The upside of economic apocalypse

Another minor difference between 1932 and now: 100 million Americans versus 300 million.

So, let's see if I've got this straight; as long as your family gets health care, but if mine dies, it would be, like, really, really tragic and you'd care, if you knew, right?

Sounds like Pol Pot on a world stage, really.

It doesn’t take an economic collapse to turn us around. What it takes is a wholesale change in the control of education and information. Without this change there won’t be any reflowering of traditional culture, which is the very object of assault by the information industry.

Kunstler also gets it wrong when he says, “It took a world war to get all that stuff humming cooperatively again…”. The war did lift the US from economic depression, but that’s not what it took. It could have been done with a reversal of the economic charlatanry that ruled the day. But that didn’t happen because the information industry of the day was too busy praising FDR as a great man of action, the man with the solution for all the problems.

Just as will happen during the next economic collapse, where the information industry will be blaming traditional culture and praising the “Great Inspiring Leader”.

If Obama has anything, he has great timing.

My message is a little more religious than political, as the messages so far seem to be. My Lenten read is Thomas Merton's The New Man. In the chapter on Image and Likeness, he talks about what our ideal actions and work should be in order to retain our image and likeness to God. Perhaps if we had adhered to these principles, such an economic decline might not be a potential reality. If such a decline does happen, perhaps adherence to these principles will be the only thing that will get us through. Hopefully I'm not breaking any copyright laws by quoting the following: "This theory conceives man as oriented towards an active life in the world. He is a 'doer,' a 'maker,' who praises God with the work of his hands and of his intelligence. And in the line of this thought, original sin would be a perversion of man's active instincts, a turning of man's creativity away from God so that he produces and creates not the society and temple which God's own creation demands as its fulfillment, but a temple of man's own power. The world is then exploited for the glory of man, not for the glory of God. Man's power becomes an end in itself. Things are not merely used, they are wasted, destroyed. Men are no longer workers and 'creators' but tools of production, instruments of profit. The ultimate extreme of this process of degeneration is reached when all man's powers are directed to spoilage, rapine and destruction, and when his society is geared not only against God, but against the most fundamental natural interests of man himself."
I think the reason so many people have connected to the "Crunchy Con" book and ideals (myself included) is that we see the road we have been and continue to travel in society takes us away from our best selves and thinks only of profit and material gain, stealing what is most fundamental and beautiful about us as people. We are no longer integrated wholes, but machines on the assembly line of mass production and materialism. All you have to do is talk to people who are part of "The Greatest Generation," who lived through the Depression and World War II, to hear how the difficulties of those eras shaped them as individuals and a collective whole. They saw a greater meaning and a greater good. Nowadays all we see are "goods." Which generation actually wound up with more?

People like Trifkovic annoy me; those who believe that the benefits of civilizational collapse could possibly outweigh the costs, IMHO, probably have no conception of what such a collapse would entail. Nasty, brutish, & short indeed.

As for families & fertility: The reemergence of families, in the context of a weak state, could easily degenerate into nepotism & tribalism. Consider also that children might reemerge as "economic assets" via child labor, or even sale into slavery (when a family has too many mouths to feed). Civilizations have the morality & ethics that they can afford, after all, and in a world of privation, many people probably wouldn't be able to afford very much.

Kunstler's "Long Emergency" strikes me as overly pessimistic. Oil is hardly a sine qua non of modern civilization; _energy_ is. And there's still plenty of energy out there (e.g., nuclear, wind, solar - heck, even trash could contribute), as well as plenty of ways to conserve what we already have (e.g., insulation, cogeneration, PHEV's) even without dramatic lifestyle changes (e.g., relocalization).

As is sometimes the case, passionate expression can obscure a hard and fast truth. The comparison to Katrina is instructive.

Our society will not change without a crisis.

That has always been the bottom line. It "took" Pearl Harbor to break US isolationism. It "took" a market crashing down from the foundation of greed, coupled with the misery so many felt, to set up the changes needed to remedy those ills. WWII, Scott, was indeed the catalyst, and valid speculation can be had if there had not been such a handy, unifying force for an FDR to rally the people around.

With much love and respect to my devout Christian fellows reading this, I am truly sorry to say that changing the hearts and minds of the people is not within your grasp. They need to be hurt first, they need something that makes them afraid. Then, and only then, will you find some of them finding their way to your doorstep.

And Rod: there will be civil war, at the least, right on the heals of a collapse envisioned by Trifkovic.

I will join anyone's prayer to the god of their choice that I am wrong about all of it. Unfortunately, I see no other reasonable outcome.

Wouldn't people so alienated from contemporary society that they long for a global meltdown be happier in mountain redoubts that don't have internet access?

...ham-fisted Federal policies (under both Hoover and Roosevelt) that managed to extend it for a decade.

Thanks, Simon. People tend to forget (me) or be ignorant of the fact that plenty of mistakes were made before the turnaround started.

re a civil war: my expectation is a general return to territorial grabs and warlord/feudal structures, with the poor sods in law enforcement either running for their lives or knowingly committing suicide trying to maintain law and order.

Fiction can be instructive when it is firmly based in human nature. I commend to all, as examples, Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle, The Postman by David Brin (avoid the movie), and Friday by Robert A. Heinlein. Better than any of those, though much further removed from contemporary contexts because of a setting in a far future, are The Winter of the World by Poul Anderson and The Masters of Solitude by Marvin Kaye AND Parke Godwin.

Kunstler was an aspiring actor, once upon a time, and he's still a drama queen.

Can't there be any difficult problems that have real solutions? Any quandaries that simply require attention and money to fix? Nope, not in Kunstelr's book. To him, every problem is the first step toward Apocalypse and Armageddon.

Y2K didn't turn out to be the nightmare he predicted (and clearly longs for), but he's incapable of embarrassment, so he won't admit his foolishness and go away away quietly. He'll keep right on finding new reasons to insist everything is going straight to Hell because nobody's listening to him.

A recession will almost certainly come, sooner or later. Maybe even
a deep, prolonged one. But that's not enough to suit Kunstler. He
WANTS something worse than the Great Depression. He WANTS a
collapse of society, because he hates his fellow and thinks we
deserve some kind of horrible punishment for our supposed sins.

But with luck, we'll ride out the next recession as we always have before. And that will irritate him no end!

Well ... at least Blackwater will be hiring.

More likely the capital of one of the first feudal states.

Yeah, the fall of Rome really led to a lot of civilizational reinvigorization. You just had to wait a few hundreds of years.

Re family fertility, things would *really* have to get bad before children were an asset again. In pre-industrialized agriculture, children were an asset, true. But once you move beyond that, which we did in this country in the last half of the 19th Century, children are at best a sort of long-term benefit as a retirement policy. The immediate benefit is nil and the costs are huge. That's why birthrates are dropping all around the world, even in Third World countries.

What's offensive about this upside-of-the-economic-apocalypse vision is that it's such a thin disguise for Envy, the vice (or sin) of being resentful of the good fortune of others and wishing them ill.

"Society" is an abstraction. Actual human beings are reality. None of us would want the particular human beings we know as persons to suffer sudden unemployment, loss of their homes, early death due to lack of medical treatment, etc. But somehow it's possible for a certain kind of mind to imagine that those horrible things might be good for "society."

Assuming, of course, that the particular people who fall victim to those horrors won't be our loved ones. And especially if most of the victims belong to some demographic group outside our usual circle of acquaintances (McMansion-dwellers, ethnic minorities, white people, gays, Christians, Jews, the rich, the poor, lawyers, teachers, investment bankers, politicians, big families, small families, people with no kids, people who buy huge flat screen TVs at Walmart, yuppies who spend a fortune at Whole Foods, etc., etc. -- fill in the name of whichever groups we personally have little experience with, and then relish the fact that in the coming Disaster they're going to have to shape up or pay the price for their behavior).

Welcoming the Economic Apocalypse is all about Envy. Any "upside" to it will be a long time in coming, and far outweighed by the damage done to real, live human beings. You might as well ponder the potential social improvements available from famine, plague or nuclear war. The moral calculus is the same.

Echoes the blood fantasies of Second Amendment militia-type absolutists who want to go down guns blazing when the neo-Nazi anti-Christ stormtroopers complete their inevitable conquest of the world.

Just Some Guy:

First, just to clarify, my text you quoted was a follow-up comment, and not intended to be a stand-alone context. That said, your question is welcome.

My answer, at the risk of cynical glibness: human history. I don't intend my cynicism to be a sweeping generlization, since I also expect variations on the theme and (see Elizabeth from Minnesota's posts) enclaves of sanity. But judging only from recent history, I sadly do not expect to be far off the mark.

No, Pearl Harbor was brought about by US neo-colonial meddling in China, propping up "our" dictator over rival's dictators.

Uh, what about Japanese territorial ambitions in Asia? Yes, we had interests in the Philippines from the Spanish-American war, and of course we forcibly opened China to trade in the previous century. Those were hardly the reasons Japan attacked us. They wanted us out of the West Pacific so they could conquer Asia for energy resources.

Regarding a second American civil war: I fail to see where the fault lines are deep enough in our society are for such a thing. Watching Jericho lately has made me think of this topic more (in the series, the US fractures into 3 countries after a nuclear attack).

The Depression, WWII, Federalism, and the economic boom afterward, wiped away most (not all) of the divisions over state's rights - we just don't hear talk of that much anymore, and certainly none discuss secession outside of white supremacist groups. Ethnic and class divisions do exist - and are even deepening, especially incomes - but I just don't see them being strong enough to be unleashed after some cataclysm. Our divisions are scattered across our territory & cities, not lumped together as in 1861.

However, a casual glance at prewar Iraq or Kenya in recent weeks might give one pause to this position. I just don't see strong tribalism (as in these examples) extant in our country right now.

Jillian - AFAIK, the term "Cold War" is generally understood as referring, not an internationalist strategy on the part of the United States, but rather to the period of heightened international tensions & geopolitical competition (occasionally rising to the level of armed conflict) between the US & USSR, from ~1945 to 1991. Arguably it ended when the Berlin Wall fell in '89; certainly it ended when the Soviet Union fell.

Insofar as current American grand strategy continues to espouse entanging alliances with, and interventions in the territorial disputes of, the various Eurasian powers, I suppose it bears some resemblance to Cold-War-era containment. But it's a stretch, I think, to conclude that such continuities mean the "Cold War" is still going on in any meaningful way.

Given my druthers, when it became clear that the USSR was history, we would've brought the military home, and ceased the aforementioned alliances & interventions.

Osvaldo Mandias: Re family fertility, things would *really* have to get bad before children were an asset again. In pre-industrialized agriculture, children were an asset, true. But once you move beyond that, which we did in this country in the last half of the 19th Century, children are at best a sort of long-term benefit as a retirement policy. The immediate benefit is nil and the costs are huge. That's why birthrates are dropping all around the world, even in Third World countries.

Like he said.

Birth rates started dropping in the West in spots in the 18th century, and by the 20th people in all strata had powerful economic motivations to limit family size. Inheritance laws, the desire to conserve estates, class climbing, etc. all contributed to smaller family sizes. One striking difference in the 19th century was that as the infant mortality rate fell (relatively speaking), and people had greater assurance that children had at least a fighting chance of living, people became extremely concerned with the fewer children they had.

Yes, there were still big families - but overall, fertility rates over the past 200 years have been slowly but surely dropping not only in the West, but worldwide. And a main reason: it has been less and less necessary to replace a couple with two children if there's a lower infant mortality rate.

In the over-idealized past (or the coming barbarism for which the writer longs), people might have had to have 8-10 children to have 2 live to maturity. He may be longing for that, but virtually no one else is.

I haven't read the comments, so please excuse me if this point has been made or I'm derailing a conversation.

I think that those of us who have had it reasonably cushy are probably waaaaaaaay to blase about the spiritual, psychological and emotional damage which will be done if everything falls apart. The problem is precisely that it is unlikely to be done in a way which allows us to make reasonable adjustments to a lesser standard of living. Many of us literally cannot move from our homes to something more modest because of a lack of financial means to come up with deposits, downpayments, etc. not to mention the challenges of getting out of leases and mortgages. So a lot of families will face homelessness if the bottom falls out radically and quickly. People will not have the money to pay for repairs in the cars they need to get to and from work - many of them are next to impossible to repair in the garage. At which point, what does a family do? Abandon their home and hitch hike into the city so they won't need a car? I mean really, we should not think that an economic fall out will mean we can't afford DVDs and cable anymore.

And what is alarming about this to me, is that there will be a few who find out what's important in life and come out OK. But for most people, not even having food, shelter and transportation will be very damaging spiritually. Think about all the unanswered prayers in the depression. Think about all the dead babies in African famines whose mothers prayed and begged God's mercy as they wasted away. What sort of relationship do you suppose people who have been through these things have with God?

My husband is without a job for the 3rd time in 2 1/2 years and we are literally looking at being put out into the street. We were up on our bills prior to him losing his job almost 2 months ago, so we still have phone, electric and internet. But that will only go on for so long. Our car is a death trap in need of repairs and is only taken out for interviews as my husband and I both look for jobs. We went through this for 6 months last year, so we have no reserves to cope. And you know what has been the hardest thing about it? Keeping my faith. I have a strong, very well tested faith life and this is hardly the worst thing we've been through, but I'm finally hitting the wall. We all have our limits. I'm just counting on God picking up the slack where my faith gives out. And I know that if I have this struggle after spending 20 years putting my faith at the very center of my life through thick and thin, it will be much, much worse for people who don't have any foundation at all.

A financial breakdown will not be the savior of our souls that some like to imagine. It will destroy people - particularly spiritually. IMO, we need to pray fervently that God spares us from the trauma of utter financial destruction. There is no panacea for what ails us. It will take hard work on our part to be more deliberate in our choices so that they reflect our value system without being crushed by disaster. Then we need traditionalists to take up the role of the "creative minority" Pope Benedict spoke about a while back and work to influence others to follow this lead. There is no glory in living in more traditional ways because we have no choice. It is when we can turn from the right ways and take the easy path laid out by the culture that taking up the traditional ways actually count for something, spiritually speaking. IMO, we ought to also be praying day and night that the sort of disaster these people seem to almost long for does not come to us. It would be a triumph for hell, not a path to heaven.

>>>It destroyed the faith in Europe, and shattered European civilization, probably forever.

True Rod. In the 2nd decade of the 20th century European civilization took a gun, pointed it to its head, and pulled the trigger.

But if and when (probably when) this calmity comes to our land I think thoughtful people will form their communities and many WILL contribute as much as possible without much help from government. These communities can form around Church and village, like it existed several centuries ago. People will need this to provide services and actual physical security.

The mass of the baby boomers can be in volunteer or semi-volunteer services and keep the economic pressure off the younger generation. Baby boomers like myself should try to do as much for ourselves as a group as we can, and not try to demand too much from the younger ones.

I suspect we could see the re-emergence of the urban Church parish, either Catholic, Evangelical, or mega-church.

rebeccat -

My thoughts and wishes are with you. My husband has only worked for 4 months of the last 15, and not for lack of trying. While our situation is not as dire as you describe, I well remember his two years of unemployment during the recession in the early 90s, when our child was a preschooler.

The anxiety and fear of a parent facing financial ruin is devastating, and anyone who celebrates economic collapse has some serious soul-searching to do.

Blessings,

elizabeth