As the readers of this blog know, I've been away for a while, but now I'm back. Thank you for the inquiries and compliments that many of you've sent in my absence and I feel both bad for making you send them and glad that you did.
Over the years that I've studied how civilizations collapse (and personal survival long before that), I've run into a lot of people who have inexplicable faith in the future. They look at the past, see that there have been many problems which have come up, then looked at the solutions to those problems, then look at the future, assuming that the past is our guide. In truth, we are entering new territory -- the point in time where we have absolutely no model for a mismanaged and overextended civilization, outside of how Rome fell. People cannot contemplate the end of things, either of their own lives, or the "world" which has been built for them and which they in turn have built on.
When we have the "balls" to point out to them that "Hey, your false idols are going to topple sooner or later, probably sooner," they have mixed reactions, from looking at us like we're a little nuts, to downright hostility to question the worldview which they have put so much faith into. And, in truth, there are a few maladjusted "doom junkies" who, for deep psychological reasons, would love to see billions die off and humanity collapse back into the paleolithic for a long downhill slide. But, for the rest of us, we live in the same space that enthusiastic optimists do...we go to the same places, have the same kinds of friends, like the same kind of food. The only real difference is that we have taken a look at the future, with an unbiased eye, and know there's no way to escape the coming storm. We're not happy about the way things are turning out, how the optimism of the 1950s has turned into the denial of 2011.
This is not an easy thing to deal with. Sometimes, we just have to take a breath, go smell the roses for a while, waste time in a hobby or other form of distraction. We look at the abyss, but the abyss definitely looks back at us. All the time. For those of us who write publicly about these topics, who spent hours thinking about the collapse of modern civilization, poring over every last scrap of relevant information and item of bad news, it's even more painful to keep going and writing on the subject. The truth is, when people call us"doom and gloom" for speaking the truth, we all too well know what a price there is to pay for going down this road of inquiry in the first place. It gets hard to enjoy modern life, when you know it's getting late in the day and there's a cold, hard rain coming. Not just modern life, with the bells and whistles, but everything. Sometimes, we have to walk away for a little while, but we come back stronger than before, with more resolve, because we know that we can at least reach a few people who will take this to heart.
Not that I've ever cared much critics, and not that I would ever quit writing because someone got mad because I suggested that all they take for granted today will likely be gone in a few years -- to quote Austin Collins -- "It's easier to offend you than to hold my breath for days." Instead, if I ever quit again, it's because I need to take a break and rediscover why I'm here and why I do what I do. In the meantime, there's plenty of material to write about, including the battle over unions and what it really means in America, to the collapse of regimes in the middle east (bonus points to anyone who thinks that civil war in oil-producing regions is going to hose our economy once more), to personal preparedness.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being real out there, not people lying to yourselves.
Showing posts with label leibowitz society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leibowitz society. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Monday, November 22, 2010
Response to Scott
A reader named Scott was kind enough to take some time to comment on my last blog post, with some suggestions and questions. It's good to hear feedback from people -- at times, I feel a little like a DJ running a pirate radio station with no phone line for people to call in. :) The feedback I have had has been overwhelmingly positive and I think that the Society is beginning to fill a need that people have had and not been able to articulate or have had met anywhere else. However, I think his comments raise some points that I think need to be addressed and would be helpful for a number of other people reading the blog.
First off, I want to talk about the idea of "membership" in the Leibowitz Society, so people don't misinterpret the intent behind this concept. To be a member, all one has to do is consider themselves to be a member. If they don't want to be a member any longer, they're not a member. There's no organization, no hierarchy, no place to give money -- just a conviction that we are going to soon experience some very rough times and that there are things we need to save for future generations and that they are worth saving. Like you, I have been concerned that there was the possibility of something like this turning into a cult, but I tend to think people who appreciate the Society's emphasis on rational thought are also the kind of people who are unlikely to be involved in a cult. I do think that, down the road, people may eventually form communities of learning and knowledge. While I have no idea what form that will take, I think the monastic model is a candidate for what form the Society will take once the bonds of organized modern civilization have been broken and people enter a strange new world. Monastic life offered order, discipline and stability in a very rough time, combined with the opportunity to become educated when education itself was a rare commodity. It may also be that when civilization has stablized and is seeking to learn from the past that the knowledge of the Society is instead exposed through something along the lines of the classical schools of learning and philosophy. While this bears some thinking about, it's still probably beyond the scope of what needs to be done in this day and age.
Second, "prepping" (as it has come to be known in recent years) is one of those things that I approach warily. The problem is, if we look at the decline of Rome, it was not something that happened in five or six days. The signs were clear much further back, so for the people living in the Empire in the latter days, it seems to have been like looking at a swaying tower about to topple -- there was plenty of time to get out of the way and find a relatively safe haven. Much of the time -- although the emphasis does seem to be shifting -- people seem to be expecting an acute event and hoping that their supplies and preparations will be enough to carry them through to the other side when things become stable again. What I think instead that people need to be doing is realizing that the state of things at this time is probably as good as it is going to get in our lifetimes, or even the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. The "machinery" of the global economy took roughly eight hundred or so years to put together, beginning with the early banking systems of the Knights Templar (and the Renaissance a couple of centuries later), then being developed into full-fledged commercial systems in the late 1600s, finally to our completely global system of the modern day. So, in our current state, trying to force this system into an artificially sustained level of luxury and productivity, we are essentially destroying this system which took nearly a millenia to assemble. Realistically, we are not going to have the chance to try to put something like this back together for quite some time, if ever.
So, barring a sudden, cataclysmic event (which leaves us all living in a world as illustrated in The Road), we are going to simply see a steady decline, with ups and downs as the global system (and civilization which has grown addicted to it) grinds to a halt. There are little signs of this happening all around us -- for example, I was coming down the highway today and saw three billboards with the number listed for the advertising content and nothing else on them. The vast tracts of empty commercial real estate, foreclosed homes, etc -- all the "broken windows" which are never going to be repaired -- are just signs upon signs of what is happening. In this kind of a world, we need to expect that once something's gone, it's gone and is never coming back, be it jobs, businesses, cities, whatever.
If anything, I think the kind of things we will be facing at first are going to be increased crime as people become desperate once the social safety net is gone, as well as problems finding medical care, food and other essentials of daily life as the economic apparatus which has supplied them begins to hiccup. It should be expected that the coming crash of the dollar (often predicted, but now looking increasingly likely) will exacerbate these problems as no one will be sure what anything is worth. The implication then is that we need to be able to think on our feet, understand how to be effective members of the larger society as long as it can still meet our needs. We need to know how to barter and interact with a wide variety of people, many of whom won't believe what they're living through even as it slaps them in the face. We need to know where the safe places are to land as the herd is running off the cliff. We need to learn to live with less and still thrive.
As far as sites I would recommend, I want to point out that the focus of the Leibowitz Society is mostly concerned with preservation of knowledge through the coming Dark Age. There are other places which are going to be better sources of information as far as what to store, how to store it, etc, although FerFAL's Argentina Collapse Blog is a good starting point. Argentina suffered something similar to what I think we're about to experience, although it was localized to only one country back in 2001, while we will be dragging the world down with us. Things we have never dreamed of -- bandits on the highway -- may become commonplace. I like Kunstler's site (and The Long Emergency was one thing that finally pushed me to get this effort rolling), although he tends to think that no real hope lies for salvaging anything on the other side. Backwoods Home is a pretty good source of information for self-reliance. I haven't looked at it in a while, but Mother Earth News also used to be good.
People tend to want to look for a magic formula for prepping, and keep searching for information, like people do with fad diets and weight loss books, but a friend of mine once pointed out that what people lack isn't information, but motivation. There is plenty of good information available for people who are looking for it, although it can usually be boiled down to the basics. Putting aside a few firearms (where legal) for hunting and self defense, some fuel for your car so that you can get around when there aren't any gas trucks running, having a house which can be habitable off the grid, a year's supply of food and medicine and the ability to produce more food, and having a good source of clean water is probably as much as anyone should reasonably expect to do. Anything beyond that is probably bonus territory. The motivation for us should come from just looking at the news and how bleak things are becoming.
Last, and probably the most important, the type of help we need (and, remember, people are helping each other, not helping me) is for people to begin looking at the knowledge content areas I'm posting and commenting on what else they think should be included, how it can be organized better, etc. On top of that, people with expertise in certain areas need to start putting together 10-20 page overviews of the various content areas so these summaries can form the text of the Codex Universalis. Obviously, some of these content areas are going to lend themselves to shorter or longer entries and aren't going to be complete, even if they were to run into several hundred pages, but they are intended to familiarize people with these areas and serve as starting points. For those with professional skills and knowledge, suggestions for written texts for people to begin storing in their personal Repositories are necessary. A couple of people have mentioned an interest in long-term digital storage, which would be invaluable if a durable form could be developed.
I'm planning on putting up a forum fairly soon which will allow people to start discussing these topics in a more user-friendly and dynamic form. I had hesitated because I wasn't sure if there was enough interest, but I think it can easily be justified now. Once it goes live, I will announce it here, along with some guidelines on its use. The blog will still be active, of course, as a good introduction to what the Society is about as well as random items I come across which may be of interest. At some point, I anticipate other people wanting to write blog entries, once they have a comfortable understanding of the Society's approach and interests.
First off, I want to talk about the idea of "membership" in the Leibowitz Society, so people don't misinterpret the intent behind this concept. To be a member, all one has to do is consider themselves to be a member. If they don't want to be a member any longer, they're not a member. There's no organization, no hierarchy, no place to give money -- just a conviction that we are going to soon experience some very rough times and that there are things we need to save for future generations and that they are worth saving. Like you, I have been concerned that there was the possibility of something like this turning into a cult, but I tend to think people who appreciate the Society's emphasis on rational thought are also the kind of people who are unlikely to be involved in a cult. I do think that, down the road, people may eventually form communities of learning and knowledge. While I have no idea what form that will take, I think the monastic model is a candidate for what form the Society will take once the bonds of organized modern civilization have been broken and people enter a strange new world. Monastic life offered order, discipline and stability in a very rough time, combined with the opportunity to become educated when education itself was a rare commodity. It may also be that when civilization has stablized and is seeking to learn from the past that the knowledge of the Society is instead exposed through something along the lines of the classical schools of learning and philosophy. While this bears some thinking about, it's still probably beyond the scope of what needs to be done in this day and age.
Second, "prepping" (as it has come to be known in recent years) is one of those things that I approach warily. The problem is, if we look at the decline of Rome, it was not something that happened in five or six days. The signs were clear much further back, so for the people living in the Empire in the latter days, it seems to have been like looking at a swaying tower about to topple -- there was plenty of time to get out of the way and find a relatively safe haven. Much of the time -- although the emphasis does seem to be shifting -- people seem to be expecting an acute event and hoping that their supplies and preparations will be enough to carry them through to the other side when things become stable again. What I think instead that people need to be doing is realizing that the state of things at this time is probably as good as it is going to get in our lifetimes, or even the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. The "machinery" of the global economy took roughly eight hundred or so years to put together, beginning with the early banking systems of the Knights Templar (and the Renaissance a couple of centuries later), then being developed into full-fledged commercial systems in the late 1600s, finally to our completely global system of the modern day. So, in our current state, trying to force this system into an artificially sustained level of luxury and productivity, we are essentially destroying this system which took nearly a millenia to assemble. Realistically, we are not going to have the chance to try to put something like this back together for quite some time, if ever.
So, barring a sudden, cataclysmic event (which leaves us all living in a world as illustrated in The Road), we are going to simply see a steady decline, with ups and downs as the global system (and civilization which has grown addicted to it) grinds to a halt. There are little signs of this happening all around us -- for example, I was coming down the highway today and saw three billboards with the number listed for the advertising content and nothing else on them. The vast tracts of empty commercial real estate, foreclosed homes, etc -- all the "broken windows" which are never going to be repaired -- are just signs upon signs of what is happening. In this kind of a world, we need to expect that once something's gone, it's gone and is never coming back, be it jobs, businesses, cities, whatever.
If anything, I think the kind of things we will be facing at first are going to be increased crime as people become desperate once the social safety net is gone, as well as problems finding medical care, food and other essentials of daily life as the economic apparatus which has supplied them begins to hiccup. It should be expected that the coming crash of the dollar (often predicted, but now looking increasingly likely) will exacerbate these problems as no one will be sure what anything is worth. The implication then is that we need to be able to think on our feet, understand how to be effective members of the larger society as long as it can still meet our needs. We need to know how to barter and interact with a wide variety of people, many of whom won't believe what they're living through even as it slaps them in the face. We need to know where the safe places are to land as the herd is running off the cliff. We need to learn to live with less and still thrive.
As far as sites I would recommend, I want to point out that the focus of the Leibowitz Society is mostly concerned with preservation of knowledge through the coming Dark Age. There are other places which are going to be better sources of information as far as what to store, how to store it, etc, although FerFAL's Argentina Collapse Blog is a good starting point. Argentina suffered something similar to what I think we're about to experience, although it was localized to only one country back in 2001, while we will be dragging the world down with us. Things we have never dreamed of -- bandits on the highway -- may become commonplace. I like Kunstler's site (and The Long Emergency was one thing that finally pushed me to get this effort rolling), although he tends to think that no real hope lies for salvaging anything on the other side. Backwoods Home is a pretty good source of information for self-reliance. I haven't looked at it in a while, but Mother Earth News also used to be good.
People tend to want to look for a magic formula for prepping, and keep searching for information, like people do with fad diets and weight loss books, but a friend of mine once pointed out that what people lack isn't information, but motivation. There is plenty of good information available for people who are looking for it, although it can usually be boiled down to the basics. Putting aside a few firearms (where legal) for hunting and self defense, some fuel for your car so that you can get around when there aren't any gas trucks running, having a house which can be habitable off the grid, a year's supply of food and medicine and the ability to produce more food, and having a good source of clean water is probably as much as anyone should reasonably expect to do. Anything beyond that is probably bonus territory. The motivation for us should come from just looking at the news and how bleak things are becoming.
Last, and probably the most important, the type of help we need (and, remember, people are helping each other, not helping me) is for people to begin looking at the knowledge content areas I'm posting and commenting on what else they think should be included, how it can be organized better, etc. On top of that, people with expertise in certain areas need to start putting together 10-20 page overviews of the various content areas so these summaries can form the text of the Codex Universalis. Obviously, some of these content areas are going to lend themselves to shorter or longer entries and aren't going to be complete, even if they were to run into several hundred pages, but they are intended to familiarize people with these areas and serve as starting points. For those with professional skills and knowledge, suggestions for written texts for people to begin storing in their personal Repositories are necessary. A couple of people have mentioned an interest in long-term digital storage, which would be invaluable if a durable form could be developed.
I'm planning on putting up a forum fairly soon which will allow people to start discussing these topics in a more user-friendly and dynamic form. I had hesitated because I wasn't sure if there was enough interest, but I think it can easily be justified now. Once it goes live, I will announce it here, along with some guidelines on its use. The blog will still be active, of course, as a good introduction to what the Society is about as well as random items I come across which may be of interest. At some point, I anticipate other people wanting to write blog entries, once they have a comfortable understanding of the Society's approach and interests.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Anathem
I suspect that at least a few readers of this blog -- and people aligned with the principles of the Leibowitz Society -- are avid readers. Of those readers, perhaps a smaller few have picked up the book "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson. I had purchased it some time ago, but only now have begun working my way through it (anyone familiar with his writings will appreciate that one does indeed "work" through a Neal Stephenson novel). Being that it deals with a fictional version of monasteries, something that it has in common with a Canticle for Leibowitz, I found the subject matter of some interest.
Early on, a key idea crops up in the book as a first-page exchange between an instructor monk and a craftsman from outside is explained to the protagonist of the novel. Without going too much into detail about the exchange (and spoiling that part of the novel), the monk is apparently trying to determine a causal link between what happens outside the monastery and what happens inside the monastery. In other words, does the outside world affect the cloistered world that the monks live in?
With the Leibowitz Society, I think we are eventually going to face a similar divide. Even if it does not exist as a formal, physical separation in the way that the monks experience, just by beginning to accept the idea that the world is sinking in a new dark age, and that we need to preserve and protect civilization's intellectual achievements, then we are already cloistering ourselves from the larger population's mode of thought. At some point, can we undertake a similarity measurement of casuality of thought between what the majority thinks and feels about events, and what we think and feel about events, and describe the differences?
The detachment of casuality of thought has another aspect here, too, and why it is vitally important in many ways. Consider the following notion: Rational thought may be the pinnacle of achievement of the arc of civilization beginning with the Middle Ages, reaching a zenith in the Renaissance, becoming a widespread ideal during the Age of Reason, and experiencing a twilight as the destruction of the twentieth century came to a close. Now, I should make it clear that I do not consider rationality as necessarily opposing ideas such as religion, the arts, altruism, etc, only that process of taking something mind and working through it to come to a conclusion about it should be an intact process.
Now, if the great intellectual tragedy of the last few decades is the movement away from rationality, into emotionality and even anti-rationality (i.e. "I don't care what you say, because I know in my heart that you're wrong"; "I go by my feelings"; "Why argue? Everyone has something to say/is right in their own view"; "Can't we all just get along?"), then if we, as members of the Leibowitz Society, operate with rationality, then we have achieved causal decoupling from what is the popular (albeit incorrect) mode of thought. In essence, if we approach a problem even from a relatively simple evaluation, using a structured method, then we are practicing something which has become less and less common in modern society. If one carries this notion out, we can use the same test as a means of determining if we are ourselves beginning to fall into the same trap, and the effect of the world outside of the Society on the Society's efforts can be measured, or at least accounted for.
This isn't meant to be a screed against the modern day, just that when we think of the "Dark Ages," we are often thinking of bandit raiders, people huddling in the burned-out ruins of a once wealthy city, and so on. Instead, we need to remember that the new dark ages can take many forms, across many stages, and that we are already beginning to be at the point where we need to start taking steps to protect our accumulated knowledge.
Early on, a key idea crops up in the book as a first-page exchange between an instructor monk and a craftsman from outside is explained to the protagonist of the novel. Without going too much into detail about the exchange (and spoiling that part of the novel), the monk is apparently trying to determine a causal link between what happens outside the monastery and what happens inside the monastery. In other words, does the outside world affect the cloistered world that the monks live in?
With the Leibowitz Society, I think we are eventually going to face a similar divide. Even if it does not exist as a formal, physical separation in the way that the monks experience, just by beginning to accept the idea that the world is sinking in a new dark age, and that we need to preserve and protect civilization's intellectual achievements, then we are already cloistering ourselves from the larger population's mode of thought. At some point, can we undertake a similarity measurement of casuality of thought between what the majority thinks and feels about events, and what we think and feel about events, and describe the differences?
The detachment of casuality of thought has another aspect here, too, and why it is vitally important in many ways. Consider the following notion: Rational thought may be the pinnacle of achievement of the arc of civilization beginning with the Middle Ages, reaching a zenith in the Renaissance, becoming a widespread ideal during the Age of Reason, and experiencing a twilight as the destruction of the twentieth century came to a close. Now, I should make it clear that I do not consider rationality as necessarily opposing ideas such as religion, the arts, altruism, etc, only that process of taking something mind and working through it to come to a conclusion about it should be an intact process.
Now, if the great intellectual tragedy of the last few decades is the movement away from rationality, into emotionality and even anti-rationality (i.e. "I don't care what you say, because I know in my heart that you're wrong"; "I go by my feelings"; "Why argue? Everyone has something to say/is right in their own view"; "Can't we all just get along?"), then if we, as members of the Leibowitz Society, operate with rationality, then we have achieved causal decoupling from what is the popular (albeit incorrect) mode of thought. In essence, if we approach a problem even from a relatively simple evaluation, using a structured method, then we are practicing something which has become less and less common in modern society. If one carries this notion out, we can use the same test as a means of determining if we are ourselves beginning to fall into the same trap, and the effect of the world outside of the Society on the Society's efforts can be measured, or at least accounted for.
This isn't meant to be a screed against the modern day, just that when we think of the "Dark Ages," we are often thinking of bandit raiders, people huddling in the burned-out ruins of a once wealthy city, and so on. Instead, we need to remember that the new dark ages can take many forms, across many stages, and that we are already beginning to be at the point where we need to start taking steps to protect our accumulated knowledge.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Clarifications
There are a few things about the Leibowitz Society that I want to clarify and emphasize as we go forward, as the Society is still in the early stages of being public.
First, there are no qualifications to being a "member" of the Society. There is no process to joining, other than simply accepting that we are in serious trouble as a society and civilization and need to start preparing on a long-term basis for what is coming our way. While I appreciate people who want to identify themselves publically as being part of the Society, and are willing to spread the word of what we are trying to accomplish, I also understand that many people are relucant to admit planning for the kind of sobering future we are facing. With this in mind, there is no record of who is a member and who isn't, because there is no process to join outside of simply deciding that you want to start preserving and protecting civilization's knowledge for when the world emerges from the new dark ages.
(as a caveat: this also means that the Leibowitz Society explicitly and emphatically accepts no responsibility for anyone who is a member does in legal, political or social terms)
Second, the Society's works and materials will always be free, outside of the open possibility of a bound hardcopy archival version of the Codex Universalis for those who are interested. If anyone were to have extra money to join an organization preparing for a collapse, I would instead suggest that they would be better off taking that money and spending it on supplies, land, relocation, etc. There is more than enough relevant information on the internet available for free to have to instead contemplate paying for it.
Third, the society is emphatically apolitical. This is because it is intended to be an international organization, as well as a broad-based organization which is intended to appeal to people from all segments of society. The political parties and the causes of today are going to quickly become irrelevant and meaningless once the facade is roughly torn away from our current existence and the reality of the new world we are entering quickly becomes apparent. What is the use of bickering over social issues when mass starvation and disease from poor sanitation are looming spectres? From time to time, I do comment on politics, but mostly from the perspective of how it has affected our current situation, not as an attempt to bolster one party or another -- both sides of the political aisle have had plenty to do with where we are now.
Last, either regarding comments on the blog, materials submitted for the Codex or Repository, and posts on the website and forum when it goes live, I will not tolerate people making asses out of themselves as trolls, or posting inflammatory/bigoted speech. The Society is intended to be an effort which appeals to a broad base of people with a large skill set. People who are interested in the Society are likely concerned about where the world is headed and will come from all walks of life. To limit the Society to one demographic or another is clearly defeating the purpose. As an aside, for the "gentleman" who sent me an Email rant accusing the Leibowitz Society of being a front for some kind of Jewish conspiracy, I'll point him in the direction of Walter Miller's novel for the origin of the Society's name and point out that when civilization crashes, no one is going to have time to spin fantasies of cabals and conspiracies.
First, there are no qualifications to being a "member" of the Society. There is no process to joining, other than simply accepting that we are in serious trouble as a society and civilization and need to start preparing on a long-term basis for what is coming our way. While I appreciate people who want to identify themselves publically as being part of the Society, and are willing to spread the word of what we are trying to accomplish, I also understand that many people are relucant to admit planning for the kind of sobering future we are facing. With this in mind, there is no record of who is a member and who isn't, because there is no process to join outside of simply deciding that you want to start preserving and protecting civilization's knowledge for when the world emerges from the new dark ages.
(as a caveat: this also means that the Leibowitz Society explicitly and emphatically accepts no responsibility for anyone who is a member does in legal, political or social terms)
Second, the Society's works and materials will always be free, outside of the open possibility of a bound hardcopy archival version of the Codex Universalis for those who are interested. If anyone were to have extra money to join an organization preparing for a collapse, I would instead suggest that they would be better off taking that money and spending it on supplies, land, relocation, etc. There is more than enough relevant information on the internet available for free to have to instead contemplate paying for it.
Third, the society is emphatically apolitical. This is because it is intended to be an international organization, as well as a broad-based organization which is intended to appeal to people from all segments of society. The political parties and the causes of today are going to quickly become irrelevant and meaningless once the facade is roughly torn away from our current existence and the reality of the new world we are entering quickly becomes apparent. What is the use of bickering over social issues when mass starvation and disease from poor sanitation are looming spectres? From time to time, I do comment on politics, but mostly from the perspective of how it has affected our current situation, not as an attempt to bolster one party or another -- both sides of the political aisle have had plenty to do with where we are now.
Last, either regarding comments on the blog, materials submitted for the Codex or Repository, and posts on the website and forum when it goes live, I will not tolerate people making asses out of themselves as trolls, or posting inflammatory/bigoted speech. The Society is intended to be an effort which appeals to a broad base of people with a large skill set. People who are interested in the Society are likely concerned about where the world is headed and will come from all walks of life. To limit the Society to one demographic or another is clearly defeating the purpose. As an aside, for the "gentleman" who sent me an Email rant accusing the Leibowitz Society of being a front for some kind of Jewish conspiracy, I'll point him in the direction of Walter Miller's novel for the origin of the Society's name and point out that when civilization crashes, no one is going to have time to spin fantasies of cabals and conspiracies.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Introduction
While I write this inaugural entry of the Leibowitz Society blog, I'm listening to classic jazz -- music from the 50s and 60s, not something more modern. This is music from the days of American optimism, when a man would soon be on the moon, when the economy was booming even as the rest of the world was trying to pick itself up from the ruins of World War Two. When I listen to it, I imagine a train of passenger cars led by a sleek, streamlined EMD F9 diesel engine. Or maybe a Lockheed Constellation, polished and shining brightly in the sun, ready to take passengers on what was still a relatively novel way to travel. In a way, it is idealism, the art of the mind to create images of motion, a trajectory that has drastically changed over the last few decades. Of course, in jazz, there is also a melancholy that can not be matched by the darkest ambient music.
People spend a lot of time and effort writing about what has changed and why it's changed. Debt, scarce natural resources, a general sense that people want to cling to what diminishing assets and position they have in the world. America, for example, has gone from being a nation where the lives of three astronauts lost in the early days of the space program did nothing but to change the safety standards of the program to being a nation where the deaths of astronauts cause people to question openly if the program should continue at all. It's all about the security, the need of people to try to hold on to where they are at. Not that it really works. Nature has an "up or out" policy -- the tree which grows fastest chokes the other trees out. Human society doesn't seem to operate much differently -- if people stop trying to achieve, stop trying to strive, then it will be choked out by a newer, more vibrant society.
Of course, in a day and age when a newer, more vibrant society has yet to emerge, there comes a vacuum and chaos sweeps in. Rome, the shining warning from the past, found itself surrounded on one hand by the "barbarian" tribes of Northern Europe that has not yet coalesced into true political entitites, and on the other hand by the relics of former great empires that had not yet succumbed to the advance of Islam. When Rome fell, no longer able to hold itself up under crushing financial and political pressures, nothing was left to take its place.
Would America's fate be much different? One can spend time swapping puzzle pieces around like a housewife trying to arrange her ideal kitchen. Some scenarios include perhaps attempts by dying Europe to reclaim parts of America once it would sink into chaos. Who are the new barbarians? The American underclass, barely kept at bay by legal force? The great bulk of the Latin American population, once willing to work like fugitive slaves but no longer needing to hide once the old empire has collapsed?
The (unspoken) consensus is that however the new players may arrange themselves, America has essentially reached the end of the line. Like most empires, our economy was built on slavery. First came the African slaves of the South and the factory workers of the North, followed then by the invention of machines that gave each American the equivalent of a hundred slaves working for them at the turn of a key or press of a button. This is not a moral judgement, of course, just a statement of fact. When the supply of labor or energy dries up, that which has sustained the empire falls apart.
But it is also not just the lost multiplication of labor at work here, but the loss of accumulated wealth. Every generation that built America tended to leave things better for the following generation. At first, it was the sense of making sure your children were taken care of until they could find their own place in the world, then a national sense of building toward an ideal which was greater than what any one person could establish on their own. Buildings named after people, for example, showed that the person cared enough to give money to make sure they would give something to people after they were gone. Now, those systems are fading under the weight of economic strain, if not outright collapse. Bernie Madoff was just a textbook symptom of what is really the disease of widespread loss.
As one subsystem -- the real estate market, manufacturing, local government, banks -- after another fails, the system itself moves farther and father from a position where it can right itself. There needs to be available capital for projects to proceed. There needs to be a consumer base capable of making purchases to sustain manufacturing. There has to be enough political goodwill for leaders to be trusted and solutions to be tried. Once these things start to vanish, there can no longer be recovery, the society will begin to crack and fragment and the system will grind to a halt, much as Rome simply was unable to sustain itself in the 400s. Of course, nothing really needs to be said about the American national debt and how it will destroy the glue of the economy (money). The discussion of the collapse of empire is not complete without mentioning war, plague, famine, etc. Like pneumonia to an old person, these just hasten along the death of a society that could otherwise fight off such things and remain healthy.
It goes without saying that nothing occurring today guarantees that a global collapse will occur. The problem is that if such a collapse occurs, then what is going to become of human civilization? After Rome fell, for example, there is archaeological evidence of people starving to death in what had been an abdundant farming area a generation earlier. In a larger sense, technology, agriculture, sanitation and living standards did not return to where they had been during the time of Rome until within the last couple of hundred years. While this is a simplification, the problem still remains that if we see a global collapse, it's likely that most of humanity's accumulated knowledge and achievement is going to be lost, not to be rediscovered for a long time, if ever.
At this point, many people may be asking why it matters to them as individuals if society collapses and the collective knowledge of society vanishes. After all, they will be too busy trying to find food and shelter to worry about higher learning. The answer to this simply lies in the fact that almost everything around us is the product of someone else's learning and experimentation. For example, in front of me is an aluminum can. Aluminum is a lightweight, durable material for building many things, yet just a little over a hundred years ago, it was scarcer than platinum because it was nearly impossible to refine aluminum ore. What would be the effect for the future if this knowledge was lost? Or, on a more practical level, consider the manufacture of antibiotics or other medical supplies. Who would want to find themselves surviving a collapse only to die of an infection which would have been easily cured just a few years before?
On a larger scale, there is the matter of how to run an effective and just society, something which may also be lost in a time when survival becomes paramount. It takes surprisingly little time for cultural amnesia to set in and for people to assume that the way things currently are is the way they've always been.
The obvious answer to these problems is to look to a way of preserving knowledge so it can be used by future generations after the crash has come and gone. Dr. Bruce Clayton, in Life After Doomsday, proposed a micro-scale solution, which he advocated storing two literary works and a scientific text as part of one's survival supplies. While this was a step in the right direction, there were a couple of fundamental flaws with it. The first is the assumption that people are going to select a wide variety of texts to preserve -- enough to reassemble a significant portion of accumulated human knowledge. The other was that people would be able to make any sense of the works at some point down the road. Given how quickly the English language can change, it doesn't seem that this would necessarily be a likely case.
Another option would be for national governments to preserve human knowledge through sealed archives. The problem with this approach is that this knowledge would be stored in one central place, with little way for most people to access it. On top of this, if it were stored in a remote location, it might be lost forever in spite of how well protected it was. It goes without saying that libraries would probably quickly become victims of plunder (paper burns well to start fires) or simply decay from neglect.
These considerations mean that the preservation of knowledge for future generations has to take a different approach. There needs to be a three-part focus:
1) Having a body of people who are able to store, preserve, interpret and disseminate stored knowledge as appropriate. This body of people would also have to be able to teach their successors as time goes on. In a sense, these people are not unlike the monks during the dark ages who were instrumental in preserving the knowledge of the West, then making it available again.
2) Having a basic manual of knowledge which can be used for building communities, reference by the people mentioned in the above point, a basic work of necessity. Think of this as a "survival encyclopedia." People will point to their bookshelves and say "Well, I have a book on how to start a fire with two sticks." This is good, but are there books about the psychology of communities or how to establish a barter system up there as well? This books -- or set of books -- would be assembled as a "go to" manual for everyday life and needs as human civilization moves deeper into collapse. It would also allow members to help build stable communities to serve as centers of learning as time goes on.
3) Finally, there is the actual body of knowledge that is intended to be preserved. This covers the seven basic areas of human learning: agriculture, civil engineering, hard science, culture, defense, politics/economy and medicine. Here is where everything from Shakespeare to space exploration would be recorded and stored. It should be noted that this is not necessarily intended to be a complete work of knowledge (very difficult to store) but in many cases may be the "start point" of where to go next.
There are obviously considerable challenges involved in an endeavor like this, but it is also a workable program and is likely to become a necessary program as the slide continues. Even as I write this up today, there is news about how once-prosperous U.S. cities are cutting back drastically on services and policing, something that is joined by one bad news article after another. Soon, the necessity of a thing like this will be made clear as communities begin to find themselves cut off from each other by deteriorating roads and political isolation.
Going back to Bruce Clayton, he termed his project the "Leibowitz Project," after the excellent "Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter Miller. It is from both of these sources that the name of the Leibowitz Society is drawn. The Society itself is non-partisan, apolitical, secular and does not concern itself with the day to day dealings of politics or government, except to comply with all relevant laws. It is open to all people, provided they do not engage in illegal activity with regard to the Society's efforts. There are no membership fees and there is no criteria or test to become a member, outside of caring about the future of the human race and making sure that our accumulated knowledge is not lost. Soon, this blog will be joined by a companion forum that will allow people to exchange ideas and information about what should be stored, as well as work on the manual of knowledge and so on. Look for an announcement here when the website is live.
People spend a lot of time and effort writing about what has changed and why it's changed. Debt, scarce natural resources, a general sense that people want to cling to what diminishing assets and position they have in the world. America, for example, has gone from being a nation where the lives of three astronauts lost in the early days of the space program did nothing but to change the safety standards of the program to being a nation where the deaths of astronauts cause people to question openly if the program should continue at all. It's all about the security, the need of people to try to hold on to where they are at. Not that it really works. Nature has an "up or out" policy -- the tree which grows fastest chokes the other trees out. Human society doesn't seem to operate much differently -- if people stop trying to achieve, stop trying to strive, then it will be choked out by a newer, more vibrant society.
Of course, in a day and age when a newer, more vibrant society has yet to emerge, there comes a vacuum and chaos sweeps in. Rome, the shining warning from the past, found itself surrounded on one hand by the "barbarian" tribes of Northern Europe that has not yet coalesced into true political entitites, and on the other hand by the relics of former great empires that had not yet succumbed to the advance of Islam. When Rome fell, no longer able to hold itself up under crushing financial and political pressures, nothing was left to take its place.
Would America's fate be much different? One can spend time swapping puzzle pieces around like a housewife trying to arrange her ideal kitchen. Some scenarios include perhaps attempts by dying Europe to reclaim parts of America once it would sink into chaos. Who are the new barbarians? The American underclass, barely kept at bay by legal force? The great bulk of the Latin American population, once willing to work like fugitive slaves but no longer needing to hide once the old empire has collapsed?
The (unspoken) consensus is that however the new players may arrange themselves, America has essentially reached the end of the line. Like most empires, our economy was built on slavery. First came the African slaves of the South and the factory workers of the North, followed then by the invention of machines that gave each American the equivalent of a hundred slaves working for them at the turn of a key or press of a button. This is not a moral judgement, of course, just a statement of fact. When the supply of labor or energy dries up, that which has sustained the empire falls apart.
But it is also not just the lost multiplication of labor at work here, but the loss of accumulated wealth. Every generation that built America tended to leave things better for the following generation. At first, it was the sense of making sure your children were taken care of until they could find their own place in the world, then a national sense of building toward an ideal which was greater than what any one person could establish on their own. Buildings named after people, for example, showed that the person cared enough to give money to make sure they would give something to people after they were gone. Now, those systems are fading under the weight of economic strain, if not outright collapse. Bernie Madoff was just a textbook symptom of what is really the disease of widespread loss.
As one subsystem -- the real estate market, manufacturing, local government, banks -- after another fails, the system itself moves farther and father from a position where it can right itself. There needs to be available capital for projects to proceed. There needs to be a consumer base capable of making purchases to sustain manufacturing. There has to be enough political goodwill for leaders to be trusted and solutions to be tried. Once these things start to vanish, there can no longer be recovery, the society will begin to crack and fragment and the system will grind to a halt, much as Rome simply was unable to sustain itself in the 400s. Of course, nothing really needs to be said about the American national debt and how it will destroy the glue of the economy (money). The discussion of the collapse of empire is not complete without mentioning war, plague, famine, etc. Like pneumonia to an old person, these just hasten along the death of a society that could otherwise fight off such things and remain healthy.
It goes without saying that nothing occurring today guarantees that a global collapse will occur. The problem is that if such a collapse occurs, then what is going to become of human civilization? After Rome fell, for example, there is archaeological evidence of people starving to death in what had been an abdundant farming area a generation earlier. In a larger sense, technology, agriculture, sanitation and living standards did not return to where they had been during the time of Rome until within the last couple of hundred years. While this is a simplification, the problem still remains that if we see a global collapse, it's likely that most of humanity's accumulated knowledge and achievement is going to be lost, not to be rediscovered for a long time, if ever.
At this point, many people may be asking why it matters to them as individuals if society collapses and the collective knowledge of society vanishes. After all, they will be too busy trying to find food and shelter to worry about higher learning. The answer to this simply lies in the fact that almost everything around us is the product of someone else's learning and experimentation. For example, in front of me is an aluminum can. Aluminum is a lightweight, durable material for building many things, yet just a little over a hundred years ago, it was scarcer than platinum because it was nearly impossible to refine aluminum ore. What would be the effect for the future if this knowledge was lost? Or, on a more practical level, consider the manufacture of antibiotics or other medical supplies. Who would want to find themselves surviving a collapse only to die of an infection which would have been easily cured just a few years before?
On a larger scale, there is the matter of how to run an effective and just society, something which may also be lost in a time when survival becomes paramount. It takes surprisingly little time for cultural amnesia to set in and for people to assume that the way things currently are is the way they've always been.
The obvious answer to these problems is to look to a way of preserving knowledge so it can be used by future generations after the crash has come and gone. Dr. Bruce Clayton, in Life After Doomsday, proposed a micro-scale solution, which he advocated storing two literary works and a scientific text as part of one's survival supplies. While this was a step in the right direction, there were a couple of fundamental flaws with it. The first is the assumption that people are going to select a wide variety of texts to preserve -- enough to reassemble a significant portion of accumulated human knowledge. The other was that people would be able to make any sense of the works at some point down the road. Given how quickly the English language can change, it doesn't seem that this would necessarily be a likely case.
Another option would be for national governments to preserve human knowledge through sealed archives. The problem with this approach is that this knowledge would be stored in one central place, with little way for most people to access it. On top of this, if it were stored in a remote location, it might be lost forever in spite of how well protected it was. It goes without saying that libraries would probably quickly become victims of plunder (paper burns well to start fires) or simply decay from neglect.
These considerations mean that the preservation of knowledge for future generations has to take a different approach. There needs to be a three-part focus:
1) Having a body of people who are able to store, preserve, interpret and disseminate stored knowledge as appropriate. This body of people would also have to be able to teach their successors as time goes on. In a sense, these people are not unlike the monks during the dark ages who were instrumental in preserving the knowledge of the West, then making it available again.
2) Having a basic manual of knowledge which can be used for building communities, reference by the people mentioned in the above point, a basic work of necessity. Think of this as a "survival encyclopedia." People will point to their bookshelves and say "Well, I have a book on how to start a fire with two sticks." This is good, but are there books about the psychology of communities or how to establish a barter system up there as well? This books -- or set of books -- would be assembled as a "go to" manual for everyday life and needs as human civilization moves deeper into collapse. It would also allow members to help build stable communities to serve as centers of learning as time goes on.
3) Finally, there is the actual body of knowledge that is intended to be preserved. This covers the seven basic areas of human learning: agriculture, civil engineering, hard science, culture, defense, politics/economy and medicine. Here is where everything from Shakespeare to space exploration would be recorded and stored. It should be noted that this is not necessarily intended to be a complete work of knowledge (very difficult to store) but in many cases may be the "start point" of where to go next.
There are obviously considerable challenges involved in an endeavor like this, but it is also a workable program and is likely to become a necessary program as the slide continues. Even as I write this up today, there is news about how once-prosperous U.S. cities are cutting back drastically on services and policing, something that is joined by one bad news article after another. Soon, the necessity of a thing like this will be made clear as communities begin to find themselves cut off from each other by deteriorating roads and political isolation.
Going back to Bruce Clayton, he termed his project the "Leibowitz Project," after the excellent "Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter Miller. It is from both of these sources that the name of the Leibowitz Society is drawn. The Society itself is non-partisan, apolitical, secular and does not concern itself with the day to day dealings of politics or government, except to comply with all relevant laws. It is open to all people, provided they do not engage in illegal activity with regard to the Society's efforts. There are no membership fees and there is no criteria or test to become a member, outside of caring about the future of the human race and making sure that our accumulated knowledge is not lost. Soon, this blog will be joined by a companion forum that will allow people to exchange ideas and information about what should be stored, as well as work on the manual of knowledge and so on. Look for an announcement here when the website is live.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)