Part II: Notes on the First Death Tremors of the Petroleum Age
June 4, 2007 6:02 amThis is the second part of the essay written by Mr. Bliss. To read the first installment, please click through this link:
II.
THE TRAFFIC JAMS I see clogging the streets and highways of Pugetopolis — increasingly the worst such congestion in North America — are not, as the authorities constantly try to reassure us, merely temporary discomforts until technology rescues us yet again. What we are witnessing is the vehicular equivalent of the last frantic costume ball before the final debacle, not Waterloo, which merely marked a shift in power, but Arthur’s last battle at Camlannis, which signaled the end of an age and a plunge into centuries of darkness.
And this time every sociological indicator I can find suggests the darkness may not never lift again: the wholesale abandonment of basic protocols of courtesy as old as civilization itself, the chronic hatefulness expressed by the ever-worsening plague of bad manners that now afflicts U.S. society from top to bottom, the increasing incidence of checkout-line scuffles and road rage and gas pump brawls — all this is not only far more prophetic than the decaying streets and crumbling public buildings but portends a descent into social Darwinist cannibal savagery of a magnitude that surely has no precedent. Even the pampered children of the elite sense the unspeakably brutish future that awaits us: note how the neo-tribal magnetism of gang life now reaches far beyond the ghetto to recruit youth from all but the most posh Caucasian schools and neighborhoods. Like post-Katrina New Orleans, such trends and incidents are glimpses of the grim tomorrow that skyrocketing fuel prices may bring upon us much sooner than we anticipate.
Meanwhile most of us have no idea just how bad things are. Corporate media ignored the apocalypse for years and now routinely minimizes it, reducing what amounts to a deadly plague of rabid grizzly bears to nothing more than a smelly but merely bothersome infestation of incontinent house cats. Thus terminal climate change is deliberately softened to “global warming” even as petroleum exhaustion is misrepresented as “temporary price instability.” And now that these problems are begrudgingly acknowledged, the primary theme of ruling class propaganda is reassurance: “don’t worry; this sort of thing has happened many times in human history — and we’ve not only survived, but see how we have progressed to all these material comforts we have today,” always with the strong implication that any day now things will get better. A related variant is the deification of technology: “times will be hard for a while, but technology will save us — and then it’ll be just like Star Trek — we’ll go on to conquer the whole galaxy.” In either case, it’s the same old “restoration of the American Dream.“
But the shibboleth of “alternative energy“ is nothing but a great pacifier, another pie-in-the-sky scam. Google “the false promise of alternative energy” without the quotation marks and scroll at will: no amount of “alternative energy” can possibly replace the declining petroleum supply, precisely because our technology is not merely dependent on petroleum, but contingent upon it. Once the petroleum runs out, there will no be technology available with which to produce alternatives — or anything else. The awful totality of our dependence — which we are only feeling the first pangs of in the socioeconomic consequences of runaway fuel prices — is precisely what makes the apocalypse unavoidable.
As always when cataclysms loom, many take refuge in theological fantasy: “after we have gone through this tribulation , we will be lifted bodily into heaven” or “after we experience this time of mandatory spiritual growth, we will all achieve collective enlightenment” — the same palliative whether expressed as Old Time Religion or New Age mysticism, though surely no more misguided than most of the common secular responses. But there are other spiritual alternatives — some of the emergent approaches to paganism for example — that are neither compensatory Abrahamic fanaticism nor vapid New Age tomfoolery: the stern repudiation of Abrahamic nature-hating, a centerpiece of both Wiccan/ecofeminist and Druidical viewpoints, is in fact genuinely revolutionary. Detailed and thoughtful discussion of such alternatives is already underway. The following link — scroll down to “Religion and Peak Oil: the Next Spirituality” — is but one example.
Thus if we are fortunate, the spiritual quest prompted by our collective anxiety will give birth to an ethos that will guarantee a sustainable human community. The quest for such an alternative actually began at least 60 years ago with publication of Robert Graves’ ground-breaking work The White Goddess, which has since fostered a legacy of rediscovery and realization that will prove infinitely valuable if our species manages to survive.
Which is an ocean-sized if. The terrifying truth — the truth the ruling class tries desperately to hide — is that there is absolutely nothing in human experience to compare with the magnitude and totality of the disaster that has already begun.
What confronts us is in fact not one apocalypse but two: species failure — or more accurately its consequences — combined with terminal climate change.
Species failure is the total, self-inflicted destruction of human civilization due to the exhaustion of petroleum resources, the consequent end of technology, and the resultant political, economic and cultural collapse — horrors substantially intensified by what I label “End Time Capitalism”: the tyrannosauric depredations of a ruling class frantic to hoard maximum wealth before Nature slams most of her doors closed forever. In other words, species failure is the complete breakdown of all human institutions, the debacle resulting from a series of suicidal errors culminating in a species hopelessly dependent on petroleum and thus unable to survive without it.
Terminal climate change — itself largely self-inflicted — worsens the consequences of species failure to the point the survival of H. sapiens sapiens may be impossible. It is “terminal” because, while our species has repeatedly survived cold and glaciation, there is grave doubt we can survive a global temperature increase so great the newest projections suggest it will make all but the polar regions uninhabitable by any life much more intelligent than centipedes and scorpions.
(I should point out I chose the terms “species failure” and “terminal climate change” very carefully and only after considerable reflection. But it seems nothing else adequately describes what is happening — especially since both conditions are the cumulative and now unavoidable consequences of at least 4,000 years of increasingly ruinous decisions, each decision based on patriarchal contempt for nature. Likewise “End Time Capitalism” reflects — correctly — capitalism’s origin in Abrahamic doctrine, especially its overwhelming impulse toward theocracy and/or other forms of fascism.)
To elaborate:
While it is true many human societies have waxed and waned, the causes of collapse never before included the death of technology — a cataclysmic event that itself has no human precedent. Technological failure — by far the most terminal consequence of petroleum exhaustion — is not only an entirely new affliction, but one for which, as we shall see, we have already moronically discarded our only possible antidote.
Though human societies are always destroyed by human folly, the previous mechanisms of such destruction were limited to economic failure (which includes the loss of the resource base essential to economic function); political failure (the inability to maintain public services and keep order); cultural collapse (the supplanting of one culture by another, often violently), or some combination of all these forces.
The Western Roman Empire died in the political upheavals of 476 CE, though its economy would continue to feed and supply Europe for another 200 years, until the first Islamic invasions wreaked such havoc the entire continent was flung into a dark age that reduced the population by as much as 75 percent (mostly by starvation) and lasted (depending on the definition) at least five centuries. The Mayan civilization cited in the link above failed economically, collapsing as it consumed its resource base.(A great deal has been written lately about the Mayans, most of it in service to reassurance campaigns.)
Destruction of the Minoan civilization centered on Knossos was inflicted suddenly and at the height of unprecedented achievement by the explosive eruption of Thera or Kallisté in approximately 1628 BCE. This civilization was at least a thousand years old (and probably much older), and the eruption that killed it was perhaps the most violent such event in human experience — by some estimates equivalent to as many as 25 or 30 hydrogen bombs. It inflicted simultaneous political and economic collapse on the whole Mediterranean region, changed the climate of the entire world for decades and laid the notably peaceful and cooperative Minoan culture open to destruction by aggressively patriarchal Greek invaders. So perished the last matriarchal, goddess-centered civilization in Europe — a civilization of women so breathtakingly organized for humanitarian purpose, they were able to evacuate all humans, pets, domestic animals and in fact all moveable goods from the cities within range of the eruption: a feat we could not (or would not) duplicate even today. But they had no defense against the devastating tsunami that followed the explosion — by some estimates a wave nearly 500 feet high. Nor could they prevail against its long-term consequences — the final extermination of an inconceivably ancient living-earth ethos that might well have saved us from the ecocidal excesses by which we have sealed our own doom.
Horrible as each of these earlier societal collapses were, basic human technology survived every one of them. Bronze gave way to iron just as flint had given way to bronze, but the tools and weapons all operated on identical principles: the blade, the hammer, the atlatl, the bow and arrow, the pulley, lever and inclined plane. Agriculture and transport remained dependent on draft animals. What complex machinery existed was driven by wind or water — there is strongly suggestive evidence the Minoans had our species’ first genuinely trans-oceanic sailing vessels, and there is no question the Romans built the largest, most mechanically elaborate water-powered grain-mills in history — which does not lessen the contribution of countless enterprises in which the sole energy sources were the intellect and brawn of human workers: free women and men in Knossos and throughout the Minoan civilization, mostly slaves elsewhere and ever after.
But in the past two centuries, all of this ancient technology — technology dating at least to the Paleolithic and existing in rudimentary form even among the earliest pre-human primates — has been swept away by the industrial revolution and the subsequent rise and triumph of the petroleum-based technology that now provides virtually all the essentials of modern civilization: not just fuel but items as diverse as permanent-press clothing, contact lenses, vitamin capsules, hearing aids, antihistamines, roofing, computers, compact disks and cell phones. Many of these items — for example, computers, compact disks, cell phones and contact lenses — cannot be made without petroleum. Nor can the insulation required for the function and safety of electric wiring. A world without petroleum will thus be a world without electricity, and in a world deprived of electricity, everything we take for granted will become useless junk. The resulting collapse will be absolute: political, economic, cultural (for today our only means of cultural transmission is electronic), and technological as well — a species-wide collapse of a magnitude and totality that has, as I already said, absolutely no precedent. In other words and also again as I said, species failure.
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