Give this author some ale, please

John Michael Greer is a prolific author and blogger on the “peak oil” end of things. He is also a pagan, occultist and ritual magician. “Dark Age America” is Greer's latest book. It delineates the author's pessimistic visions of the future. Most of the material will be familiar to avid followers of Greer's blog, The Archdruid Report or ADR.

“Dark Age America” starts off well but loses the thread somewhere in the middle. Personally, I still think “The Long Descent” is Greer's best book on the inevitable decline and fall of modern civilization. Greer constantly attacks both cornucopians and apocalypse-mongers but this “moderate pessimism” is voided by the first half of “Dark Age America”, in which he makes some pretty startling claims. Greer believes that 95% of the world's population will die off within one to three centuries due to mass starvation, pandemics and war. Agriculture will be made impossible over large areas due to loss of top soil. The seas are overfished and will become effectively empty within our lifetimes. Due to climate change, half of North America will turn into desert, while failing nuclear power plants will create huge “dead zones” even in otherwise inhabitable areas. Florida will disappear under water. Modern science and technology will (of course) disappear or even be actively destroyed by the common people. Virtually all current ethnic groups will go extinct, and the survivors will have identities created de novo. These survivors will regroup in feudal societies or roving war bands. The process of collapse have already started and can't be stopped by any political or economic reforms whatsoever.

This may or may not be true, but it's difficult *not* to see it as an apocalyptic scenario, unless you have a very narrow definition of what constitutes an apocalypse (“everyone will die/be turned into zombies tomorrow morning”). It also seems to contradict what Greer says in other books and blog posts, where he proposes various forms of societal reform to help the United States cope with the decline. Gone are the plans for decentralization, direct democracy, mutual aid societies, a return to pre-industrial high tech (such as sailing ships) or speculations about alternative forms of industrial high tech (such as steam punk). Instead, we get a super-bleak picture of a future in which only purely individual solutions are possible, if you're extremely clever, crafty or lucky. Even the fun is gone: Greer no longer talks about his plans to brew really good ale, something that would probably work even during a dark age! I get the feeling that the only option available (if you belong to the lucky 5%) is to form secret orders of book-printers to keep some of the legacy of pre-collapse civilization alive until somebody can begin anew centuries or millennia into the future…

“Dark Age America” also has some curious blind spots. Greer frequently mentions the senility of modern elites, but never the infantilism, hedonism and degeneracy which has taken hold not only of the Western elites, but of a large portion of the population as well. Nor does he mention the bizarre suicidal reflexes of some Western elites when faced with existential threats such as mass migration, major crime waves or terrorism. I think Vilfredo Pareto nailed it when he said that elite groups at the end of a cycle are “effeminate but rapacious”. In Greer's scenario, the elites are clueless (and, of course, rapacious) but seem to lack the weird naivety and lunatic fringe pseudo-liberalism which arguably characterizes much of the official discourse today. Their cluelessness is more similar to that of Marie Antoinette and the French aristocracy. Or is it George W Bush? It's not clear whether Greer believes that “SJW” liberalism is a purely ephemeral phenomenon, soon to be replaced by business-as-usual clueless Neo-Con wars and repression, or whether this is a genuine blind spot in his highly eclectic private philosophy. It's also curious to see Greer suggest that the “internal proletariat” of a declining West will unite with the “external proletariat”, i.e. the war bands attacking the West from the outside. This may happen if both proletariats are similar (perhaps both will be Muslim), but what if the internal proletariat remains White and adopts, say, paganism or Orthodox Christianity? Then the unity scenario sounds more farfetched.

After this criticism, perhaps I should point out that “Dark Age America” also contain strong chapters, the most interesting being Greer's discussion of science. He points out that although science is one of the great achievements of the human mind, really existing scientists and scientific institutions at the end of our civilization's lifespan are frequently so corrupted, oppressive and arrogant, that they inevitably alienate the common people, with disastrous results. Something similar happened to ancient philosophy. In a provocative section (remember, the author is a pagan), Greer describes Hypatia as a clueless aristocrat beaten to death by the proletarian Christian mob, since the oppressed proles of Alexandria couldn't care less about Neo-Platonist philosophy. They did notice her gilded carriage, though… Unfortunately, I think Greer is on to something when he discusses science. The author is at pains to point out that he is not an anti-vaxxer, climate denialist or creationist, but he understands why people (including thinking people) may be drawn to pseudo-science by the antics of a corrupted medical industry, privileged and hypocritical “environmentalists” or militant atheist “Brights”. Since the “internal proletariat” of a dying civilization will identify all elite activities with the old system they are trying to overthrow, science will get a bad bruising from which it may not be able to recover as the people throw out the baby with the bathwater.

“Dark Age America” may be John Michael Greer's most pessimistic book to date. It feels like Greer on downers. However, since the Archdruid Emeritus is eclectic and mercurial, we may expect this “collapse” to be followed by a more optimistic “stability” in the near future. Right as we speak, Greer is serializing the first draft of a more upbeat utopian novel on his blog, and he has promised to shortly tell us what we must do to build a mass movement against environmental destruction. Perhaps Attila and the Four Horsemen aren't standing outside the city gates just yet…