Ben Myers has been hosting a sequence of ‘why I love…’ This is my offering.

“If what we do now makes no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with” – a remark which Wittgenstein made to his friend Drury, skewering the universalist heresy. Wittgenstein was a deeply serious man, and I believe he developed insights which all theologians need to absorb. Whilst it is debatable whether he was in fact a Christian, he certainly believed in God, and infamously saw things ‘from a religious point of view’. Whilst at service on the Eastern Front in WW1, he was known as ‘the man with the gospels’, as he never went anywhere without taking Tolstoy’s summary with him. He was a rather tortured soul in terms of his sexuality, he revered Augustine (the biggest influence on his own thought – he felt the Confessions to be “the most serious book ever written”), he hated virtually all modern music (you could “hear the machinery in Mahler” for example) and he gave up all his wealth to his sisters, as he felt that they were the only people unlikely to be spoiled by it. Clearly, in a different era, he would have been a monk, possibly a hermit. I find him a compelling human being: complex, flawed, yet gripped by the claim of the divine upon his life.

What is most important about Wittgenstein intellectually is his method of philosophy, which prevents a fruitless pursuit of metaphysical ‘solutions’; more precisely, it teaches us what metaphysics actually is. As such, Wittgenstein’s method is a necessary discipline for theologians, as it prevents us from mischaracterising the nature of Christian doctrine. As he put it himself “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.” Wittgenstein has had a great influence on contemporary theology, from Hauerwas to Herbert McCabe, and it seems to me to be a wholly beneficial one.

Whilst most understandings of Wittgenstein do emphasise the ‘Sturm und Drang’ of his life, I think there is a generally underappreciated current of joy. He used to relax by going to the cinema, especially enjoying Westerns – and he found this to be of value. He wrote early in 1947, ‘I have often learnt a lesson from a silly American film’ – and I believe that he watched something that year which gave him some inner peace, that allowed him to believe that his life was worth something after all. After all, his last words were ‘tell them I’ve had a wonderful life’. I like to think it was what he had in mind.

Davidov left an interesting comment earlier, which I’d like to say something about. He wrote: “The theory [Peak Oil] relies on the twin ideas that this will be precipitous and that it is imminent. In other words the theory expects imminent crisis. It also assumes that the human species will find this crisis so bleak that (despite having only used oil for 100 years or so) we will be unable to adapt without great suffering. There is in particular no evidence for the last proposition.”

Yes Peak Oil – however optimistic you are on depletion rates – predicts something ‘imminent’ and ‘precipitous’. In terms of human civilisation this is epochal. Even if it takes 20-25 years to halve the amount of oil (an optimistic assessment) there is no way in which to adjust to that lower-energy future without huge pain.

The single word explaining the difference between 1850 and now is: population. There are vastly more of us, and this expansion of population has been driven by access to more resources – some in terms of higher quality crops, some in terms of integrating marginal farmland, but the vast majority in terms of fossil fuel use. We use something like ten calories of fossil fuel energy per calorie of food consumed.

Much of that energy is wasted. Some can be replaced by other forms. But that we are facing something like a 50% reduction in available energy in my lifetime seems to be beyond dispute – and that means that the sustainable population, although there isn’t a linear relationship, will also be reduced.

There are various ways in which this might happen. The four horsemen will probably take most away: war, pestilence, famine (death!) – but I also expect huge population movements.

I think Western countries will be insulated from much of the worst, at the beginning. We will see disasters elsewhere in the world first, as leading indicators (eg Rwanda).

Unless Iran gets dragged into the war, of course. In which case it’ll happen overnight. That’s probably the best that could happen to us, paradoxically enough, ie be forced to change our society whilst there is, in fact, still a cushion of fossil fuels available.

I have become more pessimistic than I was, simply because I am persuaded that a) it is happening now (look at what is happening in Saudi Arabia) – so there is no time for society as a whole to prepare, and b) the depletion rates will be comparatively high – therefore a quicker collapse.

I see twenty years of increasing warfare and slaughter ahead of us, and no possibility of release from it, until the number of people on the earth has been reduced by a quarter to a third, and the ‘engines’ of the world economy have shifted onto a non-fossil fuel basis.

This classes me as a Peak Oil optimist by the way. That is, I think that our present civilisation will be able to continue, not in materialistic terms, but in terms of continuity of memory. I don’t think we’re facing a dark age type collapse, and I think our descendants living in fifty years time will have a wonderful life. I just think we’re going to suffer before we get there.

Truly, that makes me an optimist.

The Oil Drum | A Letter from the TOD Editors Box…: “I’m 24 years old and for as long as I’ve known what it was I’ve been concerned about peak oil and about the potential consequences for my country (the U.S.) and the world as a whole. The thing that keeps me up at night the most is the feeling that there is nothing I can do to stop us from sleepwalking over the edge of a cliff. …My question is what can I, as an individual do to prepare myself to survive peak oil?”

Lots of questions and answers at The Oil Drum.

See in particular the post from Matt Savinar (AlphaMale Prophet of Doom) about a third of the way down, from which I extract this:

If the decline rate is 4%, that halves production in 17.5 years or so. On top of the usual decline rate, I think it reasonable to expect further/additional disruptions due to war/terrorism and weather. (More Katrina-type events) So that bumps it up to 6% let’s say, halving the supply in 11.5 years. If the decline rate is 8% (as some have speculated) plus anohter 2-3% due to terrorism/war and weather plus then we’re looking at a 50% cut in 7 years.

The ‘some have speculated’ is Schlumberger.

1. One book that changed your life:
Honest to God, John Robinson

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R Donaldson

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

4. One book that made you laugh:
Wilt, Tom Sharpe

5. One book that made you cry:
Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff

6. One book that you wish had been written:
Wittgenstein’s Confessions (in the Augustinian sense)

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
Anything by Ken Wilber

8. One book you’re currently reading:
Collapse, Jared Diamond

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson

(see also this post.)

I realise I haven’t yet introduced the other member of our household.
Polly, 34ish, probably male, but always treated as female…

The Fire and the Rose: Anti-American Superman?

“I will keep saying it until I have no more reason to: Evangelicals are propagating more heresies today than in any other era of the church. These include a Pelagian doctrine of salvation, a unitarian doctrine of God, a docetic christology and Bible, a gnostic doctrine of eschatology, and a Constantinian doctrine of church-state relations—which, by the way, was what led the German church to support Hitler. Do I really need to unpack these in more detail? I am afraid that I will have to, since I doubt most realize how much the American evangelical sector has capitulated to these grave heresies and called it ‘a personal relationship with Jesus.'”

(HT Byron)

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

(HT Eternal Echoes)

First read this;
Then read this (HT Arts and Letters Daily).

How far is feminism (by which I mean, women must be more manly than the man) a construct of temporary energy abundance, and how much sadness in men is due to women being socially constructed out of what they actually want (and what men actually want)?

OK, now that my neanderthal leanings have been rubbed in, let me recommend this book. Not unreservedly, but I do suspect that the majority of women in the Anglo-Saxon sphere have been sold damaged goods. I suspect Scripture really does have something timeless to say on the subject….

The Anglican vicar of Baghdad: “I can cope very well with orthodoxy – Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox – I can cope with Anglo-Catholicism, evangelicalism, charismatics. I just can’t cope with the woolly liberal bit in the middle that doesn’t believe much.”

Fascinating.