Post-Peak Liberal: Hopecast for a PostPeak Decade

Post-Peak Liberal

....... Life on the Downslope

Hopecast for a PostPeak Decade

Well, the Naughts (or Oughts, or Empties) are over, and we thus prepare for a new decade. Last time, we did a kind of selective review of the last decade, which at bottom proved to be period of profound self-delusion, cultural illusion, and massive sociopolitical inertia, as serial waves of collapse lapped against the shores of our civilization.

What might the decade ahead hold for us? Rather than do straight-up forecasting, or a wish list of things I hope to happen, let's put together a kind of quasi-utopian fusion of the two: what can we expect to happen in the best of all possible scenarios? We'll try to create a amalgam of things that are likely to happen, and positive things we can do to make them happen. We can call it a "Hopecast,", for lack of a better term (or actually for lack of my brain-power this morning -- depths of winter here in New England, where everything is cold and stark and bereft of moisture).

Collapse of Centralization: As the great Jim Kunstler is constantly reminding us, huge centralized bureaucracies of any kind, public or private, require a lot of physical and other kinds of energy to hold together. Large-scale enterprises that try to push human behavior away from natural tendencies must be continually coerced in some way or another, and coercion requires energy. Entropy, devolution, and creative destruction from below are continually eating away at all projects that concentrate power. We're seeing this now, as the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats shovel trillions of dollars into various failing, centralized systems: the War on Terror, the finance-industry plutocracy, business-friendly health care "reform," etc. In many respects, the instincts of the Tea Partiers are right on; they are correct in their distrust of huge, sprawling, federal spending, and the future indebtedness of their progeny. These top-down megaplans will all sputter, totter, and likely fail, due to the changing conditions of oil availability, the erosion of the planet's natural systems, and the declining value of labor (see my 3-part series on The Future of Work). Of course, the huge patch of willful blindness in the neo-grassroots conservative worldview includes: the culpability of their own GOP heroes in the ballooning of government; the unjustified pass given to a $1 trillion-a-year military establishment, which is somehow magically exempt from government inefficiency; and the utterly bogus idea that the "private" sphere of business is somehow different from the "public" sphere of the federal government (check the conditions on the ground, my conservative friends -- Big Guvmint and Big Business are the same dudes!). The awful truth of the last four decades is that power and wealth have become unsustainably concentrated into the hands of a very small elite. And rather than "share the wealth" (God forbid!), this cohort will hang onto their privileged position until the end, with the result that the supporting structures underneath their rise (mass consumption, political apathy, externalized environmental damage) will just dissolve, and the whole rotting mess will unravel.

The Rise of Localism: This will be both a necessity and an opportunity. With the hollowing out and bankruptcy of centralized power systems, there will be a massive turn to our immediate physical and economic environments, and we'll need to rehabilitate them with gusto. Right now, we're seeing a designer precursor of localism. Well-to-do liberals and other progressive activist types have been pushing the Buy Local, Think Global thing for a while. And certainly, we can see the quickening pace of local produce and organic food production. Farmers Markets and Community Supported Agriculture are expanding at a rapid clip, which is a good thing. But when we look at the localization that will be necessary after the collapse of federal and state budgets, we're really talking about exponentially more radical change, especially when we throw in the massive shifts that will happen when Peak Oil gains more traction (global supply lines will shrink, personal motoring will prove problematic, air transport will be transformed to an elite activity, etc.). We're talking about major restructuring in how we arrange our living quarters, our labor patterns (more below), and the physical landscape itself. This will necessitate wholesale changes in land ownership laws, collective finance policies, zoning standards, infrastructure maintenance, etc. We should be looking at how to create multi-use, collective, self-reliant localities. As the financial resources of federal and state bureaucracies dry up, these upper levels of government should be going with the localizing flow, not fighting it. That means rewriting laws to make it easier and more rewarding for people to organize financially and physically on the local scale. Any policies that encourage hoarding of property and capital should be scrapped, and the legal standing of corporations should be drastically curtailed. I know this sounds pie-in-the-sky right now, but I think conditions will make these adjustments viable more quickly than one might imagine.

Work: The December '09 jobs report was not good. After a small positive blip in November, the nation shed 85,000 more jobs in December, leaving the base unemployment rate at 10% and the full un-underemployed stat at 17.3% (and that's actually a lowball number, in my opinion, especially when we include the burgeoning prison population). Most economists see a continuing erosion in the months ahead, with the base rate approaching 10.8% by October. Everyone is holding their breath for a "turnaround," but I don't think it's coming. Like the recession in general, we're not seeing just a temporary setback in employment ratios, which will reverse itself once economic growth gets going again. What the serial economic bubbles (tech stock, real estate, credit card debt, health care) really mean is that we've been artificially propping up huge swaths of the economy with fake balance sheets, shady accounting, unsustainable financial instruments, and reckless lending and borrowing. The jobs spun out of these bubbles are thus not stable, permanent positions. And the overall collapse in leveraged lending means that these bubble jobs will not come back. Companies are going to continue to run leaner and meaner, utilizing less full-time labor and plowing more cash into labor-saving technological investments, which will exacerbate the jobs picture further. In the long view, we have simply de-skilled too much of the labor market to expect anything approaching the kind of purchasing power that we enjoyed in the bubble decades. We are no longer a nation that knows how to grow its own food, make and repair its own tools, and create and sustain its physical architectures and infrastructures. Oh sure, these things get done; food is grown here, and stuff is made here, roads get paved, and buildings get built. But large proportions of the population are not involved in these functions any more. The post-war shift to a service industry economy of "symbolic analysts" has really put much of our populace at risk of superfluity, and we're reaping the whirlwind now. I would not expect "full employment" to return any time soon, if ever.

Bringing Functions in House: For a culture that places so much of its individuals' self-worth and identity on career, it is difficult to see the great opportunity present in the unraveling ratios of full employment. But as we encounter more long-term unemployment (the average jobless stretch now sits at 29 weeks, the longest since data started being collected in 1948), there is going to be an enormous pool of talent and time, millions people who will be ready, willing, and able to do countless tasks outside of the market economy that has jettisoned them. As the formalized, monetized economy continues to deliver products and services with less and less compensated labor, we should look to "re-laborize" as many of those functions as possible through de-monetized alternatives. This is similar to "import substitution" in global macroeconomics . Countries can certainly gain from international trade, but an overdependence on outside entities for everything leads to vulnerability. Self-reliance should thus be sought in some spheres. Similarly, if families and communities have to purchase all of their needs through the marketplace, they are overly vulnerable to downturns and recessions, as we are seeing. The freed-up labor from long-term unemployment can thus be seen as a giant opportunity to increase non-monetized self-reliance. There's just one problem: the current social form (One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling) is not adequate to the task of de-formalizing economic functions. So we need another shift, which is....

New Forms of Collective Living: I know, I'm banging the same old drum here. But what can I say? Repetition is one of my main weaknesses -- maybe it's good for the soul. In any case, I really am convinced that the long-term trends in employment ratios, environmental degradation, and cultural collapse point to the absolute necessity of creating a new form of collective living. As a reminder of my general outlook, I view human nature through a long lens. We are the product of millions of years of human, proto-human, and mammal evolution. Those processes have shaped and molded us to thrive in certain types of social and ecological conditions, what biologists call EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness). As social primates, we require very specific settings for full development: intense, tribal groupings of 80 to 150 people or so, in intimate contact with natural surroundings. In the long view, the last 10,000 years of written history are just a blip; they cannot change the underlying needs of an organism that has been millions of years in the making. We need contact with many intimates, both human and natural, to fully mature -- and the current arrangements do not deliver. We overconsume, overindulge, drug ourselves, distract ourselves, transport ourselves to fantasy worlds -- all to fill the void opened up by having profoundly dehumanized social forms. As the great Paul Shepard noted, our recent social forms have cut us off from normal human ontogeny, resulting in a society of sick individuals. We need intense, close relationships with people, animals, trees, rocks, and rivers. Without these, we do not properly differentiate between internal and external, between self and Other, especially in the crucial adolescent period. We become, therefore, a narcissistic culture of grasping children, recreating juvenile patterns of hyper-competition and hyper-indulgence. Taking a step back from our "normal" lives, it is not hard to see how profoundly lonely and unsatisfying our current social forms are. We simply do not have enough intense interaction with other people or the natural world, and much of our consumer capitalist economy is predicated on churning out marginally-satisfying substitutes for these empty places.

The Cooperative Weapon: In the years ahead, I think it will become increasingly clear that social and economic tinkering will not do the trick. There's this kind of pathological inertia right now in mainstream political discourse, a desperate desire to believe that, at some point, all of our old mechanisms will kick out their slumber and start delivering money and success and growth again. All we need to do is weather the storm, clean up some of the excesses and inefficiencies, and the great deity of the American Economy will unstick its giant treads from the frozen ground of recession and start churning along, finally carrying us back to the hallowed ground of vigorous consumption. I just don't think this is going to happen. What we are going to need is a different kind of home base for people, something radically different than the current American Algorithm, which will die a slow, painful, bewildering death. Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good causes and trends out there that are worth pursuing, and I'm sure a lot of them will be crucial parts of a successful American future: green jobs, sustainable energy, campaign finance reform, a redefined legal standing for the corporation, local manufacturing, etc. But I don't believe any of these things will get us pointed in the right direction if the base American social form stays the same. If we continue the One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form, and fight to preserve it all costs, we will have lost the opportunity. These arrangements are simply flawed at their most basic levels: the rates of consumption are too high for ecological sustainability; their reliance on full-employment does not mesh with the emerging ratios of labor to economic output; their fundamentally atomizing nature cuts off community and group involvement at its root; they are intrinsically conducive to loneliness and anxiety, which gives artificial fuel to unneeded consumption. By contrast, collective social forms are able to attack virtually every systemic problem at once: collective ownership reduces individual risk, grouped purchasing reduces individual expenditures, combined mortgages/rents free up time for internal self-services, shared products reduce impacts on the environment, etc. In short, the current socioeconomic arrangements don't provide enough breathing space for individuals and families to get control over their finances, their time, their physical space, and their social activity. But collective social forms would provide a more powerful home base from which to attack changing conditions. More give, more flexibility, more room to evaluate and act.

Retreat from the Consumer-Based Personality: With the rising importance of gear and gadget over the last couple decades, it is frightening to behold just how stuff-centered people have become. Now, I'm not just talking about people being greedy and "materialistic." Something much more profound is happening. The concentration of mainstream media, the proliferation of digital content, the ubiquity of the web, the explosion of personal electronics -- these are all reshaping the neural pathways of the modern consumer. People's attention and thought patterns are becoming hyperfocused on the ever-changing flow of packaged visual and audio content, which does not allow for broad scope, careful analysis, or historical perspective. These issues have been covered from every angle by able commentators, so we don't need to rehash here. But suffice it to say, a nervous, impatient, overstimulated populace accustomed to endless titillation is not well-equipped to deal with long term decline and macro-trends in social and ecological disintegration. And there is a chilling potential for American vulnerability to theocrats and dictators, provided that they can deliver some kind of motivating stimuli. But on the hopeful side, I do see a major opportunity with emerging collective social forms. As mentioned above, much of the energy of modern capitalism comes from the excessive consumption that compensates for the psychological bankruptcy and loneliness of the social form itself. When you take an inherently gregarious social primate evolved to live in intimate tribal settings, and then stick it into the arid atmospheres of the nuclear family and the modern workplace, you're going to end up with epidemic unhappiness and despair, conditions that can only be soothed with stimulants, baubles, and the virtual escapes of electronic media. But remember, that tribal primate is still in there, lurking in the breast of every person, honed by millions of years of evolution. It is there to be leveraged at any time, ready to flower forth if environmental conditions appropriate to its full development re-emerge. In this light, if we choose or are forced to create more collective social forms in the coming years of the Long Emergency, I believe that a lot of the overconsumptive energy of consumer capitalism will drop away, as people once again learn the simple pleasures of hanging out with their own kind. We all know that the best things in life are interpersonal. No sitcom can compare to the uncontrollable laughter that often comes in group get-togethers. As interesting as celebrity gossip is, we're much more alive when we dish the dirt on our compatriots at a social gathering. Watching sports on TV is sometimes good, but who doesn't feel more exhilarated with a romp or game in a field or on the beach? Think back to some of the peak experiences in your own life. My bet is that most, if not all of them, involve spending quality time with larger groups of family and friends, and not getting the high score on some video game.

Really what we're talking about in the near future is a cultural change, in the fullest sense. One American way of life is passing away, and its replacement has yet to be determined. Understandably, as our economic and ecological support structures melt down around our ankles, we're upset, anxious, and terrified. We desperately want someone to come in on a white horse and rescue our full-employment, our suburban mini-manors, our cheap gas, our easy second mortgages, and our mall shopping sprees. The Democrats and the Republicans continue their epic game of musical chairs, hoping that they're not the party in power as we careen from one election cycle to the next amidst continuing decline.

And in the worldview of the culture that is passing away, our problems look insurmountable, what I have earlier called "Concentric Circles of Collapse," or "Russian Nesting Dolls of Catastrophe." We seem to be embedded in vast, interlocking sets of problems: overpopulation, overconsumption, natural-systems collapse, economic recessions, global terrorism, cultural debasement -- you name it. But in reality, almost all of these intermeshed problems draw some energy from the basic social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling. It's not that this social form is the exact cause of everything bad in the world -- of course not. But a general shift to a more collective lifestyle would start drawing the wasted energy out many of these systemic logjams, all at the same time. We just need to have the creativity and the courage to see the world with new eyes.

Here's hoping that we can find those new eyes in the coming years.