Going ungently

I keep linking to Patrick Deneen's blog because I'm fascinated by the Georgetown political theory professor's musings on what peak oil theory could mean to American civilization. Here's his latest. Deneen quotes our own regular commentator, M_David, who predicts that we'll face a long, slow glide path into a new, post-petroleum world, and that we will have the time to adjust. Deneen thinks that unlikely, because the way we have organized our lives makes a graceful transition to a more frugal way of living very difficult. He discusses how liberal democracy is premised on the idea of continuous economic growth to ameliorate inequalities. Should liberal democracy confront a period of permanent economic decline, especially among a population that has never known serious material deprivation or a radical shrinkage of prospects for mobility, economic or otherwise ... well, you can imagine the possibilities. Deneen:

People will not gladly or easily accept sure knowledge of a future of decrease. The idea that we will gradually and easily slip into a "better future" in which the stock market continuously loses value; in which our houses grow less valuable year after year; in which our purchasing power, via our dollar, buys less every passing day; in which our children can expect to make less money, to have a "less successful" future than previous generations; in which we will have to adjust our expectations to accept work of a more manual nature, for less money, and with less leisure - that we will go gladly into that "better life" without a tumultuous political upheaval and a vicious fight over the valuable scraps that remain is implausible if not pure fantasy and dangerous wishful thinking.

At the Berry conference, I gave a speech in which I said that conservatives would do well to refocus the main thrust of our efforts away from conventional party politics and instead start to build the kinds of lives, individual and communal, that would be better able to withstand the dire conditions that may be coming. I think we should do that first and foremost because it's in accordance with a more virtuous and sane way of living. But I also believe, secondarily, that it just makes sense, given the Great Unraveling that may now be underway.

I know that I personally have a lot to do in this regard. I am a man who works not with his back and his hands, but with his mind. I don't know how to grow anything, clean meat that I have killed with my own hands, or fix anything. I have never needed those skills. My dad has them, because the survival of his family during the Depression and its aftermath required acquiring them. He told me throughout my childhood that I should learn them, because you never know when times might get hard again. I didn't listen. Why should I have listened? Hard times were unimaginable. My children aren't learning these skills either. We are making a bet, people who live like I do, that it's all going to last forever in America.

As Deneen points out, there are signs that the wealthy are putting their money on an alternate future. A major American investor announced yesterday that he's converting his holdings out of US dollars into the Chinese yuan, saying that the dollar is losing its appeal as the world's safe, reserve currency. And none other than Dick Cheney is putting his money on a declining economic future for the US, even putting millions of his investments in European assets, betting on a steadily weakening dollar. Canaries in the coal mine?