The Wealth of Nature. John Michael Greer
most Americans will not be welcome.
To extract ourselves from the corner into which we have backed ourselves, however, requires coming to terms with the fact that a very large number of the previous choices all of us have made were founded on folly. If we lived in a world in which people always made rational decisions to maximize benefits to themselves, recognizing our past folly would be simply another rational decision, but in the real world things are not quite so simple. To understand why, it’s necessary to talk a little about the role of superstition in human affairs.
In the area where I live, the Appalachian mountains of eastern North America, superstition is very much a living phenomenon. Many local gardeners, for example, choose times to plant seeds according to the signs and phases of the moon. This habit may reasonably be considered a superstition, but that word has a subtler meaning than most people remember these days. A superstition is literally something “standing over” (in Latin, super stitio) from a previous age; more precisely, it’s an observance that has become detached from its meaning over time. A great many of today’s superstitions thus descend from the religious observances of archaic faiths. When my wife’s Welsh great-grandmother set a dish of milk outside the back door for luck, for example, she likely had no idea that her pagan ancestors did the same thing as an offering to the local tutelary spirits.
Yet there’s often a remarkable substrate of ecological common sense interwoven with such rites. If your livelihood depends on the fields around your hut, for example, and rodents are among the major threats you face, a ritual that will attract cats and other small predators to the vicinity of your back door night after night is not exactly foolish. The Japanese country folk who consider foxes the messengers of Inari the rice god, and put out offerings of fried tofu to attract them, are mixing agricultural ecology with folk religion in exactly the same way; in Japan, foxes are one of the main predators that control the population of agricultural pests. The logic behind planting by the signs is a bit more complex, but it may not be irrelevant that the sequence of signs include all the tasks needed to keep a garden or a farm thriving, more or less equally spaced around the lunar month, and a gardener who works by the signs can count on getting the whole sequence of gardening chores done in an order and a timing that consistently works well.
There’s a lot of this sort of thing in the world of superstition. Nearly all cultures that get any significant amount of their food from hunting, for example, use divination to decide where to hunt on any given day. According to game theory, the best strategy in any competition has to include a random element in order to keep the other side guessing. Most prey animals are quite clever enough to figure out a nonrandom pattern of hunting — there’s a reason why deer across America head into suburbs and towns, where hunting isn’t allowed, as soon as hunting season opens each year — so inserting a random factor into hunting strategy pays off in increased kills over time. As far as we know, humans are the only animals that make decisions with the aid of horoscopes, tarot cards, yarrow stalks and the like, and it’s intriguing to think that this habit may have had a significant role in our evolutionary success.
Is this all there is to the practice of superstition? It’s a good question, but one that’s effectively impossible to answer. For all I know, the ancient civilizations that built vast piles of stone to the honor of their gods may have been entirely right to say that Marduk, Osiris, Kukulcan et al. were well pleased by having big temples erected in their honor, and reciprocated by granting peace and prosperity to their worshippers. It may just be a coincidence that directing the boisterous energy of young men into some channel more constructive than street gangs or civil war is a significant social problem in most civilizations, and giving teams of young men huge blocks of stone to haul around, in hot competition with other teams, consistently seems to do the trick. It may also be a coincidence that convincing the very rich to redistribute their wealth by employing huge numbers of laborers on vanity buildings provides a steady boost to even the simplest urban economy. Maybe this is how Kukulcan shows that he’s well pleased.
Still, there’s a wild card in the deck, because it’s possible for even the most useful superstition to become a major source of problems when conditions change. When the classic lowland Mayan civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its fragile environment, for example, the Mayan elite responded to the rising spiral of crisis by building more and bigger temples. That had worked in the past, but it failed to work this time, because the situation was different; the problem had stopped being one of managing social stresses within Mayan society, and turned into one of managing the collapsing relationship between Mayan society and the natural systems that supported it. This turned what had been an adaptive strategy into a disastrously maladaptive one, as resources and labor that might have been put to use in the struggle to maintain a failing agricultural system went instead to a final spasm of massive construction projects. This time, Kukulcan was not pleased, and lowland Mayan civilization came apart in a rolling collapse that turned a proud civilization into crumbling ruins.
Rationalists might suggest that this is what happens to a civilization that tries to manage its economic affairs by means of superstition. That may be so, but the habit in question didn’t die out with the ancient lowland Mayans; it’s alive and well today, with a slight difference. The Mayans built huge pyramids of stone; we build even vaster pyramids of money.
It’s all too accurate these days to describe contemporary economics as a superstition in the strict sense of the word. The patterns of dysfunction summarized in this chapter — the factors inherent to the profession of economics that make for bad decisions; the blindness to the impact of non-economic factors on economic processes; the belief in the infallibility of free markets in the face of contrary evidence; the reliance on “cooked” and irrelevant statistics — are all part of a way of thinking about economic life that worked tolerably well, from certain perspectives, during the age of economic expansion that was kick-started by the Industrial Revolution and reached its peak in the late twentieth century. Like the Mayan habit of building pyramids, though, the reasons why it worked were not the reasons its votaries thought it worked, and underlying changes in the energy basis of the world’s industrial economies have made today’s economic superstitions a severe liability in the future bearing down on us.
Undead Money
Like most complex intellectual superstitions — consider astrology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance — economics has a particularly strong following among the political classes. Like every other superstition, in turn, it has a solid core of pragmatic wisdom to it, but that core has been overlaid with a great deal of somewhat questionable logic which does not necessarily relate to the real cause and effect relationships that link the superstition to its benefits. My wife’s Welsh ancestors believed that the bowl of milk on the back stoop pleased the fairies and that’s why the rats stayed away from the kitchen garden; the economists of the twentieth century, along much the same lines, believed that expanding the money supply pleased — well, the prosperity fairies, or something not too dissimilar — and that’s why depressions stayed away from the United States.
In both cases it’s arguable that something very different was going on. The gargantuan economic boom that made America the world’s largest economy had plenty of causes. The strong regulations imposed on the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression made a significant contribution (a point that will be explored in more detail later on in this book); the accident of political geography that kept America’s industrial hinterlands from becoming war zones, while most other industrial nations got the stuffing pounded out of them, also had more than a little to do with the matter; but another crucial point, one too often neglected in studies of twentieth-century history, was the simple fact that the United States at mid-century produced more petroleum than all the other countries on Earth put together. The oceans of black gold on which the US floated to victory in two world wars defined the economic reality of an epoch. As a result, most of what passed for economic policy in the last 60 years or so amounted to attempts to figure out how to make use of unparalleled abundance.
That’s still what today’s economists are trying to do, using the same superstitious habits they adopted during the zenith of the age of oil. The problem is that this is no longer what economists need to be doing. With the coming of peak oil — the peak of worldwide oil production and the beginning of its decline — the challenge facing today’s