John Michael Greer blogs as the Archdruid, The Archdruid Report. I find it interesting that his worldview is radically different from my Thomistic existentialist worldview, but my views align with his on a number of issues rather than aligning with those of the Catholic mainstream. I would argue this happens for a simple reason: like me, he tries to pay attention to reality and reality — as we know it in this mortal life — is best understood by way of modern empirical knowledge. In any case, I recommend his three most recent entries and maybe a browse through his archives.
- As Mr. Greer notes, history tells us that the work of building foundations for the next phase of a civilization doesn’t give immediate rewards in this life to those who lay the foundations for the future — see Religion and the Survival of Culture. Often those founders or re-founders don’t even know that they are such and sometimes, as in the case of the founders of Hinduism, their names aren’t even known.
This is disturbing within the context of modern culture. After all, our phase of western civilization is dedicated to a type of prosperity requiring a focus on the near future in which the agent will reap the profits Our best and brightest economists and political theorists seem to assume that this focus on tomorrow is sufficient for maintaining social and political and economic order. Our corporate laws would punish any executives who would have given up some return on capital in 2005 to plan for a future where movement of goods by diesel-fueled trucks becomes too expensive. In fact, our markets are organized in such a way that a company planning for the future might well have been driven out of business. Our political system also works to the advantage of those who promise more benefits from an already bankrupt Medicare system (seemingly beyond any conceivable rescue) and punishes those who speak of problems which are growing into crises which endanger the United States or its citizenry.
Mr. Greer speaks of those who have made and will make sacrifices unrewarded in this life because of a deeply held faith of some sort. There are examples of that sort from civilizational transitions within many traditions including Christianity and Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism. That faith leads to a new form for an ongoing religious tradition or to a completely new religion which can lead to new cultures or entire civilizations. On the other hand, existing institutions which suffer from the general civilizational or cultural decay will tend to use institutional means to address some symptoms in various ineffective ways. For example, American dioceses of the Catholic Church are trying to address their current problems of shrinkage by acting as if they are so many restaurant chains which have outgrown their markets. They ignore the real problem: their inability to teach their faith even to their own children. And so the diocesan bureaucracies are concentrating on making their increasingly ineffective and irrelevant selves into more efficient but still ineffective and irrelevant entities. They adopt the techniques of our businesses which aim at matching expenditures to anticipated revenues. Of course, that sort of silliness does keep the elites of our decaying institutions busy and out of the way of any possible reformers who are arising. The problem to be avoided would be the channeling of healthy, creative energies into institutional programs.
- In the following entry, see Saving Science, Mr. Greer asks if modern science will survive the transitions which will occur as we learn how to live without oil that can be cheaply extracted from the ground and also cheaply processed. The answer he proposes is: it’s not likely to survive in anything like its current form. I would agree and would note that our current ways of ‘doing science’ are much different from the ways in the era of Einstein’s explosion of creativity, let alone the era of Newton or that of Archimedes. To make a point, I’ll usefully oversimplify matters:
We may soon reach the point where vulnerable children once again die of lung diseases because of a loss of modern heating. It would be hard to imagine Western countries continuing to spend vast sums on observatories and particle-physics accelerators if this occurs. This is not a claim that our rulers are truly concerned with those children but rather a recognition that our shrinking middle-class continues to play a disproportionate role in our tax systems.
We may return to a situation where science is a field limited in its opportunities and most scientists will likely pay a price similar to that paid by those who live in religious communities under vows of obedience and individual poverty. In fact, Mr. Greer speculates that scientists may organize themselves into priesthoods of a sort. I might speculate that Benedictine monasteries might once again become storehouses of technological and cultural knowledge.
- Mr. Greer also has some words of wisdom on the matter of history — The Triumph of History . He plays off the “end of history” movement but gets to the real heart of the matter when he tells us:
[T]he collective imagination of the industrial world these days seems increasingly unable to imagine a future that isn’t either a rehash of the present or a sudden, cataclysmically driven lurch backward into the past.”
I call this the heart of the matter because it’s inertia and lack of imagination which have prevented aging civilizations from revitalizing themselves even when they had adequate resources to do so. We can’t see the future but we know it will be far different from the present and past, perhaps after passing through a phase of being a decayed version of the present age of man. The future will be different and creative. Risk-taking human beings will be the ones to shape it in its specifics.
These issues and many others are intertwined to make a complex and interesting mess. I think the best way I’ve seen for organizing a view of the trends in Western Civilization is a review of the decline in our literacy over the centuries of the Modern Age. Despite the reality of other forms of human intelligence, abstract intelligence seems necessary for our sort of complex civilization and this sort of intelligence develops by literary pathways. Our literacy has decayed to a level where most college graduates, and perhaps most college professors, can’t read truly demanding texts without some sort of guide organized according to what I would call ‘textbook reasoning’. Our effective abstract intelligence is too low to sustain a complex civilization.
I would recommend Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence in which he narrated the most recent 500 years of Western Civilization using that theme of decreasing literacy. In a prophetic addendum, he made a prediction somewhat similar to that of Mr. Greer: our civilization will decay into stupidity and poverty, disease and famine, and the revival will be initiated by small groups outside any mainstream, perhaps in the form of gatherings of self-educated men who have rediscovered the riches of the past and are struggling to learn anew how to read and think. Given the history of some revivals, that of the High Middle Ages and also that of the Renaissance, creativity may well take the form of misreadings of revered texts from the past and misunderstandings of ancient cultural and religious traditions. God has a sense of humor.
History teaches us this much: the core of any complex civilization will rot over time and any worthwhile future possibilities will be found outside of that core. It also teaches us that these periods of transition to a new phase of a civilization will take generations and the future can’t be seen until it arrives.