It's one thing to suggest, as I did in last week’s post
here, that North America a few centuries from now might have something like
five per cent of its current population. It’s quite another thing to talk about
exactly whose descendants will comprise that five per cent. That’s what I
intend to do this week, and yes, I know that raising that issue is normally a
very good way to spark a shouting match in which who-did-what-to-whom rhetoric
plays its usual role in drowning out everything else.
Now of course there’s a point to talking about, and learning
from, the abuses inflicted by groups of people on other groups of people over
the last five centuries or so of North American history. Such discussions, though, have very little to
offer the topic of the current series of posts here on The Archdruid
Report. History may be a
source of moral lessons but it’s not a moral phenomenon; a glance back over our
past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a
society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was
not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause, but
by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power. No
doubt most of us would rather live in a world that didn’t work that way, but
here we are, and morality remains a matter of individual choices—yours and
mine—in the face of a cosmos that seems sublimely unconcerned with our moral
beliefs.
Thus we can take it for granted that just as the borders
that currently divide North America were put there by force or the threat of
force, the dissolution of those borders and their replacement with new lines of
division will happen the same way. For that matter, it’s a safe bet that the
social divisions—ethnic and otherwise—of the successor cultures that emerge in
the aftermath of our downfall will be established and enforced by means no more
just or fair than the ones that currently distribute wealth and privilege to
the different social and ethnic strata in today’s North American nations.
Again, it would be pleasant to live in a world where that isn’t true, but we
don’t.
I apologize to any of my readers who are offended or upset
by these points. In order to make any kind of sense of the way that
civilizations fall—and more to the point, the way that ours is currently
falling—it’s essential to get past the belief that history is under any
obligation to hand out rewards for good behavior and punishments for the
opposite, or for that matter the other way around. Over the years and decades
and centuries ahead of us, as industrial civilization crumbles, a great many
people who believe with all their hearts that their cause is right and just are
going to die anyway, and there will be no shortage of brutal, hateful, vile
individuals who claw their way to the top—for a while, at least. One of the
reliable features of dark ages is that while they last, the top of the heap is
a very unsafe place to be.
North America being what it is today, a great many people
considering the sort of future I’ve just sketched out immediately start
thinking about the potential for ethnic conflict, especially but not only in
the United States. It’s an issue worth discussing, and not only for the currently
obvious reasons. Conflict between ethnic groups is quite often a major issue in
the twilight years of a civilization, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly, but
it’s also self-terminating, for an interesting reason: traditional ethnic
divisions don’t survive dark ages. In an age of political dissolution, economic
implosion, social chaos, demographic collapse, and mass migration, the factors
that maintain established ethnic divisions in place don’t last long. In their
place, new ethnicities emerge. It’s a
commonplace of history that dark ages are the cauldron from which nations are
born.
So we have three stages, which overlap to a greater or
lesser degree: a stage of ethnic conflict, a stage of ethnic dissolution, and a
stage of ethnogenesis. Let’s take them one at a time.
The stage of ethnic conflict is one effect of the economic
contraction that’s inseparable from the decline of a civilization. If a rising tide lifts all boats, as
economists of the trickle-down school used to insist, a falling tide has a much
more differentiated effect, since each group in a declining society does its
best to see to it that as much as possible of the costs of decline land on
someone else. Since each group’s access
to wealth and privilege determines fairly exactly how much influence it has on
the process, it’s one of the constants of decline and fall that the costs and
burdens of decline trickle down, landing with most force on those at the bottom
of the pyramid.
That heats up animosities across the board: between ethnic
groups, between regions, between political and religious divisions, you name
it. Since everyone below the uppermost levels of wealth and power loses some of
what they’ve come to expect, and since it’s human nature to pay more attention
to what you’ve lost than to the difference between what you’ve retained and
what someone worse off than you has to make do with, everyone’s aggrieved, and
everyone sees any attempt by someone else to better their condition as a
threat. That’s by no means entirely inaccurate—if the pie’s shrinking, any
attempt to get a wider slice has to come at somebody else’s expense—but it fans
the flames of conflict even further, helping to drive the situation toward the
inevitable explosions.
One very common and very interesting feature of this process
is that the increase in ethnic tensions tend to parallel a process of ethnic
consolidation. In the United States a century ago, for example, the division of
society by ethnicity wasn’t anything so like as simple as it is today. The
uppermost caste in most of the country wasn’t simply white, it was white male
Episcopalians whose ancestors got here from northwestern Europe before the
Revolutionary War. Irish ranked below Germans but above Italians, who looked
down on Jews, and so on down the ladder to the very bottom, which was occupied
by either African-Americans or Native Americans depending on locality. Within
any given ethnicity, furthermore, steep social divisions existed, microcosms of
a hierarchically ordered macrocosm; gender distinctions and a great many other
lines of fracture combined with the ethnic divisions just noted to make
American society in 1914 as intricately caste-ridden as any culture on the
planet.
The partial dissolution of many of these divisions has
resulted inevitably in the hardening of those that remain. That’s a common
pattern, too: consider the way that the rights of Roman citizenship expanded
step by step from the inhabitants of the city of Rome itself, to larger and
larger fractions of the people it dominated, until finally every free adult
male in the Empire was a Roman citizen by definition. Parallel to that process
came a hardening of the major divisions, between free persons and slaves on the
one hand, and between citizens of the Empire and the barbarians outside its
borders on the other. The result was the same in that case as it is in ours:
traditional, parochial jealousies and prejudices focused on people one step
higher or lower on the ladder of caste give way to new loyalties and hatreds
uniting ever greater fractions of the population into increasingly large and
explosive masses.
The way that this interlocks with the standard mechanisms of
decline and fall will be a central theme of future posts. The crucial detail,
though, is that a society riven by increasingly bitter divisions of the sort
just sketched out is very poorly positioned to deal with external pressure or
serious crisis. “Divide and conquer,” the Romans liked to say during the
centuries of their power: splitting up
their enemies and crushing them one at a time was the fundamental strategy they
used to build their empire. On the way down, though, it was the body of Roman
society that did the dividing, tearing itself apart along every available line
of schism, and Rome was accordingly conquered in its turn. That’s usual for
falling civilizations, and we’re well along the same route in the United States
today.
Ethnic divisions thus routinely play a significant role in
the crash of civilizations. Still, as noted above, the resulting chaos quickly
shreds the institutional arrangements that make ethnic divisions endure in a
settled society. Charismatic leaders emerge out of the chaos, and those that
are capable of envisioning and forming alliances across ethnic lines succeed
where their rivals fail; the reliable result is a chaotic melting pot of armed
bands and temporary communities drawn from all available sources. When the Huns
first came west from the Eurasian steppes around 370 CE, for example, they were
apparently a federation of related Central Asian tribes; by the time of Attila,
rather less than a century later, his vast armies included warriors from most
of the ethnic groups of eastern Europe. We don’t even know what their leader’s
actual name was; “Attila” was a nickname—“Daddy”—in Visigothic, the lingua
franca among the eastern barbarians at that time.
The same chaotic reshuffling was just as common on the other
side of the collapsing Roman frontiers. The province of Britannia, for
instance, had long been divided into ethnic groups with their own distinct
religious and cultural traditions. In the wake of the Roman collapse and the
Saxon invasions, the survivors who took refuge in the mountains of the west
forgot the old divisions, and took to calling themselves by a new name: Combrogi,
“fellow-countrymen” in old Brythonic. Nowadays that’s Cymry,
the name the Welsh use for themselves.
Not everyone who ended up as Combrogi was British by
ancestry—one of the famous Welsh chieftains in the wars against the Saxons was
a Visigoth named Theodoric—nor were all the people on the other side Saxons—one
of the leaders of the invaders was a Briton named Caradoc ap Cunorix, the “Cerdic son of Cynric” of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the efficiency of the
blender into which every political, economic, social, and ethnic manifestation
got tossed in the last years of Rome. My favorite example of the raw confusion
of that time is the remarkable career of another Saxon leader named Odoacer. He
was the son of one of Attila the Hun’s generals, but got involved in Saxon
raids on Britain after Attila’s death. Sometime in the 460s, when the struggle
between the Britons and the Saxons was more or less stuck in deadlock, Odoacer
decided to look for better pickings elsewhere, and led a Saxon fleet that
landed at the mouth of the Loire in western France. For the next decade or so,
more or less in alliance with Childeric, king of the Franks, he fought the
Romans, the Goths, and the Bretons there.
When the Saxon hold on the Loire was finally broken, Odoacer
took the remains of his force and joined Childeric in an assault on Italy. No
records survive of the fate of that expedition, but it apparently didn’t go
well. Odoacer next turned up, without an army, in what’s now Austria and was
then the province of Noricum. It took him only a short time to scrape together
a following from the random mix of barbarian warriors to be found there, and in
476 he marched on Italy again, and overthrew the equally random mix of barbarians
who had recently seized control of the peninsula.
The Emperor of the West just then, the heir of the Caesars
and titular lord of half the world, was a boy named Romulus Augustulus. In a
fine bit of irony, he also happened to be the son of Attila the Hun’s Greek
secretary, a sometime ally of Odoacer’s father. This may be why, instead of
doing the usual thing and having the boy killed, Odoacer basically told the
last Emperor of Rome to run along and play.
That sort of clemency was unusual, and it wasn’t repeated by the next
barbarian warlord in line; fourteen years later Odoacer was murdered by order
of Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, who proceeded to take his place as
temporary master of the corpse of imperial Rome.
Soldiers of fortune, or of misfortune for that matter,
weren’t the only people engaged in this sort of heavily armed tour of the
post-Roman world during those same years. Entire nations were doing the same
thing. Those of my readers who have been watching North America’s climate come
unhinged may be interested to know that severe droughts in Central Asia may
have been the trigger that kickstarted the process, pushing nomadic tribes out
of their traditional territories in a desperate quest for survival. Whether or
not that’s what pushed the Huns into motion, the westward migration of the Huns
forced other barbarian peoples further west to flee for their lives, and the
chain of dominoes thus set in motion played a massive role in creating the
chaos in which figures like Odoacer rose and fell. It’s a measure of the sheer
scale of these migrations that before Rome started to topple, many of the
ancestors of today’s Spaniards lived in what’s now the Ukraine.
And afterwards? The migrations slowed and finally stopped,
the warlords became kings, and the people who found themselves in some more or
less stable kingdom began the slow process by which a random assortment of
refugees and military veterans from the far corners of the Roman world became
the first draft of a nation. The former province of Britannia, for example,
became seven Saxon kingdoms and a varying number of Celtic ones, and then began
the slow process of war and coalescence out of which England, Scotland, Wales,
and Cornwall gradually emerged. Elsewhere, the same process moved at varying
rates; new nations, languages, ethnic groups came into being. The cauldron of
nations had come off the boil, and the history of Europe settled down to a
somewhat less frenetic rhythm.
I’ve used post-Roman Europe as a convenient and solidly documented
example, but transformations of the same kind are commonplace whenever a
civilization goes down. The smaller and more isolated the geographical area of
the civilization that falls, the less likely mass migrations are—ancient China,
Mesopotamia, and central Mexico had plenty of them, while the collapse of the
classic Maya and Heian Japan featured a shortage of wandering hordes—but the
rest of the story is among the standard features you get with societal
collapse. North America is neither small nor isolated, and so it’s a safe bet
that we’ll get a tolerably complete version of the usual process right here in
the centuries ahead.
What does that mean in practice? It means, to begin with,
that a rising spiral of conflict along ethnic, cultural, religious, political,
regional, and social lines will play an ever larger role in North American life
for decades to come. Those of my readers who have been paying attention to
events, especially but not only in the United States, will have already seen
that spiral getting under way. As the first few rounds of economic contraction
have begun to bite, the standard response of every group you care to name has
been to try to get the bite taken out of someone else. Listen to the insults
being flung around in the political controversies of the present day—the
thieving rich, the shiftless poor, and the rest of it—and notice how many of
them amount to claims that wealth that ought to belong to one group of people
is being unfairly held by another. In those claims, you can hear the first
whispers of the battle-cries that will be shouted as the usual internecine wars
begin to tear our civilization apart.
As those get under way, for reasons we’ll discuss at length
in future posts, governments and the other institutions of civil society will
come apart at the seams, and the charismatic leaders already mentioned will
rise to fill their place. In response, existing loyalties will begin to
dissolve as the normal process of warband formation kicks into overdrive. In
such times a strong and gifted leader like Attila the Hun can unite any number
of contending factions into a single overwhelming force, but at this stage such
things have no permanence; once the warlord dies, ages, or runs out of luck,
the forces so briefly united will turn on each other and plunge the continent
back into chaos.
There will also be mass migrations, and far more likely than
not these will be on a scale that would have impressed Attila himself. That’s
one of the ways that the climate change our civilization has unleashed on the
planet is a gift that just keeps on giving; until the climate settles back down
to some semblance of stability, and sea levels have risen as far as they’re
going to rise, people in vulnerable areas are going to be forced out of their
homes by one form of unnatural catastrophe or another, and the same desperate
quest for survival that may have sent the Huns crashing into Eastern Europe
will send new hordes of refugees streaming across the landscape. Some of those
hordes will have starting points within the United States—I expect mass
migrations from Florida as the seas rise, and from the Southwest as drought
finishes tightening its fingers around the Sun Belt’s throat—while others will
come from further afield.
Five centuries from now, as a result, it’s entirely possible
that most people in the upper Mississippi valley will be of Brazilian ancestry,
and the inhabitants of the Hudson’s Bay region sing songs about their long-lost
homes in drowned Florida, while languages descended from English may be spoken
only in a region extending from New England to the isles of deglaciated
Greenland. Nor will these people think of themselves in any of the national and
ethnic terms that come so readily to our minds today. It’s by no means
impossible that somebody may claim to be Presden of Meriga, Meer of Kanda, or
what have you, just as Charlemagne and his successors claimed to be the
emperors of Rome. Just as the Holy Roman Empire was proverbially neither holy,
nor Roman, nor an empire, neither the office nor the nation at that future time
is likely to have much of anything to do with its nominal equivalent today—and
there will certainly be nations and ethnic groups in that time that have no
parallel today.
One implication of these points may be worth noting here, as
we move deeper into the stage of ethnic conflict. No matter what your ethnic
group, dear reader, no matter how privileged or underprivileged it may happen
to be in today’s world, it will almost certainly no longer exist as such when industrial
civilization on this continent finishes the arc of the Long Descent. Such of
your genes as make it through centuries of dieoff and ruthless Darwinian
selection will be mixed with genes from many other nationalities and corners of
the world, and it’s probably a safe bet that the people who carry those genes
won’t call themselves by whatever label you call yourself. When a civilization
falls the way ours is falling, that’s how things generally go.
*****************
In other news, I’m delighted to announce that my latest book, Twilight’s Last Gleaming, a novel based on the five-part scenario of US imperial collapse and dissolution posted here in 2012, will be hitting the bookshelves on October 31 of this year. Those of my readers who are interested may like to know that the publisher, Karnac Books, is offering a discount and free worldwide shipping on preorders. Those posts still hold this blog’s all-time record for page views, and the novel’s just as stark and fast-paced as the original posts; those of my readers who enjoy a good political-military thriller might want to check it out. 
Posts
253 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 253 of 253Hi Juhana,
It is always a pleasure to read your refreshingly honest point of view.
The Internet is an excellent forum for discussing ideas and trading information, what it is not good at, is performing tasks in the real world.
I hope that you have had a chance to drop by and check out my weekly blog, because that is one of the goals I'm trying to get across. Every week you can see the progression of the various projects. Most of the work is done by hand so you should be able to get a good feel for how much effort is involved for each of the various projects and how the weather affects them too.
By the way, you are cheeky! I'm involved in community groups here too, and it is just one of the things I don't really discuss on the Internet. Lone organic farmer, indeed! Thanks for the laugh though.
Seriously, we are all so far past overshoot that it is not funny. The city of Perth in Western Australia is now - I believe - reliant on desalination plants for its drinking water. They even have one in Melbourne now.
The summers here may be really hot and dry, but at least things still grow all year around. In Northern Europe however, your winters are a serious problem in relation to food production. Simple discussions of community and politics will not produce food. It may well be one path with which to obtain it via force, but who knows, and the food reserves there may not provide much buffer either? Personally in your circumstances, I'd hedge my bets and pursue both that strategy as well as food preservation strategies.
Plus energy may be a real problem too. I use firewood here, but winters here are nothing like as cold or as long as yours. How many people can your forests support for how long? As long as ground water is available the trees here grow all year around, so they grow fast, but that isn't the case in your location.
Imagine transport in your environment too during winter if available energy was low. Dunno, but my thinking is that your actual human carrying capacity is much lower than the present carrying capacity in your area and all options should be on the table.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Steve,
No worries. Check out the podcast here: Smoking ice to lose weight
I can't make this stuff up. Too weird. It is a half hour radio show.
Cheers
Chris
Hi jcummings,
I've never used such a device, but the theory is sound. The plough is astoundingly simply because it is like a knife which cuts through the (compacted) soil. The knife has a fin like the sort found on a yacht, which lifts the soil slightly too.
Because the cut is done on contour, any rainfall infiltrates the sub soil.
I reckon the main benefit is that the sub soil isn't exposed to the sun like traditional ploughing does. Keeping the plants shading the soil stops the critters, bacteria and fungi in the soil from dying.
What do you reckon about it from your reading?
Cheers
Chris
Colonial history also causes migrations.
If you go to London you will find many immigrants from India and Pakistan; in Paris you'll find Algerians, in Madrid South Americans. It looks as if, when an empire collapses, the colonies migrate to the former colonial power.
The United States has military bases in 150 countries around the world. If the endgame of an empire is the colonies migrating to the former colonial power, we are going to witness interesting migration patterns.
@Shane Wilson: I respect your views. I am just saying that if person has somekind positive legacy he wants to pass to future, like organic farming skills, he should consider world as it is around him, and adapt to it. Utilitarianism is good world view. I believe that majority of US citizens have kind of delusion about how things are progressing in those parts of the world which are only exotic names for them. Your country is so young, so divided, roots of cultural memes are only couple of centuries old. You easily underestimate how peculiar these conditions are when looking Eurasian continent.
Cultural and religious history of the US is very peculiar; you are the exception to the rule, not the other way around. I have met many cultural specialists and "co-operation professionals" who complain that American companies they engage on the ground just don't get it, just don't get it how deep the roots of local cultures are in areas where unbroken cultural continuity goes back maybe two thousand years. That they stir the pot when it should not be stirred.
What I have tried to offer into ongoing conversation in this blog is opinion that when talking about Old World, strength of cultural memes and their forthcoming backlash against modernity when modernity fails to deliver it's promises should not be underestimated. That people who believe physical reality of our planet doesn't allow current consumerism continue should take that backlash and it's aftermath very, very seriously. That task is clearly hopeless.
Your nation has been strong so long. It has sailed through history without having major conflict inside it's own borders after 19th century. There has never been truly scary outside agressor. It is somewhat hermetically sealed. Those extremely unique historical circumstances clearly chance something in the way you look the world, and my skills are inadequate to cross that barrier. I personally feel that if something does not fit the frame over your side of the pond, it's ignored until it blows to the face. It's common privilege of winners in history, so I have no problem with that. But arguing about things after that is useless.
Just remember: religious empires were there long before industrialism. They thrived and survived in non-industrial world. Your personal view of Christian thinking seems also to be based upon Protestant sects common in US; remember that they are tiny minority among Christians. Visit Church of Holy Sepulchre sometime; get informed about six sects that maintain the tomb and truly feel how alien they are from those Protestant sects you are familiar with.
Your nations's leaders and armed forces were facing unpleasant surprises in Iraq and Afghanistan, surprises which were accurately foreseen bu many cultural specialists I personally know. So they were no surprises at all for those who actually knew local cultures there.
Not one of these specialists, who have been right so often, foretell death of current cultural memes in heartlands of Eurasia, not even at long run. I personally believe that US peak oilers betting their chips in that kind of cultural change are facing unpleasant surprises too,like your leaders have so regularly faced. Maybe in your country, but not in here.
Respect for you and thanks for interesting conversation, let's end it here in good mood :).
Roger said... "I wonder what institutional ghosts persist after our own collapse. I wonder for how long."
Answer: Centuries, up to thousands of years. The pope of Rome is the successor of the (East) Roman emperor.
I've long been fascinated by the migration period (AKA The Dark Ages). One thing not made clear in the books I read when young, was where the various peoples, viz., Goths, Franks, Alans, Vandals, &c. came from (apparently out of nowhere), and where they disappeared to (into the mist one morning?) when they seemingly just vanish from the historical record.
Now, from what I understand, the most recent scholarship, which includes DNA investigations, these were all formed and re-formed from the same collection of tribes, with different tribes culturally dominant at different times. Once one entity disintegrated for one reason or another, the people themselves fragmented for a while, then re-grouped under another banner for a couple of hundred years.
I saw a recent program on the BBC by a scholar who put forward the hypothesis that the Saxon Conquest was not the violent total displacement of native people by an invading horde, as there is no archaeological evidence to support that history. Of course, there is nothing to disprove it, either, and DNA evidence is inconclusive, but he makes a good case that Bede may be no more historically accurate than Thomas Mallory in "Morte D'Arthur" or Marion Bradley in "Mists of Avalon." The Saxons were, apparently, much fewer in number and came as hired mercenaries and the population adopted their mode of dress, art, &c. out of mimeosis, much the way modern Russians are eagerly adopting and integrating western styles and fashions into their own culture and thus altering it in a very radical way. People kept on living in the same place as before the Romans, but now their tribe and culture was dominated by Saxons.
This is pretty much what you are describing.
I can see the demoralized surviving remnants of North America's population implosion adopting the vibrant styles and customs of newcomers immigrating from other corners of the globe and fusing them to give rise to new cultures, new peoples, even if the numbers of newcomers per se are not very high.
Hi Deborah,
An excellent summary of the issues surrounding leadership. Your observation about the cult of leadership being simply an excuse for poor leadership skills is just so true.
I always challenged, consulted, walked away only to come back later and see what had developed in the interim. It is also important to not discourage anyone from admitting a mistake as sometimes they may be telling you something you need to hear.
Funny story from today. I went to the petrol station to fill up the car and noticed that the diesel bowser had a hand written sign on it saying: "Out of diesel". What was interesting was that it was written on the back of a pamphlet promoting a community awareness meeting about solar and wind options in the local area and future energy concerns.
Shame I didn't have a camera on me...
Cheers
Chris
Cheers. Chris.
@Cherokee:"I'm starting to suspect that a bit of hardship - which people recover from and learn from - can actually be a positive experience." Have you ever read Thackeray's "The Rose and the Ring?" His "good fairy" wishes the prince and princess "a bit of misfortune," which ultimately does them a world of good.
Dear John Michael,
Glad you finally got around to the promised ethnogenesis post. Nicely done, as always.
Did you catch the 2012 piece from Stanley Fish Two Cheers for Double Standards? It seems perfectly on point for this week (emphasis is mine, not in the original):
But there is an alternative way of looking at the matter... What counts is who your friends and allies are. You keep your word to them and not just to anybody. Your loyalty is to particular people and not to an abstraction.
...
I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.
Welcome to the New Tribalism.
peace,
Zach
Shane Wilson wrote "... it will be considered obscene or profane to consider Earth to be Satan's playground or void of any spiritual significance, and the idea of an afterlife in heaven will probably likewise be considered obscene." I'm afraid history's not on your side. Subsistence agriculturalists as often as not see Nature as an enemy and look forward to "eternal rest." My father's Christianity got him through a Nazi concentration camp, as did the Jewish faith of some of my older acquaintances (all gone now). Any belief system with a few millennia behind it has probably weathered at least one civilizational collapse and so, at least in theory, knows how it's done.
Regarding the decline into irrelevancy of American Journalism, Kunstler has some recent examples in his latest posting, "Memory Hole".
Also relevant, the latest from Brian Kaller: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ferguson-falls-apart/
Hi Chris, I will definitely listen to that broadcast. As you say, you couldn't make it up. The concept seems to me to be right up there with cutting of ones head to lose weight.
Cheers, Steve
@Shane Wilson
Most moderns, Christians or not, would not recognize the Christianity of 1900 years ago as the same religion as today. I'm no historian, but I know the early Church looked very different from the modern.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a Christianity emerge that had more in common with the early Church than current mainstream Christianity, and I'm not sure that would be in any way a bad thing.
Holy s^^^
http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/09/04/you-just-cant-beat-the-ocean-watching-th?videoId=341752497&videoChannel=117777&channelName=Reuters+Investigates
It is one thing, again, to read about it on your blog. But watching actual US citizens talk about it hapening now, with all the emotional issues involved...
I never thought either that rising sea levels would be one of the toughest challenges faced by the space industry !
Juhana, as you've commented more than once, North America and Europe aren't the same -- and I'm writing about the United States. I have no idea what the religious history of Eurasia is going to look like; on this side of the water, I see the existing Abrahamic religious groups doing their level best to dismantle their last hope for a future. Mind you, I don't see the current crop of Neopagan religions doing much better, which is why I've said, repeatedly, that the religious future of this continent is still something of a crapshoot.
Bruno, that's a sufficiently complex question that I'll probably have to devote a post to it. What will terrify the West? There's a long list of possibilities.
Chris, exactly. The school of hard knocks is the usual alma mater for warlords!
Nastarana, it's always interested me that so few people look into the details of things like legal rights under feudalism. Women in feudal Britain had the right to own property; that was taken away from them in the early modern period and they didn't get it back until the late 19th century. More on this as we proceed!
Varun, yes, that's something we'll be discussing down the road. It can be done -- there were cities that maintained a rough semblance of their Greco-Roman governmental forms straight through the dark ages into the early modern period -- but it takes a lot of work. Stay tuned for the details!
Ray, it's precisely because you don't have the sense of entitlement that I suspect you'll come through the next round of trouble in good shape. I really do feel sorry for those who believe the universe is obligated to take care of them; a lot of them will face a miserable death.
Kutamun, that's quite a plausible scenario. Combine it with seizure of a northern port so that tanks and other fighting vehicles can be landed en masse from ships, and Australia would fall in fairly short order. Aojou Nambien, anyone?
Hiruit, I'm by no means sure that's the case, but it's a topic for a future post.
Ed-M, I'm just as glad not to have seen it!
Steve, nothing like religious hatreds to get a good strong tribal identity going!
Progress4what, it's entirely possible that some form of Christianity will come through the current mess; as I noted to Juhana, the existing US churches seem to be possessed by a death wish, but the game's not over with yet. The sooner the prosperity gospel gets chucked, though, the better everyone will be.
Moshe, I'm reminded of a famous quote about an inability to understand exponential functions...
Hadashi, no argument there. Even if you never leave your current country of residence, learning a second language is valuable. As Goethe said, if you only know one language, you don't actually know any language at all.
Unknown Deborah, true -- and it's a kind of leadership that's going to be desperately needed in the years ahead.
Juhana, again, I'm not primarily writing about Eurasia, you know.
Catching Up, I need to find somebody willing to host a large PDF file for free download. If you or anyone else has a suggestion, I'm all ears.
Dennis, and of course that's also an issue. I've just encountered too many people who call themselves preppers who are mostly gun collectors. Mind you, nothing wrong with a gun collection as such, but it's not a magical talisman to keep the Long Descent at bay, and too many people seem to think otherwise.
Ellen, of course; I've read his blog and his comments on some of the other peak oil blogs, and of course he's also a friend and online ally of one of my most entertainingly foam-flecked trolls. That doesn't concern me in the least. So long as he follows the house rules here, and posts his attempts at amateur psychoanalysis elsewhere, why should I spare myself the fun?
Pglht, that's already happening. Did you read Violet's comment about her neighbors from Africa?
Renaissance, that sounds about right. Since we're talking about tribal peoples living in loose associations under charismatic chieftains, hard national or ethnic boundaries were hardly an issue -- and of course the same thing is likely to spring up again here pretty quickly.
Zach, that's not tribalism -- a tribe is loyal not to individual people but to a community and its traditions. What he's talking about -- loyalties to specific individuals as the basic structural pattern of a society -- is feudalism. We'll get to that discussion in good time!
Moshe, thanks for the links.
Jean-Vivien, likewise. Welcome to the future: already here, and lapping at your front porch!
@ juhana
Like I said before, we're just talking past each other, and my comments about abrahamic religions were directed to the blog as much as towards you in particular. As I said before you're making the mistake of looking at the future through the prism of the present and past. You're looking around the world in 2014, and if it doesn't make sense now, you're dismissing it. You're not really allowing for the possibility of a future that could be radically different from either the past or present. Also, I think you're looking at things from a much narrower time frame than the post is discussing. Sometimes, I wonder if you've read or understand the post. You seem to be setting up a false binary of" ancient tribes" vs" secular humanists" and shoehorning everything into that binary, then beating the secular straw man to death. I mean, it is "the Archdruid Report", not the" secular humanist report". There are plenty of blogs approaching peak oil from a secular humanist point of view. When you rail against secularism, the E.U., the U.S., etc, I'm at a loss as to who that's directed to, because those are all things I don't believe in or identify with, and I don't think a lot of others here do, either. It's factually inaccurate to say that European peoples have occupied their current lands for thousands of years. Most European nations date back to their settlement by barbarian tribes during the last dark ages, which is only 1500 or so years ago, which is not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, particularly when you consider how long China or India have continuously occupied their lands. Also, it depends on how you define ancient as to whether Islam or Christianity are considered ancient. Islam rose after the fall of Rome, and it took a long time for Europe to be fully converted.
@ juhana,
You offer very solid evidence that the first phase, ethnic conflict, is proceeding currently in Europe, have you given any thought to how the next phases, ethnic dissolution and ethnogenosis, will play out in the next few centuries in Europe?
You are quite right, Mr. Geer, I did not about women owning property during the Medieval period. How important is that when an heiress can neither administer her estates herself nor choose her own husband? Kings of England used to reward favored retainers by giving them the rights to an heiress; the man so favored could either marry the girl himself or choose her husband.
I began rethinking what I had read about the Middle Ages when I was learning about the great cathedrals and other Great Churches. I could not understand how such magnificent edifices could have been produced in such great numbers by an allegedly brutal, illiterate and stratified society, in which birth determines your place in life and your occupation. It also occurs to me that the wondrous crafts for which Japanese are so famous predate the modern era.
My present thinking is that feudalism is a way of organizing society for defense and for production. I am looking forward to what you have to say about the subject.
Nastarana, we'll get to that. One thing I'd point out, though, is that the customs of the 1% (in this case, those heiresses, the king, and his cronies) are not necessarily a useful guide to the everyday life of everyone else. More on this in due time.
Oh, and I was wryly amused to field a response of sorts from one of the racists whose diatribes I mentioned and deleted earlier. May I offer a helpful hint to supremacists of all kinds, ethnic, racial, and religious? Don't whine about how badly other people are treating you; it really spoils the effect. Blustering and threats are in character, but if you act like a jackbooted bully one moment and a piteous victim the next, nobody is going to take your seriously. 'Nuf said!
@JMG: I have actually learned a lot about US by reading your blog. I also share your vision that those religious sects native for your country that see material prosperity as just reward by God to believers doomed. And I understand that you are American, writing mostly for Americans. Yet we live in global world, at least now, and your country is unusually strongly committed to foreign policy. So understanding cultural forces shaping the world in Eurasian super-continent must hold some significance for you also?
I have nothing against Druidism or any other religion that's not trying forcibly displace me and my kin. I also hold you in great respect as a writer and philosopher. You are speaking clearly about very unpleasant things here: if somebody thinks that 95 % population drop is not unpleasant thing for said population, s/he should go to the shrink. So I take it for granted that you also see threats facing those European brothers and sisters in faith of yours, as flames of current problems rise higher?
I have heard dozens of times from people from Balkans how animosity and fear started to build up before explosion there during 90's. Extremely violent and HUGE riots by French-Algerian fans during football world cup this year are precisely same stuff those people from Balkans described predating their conflict. Football riots around France this summer were only one straw away from open civil war. Throw in couple of AK-47 rifles, and riots of that magnitude morph into insurgency. There was curious silence around Anglo news about these problems, but Russians and Arabs feasted on these news. If morphology as scientific method hold's true, France is facing serious trouble, SOON. You know, those rioters don't have very open-minded opinions about "idolaters" and faiths that are not based "on the Book". At he same time, counter-forces facing wishes of these rioters are rising from Völkish-nationalist pagan traditions and from very strict Christianity among native French.
So any Green Wizard around old Roman province of Gaul should take THE FACT of future pogroms against his/her ilk into consideration, no matter which mentioned side of conflict wins. Below is some video footage about football riots as Muslim Algerians teared apart French cities during this summer's world cup... Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JcgwDb7w8g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3LLkLpvrsA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jABdg4vPXJQ
@Chris: I know. Being cheeky is my worst quality... As a young boy growing up in purely blue-collar hood, it landed me into trouble often enough for me to know it... Yes, I have been following
your blog. It's very impressive what you have achieved, keep up the good work!
@Shane: I will consider expanding my historical perspective if you consider expanding your study of different variations of current monotheistic religions... Probably we both learn something new and useful. And yes, I probably don't always "get it" when reading this blog... But you have to remember English is FOURTH language to me; I speak three other languages better than it, one of them being my mother language... Make a thought play and imagine yourself having this conversation using fourth language you know basics of... Then you know in what kind of position I am here. So occasional misunderstanding is more norm, than exception for me. JMG is just so great writer that I keep coming back... One of the main philosophers of our twilight times, if anyone asks from me, even if I don't share all his visions and challenge him as often as I can...
On the other side of the fence, this kind of welcoming party is eagerly awaiting newcomers to Europe, so they can say hello to each other on football terraces: boys of the Union... And it all starts from football here in Europe, on both sides.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqY4m3uz3-E
@ JMG
The unstated idea of your post is that for the first time since pre Columbian times, North America will have its own unique culture & civilization, and not be an extension of the West, as it has been since colonization. That's pretty exciting!
@Shane Wilson and others
Juhana speaks from his standpoint in Northern and Eastern Europe, and he is telling it like it is.
The general patterns of community boundaries and trade routes are indeed thousands of years old in that part of the world, and they reach back at least to the Neolithic. It's not particularly important that that one genetically defined population might have replaced another at this or that point in all those millenia. The Barbarian Invasions that you reference did not move into an empty land, but a land that was already well settled, according to patterns of settlement that were ancient when the Romans first invaded. Nor did the Barbarian Invaders wipe the slate clean as they invaded. For the most part, they colored "within the lines" as they imposed themselves on the land. Those lines had been laid down millenia before they came. Actual genetic heritage is as nothing in comparison with perceived historical community: in such matters, perceived history trumps actual history every time.
Also ... why would you, or anyone, believe in "the possibility of a future that could be radically different from either the past or present"? This is such a strange and incomprehensible idea that I have to ask the question. To me, this seems inherently impossibe. But I am sure you must have your own reasons, and I am curious what they might be.
@JMG: This is last post I am making about this subject, but watch the video below. It is practically badly filmed first-person narrative description of religious/tribal conflict in nascent phase. I felt somewhat awestruck when I first time undestood how deep, significant historical changes are reflected by these seemingly random and unofficial conflicts. Over last years, they have been just intensifying, year after year. There are more ideology and politics involved year by year also. Sporadically they have already erupted into actual news, as former hooligans are recruited to volunteer military forces on all sides.
Official political speech in Europe has become more and more ossified. It is practically meaningless mumbling of political correctness, totally cut off from actual street level reality, and that is my unpassionate and non-partisan opinion.
I have noticed that by using intensity of European/Anatolian/North African underground sport rivalries as "weather barometer", it is possible to forecast quite reliably where social pressures are building up big time. It seems to me that journalism and politics are lagging behind, they just shoot wildly into the dark. As "high culture"-circles in Europe have very little guiding power over masses anymore, it is low culture of sports world that reflects in advance what significant amount of people really feel and where this troubled continent is heading.
Couple of first times I started to notice this symmetry between political eruptions and long-held sports rivalries/animosities, I felt it must be coincidence. But as my own hunches were time after time more accurate than "official" journalistic data to predicate what's going to happen... It feels like irrational, deepest and truest feelings of European nations and people are expressed only through sports loyalties anymore. Like other venues, culture and art, are so stiffened by correctness and political control that only this remains as barometer for future events here. Is there anything like that in the US, or is this geographical area unique in that sense?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWYZvnpYRrg
Hi JMG,
Hmmm, thought so, it is free training after all.
Speaking of which, I'm literally closing in on my stalker for a necessary face to face discussion, and they are sublimely oblivious to this fact whilst they go about their happy life out in the suburbs.
Thought you may enjoy the latest update of the weekly blog here too. This week, I'm showing the complete disaster - it is the disaster edition after all - of what happened when the water tank rolled down the hill completely out of control and smashed into a bulldozer of all things.
It would be nice to say that I made that up, but unfortunately, I had to live it: Fernglade Farm - When good tanks go bad
PS: Is it just me, but I'm finding Juhana's comments about secular society kind of ironic given that this is a blog hosted by the head of a religion? Just sayin... Perhaps irony doesn’t translate well into different cultures?
Cheers
Chris
Hi RPC,
Many thanks for the story tip, I'll check it out.
Cheers. Chris
Juhana, that's exactly why I write about what I know -- that is to say, what's going on in the US -- rather than thinking, as too many Americans do, that my experience applies globally. Here, when two football teams with a longstanding rivalry play a game, fans on both sides sit in the same sports bar and get drunk together and cheer or groan as the case may be, and go home, having had a good time that didn't involve anybody's head being bashed in. We have our problems and ghastly habits, the gods know, but pitched battles between rival gangs of soccer fans aren't among them.
The same point can be generalized. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if the western half of Eurasia and North Africa were to spend the next five centuries or so embroiled in the kind of vicious religious warfare that you've seen so many times before, and the Abrahamic faiths are the likely culprits there -- though you may see some new contenders as well, to judge by what I'm hearing from Russia and some other places. As the center of global power shifts away from the northern Atlantic basin, the descent of much of Europe into failed-state status not that different from Somalia today is a real possibility -- but that's specific to that part of the world, and once the US has the last shreds of its empire torn out of its hands, it may not concern us over here any more than the current state of Somalia does.
Shane, Spengler points out that while the political power of a Culture may expand outside of its original home region, it never sets down deep roots, and once things start sliding down the slope of decline and fall, areas that were temporarily conquered go their own way. What he calls Faustian culture is native to Europe west of the Vistula and the Carpathians and east of the Atlantic, and as its era of global dominance finishes winding down, areas temporarily into its orbit -- such as both American continents and Australasia -- will spin off on their own paths, just as Western Europe stopped being Roman in a hurry as Rome crashed and burned.
Cherokee, okay, that may be the most colorful omen I've heard this month. Your water tank smashed a bulldozer... Thank you for that.
A bit off topic, but the it appears the African Union has decided to lift there travel bans in relation to the Ebola outbreak
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/africa/2014-09/09/c_126964117.htm
Hopefully this won't turn out to be as foolish as I suspect it to be.
Thanks for these recent posts, JMG. They are timely. Affirmative. I've been hanging around the Asatru nationalist crowd lately, and have realized what a waste of time it's been. I was beginning to grow tired of the mantras "multiculturalism is evil!" and "white genocide!"
These people just don't seem to get it.
Dear John Michael,
Oh, that's very interesting - I hadn't considered that perspective. I understood Fish to be naming particular players (Bill Maher, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) as exemplars of and speakers for the tribal ethos and identity -- you seem him as arguing for personal loyalty to those leaders.
I suppose it works for that interpretation also.
In either case, it's a repudiation of the Enlightenment political project, published in our national "paper of record." That seems like a significant signpost to me.
I look forward to your turn addressing feudalism. Like "medieval," I mostly see "feudal" used as a snarl word and not for its content.
peace,
Zach
@ juhana,
There's no judgement on my part regarding misunderstanding, I was just pointing out that you might be misunderstanding some things, and that you might not have an accurate view of your audience here.
@Robert
My point was along the lines JMG has mentioned before, that often a society embraces attitudes and beliefs that are the polar opposite of the dying civilization during the rise of its dark ages. Much like dark ages Christianity was totally opposite of the classical paganism it replaced. The point of dark ages seems to be radical change in every facet of society. That was what my comment was referencing, and from that point of view, I don't see how it's that far off topic. It's my understanding that the barbarian tribes that founded the modern nations of Europe were considered foreign outsiders by Rome, I'm not sure how that is any different than how Arabs are considered in modern Europe. I know Arabs and Muslims who consider the line drawn between them and Europe to be arbitrary, pointing out that they share a Greco Roman heritage/land with Europe
Well, how about this: self-appointed "Sharia police" tries to set itself up - in Germany!
http://www.dw.de/opinion-stop-the-sharia-police-together-with-germanys-muslims/a-17909251
@ Juhana and JMG:
I have seen sports riots here in North America as well; they just aren’t as prevalent here as they are in Europe. I could easily see the sorts of rivalries that one sees surrounding European soccer teams developing based on fans of North American rules football. I live in the Pacific Northwest and actually witnessed some of the celebratory rioting that occurred in Seattle after the Seahawks won the Superbowl. I myself am a diehard Seahawks fan who has relatives who are Denver Broncos fans. While there was no violence in my family over the game, I could readily imagine people adopting sports based loyalties as other primary loyalties in America break down. It’s already happening in some areas; the process just hasn’t gone as far as it has in Europe.
Humans are social and tribal animals by nature and if primary loyalties based on ethnicity, race, religion, region and so on have broken down, people will find other means of expressing this innate tendency. It’s human nature. It’s only in the utopian dreams of post-modern Western intellectuals, bureaucrats and political activists that the conceit could arise that we could have a society based solely on loyalty to such grand but vague abstractions as “equality”, “freedom”, “democracy”, “diversity”, and “free markets”. In this day and age, sports affiliations seem to be one means by which new primary loyalties are emerging. Just look at the mayhem, gang and otherwise, that is often associated with fans of the Oakland Raiders or the Baltimore Ravens.
Juhana also brings up some good points about the re-emergence of tribalism, not only amongst Christians and Muslims but also among militant neo-Pagans. There is a growing neo-Pagan underground that passionately hates both Christianity and Islam and at least some of these groups are preparing for the civil wars and social unrest that I think we all know are coming. I am reminded of the activities and music of people like Varg Vikernes, as well as the writings of people like Jack Donovan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIiINg7pNfo
http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2014/06/a-time-for-wolves/
http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/becoming-the-new-barbarians
Wilton (offlist), sorry, this isn't a place to post announcements or advertising. If I let yours through, I'd have three or four hundred in tomorrow's inbox. Thanks for understanding.
Dagnarus, I'm not too sanguine. Mind you, if they retain the travel bans and food deliveries grind to a halt, you've got the risk of mass movements of starving people across borders, carrying the virus with them; there are some situations where no option is good.
Joseph, glad to hear it. The Asatruar I know have no time for that kind of foolishness; their attitude is that they (like all other groups) need to earn respect by their actions, not whine about how badly they're being treated.
Zach, Limbaugh's a great example of the sort of cult of charisma that helps lead to feudalism. The Dittohead crowd has nothing at all binding them together except Limbaugh's personality, such as it is. (I'm reminded of a favorite joke: what's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg? One of them is a flaming Nazi gasbag, and the other, of course, is a zeppelin.) You notice that when Limbaugh got caught abusing drugs, his followers fell over themselves excusing him; if his antidrug stance actually meant anything to them, they would have turned on him.
Moshe, I hope the Germans have the common sense to stomp on that, hard. Vigilante behavior is vigilante behavior, whether or not it comes with a religious excuse, and cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.
Hi JMG,
My pleasure!
Cheers. Chris
(Deborah Bender)
@Juhanna--Your observation that European football hooliganism is a precursor of political violence strikes me as important. I hope other Europeans pay attention to it.
We have gangs here and most of the gangs have an ethnic or geographical base, but they aren't organized around sports affiliations.
Professional team sports in the US became racially integrated after WWII. For decades, sports were a unifying influence because people of both sexes, all classes and all ethnic groups attended games and rooted for their local teams. This unifying effect is waning but still fairly strong. A few cities have more than one pro team in the same sport and in those instances the fans of the different teams may sort themselves out. An example would be Chicago, where fans of the perennially losing Cubs baseball team are typically wealthy and everyone else roots for the White Sox, who are winners.
The most popular professional team sports are basketball and American football. Basketball is dominated by black players but has a large white audience. Most people don't go to professional football games because the tickets are expensive. They watch on TV at home or in sports bars. Because Americans tend to root for the home team but often settle far from home, people watching a game in a bar will not all be cheering for the same side, just as JMG says. There are mixed marriages with respect to team affiliations as well as religion and political party preference; the team loyalties are something to be joked about.
Organized clubs of team supporters are a very minor part of the American scene. Sports related violence is also not organized. When a team wins a major trophy, there will be citywide celebrations, and often these are followed by late night riots. The Superbowl riots in 1980s San Francisco were apolitical, just drunks looking for a fight. I don't know if that's the case in other cities. Fans attend away games of their teams wearing team colors and sit in the stands surrounded by supporters of the other team and usually nothing happens except a little heckling. However, not too long ago, a San Francisco Giants baseball team fan attended a game with the rival Los Angeles team in LA, was set upon by several Dodgers fans, beaten nearly to death and suffered permanent brain damage. Something similar happened at a Giants home game. Incidents of this kind are still rare enough to be shocking.
@JMG
Yes that occurred to me as well. On the other hand it occurred to me that in principle it shouldn't have to be an either or thing. It should be possible to allow selected people to just ship food in a controlled manner to prevent Ebola spread, without allowing general travel. This led me to the conclusion that the food issue was just a useful point they could use to say, "look we have to get rid of this travel ban, see".
(Deborah Bender)
@Shane Wilson--You wrote "I know Arabs and Muslims who consider the line drawn between them and Europe to be arbitrary, pointing out that they share a Greco Roman heritage/land with Europe."
And they are right.
Muslims conquered the entire Byzantine Empire a piece at a time and adopted and adapted a great deal of its material and literary culture, from water delivery systems and public bath houses to Neoplatonic philosophy. Muslims also conquered formerly Roman territories such as the Iberian peninsula and the whole of North Africa and made a good run at most of the rest of Christian Europe. The new rulers altered the government structures but (with some exceptions) they didn't burn libraries or destroy churches.
Medieval Christian Europe was inferior to the Islamic sphere of influence in almost every way, and didn't catch up until the early modern period. The Ottoman Empire was a power into the nineteenth century.
The long, bitter rivalry between Islamic civilization and much of Christendom is partially responsible for centuries in which history written by European historians exaggerated differences between Christian and Islamic civilization and ignored the achievements of the latter. That's probably not so true now, but there is a lag before revisions in historians' outlook get passed to the general public.
I got a slightly more balanced view about this growing up. Among Jews, the period when Islam ruled Spain is known as the Golden Age for its prosperity, social and religious tolerance, and flourishing intellectual culture.
It's an advantage to be taught a different set of heroes, villains and facts at home than you get at school and from mass media, because you learn at an early age to pay attention to the biases of the person telling the story.
@Juhana, Shane re "secular humanists"
That would be me then.
While I agree with much of the general direction that Juhana describes, I am more inclined to want to highlight the magnitude of changes that are looming on a rather far away horizon, much like Shane does.
I think of my cherished humanism as the fuzzy dice behind the windshield of a car that's going off a high cliff. If you like your religion or ethnicity can be the cup holder or even the bumper. Most likely though all these things will serve another function (scrap metal, compost, source of shadow) as the changes to the rest of the structure are too large to continue their existence in the same role.
As for HUGE riots by French-Algerians in France this year - I cannot say I fully agree. I am used to twice as much, and that three times a year (when I lived in Germany). But the AKs are already here (though not so much in Paris). Here the Algerian kids had a pretty long party - but what do you expect? They have a couple more kids than most others, and many are poor. I think poor youth is often threatening enough nowadays. You do not NEED confrontational religions or soccer to make them more so. Although I agree that the vulgar things are the ones to look out for most (though team sports are only one among many). And these vulgar things really only channel a frustration that would otherwise find another path.
Also, think back to 1968 when there more kids all around (and France had some major issues). This is not a terribly new development. The weakness and corruption of the critical pillars of government are hard to judge for me though.
Another point is that you may very well get new neighbors if population reduction manages to lag behind a drastic change in climate for long enough.
@JMG: Sorry for writing such long essays all the time, but I try to stay reasonably anonymous, which makes regular blogging and convenient commenting difficult.
Please feel free not read or post stuff if it is too much. It is still good for me to think it through on the keyboard.
@Deborah: Thanks a lot for your comments!
@Robert Mathiesen
Also ... why would you, or anyone, believe in "the possibility of a future that could be radically different from either the past or present"? This is such a strange and incomprehensible idea that I have to ask the question. To me, this seems inherently impossibe. But I am sure you must have your own reasons, and I am curious what they might be.
I haven’t been paying that much attention to some of the “It’s different this time” scenarios, so I’m not entirely sure what Shane Wilson is proposing without going back and looking at a lot of posts. My reason, which I haven’t said anything about here, and which I won’t elaborate on unless JMG gives me the go-ahead, is theological in the strict sense of theo-. If the mid-causal entity called “Michael” isn’t talking through their mid-causal hat, what the socio-economic system looks like three or four centuries from now is going to be radically different from what we’re expecting. The transition is not going to be pleasant, and my assessment is that the odds of what JMG is talking about happening are at least 3:2. (I tried to write 2:1, but 3:2 is what came out. Take that as you will).
@Dagnarus
There is an extremely effective experimental Ebola vaccine. Getting it out of the lab and into actual production in time to do any good will probably take several Acts of God. Normally I’m rather cynical about the effectiveness of letter-writing campaigns, but some letters to congresscritters here in the US asking them to instruct the FDA to nuke the red tape, and equivalent to whatever the appropriate people in the EU are, will probably be as effective as anything else.
@Juhana It's a great article - and the flip side to the other topic you've been raising. To quote that famous Welshman, Dylan Thomas: "Rage, rage, against the dying of the light". The question is: as the light dies, do you rage, or not?
"The dying Russians" reminds me of another quote, from the 2005 film Serenity: "There's thirty million people here, and they just let themselves die". It's like the Native American tribesmen who once were warriors and became drunks in the street. Their future, their cosmos, was taken away from them and nothing put in its place, and so they gave themselves up to death.
In Old Europe, our cities used to have civic pride. They had industries, where working men made things, and gained dignity from their work. Their pride expressed itself in culture, music - and support for their local football team.
It's no coincidence that the rise of the football 'firms' coincided with the deindustrialisation of the 1980s. With the work gone, where could the men get their self-respect? Brass bands, male voice, all the other cultural expressions often need money and, scarcer, hope. In the irreligious West, there was just the football team. The other alternative was a passive retreat into drugs. Some went one way, some the other.
There were also, of course, the options of race-based identity, and (in Eastern Europe) religion. Throw those into the mix, and some ugly things came out.
The general affluence of the past decade seems to have weakened the firms' appeal in the UK and elsewhere; I expect we'll see them again - perhaps, as Juhana and JMG both predict in their various ways, as the early forms of warbands.
In the US, as other people have pointed out, sport loyalties worked in different ways. Young men who've lost their work as a source of identity will have to find it in other ways. I don't know enough about the US to know.
Anyway, Juhana, I'm not sure if you saw my reply to you some weeks ago: I'm not sure of the extent to which our worldviews overlap, but if you find yourself in St Petersburg, let's compare notes over a Baltika or two...
JMG wrote: "Bogatyr, communities of the kind that can answer your questions in the affirmative don't currently exist in the industrial world, nor will they for a good long time".
I think I'll have to disagree with you on this one, JMG! Right now seems to me to be the time to be modelling these communities, and planning how to establish them. It may mean simply hybridising Transition efforts with TAZ elements a la Hakim Bey; it may mean teaching urban farming to firms of football hooligans. As Dmitry Orlov has pointed out, in times of collapse, you make strange new friends.
@Cherokee Chris: "I'm starting to suspect that a bit of hardship - which people recover from and learn from - can actually be a positive experience. Thinking much further ahead, I suspect that successful war lords will also arise from such experiences?"
You know, for a moment there, I saw you measuring yourself up for a warlord's robe, preparing to gather a band in your mountain fastness. An Old Man of the Mountains de nos jours...?
@ juhana
My guess is, once the climate instability works out, Finland will benefit from a warmer climate and longer growing season in the future.
I've noticed the same thing regarding peppers and permaculture/sustainability at local events. Quite a few presenters come from strict evangelical millenarian prepper backgrounds. Strange bedfellows, indeed. No reason not to set aside differences and learn from each other.
I'd have to agree with JMG regarding fighting in Eurasia. The whole area is severely overpopulated relative to the Americas. That alone should guarantee fighting for a long time to come. The only thing that would save western Europe from failed state status is if Russia comes to their rescue the same way the U.S. did in the 20th century. Not necessarily a given, though.
Katain,
As a citizen of Baltimore I am genuinely curious what this gang mayhem is that you attribute to Baltimore Ravens fans. I have no idea what your talking about. There are no Raven centric "gangs" in this city and there has been no mayhem outside of the normal drunken behavior after winning the Super Bowl. I think you are conflating the drug related violence in Baltimore with the football team...the two have nothing to do with each other.
I have no interest in football but I think we should try to stick to facts here when discussing social indicators of internecine conflict.
Nice twist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ0aksbiiXw
@Snotra and Kristoffer
Have a look here:
http://www.nord-star.info/index.php/about-nordstar/nordstar-description
and here:
http://www.nord-star.info/attachments/article/125/NORD-STAR-WP-2013-02-Wilk-Hjerpe-Jonsson-Andre-Glaas.pdf
It is a start...
And don't be so sure the barbarians won't be at the gates any time soon. If things go south where I am now, I might be your new neighbor real quick...
I have to agree with sam prenner. Fox News likes to play up Ray Lewis' arrest record, but here in Fed Hill you'll see all colors of people wearing Ravens jerseys stream into the bars before and after home games. You'll see some Redskins, Packers, even one or two Steelers jerseys, but no one bothers the wearers.
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