A work in progress

Not John Michael Greer 

“After Progress” is an important book by peak oil blogger John Michael Greer. It seems to be largely non-overlapping with his other books, but readers of his blog will recognize many of its central themes. “After Progress” should probably be read together with Greer's magnum opus “The Long Descent”. While that book dealt mostly with the economic ramifications of peak oil and the decline of modern civilization, “After Progress” takes a look at its spiritual dimension. What will happen to religion and spirituality on the downward slope from the peaks of modernity?

Greer argues at length that the modern Western belief in Progress is really a religion, a “civil religion” to be exact. It offers promises of transcendence (“our destiny in the stars”) through technology and economic growth, bestows a quasi-divine status on “Man” (with a capital m), and fills pretty much the same psychological function as the old theistic religions it has replaced. This is most obvious in the case of Marxism, but the same tendencies are at work all over the modern political spectrum. By their very nature, however, civil religions are less stable than “real” religions. They are bound up to a concrete society or polity. If that fails, the civil religion will crumble with it. Greer believes that the 300-year era of Progress has come to an end. The Great Pan of Progress is therefore dead, and the civil religion of the West will soon face a crisis, a crisis which will prove to be terminal.

This is pretty basic, provided you accept Greer's premise that the age of cheap and abundant energy is over. However, Greer believes that the upcoming changes will cut deeper still. The civil religion of Progress is really a secular imitation of Christianity, and Christianity in turn is part of a broader “religious sensibility” which also includes Buddhism, Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism. That sensibility is world-denying in the sense that it promises escape from the world as presently constituted. Christianity is situated on the apocalyptic and populist end of this spectrum, promising salvation/transcendence to the common man (not just the spiritual elite) through a final judgment encompassing the whole world. Earlier religious sensibilities were world-affirming, since they saw the world as normal and lacked the longing for escape. Rather, they wanted to bring humans into a right relation with the cosmos as it actually is. (This is a very short summary of an argument that's considerable more complex and nuanced in the book.)

Note that the civil religion of Progress is, in a somewhat paradoxical way, also world denying. It promises an escape from the present state of the world into a blissful utopia. In some versions, that utopia lies on the far end of violent, apocalyptic changes. Greer believes that the decline of modern civilization will lead to an entirely new religious sensibility. The older theistic faiths will also face a crisis, as the downfall of Progress will make people question the very notions of utopia, apocalypse, transcendence and world-denial. What will replace them is less clear. Perhaps new forms of Christianity, suitably reinterpreted to fit a post-progress context? Perhaps Buddhism, or some form of Pagan Revivalism? The new religious sensibility will be ecological, non-apocalyptic and see death as a natural part of life. It will be unabashedly “superstitious” and believe in the concrete reality of gods or spirits.

Greer bases his conclusions both on empirical observations of the contemporary American religious scene, and on a more “morphological” approach rooted in Oswald Spengler's work “The Decline of the West”. Spengler believed that rationalism was typical of civilizations at their seemingly triumphant apex, while a “Second Religiosity” becomes dominant when civilizations decline. Greer doesn't see the Second Religiosity as necessarily negative, but rather describes it as a creative compromise between faith and reason, drawing on the strengths of both.

On his blog, Greer occasionally sounds almost “radical”, but in this book, his more conservative side is visible. The author argues that only religion can save humanity during the future decline, since religions are based on faith rather than on “facts”. The crisis of modernity is also the crisis of rationalism, which eventually becomes nihilism, when Reason turns against itself, and realizes that we can't really know anything at all! The only way out of the impasse is faith, more specifically a faith in a higher order of things, in which humans are constrained to play a subordinate role, rather than feeling hedonistically entitled to super-abundance and cosmic utopias. Greer also believes that new forms of monasticism will flourish in the centuries ahead, since they are more compatible with the absence of economic growth than the present mega-churches or luxurious meditation resorts. Communal living, according to the author, usually only works in a religious setting.

Personally, I feel that Greer – a supposed pessimist – might be somewhat over-optimistic about what will happen during the long descent from Hubbert's peak to neo-medievalism. I think the initial “sensibility” of most people faced with the impending failure of modernity, is to cling even harder to the twin notions of Progress and Apocalypse. Fanaticized climate change denial, bizarre sects awaiting gifts of free energy from the Space Brothers, suicide cults, scapegoating of people like Greer on a truly massive scale for being the one's responsible for our current predicament…these are more likely reactions than a peaceful transition to clean country (and spiritual) livin'. (In his novel “Star's Reach”, Greer himself creates a scenario similar to the one mentioned here.) The Second Religiosity might eventually emerge, but it will emerge the hard way.

That being said, “After Progress” is nevertheless a very good, interesting and even important work. What struck me most when reading it, was the sheer immensity of the change demanded by Greer. *All* our basic presuppositions have to go. Like most people, I also tacitly assume that, of course, Progress is something objectively real rather than a “civil religion”, that religion is about transcendence from a corrupted world, that life would be meaningless without some kind of teleological evolution towards a final goal (“among the stars” or elsewhere), that abstractions are more real than the disparate facts being abstracted, and that this is obviously true! I'm not sure if I can make the transition demanded by the Archdruid, but his challenge has hereby been accepted, come what may…