{"id":1071,"date":"2009-06-21T09:17:00","date_gmt":"2009-06-21T09:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=1071"},"modified":"2009-06-21T09:17:00","modified_gmt":"2009-06-21T09:17:00","slug":"the-long-descent-john-michael-greer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=1071","title":{"rendered":"The Long Descent (John Michael Greer)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I bought this as soon as it was published, as I am a fan of Greer’s blog<\/a>, but I hadn’t had the space to read it with any justice until last week. Summary impression: excellent, highly recommended, one of the best peak oil books, etc etc; it’s also one of the few books I’ve read on Peak Oil which starts to treat some of the spiritual aspects with any seriousness (indeed the book I hope to finish on my sabbatical<\/a> is in some ways a Christian equivalent of this), and, other than a forgiveable equation of Christianity with it’s North American instantiation, he says a lot of good things on the spiritual side. <\/p>\n

However, I do have some minor disagreements, the most important of which is that Greer holds out no hope for a high-technology future. To my mind, given the existing expenditure on infrastructure, there is no necessary reason why (in, obviously, a much reduced form) some sort of internet, for example, couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. I take the point that, eg, clean rooms for the manufacturing of chips will become virtually impossible to sustain, but I see no reason why, once the changed context is understood, the industry couldn’t make a laptop which would last for fifty or a hundred years without needing any maintenance. In other words, I think the sustainable point on the far side of Hubbert’s curve is higher up the technological scale than Greer anticipates. I suspect that there is a spiritual judgement hovering behind this; I think we’d agree that the true outcome would surprise us both.<\/p>\n

How about this for the outline of a novel, a sort of cross between Canticle for Liebowitz and The Road (and could easily be Joseph-Campbellised): peasant boy with talent is commissioned by monastery for a task – take this book to the monks at [High Monastery in the Mountain]; boy goes through various adventures to get to High Monastery; arrives, is asked to accompany the monk into their ‘chapel’ – has to put on pure white robes – astonishingly bright white light – watches as his ‘book’ is repaired. Of course, the contemporary reader can understand that this is a laptop being repaired in the sole remaining ‘clean room’ in the entire US continent, but that needn’t be spelt out explicitly.
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I bought this as soon as it was published, as I am a fan of Greer’s blog, but I hadn’t had the space to read it with any justice until last week. Summary impression: excellent, highly recommended, one of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[56,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-crisis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-hh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}