Brian Davey responds to yesterday’s excerpt:

“So, Eric Harris Braun doesn’t like the word “collapse” because “to call what’s happening now a “collapse” I think keeps us from stepping into the very “myriad opportunities it presents,” because it keeps us thinking in the old way. If instead we conceive ourselves as part of a living system, then how we conceive of what’s happening right now might be vastly different.”

Well, frankly I think this is making an awful of fuss about one word. I don’t think using this word stops me thinking about opportunities and I’ve never met anyone else whose thinking came grinding to a halt unable any longer of seeing the point of working for a more positive future.

Jared Diamond wrote a book called “Collapse” in order to help our society avoid one. On the other hand Joseph Tainter wrote “The Collapse of Complex Societies” and what he wrote makes plenty of sense to me. Sometimes things are as bad as they seem – but somehow things continue afterwards – some kind of life continues after collapses – or whatever word you want to use.

In the book “Panarchy. Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems” edited by Gunderson and Hollins, the word “release” is used for a phase in what they call “adaptive cycles” – where release is the release of resources from highly productive and interdependent systems that have lost their resilience because of their hyper interdependency – so that problems cascade through them and the system disintegrates. In this context the word “release” is meant to convey the idea that, as the big systems break down their resources are now available for new beginnings….

It’s great fun to make sweeping world historical generalisations but if we’re going to have a “Butterfly moment” as opposed to a “collapse moment” then we need, to continue with Eric’s metaphor about how caterpillars turn into Butterflys, more people functioning as “stem cells” in the social-economic and political “goo” after “peak everything”.

That means we need people who actually try to develop different forms of productive organisation – like common pool resources, local exchange systems and currencies, community farming etc – and develop them successfully as responses to the growing chaos “as the mainstream turns into goo” (to use Eric’s metaphor again). So we need project developers more than essay writers….

It also depends who you are how you describe what is happening. I dare say there are a few people in the USA, now living in cars and tents, who would think that their lives have “collapsed”. When US municipalities can no longer pay pensions I dare say that a number of pensioners in the USA will think that their world has collapsed too. I think it would actually help these people psychologically if there was a widespread acknowledgment that US society was breaking up, that they were involved in something bigger that needed big responses – and not deny it just because there is a facade of normality in Washington and in Wall Street – among the too big to fail, too big to tell the truth, too big to be accountable to the law institutions.

Above all I would like to insist that it is a time of great danger and great danger can go either way – into transformative lifeboat projects that become new starts for fulfilling lives and new opportunities….if and when people organise tangible and really helpful mutual aid and skill sharing that are really supportive – or it can lead to catastrophe…or indeed to both, depending where and who you are, and/or what stage in the process you are talking about….

Eric writes inspirational stuff about the accumulation of knowledge alongside great ignorance and oppression. Quite – but we can’t assume that the accumulated knowledge of humanity so far will see us through against the other side of what’s happening. There’s still huge danger and I dare say there will be many casualties who will need support….

Eric seems to be more on the optimistic side – partly because of the accumulation of science, knowledge and understanding by humanity over its history. For my part I think there’s a very common oversimplification about the way that societies accumulate more and more knowledge and understanding – what is less well appreciated is that, at the same time, societies and individuals forget and lose knowledge – the skill of mending or re- tayloring clothes, how to put a new sole or heel on shoes, the skill of growing and cooking local food, how to look after animals. Over and against this there is what sometimes feel to me to be a euphoric idea that society is somehow growing in its knowledge because people are accumulating a lot of skills to write inspirational tracts and are good at putting photos on Facebook.

As ecological economists Herman Daley and Joshua Farley point out:

“new knowledge often renders old knowledge obsolete…and when knowledge becomes obsolete the artifacts that embody that knowledge become obsolete as well. …As E J Mishan noted, technological knowledge often unrolls the carpet of increased choice before us by the foot, while simultaneously rolling it up behind us by the yard….. Furthermore new knowledge need not always reveal new possibilities for growth, it can bring serious harm and reveal new limitations. The new knowledge of the fire resisting properties of asbestos increased its usefulness, subsequent knowledge of its carcinogenic properties reduced its usefulness. New knowledge can cut both ways. Finally, and most obviously, knowledge has to be actively learned and taught every generation – it cannot be passively bequeathed like an accumulating stock portfolio. When society invests little in the transfer of knowledge to the next generation, some of it is lost, and its distribution often becomes more concentrated, contributing to the growing inequality in the distribution of income, as well as a general dumbing down in the future.

“It is a gross prejudice to think that the future will always know more than the past. Every generation is born totally ignorant, and just as we are always one failed harvest away from starvation, we are also always one failed generational transfer of knowledge away from darkest ignorance. Although it is true that today many people know many things that no one knew in the past, it is also true that large segments of the present generation are more ignorant than large segments of past generations. The level of policy in a democracy cannot rise above the average level of understanding of the population. In a democracy, the distribution of knowledge is as important as the distribution of wealth”

Joshua Farley and Herman E Daly Ecological Economics pp40-41

So, while it is true, that, at a great ecological cost that often goes unrecognised, computers and the internet can and do provide a wonderful means for the generational transfer of knowledge, I think that on balance we are probably NOT on course to a Butterfly metamorphosis but, if anything rather the reverse. The antibodies of the old order are currently doing a lot of damage to the possibilities for renewal. For example, in the USA what Daly and Farley term “the average level of understanding of the population” is moving in the direction of creationism and pre-Darwinian thought and the majority don’t believe climate change is caused by fossil fuels because of the PR work of the fossil fuel corporations added to collective psychological denial. So science is in retreat in favour of corporate lies. No wonder the powers that be are hysterical about wikileaks…..

So, in summary. (1) The use of the word ‘collapse’ is perfectly compatible with working for, and believing in, the possibility that one might make a difference for the better. ( I claim no more than that – let’s be less grandiose please!) (2) At the moment we are still in great danger and the forces of ignorance seem to me, to be gaining ground if anything. I say that not in order deliberately to cast gloom, but in order to stay grounded in the reality. There are some positive developments but it’s not looking good. (3) Instead of writing tracts on world historical generalisations can we try and stay on how we organise concrete and tangible projects and carry them forward please.”