John Michael Greer’s lastest from the Archdruid Report.
John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report: How Great the Fall Can Be
This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like. It’s not about sitting in a cozy earth-sheltered home under a roof loaded with solar panels, living some close approximation of a modern industrial lifestyle, while the rest of the world slides meekly down the chute toward history’s compost bin, leaving you and yours untouched. It’s about political chaos–meaning that you won’t get the leaders you want, and you may not be able to count on the rule of law or even the most basic civil liberties. It’s about economic implosion–meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out, or it’ll be a race between the local government and the local bandits to see which one gets to tie your family up and torture them to death, starting with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is located.
It’s about environmental chaos–meaning that you and the people you care about may have many hungry days ahead as crazy weather messes with the harvests, and it’s by no means certain you won’t die early from some tropical microbe that’s been jarred loose from its native habitat to find a new and tasty home in you. It’s about rapid demographic contraction–meaning that you get to have the experience a lot of people in the Rust Belt have already, of walking past one abandoned house after another and remembering the people who used to live there, until they didn’t any more.
If you are not working with your neighbors and local communities to built in some resiliency and contigency plans for the consequences of some old and some recent bad decisions, you better get cracking. Relitigating the election won’t get it done. It can be done at the same time as resisting the Trump administration’s excesses. And the networks you develop might be the path to a better politics, but there are no guarantees.
We have indeed squandered 40 years in inaction on the environment in any way that matters.
I believe as each day passes, DT will be compared to Nerō Claudius Caesar …
Quo Vadis - Nero (Peter Ustinov)
There are a lot of people who have to leak to get quite to that point, but I think that this comment strays a bit from the points that John Michael Greer is making.
It is not about the elites but about the activists who still have not started freezing in the dark. And that is a sign of a very hard landing in the climate crisis, especially after 40 years of warnings.
Re stashes: Farmers in France are still plowing up earthenware jars full of Roman coins with dates in the fourth and fifth centuries. Gibbon tells us that to collect taxes from the wealthy, who by then had fled the cities to their fortified estates, Emperors came calling personally, backed by a couple of legions of regular troops. lesser officials were treated like Harlan County revenoors.
Bryan Ward-Perkins in The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization tells us that under the Empire, even at the end, the cottages of Italian yeoman farmers, even poor farmers, were built of stone, with ceramic tile floors and clay tile roofs and owned glassware,pottery, and cutlery that were mass-produced. Few cottages are available from later eras because they were built of wood with thatched roofs (instead of tile roofs as you see today in Spain and Italy).
Built of wood with thatched roofs by the yeoman farmers’ descendants. (Even though I believe that yeoman farmer was an institution particular to England and used as a class reference beginning in the 18th century).
Says we better learn how to grow the plants required to make good thatched roofs and take particular care of our trees best suited for building. (Tell that to the Georgia-Pacific Koch brothers.)
Folks in marginal agricultural climates that have been made livable only through a significant transportation infrastructure and hi-tech hydrological engineering systems are the ones who will have a rough time. And areas that have paved and poisoned what was rich, arable land. Strangely, where I live is an example of the first because of the nature of the soil and geology. It was mostly timbering and small plot farming until the 1940s when pave roads finally were extended through what in rainy spells becomes sticky muck, almost like the gumbo soils of the Dakotas. Suburban development was a product of Research Triangle Park and started (barely) in the 1960s but did not begin in earnest until the 1990s after the city and county schools were merged. Now, we’re close to building out the last vacant land for subdivisions, done with significant amounts of terraforming and temporary settling ponds and retention ponds. Those still are not sufficient to keep the pollution of the Corps of Engineers lakes that are water source for several cities from becoming more polluted with nitrates, phosphates, and E. coli released from erosion, erosion from mass grading, and the animal population (suburban dogs and deer).
Possibly or his successors. The point being that the new construction was like the German barbarian huts, not the product of a continent-spanning civilization. IIRC, he called the glassware Phoenician. Few of the manufactured goods came from Rome or Italy. Mostly Greece (stonework) or the Middle East (glass and metal work). Even in Cesarean times, rich woman had silk gowns, the cloth from China coming over the Silk Road.
Surely you are correct. I believe he used that term (he did) to indicate small freeholders rather than slaves or what we would call sharecroppers.
Ward-Perkin’s book is one in an intellectual counter-revolution. The Fall of Rome was a given until the late ’80s(?) or ’90s when a revisionist view held that the Germans were not barbarians but successors to the Romans that built on their civilization and extended it. Ward-Perkins and others countered that the Fall was real and a set back to civilization. Good arguments on both sides. I particularly remember the comparison of Germans on the Rhine to Mexicans on the Rio Grande. On the German (Mexican) side of the river, people noticed the prosperity of the Romans (Americans) and didn’t so much want to destroy it, but to share in it. These immigrants became the backbone of the Roman Legions (American Army) as the Romans (Americans) failed to pursue military careers but the rulers needed soldiers more than ever.
This whole argument by historians brings up the question of what exactly is a civilization. It is a centralized citified economy, polity, and culture. In one sense, it can be argued that the middle ages did not exactly end until the 1960s when all social relations, even in “socialist” countries, were fundamentally built on capitalism that came out of the 1500s and dominated during the 1800s.
If the characteristics of our current civilization are that it fundamentally drives toward being secular, urban, and scientific, what is the successor characteristics. Are they religious, rural, and …. that’s where the issue is. What is the origin of the common sense of the world going forward if no longer scientific? Or do you have religious common sense, rural style, and nationalist symbology? Notice that the urban-rural is not about location but style of the society.
Notice that religious is not the opposite of secular, but of scientific. And that the vaccuum of myth, rite, and symbols left by iconoclastic religion is filled with national myths, national rites, and national symbols. Pledges of Allegiance and loyalty, holidays and patriotic spectaculars, flags and coins and gravestones and …So what now is rural style? Anything that is far from “urbane”, finely measured (refined), formal, restrained.
It’s rather astonishing to see how quickly the left adopts the nonsense about the national debt.
This is, of course, sheer nonsense. It was nonsense when the deficit scolds were saying it a year ago, and it is nonsense today.
There are always, I guess, going to be purveyors of disaster porn. Really there is little difference between the archdruid report and the survivalists on the right.
But as I wrote before, on a global scale there is more good news than bad news.
https://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2017/01/how-great-fall-can-be.html
This is not to say bad stuff isn’t going to happen under Trump – it will.
But this is not an existential moment for Democracy in the United States.
And the fact the Trump complied with the court orders last night is exhibit one.
And the fact the Trump complied with the court orders last night is exhibit one.
He did? I’m hearing that Dulles, among others, is refusing to comply.
I would not call Burkeian libertarian John Michael Greer exactly “the left”.
You can always read Dimitri Orlov.
Yes, indeed. Choose your dark ages.
But it helps to get a contrary whack on the head sometimes to keep you from tunnel vision.