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130 comments on How Relocalization Worked
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130 comments on How Relocalization Worked
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Indeed. JMGreer gives us some useful understanding here (and well-presented) but seems to have a huge critical 600-800 year gap in his history books. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 400s, the system of guilds and apprentices developed many centuries later. In the meantime there were those centuries in which (to quote JMG above):
To be a bit more explicit, the chaos of brutal anarchy reigned for a long time. A look at the archeological record in the UK shows that the Dark Ages did not warrant the "..." that Ghung put there; they were indeed very Dark and lasted Ages for anyone surviving through a small part of them.
I think this huge oversight by JMG is a symptom of a larger misapprehension he has, namely his resolute conviction that there is not going to be a sudden collapse. I tried to discuss this concept with him on his website and his response was little better than flaming. He's clearly a very informed, intelligent and perceptive person committed to studying the field, so I incline to put this peculiar blindspot down to emotional denial.
(And some people react to praise from a fan club by becoming very arrogant and impervious to any possibility that their critics might be more right than themselves; another notable example of the syndrome may have initials D.O.)
My reckoning is, yes the principles that JMG here indicates will be relevant in the future, but for as far as our own generations are concerned, we have to instead concentrate on how to survive a new Dark Ages, albeit hopefully just a few months or years this time rather than centuries. This is my reasoning on collapse:
http://energyark.blogspot.com/2009/07/will-there-be-abrupt-collapse.html
and this is my reasoning and project on what to do:
http://energyark.blogspot.com/
[P.S.: I note that member JMG3W, after 18 days of not commenting, and having previously commented only four times in the last month, has started commenting by amazing coincidence on this post by an author JMG. And with a profile page that conspicuously fails to indicate whether this is the same JMG. Is he shy of being upstaged in open debate? Normally the author appears in the comments with a clear identification. What's to think?!
I have no idea who JMG3W might be; it's certainly not me. I haven't posted on TOD in the past, mostly because there are only so many hours in a day.
As for my "blind spot," if you want to use that label for the fact that I disagree with your notions about the future, that's your prerogative.
Thanks John. My theory that JMG3W=JMG has now fallen on hard times further down this page.
I can appreciate your point about only so many hours in the day but I think many here would think it valuable (for readers and writer alike) to have a knowledgeable etc person such as yourself occasionally contributing in the comments here.
Re blind spot (yours or maybe mine instead)... how about you say why you dismiss the proposed reasons (linked above) for a sudden collapse? (Some others here are inclining likewise so you'll be in suitably challenging territory!)
Robin, one of the difficulties with internet discussions is that it's difficult to cover the reasons for a point of view of any depth or complexity in the sound-bite dimensions of a blog's comment page. It took me most of The Long Descent to explain why I think claims of a sudden, total, and global collapse are unlikely to prove correct, and even then I freely admit I skimped some points. Toynbee's ten volumes are about the length that would be needed to treat the issue adequately.
On a back-of-the-envelope basis, though, my central point is that collapse tends to be self-limiting in the short run, because it frees up resources no longer needed to support the people who die, the systems that fall apart, the buildings that get burnt to the ground, etc. There are also homeostatic processes within human societies that counter sudden change. This won't prevent a collapse driven by some underlying predicament from playing out at length, but it does impose the kind of stairstep decline -- crisis, followed by partial recovery, followed by renewed crisis, rinse and repeat until you've got sheep grazing in the Forum at Rome -- that shows up so commonly in historical examples of decline and fall.
I'm not sure this counts as a "slow collapse" in the sense you seem to mean, as most of the collapsing happens in a series of pulses that can be very sudden and horrifically destructive. It also offers essentially no support to the idea that we can somehow manage the decline -- those of us who survive the first wave of crises will be too busy scrambling for raw survival to spend a lot of time on anything else. What it means is simply that we won't be landing in the Stone Age overnight. (I don't think we'll get there at all; my midrange guess is a dark age 3 to 4 centuries in length with roughly an 18th century technology, though with bits and pieces of more advanced stuff here and there.)
Can that model be picked to pieces here? Of course, because I don't have the 200+ pages to get into details, discuss sources, etc. That's one of the reasons I don't get into it with people who post critical comments on my blog, fwiw.
JMG (the real one!):
Thanks for your articles, well written and thought provoking.
When thinking about possible futures, IMHO it is helpful to visualize them as a spectrum of possible scenarios, each with a different probability. At the one extreme we have technocopian optimism, and the other extreme we have dieoff doomer pessimism. In between are more mixed and moderate "long descent" or "catabolic collapse" scenarios. I would call those mid-range scenarios (and myself, and, if the shoe fits - as I presume it does - yourself) "declinist".
A phenomenon I am observing here: To the technocopian optimists, even declinists sound too pessimistic, and technocopians seem to see little difference between declinists and doomers; on the other hand, to doomers, even declinists sound too optimistic, and doomers seem to see little difference between technocopians and declinists - we are all "in denial" to them.
I acknowledge that the doomer scenarios are real possibilities. I just don't see them as having a 100% probability - yet. I'm more inclined to see the midrange declinist scenarios as actually being the most realistic and thus having the highest range of probabilities, at least for now. None of us can actually know the future, for the simple reason that the future is contingent - it depends upon decisions that haven't yet been made and actions that have not yet been taken.
Time scale matters, too, and I think that sometimes we all talk past each other because we are focused on different time scales. I am focused on the next 25-50 years, because my own life span will not extend beyond that time frame. I do have some interest in the longer time frame up to the next century or so beyond that, mainly as a matter of intellectual curiosity. I have no idea what the future will be like 500 or 5,000 or 500,000 or 5 million years from now. It seems to me to be pretty pointless to even speculate that far into the future; that actual future will almost certainly be different than any of our speculations, and in any case it will be up to the people living then.
WNC Observer wrote:
Being the unreal JMG (if that is the logical inverse of being the real one), that must make me a figment of my own imagination, the ultimate in narcissic solipsism? :-)
My thoughts on the doomer-technoutopian spectrum:
If you are on either end, there is no need to prepare for the future, because you are either completely doomed or because the future will be good. If you are in between or if you believe in a spectrum of possible outcomes, then preparations are important. I am becoming increasingly pessimistic and leaning towards doom, but I also consider the possibility of total, rapid collapse, nuclear war or ecosystem collapse to not be scenarios that I can prepare for, and therefore I don't spend much time thinking about them except for the near-inevitable premature death they would entail. Descent scenarios are more interesting because they are survivable and more likely than technoutopia.
I usually just say: "Hope for the best but prepare for the worst". Its shorter.
Thanks John for further replies (and meanwhile I've been away from here a few days).
I'm sceptical of a self-limitingness of collapse preventing a sudden new "stone age" (at least in some locales) -- I suspect we have an unusually precarious house of cards now. But until I've looked further into your reasonings I can hardly make myself out to know better than you.
And I'd like to apologise for the unnecessary negative ad hom I posted as the second comment on this page; I'd hope I/we can give you a more friendly welcome on any future occasion!
No, we are not the same individual but we do have a few things in common. JMG has authored more books than I, I preceded him across the U of Washington campus in undergraduate and graduate work, and I preceded him into this - Lessons from Amateur Radio (which I, as does AD7VI, highly recommend). As to why I do or don't post, I scan TOD more regularly than I post, posting when I happen to have the time (seldom) or am procrastinating on a work project (usually). Now that I've completed building and outfitting a treadmill desk, I'll multi-task more broadly beyond completing a book every couple of weeks while keeping my blood pressure down and other aging effects at bay (yes, I have a desk job).
RobinPC,
To be fair to JMG, he did seem to leave the subject open to discussion. As a relative newbie to the site I am not really familiar with his previous posts or you guys' history. My (mostly intuitive) feelings regarding steep decline (not that it will happen, just that it likely could) are born of personal observation. In the late '70s I traveled to Yugoslavia as a student. With all of it's faults it was a functioning society with a multiethnic population including many enlightened, educated people (the govt. not-withstanding, perhaps). Indeed, shortly after, they hosted a quite successful Winter Olympics. Just a few years later I was back, in a very different role, and I realized how quickly a population can turn on itself. I had a similar close-up view of Somalia. The thing is, this time there won't be any NATO or UN to eventually come to the rescue because this time it will be global and much more complex. Mix in feelings of entitlement, various forms of "divine right", racial and tribal tensions, justifiable fear, all of the other things that preclude any form of societal security, you have a powder keg waiting for a match. It occurs to me that we may be nearing this condition in my lifetime. There are 6.8 billion+ humans on the planet and most of them don't know jack (lucky folks). The match could be global warming, resource depletion (as in Rome, etc, ect), peak energy, environmental, political, overpopulation, famine, disease, most likely a combination of all of the above. We are in historical overshoot as all of these thing are happening on a scale never described by history, so I get a little uneasy. I'm used to describing problems in some context. Then again, I suppose humankind is always in historical overshoot.......
Methinks I'll spend the rest of my birthday curled up with my poodle and a good book on another subject.
Peace y'all!
The interesting issue here is the question of what kind of collapse is ahead. What I see is that all our present strategies are to push harder and faster toward collapse, and so the real trick is figuring out what to quit doing more than what to work at ever harder. I think even if we continue to pull out all the stops for making our present technologies outmoded and inoperable, the effect of pursuing so many deeply mistaken strategies, I think it will still take a long series of large and small tumbles to bring about what anyone would call a general collapse.
The least expensive way to delay, soften or prevent them would be to cease devoting our energies to displacing our own indisposable systems. Barring that, I think it'll still take a fair amount of time, and considerable persistence with self-defeating strategies to pull it off.
It took the Romans several hundred years to grind their system into the dust, by maintaining a culture of ever more exhaustive practices. It may go faster for us, being closer to the edge in some ways than they were, and having further to fall, maybe, but it's still going to take more than any one lifetime and a great deal of concerted effort. The main thing that natural systems demonstrate as a way to keep their growth processes from destroying their own beginnings is by quitting them.
So... I still do think people are fully capable of the great discipline and many years of devoted labor to stick with completely self-defeating strategies to the very end. They've done it many times it seems. It's very much what we're now caught up in too. You can see that in how our main societal purpose is devotion to accelerating the consumption of all available resources. It's our primary strategy for "conserving" our society. It's not necessary if you take a realistic view, though.
Yes, surely a strange society has been created when consumption seems to conserve it.