers, and aristocrats in and total. That claim is just as hard to square with the Sumer in 3000 BCE differed only in relatively minor realities of our predicament as the argument for perpet- details from those of their equivalents in Chou dynasty ual progress. Every previous civilization that has fallen China fifteen centuries later, Roman North Africa fif- has taken centuries to collapse, and there’s no reason teen centuries after that, or medieval Spain another to think the present case will be any different. The fifteen centuries closer to us. The ebb and flow of tech- resource base of industrial society is shrinking but it’s nologies before the modern period had little impact on far from exhausted, the impact of global warming and daily life, because without cheap abundant energy to ecological degradation build slowly over time, and gov- power them, it was more efficient and economical to ernments and ordinary citizens alike have every reason rely on human labor with hand tools. to hold things together as long as possible. This stable pattern changed only when the first steam The history of the last century—think of the Great engines allowed people to begin tapping the fantas- Depression, the Second World War, and the brutal tic amounts of energy hidden away within the Earth. excesses of Communism and Nazism—shows that That and nothing else brought the industrial world industrial societies can endure tremendous disruption into being. For thousands of years before that time, without dissolving into a Hobbesian war of all against everything else necessary for an industrial society had all, and people in hard times are far more likely to fol- been part of the cultural heritage of most civilizations. low orders and hope for the best than to turn into the Renewable energy sources? Wind power, waterpower, rampaging, mindless mobs that play so large a role in biomass, and muscle power were all used extensively in survivalist fantasies these days. the pre-industrial past without launching an industrial society. Scientific knowledge? The laws of mechanics The Hollywood notion of an overnight collapse makes were worked out in ancient times, and a Greek scientist for great screenplays but has nothing to do with the 2 Greer Progress vs. Apocalypse realities of how civilizations fall. In the aftermath of into our collective thinking that many people simply Hubbert’s peak, fossil fuel production will decline grad- can’t get their minds around the implications of fossil ually, not simply come to a screeching halt, and so the fuel depletion, or for that matter any of the other factors likely course of things is gradual descent rather than driving the contemporary crisis of industrial civiliza- free fall, following the same trajectory marked out by tion. All these factors promise a future in which energy, so many civilizations in the past. This process is not raw materials, and their products—including nearly all a steady decline, either; between sudden crises come of our present high technology—will all be subject to intervals of relative stability, even moderate improve- ever-tightening limits that will make them less and less ment; different regions decline at different paces; available over time.