Peak Everything (32 page)

It was inevitable that magical thinking would flourish given that there were so many subjects of interest for which empirical investigation was impractical or impossible. That situation continues: there is still no empirical basis for answering, once and for all and to everyone's satisfaction, questions like, “Does God exist?”, “Who am I?”, “What happens to us when we die?”, or “What is the greatest good?”

Yet however strong the temptation to engage in it, magical thinking when tied to religion failed to provide much practical help in industry or commerce. As these limits came to be appreciated, and as industry and commerce expanded, philosophers and students of nature began to construct the formalized system of inquiry known as the scientific method. Here was a way to obtain verifiable knowledge of the physical world; better still, it was knowledge that could often be used to practical effect. The method came to hand at a propitious time: wealth was flowing to Europe from the rest of the world due to colonization and slavery; meanwhile the development of metallurgy and simple heat engines had proceeded to the point where the energy of fossil fuels could be put to widespread use. When coupled with the project of technological invention, science and mathematics yielded undreamt-of power over the environment. When further coupled with capitalism (corporations, banking, and investment) and fossil fuels, the result was the industrial growth machine.

All of this would have been fine if we lived in an infinite sea of resources, but instead we inhabit a bounded, finite planet. Humanity had set a course toward disaster.

The ecological dilemma (which consists of the mutually rebounding impacts of population pressure, resource depletion, and habitat destruction) is certainly not unique to the modern industrial era; indeed, it is not unique even to humans. However, modern humans
have created a dilemma for themselves of unprecedented scope and scale.

The dilemma, whether encountered by people or pigeons, is often a matter of the failure of success: the genetically engrained aims of the organism are to reproduce and to increase its energy capture, but its environment always has limited resources. Thus temporary population blooms (which are, in their way, evidence of biological success) are usually followed by a crash and die-off. In humans, the powers conferred by language, tools, and social organization have enabled many boom-and-bust cycles over the millennia. But the recent fossil fuel era has seen so much growth of population and consumption that there is an overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions.

This should be glaringly obvious to everyone. Our ecologists have studied population blooms and crashes in other species. Our soil scientists appreciate the limits of modern agriculture. Our geologists understand perfectly well that fossil fuels are finite in quantity. And our mathematicians can easily calculate exponential growth rates to show how quickly population increase and resource depletion will outstrip our ability to satisfy even the most basic human needs. Verbal and mathematical logic, joined with empirical evidence, make an airtight case: we're headed toward a cliff.

But language also keeps most of us in the dark. This is partly because magical thinking is alive and well — and not just in churches and New Age seminars.

In the last couple of centuries, the magical thinking associated with religion, under assault from science, has found a new home in political and economic ideologies. Economics, which masquerades as a science, began as a branch of moral philosophy — which it still is in fact. For free-market ideologues, the market is God and profit is the ultimate good. We have used language to talk ourselves into the myth of progress — the belief that growth is always beneficial, and that there are no practical limits to the size of the human population or to the extent of renewable or even non-renewable natural resources we can use. This particular myth was an easy sell: it is an inherently welcome message (a version of “you can eat your cake
and have it too”) and it seemed to be confirmed by experience during a multi-generational period of unprecedented expansion based on the one-time-only consumption of Earth's hydrocarbon stores.

Meanwhile, at the business end of economic theory, masters of advertising, marketing, and public relations have learned deftly to manipulate symbols and images for emotional effect, sculpting the public's aspirations for comfort and prestige. This new kind of magical thinking
did
contribute to commerce and industry — and spectacularly so! (For historical details on this, see the BBC television documentary series “Century of Self ” by Adam Curtis, and the books of Stuart Ewen.)

In politics, the 20
^th
century saw battles between the quasi-religious ideologies of the left and right — Leninism, Stalinism, Fascism, Nazism, and Maoism, along with British “it's-for-your-own-good” colonialism and equally benevolent Yankee imperialism. In recent years, the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and his followers has come to the fore via the neoconservative members of the current Bush administration. Strauss taught a doctrine that is really just the explicit utterance of an implicit belief common among ruling elites — it is the duty of wise leaders to cloak their policies in potent patriotic and religious symbols and myths in order to galvanize the internal ethical imperatives of the masses. In other words, lies (if told by the right people for the right reasons) are not only good and necessary; they are the very foundation of responsible statecraft. On this basis, however, language ceases to provide a toolset for accurately mapping the world and instead becomes a mental haze enveloping society, preventing us collectively from grasping our situation. Only the rulers are expected (or allowed) to know the true score; but all too often they come to believe their own myths.

And so we live today in a fog of words so thick that it largely prevents us from seeing where we are or where we're headed. Language helps us understand, and at the same time prevents understanding. It enables reason and rationality, yet also frustrates them.

Simply put, language magnifies all of the conflicting priorities and potentials of the human organism.

It might seem that the solution to our quandary is a big dose of logic and empiricism. If only the matter were that simple.

Modern brain research explodes the notion that logic can exist in pristine isolation from emotional and somatic states: as neurologist Antonio Damasio explained in his book
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain,
emotion and reason are not separate; in fact, the latter is inherently dependent upon the former. Domasio explored the unusual case of Phineas Gage, a railroad construction foreman whose severe brain injury (a tamping iron was blown through his skull) prevented him from feeling emotions. While Gage remained intelligent and responsive after his accident, he lost the ability to make rational decisions and to reason, because his emotions were inaccessible to the process. Damasio argued that bodily senses give rise to emotions, which in turn provide the basis for rational (as well as irrational) thought. Thus our state of mind merely reflects our state of body, with emotion as the essential intermediary. The rational and emotional functions of language appear to be handled differently by the hemispheres of the brain: it seems that the left hemisphere processes verbiage that conveys linguistic meaning, while the right hemisphere processes verbal (as well as musical and other artistic) expression that conveys emotional content. There are indications that, in most people, the right hemisphere has a tendency to repress the free functioning of the left, thus making brain activity lopsided and dysfunctional while fomenting self-sabotaging internal conflict. This may be one reason we can appear perfectly rational in our pursuit of ends that are, from another perspective, just plain crazy.

Again, the organism wants energy, space, and the opportunity to reproduce itself. However, if every human's individual pursuit of those goals went unchecked, there could be no organized society because all collective effort would dissolve in continual one-on-one competition. Humans would go from bloom to crash with no period of stability between. As history has shown, an organized society can be quite effective at increasing human survival options and population levels.

Therefore the organism also needs to cooperate, to attenuate wants and desires, and to restrain reproduction. Accordingly we have developed innumerable customs, institutions, and moral strictures to promote moderation. The result is the battle of instinct against society that Freud agonized over (and largely mischaracterized) in
Civilization and Its Discontents.
In stable societies, a truce is struck that may last centuries or millennia. In our modern world, temporary success based on unique historical circumstances has led us to cast most self-limitation aside, and we have given ourselves perfectly good reasons for doing so. The truce is broken, and we are at war with nature and future generations.

Is it possible, now and quickly, to tame the organism's hunger for growth and head off catastrophe? Yes, in principle. One of the wonders of language is that it makes rapid societal change possible. Where another species would require centuries or millennia of genetic variation and natural selection to adapt itself to new conditions, we can shift our collective behavior in a matter of months or years, given language, media, and effective appeals to ethics. Whether it is possible to do so in the current situation, given the enormous growth momentum developed during the past two centuries, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it is a useful exercise to imagine how a rapid surge toward collective self-limitation might come about.

An appeal would need to be made, on an ethical basis, to reduce consumption and alter personal aspirations. President Carter tried to do this when he suggested, in 1977, that solving the energy crisis was “the moral equivalent of war” — but sadly other politicians and the arbiters of economy and culture failed to back him up. To be successful, such an effort would require the enthusiastic participation of the advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries, as well as organized religions and all major political institutions. Leaders would have to engage the non-rational aspects of mass consciousness by playing upon our shared needs for meaning and myth, using verbal voodoo to alter attitudes and behavior as rapidly as possible. Wartime jingoism has accomplished something similar on many occasions in the past.

The campaign would have little chance of success if it were not also based on sound rational arguments, since purely emotional appeals would be rejected out of hand by the most intelligent and influential members of society. Moreover, if an attempt to change collective behavior were not based on empirically verifiable, survival-based necessity, it would amount to crass manipulation worthy of a Karl Rove or an Edward Bernays; hence its moral credibility would soon wane.

In the current instance, the rational basis for the appeal, and its centrality to our survival, are clear. Nothing is to be lost and everything to be gained by sharing accurate and relevant information about our situation; there is no need to exaggerate the threat.

Today precisely such an effort is already under way with regard to Climate Change. Al Gore and his famous movie have framed the crisis in moral terms, while hundreds of scientists, by endorsing the conclusions of the IPCC, have established a concurrent appeal to rationality.

As yet, the message does not have a sufficiently broad base of cultural support to curtail ongoing, richly-funded calls to buy, consume, and travel. Perhaps the addition of the Peak Oil message, by highlighting immediate economic and geopolitical threats posed by continued societal reliance on fossil fuels, will help broaden the coalition of support for needed change. But all of this will have to happen very quickly.

At this point, language is a given. For better or worse, we humans are stuck with it, even if it arguably has contributed to crises that threaten us with extinction. One way or another, the way we deal with the enormous ecological challenge facing us will be mediated by words, words, and more words — some accurately reflecting the situation, others concealing it.

Meanwhile here we are, I writing, you reading. We share — I hope and assume — a commitment to logic and evidence, and to an ethic of collective human and non-human survival that transcends the myths of religion and progress.

There is no denying the satisfaction — even thrill — that comes when language hits its mark by dramatically aiding our understanding
of what is by now an unimaginably complex human matrix. Perhaps the most we can do, now as before, though with more urgency than ever, is to harness that thrill by using language skillfully to describe and persuade; and meanwhile to act in ways that are congruent with the ethical content of our words.

My hope in writing
Peak Everything
is not to leave readers in despair, but to impel them to action. There are many things we all can do to ease the transition from the century of growth to the century of contraction. The following are a two of the most important organizations helping to coordinate such efforts.

Over 150 Post Carbon groups have emerged in recent months, coordinated by the Post Carbon Institute (
postcarbon.org
). The
Relocalization Network
(
relocalize.net
) supports local Post Carbon groups as they work to develop and implement the strategy of relocalization in their communities. Relocalization Network Coordinators support the Network by providing on-line communication tools, developing resources, facilitating connections between local groups, and cultivating a sense of working together globally on local responses.

Those living in Britain may wish also to join the
Transition Towns Movement
(
transitiontowns.org
;
www.transitionculture.org
). The mission of this burgeoning movement is to inspire, inform, support and train communities as they consider, adopt and implement a coordinated transition away from fossil fuels and toward a renewable, local economy.