This week, Greer covers the second trend of deindustrialization he’s outlined, migration. As readers will notice, I’m agreed with Greer here in principle. Earlier this week, I published the “Mexamerica” entry for our continuing Nine Nations series, and flatly said that Mexican culture would dominate what’s now considered the southwest. The main problem I have with Greer’s analysis is that, for all his claims to be taking his cues from history, he’s ignoring history, and making much more of this than there actually is.

Of course, Greer starts off by equating “apocalypse”—the idea that life would get better after the end of civilization—with the insanity of perpetual growth: “Both these narratives attempt to force history into the Procrustean bed of some form of secular theology; neither one of them, as I’ve argued repeatedly here, offers much in the way of useful guidance for the future taking shape in the circumstances, choices, and missed opportunities of the present.” But what he labels “apocalyptic” is what an ecologist would simply recognize as a situation of overshoot. Greer can compare this to an apocalyptic cult all he wants, and it will never change the fact that ecological data is evidence qualitatively different from the tortured exegesis of Biblical prophecies. Greer says he’s analyzing positions from the level of narrative, and yet he still has not caught up to the level of analytic sophistication I had already reached almost a year before the first post appeared on the Archdruid Report, taking a close look at the parallels between primitivism and apocalyptic thought, titled, “The Eschatology of the Left.” But even so, I had reached by its conclusion an important point that Greer still has yet to account for:

Peak Oil and primitivism are not surprised that fundamentalist Christianity has so often been wrong. Their apocalypse scenario has always been predicated on the interpretation of Bronze Age literature. Peak Oil and primitivism base their claims on actual, empirical evidence. There is the key difference.

The apocalyptic narrative didn’t appear out of thin air; it is so ingrained in our culture because it does happen. It is fundamentally the myth of natural selection: the selective pressure is the “cataclysm,” and the selected variety are the “Elect.” The apocalyptic narrative keeps coming up because it keeps happening all around us. How could it be otherwise? Even as far back as 1925, Alfred Lotka, one of the great biologists of all time, could see that our current trajectory had only one possible outcome:

The human species, considered in broad perspective, as a unit including its economic and industrial accessories, has swiftly and radically changed its character during the epoch in which our life has been laid. In this sense we are far removed from equilibrium—a fact that is of the highest practical significance, since it implies that a period of adjustment to equilibrium conditions lies before us, and he would be an extreme optimist who should expect that such adjustment can be reached without labor and travail. … While such sudden decline might, from a detached standpoint, appear as in accord with the eternal equities, since previous gains would in cold terms balance the losses, yet it would be felt as a superlative catastrophe. Our descendants, if such as this should be their fate, will see poor compensation for their ills and in fact that we did live in abundance and luxury.

So, to say that Greer’s dismissal is short-sighted and flawed would certainly be an understatement, but Greer mentions this only by way of prologue (lest he go through an entire article without bashing primitivism), before moving onto his main topic of migrations in the midst of collapse.

Greer begins by pointing to the examples of history, and how we can learn about what awaits us by observation of what happened in previous collapses. I agree with this, but it is a curious preamble for an article that then proceeds to ignore the lessons of history. For instance, following immediately, Greer begins talking about how our civilization was “made more gargantuan by the combination of luck and cleverness that enabled the industrial revolution to replace sun, wind, water, and muscle with the vast but not limitless supplies of ancient sunlight stored away in the earth’s fossil fuels,” but still basically belongs to a long cycle of growth and collapse. This utterly ignores the lessons of history altogether. The Greek city-states at their zenith were less complex than the Roman Empire; the Roman Empire at its zenith was less complex than the later, coal-driven European empire. When the Greek city-states collapsed, they left behind more complexity than that with which they started; so, too, did the Romans. The complexity of civilizations’ growth and collapse is no sine wave; it has been an unsteady escalation. It was not a combination of luck and cleverness that made our civilization more gargantuan, but the culmination of an escalation as old as civilization itself. This can be seen in the pattern of Western civilization’s movement, not as a cycle of boom and bust, but as a constant expansion:

Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat’s strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period.¹

The Greeks established colonies to the west, in Italy; the Roman Empire’s western provinces—France, Britain and Spain—became the main powers in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and thanks to New World colonies still further west, were able to create global empires. Now, the locus of power in Western civilization has even crossed the Atlantic, and come west all the way to North America, where the United States became rich and powerful by settling the west. Western civilization is rapidly running out of “west” to expand into. Is this a pattern of cyclical growth and collapse? Or are previous collapses simply momentary setbacks in an overall pattern of constant expansion? I think history is fairly clear that the lesson Greer has drawn from history is completely wrong.

Of course, that realizaton would challenge Greer’s narrative frame (one he doesn’t admit to having), that civilization is the way humans were destined to live, and that while it is subject to cycles of boom and bust, it is essentially a perfectly good system, one that humans were destined for, and one that can never be given up. So it’s no great surprise that he’s missed the most obvious lesson history has to teach, and thus, completely mistakes the significance of the present situation as the only end such a positive feedback loop could ever have: the point at which there’s nowhere else to expand, nothing more to conquer, and the entire system shatters.

Next, we get to the real meat of this week’s post, and further examples of Greer ignoring the lessons of history:

When major civilizations disintegrate, though, these changes shift into overdrive. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire offers one of the best documented examples. Outside of Scandinavia, Scotland, and Ireland, practically none of the peoples of Europe stayed put. Before Rome fell, for example, the ancestors of the English lived in Denmark, the ancestors of the French and the northern Italians lived in Germany, the ancestors of the Spanish lived north of the Black Sea, and the ancestors of the Hungarians lived not far from the Gobi Desert. It took most of a thousand years for the rubble to stop bouncing and the new nations of Europe to take shape, and when that finally happened, those nations and cultures had only the most distant connections to what had been there before Rome fell.

Let’s take a closer look at one of these examples to see how Greer misses the point that history actually makes: the Diocese of the Gauls, formed by Diocletian’s reforms, which included the provinces of Gaul and Britain. Before the Roman invasion, they had shared a largely similar culture, with several tribes holding lands on both sides of the Channel (Paris, for instance, is named for the Parisii, who also controlled territory in Yorkshire). They were equivalently Romanized, and usually treated as a single unit (like the Diocese of the Gauls) by the Roman Empire. Thus, to the end of the Roman Empire, Gaul and Britain had very similar histories and cultures.

Clovis (the initial “C” was later dropped, and the “v” became a “u” to make him Louis I) conquered most of the former Gallic province over a period of less than 30 years, a conquest so swift that it left much of the Roman tradition and population in place. French culture emerged from that, building off of a base primarily in Latin, Roman law and Roman custom. In Britain, however, the English conquest took place over a much longer period of time, and the entrenchment made Anglo-Saxon culture predominate. Yet, with the withdrawal of Roman power, it was the civitates (city-states) that emerged to become kingdoms; the civitiates had been formed after the Roman invasion around tribal territories, and frequently maintained tribal elders and chiefs as the new magistrates and counsellors. As Kenneth Dark argues in Civitas to Kingdom: British Political Continuity 300-800, post-Roman Britain continued the basic forms not just of Roman administration, but even further back to the late pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA). Furthermore, these were the same kingdoms that Anglo-Saxons eventually gained ascendancy over. More recent evidence has shown a continuity of population, as well, underlying the English myth of the Anglo-Saxon race.²

So does history support Greer’s contention that, “those nations and cultures had only the most distant connections to what had been there before Rome fell”? On the contrary, the nations and cultures went on nearly unchanged, with only a shallow veneer of difference. The same bioregional boundaries that created the LPRIA tribal boundaries continued to mark the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and can even be traced to the modern-day English counties.

Greer even gets the nature of the Völkerwanderung wrong—these weren’t “barbarians” wandering into the vacuum Rome left behind, but a series of dominos that pushed eastern populations into the Roman Empire, a pressure that the empire could not resist, because its complexity was too far beyond the point of diminishing returns.

The first ripples of this future flood can be seen by anyone who travels by bus through any rural region west of the Mississippi River, as I did a few days ago. Stray very far from the freeways and the tourist towns, and in a great many places you’ll discover that culturally speaking, you’re in Mexico, not the United States. The billboards and window signs are in Spanish, advertising Mexican products, music, and sports teams, and the people on the streets speak Spanish and wear Mexican fashions. It’s popular among Anglophone Americans to think of this sort of thing as purely a phenomenon of the Southwest, but the bus trip I’ve mentioned was in northwestern Oregon. There are some 30 million people of Mexican descent in the US legally, and some very large number—no one seems to agree on what the number is, but 8 million is the lowest figure I’ve heard anyone talking about—who are here illegally. As the migration continues, a very large portion of what is now the United States is becoming something else.

Hispanic population in the United States (2000 Census)

I’ve said something similar already in the article on Mexamerica, but Greer is certainly pressing too far here. Consider the map of Hispanic population according to the 2000 census; granted, such data is imperfect given the numbers of illegal immigrants, but this data can still be useful as long as its accuracy is not overrated. Look particularly at eastern Oregon. Is it surprising that Greer would encounter these scenes there? Is it fair to extrapolate that to everything west of the Mississippi? What about Iowa? Montana? The Dakotas? Most of the Hispanic population is in the southwest—inside the Mexamerican bioregon, where it is highly adaptive. Of course, it would be foolish to say that it’s confined there, particularly given that the U.S. uses its immigration laws to create an effective slave class. But Greer’s case here is obviously exaggerating a much more local phenomenon to a much wider area than is warranted. Even western Oregon—more closely related to the Cascadian bioregion—shows a much smaller Hispanic community, and the distribution even in the Empty Quarter clings closely to the boundaries of Mexamerica.

This is not the willy-nilly Völkerwanderung Greer imagines; this is a clearly bioregional phenomenon, developing along bioregional lines. A careful study of history would have already provided that clue, because the original Völkerwanderung was also a clearly bioregional phenomenon, as we saw with the Roman civitates of Britain, and their transformation into Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. People will move around, to be sure, but in each given place, the unique bioregional character is always what comes through in the end.