Black Golden Age

The poetic imposition of metallic ages upon history—always viewed in retrospect or awaiting realization in the future, because we always, always live in the bottom-most iron age, and with clay feet yet—arises, I think, from the same faculty where poetry arises, a sense that we come from a higher realm. When ages are projected into the past or the future, the times are secular. We’re living in the flatlands. When such a state is projected vertically to Heaven, the times are religious. Progress is the word we use to say that we’re approaching—in horizontal time, of course—the Golden Age. But when chaos begins to cloud up the sky to such an extent we no longer see the promised light of dawn just below the horizon, there is a tendency to imagine that times past might have been much better and that we are declining.

I confess this to be one of my failures—hence frequent contrasts here between the secular and the religious, with the implication added that the religious is better. But when I look at things through the lens of daily life, is that really true? From time to time I make some efforts to check. It’s easy to do. I pick a century and look up what happened then. The process is always sobering, although I learn some history. I put a magnifying glass on any past period, and what I see is pretty much the same thing. What history records are so-called important events—almost always wars. The well-off are always very few, the majority always labors in some misery, certainly those at the margins. Punctuating this are names of wise people here and there, the names of great books or sagas.

The important difference between all earlier ages and ours came with the invention of ways to use fossil fuels—and then their massive exploitation. This lifted the status of the masses all across the world. But. But it also brought about an unprecedented growth in population quite unthinkable, in fact, had coal and oil not happened. Progress therefore has had an actual physical underpinning. And if we now feel a decline—and who can doubt it—it is because the population is still growing while the Age of Fossils is pumping its way to a terminus.

The poets of old were expressing something inwardly felt but wrongly projected. And their imaginations failed them. They settled on the metals, rather than on organic chemicals. If Virgil had projected an Age of Oil, he would have been right on target. Alas, for my grandchildren’s children that age is also coming to an end.

Wither Small Tenacious Cultures?

I’m reading the novels of Tony Hillerman again, and after the lapse of two decades and counting, they are both fresh and yet familiar. Yet so much has changed! And a thought that I had then now produces a different answer. Back then I viewed the Navajo life and thought that it preserved a genuine cultural deposit and lasting values—but it seemed to me that the relentless advance of modernity would sooner or later inevitably swallow it—despite the fact that large numbers (these days approaching 300,000 people) still lived a more or less traditional herding life in an arid and thinly populated region of the West. Today I wonder.

I wonder because the sunset of the fossil-energy age has become more and more visible, and as it approaches very great changes loom ahead. We remain altogether blind to it collectively, but in another hundred years the fossil sun will set in earnest with unimaginable changes to a peoples staring at computer screens today. With every increase in the price of energy, with every global conflict, with consequent disorders spreading, the Navajo way of life will become ever more adaptive and ours ever more threatened. Hence today I’m far from certain that the vast destructive spread of modernity will actually swallow up the Navajo. If anything they will become ever more ignored. Their way of life produces genuine values—while ours sucks the life right out of what still feebly remains of our pre-industrial traditions. And they will survive—changed but, once more living in harmony with the land and the mountains, better prepared.

Hillerman provides a painless way to obtain knowledge and appreciation of the sophistication and depth of the Navajo culture. It’s a whole lot more complex than reading a few web pages suggests. It must be seen from the inside, not through the distorted and facile lens of our sociology. I recommend his first three especially, The Blessing Way, The Dance Hall of the Dead, and Listening Woman. The early novels featuring Chee are also good. The quality gradually drops off as Hillerman, too, succumbed to the wasting literary disease of overproduction that plagues our times.

Strange to imagine how brief modernity will seem to generations in the future as they look up at a bright and star-filled sky again—star-filled because the harsh light of technical civilization will have dimmed.

Reminder

Power failures are intended, I believe, to remind us that the most important technological innovation of the modern age is the discovery of electricity. That reminder came again abruptly yesterday evening at 5:30 p.m. Light enough remained to let us find the flashlights and, using those, to find the matches to light the candles. The message for me, personally, was that while technology may be neutral, its absence can be felt as something positively annoying. Light is that ultimate symbol of value. Let there be light!

I’ve spent a substantial part of my life studying technology from various points of vantage. This began for me as a personal point of curiosity while I was still in the Army and later became a professional activity. I remember once in the service filling an empty hour looking up the respective populations per square mile of India and the United States and then calculating the U.S. population as it would be if it had India’s population density. That is a technological preoccupation? Absolutely. By the time I first chanced across Blake’s “Energy is eternal delight,” I lit up, as it were, already adequate to understand that feeling.

You cannot spend your time doing things of that sort without becoming painfully aware of the fact that our civilization is largely defined by the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels beginning early in the nineteenth century. In my personal parlance we have been and are still traveling on a bubble of oil, suspended in air, as it were, but this bubble, like the soapy kind, is of a brief duration. What follows after we’ve exhausted oil, gas, and eventually all coal? What I am hoping is that we shall still have the most important gift that we discovered: light.

That may happen if we eventually master fusion technology. The interesting aspect of that potential development is that it promises to give us light and modern communications and, possibly, energy enough for emergency transportation—and not much more than that. The reasons for that are that the yield of energy obtained, per unit of new energy needed to get it, will be modest. I’ve summarized the issues on LaMarotte here. Still, if we could get there, it would be a great boon—although, at present, mastery still eludes us. But if this brief blip in history, the Age of Oil, now stumbling towards its chaotic end, leaves us with electric power, that will have justified its vast excesses and violence for endless generations to come.