Perennials

This blog, says the masthead, has set its face against 

 “offering comments on current affairs. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to offer musings about our social endeavours. So old posts are as good as new!” 

But these are “Manichean” days – when people expect you to favour one of two sides; and, indeed, to nail your colours to the mast. And this I refuse to do – since I belong to the generation which grew up on Bertrand Russell - whose “Sceptical Essays” opens with an essay on “The Value of Scepticism” which puts in shade a lot of current discussions about “fake news”. And it was written almost a hundred years ago……. 

Although I was very active politically for some 25 years, my values were mainstream and I readily own up to being a bit of a “mugwump” who sees several sides to any story - and is open to new ideas. Just a few weeks ago, I found myself quoting this Russian proverb – 

“Don’t fear your friends - because they can only betray you.

Don’t fear your enemies – because they can only destroy you

But fear the indifferent – because it’s they who allow your friends to betray you and your enemies to destroy you” 

But under no circumstance should we confuse the “indifferent” with the sceptical!!

-      The indifferent are simply those who don’t care - they shrug their shoulders and “pass by on the other side”.

-      The sceptics, on the other hand, care deeply – they are passionate searchers after truth and, like Voltaire, will defend your right to your hallenge to what JK Galbraith called “the conventional wisdom” 

I would like to think my posts are as much “perennial” as open-minded and sceptical. Just click a title to access a post! 

 The 2020 posts - continued

Post title	What sparked it off	Its basic message
Explaining the blog’s title	Realising that I had never given a proper explanation of the changes in the blog’s name	Quite an important personal statement about the importance of trespassing – and how long I’ve felt this
No Man’s Land	This title was too warlike	why straddling boundaries gives insights
Should I buy this book?	Applying the test I have developed for non-fiction books to a book which caught my eye.	Authors and publishers really do need to understand we are fed up with the flood of books they inflict on us
In praise of the Outsider	Wondering if straddling different worlds, however uncomfortable, doesn’t help challenge groupthink	There are some very-well written books out there about the operation of our economic system – but you have to know how to find them
We are all Pirates now!	Updating my list of journals worth reading	Ditto for journals
Writing Again	Starting with a great find from 1983 about how to write well and a 1944 book on the same topic	I confess I have a hidden folder on the art of writing
Does being an outsider help original writing?	Trying to pursue this hypothesis	It helps open one’s eyes – but then sheer discipline needed
How to write well	Summary of a marvellous essay from a man who changed into a woman a couple of decades later -	Imagine a reader – ensure paras have points – check each word – reread, reread, tighten – be concrete and plain
Reading Tips on better writing	Gathering the best references in one place	Practice, practice – and use appropriate tools like this table
Breakdown and Crises	The first of 7 well-written books dealing with a sense of humanity at the crossroads	David Runciman’s book is a stunning example of good writing
Gods and the rest of us superfluous people	Harari’s “Homo Deus – a history of tomorrow”	He may be too much the techno-optimist
Links I Liked	Starting with Coronavirus, then painting and ending with a couple of new series	As always some great hyperlinks
Facing Extinction?	A post from a survivalist	The apocalypticists may have a point!
Coronavirus - who do we believe?	The urge to select and disseminate the clearest	The most helpful advice is not from government sources
Links I Liked	A model book review; Adam Curtis; survivalist blogs	The need for straight talking
Voice in the wilderness	Discovering a German pulmonological/.political sceptic	The importance of scepticism and peripheral vision
Music from my travels	Rediscovering CDs	I need to honour tonality more than textuality
Links which appealed in Ploiesti	Appalling TV programme selection; intellectual history; accounts of lockdowns	At times such as these we need sensitivity and honesty
Thought for the Day	A good quote from William Davies	This could be a paradigm change
On Perspective	About how mundane our prior passions now look	Useful to look back and see how we were dealing with the pandemic in its early stages

 Bach Cello Concertos - I'm sure Radio Muzical said the Cello Concerto I heard an hour or so ago was the "Seventh" - but there are apparently only 6 all of which you can view here

The 2020 posts …..so far

The blog marked its 1,500^th post at the beginning of the month – over eleven years. That’s almost 3 posts a week. To celebrate I’ve uploaded the posts for 2020 (86 so far) into a little E-book of some 200 pages which you can find here

I realise this may be a bit daunting for you – so here is the first instalment of a little series I’m offering to entice you into the riches….. I use that word only half-mockingly since the key feature this blog offers is the depth of the hyperlinks it offers into articles and books on important subjects…. It takes the form of one of the tables which have become one of the blog’s distinguishing features – with

-      the first column being the title of a post - to access, just click

-      the second column, trying to identify the event which was the catalyst to the post

-      the final column ,the basic message I would like to think the post should leave with the reader  

The E-book itself starts with an explanation first of the benefits blogging offers; then of why I, in particular, continue to find it a useful self-discipline for almost every morning; and finally why, for the past year, the blog operates with this particular title….. 

The Posts so Far in 2020…..

Title	What sparked it off	The “takeaway” or basic message
To whom it may concern - the 2019 posts	Pride in my posts of the previous year	Tables have become an important self-discipline
Poetry? Maybe	An Adrian Mitchell poem	“Most people ignore most poetry - Because - Most poetry ignores most people”
The Beast destroying the World	Discovering that posts about capitalism were the 2019 posts‘ second favourite topic	Most interesting narratives are from Collier, Hirschmann, Mander, Varoufakis
The Beast – part II	And that few economists could properly explain the global financial crash	My “Dispatches to the Next Generation” identifies more than 200 key books and then whittles that down to 50 or so key texts
Is public administration really all that sexy?	exploring why my fixation about this issue is actually increasing	Events in 2020 have demonstrated how much we have neglected the importance of “the state” in the past 30 years
57 Varieties of Capitalism	The matrix that resulted from an  “ideological triangulation” of a dozen academic disciplines	We need to be more aware of the ideological lens authors are using (often without their own appreciation)
Postmodernism – what is it and does it have a future?	The further thoughts that led me into	It’s been in the air most of us still alive have breathed; we don’t really think about it – nor care…..
My Best Reads of 2019	A useful January exercise	We like to feel, flick and smell the pages of real books
The perils of leaving economics to experts	A great little book called “The Econocracy” with this warning as a sub-title	Economics is a religion – and needs more pluralism and sceptics
The end of a doomed relationship	The leaving of the EU on Jan 31st – Brexit being this blog’s most frequent topic during 2019	To my horror I find that a “Daily Telegraph” article has read my thoughts
Why the British Masochists did what they did	A Dutch friend’s farewell letter	I didn’t do justice to the LEXIT arguments
Does the EU still warrant the support of progressives?	An episode of “The Crown” takes me back to the 1960s and suspicions about a British PM being a Moscow mole	The continuing post-mortem on the British suicide mission
Neutralising Democracy	A superb satire on the british system	Anthony Jay put it all so well in 1989
In Case You Missed it	Frustration with Dropbox	See the E-books listed in the top-right corner of the blog
Links I liked	many significant hyperlinks never see the light of day	I share my morning routines

 

Whatever Happened to “Peak Oil”?

It was almost 50 years ago we first heard the notion of there being “Limits to Growth” and the idea of oil supply – the basic source of modern civilisation – reaching a peak was developed by a geophysicist a decade earlier.

It was, however, Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse – the soviet experience and American prospects and J Michael Greer’s The Long Descent – a user’s guide to the end of the industrial age” (both 2008) which first made me aware of the dramatic changes we would need to make in our life styles - if these predictions proved true. These, of course, were the days when the reality of global warming had not really struck home – although there had been no shortage of warning voices in earlier years eg Bill McKibben whose “The End of Nature” was published in 1989.                 

The rise and fall of civilisations had, of course, been a popular theme at both the beginning and the middle of the 20^th Century in the writings of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee but, by the 1960s, we had become so enthralled with the notion of technical progress that such writing was seen as “old wives’ tales”. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987) may have been a warning shot but, coming a mere 2 years before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, served only to boost the celebrationism of the time.  And Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) was too narrowly conceived – with this critical review lambasting it,

Jared Diamond tried to jolt us back to our senses with his “Collapse – how societies choose to fail or succeed” (2005) - but it took the global financial crash of 2008 to make us begin to question our direction with any seriousness.

Right-wing historian Niall Fergusson’s 2010 article in “Foreign Affairs” reflects that new mood of sober realism.

And it was that same global financial crash that brought oil prices down and made investment in renewable energy once again a “yessable” proposition – as Greer anticipates in “The Long Descent”. Covid19 is having the same effect…  

I read Orlov’s book some years ago and followed Greer’s blog until it ended a couple of years ago. But I have just been able to download “The Long Descent” from Zlibrary (https://1lib.eu/) and found this recent post by Michael Greer a useful summary of his position -

Since some of my current readers weren’t yet reading me when I last discussed these issues – in “The Long Descent” (2008), I’ll start with some general points and go from there.

One of the great mental blind spots of our society is the notion that there are only two possible futures: on the one hand, business as usual stretching endlessly into the future, with a side order of technological progress dished up at intervals; on the other, sudden apocalyptic mass death, with or without a small band of plucky survivors sitting around a campfire as the final credits roll. An astonishing number of people these days literally won’t let themselves think about any other possible future, and will either change the subject or get furiously angry at you if you should be so bold as to suggest one.

 

The evasion and the anger come from the same source, which is that those imaginary futures are the ways most of us distract ourselves from the future we’re actually getting: a future of decline.

·         We all know this. If you’re old enough to be out of elementary school, you’ve already seen ongoing declines in standards of living, public health, public order, the quality of education, the condition of our infrastructure, and much more.

·         Those trends define our future. They also defined the future of every past civilization, because that’s how civilizations end, and it’s how ours will end, 100 to 300 years from now.

·         Again, at some level, all of us know this, but it’s taboo to discuss the matter or even think about it, which is why so many people bury their heads in shopworn fantasies of perpetual progress or overnight cataclysm.

 

One other thing. Technology will not save us from the Long Descent, because technology is the main factor driving the Long Descent. The more technology you have, the more energy and resources of every kind you need to build, maintain, repair, replace, and dispose of it, and the mismatch between endlessly rising resource costs and the hard limits of a finite planet is one of the main factors bringing about the declines I’ve just described. Nor does technology allow one energy resource to be replaced with another, except in small and irrelevant ways.

 

The world now burns more coal than it did at the peak of the Coal Age, for example, and more wood than it did when firewood was the main source of heating fuel worldwide. As renewable power sources got added to the mix, furthermore, the amount of fossil fuels being burnt didn’t go down -- it went up. (That’s caused by a widely recognized law of energy economics, by the way; look up Jevons’ Paradox sometime.) If progress is the problem, more progress is not the solution -- but here again, that’s utterly unthinkable these days. Faith in progress is the most popular idolatry of our time, and a vast number of people who claim to belong to other religions or to no religion at all are devout worshipers at the shrine of the golden calf named Progress.

 

So where are we headed?  That hasn’t changed one iota since the last time I discussed these issues. “The Limits to Growth”, the most thoughtful (and thus inevitably the most savagely denounced) of the Seventies-era books that explored the landscape ahead of us, traced the arc of our future in a convenient graph. Between 1972 and the present, its predictions have proven much more accurate than those of the book’s critics -- another reason why it’s been assailed in such shrill language for all these years. Here’s the graph: (sorry it doesn't show in this text - please consult Greer's post)

 

I’d encourage my readers to pay attention to two things about the graph. The first, which should be obvious at a glance but has been ignored astonishingly often, is that it doesn’t show any kind of sudden apocalyptic event. What it shows is a long and relatively smooth transition from a world of abundant resources and sustained economic growth to a world of scarce resources and sustained economic contraction. Population doesn’t fall off a cliff, it rises, crests, and declines. Pollution doesn’t up and kill everybody; it rises, helps drive declines in food and population, and then declines in turn as industrial output falls off.

 

The second thing about the graph I’d like readers to notice is subtler, and you may need to read the book to grasp it: the limits to growth are economic limits, not technical ones. What happens, in brief, is that the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits, until finally they overwhelm growth itself and force the global economy to its knees. What this means, in turn, is that proposed solutions have to be economically viable, not just technically feasible. 

As you can see, Greer writes very well. And he’s not just good on theory but on practice. Chapter 4 of his book has 4 bits of advice –

- reduce your energy use (by half id possible – restrict use of the car;praxtice coping with blackout)

- DIY health

- community networking

- choose a viable profession (market gardening; clothes repair) 

A Peak Oil resource

- Prosper – how to prepare for the future and a world worth inheriting; Chris Martensen and Adam Taggart (2017). The vast majority of books on peak oil (let alone global warming) are written by leftists. This is a rare, exuberant and remarkably easy read; aimed at those who want to be ahead of the curve; takes the question of collapse for granted; and looks at how we should be preparing for it – using the concepts of time and 6 forms of capital (social, intellectual, material etc). 

“The first step toward achieving long-term sustainable prosperity is, of course, to adopt a better narrative - a narrative of living within our means, of resource stewardship, and of finding happiness in a life of purpose, not of possessions. If the old narrative was extractive and isolating, the new narrative needs to be regenerative and relational”. 

A presentation by Chris Martenson about his Crash Course here

 Some of Greer’s writings can still be found in the Counter Currents website eg  https://www.countercurrents.org/greer290511A.htm; and   https://www.countercurrents.org/greer241111.htm. Just type J Michael Greer in the search engine

-       The Five Stages of Collapse – survivor’s toolkit; Dmitry Orlov (2013) I’ve just been able to download this more recent book by Orlov. The guy has a great sense of humour.

-       https://www.resilience.org/ One of the movement’s main mags