9 August 2007

Archdruid Watch: Cities in the Deindustrial Future

Despite his penchant for axe-grinding against primitivists, I actually agree with John Michael Greer on far more than we disagree. He generally doesn’t like to be reminded of that fact, as it gets in the way of the regular primitivist hate-fest to be reminded that you’re alike in far more ways than you’re not, but for the most part, I keep up this regular series mostly in the hope that he might one day be willing to actually discuss those differences we do have. But this week’s post, “Cities in the Deindustrial Future,” summarizes everything that I take issue with in Greer’s work. A full rebuttal is necessary, and I hope it manages to reach as many people as Greer’s offering of pablum, if only to provide an antidote to the delusions, confusion, and misconceptions that his article has spread this week.

As usual, Greer begins with several paragraphs rehashing the same old logical fallacy he always trots out, how apocalyptic scenarios in the past drawn from the exegesis of Bronze Age texts went awry, and so therefore modern predictions based on scientific models and consistent data must also be wrong, because they follow a vaguely similar narrative. I had already discussed, answered, and moved past that particular logical fallacy months before Greer wrote the first post of the Archdruid Report, in “The Eschatology of the Left.” Along the way, Greer makes some startlingly wrong statements—like the suggestion that the United States’ westward-looking, rural culture wasn’t equally rooted in European culture as the cities in the east (William Cronon’s classic essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” shows the many ways in which their relationship with the “wilderness” came at least as much, if not more so, from European notions), or that we have traditionally seen cities as places to flee, and wilderness as a place of sanctuary. Again, as Cronon illustrates so well, this is quite the opposite of what is actually the case. Even in the Old Testament examples Greer cites, the wilderness is, at best, a place of trial where one might meet divinity; more commonly, it is nothing but a home for monsters, like the Anglo-Saxon anthropomorphization of wilderness, Grendel in Beowulf. At the end of the New Testament, the Garden of Eden is replaced with a city, the New Jerusalem. The great project of eradicating wilderness was central to the religious ideals of some of America’s earliest settlers. In short, wilderness was a place to flee, and cities have always been seen as a place of refuge; that’s why, historically, in times of collapse, rural areas are abandoned and city populations swell. It’s called “urban flight,” and it’s become a well-known demographic rule that when populations are under stress, they run not for the hills, but for the cities.

While Greer at least recognizes the unsustainability of massive megalopolises like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, he is quick to offer this:

Imagine, by contrast, a city of between 20,000 and 200,000 people in a mostly agricultural region; there are hundreds of such cities scattered across the North American map, so this shouldn’t be hard. In the sort of overnight collapse imagined by too many writers on peak oil these days, that could still be a very difficult place to be – but as I’ve pointed out more than once in this blog, an overnight collapse is very nearly the least likely way the downslope of Hubbert’s peak might play out. In the far more plausible scenario of uneven decline and slow depopulation spread out over many decades, such a city would have immense advantages over a rural lifeboat community. Located within easy reach of surrounding farmland, stocked with raw materials in the form of surplus buildings, cars, and the like, and a large enough work force to allow division of labor and the production of specialty goods, the city could easily import food and other necessities by supplying trade goods to the nearby countryside, the way cities in preindustrial times have always done.

Beginning with a protracted logical fallacy, followed by a superficial understanding of historical attitudes towards cities and wilderness that completely inverts their actual relationship, we might guess that this, too, glosses over important historical trends; specifically, “the way cities in preindustrial times have always done.” Let’s follow the line of thinking Greer has pointed out here for a moment, and take a look at what cities in preindustrial times have always done.

In fact, cities are quite new, historically, no older than the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago, so that they fit in the most recent 0.16% of human history. In Endgame, Derrick Jensen offers a definition of a city: “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” William Catton, author of Overshoot, agrees, suggesting that a city could be defined as a permanent human population dense enough to grossly exceed its local carrying capacity. Cities have always been civilization’s defining phenomenon, and they are fundamentally unsustainable.

The basic nature of agriculture lies in catastrophe: its primary crops (wheat, corn and rice) are grasses that play a role in early succession as catastrophe-adapted plants. Thus, the farmer’s role is to mimic a natural disaster. That’s what a plow does: it is a machine for turning a healthy ecology into an ecological catastrophe. Of course, this practice has long-term effects. While the use of “night soil” or other so-called “sustainable” techniques can slow the process, farming always depletes the soil over time. As William Koetke put it in The Final Empire:

In 1988, the annual soil loss due to erosion was twenty-five billion tons and rising rapidly. Erosion means that soil moves off the land. An equally serious injury is that the soil’s fertility is exhausted in place. Soil exhaustion is happening in almost all places where civilization has spread. This is a literal killing of the planet by exhausting its fund of organic fertility that supports other biological life. Fact: since civilization invaded the Great Plains of North America one-half of the topsoil of that area has disappeared.

Or, as Richard Manning wrote in “The Oil We Eat“:

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.

When cities, and the agriculture that allowed them to exist, began in the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent was not a cruel joke. In fact, we know now that at that time, Iraq was covered in an old growth cedar forest so thick that the sunlight never touched the ground (as shown by pollen remains of shade-intolerant plant species). The very first civilized myth (”civilization” comes from the Latin word civis, meaning “city”) is that of Gilgamesh setting out to destroy that forest to make way for cities. In time, the old growth cedar forest was decimated (the celebrated “cedars of Lebanon” are the only remaining remnant), and the land was completely killed by a few thousand years of agriculture. The blasted wastelands we see on the nightly news in Iraq are man-made, the legacy of the Agricultural Revolution.

From then, the race was on to keep agricultural expansion ahead of its own consequences, and it was not a peaceful expansion. The historical trend that no wild human would willingly give up their way of life for farming, but would fight to the death rather than become civilized, is not a recent one. The only evidence of material exchange between the first farmers in Europe and the native hunter-gatherers come from the farmers’ arrow heads found in the hunter-gatherer’s chests. Some have tried to suggest that that represents a peaceful exchange, but if that weren’t enough, now genetic evidence has shown clearly that farming didn’t “spread” into Europe as other people recognized what a great idea it was; it invaded Europe and killed anyone who opposed it.

As farming killed off the soil, farmers moved westwards, providing the westward drive of Western civilization’s history. The West has always been the place of potential and new beginnings, because that’s where you’ll find the soil we haven’t killed yet. It was already 2,300 years ago that Plato wrote about the impact of such “sustainable” methods in southern Europe:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. … Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.

In “The Oil We Eat,” Manning comments on this passage:

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.

By 500 BCE, Greek coastal cities had become landlocked due to deforestation, leading to soil erosion, filling in bays and the mouths of rivers; Plato wrote, “All the richer and softer parts have fallen away and the mere skelton of the land remains.” The Meander River become so silted that its course changed, weaving back and forth, giving us our word “meandering.” Greece suffered from massive soil erosion that degraded agricultural quality over the few centuries of the city-states.

Even as early as the Roman Empire, enormous birth rates were needed just to keep society afloat in the face of such catastrophic mortality. As Peter Brown wrote in The Body & Society:

Citizens of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into the world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived childhood remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty. It was a population “grazed thin by death.” In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives. Unexacting in so many ways in sexual matters, the ancient city expected its citizens to expend a requisite proportion of their energy begetting and rearing legitimate children to replace the dead. Whether through conscious legislation, such as that of Emperor Augustus, which penalized bachelors and rewarded families for producing children, or simply through the unquestioned weight of habit, young men and women were discreetly mobilized to use their bodies for reproduction. The pressure on the young women was inexorable. For the population of the Roman Empire to remain even stationary, it appears that each woman would have had to have produced an average of five children. Young girls were recruited early for their task. The median age of Roman girls at marriage may have been as low as fourteen. In North Africa, nearly 95 percent of the women recorded on gravestones had been married, over half of those before the age of twenty-three.

In the Middle Ages, the human toll of agriculture’s ecological devastation was even more oppressively bleak. In his article for the Atlantic Monthly, “1491,” Charles C. Mann writes:

France—”by any standards a privileged country,” according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger’s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts “like common dung” (the simile is Daniel Defoe’s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, “merely a realistic detail.”

With the colonization of the Americas, the sharp contrast of agriculture’s toll could be seen in the comparative heights of Europeans vs. Americans, as a reflection of the soil. Richard Manning, again from “The Oil We Eat”:

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.

This should paint a clear picture of “the way cities in preindustrial times have always done”: preindustrial cities were able to exist only by continuing to move west. The race to stay ahead of the consequences of their way of life meant that the present was afforded only by consuming the future. To go back to preindustrial city life requires going back to living off of the frontier. The cities that once were fed by their agricultural hinterland existed only because that hinterland had never been farmed before. But something happened in our first, headlong race: we eventually ran out of planet to conquer. In 1960, with the world’s population at 3 billion, we ran out of unfarmed, arable land. That’s when the Green Revolution began, allowing us to use fossil fuels as a new way of expanding agricultural production, so we could burn up mountains, deserts, and even the air, rather than simply chewing up soil. But that’s precisely what the deindustrial future won’t have. And because we have to deal with the legacy of the past that our ancestors lived through, we can’t live the way our ancestors did. The cities Greer talks about were possible because no one had farmed that land before. But today, half the topsoil of the Great Plains is gone. The Dust Bowl was the beginning of the same desertification that the first farmers wrought in the Fertile Crescent, and just like you’ll have a hard time eking out a wheat farm from an Iraqi sand dune, you’re not going to be able to grow food in Iowa without petrochemicals, either. The six foot drop that Manning describe in Iowa’s “postage stamp” parcels of prairie documents the amount of fertilizer it takes to make Iowa fertile, and how much soil is already gone underneath that. North America’s soils are 85% depleted of their mineral content; food grown in soil that depleted is barely worth eating, possessing almost no nutritional content. Sure, there are some areas that have been spared, some pockets where soil fertility might still exist in naturally occuring amounts sufficient for a small farm, but these are the exceptions. For the most part, the Great Plains are already a desert; they’re simply, at present, a very well fertilized desert.

So Greer’s notion is completely untenable. It requires a soil fertility that simply doesn’t exist. Greer’s aware of this, as I’ve made this argument plenty of times before, but he continues to ignore the evidence and pretend that agriculture has no consequences, and everything can go on as it has before. He does eventually admit that “Some areas of the continent lack the agricultural and resource base to support such a pattern.” This is a severe understatement. In general, all areas of the contient lack the agricultural and resource base to support such a pattern, as a consequence of their history of supporting such a pattern. There may be some exceptions, but not many. The basic pattern of Western civilization was to expand to the west to make up for the unsustainability of their way of life; well, we’ve finally run out of west to expand into.

Elsewhere, though – especially east of the Mississippi and west of the Cascade crest, where rainfall and soil quality combine to make sustainable organic agriculture a good bet for the foreseeable future – urban centers are likely to play a significant role through the approaching deindustrial Dark Ages and on into the successor cultures to come.

I don’t know about west of the Cascade crest (which forms only a small sliver of coastal territory), but Greer obviously does not understand the situation east of the Mississippi. Here, farmers are already being forced to leave more and more land fallow as they can’t afford petrochemical fertilizers, and the soils has little natural arability left. Lands that were once major agricultural centers are now nearly impossible to farm, precisely because they were so heavily farmed in the past. Greer had previously talked about how rust belt cities could find new agrarian lives, which I answered in “A Depopulation Explosion?” with the example of my native Pittsburgh, the veritable buckle of the rust belt and seemingly the ideal model of what Greer’s referring to. Here, the soil quality is so far gone that the prospect of supporting the city agriculturally is pure fantasy. The situation is not so different anywhere else east of the Mississippi. Greer goes on:

When city governments draw up meaningful plans to reduce their fossil fuel usage by 50%, as Portland, Oregon did in its recently released peak oil plan, or look seriously at reestablishing local rail service, as several US cities are now doing, it’s hard to justify the claim that urban populations will check their common sense and their instinct for self-preservation at the door of peak oil and turn into the mindless ravening mobs of the classic survivalist fantasy.

Cutting fossil fuel usage by 50% is insufficient by half. The basic, inescapable conclusion remains: cities are fundamentally unsustainable. How will Portland feed itself? Greer’s presumption that the future will look just like the past can be quickly ruled out because of the ways the future differs from the past: namely, the future has to take into account the consequences of the past, which is something the past never had to worry about. Without agriculture, there is no way to produce the nutritional density necessary to feed a city. Greer paints a picture of the city-state as a static and more-or-less sustainable entity, but as we’ve seen, it never was: city-states rose and quickly fell in a headlong rush westwards, as civilization tried to stay ahead of its consequences. That race has finally ended in the only manner it ever could: we’ve lost. Our consequences have caught up with us, and clinging to the fantasy Greer offers that we can simply go on as we always have is dangerously naive.

About Archdruid Watch

John Michael Greer’s “Archdruid Report” comes out every Wednesday, and one of his favorite topics is the failing of primitivism, or “apocalyptic narrative,” as he prefers to pigeon-hole it. Unfortunately, Greer also thinks that actual primitivists stopping by in the comments to defend their “apocalyptic narrative” side-tracks the disucssion of how looney and wrong their narrative is. Primitivists who try to answer Greer’s attacks are eventually censored and banned. Enter “Archdruid Watch,” a weekly response to Greer’s weekly attack, on a forum that encourages discussion and dissenting views, rather than squelches them from the bully pulpit. If you think we’re wrong, by all means say so. It’s not as though we’ll delete what you have to say just because you make a good point—and that’s not something all blogs involved here can say.

Last Week: “Tillicum River“
Next: “The Age of Salvage Societies“

Categories: Archdruid Watch

Tags: agriculture, city, collapse, erosion, peak oil, soil depletion

Comments

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield

You know, I’ve actually flown out to Iowa a couple times. The midwest, from a plane, is a pretty terrible sight. Aside from shelterbelts & windbreaks, you don’t see any land that isn’t being used heavily. Around the rivers & streams, patterns of erosion are evident.

Comment by jhereg — 9 August 2007 @ 10:51 AM
Lots of points to make back at you.

While I agree that the trend is toward primitivism, what Greer envisions is catabolic collapse. He may be wrong in that vision but within the context of a catabolic collapse (if it occurred) you would very well expect to see city-states emerge from the larger empire itself dissolving around them. These city states, especially those in agricultural regions would naturally try to extend protection and control over as much agriculture as they reasonably could manage.

Now personally I think these practices are also doomed to failure due to the severe strain we have placed on planet earth, but given Greer’s initial assumptions, I can see how he came to his conclusion. Further, given his assumptions and the pace he expects for catabolic collapse (a century or two) what he is saying makes sense for those of us alive today. My descendant in 2150 may find my choices absurd or not even comprehensible, but they may have made sense to me in the context in which I found myself at that time.

Finally, a stylistic comment - green-grey text on a relatively dark green background? Who are you trying to make blind here? I strongly urge you to choose another color scheme for your blog. I almost did not bother to read it because it is actually painful to read, as I must squint and fight the natural light around me to understand your text.

Comment by Greyzone — 9 August 2007 @ 2:09 PM
While I agree that the trend is toward primitivism, what Greer envisions is catabolic collapse. He may be wrong in that vision but within the context of a catabolic collapse (if it occurred) you would very well expect to see city-states emerge from the larger empire itself dissolving around them. These city states, especially those in agricultural regions would naturally try to extend protection and control over as much agriculture as they reasonably could manage.

They may very well try, I have no doubt of that, but will they ever see even one harvest? That’s the difference between what people try, and what they actually accomplish. Model aside, you need to explain how the farmers around Portland are going to make crops grow in 2050.

Finally, a stylistic comment - green-grey text on a relatively dark green background? Who are you trying to make blind here?

That sounds like a big, nasty bug. The background should be a light tan, not dark green. What browser/OS are you using? That sounds like something I need to fix ASAP.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 2:21 PM
The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent.

A lot of pro-life types would doubtless be horrified at the idea of infanticide being considered an acceptable means of population control in primitive societies. The problem with going the route of civilization is that it results in infant death on a scale the thought of which would make even the most stoic primitive weep at the sheer horror of such a thing. And doing what we’ve done with the Green Revolution and fossil-fuel powered industry has created a story that can only end with death and mayhem and very massive scale. That’s the worst thing can happen, and it’s important that we recognize how awful a thing this will be without letting whatever personal baggage we might have about modern humanity getting in the way of that recognition.

Comment by venuspluto67 — 9 August 2007 @ 2:24 PM
You had me until you trotted out the tired trope of Quinn’s evil agriculture.

Sorry, agriculture, even if downsized, is not going to go away…

Comment by Al Billings — 9 August 2007 @ 3:24 PM
Where is it going to go, when there’s no soil for it? That’s like saying that people are’t going to go away just because there’s no oxygen. Simply stating that it’s not going to go away because it’s been around for a long time (which it hasn’t) doesn’t fly. If it’s not going away, then where’s it going, without any soil to grow in?

Calling it “the tired trope of Quinn’s” is hardly fair, either. I didn’t even mention Quinn in any of this, and it’s hardly just his idea. He actually distinguishes between “totalitarian agriculture” and benign agriculture. I call that permaculture or horticulture, and I call “totalitarian agriculture,” well, agriculture.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 3:32 PM
I simply don’t believe your arguments that all agriculture is unsustainable and that all soil will be permanently destroyed by it.

If one believes that there are sustainable models of agriculture, a lot of your views or predictions for the future simply fall apart, don’t they?

I’m not saying that things are anywhere near sustainable at the current levels but I think that the idea that we’ll all become foragers is a religious belief for primitivists and not actually proven to be true (sustainable!).

Comment by Al Billings — 9 August 2007 @ 3:43 PM
I simply don’t believe your arguments that all agriculture is unsustainable and that all soil will be permanently destroyed by it.

Agriculture is defined by tilling and disturbance. It is by its very nature unsustainable. That’s not to say that all cultivation is unsustainable, of course, but sustainable forms of cultivation aren’t agriculture; they’re horticulture or permaculture. See “Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter.” This is directly relevant to discussion of cities, because agriculture is the only thing that can provide for cities.

If one believes that there are sustainable models of agriculture, a lot of your views or predictions for the future simply fall apart, don’t they?

A lot of my views and predictions fall apart if you believe in magical fairy dust, too. I’ve presented clear evidence of why agriculture is unsustainable, and a 10,000 year history of how all civilized history has been driven by that unsustainability. You say you don’t “believe” it, but where’s the evidence? Where is this “sustainable agriculture”? Everything I’ve seen so far (and there’s no end of people trying to convince me of it) is either (1) not sustainable, or (2) not agriculture (usually, it’s permaculture or horticulture).

I’m not saying that things are anywhere near sustainable at the current levels…

Forget current levels. They were nowhere near sustainable at Neolithic levels, or Greek levels, or Roman levels, or medieval levels, or Renaissance levels, or colonial levels, either. In fact, it’s never been anywhere near sustainable.

…I think that the idea that we’ll all become foragers is a religious belief for primitivists and not actually proven to be true (sustainable!).

That’s just ridiculous. You’re telling me about the things you “believe” in response to clear evidence, but the religious belief is that the only proven, long-term, sustainable lifestyle humans have ever employed, isn’t?

Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 4:02 PM
Jason, I am using Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Ubuntu Feisty Linux with all patches up to date as of today. I’ll take a look at your blog from home with both Firefox and IE and report back then how it looks there as well, ok?

Also, most of these people have no idea of the effects of agriculture (as opposed to permaculture and other methods of interacting with the environment). For most people, the word agriculture means anything related to growing plants. They consider an orchard to be a kind of agriculture but an orchard is closer to being a kind of permaculture.

The loss of agriculture does not mean that homo sapiens must give up shaping the environment around him. No, indeed homo sapiens will continue to do this. But what we need to find are sustainable practices and traditional agriculture is not sustainable. (Note: I define sustainable as meaning through the entire existence of our species, not a few hundred or a few thousand years.) A key factor though is that sustainable practices require far lower population densities than we have now. And since we cannot achieve those densities as things now stand, something must change. Given the population curve of homo sapiens (looks just like a damned yeast dish!!!) the logical conclusion is that homo sapiens population will do what other populations have done - crash via dieoff.

But you cannot argue with people about this. Those above who believe agriculture will go on forever are not going to be shaken by any facts you present. They live in a world of faith.

Comment by Greyzone — 9 August 2007 @ 4:05 PM
Ah, Linux … yes, we’ve been having a good bit of trouble with various Linux distros.

They consider an orchard to be a kind of agriculture but an orchard is closer to being a kind of permaculture.

And yet most people would hardly call a backyard garden a “farm,” so even though we’ve obfuscated what “agriculture” means, so that when we think of “agriculture,” we think of any kind of cultivation, the reverse does not hold—when presented with any kind of cultivation, we don’t immediately think of it as agriculture. That reflects our intuitive understanding that agriculture is a very different thing than permaculture or horticulture.

The loss of agriculture does not mean that homo sapiens must give up shaping the environment around him. No, indeed homo sapiens will continue to do this.

Absolutely! But agriculture doesn’t just mean changing the environment. Horticulturalists built up the Amazon and the Great Plains. Agriculturalists turned the Fertile Crescent into a desert. If anything, horticulturalists changed their environment on larger scales, but they enhanced their ecology, rather than decimate it.

Note: I define sustainable as meaning through the entire existence of our species, not a few hundred or a few thousand years

That is what the word means. That’s far too often forgotten, and people will refer to things as “sustainable” if they’re simply slightly less destructive.

A key factor though is that sustainable practices require far lower population densities than we have now. And since we cannot achieve those densities as things now stand, something must change. Given the population curve of homo sapiens (looks just like a damned yeast dish!!!) the logical conclusion is that homo sapiens population will do what other populations have done - crash via dieoff.

That’s it precisely.

But you cannot argue with people about this. Those above who believe agriculture will go on forever are not going to be shaken by any facts you present. They live in a world of faith.

Some, certainly, but there are also some who live in a world of ignorance. We’re blinded less by information we don’t have, than by a lack of curiosity. Information is easy enough to obtain—once we’re curious enough to go find it. And for most of us, this simply never made us curious. Agriculture has always been taken for granted. Of course it’s not going anywhere, by gosh, it’s agriculture! How much more basic could you get, right?

Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 4:32 PM
Are there any examples of places that continuously supported agriculture for a significant period of time? Up until 1960 there were places that had been farmed for thousands of years without the help of the Green Revolution, right? Sure, they had famines all the time but that didn’t necessarily mean the soil was depleted to the point that they couldn’t farm at all, right? Also, do you have a source on your statement that North America’s soils are 85% depleted? I’m not really trying to argue with you, I’m just trying to get more informed.

Comment by mr derp — 9 August 2007 @ 4:37 PM
Define “significant period of time.” It took thousands of years to turn the Fertile Crescent into a desert. It took hundreds of years to deplete Europe. It took decades to turn the Great Plains into the Dust Bowl. Obviously, there’s been an escalation here. Along the way, yes, you can find places like Jericho that have been around for thousands of years, but only because things were still expanding the whole time. The famines and plagues were only one part; the soil was also being constantly depleted, and it was being depleted faster and faster.

Sources on the 85% statistic: 1, 2 Apparently comes ultimately from the 1992 Earth Summit.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 4:50 PM
Thanks for the info, Jason.

Comment by mr derp — 9 August 2007 @ 5:02 PM
Hi Jason,

One of Greer’s contentions that always bothers me, yet I haven’t seen you comment on it: The collapse of civilization necessarily will be a slow, measured and drawn out event.

Personally, while I think that this may be possible, I think that a fast crash, with some periods of reprieve, is more likely.

For example, here in the Northeast, one hard winter with out food and fuel deliveries will result in a large population reduction. Every year that passes makes such an event more and more likely.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

Also, by my way of thinking, such occurance vastly improves the survival potential of any who might be left after such a localised dieoff.

Dave

Comment by DaveL — 9 August 2007 @ 5:14 PM
It’s interesting that it was Greer’s own theory of catabolic collapse that told me why collapse would happen quickly: because it accelerates and snowballs. The more things collapse, the more things collapse because of that. It’s a self-reinforcing process in many ways.

Of course, people adapt, and we’ve been known to come up with a clever thing or two, so there is a good point underlying what Greer so gratingly calls “the Y2K Fallacy” (but see my own article, “The Y2K Fallacy“).

I don’t expect collapse to occur overnight, or even over one bad winter. Actually, you yourself identified one of the main reasons: “such occurance vastly improves the survival potential of any who might be left after such a localised dieoff.” That’s the “step” pattern Greer talks about.

But Greer also overestimates things like soil quality and the like. Those steps are going to be much steeper than he gives them credit for, and some of them are going to give way when we try to step on them (like when people start trying to make cities “sustainable,” thinking that arguments like Greer’s make sense, but mostly trying to make the things they’re used to work).

Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 5:23 PM
Thank you, Jason.

As a regular reader of peak-oil websites, where Greer’s work is often prominently featured, I am so glad to see someone finally deconstructing him. I used to admire his writing a great deal, mostly the early essay on catabolic collapse that has been cited so often, but when I started reading the Archdruid Report I quickly realized what an egotistical blowhard he really is. He routinely treats his readers as though they are infantile morons who must carefully be taken by the hand, patted on the head, and led step-by-step through what apparently is the sublime magnificence of the World According To Greer.

Anyone who reads his writing with a critical eye must soon ask themselves “what is his point?”. If his intent is academic writing, and he frequently trots out literary and historical references as though they were some sort of collection of merit badges, then he could do well to study other academic writers who manage to state their arguments clearly and concisely, with citations where necessary, but entirely without conceit. If his writing is meant to be social commentary then he should take a good hard look at a writer such as J. H. Kunstler who does a masterful job of ripping our current social arrangements to shreds, and occasionally taking shots at the cheerleaders of those arrangements, but he manages to do it without sounding as though he thinks he’s better than everyone else. Very few of Greer’s polemics rise to even that simple standard.

I read a biographical blurb about Greer on one of his druid websites, by coincidence I happen to live in the Puget Sound region and I am familiar with the small town of Bremerton, WA where Greer grew up. It is a utilitarian military town completely dominated by the Naval station on it’s shores and I can only imagine the torment endured by what must have been a bookish nerd like Greer, relentlessly persecuted by the Navy brats for wanting to play Dungeons and Dragons instead of football. Perhaps he sees his newfound fame as a darling of the peak-oil doomers as a chance to finally get some revenge, a long awaited opportunity to play the role of intellectual god to his hamster-like readers who eagerly await his carefully rationed morsels of wisdom.

It would be unfair not to acknowledge that he sometimes has interesting things to say, like you I often agree with Greer more than I disagree, but I find his ponderous and conceited presentation so unpleasant that I stopped visiting the Archdruid Report long ago.

Cheers,
Jerry

Comment by Jerry McManus — 9 August 2007 @ 6:16 PM
I have one thing I want to mention regarding the agriculturization of Europe. Are you talking about the invading Middle Eastern farmer vs. the native European hunter gatherer? You are correct that agricultural expansion was often violent, but most of Europe was pretty much genetically untouched by invading Middle Eastern farmers. Southeastern Europe though, does show significant Middle Eastern genetic influence, so that area probably represents Mid-Eastern farmers replacing the native population. That area is also the first place in Europe that agriculture was introduced. And there are places throughout all of Europe showing small amounts of Middle Eastern genes, but Europeans are mostly decended from pre-agricultural natives of Europe.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that agricultural expansion in Europe wasn’t violent. If only a few groups of native Europeans for whatever reason, adopted agriculture, their numbers would swell and overtake any remaining populations of hunter gatherers, either by violence or simply outbreeding.

Comment by Anonymous — 9 August 2007 @ 7:00 PM
I dunno, that’s a tad harsh, Jerry. Sure, there’s a need to counter JMG’s ideas, but I don’t think it needs to get personal. If nothing else, I enjoy a good D&D campaign, myself.

Anonymous, check out “Tracing the Origin and Spread of Agriculture in Europe” by Pinhasi, Fort and Ammerman, “Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe by demic diffusion” by Sokal, Oden and Wilson, “Y genetic data support the Neolithic demic diffusion model,” by Chikhi, Nichols, Barbujani and Beaumont, and/or “Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene pool” by Chikhi, Destro-Bisol, Bertorelle, Pascali and Barbujani. Europeans are not mostly descended from pre-agricultural natives; they are overwhelmingly descended from Neolithic invaders. “Demic diffusion” is the academic term for violent conquest and near-on genocide. A slow genocide, perhaps, but by and large, genocide.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 8:52 AM
Hi Jason,

Ya, just be clear, i don’t equate a localised dieoff over the course of a single hard winter with a system wide collapse either.

However, a dieoff above the 40′th parallel over the course of a single winter would indeed cripple the world wide financial and industrial system. Such an occurance could easily snowball into world wide industrial collapse over the course of a decade, or less.

My real point is the collapse, in my mind, however it transpires, will not be a slow (100 years or more) or measured (transpireing evenly across industrial civilization) as Greer seems to portend.

It will be something like: crashcrashcrashCRASHCRASH…

For whatever all that might be worth.

Dave

Comment by DaveL — 10 August 2007 @ 9:35 AM
I think the difference between my view and Greer’s is one of perspective. As I tried to illustrate in the Unfolding Collapse series, we are in many ways already a century into collapse. As I wrote in that series’ conclusion, “Living in Collapse“:

The “long decline” is always an academic exercise. It is the perspective of an historian with hindsight, looking back and tracing the patterns that led to collapse, as well as the continuing attempts to maintain a way of life afterwards. It does not describe the experience of those who live through such events. Contemporaries experience collapse as a swift transformation of their society; they might notice things getting somewhat worse beforehand, and desperate attempts to hold their way of life together in the aftermath, but for the most part, collapse is experienced as a sudden transformation. It’s historians in future centuries that are able to distinguish the “long decline.”

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 9:41 AM
ya, thanks. I’ll read through those essays.

By the way, I’ve been reading your stuff for a while. you do good work.

Dave

Comment by DaveL — 10 August 2007 @ 10:05 AM
Thank you!

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 10:16 AM
Just to make sure everyone understands that Permaculture is not simply an approach to organic gardening…

Permaculture is a whole system design approach. Basically, the perfect human habitat designed using the permaculture principles would not require the importation of anything. The site itself would provide everything needed by the human population.

David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept describes it as, “Conciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre, energy for relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for the provision of local needs.”

Comment by Travis — 10 August 2007 @ 10:40 AM
Permaculture’s biggest detraction is that it tries so hard to reinvent the wheel sometimes. Take a look at “Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter.” Sure, permaculture’s designers have described it as a whole methodology. But in fact, every subsistence strategy brings with it different cultural adaptations, religious, philosophical and aesthetic implications, and even patterns of thought. Permaculture isn’t unique in that regard. In fact, there’s almost no way to distinguish permaculture from what anthropologists call “horticulture.” Full discussion in the linked article.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 10:45 AM
Europeans are not mostly descended from pre-agricultural natives; they are overwhelmingly descended from Neolithic invaders. “Demic diffusion” is the academic term for violent conquest and near-on genocide. A slow genocide, perhaps, but by and large, genocide.

Indeed. It is thought by many that the Basque peoples in Spain and France are all that remains of those ancient peoples.

Comment by venuspluto67 — 10 August 2007 @ 11:25 AM
Actually, a good bit of the Finnish population appears to be related in some ways to the Basques, so it’s not quite “all” that remains. There’s also a possibility that the “Picts” may be another group, though they were eventually absorbed by the Irish Scots, though the matrilineal descent of Scottish clans may be a tiny echo of the old Pictish matrilineal/matrilocal system, which was rather like the Haudenosaunee.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 11:33 AM
Good job Jason!

I’m really beginning to understand the fallacy of what Greer’s arguing. For me, it often has been an ideological preference for foraging that’s made me dimiss those who talk about future agriculture, and so in that way, I understand when folks like the commentor about argue that it’s a ‘religious’ preference. But after reading it a half dozen or so times, it’s finally sunk in a bit that it’s not just because foraging is substantially better in terms of human quality of life that it’s going to be what the people of the after-cultures adopt (at least partly, probably often coupled with perma-/horticulture). It’s more specifically because agriculture just won’t be possible- no synthetic fertilizers, continents of depleted soils: no agriculture. Even the organic farm I get my CSA produce from uses heaps of compost (shipped in from afar typically) to make the crops grow.

Sure, some biodynamic farms will continue, but probably not that many, and I suspect, though don’t know for sure, that many of their methods are perma-/horticultural in nature. I mean, the definition mentioned above. highlighting the importance of not importing anything is, in my understanding, essential to both biodynamics and permaculture.

And the fact that the bottleneck here won’t be an abundance of people flooding out to too little land is saddening, but also heartening. Sad, because most people will chose to cling to this culture to their death, and could avoid it, but heartening because those of us who try other things will have a high(er) chance of making it, and rebuilding healthy human societies. It reminds me of that quote about scientific paragdims; to paraphrase: “New paradigms don’t take hold because everyone’s minds are converted. Rather, the people of the old mind die, and the successive generations who grow up and take their place are raised with the new paradigm.” We’re the ones who see the changing paradigm, and the ones whose kids will be those successive generations.

Comment by Archangel — 10 August 2007 @ 11:37 AM
Also- a technical question- whatever happened to the idea tossed around for a link to a printable version of Anthropik’s articles?

Comment by Archangel — 10 August 2007 @ 11:38 AM
Archangel, that comment warmed my heart. You got it exactly.

Rather than a printable version, there’s a printing CSS. If you print it out or do a print preview, you’ll see a fairly different formatting.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 11:41 AM
Actually, it looks like it was pointing to the wrong place, so the print.css stylesheet wasn’t actually being used. Fixed now.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 11:50 AM
Great work Jason!

As for calling Permaculture a “subsistence” strategy, that isn’t appropriate. In fact, UK had this issue in the courts (according to Geoff Lawton at a recent PDC course). Think about it, if all you managed to receive from the land was enough, then what do you do in the bad years?

Permaculture is an “abundance” strategy. Without abundance, you can’t adhere to the third Permaculture ethic of sharing what you don’t want (reinvest in land and people). Without abundance, there wouldn’t be much mulch. The more you reinvest in your base, the more their will be for sharing. This is the fundamental of soil building (feed the soil, not the plants as agriculture attempts).

Of course, reinvestment isn’t as effective when implemented as a random act. This is why Permaculture is a design system, as opposed to the usual perception of it being a technique for attaining subsistence. All connections must be functional.

Comment by -Sean. — 10 August 2007 @ 12:48 PM
That is a subsistence strategy. A subsistence strategy is however you get your food. From that follows your social structure, kinship patterns, settlement patterns, complexity, language, religion….

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 1:01 PM
There are many definitions for “subsistence”, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. However, I want to be clear that Permaculture doesn’t imply “means barely sufficient to maintain life”. Permaculture implies “oversufficient to maintain life”. There is a crucial distinction here, as your article makes other crucial distinctions.

Comment by -Sean. — 10 August 2007 @ 2:19 PM
I’m not sure how crucial it really is. Any subsistence strategy is going to be used to produce as much abundance as possible. In fact, the only subsistence strategy marked by such bare subsistence is agriculture. Foragers, too, live in abundance (see Marshall Sahlins’ “Original Affluent Society”), but hunting & gathering is no less a subsistence strategy for that. Subsistence merely means how you subsist, i.e., how you live, not how successful you are at it.

Ultimately, as much as I agree with the ethics of permaculture, it’s not as if you’re going to get every permaculturalist to agree with you. Ethics are far too easily dispensed with when they become inconvenient. To be actually relevant, ethics must follow from the way you make your living, and that’s where permaculture’s value really comes in. You can preach about the ethical framework the founders outlined all day, but when the context of your subsistence strategy makes those things not right but smart, that’s when it will change people’s behaviors. Human behavior isn’t guided by ethics; it’s guided by need, and we invent ethics after the fact to rationalize our actions.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 2:28 PM
Jason, you’re making it sound as if ethics were a mere epiphenomenon that has no influence on people’s actions. That just doesn’t fly. Ethics is our guide through life. Of course, ethics has to be in tune with our needs, otherwise, it’ll be abandoned, just as any guide who gets his group lost winds up being stripped of his title/role.

Comment by Hasha — 10 August 2007 @ 2:39 PM
Maybe for an individual, but when you’re talking about groups, a mere epiphenomenon is precisely what ethics amount to. Where you happen to land on the great bell curve of ethical behavior is not nearly as relevant as how quickly and easily that bell curve’s mean and standard deviation can be moved.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 2:48 PM
Subsistence often implies “just enough”, particularly as “subsistence farming”. It should be taken in the way you use it, as a means for making a living. For those who may have read “just enough” upon reading your comment, like myself, I made my clarification of “more than enough”.

You are correct to point out that many Permies fail their duty to follow the Permaculture ethics: Care for Land, Care for People, and Share the Surplus. In fact, there have been efforts to expand this list to include what Mollison refers to as “woo-woo”. This limits the Permaculture movement severely, among the more legitimate quirks of Mr. Mollison. It frustrates me to see some of this shallowness.

Nevertheless, perhaps we could get Toby to come back East again for a PDC for you and others in Pittsburgh? If you haven’t seen it yet, Dave Jacke wrote an outstanding book, “Edible Forest Gardens” that would be a must read for your location.

Comment by -Sean. — 10 August 2007 @ 3:28 PM
Subsistence often implies “just enough”, particularly as “subsistence farming”.

Really, just in subsistence farming. It’s the farming that’s given subsistence that connotation of “just enough.” In fact, subsistence farmers often do grow more than they need, in order to store away for the future; the term distinguishes farmers who grow to keep themselves alive, from farmers who grow crops for sale. The connotation of “just enough” has followed from the fact that subsistence farmers so often lead lives of scarcity and want.

Nevertheless, perhaps we could get Toby to come back East again for a PDC for you and others in Pittsburgh? If you haven’t seen it yet, Dave Jacke wrote an outstanding book, “Edible Forest Gardens” that would be a must read for your location.

There’s a well-thumbed, many-bookmarked copy of both volumes on my shelf. If we could draw Toby out this way, I’d be there lickity-split.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 3:39 PM
Jason, think of it this way. People have needs, ranging from the very basic ones such as the need for food and water, to the more complex ones such as the need for love, security, etc. A healthy individual will do what s/he can to fulfil those needs. Now, how is this individual to go about doing this? Human beings aren’t born with this knowledge; they need some kind of guide/map to tell them how to do it. Ethics, and religion, and culture in general, are precisely these kinds of guide. Remove these things (or alternatively, give people ethics/religion/culture that doesn’t lead to the fulfilment of their needs), and people become hopelessly lost.

But even on the level of society, I don’t think that ethics amounts to nothing but an epiphenomenon. Why not? Quite simply because ethics can, on the societal just as on the individual level, become maladaptive. The Norse did starve. Why is that? Because their guides (ethics/religion/whatever) didn’t know what they was doing in the region that they found themselves in. So ethics can prevent whole groups of people from making rational choices, choices that lead to the fulfillment of their needs. Likewise, it can lead whole groups of people toward making decisions that do lead to a fulfillment of their needs. It’s not irrelevant which kinds of ethical systems a society is working with, and it isn’t true that ethical systems always change just in time to allow people to do what they need to do in order to survive. (As I said: the Norse did starve.)

Comment by Hasha — 10 August 2007 @ 3:50 PM
You’re describing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and while some of his details are iffy, I largely agree with the general idea. But how to be “good” is such a lofty goal that most people never get that far along. So as far as society in general is concerned, those things barely even exist, since too few people ever have enough of their other needs secured to worry about them for very long. Those that do are too exceptional to provide too much of a driving force. Besides, while there are clear strategies that will either demonstrably work or not work for more basic needs, there is no clear route for “ethics” or “morals.” They are too easily changed and rationalized to ever amount to any significant social force. If they’re inconvenient, you can always reason them away, or focus on other, contradictory ideals.

The Greenland Norse are a bad example; you’re not talking about ethics here. They didn’t look at the fish and think, “I shouldn’t eat that because that’s wrong.” They never even thought of it at all. The cultural construction of food is a very different thing than morality or ethics. The Greenland Norse refusal to eat fish was no more an ethical stance than your average modern American’s refusal to eat dandelions or tree bark or rocks. Those things just aren’t food.

Now, Jews eating pork to stay alive is another matter entirely, because they know that pork is food; it is forbidden for ethical reasons. And notice: in desperation, Jews throughout history have eaten pork. So the Greenland Norse rather nicely prove my point: ethics are set aside easily when they become inconvenient; the Greenland Norse illustrate the staying power of non-ethical thought processes by comparison, when it’s not a question of ethics but a systemic cultural structure.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 3:59 PM
Some Jews have eaten pork. Just as other Jews have not. Apparently, during WWII, some Jews were discovered by the Nazis precisely when it was observed that they wouldn’t eat pork. (Not, mind you, that I think that those Jews were wrong to refuse pork under such circumstances. I don’t think they were right either. What I think is that it’s not mine to judge.)

And yeah, I suppose my Norse example wasn’t so great when it comes to proving the importance of ethics in particular, but as a cultural materialist, you would’ve made the same case (that it is a mere epiphenomenon) about religion, mythology, or any aspect of culture in general, wouldn’t you? And while it may not have been ethics that kept the Norse from eating fish, it definitely was their culture. What I’m saying is that you’ve got much more of a dialectic going on. Crude material realities (e.g. climate) influence culture. But then culture influences people’s actions, which in turn change material realities, both in the short and in the long run (e.g. anthropogenic climate change).

Comment by Hasha — 10 August 2007 @ 4:16 PM
Sure, there are parts of culture that have consequences, like how you get your food, or what you consider food. Because those things come down to a group’s relationship with the material world. Ethics, religion, philosophy, mythology … these things change far too easily, and we change them on a whim whenever they become inconvenient. Because of that, they’re incapable of shaping how groups act. They can be powerful reinforcements to what a group was going to do anyway, but they never change, set, or decide what the group is going to do. All they’re capable of is accelerating it.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 4:24 PM
Ethics/religion/philosophy/mythology are not about a group’s relationship with the material world??

Comment by Hasha — 10 August 2007 @ 4:28 PM
They’re how a group understands its relationship with the material world, but that’s a very different thing from your actual relationship with it. Whatever your relationship with the material world is, ethics, religion, philosophy and mythology will rush in to tell you that it’s OK, good, and probably even necessary to do what you want to do.

If humans discovered a way to make a living by raping kittens, those people would develop a system of ethics, a philosophy and a mythology that would be all about how right and good and natural and even necessary it is to rape kittens. Why, what kind of world would it be without raping kittens?

Considering that we live in a society that did that for systemic depletion of our own ecological foundation, I can’t say that the “kitten-rape-aculturalists” are any less insane than that.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 4:31 PM
So ethics, religion, philosophy, mythology, etc. are mere epiphenomena, having no influence at all on people’s actions. Therefore, they have no adaptive value. Yet, we find them in every single human society. And they (ethics/religion/philosophy/mythology) require big brains. Brains are expensive organs, you know. Really expensive. It follows that ethics/religion/philosophy/mythology are burdens that offer no adaptive advantage. In short, they are maladaptive. So how come they weren’t eliminated by natural selection?

Comment by Hasha — 10 August 2007 @ 5:15 PM
Jason, every study I’ve read the past several years have said that European ancestry is something like 80% native hunter and 20% invading farmer. These are widely acknowledged numbers. Most of the 20% farmer number comes from southern Europe, particularly southeastern Europe. Elsewhere, it’s almost entirely native European genes. I saw a map of European Y chromosome dispersion. There were 4 different haplogroups that represented people descended from pre-agricultural Europeans. They were haplogroups R1b(mostly western Europe), R1a(mostly eastern Europe), I(mostly central Europe), and N(mostly northeastern Europe). These 4 were by far the most represented throughout all of Europe, especially outside of southeastern Europe (although there was plenty there too.)

Comment by Anonymous — 10 August 2007 @ 6:21 PM
Hasha,

I wouldn’t bother even trying to convince Jason of the point you are making. Jason is absolutely certain that the ONLY way to understand human beings that has any merit is by looking at their subsistance strategy. Everything we need to know about a particular group of homo sapien sapiens is found in how they get their daily intake of calories.

Here is the pithy version of the basic approach to things here at Anthropik, if I’m not mistaken. The way a people fulfill their needs tells us everything that is important to know about them. All else is secondary and every culture of each basic subsistence strategy is so fundamentally alike in the ways that matter that all else is superficial. For example, the material and moral culture of all agriculturists are essentially the same and so it is unnecessary to differentiate between them because their differences are only skin deep. They are all exploitive conquerers that see the best thing in life is to crush your enemy, see them driven before you and hearing the lamentation of their women.

Comment by Travis — 10 August 2007 @ 8:25 PM
Hasha, the question of how you balance out the energy cost of that big human brain is an important one, but first you’ll need to dispel the notion that mythology, philosophy, religion or any other kind of ideology is the primary purpose of that big brain. That kind of “higher thinking” only takes place in the neocortex; in other words, it’s the icing on the neurological cake. We get those things incidentally. Now, it is true that humans ride the cost/benefit line for our brains pretty closely even under the best of circumstances, so you could say that the evolutionary experiment of Homo sapiens is primarily asking the question of whether intelligence is a worthwhile investment. What pays for the massive energy cost of the human brain lies in our method of tracking, and if you really want to get into ideology, you might even say that the oral tradition as a means of cataloguing and preserving information is up there, too. The philosophy and religion are really just side effects, though, simply because it would be so difficult to have the things we need without them. So they don’t cost us, since they’re not what that big brain is for, and they reinforce what we’re doing, so they have a slight benefit, but they’re still not really setting any major course.

Anonymous, now you’ve seen four studies that say otherwise. I recognize the pattern you’re talking about, but you’re a good 20 years out of date. The demic diffusion model has really gained a lot of prominence in that time.

Travis, yes, that’s cultural materialism, which is really the dominant paradigm in modern anthropology. We owe a lot to Marvin Harris. The notion that you can tell a great deal about a culture by its subsistence method—particularly about how it relates to its ecological foundations—is something you’ll find a chapter devoted to in any decent introductory anthropology textbook. That isn’t an assumption; that’s the conclusion of Yehudi Cohen, whose work has become that fundamental to modern anthropology.

But you’re wrong that all cultures are that alike: really, only agricultural societies are that homogeneous. Again, that’s not just an assumption, that’s something we’ve argued explicitly; it happens for very specific reasons, and it’s one of civilization’s biggest drawbacks. Every other subsistence strategy has far more diversity, particularly “hunter-gatherers,” which is a nigh-on useless wastebasket category that basically amounts to, “Everyone who isn’t us.” They share some things in common, but those tend to be mostly the things they don’t have that only civilization does, so even that isn’t a question of their homogeneity so much as it is ours.

Sure, individual civilized folk might be peaceful, benevolent, or otherwise kind, but they’re still subject to a system that must grow or perish. I live in Pennsylvania, a state founded by Quakers who genuinely wanted to deal fairly with the natives. The story of the place I live is an excellent case study in the futility of personal benevolence inside of systemic expansion. For every good person there’s a bad one; for every greedy one, a generous one; for every ruthless one, a merciful; et cetera ad infinitum. That’s why personal differences just don’t matter on a social scale.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 9:03 PM
The philosophy and religion are really just side effects, though, simply because it would be so difficult to have the things we need without them.

And why is that if they contribute nothing worthwhile? I mean, if tracking had next to nothing to do with religion, ethics, mythology, philosophy, if your religious/ethical/mythological/philosophical views had no potential for enhancing your tracking abilities, then why couldn’t you just keep the ability to track and dispense with the rest of the burden? (And why do you, Jason, insist on the importance of the animist worldview as opposed to the mere mastering of technical skill if animism has nothing to do with your ability to track, and if tracking is really what’s going to get you your dinner?)

Again, I fully acknowledge the fact that material constraints will heavily influence people’s culture - how could it be otherwise? But culture, in turn, influences how people deal with those material realities.

Both Cuba and North Korea lost their oil supply with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, well, let’s just say I’d far rather be living in Havana right now than in Pyongyang. Part of it is climate, but come on, it can’t be reduced to climate. Might have something to do with culture (and the personality traits of the political leaders).

The economic situation in Europe during the 1930’s may have made something like the WWII more or less inevitable; but was the Holocaust inevitable? Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki inevitable? Again, might have something to do with culture.

And while it may be true that any agricultural society requires expansion, the exact form of that expansion is not a given. Was the industrial civilization inevitable? I mean, quite a few civilizations collapsed prior to the industrial age without developing anything like the industry. Might have had something to do with the cultural accidents.

You could, of course, call these things ‘details’; but they’re pretty major details! (And if you deny this, then do me a favor and never again accuse Greer of being ‘academic’, because by calling these things minor details, you’d outdo Greer by a long shot in this respect.)

Comment by Hasha — 10 August 2007 @ 9:47 PM
And why is that if they contribute nothing worthwhile? I mean, if tracking had next to nothing to do with religion, ethics, mythology, philosophy, if your religious/ethical/mythological/philosophical views had no potential for enhancing your tracking abilities, then why couldn’t you just keep the ability to track and dispense with the rest of the burden? (And why do you, Jason, insist on the importance of the animist worldview as opposed to the mere mastering of technical skill if animism has nothing to do with your ability to track, and if tracking is really what’s going to get you your dinner?)

I never said that they don’t contribute something worthwhile; I said that they’re not able to make any social-scale changes. Religious commitment to civilization reinforces what we were already doing. Oral traditions allow for an encyclopedic knowledge of local plants. Animism gives trackers an edge. But trackers don’t track because they’re animists; they’re animists because they’re trackers. Likewise, farmers don’t farm because they’re theists, they’re theists because they farm. Ideology is not the guiding force; it simply reinforces what you’re already doing.

At the end of the day, it is tracking that’s going to get your dinner, but the reinforcement that animism provides is the difference between actually getting it, and going hungry. Let me put it this way: a mass conversion to animism, by itself, would change almost nothing. Making everybody a tracker, though, would result in a mass conversion to animism.

But culture, in turn, influences how people deal with those material realities.

Not really, I don’t think. For the most part, people simply change their culture to adapt to those material realities. The more material the aspect of culture is, the more difficult it is to change, but culture is a human layer of adaptation to the world around us; we change it whenever we need to. That’s precisely the adaptive potential of culture.

Both Cuba and North Korea lost their oil supply with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, well, let’s just say I’d far rather be living in Havana right now than in Pyongyang. Part of it is climate, but come on, it can’t be reduced to climate. Might have something to do with culture (and the personality traits of the political leaders).

In terms of personality, I can’t see much difference between Castro and King Jung Il; they’re both despotic, power-mad megalomaniacs. The biggest difference I would say is soil quality. Korea’s been in a state of near-perennial famine for centuries, even millennia, while Cuba has always been one of the most productive agricultural centers in the Western hemisphere.

The economic situation in Europe during the 1930’s may have made something like the WWII more or less inevitable; but was the Holocaust inevitable? Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki inevitable? Again, might have something to do with culture.

If not inevitable, certainly close to it. Germany was building up to the Holocaust for a thousand years; the foundations were laid even as far back as the Crusades. Martin Luther outlined the Holocaust and promoted it as a great idea back in the Reformation. With the economic situation as it was, of course Germans fell back on their ancient hatreds, and what else was going to happen in that situation? Some kind of genocide was relatively inevitable, and the fault lines were ancient. Same thing in Rwanda with the Hutus and Tutsis.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki … again, probably in one form or another. Complexity always has to build, and both sides were working towards a nuclear weapon throughout the war. The Germans also had some plans they were going through. Sure, the details might have changed on both accounts if things had gone differently, but what else was going to happen? Do you really think we wouldn’t have found a military application for atomic energy?

Was the industrial civilization inevitable?

Well, that’s exactly what Richard Heinberg has said. Fossil fuels are so energy-dense, it’s nearly inevitable that someone would eventually put them to use. The focus on invention follows from the economics of fossil fuels, which made invention profitable for the first time.

I mean, quite a few civilizations collapsed prior to the industrial age without developing anything like the industry. Might have had something to do with the cultural accidents.

Actually, it had mostly to do with the relative cost of people vs. fuel. Through most of history, systemic overpopulation meant that fuel was expensive, but people were cheap. In England and the Low Countries, as a result of the “Age of Exuberance” that followed Columbus just like an algae bloom on old autumnal leaves in the spring melting, you had booming populations that were actually quite well-paid, thanks to trade with the colonies and the importing of the New World’s wealth, which led to a “peak wood” scenario and the timber crisis, which quite literally forced people, quite reluctantly, to use coal. That put you in the position where it was fuel that was cheap, and people that were expensive: the basic economic formulation that gives rise to industrialization.

You could, of course, call these things ‘details’; but they’re pretty major details! (And if you deny this, then do me a favor and never again accuse Greer of being ‘academic’, because by calling these things minor details, you’d outdo Greer by a long shot in this respect.)

I would, but I wouldn’t call these things minor details. They’re good points. But I see these, too, as being largely material, as I’ve explained here.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2007 @ 10:11 PM
I couldn’t care less about the dominant anything in modern anthropology. It is one way of looking at things and it doesn’t mean that it should be the only way. That is exactly the sort of narrow-minded tunnel vision that got humanity in trouble in the first place. Humans are clever creatures. Some of us might even be clever enough to figure out ways to retain some of the better parts of civilization without turning the world into an ashtray.

You’ve put forward that the only way that humans will be able to survive into perpituity is to return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. To use your term, you’ve “explicitly argued” this concept. A person of average intelligence could come to the conclusion that, in your opinion, any other point of view, any other opinion of the prediciment we find our selves in, any other means of survival that doesn’t move directly toward the end point of hunter-gatherer is a, “protracted logical fallacy” or “superficial approach” or perhaps “dangerously naive.”

Why do you continue to bother making verbose rebuttals to missives that are obviously so simple minded as to be laughable? Why bother writing anything about Greer at all since he so wrong? Shouldn’t your previous writing make it obvious to us all that he’s wrong?

Why not spend your time putting practical material that has some value in the physical world? Hell, even book or film reviews on survival subject would be more valuable than this screed. This sort of mental masturbation is why I come to this site rarely anymore.

Really dude. We get it. You’re right. Everyone else is wrong. You’ve ‘explicitly argued” your way into being boring and of little real use to me. More praxis less theory please.

Comment by Travis — 10 August 2007 @ 11:08 PM
I couldn’t care less about the dominant anything in modern anthropology.

That’s fine, as far as it goes, but I don’t think it’s exactly legitimate to talk about the paradigm that anthropologists have found most helpful in understanding other cultures as if it were my own idea, and not one of the most well-established ideas in the whole field.

It is one way of looking at things and it doesn’t mean that it should be the only way. That is exactly the sort of narrow-minded tunnel vision that got humanity in trouble in the first place.

It’s certainly one true way of seeing it, and a very enlightening way. There may be other enlightening ways to see it, and if you have one to offer, I’d be happy to discuss it. We do discuss some of those other ways from time to time, so it’s not a “narrow-minded tunnel vision,” it’s simply very useful.

Nor do I see much evidence that “narrow-minded tunnel vision” has much at all to do with our current crisis whatsoever, so you’ll need to explain that one.

Humans are clever creatures.

I see this as a wholly unsubstantiated claim.

Some of us might even be clever enough to figure out ways to retain some of the better parts of civilization without turning the world into an ashtray.

The “better parts of civilization” have nothing to do with civilization—they’re all universal to all human cultures, civilized or otherwise, and they all date back at least 40,000 years, making them four times older than civilization. So the “better parts of civilization” are simply that civilizations are a subset of human cultures, and there are certain elements that all human cultures need to function, even if only in the short term—even civilizations.

You’ve put forward that the only way that humans will be able to survive into perpituity is to return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles. To use your term, you’ve “explicitly argued” this concept. A person of average intelligence could come to the conclusion that, in your opinion, any other point of view, any other opinion of the prediciment we find our selves in, any other means of survival that doesn’t move directly toward the end point of hunter-gatherer is a, “protracted logical fallacy” or “superficial approach” or perhaps “dangerously naive.”

Perhaps, but that would be a very disingenuous and dishonest way of putting it, since “hunter-gatherer” is also a category so broad as to be almost useless: after all, all “hunter-gatherer” really means is “not a food producer.” To put it as you have makes it sound as if I’ve argued only for one, narrow possible future. In fact, what I’ve argued is that only one, narrow possible future will be eliminated.

Why do you continue to bother making verbose rebuttals to missives that are obviously so simple minded as to be laughable? Why bother writing anything about Greer at all since he so wrong? Shouldn’t your previous writing make it obvious to us all that he’s wrong?

I refer back to my previous articles because I’ve grown tired of constantly repeating myself. You seem to be really picking up on the phrase “explicitly argued,” which I used in reply to your charge that I’m simply making undefended assumptions. That’s not true; I’ve defended them, at length, elsewhere. That I don’t retread the same ground endlessly isn’t something I think of as particularly negative.

But as much as I often disagree with Greer’s arguments, I certainly can’t deny that he makes them well and argues them persuasively. I wouldn’t call them “so simple minded as to be laughable” at all. As I said at the outset, I agree with Greer more than I don’t. It is, in fact, Greer’s intelligence that makes the few items we do disagree on all the more persuasive. That is why a rebuttal is in order. While I may have written these arguments before, I have not always put them together in quite the fashion that answers Greer’s latest arguments.

Why not spend your time putting practical material that has some value in the physical world? Hell, even book or film reviews on survival subject would be more valuable than this screed. This sort of mental masturbation is why I come to this site rarely anymore.

I fail to see how. Me telling you how I started a friction fire with a bow drill is not particularly helpful. You can find many descriptions of that elsewhere, written far better and with greater expertise than I can offer as someone learning it. Why should I duplicate the efforts of people writing field guides and other material who have already done it, and done it better? I began “The Storied Landscape” series because I found a niche that had not been filled already, but in general, I’m not terribly keen on duplicating the efforts of others when so much is still left to do. Call it “mental masturbation” if you wish, but I believe it has value, and I’m not alone in that. If that’s why you come to this site rarely anymore, well, I hope you can understand given the tone of your comments here why my first response to that would be, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”

Really dude. We get it. You’re right. Everyone else is wrong.

Do you often argue positions you think are wrong? Of course I think I’m right; if I didn’t think it was right, I wouldn’t think it, would I? There’s a difference between having reasons for the things you’ve concluded, and not being open to new arguments that you might be wrong. But that doesn’t mean you change your mind just because somebody trots out the same arguments you’ve debunked a dozen times already, either. Give me something new, something convincing, something that can stand up to scrutiny, and you’ll change my mind. It’s happened plenty of times before. What, do you think I was raised on anti-civilization philosophy? I used to be a faithful Catholic. Changing my mind is a regular occurence for me.

You’re not the first person to try to paint me as someone unwilling to listen, but that portrait just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, no matter how much you stomp your feet and cry about it. I’ve changed my mind, publicly, far too many times for that to hold. When I hear a good argument, I change my mind. But I have noticed that this is generally the response of people who can’t make good arguments, and become frustrated when I poke all the holes in all the reasons why I’m wrong. Then they tell me how I’ll never be convinced by a logical argument (which I have been, often), simply because their arguments were illogical and unconvincing.

…being boring and of little real use to me.

I’m sorry I haven’t catered to your personal desires. Please let me know what topics I should write on for the next week and I’ll get right on that. We have thousands of people who come here every day because they’re not bored, they’re actually fairly interested in what’s going on here. But fuck them. I want to know what you want, Travis. That’s what it’s all about. I mean, that’s why it’s the Travis Network.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2007 @ 12:04 AM
Jason, the studies I’m referring to are recent. As a matter of fact, I think if either of us is out of date, it’s you. Do you know about the Genographic Project? That’s a new thing. I was on their website, and their data showed the same damn thing I’ve been telling you. Are you disputing the Y chromosomal and mtdna results on the Genographic Project? Are you saying that haplogroup R1b isn’t by far, the most common haplogroup in western Europe today? Are you disputing the fact that R1b (and I and R1a) had been in Europe thousands of years before invading farmers made their way to southeastern Europe, and that the majority of Europeans carry these markers?

Comment by Anonymous — 11 August 2007 @ 6:57 AM
In terms of Cuba and North Korea: look, North Korea may have poorer soil quality than Cuba, but they could’ve still planted urban gardens etc. They wouldn’t have been as productive as Cuba’s, perhaps, but they would’ve reduced the impact. So why didn’t they (the North Koreans) follow the Cuban example?

As for the Holocaust, the Jews were prosecuted for centuries, but: gas chambers? I mean, this was something new. Even if you wanted to argue that some kind of prosecution of Jews was inevitable, well, they could’ve just had their wealth confiscated; they could’ve just been put in camps and fed a semi-adequate diet and not killed. You can’t explain the Holocaust, in all its gruesome detail, by climate, soil quality, and what have you.

I mean, I could go on, but what’s the point? Nothing I say is going to convince you. You’re going to tell yourself that my arguments are not convincing, and the reason you’ll be able to pull it off is because I haven’t proven my case. And of course, it is impossible for me to prove my case because your position is not falsifiable. I mean, how could it be falsified? By finding two groups having the exact same set of material conditions to deal with and yet acting in different ways. And since no two groups have ever lived under identical material conditions, this is impossible to do. And so you’ll always be able to point to some difference or other in the material circumstances and say that, well obviously, given these major differences, group A had to act as it did, just as group B had to act as it did. So, for the readers of this site, I’ve made my case. For you: nothing I say will change your mind, so I won’t bother continuing this debate.

Comment by Hasha — 11 August 2007 @ 9:03 AM
Hasha –

Don’t give up… Jason and I have been having this same argument for years and, well, yes, over that time I have made a subtle impact on his approach…. as he says, he is willing to learn when he finds compelling new info — problem is, so few people get into subtleties that often it is hard to relate on the blog that it IS subtleties that are being addressed

Fair, J?

Janene

Comment by janene — 11 August 2007 @ 10:03 AM
North Korea’s so used to famine at this point, just like China, that trying to avoid it by following an example from halfway around the world would be a fairly shocking development, I think. As for the Holocaust, well yes, of course gas chambers. The world wars were basically about the shift in fossil fuels, with Britain shifting to petroleum, and Germany still quite rich in coal. What else could a German genocide be but engineered and industrial in nature?

The details, as you say, are much more amenable to change. Under different circumstances, and you might have had more or fewer gypsies involved in the Holocaust, for example, or you might have had some industrial method other than gas chambers for killing large numbers of people instead. It’s just the general outline that would remain the same. For the Holocaust, you’re really looking at a very large population of Jews that would be killed, and killed along German lines (industrialized, engineered, in Germany, etc.) But, for instance, it may not have been inevitable that the Nazis also involved any kind of esoteric, pagan revival (although, as the culmination of the Romantic movement, which was the backlash against the Enlightenment, which was the backlash against the medieval “Age of Faith,” which was the legacy of the Roman Empire, maybe it was). The large-scale movements of history seem quite set by material factors, and fairly easy to predict because of that. The reason predictions so often go awry is that we give so much more credence to details than they deserve.

As far as being falsifiable, to be fair, your position isn’t falsifiable, either. That’s the problem with history. Really, the question should be, which perspective is more useful? But focusing on trying to change my mind, or me focusing on trying to change yours, might not be the most useful path to take. A good debate airs out a lot of information and perspectives, and that’s good in its own terms, don’t you think? I hear what you’re saying, but as you said, I don’t find them particularly convincing. The arguments I mentioned about North Korea vs. Cuba, the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb and industrialization weren’t justifications I made up on the spot, if you think I’m just throwing up whatever I can find; I’ve actually made all of those arguments independently already. It’s just that for your examples of how materialism fails, you happened to pick things I already saw as examples of the influence of materialism.

It’s not necessary to find two groups with identical material resources, though. Actually, I very much appreciated Michael Holmes’ book on the question of a historical King Arthur precisely because it set up a kind of “control case” by establishing the many parallels between late Roman Britain and late Roman Gaul, and explored how their histories diverged from there. Unfortunately, the reason once again came down to material causes, I think: the Anglo-Saxon invasion was much slower than Clovis’ rapid conquest, so that Roman language, law and traditions survived in Frankia, while in Angle-land there was much more hatred built up, which led to more cultural replacement (even though the Anglo-Saxons ended up being a fairly small minority ruling over a British underclass).

But, for instance, if you want to compare North Korea vs. Cuba’s response to limited oil in terms of how they approached cultivation, I would say that Cuba’s productiveness and long history as a highly productive agricultural area, vs. Korea’s millennia-long history of impoverished soil and endemic famine are far from trivial details.

Anonymous, sure, there are still modern studies making that case. It’s not undisputed. But it’s been a good 20 years since the idea of demic diffusion was even a marginal one; in that time, it’s become the prevailing view. Actually, you’ll note one of the studies above directly takes issue with the Genographic Project, arguing that Y chromosome evidence points to demic diffusion, also. At this point, it’s the widespread survival of European hunter-gatherers that’s become the marginal view, so if you haven’t heard of it, I don’t think you’ve read very widely on this question.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2007 @ 10:35 AM
North Korea’s so used to famine at this point, just like China, that trying to avoid it by following an example from halfway around the world would be a fairly shocking development, I think.

Exactly. The Koreans have a long history of famines, which is why their culture tells them that famine is normal, which is why, when faced with the threat of yet another one, they don’t even bother looking for alternatives even though (as we’ve seen in Cuba) alternatives (or at least palliatives) are, in principle, there. That’s a dialectic for you: material conditions influence culture which then influences the response to material conditions.

And now I’m really dropping this debate.

Comment by Hasha — 11 August 2007 @ 10:52 AM
Well, through the years Koreans have tried a number of ways to try to end the constant famine, so I’m not sure you can say that they don’t try. It’s just that those attempts always fail, because of the climate, soil and other conditions, like we discussed in “Oriental Myths.” Korea follows much the same pattern as China, just without much of China’s ecological wealth. Had Pyongyang tried to follow the same course as Havana, I’m not sure it would have succeeded.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2007 @ 10:56 AM
Hasha writes: “You can’t explain the Holocaust, in all its gruesome detail, by climate, soil quality, and what have you.”

Just an historical point here: the Holocaust was a direct result of concerns related to climate, soil quality and all that. The Nazis had an ideology called Lebensraum, or “living space,” which stated that the pure Aryan race did not have enough farmland in Germany to support itself properly and so other lands were required. The Nazis wanted to expand to the east, into Russia, and thought they could do it with the help of the Russians, but then came to believe that the Bolshevik revolution had been the work of Jews. So instead of expanding east through an alliance with Russia, they invaded, and when they did they started rounding up the Jews there and putting them in concentration camps so they wouldn’t threaten the Germans’ lebensraum. After time they didn’t know what to do with all the Jews so they initiated the “final solution.”

Comment by Paula — 11 August 2007 @ 11:06 AM
I realize I’m being completely and utterly irrational & unreasonable to continue posting in this thread, but I just couldn’t let this one go.

The Nazis wanted to expand to the east, into Russia, and thought they could do it with the help of the Russians, but then came to believe that the Bolshevik revolution had been the work of Jews.

And why on Earth would they have believed such a thing? It may or may not be true that there was a significant number of Jews among the Bolshevik leaders, I honestly don’t know. But what would possibly induce anyone to believe that this had anything at all to do with your average Jew in Germany or anywhere else, for that matter? (Or are you going to suggest, Paula, that this was indeed a reasonable conclusion on the part of the German leadership?) If there hadn’t already been a deeply ingrained hatred/resentment/whatever of Jews (which is a matter of culture, of course, although it may very well be that such cultural constructs were influenced by all kinds of material factors) , such a preposterous idea never would’ve occurred to anyone. Sure, the Germans may have wanted to spread East, but from this desire to the idea that it was the millions of Jews who were somehow responsible for the fact that this proved to be difficult/impossible, to the systematic extermination of those millions of Jews… Well, you need some really twisted ideology, that is, some really twisted culture. Without the understanding of the specifics of stereotypes and ideologies (culture!) floating around in the German society, you could never, ever understand the leap from the German desire for more land in the East to the murder of 6,000,000 Jews.

Comment by Hasha — 11 August 2007 @ 11:59 AM
And why on Earth would they have believed such a thing?

Because they were a bunch of crazy, paranoid anti-Semites. The real question is how a bunch of crazy, paranoid anti-Semites managed to take over the country, and that’s largely because most of Germany had been made crazy, paranoid and anti-Semitic.

The roots of anti-Semitism lie in two basic human reactions, both of which are quite adaptive in their normal context. First is the close-knit Jewish community; second is the tendency to see a close-knit community as a “clique.” Judaism survived the Babylonian Exile by forming tightly-knit communities and preserving their identity in exile. That became crucial in the Diaspora. That leads to an escalation; the more cliquish the group is seen as, the more persecution they face, and the more closely-knit they become. When you’re neighbors with a tightly-knit community that’s pulling together to help each other, while everyone else has fallen on hard times, it’s easier for people to become suspicious and paranoid. You get crazy things like an international Jewish conspiracy, or the Bolshevik Revolution being a Jewish conspiracy. Run that escalation over some three thousand years, and you’ll come up with something very much like the Holocaust.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2007 @ 12:18 PM
Your last post makes perfect sense, Jason. What I fail to understand, though, is how you fail to see the workings of a dialectic here. A certain set of material factors leads to a certain kind of adaptation on the part of the Jews, which in turn leads to the formation of a particular set of beliefs/stereotypes about the Jews on the part of the Germans, and then, based in part on these stereotypes (culture!!), the Germans go ahead and come up with the Holocaust, which (apart from these stereotypes etc.) makes no sense whatsoever in the material context (I mean, it’s not as though the extermination of all those Jews was somehow going to help them win the war, or expand to the East). In fact, the Holocaust was, in purely material terms, and from the German perspective, totally counter-productive (since it represented a resource drain, and therefore, if anything, hampered the war effort); so why didn’t the stereotypes about the Jews change when the material circumstances made them counter-productive?

Comment by Hasha — 11 August 2007 @ 1:09 PM
I understand the dialectic, but let’s take a closer look at it. If you start with material forces acting, then you’ll get cultural forces which will act in the same direction, reinforcing and accelerating that flow, which may compound with even more material forces. So material forces shape culture. What about the inverse? If we begin with just a cultural change, will that change the material base? No; the cultural change simply withers away and dies out because it has no basis in the material world. So it’s not that culture’s unimportant; it does reinforce existing trends. But it’s not capable to changing the basic structure of history, either, because it can’t make any changes on its own; it can only reinforce changes made by more material factors.

But the Holocaust was anything but a resource drain. The concentration camps provided a very useful pool of slave labor and a means of appropriating significant private wealth for the state, without which the Nazi regime would not have lasted nearly as long as it did. We’re still dealing with countries and corporations that grew rich on stolen Jewish wealth from the Holocaust. Obviously it was anything but counter-productive.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 11 August 2007 @ 1:29 PM
Jewish wealth undoubtedly gave the German economy and war effort a boost; but wealth could’ve been confiscated without killing anyone (or at least, without killing anyone who didn’t complain). And I’m sure that slave labor, in and of itself, constituted a boost, but the question is: at what cost? You needed to build those concentration camps, you needed a huge bureaucracy, and perhaps most importantly, you needed to relegate to the ‘Holocaust effort’ all those trains (and fuel) that could’ve been used toward directly for the war effort (to transport resources to the battlefield). And, unless I’m mistaken, one of the main reasons why the Germans lost the war was because they ran out of fuel! So all in all, I am far from convinced that, apart from the confiscation of wealth (which, as I said, could’ve been achieved far more benignly and far more cheaply), the Holocaust constituted anything like a boost to the German war effort.

More directly relevant to the topic at hand: I think you’d be hard pressed to find an explanation for the Holocaust that didn’t involve some kind of reference to the stereotypes etc. that the Germans had about the Jews. It’s not as though they had to exterminate the Jews in order to gain this or that vital resource, as though they were going to exterminate them ‘anyway’, and then came up with the whole anti-Jewish mythology in order to rationalize/justify what they’ve done. The mythology was there first, and if it hadn’t been, the Holocaust would never have happened. Confiscation of wealth? Maybe. Gas chambers? I really can’t see how.

Further… First of all, you seem to have changed your position somewhat. (Either that, or you failed to make yourself clear initially, or if you prefer, I misunderstood you.) You were originally claiming that ethics/religion/mythology/philosophy were mere epiphenomena, things that people come up with after the fact in order to rationalize what they’ve done (and what they were going to do ‘anyway’). Now you’re claiming that these things can reinforce the existing trends. This is an important distinction. Second, you are undoubtedly right that any ethics/religion/mythology/philosophy that is out of tune with the material reality will wither away and die. Of course, how could it possibly be otherwise? But the way I see it, while material conditions put constraints on what’s possible, they don’t completely determine the eventual outcome, because many different outcomes will be consistent with the initial material conditions. The details of the eventual outcome will depend on the particularities of your culture (as well accidents of various sorts, of course). And to be sure, not just any culture (mythology etc.) will be possible under a given set of material constraints; but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t many different paths that a particular group could follow and still be in tune with the material constants.

Comment by Hasha — 11 August 2007 @ 8:10 PM
Hasha writes: “Or are you going to suggest, Paula, that this was indeed a reasonable conclusion on the part of the German leadership?”

That was completely ridiculous, uncalled-for, and borderline offensive.

The fact is that I am inclined to agree with you in regard to cultures that arose from the Neolithic revolution in SE Asia (I don’t know enough about the chronology of other agricultural revolutions to have an opinion), but in the Nazi example it was the need for farmland that gave rise to the lebensraum ideology and the fetishization of agrarian life. If the need for farmland — i.e., the material conditions — hadn’t driven the lebensraum ideology to begin with, German anti-Semitism may have culminated in mass deportation instead of the “final solution.” This example does not support your argument.

As for how the Nazis came to their conlcusion that the Bolshevik revolution was driven by Jews, iirc there was a high-ranking Nazi official (whose name escapes me now) who had been in Moscow during the revolution, who came to that conclusion on his own and later convinced Hitler it was the case.

Comment by Paula — 12 August 2007 @ 2:10 PM
That was completely ridiculous, uncalled-for, and borderline offensive.

I got pretty pissed off by what seems to me to be a dogmatic adherence to cultural materialism. Hence that comment, which I suppose was a somewhat offensive. I apologize.

This example does not support your argument.

Except that it does. Come on. Find an explanation for the Holocaust that doesn’t involve any reference (explicit or implicit) to the anti-Jewish mythology. If the anti-Jewish mythology was really nothing but a rationalization devised after the fact to justify the extermination of Jews that was going to happen ‘anyway’, then that means that the Jews did in fact represent an obstacle to obtaining some vital resource or other, and therefore needed to be exterminated. If they didn’t represent such an obstacle but were merely perceived as representing it, then you need to explain where this perception came from. And how are you going to that without referring to the anti-Jewish mythology, which was present long before the so called ‘final solution’?

As for the high-ranking German official: he never would’ve reached any such conclusion, nor would he ever have managed to convince Hitler, if both this official, whoever he was, and Hitler, hadn’t already bought into the whole anti-Jewish mythology.

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 2:38 PM
BTW, Paula, maybe you thought that I was arguing that the Holocaust had nothing to do with climate, soil quality, etc.? That’s not at all what I’m arguing. What I’m arguing is that the Holocaust is not reducible to these things alone, and that the anti-Jewish mythology was an indispensable ‘ingredient’ without which the Holocaust never would’ve happened.

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 3:22 PM
Hasha — what you are asking me to explain, in effect, is where any justification for agrarian aggression against neighboring landholders comes from. Agriculturalists have been murdering and enslaving their neighbors to steal and work their land since the very beginning. They do this because they need that land for their crops to feed their populations. There are probably as many demonizations of neighboring ethnic groups as there are agricultural societies that require more land.

If you are looking for the root of anti-Semitism, it is possibly this: the Jews were one of the only cultures that set out to keep themselves separate from agriculturalist empire at its advent 12k-ish yrs ago in SE Asia. The notion taht Jews are a threat to empire is as old as history itself; their obstinate refusal to get with the pagan, agricultural, imperial program provided a viable alternative for all to see, and did in fact represent a threat to that program. And if that weren’t enough, the ancient Jews had the audacity to preserve and later record the sequence of events that led to imperial culture in the first place, thereby immortalizing their threat to pagan imperialism — not because Jews are evil and civilization is good, but in the same way that a witness to a crime is a threat to the criminal. Jewish culture is, and always has been, correct in its assessment of pagan agriculturalism.

Note that agriculturalist empire is precisely what the Nazis were trying to create. Whether any Nazi was ever conscious of all this is probably impossible to determine, but it seems telling to me that German anti-Semitism rose at approximately the same pace, over a similar interval of time, as Germans’ obsession with their own pagan, agrarian history. To me, the Holocaust was a 20th-century eruption of this very old aggression of taker culture against leaver culture.

There is no way to definitively prove any of this of course, but it fits the archeology and the mythology so far as I am aware.

For me the vital question that calls cultural materialism into question is why people started sticking seeds in the ground in the first place. It seems evident in Genesis mythology and in the explosion of symbolic representation that preceded mass-scale agriculture that some change in the culture occurred first, but no one knows for sure.

Comment by Paula — 12 August 2007 @ 4:34 PM
Sigh. We are really not communicated here. I am decidedly not asking for an explanation of how antisemitism came into being. What I am asking for is an explanation of the Holocaust that makes no reference whatsoever to antisemitism. Because antisemitism is a mythology. And, according to Jason’s original argument, as I understood it at least, mythology has no impact on how groups behave; mythology is nothing but an epiphenomenon devised after the fact, meant to rationalize/justify the actions that would’ve been committed anyway, and for purely material/economic reasons. So, I’m asking for a purely economic/materialistic explanation of the Holocaust. Explain, if you can, how the Holocaust made sense in purely economic terms. Because, according to Jason’s argument, antisemitism (as a mythology) in no way represented even a partial cause for the Holocaust; it was a mere rationalization, devised after the fact.

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 4:59 PM
If they didn’t represent such an obstacle but were merely perceived as representing it, then you need to explain where this perception came from.

That’s what I did, by way of explaining this:

If the anti-Jewish mythology was really nothing but a rationalization devised after the fact to justify the extermination of Jews that was going to happen ‘anyway’, then that means that the Jews did in fact represent an obstacle to obtaining some vital resource or other, and therefore needed to be exterminated.

Which is also an explanation of this:

So, I’m asking for a purely economic/materialistic explanation of the Holocaust.

I don’t know how plainer of English I can put it and I really don’t care to repeat myself again and again. You can choose to read what I already wrote, or not; it doesn’t really matter to me.

Comment by Paula — 12 August 2007 @ 5:22 PM
Well then, I don’t buy your explanation. The Germans would’ve needed to be in direct competition for some resource or other with the Jewish population, and the extermination of Jews would’ve needed to be the most efficient way of obtaining this resource. So what’s the resource? The land? It wasn’t Jewish land to begin with. Labor? But fuel and trains were in shorter supply than labor was; it just doesn’t make sense to use up all that fuel and employ all those trains (relatively scarce resources) in order to obtain cheap labor (a relatively abundant resource). Really, the only thing that would’ve made the extermination of Jews seem reasonable, and more importantly, urgent (so that it couldn’t wait until after the war when resources for such a major enterprise could’ve been expected to be more available) is an anti-Jewish mythology.

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 5:36 PM
Just out of curiosity, Paula: do you really, honest to God, believe that antisemitism, as a mythology, had nothing to do with the Holocaust? That it didn’t contribute anything at all? Not even a little bit?

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 5:44 PM
If your kids (or nephews/nieces, best friend’s grandchildren, whoever) asked you what the Holocaust was all about, you wouldn’t mention antisemitism as at least a partial cause/explanation?

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 5:49 PM
Jewish wealth undoubtedly gave the German economy and war effort a boost; but wealth could’ve been confiscated without killing anyone (or at least, without killing anyone who didn’t complain).

In general, killing everyone is the easiest way to grab all the wealth. See also the Albigensian Crusade (poorer northern French nobles siezing southern French wealth), or the dissolution of the Knights Templar (so King Philip could sieze the order’s wealth).

And I’m sure that slave labor, in and of itself, constituted a boost, but the question is: at what cost? You needed to build those concentration camps, you needed a huge bureaucracy, and perhaps most importantly, you needed to relegate to the ‘Holocaust effort’ all those trains (and fuel) that could’ve been used toward directly for the war effort (to transport resources to the battlefield). And, unless I’m mistaken, one of the main reasons why the Germans lost the war was because they ran out of fuel!

Wow. I was actually watching a documentary on the neo-Nazi pop group, “Prussian Blue” yesterday, and they used the exact same argument to suggest the Holocaust never happened. Not that that’s your argument, it’s just wierd to go from 0 to 2 mentions in as many days….

Anyway, that’s not a very good argument, because the Holocaust was demonstrably an incredibly profitable move for the Nazi regime. Whatever costs they incurred, they brought in far more than they spent. They ran out of fuel, but with all the wealth they stole from Europe’s Jewish population, they were able to keep the fuel a little longer than they would have otherwise.

So all in all, I am far from convinced that, apart from the confiscation of wealth (which, as I said, could’ve been achieved far more benignly and far more cheaply), the Holocaust constituted anything like a boost to the German war effort.

There was so much wealth generated for Germany by the Holocaust that there was still enough left over to found fortunes for IBM and the Bush family afterwards. There’s still fortunes of stolen Jewish wealth sitting in Swedish banks, waiting to be tracked down. It was an enormous boost to the German war effort. You are underestimating the amount of wealth it brought in, and overestimating its cost, both by an order of magnitude.

The mythology was there first, and if it hadn’t been, the Holocaust would never have happened. Confiscation of wealth? Maybe. Gas chambers? I really can’t see how.

Gas chambers had little to do with existing anti-Semitism. It made it cheaper to kill large numbers of people, that’s all. Sure, anti-Semitism had a long record. Martin Luther basically provided the outline of the Holocaust 400 years before Hitler was born. If beliefs had so much to do with it, why did it take four centuries for someone to act on it, and then only when it provided a material benefit? Those kinds of hatreds provide the perforations, the fault lines where things break when you pull on them, but that’s about all you can say for them.

Without the anti-Semitic furor boiling in Germany for a thousand years, the Holocaust still would have happened, because Germany needed a scapegoat, and it needed someone to rob. It just might have been a different group.

Now you’re claiming that these things can reinforce the existing trends. This is an important distinction

I’ve been saying that for a while. Upthread, you’ll see my claim was that ideology can’t change the direction of history, not that it’s completely without value.

But the way I see it, while material conditions put constraints on what’s possible, they don’t completely determine the eventual outcome, because many different outcomes will be consistent with the initial material conditions.

And under those circumstances, you’ll see pretty much everything possible pop up and contend, until a selective pressure acts on them. Which ones dominate will be determined by how well they each serve to reinforce the existing trends.

…German anti-Semitism may have culminated in mass deportation instead of the “final solution.” This example does not support your argument.

I doubt it would have culminated in anything at all. That anti-Semitism had formed a basic baseline for nearly a millennium before the Holocaust without the Holocaust happening. You can’t really point to a “cause” that existed for 1,000 years without ever causing its supposed effect, can you? Not that pogroms, persecutions and other atrocities didn’t happen, but they always needed some material impetus. The Crusades, for example, or the Black Death. When those happen, yes, the existing anti-Semitism pointed them towards the Jews first. But if the anti-Semitism hadn’t been there, things couldn’t have gone much differently; they would still need a group to blame. Who that group might be might have changed, but the consequences almost certainly wouldn’t.

I got pretty pissed off by what seems to me to be a dogmatic adherence to cultural materialism.

Well, I’m convinced by it, and so far I’m not convinced by the other explanations, but I wouldn’t say I’m being particularly dogmatic about it. It just fits the evidence in a way that the other explanations don’t, as above.

Come on. Find an explanation for the Holocaust that doesn’t involve any reference (explicit or implicit) to the anti-Jewish mythology.

Easy: Germany was defeated, broken and humiliated after the Treaty of Versailles. They needed someone to rob for material wealth, they needed land, and they needed someone to blame. So they picked group X to be the scapegoat, made a fortune taking everything they had just like previous mass robberies of its kind, and used them for slave labor for extra benefit.

Anti-Semitism only comes in to explain why group X was the Jews, and not some other group. Anti-Semitism on its own cannot explain the Holocaust, though, because then it should’ve happened with Martin Luther at its head during the Reformation, or at any time during the 1,000 years in which people were saying the Holocaust would be a great idea. Otherwise, why did people only act on that ideology when it became materially beneficial to do so?

f the anti-Jewish mythology was really nothing but a rationalization devised after the fact to justify the extermination of Jews that was going to happen ‘anyway’, then that means that the Jews did in fact represent an obstacle to obtaining some vital resource or other, and therefore needed to be exterminated.

Largely, yes, but it didn’t necessarily have to be the Jews. It had to happen to someone, but not necessarily the Jews. Could’ve been anybody. The anti-Semitism simply meant that the choice wasn’t random, but it didn’t change much of anything else. Even so, the Jews weren’t the only ones: Roma, Slavs, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, and many others also went to the concentration camps. So what does that say about the Holocaust as motivated by anti-Semitism? (Not that the people behind it weren’t anti-Semites, but the ultimate causes had more to do with Germany pulling off a large-scale robbery than the virulent anti-Semitism that simply simmered below the surface for 1,000 years.)

What I’m arguing is that the Holocaust is not reducible to these things alone, and that the anti-Jewish mythology was an indispensable ‘ingredient’ without which the Holocaust never would’ve happened.

Without it, it would’ve happened differently. Take away the anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust simply happens differently. Take away the degrading soils, and it doesn’t happen at all.

There are probably as many demonizations of neighboring ethnic groups as there are agricultural societies that require more land.

Sometimes such demonizations already conveniently exist (like the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda); sometimes, they’re just made up on the spot.

…but in the same way that a witness to a crime is a threat to the criminal. Jewish culture is, and always has been, correct in its assessment of pagan agriculturalism.

That’s a fascinating notion. Never considered that before. Hmmm.

Note that agriculturalist empire is precisely what the Nazis were trying to create. Whether any Nazi was ever conscious of all this is probably impossible to determine, but it seems telling to me that German anti-Semitism rose at approximately the same pace, over a similar interval of time, as Germans’ obsession with their own pagan, agrarian history.

They were certainly aware to some degree.

For me the vital question that calls cultural materialism into question is why people started sticking seeds in the ground in the first place. It seems evident in Genesis mythology and in the explosion of symbolic representation that preceded mass-scale agriculture that some change in the culture occurred first, but no one knows for sure.

That could be as simple as how they could best understand it, the same way we today think anti-Semitism had something to do with why the Holocaust happened, and not just how. We generally ascribe to ourselves far more autonomy and free will than we really deserve. It certainly seems that the origins of agriculture had a good deal to do with settlement, sunk costs, and changing climate, and very little to do with ideology.

And, according to Jason’s original argument, as I understood it at least, mythology has no impact on how groups behave; mythology is nothing but an epiphenomenon devised after the fact, meant to rationalize/justify the actions that would’ve been committed anyway, and for purely material/economic reasons.

You’re exaggerating my claim. The Holocaust was going to happen anyway; ideology determined who it would happen to, that it would happen to group A and not group B, but even if nobody in Germany had ever thought anything of a Jew except how wonderful they all are, the Holocaust would still have happened—it just would’ve happened to a different group. They needed the money, the slave labor, and somebody to blame. It was going to happen; the only question ideology got to answer was who would get the stick-up.

Explain, if you can, how the Holocaust made sense in purely economic terms.

It was enormously profitable. It was one of Nazi Germany’s principle sources of income, and even made a fortune for groups that worked with Germany.

The Germans would’ve needed to be in direct competition for some resource or other with the Jewish population, and the extermination of Jews would’ve needed to be the most efficient way of obtaining this resource. So what’s the resource? The land? It wasn’t Jewish land to begin with. Labor? But fuel and trains were in shorter supply than labor was; it just doesn’t make sense to use up all that fuel and employ all those trains (relatively scarce resources) in order to obtain cheap labor (a relatively abundant resource).

Primarily, money. And it was successful; the Germans made a lot more money than it cost them. Your argument is akin to saying that it’s not worhtwhile to haul tons of gold bars because that would cost fuel. You’re ignoring just how much more fuel you can buy with a few tons of gold bars. Sure, there were some minimal costs to execute the Holocaust, but it brought in so much disgustingly more money than it cost.

Really, the only thing that would’ve made the extermination of Jews seem reasonable, and more importantly, urgent (so that it couldn’t wait until after the war when resources for such a major enterprise could’ve been expected to be more available) is an anti-Jewish mythology.

I suppose, if you overestimate the cost of the whole endeavor by an order of magnitude, and then underestimate how much wealth it brought into the Nazi coffers by an order of magnitude, then the input and output would be about even. But in reality, it was disgustingly profitable for the Nazis.

If your kids (or nephews/nieces, best friend’s grandchildren, whoever) asked you what the Holocaust was all about, you wouldn’t mention antisemitism as at least a partial cause/explanation?

I’d mention that that’s why they decided to rob the Jews intead of someone else, but that’s really about it. It wasn’t a primary motivation, it didn’t cause the Holocaust, it just pointed out one of the main victims. Though, saying that the Holocaust was because of anti-Semitism would still not answer why so many Gentiles were killed in it, too.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 August 2007 @ 6:20 PM
Our major finding basically was that this was the greatest theft by a government in world history; that the Germans looted from the central banks of the countries they overran some $580 million in gold, which would be worth $5 ½ billion today; that they transferred the large part of that to Switzerland so that they could convert it into Swiss franks to purchase what they needed to sustain their war effort; that the role of the neutral countries and well-established principles of neutrality collided in the case of World War II with morality; and that many of the actions taken were really actions that—by all the neutral countries—this is not just Switzerland, but Sweden, Portugal, Spain—really contributed to prolonging the war effort.

— Stuart Eizenstat, U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce, News Hour, 7 May 1997

Emphasis added. Notice, also, when they were done killing people, they literally mined their bodies for gold, with special protocols to make sure no gold filling went un-extracted. The Holocaust killed some 11 million people; 6 million Jews. Almost half were Gentiles: 2-3 million Soviet POW’s, 1-1.5 million political prisoners, and up to half a million Roma being the largest Gentile groups.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 August 2007 @ 6:28 PM
Again, I am fully prepared to believe that the confiscation of wealth aided the German effort. Putting people in concentration camps and then killing them, I’m still far from convinced. Ultimately, it comes down to statistics. It possible that someone has done this kind of comprehensive work. It’s also possible that people have shied away from it due to fear of controversy. But anyway.

Further, the fact that it was (primarily) the Jews and not some other group might seem like a minor detail to you, but it would hardly seem that way to someone whose family perished in Auschwitz. (Or to the Muslims in the Middle East, for that matter, who would quite likely not have to deal with a Jewish state in their neighborhood - or on their very land, in the case of the Palestinians - today if the Germans had had the ‘courtesy’ to vilify another group.)

And as for Germany needing a scapegoat after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles… We are again talking about mythology (scapegoat as a mythological figure). If mythology counts for next to nothing, why bother looking for a scapegoat?

But I wanted to approach all this cultural materialism business somewhat differently. The way I see it, the world we live in is an infinitely complex thing, something we’ll never understand completely. That, of course, doesn’t mean we’ll never understand anything and that we might as well quit trying. It does mean that, no matter how much you think you know about something, it’ll always be possible to come up with other illuminating ways of looking at the same thing. Now, how do we go about understanding the world? Well, we have all kinds of tools. Cultural materialist approach is one tool. A great tool, really. Works best when you’re trying to understand broad outlines of historical events.

So we’ve got this huge war in the middle of the 20th century. The whole world involved in one way or another. Tens of millions of casualties. What on Earth was that all about? Must be that people were fighting over some vital resources. What were these resources? Why exactly were alliances formed the way they were formed? Etc.

And then you start getting down to the details, and now it doesn’t make sense to try to explain them in purely materialistic/economic terms. How interesting, for instance, that in the United States, the Japanese were vilified considerably more than were the Germans! What was that all about? Pearl Harbor for one thing. But then there’s this really curious phenomenon: racism. Or in Germany, they killed all these Jews. What was that all about? Well, they needed wealth, for one thing. But why this huge paranoia about the Jewish conspiracy? Why the urgency to kill all these people, rather than simply confiscate their wealth? Ah, but they needed a scapegoat after the humiliation of the previous war! And then there was this antisemitism business. And that leader of theirs was both completely deranged and hugely charismatic.

And so on and so forth.

As you can see, I’m throwing into the mix some purely materialistic factors, some mythological factors, some personality traits… Basically, I’m being eclectic in my use of tools for explaining as many details of the WWII as I can. What’s wrong with that? Of course, you could dig deeper and ask where racism and antisemitism came from, and it may very well be that the cultural materialist approach will give you some good results here. But whether or not it gives you valuable results on this front, what I’d like you to acknowledge is that antisemitism was one of the direct causes of Holocaust as we’ve seen it, and that racism was one of the direct causes for the differences in the treatment of Americans of Japanese vs. German heritage.

Another way of making this last point, and in a more general way… See, I don’t necessarily think that everything is ‘ultimately’ traceable to material causes, but I don’t really have much of a problem with your thinking that it is. Provided, that is, that you’re not too serious about it. And what do I mean by that?

Analogy: Galileo thought that the ‘great book of Nature’ was written in the ‘language of mathematics’. Take this too literally and too dogmatically, and you wind up with nonsense like the distinction between the primary qualities (those that can be measured) and secondary qualities (those that cannot). Or, as Derrick Jensen has written: “if it doesn’t fit the model, it doesn’t exist.” See, I am far from convinced that everything is ‘ultimately’ explainable by mathematics. But I don’t have much of a problem with a person thinking that it is, as long as that person is willing to say something like “Why, this is a really curious thing. While I have no doubt whatsoever that it could somehow be translated into the language of mathematics, I have no clue how one might go about doing such a thing. So for the time being, let’s forget about mathematics, and let’s focus on those properties of this thing that we are able to observe.”

Similar with cultural materialism. It may very well be that racism and antisemitism have roots in some kind of competition for resources or what have you. If you want to go explore that, then that’s great, good luck, and you might very well obtain good results. Or maybe you won’t. But in either case, if we’re just focusing on making sense of WWII, we want to know why the Jews were exterminated, then your current ability or inability to find the material roots of antisemitism should have no influence on your willingness to acknowledge that antisemitism, whatever its background was, played an important part.

Antisemitism (a particular kind of mythology) was a direct cause (or at least one of the direct causes). If you want to look for the causes of that, be my guest. But Hitler was directly motivated by a fierce hatred of Jews. Indirectly? Oh, by the Babylonian exile, and by Jewish tribalism, and all that… But directly: by his hatred. And I don’t want to be obliged to discuss all the ‘ultimate causes’ when I say that the direct cause was antisemitism (mythology). Indeed, if I’m just trying to understand the WWII, then focusing on those ‘ultimate causes’ seems like a somewhat unproductive use of my time and energy.

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 9:28 PM
Further, the fact that it was (primarily) the Jews and not some other group might seem like a minor detail to you, but it would hardly seem that way to someone whose family perished in Auschwitz. (Or to the Muslims in the Middle East, for that matter, who would quite likely not have to deal with a Jewish state in their neighborhood - or on their very land, in the case of the Palestinians - today if the Germans had had the ‘courtesy’ to vilify another group.)

So what? If it had been 6 million Roma, rather than 6 million Jews, it would hardly seem that way to someone whose family perished in the hypothetical concentration camp that might’ve existed in some other town other than Auschwitz, and it would mean the same to Egyptians forced to give land to some hypothetical Roma state that might have followed, had things gone that way instead. A lost life is a lost life, and whether it’s Jews being massacred, Roma being massacred or any other group being massacred, what group is being massacred is a trivial detail. What matters is that a group of people are massacred.

And as for Germany needing a scapegoat after the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles… We are again talking about mythology (scapegoat as a mythological figure). If mythology counts for next to nothing, why bother looking for a scapegoat?

The mythology’s just how it’s consciously understood. Germans were saddled with the full cost of WW1, which they couldn’t pay. They needed someone to pay it for them—a scapegoat.

And then you start getting down to the details, and now it doesn’t make sense to try to explain them in purely materialistic/economic terms.

Material concerns don’t motivate individuals very much. By the same token, ideological concerns don’t motivate groups.

How interesting, for instance, that in the United States, the Japanese were vilified considerably more than were the Germans! What was that all about? Pearl Harbor for one thing. But then there’s this really curious phenomenon: racism.

The other element being that Japan and the U.S. were in a real contest for the Pacific. As much as FDR wanted to join the war in Europe, the country wouldn’t have it; they had no stake in Europe. A fine example; it was FDR’s ideology (he liked Britain) that made him want to get involved in Europe, but the material concern wasn’t there. When it did arrive, with Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was still much more interested in Japan than Germany. Sure, racism reinforced it, but that racism had its roots in the fact that the U.S. and Japan were rivals.

Or in Germany, they killed all these Jews. What was that all about? Well, they needed wealth, for one thing. But why this huge paranoia about the Jewish conspiracy? Why the urgency to kill all these people, rather than simply confiscate their wealth? Ah, but they needed a scapegoat after the humiliation of the previous war! And then there was this antisemitism business. And that leader of theirs was both completely deranged and hugely charismatic.

Well yes, of course it exists, and if you want to study it, it’s certainly a fascinating question. But the original question was whether ideology shapes the course of history in any significant way. The examples we’ve been discussing certainly point to a negative answer to that; the examples we’ve been looking at were all shaped by material forces. Naturally, ideology played a part, but always a bit part, determining no more than minor details.

Basically, I’m being eclectic in my use of tools for explaining as many details of the WWII as I can. What’s wrong with that?

Absolutely nothing. Unless you’re simply eclectic for its own sake. If you reject the best explanation simply because you’ve used it before, then you’re being just as dogmatic as if you were to insist that everything must be seen through the same lens. I’m not dogmatic about cultural materialism; I simply have yet to find an example that can be better understood through any other lens. Such an example could well exist, I just don’t know what it is.

…what I’d like you to acknowledge is that antisemitism was one of the direct causes of Holocaust as we’ve seen it, and that racism was one of the direct causes for the differences in the treatment of Americans of Japanese vs. German heritage.

“As we’ve seen it”? Well, sure, with that caveat. The precise details of any historical event would no doubt be changed if you radically altered the underlying ideologies. No end of names and dates would be rearranged. Without anti-Semitism, the Holocaust would’ve happened to some other group than Jews; Adolf Hitler would be replaced by someone with a vaguely similar personality, but a different age and name; the Nazi party would still be pretty much the same, but it would have a different name, different uniforms, and so on. It still would have been Germany vs. Britain & the U.S., and the course of the war would still have gone generally the same, but battles would have occured at slightly different places, at slightly different times, with different names. All the details would be rearranged, even though it would still add up to the same basic picture.

Of course, that’s what I meant when I said that ideology really has no ability to change the basic course of history.

See, I am far from convinced that everything is ‘ultimately’ explainable by mathematics. But I don’t have much of a problem with a person thinking that it is, as long as that person is willing to say something like “Why, this is a really curious thing.”

Well sure, there may well be some historical event out there for which some other view gives us a better understanding than cultural materialism. I’m sure it exists, even though I don’t know what it would be. Cultural materialism isn’t the only valid point of view, it’s simply the most useful one I know. I find even the things where people usually say it doesn’t help, it still explains those things better than the alternatives. But everywhere? I may not know of any exceptions, but I’m sure they exist, somewhere.

But in either case, if we’re just focusing on making sense of WWII, we want to know why the Jews were exterminated, then your current ability or inability to find the material roots of antisemitism should have no influence on your willingness to acknowledge that antisemitism, whatever its background was, played an important part.

If your question is why it was the Jews, and not some other group, then yes, that’s absolutely a question about ideology, and you’ll want to trace the history of anti-Semitism in Germany to answer that.

But if the question is whether “changing minds” could have averted the Holocaust—or, the original question you challenged me on, whether the ethics of permaculture would actually have an impact on any group’s behavior all by themselves—then I’d say no. It was material need that drove the Holocaust; anti-Semitism just fingered the victim. And permacultural groups in the future will do what all societies have always done: whatever’s in their best interest, and their philosophers will come up with some ethical code to justify it. Just look how quickly Christianity began baptizing soldiers and developing a full-blown “just war” theology once it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, setting aside 400 years of strict non-violence at the drop of a hat.

Antisemitism (a particular kind of mythology) was a direct cause (or at least one of the direct causes). If you want to look for the causes of that, be my guest. But Hitler was directly motivated by a fierce hatred of Jews. Indirectly? Oh, by the Babylonian exile, and by Jewish tribalism, and all that… But directly: by his hatred. And I don’t want to be obliged to discuss all the ‘ultimate causes’ when I say that the direct cause was antisemitism (mythology). Indeed, if I’m just trying to understand the WWII, then focusing on those ‘ultimate causes’ seems like a somewhat unproductive use of my time and energy.

Saying that it was caused by Hitler’s hatred seems like a completely insufficient answer to me. How did Hitler get into a position where his personal hatred mattered so much? Why did his hatred matter so much more than equally virulent anti-Semites throughout German history, like Martin Luther? Ultimately, what does Hitler’s hatred really matter? It’s only relevant because he was put into that position. As Jesus answered Pilate, “You would have no authority over me, unless it had been given from above; for this reason he who delivered me to you has the greater sin.” (John 19:11)

The view that leaders are relevant to history is a view that leaders would like us very much to take, but the fact of the matter is they only hold their power because they represent something the people want, otherwise they would be removed. So the personalities and whims of leaders rarely mean much to the major course of history, except in its fine details; the better questions are things like, why do those people want that?

Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 August 2007 @ 10:04 PM
Different victim and you’d have a different map of the Middle East today. (Of course, I wouldn’t be too surprised if you argued that, obviously, you’d still have Israel anyway, which would obviously behave in the same way as it’s behaving now; or even if you didn’t, the situation in the Middle East would obviously, for all practical purposes, still be the same, because of this or that reason that you’ll doubtless be able to come up with.)

But anyway. Reading you, it seems clear to me that you’re being quite dogmatic. Not that I expect to convince you that this is so…

Comment by Hasha — 12 August 2007 @ 10:39 PM
Well, Zionism did exist well before WW2. And if you look at groups like al-Qa’ida, they don’t even get to Israel except as an afterthought. The Western interest in the Middle East can be seen back with T.E. Lawrence, for example, before WW2. I’m not sure what you mean by calling me dogmatic, though; you’re the one telling me how regardless of evidence, having a good counter-argument somehow invalidates my position. To my mind, that’s what it means to take a dogmatic stance; having evidence just means, well, that you have evidence. But I suppose that just proves I’m dogmatic? You were mentioning unfalsifiable positions earlier?

Comment by Jason Godesky — 12 August 2007 @ 11:03 PM
What about suburban backyards? With a declinig population will all these lawns once cleared maybe be suitable for agriculture and prolong dependence on it?

Comment by Joe Potter-Butler — 13 August 2007 @ 12:01 AM
A lot of them could become backyard gardens, but those aren’t sufficient for subsistence. Peak Oil authors have focused a great deal on suburbia, and they’re largely correct, I think: they’re far too car-oriented to survive. Transforming a suburban community into a sustainable horticultural village will be a much bigger challenge that turning an urban neighborhood into one.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 August 2007 @ 7:41 AM
‘The Greenland Norse are a bad example; you’re not talking about ethics here. They didn’t look at the fish and think, “I shouldn’t eat that because that’s wrong.” They never even thought of it at all. The cultural construction of food is a very different thing than morality or ethics. The Greenland Norse refusal to eat fish was no more an ethical stance than your average modern American’s refusal to eat dandelions or tree bark or rocks. Those things just aren’t food’

Unless you know something I don’t, it’s a mystery what the Greenland Norse were (or were not) thinking when they failed to eat fish. No explanation that I’ve heard has been very compelling. Beyond the plain fact that they didn’t eat fish, it’s all speculation.

Comment by Nora — 13 August 2007 @ 9:36 PM
That’s not quite true. The Greenland Norse were descended from people in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark that ate a great deal of fish. But they also came through a population bottleneck: Eric the Red & co. were the original settlers, and they were all descended, to one degree or another, from them. That actually makes the origin pretty clear: the original populating group didn’t like fish. I personally find Jared Diamond’s suggestion of “Eric’s tummy ache” pretty compelling. Food taboos stick, long and fast. We all have experience with how just one bad experience can put us off a particular food for years, or even forever. That’s quite adaptive: it keeps us from poisoning ourselves, and it means we learn quick. Rats are even worse: they can’t throw up, and because of that, they’re extremely picky eaters. They’ll nibble at something new a very tiny bit, and if anything goes wrong, they’ll never go near anything remotely like it ever again, so long as they live. And it’s certainly true that ill-prepared seafood can produce some of the very worst food poisoning. It’s hardly unlikely that such an incident might have occurred with Eric the Red, leading to fish being strictly ruled out at all the major functions. Since the habits of the ruling class have a way of filtering down fairly quickly, since everyone tries to emulate the ruling class, and that goes doubly for such a small population, fish could have simply dropped from the diet, and in a generation or two become so far removed from anything any of them had ever eaten that the notion that fish could be food would be as alien to them as eating bull penises to us. Sure, we may be remotely aware that somewhere out there, people eat bull penises, but is there any level of desperation where you’ll look at a bull penis and immediately think. “Dinner”? So with the Greenland Norse and fish.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 August 2007 @ 9:47 PM
Is it possible heavy investment in nuclear power and eletric vehicles could keep the present way of things going at least for a while longer?

Comment by Joe Potter-Butler — 14 August 2007 @ 4:07 AM
No. See “Splitting the Atom” on nuclear power, and “The World’s Biggest Machine is Breaking Down.” Those are both part of the “Dei ex Machinis” series, which goes through the various “alternatives” we have, and why none of them pan out. There’s also “Do you believe in magic?” on biofuels, “The Other Fossil Fuel” on coal, “Sermon to the Sun Worshippers,” on photovoltaics, and “The Mr. Potato Head Economy” on the idea of using a mix of such sources.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 August 2007 @ 8:38 AM
I’m not continuing this debate. I just wanted to say ‘goodbye’ to everyone here: I won’t be posting on this blog anymore, at least not in anything resembling the near future.

For one thing, I feel highly uncomfortable with any way of thinking that seeks to reduce human anything to simple formulas, which is what cultural materialism, as I understand it, does.

Second, Jason, discussing things with you feels like being run over by a truck. Honestly. You just refuse to budge even when people make good arguments. I’m not just talking about the one at hand, and I am not just talking about other discussions/debates that you and I have had, but also about just about any debate of yours that I’ve followed, even when I didn’t participate at all except as a reader. It’s a stile, and in fact, there are some goods things to be said for it, but I don’t want to deal with it. I am certainly not telling you to change anything: this is your blog, and the content and stile of your posts should be the way you think is best. Just as this is my time and my energy, and I should be spending them the way I see fit. And under the circumstances, I simply cannot justify to myself spending any more of either on this blog.

I’m not saying I haven’t gotten quite a bit out of reading your work; I have, but now it’s time to move on.

I wish you all the best. For a variety of reasons, I’ve never been convinced that you’ll make it as a hunter-gatherer. I do, however, hope that you will: the world needs a lot more wild (or feral, whatever) humans than it’s got.

Farewell.

Comment by Hasha — 14 August 2007 @ 11:55 AM
I’m certainly sorry to hear that; you always brought a valued perspective, Hasha. I may not have agreed with it, but I do think disagreement is a very healthy thing.

I don’t think I’ve ever ignored a good argument, though. “You just refuse to budge even when people make good arguments.” I don’t see that at all. I don’t budge when people make bad arguments, but good arguments? I’ve changed because of good arguments frequently, often in ways that have cost me a great deal personally. I don’t see materialism as a “reduction” or constriction, either, any more than, say, gravity. But obviously these are the kinds of disagreements you’re having trouble with. As I said, I’ve always valued disagreement, and I’ve always valued your contribution, so I’m sorry to see you go. But ultimately, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, so I wish you all the best.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 August 2007 @ 12:53 PM
“Resources and reserves

It is estimated that there is 4.7 million tonnes of uranium ore reserves (economically mineable) known to exist, while 35 million tonnes are classed as mineral resources (reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction).[32] An additional 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium are estimated to be in sea water (Japanese scientists in the 1980s proved that extraction of uranium from sea water using ion exchangers was feasible).[33][34]

Exploration for uranium is continuing to increase with US$200 million being spent world wide in 2005, a 54% increase on the previous year.[32]

Australia has 38% of the world’s uranium ore resources - the most of any country.[35] In fact, the world’s largest single uranium deposit is located at the Olympic Dam Mine in South Australia.[36] Almost all the uranium is exported, under strict International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards to satisfy the Australian people and government that none of the uranium is used in nuclear weapons. As of 2006, the Australian government was advocating an expansion of uranium mining, although issues with state governments and indigenous interests complicate the issue.[37]

The largest single source of uranium ore in the United States was the Colorado Plateau located in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. The U.S. federal government paid discovery bonuses and guaranteed purchase prices to anyone who found and delivered uranium ore, and was the sole legal purchaser of the uranium. The economic incentives resulted in a frenzy of exploration and mining activity throughout the Colorado Plateau from 1947 through 1959 that left thousands of miles of crudely graded roads spider-webbing the remote deserts of the Colorado Plateau, and thousands of abandoned uranium mines, exploratory shafts, and tailings piles. The frenzy ended as suddenly as it had begun, when the U.S. government stopped purchasing the uranium.” A quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#_note-stanfordCohen

Is this wrong? I read your”Splitting the Atom” article. Still not sure.

What I’ve read on this site and elsewhere has me pretty convinced that the agricultural revolution was a mistake from the point of view of our species and the planet generally. Will it be undone by the depletion of fossil fuels? Not yet convinced.

Comment by Joe Potter-Butler — 14 August 2007 @ 6:10 PM
Not wrong so much as looking in the wrong direction. Uranium production can’t replace fossil fuels, because it takes so much fossil fuel to get the uranium. And it looks like uranium production peaked back in the 1980’s. Expanding exploration is not the same as expanding finding, after all.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 August 2007 @ 6:16 PM
So you’re saying that even with the whole extracting from seawater possibility, there’ll be no overlap where, before the depletion of fossil fuels, the nuclear ball will be rolling well enough so that when fossil fuels ARE depleted, electric vehicles can pick up where internal combustion left off and we’ll be able to use uranium (through nuclear power) to obtain more uranium. Just like we use fossil fuels to obtain more fossil fuels currently. “An additional 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium are estimated to be in sea water (Japanese scientists in the 1980s proved that extraction of uranium from sea water using ion exchangers was feasible).” Does anyone have a rough guess how long that much uranium could help to maintain the status quo? Seems like there’s a lot of uncertainties to me.

Comment by Joe Potter-Butler — 16 August 2007 @ 7:56 PM
…even with the whole extracting from seawater possibility…

There’s extremely little uranium in sea water to extract. It really doesn’t change much.

…before the depletion of fossil fuels, the nuclear ball will be rolling well enough so that when fossil fuels ARE depleted, electric vehicles can pick up where internal combustion left off and we’ll be able to use uranium (through nuclear power) to obtain more uranium.

Considering that uranium production has already peaked, no. Uranium production has been dropping since the 1980’s, so the idea that you could ramp up a peaked resource is a little silly.

“An additional 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium are estimated to be in sea water (Japanese scientists in the 1980s proved that extraction of uranium from sea water using ion exchangers was feasible).” Does anyone have a rough guess how long that much uranium could help to maintain the status quo? Seems like there’s a lot of uncertainties to me.

You hear statistics like this all the time, and 99.999% of them are completely bunk. If it were really so profitable, why hasn’t it been done? We have a highly competitive society. That kind of edge would make someone a fortune. If we look a little deeper, that statement on Wikipedia has two sources: one is broken, and the other has some pretty suspect arithmetic.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 August 2007 @ 8:11 PM
So I did a few minutes of research on obtaining seawater from uranium; there could be a great deal of uranium in seawater, but it’s not economical to extract it.

Technology already exists to separate this uranium from seawater, but currently its cost far exceeds the cost of conventional uranium mining. Nonetheless, the potential for such seawater uranium extraction holds considerable interest for countries like Japan where other sources of energy are lacking.¹

The recovery cost was estimated to be 5-10 times of that from mining uranium. More than 80% of the total cost was occupied by the cost for marine equipment for mooring the adsorbents in seawater, which is owning to a weight of metal cage for adsorbents. Thus, the cost can be reduced to half by the reduction of the equipment weight to 1/4. Improvement of adsorbent ability is also a problem for future research since the cost directly depends on the adsorbent performance.²

So, even if this works (and the study ignores the fact that making the cage lighter also makes it more prone to breaking), you’re still talking about reducing it by half, which is still 2.5-5 times more expensive than mining. These kinds of things matter a great deal, because it’s EROEI that matters more than simply how much material you can pull out. Tar sands and oil shale can provide sources of petroleum, too, they just cost too much. Sounds like seawater uranium falls into the same category. Mined uranium just barely breaks even for EROEI when all inputs are fully considered (it seems like a great energy source now only because it’s subsidized by fossil fuels, and most of the inputs are ignored); increase the cost by 2.5-5 times, and nuclear gets a very negative EROEI.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 August 2007 @ 8:20 PM
Thanks. Think I’ll look into it more but that sounds reasonable. Enjoyed the dialogue.

Comment by Joe Potter-Butler — 16 August 2007 @ 8:25 PM
Let’s see if I can get a nested blockquote to work….

For me the vital question that calls cultural materialism into question is why people started sticking seeds in the ground in the first place. It seems evident in Genesis mythology and in the explosion of symbolic representation that preceded mass-scale agriculture that some change in the culture occurred first, but no one knows for sure.

That could be as simple as how they could best understand it, the same way we today think anti-Semitism had something to do with why the Holocaust happened, and not just how. We generally ascribe to ourselves far more autonomy and free will than we really deserve. It certainly seems that the origins of agriculture had a good deal to do with settlement, sunk costs, and changing climate, and very little to do with ideology.

Oh, I don’t question that — I guess I’m looking at it back further in time. Who chose to stay put instead of follow the game? Sunk costs always have a beginning point, a person deciding to sink resources into something, who made that decision originally and why? If food was getting scarce, wouldn’t it have made more sense to move on rather than gamble on investment in a location suffering resource decline?

The proliferation of symbolic activity that preceded agriculture suggests a change in the culture. Is this change what caused people to start planting things? If so, then in this instance the culture would have created the material conditions — settlement, sunk costs, and possibly to some degree climate change — that eventually gave rise to agriculture. But no one can say for sure.

Comment by Paula — 17 August 2007 @ 3:05 PM
I think it ultimately comes down to a fluke. For one exceptional moment in global history, it was adaptive, so we did it. No more, no less than that, just like any case of ecological overshoot. If it were a software problem, you’d call it a bug, maybe even a bug not worth fixing if the input is that rare. Same thing here, I think.

Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 August 2007 @ 3:20 PM

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