What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

I just finished reading Dmitri Orlov’s article, The Five Stages of Collapse, published on the Energy Bulletin. I highly recommend it. Orlov helped me, as I believe he intended, to visualize and come to more concrete terms with the likely course of The Collapse of Western Civilization. He presents a lucid picture of what the unwinding will look like in the United States or, as the case may be, the coming “North American Union.” Which political entity will be in place depends, of course, on whether the powers that be will have time to implement their more elaborate political plans for control and domination before the balloon bursts and their insane schemes fall apart.

I very much appreciate Orlov’s analysis and I want to offer a couple of additional perspectives that occurred to me as I thought about it. First, he is incredibly clear and thoughtful about the economic, political and social conditions, but does not factor in the impending torrent of wild fluctuations in weather and climate. To me those forces, as well as global fossil fuel shortages, are likely to hasten the movement through the stages he describes, to accelerate the process. It’s rather sobering to consider crop failures, serious interruptions or losses of basic fuel imports, and likely power grid disruptions from weather events, in additon to the economic and financial failures already in motion.

The other issue that occurs to me is that Orlov doesn’t point to any ultimate “good” to come of collapse, either for humans or for the non-human world. The tone of his article suggests only a sense of failure, that we have “fucked up,” collectively, and that there’s not much to feel but a kind of stupidity and despair, as well as, of course, alarm. It brings to my mind the image of a teenager who stumbles out of a police car, having totaled the family car, seriously injured his girlfriend now in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, with six too many beers already vomited into the ditch, and muddy clothes torn, on a rainy night. He’s scraped up but still able to shamefully stagger into the house, aware that there is no way to avoid the horror and wrath of critical parents. There’s no suggestion of greater meaning inherent in this image, nor is there a larger context from which to view the scene. The kid fucked up and it’s a big mess. It is easy to see this culture in those terms. Collectively, we, the people of civilization, have fucked up and it IS indeed a big mess. Despite the contributions of Mozart, Einstein, and countless other human luminaries, as a whole we’ve brought the planet into a global mass extinction event that has the potential to rival the end Permian extinction, when more than 90% of all species were lost. It’s that bad.

Still, I see it in a larger context. I see the collapse as a piece of the story of the human, a real live myth, a very big and very profound story. I see this time and these events in ways that I imagine Gaia or Mother Earth may see them. What all of this represents is a vitally necessary process of cleansing and balancing. At it’s best, what we are involved in, and witness to, is a spiritual initiation rite of the highest order for an adolescent species in sore need of such an initiation. The stakes are extremely high, as well they should be. It’s hard, sobering, and at times shameful to look at our drunken, disconnected, destructive behavior. But I sense that we are in the hands of Elders, the forces of Life, our ancestors, or even maybe just simply the laws of biology, evolution, and physics, but certainly powers older and greater than the inflated collective, civilized human ego in the midst of this wild and unrestrained adolescence brought about by the fossil fuel age. If we, some of us anyway, are willing to stay the course of this initiation, we may make it through to adulthood and beyond. Or not. But if we do not then the species was not up to the task. We won’t get to become a mature species. The process of incorporating big brains and opposable thumbs into a carbon based world will have to begin again. It will be a tragic loss. But at any rate it’s a good and meaningful story to be a character in. Better this than “Leave It To Beaver.”

While Orlov doesn’t touch on the profound mythos here, I still heartily recommend reading the whole article. His new book is likely even better. Here is a brief excerpt, where Orlov describes the stages:

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost. As local social institutions, be they charities, community leaders, or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

The word “collapse” implies for most people something highly negative. No doubt it is important to be sober about the level of shock and suffering that will be entailed in this process. But it is also important, in order to be able to imagine any light at the end of the tunnel, to play with other language that could also describe the process we find ourselves in.

For example, it feels very different to say: “We are on the brink of the radical simplification of human society on the planet.” Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, describes collapse as a reduction in the scope and complexity of a society. We’re going to find ourselves with far less complex systems due to less availability of fossil energy to support those complex systems, but also due to greater stresses on basic systems of food production, shelter, heating, water availability, etc. These stresses will be result from climate change and ecological overshoot, by which we’ve seriously damaged the life support systems, the ecosystems, of our local landbases.

The word collapse calls up images of horror. And that’s not inappropriate. But images of collapse inspire no visions of ultimate benefit. On the other hand the term radical simplification could sound a different chime for people exhausted from the current wage slave system, where the many work ever harder to stuff the ever more soft and opulent feather beds of the few elite. Radical simplification of life, if people would slow down enough to contemplate it, could actually feel like a breath of non-polluted air. Too many people, most people I would venture to say, and even those with currently stable incomes, are incredibly lonely. They sit in quiet despair in front of their television sets or walk the malls with iPods stopping their ears, or drink beers and soullessly cheer at yet another sporting event, forever in frantic search of more distraction. For most, collapse will be, alternatively, either a shock or, if it proceeds slowly, just a heightened erosion of already degraded and meaningless lives. The coming transition will not be pretty for the bewildered herd. But for visionaries and cultural creatives collapse, or radical simplification, likely calls up what may seem to be paradoxical feelings of relief and even empowerment. I’ve heard more than one friend recently exclaim, “Bring it on. I’m sick of this shit.”

Joseph Tainter suggests that the fall of the Roman Empire was not, except for the elite, a step back. According to Wikipedia,

We often assume that the collapse of the Roman Empire was a catastrophe for everyone involved. Tainter points out that it can be seen as a very rational preference of individuals at the time, many of whom were actually better off (all but the elite, presumably). Archeological evidence from human bones indicates that average nutrition actually improved after the collapse in many parts of the former Roman Empire. Average individuals may have benefited because they no longer had to invest in the burdensome complexity of empire.

While mainstream culture, and it’s majority, have no realistic idea what’s brewing, there are many movements towards simplification already sprouting, perhaps from an intuitive sense, amongst the sensitive and creative, that the current system is in free-fall and about to go splat on hard pavement. Local food, local, cooperative business, the growing co-housing and communities movements, and small but aware groups now gather to educate their neighbors about the impending crises, as is evidenced in the “relocalization movement” typified by national groups like the Post Carbon Institute, The Community Solutions, and more local groups like Boulder Going Local.

The relocalization movement, already seeded in many minds, if not in huge numbers of actual locations yet, will grow best and fastest from the composted detritus and decay of the fossil fueled consumer culture. Orlov suggests that decay has already begun and will culminate in Stages 3 and 4, hopefully avoiding Stage 5. While I don’t relish the suffering that all of this will entail, I do welcome the open and more fertile ground that will open up as we move away from the current dominant culture and paradigm. The decay of large systems of control and domination will foster the possibility of reconnection to place, to non-human life, and to one another in families and small communities, like we have not seen for generations, perhaps centuries. We have the opportunity to become members of local communities grounded in the reality of the planet.

I don’t have a sense that Orlov holds any such sentiment. I use the word sentiment in it’s highest sense: the thought that it is necessary for us as a species to pass through terribly trying physical times and rigorous spiritual exercise is one based on pure sentiment. I possess a basic and enduring love for the capacities we have as human beings: our abilities to love deeply, to care immensely, and to be consciously, intimately and passionately connected to all of life.

I very much appreciate Orlov for giving us a likely map to the unwinding because it reinforces for my rational self what my heart has intuitively come to: it’s time to get out of highly populated areas, to find a small, remote town or village where there is the possibility of coming together to provide for the essentials locally, apart from the larger systems that are about to crumble.

As I read Orlov’s analysis I felt ever more convinced of the dangers of dependence on the larger structures for one’s basic needs. But I could also see that there clearly resides the possibility, and even likelihood, that for some of us who are aware and making rapid preparation, that collapse, necessary radical simplification, is likely to foster the growth of innumerable small bastions of sanity, deep humanity and growing spirituality. In those places we will work with great purpose toward the regeneration of natural systems and the evolution of loving connection across species, generations, races and sexes.

If we wake up now, see the handwriting on the wall of this prison and walk away from it, we can sit together in circle with one another, and with the whole community of our landbase, to weather the huge storms that will rage around us. And as the storms abate, those of us who have done our work, our mental, emotional, spiritual and physical work, with the help of greater forces, will have the opportunity to make amends, to work to offer deep reparation for the harm we have collectively caused. With grace, we, and our descendants, will also have the chance to water and care for the seed of re-member-ing our deeper ancestral selves, our ancient legacy of consciousness, that honored life in all it’s forms. What a Way to Go.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Sally's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.