"Ye shall be as gods..."

I've been hearing so much about Wendell Berry's economics essay in the May issue of Harpers that I went out and bought a copy on Sunday (the piece is not available online yet). It was worth the cost of the magazine. It's nothing here that Berry hasn't said a thousand times before, but there is something gripping about reading it in a time when the events long prophesied by Berry -- basically, the collapse of our unsustainable, unnatural economic and social structure -- appear to be beginning.

Berry begins by saying:

The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. ... The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

Here's what I found to be the most striking passage -- Berry's prophetic (in the Biblical sense) accusation that we have arrogated to ourselves god-like powers, and that we are going to pay dearly for our hubris (this, in a nutshell, is the essence of Berry's message over his career):

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. [Emphasis mine -- RD] ...Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define Himself: "I am that I am."

... In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: all are entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable -- a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer. ...[T]his credo of limitlessness clearly implies a principled wish not only for limitless possessions but also for limitless knowledge, limitless science, limitless technology, and limitless progress.

But Berry does not see the advent of this new age of limits as a disaster. Rather, he sees it as returning us to our true nature: as creatures made to live within natural limits. Circumstances will force us to embrace an older definition of freedom and selfhood, says Berry: not freedom as self-discovery in the absence of restraint, but as self-discovery within a community, defined by your relationships to your traditions and to each other.

We can only know ourselves as humans by living within limits. Otherwise, we become monsters. Recall Philip Rieff's insight: either live within limits, or the evil within you, within each of us, turns us into terrorists.

Anyway, Patrick Deneen, who believes that we are indeed living in a world that is going to have to live within natural limits, writes that our educational system (he teaches at Georgetown, remember) is not preparing young people for the world that is coming into being:

Every day, in one way or another, the leaders of my educational institution - like that of many others - tell us that we are driven by the imperative to prepare our students for a world of globalized commerce, a world in which they will need the skills of a vagabond or an itinerant vandal. In the throes of a dogma, they are unable to see the evidence before their eyes that suggests that their belief in historical inevitability may be at least slightly out of touch.

If so, we are preparing our students for a future that has no future. In light of these pieces of "evidence seen" which militate against our curious and touching faith in a globalized future, it is worth revisiting an uncharacteristic graduation speech that was delivered about a year ago at this time. In his address at Bellarmine University [Which you can watch by following this link -- RD.], Wendell Berry asked the graduates whether they were prepared for a very different future than the one so many of our elites believe to be awaiting us. No doubt, he suggests, they have been sold a certain bill of goods (and ones at a very high price): "You will be told that you and your community are now ruled by a global corporate empire, to which all the earth is a 'third world,' against which you have no power of resistance or self-determination, and within which you have no vocational choice except a technical and servile job which will give you a small share of the plunder. You will be told also – ignoring our permanent dependence on food, clothing, and shelter – that you live in a “knowledge-based economy,” which in fact is deeply prejudiced against all knowledge that does not produce the quickest possible return on investment....

Then he asks, what about a real education for real times? "What more than you have so far learned will you need to know in order to live at home? (I don’t mean “home” as a house for sale.) If you decide, or if you are required by circumstances, to live all your life in one place, what will you need to know about it and about yourself? At present our economy and society are founded on the assumption that energy will always be unlimited and cheap; but what will you have to learn to live in a world in which energy is limited and expensive? What will you have to know – and know how to do – when your community can no longer be supplied by cheap transportation? ...

Reading Patrick's item, and Berry's speech, last night after I got in from Louisiana made me reflect on how ill-prepared I am for a world of serious and permanent energy and food shortages -- Kunstler's "World Made By Hand," in other words. My mom and dad, who live in the countryside north of Baton Rouge, were telling me how high their bills for butane and diesel have been. Diesel is necessary to run the tractor that keeps the pasture mowed. And gas prices are eating them alive, because you have to drive six miles to town to take the kids to school, to buy groceries, and so forth, and 20 miles or so to Wal-Mart to buy everything else.

Still, if times got hard, they'd be in a lot better shape than us city dwellers. The land is fertile and lush, and they could grow what they needed. My brother in law, when he hunted more, usually bagged a deer on my dad's land, which ended up as roasts in the deep freeze that kept the family fed. My dad has a pond stocked with bass and bream. If the weather gets unbearably hot -- which it does in this part of the country -- all they have to do is open the windows and turn on fans. Far from a perfect solution, but me, I can't open the windows of my old house (though it was made for pre-a/c weather) because they've been painted closed to prevent thieves from breaking in. I could have them opened, and put screens up, but there's no way I'd leave the windows open at night. You'd have to be crazy to do that. How about you readers -- how many of you live in a place where you could sleep easy at night, even though the windows of your house were all wide open to let in the breeze?

Little things like that I think about.

I was watching my dad yesterday afternoon working in his garden patch -- a small one this year, unlike years past, when he was stronger and younger, and would put in a big garden. Dad's in his seventies, and his health is not great. More and more, I wonder about all the practical knowledge of how to live in the country -- and not only the country, but the patch of earth in south Louisiana where I was born and raised -- that will be lost when he passes on. He was the first in his family to go to college, and did a lot with his degree, but the knowledge he acquired at the university has not, in the end, been the most important thing to sustaining the life he's lived. I have far more knowledge of the world, as we usually think of it, than my father does, but my knowledge is the kind of knowledge that's most useful in an advanced economy. I have almost none of the practical, agrarian knowledge that my father does, because he learned his growing up rurally in the Depression, and the years that followed. Point is, he's done okay for himself in our current economy, but if times got hard again, a man (or a woman) with his knowledge of how to grow, how to hunt, how to raise farm animals, and how to fix the tools you need to sustain a farm, will be fine.

And somebody like me, who didn't care to learn these things when he tried to teach them to me? These days, I'm feeling like an investor who is just discovering how badly exposed his portfolio is to risk.

It's kind of a running joke on this blog that my sensibility tends to be apocalyptic, always waiting for what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "the Black Swan" -- that enormously consequential big event that arrives out of nowhere and drastically alters the way we live. But what if the end of cheap energy is not a sudden Black Swan, but an entirely predictable, slow-motion Black Swan (which would not make it a Black Swan, strictly speaking, but indulge me here...). Nobody can see a Black Swan coming, though as Taleb points out, after it arrives, we look back at all the signs and say, "Of course, it was obvious!"

Peak Oil might be a Black Swan, but if so, it's not a Black Swan like 9/11 was. It's one we can see flying in over the horizon. If you don't necessarily believe in orthodox Peak Oil theory, it is at least undeniable that the rise of China and India is going to put -- is now putting -- global oil supplies under unprecedented stress. If you read nothing else today, read this from the NYT on Sunday. Excerpt:

Producers are struggling to pump as much as they can to quench the thirst not only of the developed world, but fast-growing developing nations like China and India, the two most populous countries. To many experts, the steadily rising price underscored longer-term fears about the future of a system that has supplied cheap oil for more than a century.

“This is the market signaling there is a problem,” said Jan Stuart, global oil economist at UBS, “that there is a growing difficulty to meet demand with new supplies.”

Today’s tensions are only likely to get worse in coming years. Consider a few numbers: The planet’s population is expected to grow by 50 percent to nine billion by sometime in the middle of the century. The number of cars and trucks is projected to double in 30 years— to more than two billion — as developing nations rapidly modernize. And twice as many passenger jetliners, more than 36,000, will in all likelihood be crisscrossing the skies in 20 years.

All of that will require a lot more oil — enough that global oil consumption will jump by some 35 percent by the year 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, a leading global energy forecaster for the United States and other developed nations. For producers it will mean somehow finding and pumping an additional 11 billion barrels of oil every year.

And that’s only 22 years away, a heartbeat for the petroleum industry, where the pace of finding and tapping new supplies is measured in decades.

I would like to know, then, how the era of cheap oil is not over, given these numbers, given these realities.

Here's the thing: we all suffer from what Taleb identifies as the "confirmation bias" and the "narrative bias." In short, we seem geared toward believing that things will only get better, and that we will overcome any limitation on our desires, because that's been the narrative of our culture in modernity. And we are conditioned to have that belief confirmed, because that has been our recent experience (Taleb writes of the turkey who believes on the day before Thanksgiving that life is going to keep going well for him, because the previous thousand days have all been pretty great).

And you know what, maybe we will pull out of this mess. Maybe science will pull a rabbit out of a hat. Taleb also writes about a fictional military officer who spends his whole life living in a fort on the frontier, waiting for the Huns to attack. They never do, and he dies in solitude, having wasted all the opportunities he had to thrive and enjoy his life. He had tunneled in to his belief that a particular Black Swan was probable, and could not give up that illusion.

I think the far more dangerous illusion we face today is believing that This Too Shall Pass without our having to make major changes in the way we live, individually and collectively. Here is Taleb's general advice:

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future -- but this is not necessarily bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitatinos. It just takes guts. ...

Invest in preparedness, not in prediction. ... The probability of very rare events are not computable; the effect of an event on us is considerably easier to ascertain. ...We can have a clear idea of the consequences of an event, even if we do not know how likely it is to occur. I don't know the odds of an earthquake, but I can imagine how San Francisco might be affected by one. This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.

The question I'm thinking about right now is at what point do I -- and you -- act on what we're seeing with the energy situation? At what point do we accept that the world is moving into a different and more difficult stage, and take actions to prepare ourselves and our families for that eventuality? I'm not talking about heading for the hills and awaiting the Apocalypse. I'm talking about sensible preparation, even to the point of relocating to a place that will be more livable -- socially, agriculturally and otherwise -- in a period of hardship caused by the end of cheap energy.

At what point to you conclude that the way we're living now is not going to be sustainable in the future that's rapidly coming upon us, and that it's time to make prudent, though perhaps somewhat radical, changes, given the consequences of failing to prepare for the economic end of the Modern era?

At what point do you -- do any of us -- accept that we can't keep living like we do, because the old order will not survive the shocks to come? And to really accept that, as opposed to endlessly contemplating it on blogs and in bar conversation, is to act on it. All of which is a roundabout way of asking the question: at what point do you yourself become a new, and doubtless very different, Benedictine?

"A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict." -- Alisdair MacIntyre, "After Virtue"