John Michael Greer: The Long Descent
This conversation with John Michael Greer was released as episode 120 of the C-Realm Podcast on September 17, 2008. The transcript below begins with the interview itself and omits the episode-opening material. KMO's post-interview remarks are included where they bear directly on the conversation with Greer. This version has been lightly edited for readability from an automatic transcript of the preserved audio; obvious transcription errors have been corrected where the intended wording was clear, and uncertain passages are marked.
Interview
KMO: John Michael Greer, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast.
John Michael Greer: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
KMO: The introduction that I gave to you, which I cribbed from your Wikipedia entry, gives a pretty good introduction to what it was I wanted to talk to you about. That is your new book, The Long Descent. Most C-Realm listeners are familiar with James Howard Kunstler, who has written a book called The Long Emergency. James Howard Kunstler, as well as many other folks whose words you will find in places like Energy Bulletin or The Oil Drum, think that we are in for a rather sudden shift, a breakdown of sorts that will leave us bereft materially and not living anywhere near the standards that we're used to. You don't really subscribe to that. You think that we're in for more of a gradual decline. If you would, talk about your reasons for thinking so.
John Michael Greer: Well, I want to draw a distinction, first of all. We are certainly in for some discontinuities and some periods of crisis, some economic, political, unfortunately probably also military difficulties, shall we say. History is full of situations where things get really crunchy for a time. We will unquestionably see a lot of those. We may just be moving into one of them right now with the recent turmoil on Wall Street.
The issue that I'm trying to discuss here is that these things need to be set into a broader context. A lot of people have the idea that the end of a historical period, or even on a broader level the end of a civilization, is this kind of sudden, bam, everything falls to pieces and all of a sudden there's nothing left but smoking ruins, or small bands of survivors, or roaming mobs of starving survivors rampaging across the landscape being gunned down with automatic weapons in the usual survivalist fantasy.
This isn't actually what happens, historically speaking. Plenty of historical periods have ended in the past. Plenty of civilizations have ended in the past. We've actually got a fair idea of what happens. And although it's very comforting to our own sense of cultural self-importance to assume that we are somehow different from every other civilization that ever lived, I don't find that argument convincing, at least in this case.
What I suspect we are facing instead is a process rather like falling down a staircase instead of a single crunch and then it's all over with. I don't know how many of our listeners grew up reading Winnie-the-Pooh, but in the opening scene of that book Christopher Robin is dragging his toy bear down the stairs. That, in a kind of comic form, is rather the future that I envisage, and it's certainly the way that civilizations in the past have wound down. One crisis after another, one period of breakdown after another, separated by brief intervals of stabilization, sometimes partial recovery. It's a long process. It's not something that can be packaged in a nice Hollywood format, giving the usual exciting crisis and then the survivors dust themselves off and go on with whatever they go on with.
KMO: I love the colorful language and metaphors that you use to describe your ideas. I read earlier this year a book by Jared Diamond called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. A lot of what Jared Diamond had to say in that book runs somewhat counter to what you've just said. He described many civilizations where, yes, there were signs that the end was looming, but those societies carried on with their standard modus and continued operating in the accustomed way long after it was tenable to do so. Many of them did seem to suffer a dramatic crash, a collapse.
John Michael Greer: Well, I've also read Diamond's book, and it's a good book worth reading. You'll notice, however, that most of his examples that he gave in any kind of detail were very small, very marginal societies on the edge of survival. The Norse colony in Greenland and, of course, Easter Island were his two central examples.
He didn't discuss the fall of Rome. He didn't discuss the multiple breakdowns of the Chinese Empire in the course of its 5,000-year history. He kind of skimmed over, frankly, the decline and fall of the Maya. And I don't believe he mentioned at all their northern neighbors, the Teotihuacan civilization, and so on.
There are many different examples of historical collapse and breakdown, and as a general rule, once you get beyond the sort of highly marginal, highly vulnerable, geographically very tightly located societies on the Easter Island and Norse Greenland colony basis, you have a much slower process. The Maya are a classic example. It took them about 150 years to go from thriving city-states throughout the Yucatan to moldering ruins in the jungle. And 150 years, that's fairly close to average for a civilization of any size.
KMO: I know that there are a great many people, and sometimes I have to count myself among their ranks, who in fits of frustration are rather looking forward to the crash. And then the idea that it's going to take 150 years and that none of us will really see it happen or unfold is very, very depressing.
John Michael Greer: Yeah, it sure is. At this point we're actually getting into some of the deeper issues here. Talking about a crash, talking about the end of industrial civilization, which is what we're addressing here, there are two things going on.
On the one hand, there's the actual facts on the ground: the problem with the overuse of nonrenewable resources, the building up of pollution effects such as global warming, generally the collision with the limits to growth that we were all warned about in the 1970s and we all forgot in the 1980s, and guess what, here we are.
That's one side of it. The other side, and the side that I think has been pretty thoroughly ignored both among people who are very much into such theories and their opponents, is the role of cultural narratives — one might actually say cultural mythologies — in how we think about the future.
We've basically got two ways of thinking about the future in modern America. On the one hand, we tend to think that the future will necessarily involve this onward-and-upward forward spiral of progress leading out to some Star Trek future, dancing among the galaxies or something like that. The idea is that, left to itself, that's inevitably what's going to happen.
On the other hand, you have the claim that that would happen except we're about to run into a brick wall and collapse: all the cities abandoned and roving hordes of starving marauders heading across the landscape, all the usual survivalist stuff. Those are the only two futures most Americans are willing to envision.
And if you poke those images enough, what you find is that they're actually a rehash of imagery out of the Book of Revelations in the Bible. I don't know how many people outside of fundamentalist Christians these days even read the Book of Revelations, but it has had a profound impact on Western culture. It's had a profound impact on American culture. It basically sets out a mythic vision of the future in which, first of all, things get really, really, really bad. We get the Tribulation, we get the Great Beast, we get plagues and warfare and monsters roaming the landscape and all kinds of ghastly things. And then the Second Coming happens and you get the Millennium and everything's wonderful forever and ever.
Sociologist Philip Lamy pointed out a little while ago that in recent decades this complicated vision, with first the bad and then the good and all this various mythic richness, has been splintered into two narratives of the future. There's the bad future and there's the good future. We have our future of perpetual progress, the onward and upward to the stars. We have our future of imminent apocalypse, the down-in-flames version.
Even those of us who think of ourselves as post-Christian or non-Christian or rabidly anti-religious, we've all grown up in a society profoundly shaped by these narratives, and those are the ordinary furnishings of our imaginations. It takes a great deal of introspection and a great deal of mythological literacy to see past them and to look at that and say, oh, these views of the future that we've received from our culture, that we all pick up from the media, that we all pick up from the cultural context we all grew up in, are a set of old myths that have been rehashed and had the serial numbers filed off and are being retailed now in a kind of secular drag.
KMO: Well, you mentioned a couple of things that are a little dangerous. The first is that you mentioned Star Trek. And when anyone mentions Star Trek, then I take that as license to talk about Star Trek.
John Michael Greer: I should warn you, if you talk about anything other than the original series, I'm pretty much lost. I haven't owned a television since 1979.
KMO: The original series is interesting because in that series there were predictions made. It was history in the context of the series, but there were all sorts of things happening in the '80s and '90s and the turn of the century that obviously have not come to pass. So the Star Trek timeline has had to sort of adjust itself to account for the fact that it has lived so long.
John Michael Greer: The Eugenics Wars just never got around to happening, as I recall.
KMO: No, no, they didn't.
John Michael Greer: Just as well.
KMO: And the genetic supermen didn't actually climb into their cryoship and zip off out into space.
John Michael Greer: Also just as well.
KMO: But no matter which version of the Star Trek timeline you're talking about, the onward-and-upward progress into the lovely Star Trek universe with holodecks and replicators and such does not progress smoothly. There is an enormous crash and an enormous die-off of humanity, and there is a really ugly period. I think many people have their stories that they live by, by which they frame the events around them, informed not only by Star Trek but by the forces and traditions that shaped Star Trek itself, probably going back to the Book of Revelation and the other sources that you mentioned.
John Michael Greer: Well, in fact, the future you've just sketched out is, again, the Book of Revelations filtered through Gene Roddenberry's imagination. You have the time of tribulation followed by the second coming of technology and the ascent of humanity into the heavens.
KMO: There are a good many people, I think, who welcome the onset of the trials and tribulations of the dark period because they know that is a necessary step. In fact, there is a group of Christians here in the United States, I think they're based in Texas, and they're looking to breed this one perfect red calf, which they think will help bring about the Second Temple in Jerusalem and move us into fast-forward in terms of fulfilling biblical prophecies.
John Michael Greer: It never occurs to them that what they are praying for is the mass murder of most of humanity, because that's what the Book of Revelations prophesies.
One of the things that has to be teased out from within these speculations about imminent catastrophe, and all these people who are very eager for the prospect of a collapse in which billions of people will die, is that there's a great deal of rage and a great deal of very ugly emotions about a quarter of an inch below the surface.
A lot of people who feel themselves disadvantaged, who feel that they don't have the privileges that they think they deserve, who feel that they get the short end of the stick and they ought to have the whole stick, have taken these apocalyptic prophecies, whether religious or allegedly secular, and used those as a dumping ground for some of these very ugly feelings.
And unfortunately, when you poke at those feelings too much, or you poke at those prophecies too much, you tend to get the backlash from those feelings, as I've discovered the hard way a few times.
KMO: Certainly. You've described the mainstream visions of what the future can hold. Here on the C-Realm Podcast, I frequently delve into a couple of sort of esoteric visions. These are both visions that involve radical transformation in the near future. One is the psychedelic Terence McKenna end-of-the-Mayan-calendar 2012 event, and the other is the Ray Kurzweil/Vernor Vinge technological singularity.
When you mention the singularity to peak-oil enthusiasts, they get enraged frequently. They react with far more emotional content than the topic seems to justify, and it seems as though you are touching a nerve and violating something that they hold sacred.
John Michael Greer: Mind you, I consider the singularity to be a singularly unconvincing argument. It's simply proof that if you extend any exponential curve far enough, the result is absurdity. But you're quite right that the people who want a crash do not want — it's more than just an opinion. It's a faith.
And equally, people who want a singularity, who want that technological ascension, the technological rapture if you will, again, it's not just an opinion. It's faith. And as faiths, on the one hand they're basically not subject to rational disproof, and equally they pack a lot of emotional power, and you challenge them at your peril.
KMO: The peak-oil aficionados tend to respond with anger when you mention any potential technological fix that will keep the cars running and keep everything from falling apart. The singularitarians tend to respond with incredible disdain to anybody who doubts their vision of the future, because they themselves are incredibly smart, and if you don't agree with what they have to say, then obviously you are not so smart.
John Michael Greer: People have this pleasant superstition in our society these days that people sit down and rationally decide what they're going to think about the future. And of course that's hogwash. We decide what we're going to think about the future based on our emotional lives, based on typically unstated and often unconscious factors, and then we go looking for the facts to back them.
We're human beings, which means we are not little bubbles of intellect floating along in some Kurzweilian post-singularity electrocosmos. The irrational is very powerful in our lives. And that, of course, makes it very difficult to plan for the future when so many of us have learned to use it as the dumping ground for our fears, our fantasies, our hopes, sometimes our extremely nasty hopes about what's going on.
It is kind of interesting that our society has fixated on the future that way. Many societies do it with the past: the idea there's a golden age back in the past and everything that is of any importance or real value comes down to us from the ancients. That was very typical in many cultures.
But our heaven is the future. Our paradise is the future. And so our different secular religions have their various different visions of what the future is going to hold, whether it's going to be a wholesale slaughter of everyone that disagrees, the technological rapture of the Kurzweilians, and so on.
KMO: Of course, the singularitarians are not all of a single mind on every issue.
John Michael Greer: Of course.
KMO: But they tend to get a little sensitive when you compare their vision to a religious expectation.
John Michael Greer: I think it was Ambrose Bierce who defined superstition as your irrational belief, not mine.
KMO: Yeah, exactly.
John Michael Greer: Most of our religions in the modern world are secular religions. They don't actually have overt gods or afterlives. In fact, singularitarians are rather closer to the sort of orthodox religious thing in that they do have this kind of rapturous ascent into heaven. It's just that instead of their souls being raptured to Jesus, their minds are being uploaded into computers. It's basically the same thing.
Again, you can't tell them that because — as with so many religions — the idea is that there are religions and then there's the truth. And among our modern secular religions, there are religions and then there's scientific fact.
The faith in progress is the great religion of our time. It's the established religion of the modern world. Progress is our God. It's our paradise, our hope of salvation. A huge percentage of modern people put the same kind of faith in progress that medieval peasants put in heaven with God and his saints.
It is, I think, perhaps the most difficult thing that I've had to communicate to people in the course of writing my blog and working on my books: first of all, this is a narrative; it's not simply fact on the ground. And second of all, I don't believe in it.
Yes, there has been significant improvement of technology over the last 300 years. We'll grant that. I don't believe the modern myth that pictures all of human history as this arc of ascension from the caves to the stars. That's the myth, and that's the religious belief of the religion of progress, and I don't buy it. I'm a heretic, if you will, an unbeliever, a howling heathen or something like that.
KMO: Ray Kurzweil calls that the law of accelerating returns. Terence McKenna also had a similar rap. He said that nature is a novelty-conserving engine, that it builds upon complexity and does so faster and faster and faster, which is very much the message that Ray Kurzweil is preaching.
John Michael Greer: Except that that only happens in specific, narrowly defined sections of time. It's very easy to show over the course of the evolutionary sequence, for example, that there are periods of increasing novelty, then there are periods of great stability, and there are also periods of decrease and contraction.
Equally, in the history of human societies, societies rise, they reach a stable plateau, they break down and they collapse, and a great deal is lost. So yes, one can come up with attractive-sounding laws that are basically modeled on the petroleum age and the beliefs of the petroleum age.
One of the things that I think is very poorly understood is just how weird the last century or so has been within human history. We think it normal for every man, woman, and child in America to have the equivalent of a hundred slaves working for them night and day. That's the energy equivalent of the fossil fuels we burn. And it's produced a bizarre outlook on life.
We assume that not only is it perfectly normal for us to have this extravagant outpouring of energy shaping our entire lives, but that there will be even more of it in the future just because we've got pretty blue eyes or something.
KMO: You've mentioned that we tend to look at our own society and put on special exceptional lenses to view our exceptional selves, and you try to disabuse people of that. But at the same time, you have just given an example of how this current situation is, in fact, quite different from anything that has existed in the past.
John Michael Greer: I'm saying that it's unusual. I'm not saying that it's unique. Our situation is identical to that of yeast when you drop yeast into sugar water. The yeast go nuts. They can breed to capacity. They can live the yeast equivalent of extravagant lifestyles because there's plenty of sugar. When they finish processing the sugar into alcohol, they die. That's the extreme case, but it has happened a few other times in human history that human beings have gotten into some aspect of the environment they did not have access to in the past, where they've had access to more energy, and the result has been a great deal of excess and often completely unsustainable modes of living that end up dragging them down the long, rough road to a much more impoverished future.
As far as anyone knows, we've only got about 6,000 years of human history to work with, and human beings have been around for most of a million years, so we're just going to have to go with the sample we've got.
As far as we know, this is the first time in history that human beings have figured out the trick of extracting the Earth's carbon reserves. And we've extracted them in astonishingly extravagant volumes. We've burned through 500 million years of stored photosynthesis in a couple of centuries. And yes, it's enabled us to do some really remarkable, really extravagant things. That's a difference. Every civilization is different.
KMO: We've been talking about the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories by which we live our lives, and how the same stories pop up again in different clothing, be it the clothing of the peaknik, the peak-oil aficionado, or the singularitarian, or the traditional conservative religious fundamentalist. These stories come up again and again.
Another thing that comes up again and again is people viewing themselves as exceptional when in fact they are behaving in ways that are rather mundane and predictable according to a long historical view. I read something that you wrote recently in which you compared societies to the succession of plants that grow in a lot that has been cleared. You first get some pioneer-type weeds which give way to grasses, which give way to shrubs, each one preparing the ground and the plot for the plants that will succeed it. You say this proceeds in a rather predictable fashion and that there is a parallel to the way societies progress. If you would, spell out that parallel and say how it is relevant to us.
John Michael Greer: Okay. Well, first of all, of course, the parallel can only be taken so far. There are limits to borrowing any biological metaphor and applying it to human societies, but there's a point to the comparison.
We know on several previous occasions in human history a new mode of getting a living, if you will, a new mode of supporting a society, has emerged out of some previous, somewhat simpler system. The development of agriculture is the classic example. As far as we know, agriculture first emerged in the Middle East during the millennium or so after the end of the last ice age, when areas of the Middle East that used to be basically forest and grassland got a lot drier. The human populations in those areas had to figure out something to do or starve to death.
Instead of simply gathering the edible grass seeds from the uplands where they'd been doing it for a thousand generations or so, some bright person had the idea of deliberately planting those seeds, and from that, step by step, an agricultural society arose.
The first agricultural societies tended to crash and burn in fairly short order because nobody had yet figured out issues like maintaining soil fertility. It was very much the kind of lifestyle of a dandelion or some other early successional plant on a vacant lot.
The weeds that grow first in a vacant lot maximize their use of resources. They reproduce themselves, produce lots of seeds, they don't cycle. They tend to just burn through the available cheap and easy resources and then get squeezed out by something else which is slower and more efficient. And it goes stage by stage, with increasing efficiency, more cycling, more concern for durability, less concern for maximum production in the immediate period.
The history of agricultural societies follows that trend. We look at the very early agricultural societies, which tended to rise and fall with pretty fair regularity. Then we look at the slow transformation of agriculture as better methods were used, ending up with situations like pre-modern, pre-chemical Chinese or Japanese rice culture, which in some places has been going on continuously in the same field for 2,000 years with no loss of soil fertility.
They're taking manure from animals and human beings, composting it and returning it back to the soil. They've got the cycle worked out in great detail, just as trees in a climax forest: the leaves fall on the ground, the nutrients wash out of the leaves, they go into the roots, and up they go again.
So this is a process that has happened in the history of agriculture, from the very early, very linear extract-the-soil-fertility-and-crash of the Neolithic periods to the most sophisticated and ecologically sensitive agricultures of the pre-modern and early modern periods before the coming of chemical agriculture.
One of the things that I've been suggesting is that we may be in the same kind of situation with the emergence of what I'm calling a technic society. Industrialism as we see it is kind of the dandelion version of a technic society. It's based on resource extraction. It burns through the easy pickings, picks all the low-hanging fruit, and crashes.
There will be other techniques. These will gradually evolve in a direction of more and more efficiency and more keeping the cycles within themselves, as a tree will keep most of its nutrient content within it. It doesn't lead to a Star Trek future. This isn't a fast process. [A short passage in the surviving transcript is unclear.] And so that, I think, is the hope that I would like to hold out to people as we face the declining curve: some kind of technic society, but in harmony with nature.
KMO: When you describe that society, which does sound much kinder than the one in which we live and certainly more sustainable — although I'm trying to find a different way to say "sustainable," as it's been said so many times that it no longer has much meaning or impact — I think back to a conversation that I had recently with Dennis M. Bushnell. He is the chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Institute.
His vision for the near future and his proposed solution for coping with peak oil and associated problems is to start to use biofuels, but to use biofuels grown from algae and from salt-tolerant plants so that we're not taking agricultural land, which is now feeding people, and using it to feed cars instead.
He also prescribes tele-everything: telepresence, telecommuting, telemedicine, just using the infrastructure of the Internet and the skills that we've all acquired — using email and playing our massively multiplayer online games and having avatars in Second Life — and just extending that and traveling less and making our society one that is physically distributed but very mobile in terms of mind-to-mind communication and commerce and whatnot. That sounds pretty good to me, and it also sounds rather like technological and cultural progress.
John Michael Greer: Well, I think that it's not implausible that such a thing would be imagined by people in a society like ours, which basically produces very little and simply lives off the production of the Third World. But I don't know that it's realistic.
First of all, we have to remember that the Internet was created during a period when energy was cheaper than it has ever been. During the '80s and '90s and the first five years of the 21st century, we went through a quarter of a century where a barrel of oil routinely bumped around right above $10 a barrel. For the most important fuel, the most important substance in the modern world, $10 a barrel. Energy was basically free.
It apparently made sense — it certainly looked as though it made sense — to ignore distance as a factor in the economy, to offshore everything. One of the things that has come up in discussions fairly often in this whole topic is the idea that we don't have to worry about peak oil or anything like that because we're a post-industrial society. We don't have any industry.
Well, no. We're totally dependent on industry. It's just we've shifted it off to China and to other countries of the non-developed world because we don't want to deal with the pollution directly, and we don't want to pay U.S. wages. We don't want to pay the prices that would be necessary to support people at U.S. wages.
I have my doubts that the Internet will prove viable over the middle to long term simply because its server farms and its infrastructure both embody and require so much energy. A medium-sized server farm can use more electricity than a decent-sized town, and there are a lot of them to keep the Internet up and running. I don't know that that's going to be viable over the long term.
I think it's a good idea to explore such options, but the first thing to look at, instead of saying, how can we fuel our present lifestyles, or how can we tele-whatever our current lifestyles, is: what do we need to change in our current lifestyles?
Instead of trying to figure out something else to pour into the gas tank, maybe it's time to ditch the car. Maybe it's time to start reshaping the way we live and the way we ghettoize residences and businesses and jobs and so on, so that people actually live where they work, where they get educated, where they have entertainment and shop and things like that.
There have been many surveys of people who indicate they actually enjoy neighborhoods like that, but try getting one built. We have a need to revisit the basic decisions we've made about our lifestyles. We need to look at whether it actually makes sense for us to use this much energy. In America especially, this is the case.
Americans right now are 5% of the world's population. We use 30% of the world's natural resources. There is more waste in this country, more energy wasted in this one country, than most other countries use. We could cut a huge amount without significantly impacting our lifestyle.
You go over to Europe, for example. The average European uses one-third the energy per capita that we use here in America. And I've been there. It's civilized over there. In many ways they have a better lifestyle than we do. Maybe we need to learn from them.
So rather than starting by saying, here's our non-negotiable lifestyle, how are we going to keep doing it, let's start by saying, okay, what do we need to change? It's like the Rainer Maria Rilke poem, where he looks at an archaic torso of Apollo, and what that statue basically says to him is, "You must change your life." That's the lesson I think peak oil has for us more than anything else.
We must change our lives. We've come to live in ways that are hopelessly unsustainable, that aren't actually that satisfying, that are ravaging the planet on which we depend moment by moment for our survival. And there's a better way. There are many better ways. Maybe we need to start with that.
KMO: I certainly agree that the amount that we consume does not equate to the quality of life that we enjoy. In fact, one of the things that I like to do on this program is introduce people to the distinction between standard of living and quality of life, because those two are used rather interchangeably.
This last summer, I made my fourth trip to the Peruvian Amazon. I spent the first week in Peru in the jungle at a lodge that had no electricity, and that was a marvelous, absolutely marvelous experience, and I was consuming almost nothing and using very, very little energy.
Then for the next week and a half I was in a city called Iquitos, which is a bustling city in the heart of the Amazon. You can't get to it by road. You have to go by river or by plane. But once you're there, it's loud, polluted, congested, and distractingly loud because there are thousands of these rickshaw taxis, converted motorcycles that make a lot of noise.
It sounds chaotic and stressful, but at the same time you don't need a car. Most people don't have them. Most people get around on foot. It's a very walkable sort of city, and when you do have to travel long distances, cheap transportation is available. It's not really sustainable in that they're still burning gasoline. But in that environment I was still consuming far less than I do here, still using a lot less energy than I do here, and still having a much better time than I typically do here.
John Michael Greer: Well, there you go. I've lived without electricity, running water, central heat, and flush toilets. I've lived that way and I had no particular difficulty with it.
Just now I do have electricity. I don't have central heating where I live. I don't own a car. Somehow my quality of life is pretty good, despite the fact that my standard of living probably puts me down fairly close to the poverty line. It's crucial to differentiate.
Somebody stuck a sticker on a sign in the parking lot of one of the big-box stores in the larger town just north of where I live. The sticker said, "If you had enough, how would you know?" I think most Americans have lost the ability to answer that question. We don't know what the word enough means.
We distract ourselves from ourselves. We distract ourselves from the fact that our lives aren't actually that satisfying, aren't actually that interesting, with all of these technological gimmicks, all these noisemakers and all these distractions that serve mostly to keep us from noticing that we're not actually having a very good time.
So, painful though it is, I think one of the things that would do many of us in this country a lot of good is just turn off the noisemakers, cut back on the distractions, and take stock. Say, is the life that I'm living actually something that I enjoy? Is it actually meeting my needs? Is it actually fulfilling? When I was younger, is this where I wanted to end up?
I think a lot of us can look at ourselves and go, wow, no, it isn't. Maybe it's time for a change. And one of the possibilities, one of the things that's always opened up by the decline of a civilization and the breakdown in its narratives, its myths, the stories that people tell to themselves, is that it opens up the possibility of turning inward and moving away from an outer-directed life directed toward accumulating the largest possible amount of stuff, or whatever our culture's outward goal is, and actually paying attention to what's going on inside the game.
KMO: That brings me around to how I had intended to close, because I'm sure that there are some people listening to this who are thinking, gosh, you've had John Michael Greer on the phone for nearly an hour now, and you've talked about peak oil and the technological singularity; you never even mentioned Druidry or earth-centered religions or anything of the sort. It's not very difficult to equate the two or to demonstrate some relevance between them.
So if you would, just take a few minutes — and this will have to be the end of the interview — and talk a little bit about your role as Archdruid and how this relates to the interests that we've been talking about for the past 50 minutes.
John Michael Greer: Well, I had no particular intention of becoming an Archdruid. I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, so to speak. But the Druid tradition — please start by being aware, we don't claim to be descended from the ancient Celtic Druids. It would be nice, but the modern Druid movement was recreated beginning in the 18th century, right around the time the Industrial Revolution was really getting underway.
All through the almost 300 years now of its history, it has been very much focused on presenting an alternative to the sort of industrial ideology of onward and upward, more is better, and screw the living Earth, that has dominated Western culture through most of that period.
And now we're really moving into the time for which Druidry came into being, the time that Druids have been talking about for a long time, when the limits to growth would be reached. It's not as though we have a canned solution. We don't have an ideological program: sign on to the Druid five-year plan and we'll save the world.
The Earth is old and strong and smart, and she will save herself, especially if we get out of her way. But one thing that I think we can offer — and of course many other earth-centered traditions can offer the same thing — is a sense of the sacredness of nature, a sense of the centrality of nature to human experience.
We have this delusion in the modern world that we are apart from nature, that nature is this little cute green thing over in a corner somewhere where we can go and look and go, ooh, ah, isn't it nice? We survive moment by moment because the natural world produces the oxygen and the water, and most of our economy is dependent in one way or another on nature.
There was a study done a couple of decades ago about the total economic contribution of nature to the world economy. It turns out that out of every dollar of economic value produced in the world, three-quarters of that — 75 cents — is actually produced free of charge by nature.
We're totally dependent on nature, yet we act like a bunch of spoiled three-year-olds who think they don't need it. We could find out the hard way, or we could actually get a clue. The Druid tradition is simply suggesting that maybe we should get a clue. Maybe there's a gentler way to come to this realization than by running headfirst into a brick wall.
So that's basically what I'd say. We could get into Druid traditions and philosophy and funny white robes and golden sickles and all that kind of stuff. But what it comes down to is recognizing that it is nature in which we live and move and have our being, and maybe we should pay attention to that.
KMO: You will find the C-Realm audience a very receptive audience for that particular message.
John Michael Greer: I'm glad to hear that.
KMO: Just before you go, tell us a little bit about your book. Is it available already, and if not, when will it be available?
John Michael Greer: It's available. You can get it online any place you want. The title is The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, published by New Society Publishers. It covers a lot of the issues that we've talked about here, as well as a great deal more. And I hope it starts some interesting conversations.
KMO: I will be adding it to the C-Realm Amazon bookstore, and I will be looking for a copy. I'm interested in learning more about what you have to say, because everything you've said thus far has fit very nicely into the sort of loose worldview that I've been assembling over the past few years.
And I like to have surprises that fit in with what I have already accepted, because I think that's pretty much the only way that anybody ever really comes to anything new.
John Michael Greer: You're probably right.
KMO: John Michael Greer, thank you very much for appearing on the C-Realm Podcast.
John Michael Greer: Thank you for having me here. I've enjoyed it.
KMO's Postscript
KMO: I talked with John Michael Greer about the stories that we tell ourselves. One story that is popular among a tribe that I used to be a full-fledged member of and am now sort of a satellite member of is the tribe of the Singularitarians. I do make fun of their seriousness from time to time, but don't take that to mean that I think that they're full of excrement.
I do take seriously the possibility that advances — and I can use that word without quotes — advances in artificial-intelligence technology could rapidly and radically reshape the world that we experience.
There's something that I wanted to read. I won't read it in its entirety, but I'll read you a select bit from it. It is an excerpt or two from a blog post by Stephen Smithey. It's called “Rapture of the Nerds, Not.”
Smithey's point is that the technological singularity is sometimes derided as the “rapture of the nerds,” but that the resemblance to fringe Christian end-times beliefs is not, by itself, an argument that the technological developments envisioned by singularitarians will fail to materialize. A psychological parallel may be a useful reason to inspect a claim more closely, but resemblance to a religious belief does not settle the technical question.
He goes on to list ways in which the singularitarian vision differs from the Christian Rapture: it is naturalistic rather than supernatural; it does not depend on a god intervening from outside the world; there is uncertainty about exactly how or when it would unfold; it is human-caused; and it is generally envisioned as affecting or benefiting humanity broadly rather than rewarding only an elect group of true believers.
I don't think all of his claimed differences are equally strong. In particular, the claim that there are no religious trappings, rituals, worship, or holy writings is one I don't think he can make a very strong case for. But I do think it's worth resisting the temptation to substitute the “rapture of the nerds” analogy for an actual argument.
So there was a bit of singularitarian bashing in the interview with John Michael Greer, and I offer these words from Stephen Smithey to soothe that irritation a bit. I'm also hoping to get some singularitarians here on the C-Realm Podcast in the not-too-distant future to talk about the topics discussed at the Singularity Summit.
Source: C-Realm Podcast episode 120, “The Long Descent,” released September 17, 2008. Transcript prepared from the preserved episode audio.
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