Greer: The US Response To Crisis And Complexity: "La La La La I Can't Hear You!"

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Still, a series of news items over the last week or so have me worried. No, it’s not the latest news about methane plumes in the Arctic Ocean; it’s not the current round of economic idiocy from Europe, where the bizarre conviction that banks ought to be sheltered from the consequences of even their most clueless investment decisions has become the centerpiece of an economic nonpolicy that will likely tip the entire EU into mass bankruptcy; it’s not the death struggle between two failed ideologies that’s frozen Washington DC into utter political paralysis at a time when avoiding hard questions any longer may well put the survival of the nation at risk. No, quite the contrary: it’s the rising chorus of voices, from all across the political and cultural spectrum, insisting that everything really is all right and that any suggestion to the contrary ought to be shouted down as quickly as possible.

That’s been one of the less useful habits of large parts of the American right for some time now. Still, the habit of detachment from reality reached new lows this month, as North Carolina’s senate passed legislation forbidding the state from considering scientific evidence for rising sea levels in any policy dealing with the state’s low and vulnerable coastline. Texas and Virginia have already taken similar steps; it’s reminiscent of King Canute, who famously commanded the tide to retreat and just as famously got his royal feet good and wet. Since all three of these states are in the hurricane belt, and rising sea levels add mightily to the destructive impact of hurricane storm surges, it’s unlikely that this attempt to better Canute’s score will end so harmlessly.

Over on the other side of the spectrum, mind you, there’s no shortage of equivalent ideas. My fellow peak oil blogger Jan Lundberg, an activist well over on the leftward side of things, recently posted a thoughtful critique of the ideas on display at a San Francisco alternative culture expo. In there with the alternative healers and pop mysticism was a pervasive and contemptuous rejection of the idea that there might be limits to material abundance. That habit’s been popular in the New Age scene for decades—Rhonda Byrne’s meretricious The Secret, with its insistence that focusing on your sense of personal entitlement will browbeat the universe into giving you all the goodies you want, has a long pedigree—but as Lundberg pointed out, it’s become tangled up with frankly paranoid conspiracy theories and frankly delusional notions about the human mind’s alleged ability to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. Lundberg suggests that what’s emerging here is a New Age equivalent to the Tea Party, and he’s quite correct: there’s really not much to choose between "visualize, baby, visualize" and "drill, baby, drill."

I had a personal run-in with the same sort of thinking not long ago, in the course of finding a publisher for After Oil, the anthology of peak oil science fiction to which this blog’s readers contributed so many excellent stories late last year. (Yes, it’s going to press; I hope to have a tentative release date shortly.) One potential publisher, who had been enthusiastic about the project early on, rejected it with some heat once he read the manuscript. He didn’t object to the literary quality of the stories; no, what upset him was the fact that the stories assumed that people in a post-peak oil world would be more or less like people today, living in a world no more loaded with miracles than the one we now inhabit. Why, he asked, couldn’t the authors have written stories in which the problem of peak oil was solved by people sprouting psychic antennae, or creating new forms of kinship with water molecules, or at the very least powering the world on algae fuel?

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http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-06-14/parting-ways