Narratives

In the process of investigating Derrick Jensen's intellectual forebears, our tutorial read a few classic anarchist texts from the turn of the century - Voltairine de Cleyre's "Direct Action" and Petr Kropotkin's "The Conquest of Bread." These works are of course spiritually and often literally in line with Derrick's analysis and his feelings - though they just as often seem anachronistic and irrelevant. However, the most striking relationship between the two was their reliance on narrative. They seemed to agree that no activist plan could be established without a clear schematic idea of what caused the relevant problems. The analyses provided, especially that of Kropotkin, offer a sort of cautionary tale about relying on such narratives, since they are based on anachronistic ideas about progress, history, class relationships, among other things. They gave a narrative of the history of the world in simple, moralistic terms. Technical progress and hard work developed raw materials into riches but the greedy powerful people monopolized the riches and stole what rightfully belongs to all. They move on to a solution that seems obvious and easy in the light of their narrative: take the stuff back from the rich. The narratives ignore the vast complexity of the world and impose an artificial simplicity that precludes practical work.

In DGR, Lierre critiques millenarian cultists who believe "the end is near." But is DGR not just another one of those groups, believing, without substantial scientific evidence, that civilization will collapse within a century or two? Jensen's analysis lines up uncannily with the archetypal story of Christianity, as John Michael Greer points out in "The Long Descent." To illustrate: before the Original Sin of civilization, there was an indigenous Eden. Civilization emerged, nigh-miraculously, through the hubris of greedy men, and has caused all human suffering ever since. One day civilization will Collapse, those in power will be deposed and brought to justice. An indigenous lifestyle will again prevail and all the wounds of civilization will be healed.

Of course, Jensen's claims and the things he advocates don't become false simply by fitting the criteria Greer lays out. However, Jensen's overly simplistic historical narrative and understanding of anthropology reveal at least that part of his narrative is flawed, which calls into question the other claims he makes. What consequences does the narrative have for Jensen's factuality?

In general, there is a substantial amount of ambiguity about collapse in DGR writings. It is never specified just what politic system is going to collapse and how, and there are many possible paths provided that apparently all lead to the same end. While there are substantial ambiguities inherent in prognosticating the potential futures of a very complex system, it seems important to discuss specific possibilities. Instead, McBay merely offers a list of possible avenues to what one infers must be essentially the same collapse. McBay’s imprecision is both understandable and necessary (criticism would be much harsher had he claimed to know the fate of industrial civilization in detail!), but it should be clarified with a caveat: collapse is not an apocalypse. Further, a more realistic and less mythological approach to collapse would inform an effort to constrain the specifics of possible collapses. This would in turn aid efforts from all sides to influence the course of collapse. In our tutorial, we imagined an "Intergovernmental Panel on Global Collapse," to parallel the IPCC in collecting and interpreting data about the possible routes to collapse and which systems were most vulnerable, as well as how we might go about preventing and/or guiding and encouraging such processes.

The only acute oversight introduced by this apocalyptic scenario regards time: McBay's scenarios play out suddenly – the collapse could be dated at least to a year, if not a day, and its consequences involve an immediate shift to a new stable state. The changes are drastic and very much noticeable to people in their everyday lives. Yet this is by no means the only possibility, and it is certainly rare in the historical record. Most of the examples used by, for instance Tainter, take place over the course of centuries. (Tainter, 1985) John Greer uses this evidence to assert that collapse is already occurring (perhaps beginning with the global peak in per capita energy usage in the 1970's) and that the process will take centuries, so long that the changes will be imperceptible to any given individual. This possibility is never even entertained by the DGR authors. If collapse is in fact already occurring, then the role of activists may change in ways they don't account for. It should also be perceptible in many social metrics for which there exists reliable data, so the same program of information gathering suggested above would theoretically also investigate this question and its implications.

Greer's alternative to Jensen's simplistic narrative is, if nothing else, a bit more humble. He doesn't claim that we as activists can change the course of civilization - he believes it is collapsing, and will do so over hundreds of years in a complex way as fossil fuels gradually run out. He sees it is a predicament we need to deal with, like death, rather than a problem we are capable of solving - in any direction. This makes sense, since the whole process is big and complex and we are small and don't understand very much - the IPGC does not exist, after all. His alternative is appealing in its calm demeanor - yes, everything's going hell in handbasket and we're killing the planet &tc, but there's no reason to freak out about it because there's nothing we can do about it. This is true for many of the same reasons Jensen and co. so often bring up to discredit the exclusive use of traditional routes of activism. To Greer, they just fail to mention that their model won't work either, for a variety of reasons - no one will actually do it, it would be too little too late, and the system is too large, complex, and full of inertia to be swayed by such a program.

While Greer's analysis has appealing aspects, Jensen's of course does as well, and the point I'm trying to make is that, without more specific information, we can't know which makes more sense - they are really more appeals to variations in personality and ideology. This is a problem throughout writing on collapse, as I'll detail in a later post.