How inevitable is decline?

Have we passed the point of no return?
Our contemporary industrial society is sick. But how bad is our diagnosis? Do we have a mild illness requiring a brief lie down and an aspirin, a major problem requiring emergency surgery, or a terminal illness beyond curative treatment, leaving only better or worse palliative care?

Dark Mountain
There has been an interesting debate on this question upfolding recently on the Guardian website between what may be viewed as different branches of environmentalism. To understand the debate, you first need to get a bit of a handle on a new movement in the UK called The Dark Mountain Project (DMP). Launched just over a year ago by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, DMP is a literary and cultural project exploring new stories for an age of collapse and transition. Their manifesto can be found here, though this quote might give you a taste of their perspective:

"This project starts with our sense that civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse – which is already beginning – could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop."

So while being deeply pessimistic about the chances of continuing life as we know it, they are searching for new (or renewed) cultural narratives to guide us through what they expect will be a period of widespread ecological, social, economic and political change. In particular, those at the DMP are quite critical of an optimistic environmentalism that sees us developing and implementing technological solutions to ecological crises based around a low-carbon economy that will enable the continued economic development of a social and cultural trajectory not too dissimilar to the one we're already on, that the future will be merely "an upgraded version of the present". Nicholas Stern's newish book is one example of this kind of thinking. In other words, DMP are questioning whether sustainable development is really sustainable if it assumes the necessity and desirability of ongoing industrial development in even the developed world. I have previously quoted John Michael Greer, who spoke about contemporary industrial society facing a predicament, not merely a series of problems. That is the basic idea: that we need to work out how to best cushion a now inevitable descent from our current level of social complexity, and Dark Mountain wants to explore cultural narratives other than the myth of progress.

Dark Mountain is gaining a bit of a following, and are holding their first festival in Wales in a few weeks' time. One of the keynote speakers at the festival is well-known Guardian journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot.

The Guardian debate
Monbiot started the Guardian conversation on Tuesday with an article titled "I share their despair, but I'm not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain. He accused the DMP of "giving up" on industrial civilisation, being content to wait for its downfall, which will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we ignore the real opportunities to reform the current system.

Kingsnorth and Hine, founders of Dark Mountain, came back yesterday with "The environmental movement needs to stop pretending". They rejected Monbiot's portrayal of their ideas and charged mainstream environmentalism (including Monbiot) with having been co-opted by capitalist dreams of endless growth, just with wind farms replacing coal.

And then today, Simon Lewis, Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds tried to find a mediating position in "Yes, we can change society before global crises overwhelm us". Lewis argues that Monbiot is too optimistic about the life expectancy of industrial civilisation while Kingsnorth and Hine are premature in issuing a terminal diagnosis. Instead, there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity.

A growing conversation
All three articles are contributions to an ethical and cultural debate that I think will only continue to grow in coming years. It is not a new debate, but it is likely to become increasingly mainstream as more people come to see the depth and breadth of ecological crises our industrial society has spawned. I think this exchange includes its fair share of misunderstandings and misrepresentations (for instance, it is clear that Kingsnorth and Hine are not advocating any kind of quietist despair, nor does Monbiot hope for endless growth. Nonetheless, these authors differ in their estimation of how deeply ecological crises cut into the arteries of our present way of life and how radically and rapidly things need to change as a result. Anyone who takes seriously our present crises will need to face these questions, and on our answers, new alliances and battlegrounds will be drawn.
Speaking of interesting Guardian articles, this one is also worth a read, pointing out that most of the current climate debate is way too simplistic and that scientific, economic, political and ethical questions are not be carefully enough distinguished.
Monbiot and Kingsnorth had an earlier run-in over these questions a little while back.

Thesis question articulation IV: Predicament

Predicament: part two
Series begins back here.
John Michel Greer in The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age usefully distinguishes between two kinds of threats, which he calls problems and predicaments. Problems have solutions, whereas predicaments do not. A problem has a path may be discovered and chosen that will effectively avoid, nullify, or significantly diminish the problematic aspect of the situation. A predicament lacks such options. It is a situation in which there are no strategies that will substantially avoid all the significant negative aspects of a threat.

Greer suggests that the archetypal human predicament is death. Facing death, humans have come up with a wide range of responses, some healthier than others: from denial or suppression to great works of art and a variety of ethical and spiritual impulses. Yet it is a mistake to treat our mortality as though it were a problem we are to solve.

I may correctly treat this or that threat to my life as a problem and seek a solution to stay alive. I am standing in the middle of a busy road; I will get out of the way (or perhaps I will campaign for more pedestrian areas and higher taxes on private automobiles). But while specific problems can be seen and solved, the fact that I am mortal is a basic condition of my life. No amount of wishing, campaigning, meditating, medicating or moralising will decisively remove the constant threat and ultimate inevitability of my own demise.

Staying alive is a good thing. And so medical research and (probably more significantly), public health initiatives such as sewers and effective garbage disposal that reduce mortality rates and increase life expectancies are generally instrumental goods worth pursuing. But it is possible to pursue one good thing in a way that undermines other good things and distort the proper ordering of goods. There is an often unspoken assumption behind much of the angst over healthcare funding (whether private or nationalised): that, given sufficient resources, we can endlessly defer the inevitable. But throwing more and more resources towards medical interventions that merely prolong the continuation of a pulse may well be mistakenly treating a predicament as a problem, and ironically, diverting attention from other problems that do have solutions.

Death is a personal predicament. Greer argues that the present ecological and resource crises are a social predicament, indicating the unavoidable end of the industrial age as we have known it. Although at one stage (he identifies the 1970s oil crises for instance) the unsustainability of contemporary industrial society was a problem that could have been confronted and solved through an ordered transition to more sustainable ways of living, it is now too late. The moment for solutions has passed and we are now in a predicament, where no amount of activism, technological advance or personal reform is remotely likely to succeed in maintaining the astonishing trajectory of growth that industrial nations have enjoyed for the last few generations. Indeed, nothing can avert widespread social decline and political instability. He claims that treating this as a problem distracts us from a healthy response in which the inevitability of this decline is accepted and we seek ways of cushioning the most likely quite rugged downslope that lies ahead.*

Of course, it is crucial to identify correctly which threats are problems and which are predicaments. Treating a predicament like a problem is pointless waste of energy. Treating a problem like a predicament is an irresponsible defeatism. But how can we tell the difference? How do we know if an issue is insoluble unless we resolutely attempt to solve it?

These are important questions, and in the case of whether our society has reached or is reaching various limits to growth, very important questions. However, I would like to plead some measure of ignorance on the precise global situation and instead pursue some subsequent questions: if Greer is correct and unsustainability is not simply a problem, but a predicament, what does a healthy response look like?
*Greer also claims that we face long-term decline, not sudden collapse (hence The Long Descent). But that is a post for another day.
UPDATE: I've also just discovered that the relevant section of The Long Descent was first posted here on JMG's blog some time ago.

This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one

Thesis question articulation II: Societal unsustainability

Societal unsustainability: part two
Series begins back here.
We shall refer particularly to contemporary industrial societies, rather than to all societies globally or historically. There are of course various kinds of industrial societies. Western societies have a long established tradition of industrialisation and only distant cultural memories of any other kind of social organization. For some other societies, industrialisation is rapidly becoming the dominant pattern of social and economic activity. Again, this project will focus more on the former than the latter. Although many of the challenges just mentioned are global in scope and threaten all societies, there is a particular shape to the issue in those societies whose historical and present activities are principally to blame, since at stake is not simply survival, but also the moral, spiritual and legal problem of guilt.

Industrialism is a complex cultural phenomenon involving shared beliefs, narratives, and moral judgements, a set of habitual practices and various social structures and institutions. From a physical viewpoint, it is the historically unprecedented exercise of human power through harnessing non-human energy (particularly fossil fuels) in the rationally-governed pursuit of maximal production of material goods. And the very ‘success’ and increasingly global reach of this way of life is a or the primary cause of the present ecological crises. Pre-industrial societies have undermined the conditions of their own possibility before and collapsed as a result. But the activities of contemporary industrial societies threaten not only their own continued existence, but that of nearly all human societies.

This line of analysis and critique is well worn amongst ecologists and eco-theologians. Although there are significant disputes within this field, the precise account of the cause and extent of the problem is not crucial to this project. It is enough to note that there is an increasingly widespread perception based on coherent evidence that the present pursuit of relentless industrial growth will continue to have increasingly disastrous consequences both for human societies and much of the rest of the biosphere too. Put another way, continuing ‘business as usual’ is not simply a moral impossibility, but an ecological impossibility.

For this reason, I considered using the term societal decline rather than societal unsustainability since the force of threat in the latter has been diluted through overuse. Nonetheless, I have retained it because although serious decline is the likely fate of an unsustainable society, the societal threat from lack of sustainability has a particular shape not shared by other potential causes of societal instability and degradation.

Also, I am deliberately using societal rather than social. Although almost synonymous, the latter has a broader semantic range, including ‘interpersonal’ as well as ‘society as a whole’. Therefore, using social leaves open the possibility that the threat in question could simply mean this or that aspect of society being altered, rather than the entire present social order in danger.

Notice too that our topic speaks of society rather than politics. There are, of course, specifically political implications of ecologically-driven decline, and various political regimes may be more or less sustainable under the conditions of late modernity. But the focus here will be more broadly societal than specifically political.

This perception of grave societal vulnerability is the background, not the focus of this project. Let us continue backwards through the sub-title to see how it is important for the question I wish to pursue.
This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one
Image by CAC.

Thesis question articulation I: Societal unsustainability

Societal unsustainability: part one
The background for my project is the increasingly widespread perception of the unsustainability of the present order of industrial society. This belief is based on a wide variety of factors and takes a variety of forms, but uniting them all is the judgement that contemporary industrial society is undermining the material conditions of possibility for its own existence. Deforestation, soil degradation, water depletion, climate change, peak energy, biodiversity loss, pollution, sea level rises, mineral exhaustion, introduced species, pollinator decline, desertification and over-fishing: each of these challenges are caused or exacerbated by the industrialisation of much of human society over the last few hundred years. The scale of each issue is multiplied by the unprecedented population expansion that industrialisation has enabled. And each of them could sooner or later threaten significant social disruption. Many of these problems already cause widespread suffering and political tension, but taken together and in their bewildering array of interconnections, they drastically endanger the continued growth of industrialised society, and perhaps its very existence. Although ours is certainly not the first society to face a crisis that threatens the basis of its continued existence, nonetheless, the global extent and technologically-enhanced degree of environmental degradation are historically a novelty.

A number of thinkers, such as Jared Diamond, William R. Catton Jr. and Joseph Tainter, argue that, due to a range of converging reasons, the present way of life enjoyed by the developed world and aspired to by the developing world will reach the limits of its conditions of possibility within the next few years or decades. If so, then significant social changes are imminent. Whether accepted voluntarily or imposed forcefully by material conditions, total human population, production and consumption will not continue to grow indefinitely in a world of finite resources. A sustained or precipitous decline in the world economy may well bring with it the compounding difficulty of political and social instability. If the decline is as severe, permanent and global as these thinkers suggest, such instability is unlikely to be confined to the poorer nations or those usually considered volatile.

Whether such claims are accurate is a complex matter, and so are the analyses of the causes: the causes of the situation if the perception is accurate or the causes of the false perception if it is not. All these questions are important, but I would like to set them to one side. My concern is with the perception itself, its effects on thinking (specifically on moral reasoning) and possible responses to it.
This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one

Nicholas Stern: facing the future

On Thursday night I went to hear Nicholas Stern at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Lord Stern is the author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, a 2006 publication of the Government Economic Service of the UK, which famously laid out an economic argument for a strong global response to climate change. The Review claimed that an annual investment of around 1% of global GDP is required to avoid the worst effects of climate change, which, if left unattended, could have a long term consequence of reducing global GDP by 20%.

Lord Stern has recently published another book, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet, in which he defends the necessity and content of a comprehensive global agreement that must be achieved at the Copenhagen conference on climate change later this year, an event which he calls "the most important gathering since WWII".

His talk at the Book Festival the other night consisted of readings from his new book as part of a summary of its argument. In it, he claims that poverty and climate change are inextricably linked in our context and one cannot be addressed without reference to the other, that these are the two great challenges of the present time. In order to minimise the risk of runaway climate change, he argues for a 50% reduction in carbon emissions (from the usual 1990 baseline) by 2050, with developed nations (who have been responsible for the vast majority of carbon already emitted) leading the way to demonstrate that low-carbon growth is possible and developing nations following according to a timetable he lays out in more detail in the book. But for developed nations, this involves a 20-40% reduction by 2020 and an 80-90% reduction by 2050 (the numbers vary for different nations, depending on their current and historical emissions). This timetable would see emissions peak around 2030 and reach a steady level by 2050 at around 2 tonnes per person per annum (currently, the UK average is about 10 tonnes per person, the US and Australian average is almost 20 tonnes).

In passing, he acknowledged that the numbers used in 2006 to estimate the extraordinary costs of continuing business as usual were hopelessly out of date. When more recent data is included, he now believes the real cost would be far higher than 20% and probably closer to 50% of global GDP.

Nonetheless, he was upbeat and positive and confidently assumed that a solution is possible that includes continued economic growth (low carbon growth). Noticely absent was any mention of peak oil or any references to other reminders of the impossibility of infinite growth in a finite system. As a member of the UK House of Lords, he was also unsurprisingly positive about the role of national governments and international agreements (despite admitting that no precedent exists for an agreement of the scope and nature that he is advocating). He also seemed to be at least partially banking on technologies that remain as yet unsuccessful, making reference to carbon sequestration and nuclear fusion.

However, what I found of most interest for my own research were a couple of telling points during the question time with audience members after his talk. First, he was asked what would happen if no agreement is reached in Copenhagen, or the conference is inconclusive. His answer was over five minutes long but he never answered the question. He merely repeated how important it was that the conference not fail and pointed to various indications that might give hope of success. Second, the final question of the evening came from the lady chairing the session. She pointed out that he had spoken of some terrifying possibilities and that he had told us we ought to be scared, but that he had still come across as a cheerful person. She asked how he managed this. After first joking that it was due to his chemistry (natural, not illegal!), he went on to say that if we believed that it was impossible we would never even try. Optimism by itself may not be sufficient (since it may be deluded), but it is necessary. Amongst his final words were ones something like this:

"If we don't think we can do it, we may as well buy a hat [presumably due to the hotter climate?] and write a letter of apology to our grandchildren."

In these two responses I felt there was something missing (and granted that Lord Stern is a very smart man and the format was brief and fairly popular). There seemed to be nothing between success and total failure, no possibility that we might fail to solve climate change (or that some of these problems might lack solutions) and yet still respond well. I am not talking about mitigation or adaption, though these will be elements of any scenario since much damage has already been done. I am talking instead about the possibility of faithful "failure". This is not to say that action on climate change is unimportant, nor to foster any kind of defeatism. However, I do feel sceptical that we can (in the words of his new book's subtitle) manage climate change and create a new era of progress and prosperity. What if despite our best efforts at responding to climate change (and the host of other issues) we end up poorer and more fractured as a result of the damage already done? What if cushioning social decline is all we can legitimately hope for?

To put it in more personal terms, imagine someone dying of a terminal illness for which there is no known cure. The doctors may say that optimism is necessary but not sufficient, they may wish to try new things and seek breakthroughs, and these may all be good things. But the fact remains that it appears likely the patient will die. Faced with such a situation, it is tempting to think that there are only two options: success (a miracle cure) or failure (death). And it is tempting to think that the highest calling is to devote every resource to avoiding death. But might there be a way of dying, of facing one's own imminent end, that is faithful and "successful" in some deeper sense than spending every scrap of remaining energy on seeking to escape death a little longer?

Of course, the parallel is far from perfect, since a society is not a single organism with a lifespan that faces biological death. Such terms are metaphorical when used of societies, which transition from one level of complexity to another, rather than suddenly dying. But the point is similar: that perhaps there are situations where the desperate search for a solution that gambles everything on maintaining the status quo is a worse path than grieving loss, accepting change, caring for others and preparating for a very different future. I am not necessarily saying that we have reached that point, but if we had, how would we know? And if we had, would we be willing to admit it? Can our social identity survive the realisation that the foreseeable future might be all downhill?

Competing apocalyptic visions: an insight into my project

This recent exchange in The Guardian between Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot raises many of the issues I would like to deal with in my PhD research: what is a faithful Christian response to impending civilisational decline? What role might nightmarish apocalyptic visions play in Christian moral reasoning on these matters?

I am still trying to clarify the scope and focus of my main question, though these are some sub-themes within it. At the moment, I am playing with a descriptive subtitle along the lines of "Christian moral reasoning in the predicament of social decline". I will explain what I mean by "predicament" (and how it is different from a problem) in a future post.

Nations have no right to exist

...the right of national self-determination does not exist in the Bible. Before God nations have neither a right to exist nor a right to liberty. They have no assurance of perpetuity. On the contrary, the lesson of the Bible seems to be that nations are swept away like dead leaves and that occasionally, almost by accident, one might endure rather longer.

- Jacques Ellul, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man
(trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Eerdmans, 1972 [1966]), 27-28.

We have no divine guarantee that the present international order will not be swept away. Quite the contrary: autumn may have already begun.