Many people in the Peak Oil community chafe at the label of doomer, but a lot of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com,\u00a0The Death of the Oil Economy,\u00a0The End of Suburbia,and\u00a0The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren\u2019t immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes\u2019s Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words \u201cwar,\u201d \u201cfamine,\u201d \u201cpestilence,\u201d and \u201cdeath\u201d\u2014the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right, the saying goes, has the\u00a0Left Behind\u00a0books, and the Left has Peak Oil. Both predict that the end is near. One fascinating aspect of doom scenarios is that they have evolved over the centuries to suit the times. Once you get familiar with the history of apocalypse stories, it’s no surprise that in our technological age, technology\u2014and not a god, an emperor, or the stars\u2014is the bringer of the end.<\/p>\n
After I published an article suggesting that Peak Oil may lead \u201cmerely\u201d to widespread unemployment and hardship rather than collapse, hundreds wrote to tell me I was a na\u00efve optimist and a cornucopian. A significant part of the Peak Oil community holds the rock-solid sentiment that the only future is one of chaos. While the end of the oil era possesses \u201cdeath and taxes\u201d certitude, plausible post-peak scenarios span a wide scope. So why is the most touted one the most extreme? Predictions of any stripe, a review will quickly show, are almost always wrong. The future rarely goes in the direction we expect. The certainty of coming doom held by so many made me wonder why we are drawn to societal collapse and our own extinction.<\/p>\n
I’m not arguing here for or against a Peak Oil collaps, because that’s a futile debate that won\u2019t end until we enter that future. And I’m not discussing whether our civilization deserves to continue. Rather, this is an exploration into why, given an impending crisis or major challenge, many people in our culture spiral so quickly and automatically toward an \u201cend of the world\u201d vision rather than imagining any of the countless other options.<\/p>\n
My earliest hypothesis was that a person\u2019s chosen energy future was based more on personality than on data: Given the same information, people I knew to be optimists generally envisioned a positive future, while pessimists descended into doomerism. But in this simplistic reasoning, I was leaving out a growing mass of critiques of civilization itself by authors such as Joseph Tainter, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, and others esteemed by many Peak Oil adherents. While many of these writers argue that civilization is evil, unsustainable, and must collapse, they also posit that human beings deserve something better that can only arise after this culture dies. This death-and-rebirth thinking didn\u2019t fit my \u201coptimist versus pessimist\u201d hypothesis. And seeing how vehemently and urgently people argue for doom-and-gloom\u2014I\u2019ve literally had my lapels grabbed\u2014made me suspect that neither individual psyche nor the cold logic of pure reason was at work here.<\/p>\n
I now believe that Peak Oil catastrophism is largely a manifestation of our primary cultural myth: that all things end with suffering, death, and then resurrection. Belief in apocalypse is programmed into western civilization. Given our heritage, \u201cthe end is nigh\u201d is the nearly unavoidable personal and collective response to times of uncertainty and rapid change.<\/p>\n
Apocalypticism is at the core of the Judeo-Christian social mythology, and it influences our beliefs far more than we are conscious of. I can hear the objections: \u201cI\u2019m not religious\u2014I\u2019ve never even been to church.\u201d But that\u2019s like saying, \u201cI never studied Greece, so ancient Greek culture hasn\u2019t influenced me in any way.\u201d Cultural beliefs are in the air we breathe. We are programmed by our knowledge of mortality and of the natural world, as well as by millennia of myth-telling, to believe that all things, from organisms to businesses to civilizations, progress from birth to a shuddering death and, often, a renewal in new form. As much as the Religious Right\u2019s boast that America is a Christian nation makes liberals uncomfortable, there is some truth to it. From the Declaration of Independence\u2019s \u201cendowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights\u201d and the dollar\u2019s \u201cIn God We Trust,\u201d to once-pagan, Christian co-opted Easter egg hunts, Judeo-Christian beliefs saturate our culture. And the idea of apocalypse, that some time\u00a0soon\u00a0the End Times will be upon us and all will be transformed, is one of the most fundamental tenets of that system. A look at the history of apocalypticism proves this, and reveals that Peak Oil catastrophism conforms to our apocalyptic myth in such detail that it is difficult to deny its role.<\/p>\n
The archetypal apocalypse story in the West is, of course, that of Jesus of Nazareth. Both his life\u2019s story and his messianic prophecies of Judgment Day reflect oppression, death, and transformation, following the common arc of the apocalypse myth. This trajectory is echoed in the Peak Oil projection of increasing global despoliation and chaos, collapse, and the belief that \u201cafter Peak Oil, everything will change.\u201d But this myth has also emerged hundreds of other times in our history. Jesus would have remained one of thousands of minor apocalyptic prophets, all predicting a similar end, if not for the brilliant public relations of Saul of Tarsus and other early Christians. And one of their tactics was to piggy-back onto already existing apocalypse stories.<\/p>\n
Apocalypse myths predate Jesus by centuries. Ancient Greece, Persia, and Egypt are their primary birthplaces for the West. In Greek mythology, Zeus destroyed the world several times via flood, fire, and war. In one typical example, Zeus, seeing that humanity had become corrupt, ended the world by flood, sparing only two people to found a new race. And there it is: the basic pattern of apocalypse that\u2019s been followed ever since. Humanity becomes wicked and is destroyed except for an elect, who go on to birth a new world.<\/p>\n
Always a Social Context<\/strong><\/p>\n Most people think of apocalyptic groups as religious sects. But as religion has been replaced with other organizing principles such as science and economics, so too have the reasons for apocalypse. Religious people express their doomsday belief through acts of their deities, but the common feature of apocalyptic belief is not religion. It is a social background of upheaval and anxiety. When times get uncertain, people in Judeo-Christian culture gravitate to the idea that the end to the misery will come not through benign relief, but through disaster and collapse.<\/p>\n An example is one of the first Western apocalypse stories with a known historical setting, Daniel\u2019s prophetic dream of the world\u2019s end in the biblical\u00a0Book of Daniel. Here, political and social strife paints the background. This story was written about 165 BCE, during the height of a Jewish revolt. Jews had enjoyed several centuries of peaceful rule under first the Persians and then Ptolemy, but Palestine then fell under a Syrian-Greek tyrant. He trampled on civil and spiritual liberties, and forbade Jewish religious ceremony. The result was the Jewish Maccabean uprising. During this, Daniel dreamed of four beasts, each representing a successive ruler of Palestine, in which the final beast would \u201cdevour the earth . . . and break it in pieces.\u201d This rapacious empire would then be overthrown, and only Israel would be saved. Nearly every subsequent example of apocalyptic belief occurs in a similar social context of upheaval, oppression, and alienation.<\/p>\n The hallucinatory\u00a0Book of Revelation\u00a0is the best-known apocalyptic text, but early Christians and Jews had many other books for solace in difficult times. The first-century books of\u00a0Ezra\u00a0andBaruch, excluded from the Bible, tell of a time of terrible hardship and injustice, symbolized by the wrath of a devouring eagle. The eagle was the well-known emblem of the Roman Empire,which, it was prophesied in these books, would soon be destroyed by a mighty warrior, and all those who collaborated in the empire\u2019s rule would die.<\/p>\n A later set of end-times texts, known as the Sibylline books, first appeared in the fourth century during the chaos after the death of Emperor Constantine. The Sibylline books tell of a time of tyrants who oppress the poor and enrich the guilty. But a new leader will appear and destroy the heathens and their temples. A similar set of Sibylline books appeared when Syrian Christians suffered under Moslem rule in the seventh century. In all these cases, people hoped for the end of social disorder through catastrophe.<\/p>\n Countless other apocalyptic movements arose in similar contexts of confusion and oppression. In 13th century Germany, Frederick II was enmeshed in bitter conflict with the Pope, claiming that the Church was irredeemably corrupt. During this clash, Joachin of Fiore arose as a prophet to preach of approaching last days when the Church would be destroyed, choosing 1260 as the date of its collapse. Later, in the reign of the singularly ineffective Frederick III, when the gap between rich and poor grew enormous and lawless nobles extorted the populace, the Bohemian Wirsburg brothers attracted thousands who believed the final days would come in 1467. Apocalyptic cults arise, it seems, in a context of oppression, uncertainly, and corruption.<\/p>\n But didn’t the old apocalypts speak of destruction brought by supernatural powers, while the end times we face now stem from scientifically proven sources such as ecological damage and resource depletion? This, too, follows the trend of constant updating and modernization of the Last Days myths to suit the times. In biblical times the apocalypse was brought by a god. In the early centuries of the common era, human warrior-leaders were the destructive force. In the late Middle Ages, during a major migration of peasant farm-workers toward urban centers, it was not a god or prophet, but the fury of the newly empowered laborers in the Jacquerie rebellion of 1356 and others that was predicted to bring down the nobility. The reasons for apocalypse are constantly evolving.<\/p>\n The Modern Doomsday<\/strong><\/p>\n America is perhaps the most apocalypse-believing nation on Earth. It was so from the beginning, even before the stormy death-rebirth cycle of the American Revolution. After Christopher Columbus\u2019s third journey to the New World, he began signing his letters \u201cChrist-carrier\u201d and wrote that the world would end in 1650.<\/p>\n America\u2019s apocalyptic tendencies peak in hard times. In the 1830s, the rise of the anti-slavery movement coincided with a resurgence of doomsday sects and prophets. William Miller, an abolitionist minister with 50,000 followers and perhaps a million more sympathetic to his message, predicted that Judgement Day would arrive on October 14, 1844. After that date, his movement collapsed. But the abolitionists and their foes, as their acts became more violent, continued to invoke end-times rhetoric in their arguments. Slavery was seen, with good reason, as having the potential to destroy the nation.<\/p>\n In recent centuries, people\u2019s lives have become less occupied by piety and the church, and more oriented toward technology and economics. So too have the causes and results of the apocalypse. In the 16th century, astrology was the favored method of predicting the future, marking early stirrings of the scientific view. The newly improved methods of planetary observation were conscripted by catastrophists. In the 1530s, French astrologer Pierre Turrel used four different methods to calculate final dates of 1537, 1544, 1801, and 1814. Astrologer Richard Harvey marked the end as 1583, during a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.<\/p>\n The newly refined sciences were enlisted to prove the end was near. In 1578, physician Helisaeus Roeslin of Alsace used observations of a nova visible in 1572 to foretell a final date of 1654. In 1688, John Napier, inventor of the logarithm, made his first doomsday calculation based on a mathematical analysis of the Book of Revelation. Other scientists chose end dates of 1892, 1911, and December 17. 1919. David Berg, leader of the Family of Love, predicted that Comet Kohoutek would destroy the planet in 1974. A few of the dozens of other scientifically oriented causes of a predicted world\u2019s end were a planetary alignment in 1982, comet Schoemaker-Levy 9\u2019s 1994 collision with Jupiter, and of course, Y2k. As science has replaced God as our source of certainty and faith, so have our myriad predictions of apocalypse become more rationally defensible.<\/p>\n The doomer Peak Oil scenario also replicates the final phase of the apocalypse story: that of rebirth after the collapse. Richard Heinberg, in a speech to the E. F. Schumacher society, said that after the peak, we will return to a more agrarian way of life, when \u201cwe actually regain much of what we have lost.\u201d He and others envision a future with far fewer people, many of them living rurally and raising most of their own food using permaculture and bio-intensive gardening. Some argue that post-peak, only those with primitive skills such as tanning and flint-knapping will survive. Suburban drones will die. So after the collapse, we follow the myth\u2019s final trajectory into the survival of an elect, and a rebirth in the Garden and simpler times.<\/p>\n Again, my point here is not that Peak Oil doomerism is wrong. The apocalypts may be right this time. We face enormous crises and we have the tools to end civilization. But remember, as you feel yourself drawn to the apocalyptic story, that it is the natural place to go in uncertain and dangerous times. We are culturally programmed to do it. Whether we are describing first-century Christians who were threatened with death for their beliefs, 14th-century weavers whose jobs were being automated and outsourced out of existence, or oil addicts about to tumble down Hubbert\u2019s Curve, people who take the apocalyptic view often have good reason to believe they are in mortal danger. The source of the threat varies\u2014an angry god, a brutal empire, a class struggle, or resource depletion\u2014but the response has remained the same over the millennia. The path to \u201cend of the world\u201d thinking is well trod, most heavily so in times of oppression, uncertainty, and corruption. But perhaps some of us can recognize how familiar is this dark road, resist the natural urge to repeat the story once more, and remember that there are many routes into the future other than the one toward the lowest common denominator.<\/p>\n Bibiography<\/strong><\/p>\n Copyright 2006 by Toby Hemenway<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many people in the Peak Oil community chafe at the label of doomer, but a lot of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com,\u00a0The Death of the Oil Economy,\u00a0The End of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[35],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n