# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, June 30, 2010

### Merlin's Time

Perhaps the most interesting responses to the discussion of mass movements here on The Archdruid Report have been those that insisted that the only alternative, either to a mass movement in the abstract or to some specific movement, was defeat and despair. That’s an odd sort of logic, since mass movements are hardly the only tool in the drawer; I suspect that part of what drives the insistence is the herd-mindedness of our species – we are, after all, social mammals with most of the same inborn habits of collective behavior you’ll find in any of the less solitary vertebrates.
Still, the pressure toward some such movement has another potent force driving it: the awkward fact that the vast majority of people today simply do not want to hear how difficult their future is going to be. It doesn’t matter how good your evidence is or how well you make your case, most of your listeners will simply look uncomfortable and change the subject. Why this should be the case is an interesting question; I suspect that much of the blame lies with the cult of positive thinking Barbara Ehrenreich anatomized in a recent book, though I’m quite willing to hear alternative explanations.
Still, for whatever reason, an extraordinary blindness to the downside has become crazy-glued in place straight across contemporary culture. From economists who insist that the bubble du jour (right now, in case you haven’t noticed, it’s government debt) can keep on inflating forever, through technology fans who believe devoutly that their favorite piece of drawing-board vaporware will necessarily solve the world’s problems without side effects and with spare change left over, to millions of ordinary people who can’t or won’t imagine a future without the material abundance of recent decades, we seem to have lost the collective capacity to recognize that things can and do go very, very wrong. It’s not merely a matter of blindness to the “black swan” events Nassim Nicholas Taleb made famous, either; we’re just as bad at seeing white swans coming, even when they’ve been predicted for decades and the sky is so thick with them that it’s hard to see anything else.
It’s an appalling predicament: how can a community prepare for a troubled future if most people tune out even the slightest suggestion that it might be troubled? It’s for this reason, seemingly, that many people in the peak oil scene have chosen to downplay the difficulties and insist that we can have a bright, happy, abundant future if we just pursue whatever baby steps toward sustainability we all find congenial. I’ve been assured by some of the people making such claims that they’re perfectly aware that the situation is far more difficult and dangerous than that, but that the need to get as people involved in some kind of movement toward sustainability is so great, they say, that waffling on that point is as justified as it is necessary.
As it happens, I think they’re making a hideous mistake. I’ve discussed the reasons for that perception at length in several recent posts, and won’t rehash them here. The question that remains is whether there are any viable alternatives, and that’s the question I want to address in today’s post. To explain the option I have in mind, though, it may be useful to borrow a metaphor from history.
I don’t know how many of my readers know this, but my most recent publication is a translation of a very strange book from the Middle Ages. Its title is Picatrix, and it is one of the sole surviving examples of that absolute rarity of medieval literature, a textbook for apprentice wizards. Those of my readers who grew up on stories about Merlin, Gandalf et al. take note: those characters, legendary or fictional as they are, were modeled on an actual profession that flourished in the early Middle Ages, and remained relatively active until the bottom fell out of the market at the end of the Renaissance.
By "wizard" here I don’t mean your common or garden variety fortune teller or ritual practitioner; we have those in abundance today. The wizard of the early Middle Ages in Europe and the Muslim world, rather, was a freelance intellectual whose main stock in trade was good advice, though admittedly that came well frosted with incantation and prophecy as needed. He had a good working knowledge of astrology, which filled roughly the same role in medieval thought that theoretical physics does today, and an equally solid knowledge of ritual magic, but his training did not begin or end there. According to Picatrix, the compleat wizard in training needed to get a thorough education in agriculture; navigation; political science; military science; grammar, languages, and rhetoric; commerce, all the mathematics known at the time, including arithmetic, geometry, music theory, and astronomy; logic; medicine, including a good knowledge of herbal pharmaceuticals; the natural sciences, including meteorology, mineralogy, botany, and zoology; and Aristotle’s metaphysics: in effect, the sum total of the scientific learning that had survived from the classical world.
Now it may have occurred to my readers that this doesn’t sound like the sort of education you’d get at Hogwarts, and that’s exactly the point. Whether you believe that the movements of the planets foretell events on Earth, as almost everyone did in the Middle Ages, or whether you think astrology is simply a clever anticipation of game theory that gets its results by inserting random factors into strategic decisions to make them unpredictable, you’ll likely recognize that a soothsayer with the sort of background I’ve just sketched out would be well prepared to offer sound advice on most of the questions that might perplex a medieval peasant, merchant, baron or king. Nor, of course, would someone so trained be restricted in his choice of active measures to incantations alone. This is arguably why so many medieval kings and barons had professional sorcerers and soothsayers on staff, despite the fulminations of all the dominant religions of the age, and why wizards less adept at social climbing found a bumper crop of customers lower down the social ladder.
The origins of this profession are, if anything, even more interesting. Pierre Riché’s useful study Education and Culture in the Barbarian West showed in detail how the educational institutions of the late Roman world imploded as their economic and social support systems crumpled beneath them. In Europe – matters were a little more complex in the Muslim world – they were replaced by a monastic system of education that, in its early days, fixated almost entirely on scriptural and theological studies, and by methods of training young aristocrats that fixated even more tightly on the skills of warfare and government. Only among families with a tradition of classical letters did some semblance of the old curriculum stay in use, and Riché notes that while that custom continued, those who learned philosophy, one of the core studies in that curriculum, were widely suspected of dabbling in magic. It’s not too hard to connect the dots and see how a subculture of freelance intellectuals, equipped with unusual knowledge and a willingness to stray well outside the boundaries set by the culture of their time, would have emerged from that context.
All this may seem worlds away from the issues raised earlier in this essay, but there’s a direct connection. The wizards of the early Middle Ages were individuals who recognized the value of certain branches of knowledge and certain attitudes toward the world that were profoundly unpopular in their time, and took it on themselves to preserve the knowledge, cultivate the attitudes, and make connections with those who shared the same sense of values,or at least were interested in making practical use of the skills that the knowledge and attitides made possible. There was no mass movement to support the survival of classical science in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, and no hope of starting one; the mass movements of the time – when they weren’t simply stampeding mobs trying to get out of the way of the latest round of barbarian invasions – embraced the opposite opinion. How much of a role wizards might have played in the transmission of classical learning to the future is anyone’s guess, since records of their activities are very sparse, but it’s clear that they were an intellectual resource much used during an age when few other resources of the kind were available.
I’ve come to think that a strategy of the same kind, if a bit more tightly focused, might well be one of the best options just now for an age when very few people are willing to make meaningful preparations for a difficult future. Certain branches of practical knowledge, thoroughly learned and just as thoroughly practiced by a relatively modest number of people, could be deployed in a hurry to help mitigate the impact of the energy shortages, economic dislocations, and systems breakdowns that are tolerably certain to punctuate the years ahead of us. I’m sure my readers have their own ideas about the kind of knowledge that might be best suited to that context, but I have a particular suggestion to offer: the legacy of the apppropriate technology movement of the 1970s.
This was not simply a precursor of today’s sustainability projects, and the differences are important. The appropriate tech movement, with some exceptions, tended to avoid the kind of high-cost, high-profile eco-chic projects so common today. Much of it focused instead on simple technologies that could be put to work by ordinary people without six-figure incomes, doing the work themselves, using ordinary tools and readily available resources. Most of these technologies were evolved by basement-shop craftspeople and small nonprofits working on shoestring budgets, and ruthlessly field-tested by thousands of people who built their own versions in their backyards and wrote about the results in the letters column of Mother Earth News.
The resulting toolkit was a remarkably well integrated, effective, and cost-effective set of approaches that individuals, families, and communities could use to sharply reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and the industrial system in general. It was not, I should probably point out, particularly esthetic, unless you happen to like a lively fusion of down home funk, late twentieth century garage-workshop, and hand-dyed back-to-the-land hippie paisley; those of my readers who own houses and are still fretting about their resale value (and haven’t yet figured out that this figure will be denominated in imaginary numbers for the next several decades at least) will likely run screaming from it; those who were incautious enough to buy homes in suburban developments with restrictive covenants will have to step carefully, at least until their neighbors panic. Apartment dwellers will have to pick and choose a bit; on the other hand, those of my readers who will spend time living in tarpaper shacks before the Great Recession ends – and I suspect a fair number of people will have that experience, as a fair number of people did the last time the economy lost touch with reality and imploded the way it’s currently doing – will find that very nearly everything the appropriate tech people did will be well within their reach.
What’s included in the package I’m discussing? Intensive organic gardening, for starters, with its support technologies of composting, green manure, season extenders, and low-tech food preservation and storage methods; small-scale chicken and rabbit raising, and home aquaculture of fish; simple attached solar greenhouses, which make the transition from food to energy by providing heat for homes as well as food for the table; other retrofitted passive solar heating technologies; solar water heating; a baker’s dozen or more methods for conserving hot or cool air with little or no energy input; and a good deal more. None of it will save the world, if that hackneyed phrase means maintaining business as usual on some supposedly sustainable basis; what it can do is make human life in a world suffering from serious energy shortages and economic troubles a good deal less traumatic and more livable.
This is the suite of technologies I studied as a budding appropriate-tech geek during the late 1970s and 1980s, and it was central to the training program that earned me my Master Conserver certificate in 1985. One teaches what one knows, and I’m going to take the gamble of devoting much of the next year or so of Archdruid Report posts to the details. My hope is that I can encourage at least a few of my readers to follow the very old example mentioned earlier, and become the green wizards of the decades ahead of us.
For that, I have come to think, is one of the things the soon-to-be-deindustrializing world most needs just now: green wizards. By this I mean individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn, practice, and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills – the skills of the old appropriate tech movement – and share them with their neighbors when the day comes that their neighbors are willing to learn. This is not a subject where armchair theorizing counts for much – as every wizard’s apprentice learns sooner rather than later, what you really know is measured by what you’ve actually done – and it’s probably not going to earn anyone a living any time soon, either, though it can help almost anyone make whatever living they earn go a great deal further than it might otherwise go. Nor, again, will it prevent the unraveling of the industrial age and the coming of a harsh new world; what it can do, if enough people seize the opportunity, is make the rough road to that new world more bearable than it will otherwise be.
I also propose to have a certain amount of fun with the wizard archetype in the posts to come. Still, that’s an example of what the Renaissance alchemist Michael Maier called a lusus serius, a game played in earnest, a dead serious joke. The present time, as I’ve suggested here more than once, has plenty of features in common with the twilight years of classical civilization, the age that gave rise to the legends of Merlin and Arthur, and made it in retrospect a poetic necessity for the greatest of all legendary kings to be advised by the greatest of all legendary wizards.
Thus there’s a certain lively irony in the fact that, back in the days when I was sanding blades for a homebuilt wind turbine and studying the laws of thermodynamics in Master Conserver classes in the meeting room of the old Seattle Public library, one of my favorite bits of music was Al Stewart’s Merlin’s Time:
Who would walk the stony roads of Merlin’s time,
And keep the watch along the borderline?
And who would hear the legends passed in song and rhyme
Upon the shepherd pipes of Merlin’s time?
In its own way, that’s the question that upcoming posts will pose to my readers; we’ll see what the answer turns out to be.

#### 219 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 219 of 219

Dan said...

  Ah... what a lovely 'transition'... from mass movement to hands-on wizardry!
  Your last few posts left me thinking about means and ends.
  As anyone who participated in any of the revolutions of the 20th century can attest, as soon as the "ends justify the means" comes into play, things get dark. Every time this easy road is chosen, the result is a 20-year death march from idealism to atrocity.
  Though we think we are cleverly shaping the 'means' to our 'ends', it is really the 'means' that shape us.
  We never reach the 'ends' anyway, and in acting out our 'means' we are changed and bent by them. If the 'means' require that we lie to people about the future in order to better manipulate them for their own good, well... we are not likely to change anyone else, but we sure will transform ourselves into manipulative liars!
  So, I look forward with great joy to a year of wizardish means! Practical, tangible, applicable means, that we can learn, and practice, and share with those around us... and come what future may, know that we have lived and worked with dignity and honour.
  Those are the means that I would shape, and in doing, let shape me!

  7/6/10, 6:46 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Don and Cathy, it's complex enough to want a post of its own -- I'll fit it in when I decide to take a short break from wizard lessons. The short form, though, is that every civilization ends up with external proletariats -- neighboring peoples whose labor and resources help support the civilization but who receive very few of the benefits. When a civilization begins to decline, one sign is that the relationship between the civilization and its external proletariats becomes increasingly hostile, and eventually leads to insurgency and/or open war. Think Rome and the German tribes, China and the steppe peoples -- well, you can fill in the blanks yourself, and it shouldn't be hard to think of the logical equivalents today.

  7/6/10, 7:51 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Dan, excellent. It's exactly the transformation of the worker by his or her tools and labors that's the key to moving ahead just now.

  7/6/10, 7:52 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  By the way, the discussion of this post has knocked all past records for number and thoughtfulness of comments into a very old-fashioned hat. Thank you all for your enthusiasm and your courtesy!

  7/6/10, 7:54 PM
GeoWend said...

  Hey there! This is Geoffrey Wendel (We met at the Spoutwood Faery Fest), dropping a quick line...
  Not found any brewers in the area as of yet, but we have started trying our hand at ales...currently just about to bottle some Yarrow Ale. I will continue to keep an ear out, but the folks at the very nice brew shop in Fredrick (The Flying Barrel) could not think of anyone out by Cumberland.
  We will be having a bit of a bottling party this weekend (I also have some mead that needs to go into bottles.).
  Of course, we might be doing a fair bit more brewing over in Berkeley Springs...some friends of mine have moved in next door, and they make mead as I do, and are also about to try their hand at beer.
  (Hopefully next year we will try our hand at growing a bit more grain...)
  I hope this finds you all well!
  Great post, by the by...I really liked this one, and it makes much sense.
  Geoffrey

  7/6/10, 9:10 PM
Ruben said...

  @ Lucid
  Here are a couple of sites that describe how to find solar noon, and then determine solar south. Orient your greenhouse to solar south, not magnetic south.
  Green Building: Finding True South to Optimize Orientation
  Ways to find true south for solar site survey

  7/7/10, 12:08 AM
timewalker said...

  [quote]Grains and such -- I have long noted that most urbanites who start thinking about growing their own food seem to fail to grasp one big point: Most diets that most humans have lived on through most of the last few millenia have a caloric base of a starchy root or grain crop[/quote]
  Bill, funny you should mention that, when I first became peak oil aware, I got an allotment and tried to do exactly that (as an experiment). I planted a small patch of wheat and spelt (bought the grain from a local health-food shop). It grew fine, but on the point of ripening the whole lot was eaten by rats and other small creatures (I think these live in people's compost heaps). Mt neighbour's sweetcorn was also eaten by the same creatures.
  I also planted some potatoes, which were affected by blight (as were those of all my neighbours).
  The thing I've learnt from this is that it's important to plant a wide variety of basic staples, just in case any of them fail. (Adding a starchy squash, parsnips and oca this year, and not bothering with the grains).

  7/7/10, 4:20 AM
chriswaterguy said...

  Green wizard - makes me think of Lonny Grafman, educator in appropriate tech, engineering and permaculture at HSU. http://www.appropedia.org/User:Lonny - you might want to tell him your ideas.

  7/7/10, 6:54 AM
Michael said...

  Hello all, first time commenter. I had an idea I wanted to bounce off everyone.
  In Denver there is a bicycle collective called Derailer; they do free tune ups and occasionally build people bikes for free.
  My idea was some kind of "Clunker Collective". Course I have no knowledge of cars (though I'd like to learn) but I thought a non-profit type mechanic shop (perhaps also conversion shop) would be a good idea.
  Also, this just dawned on me. How about some kind of apprentice database? For people like me that want to learn new skills but also really don't know anyone to learn from.

  7/7/10, 8:38 AM
Luciddreams said...

  No worries. So you know of Wilber just never was interested. Hmm. I know holons weren't unique to Wilber. His claim to fame is linking the perennial philosophy with western psychotherapy/psychology. The man is a genius in my opinion.
  And for the record I feel the need to say that I'm not going to cut down either of those oak trees I told you about. As badly as I have wanted to cut down the oak on the east side of the property I haven't.

  7/7/10, 9:19 AM
Loveandlight said...

  A bit off-topic, but I have an interesting challenge for you for a future post: Let's say you have twenty-something friend at the time when collapse is accellerating and becoming increasingly self-evident. This friend is very frightened because he sees all this awfulness happening and he doesn't understand why because he doesn't know anything about the dishonest world of money and finance, peak oil and gas, overpopulation, or any of that stuff. Let's say he suspected you knew what was happening and he wanted you to tell him in as simple terms as you could manage. The challenge of this post I am suggesting to you is, what would you say to him? Whether or not you approve this comment, I hope this challenge intrigues you at least a little.

  7/7/10, 12:16 PM
Danby said...

  Dear God! 200 comments! I'm not going to read them all.
  It is odd to contemplate that JMG thinks I have the makings of a wizard. A green one, but a wizard nonetheless.
  Seriously, this approach has a lot more to recommend it than the other peak-oil strategies I've seen discussed. The primary one being that anyone can do it. Right now. I've been doing it for 25 or more years. No coalition building. No small-group discussion. No dependency on anyone else. Sinn Fein, y'all.
  Of course, you will have to kiss your comfortable, lazy middle-class life goodbye, but that's happening whether you choose it or not.

  7/7/10, 12:22 PM
Danby said...

  @timewalker.
  Species and variety diversity are critical to crop reliability. If blight is endemic in your area, make the expense to purchase seed potatoes. They are expensive, but you are much more likely to get a crop than if you save infected seed. Crop rotation helps a lot with this, making sure never to plant potatoes in soil that in the last 2 years has had potatoes, tomatoes, tomatilloes, husk cherries, or hoe nightshade (a pervasive weed of the Western US that I struggle against every year). And, of course resistant varieties help a lot too.
  re:rats. small dogs, especially terriers, will reduce any kind of rat problem to negligible dimensions.

  7/7/10, 12:30 PM
Danby said...

  Okay, I lied, I did read them.
  @team10tim
  While Eastern and Western monasteries were outwardly very similar, the spiritual content was astoundingly different. Basically it was 2 groups of men trying to achieve opposite ends by the same means. Christian monks are trying to perfect themselves, Buddhist monks are trying to negate themselves. While the means were identical (self-mastery, abolition of desire, disciplined life in a community) the endpoint was very different indeed.
  Also, Christian clerics are supposed to be an alter Christus another Christ. This demands non-violence, as He gave himself over to his persecutors rather than defend Himself, even with words, let alone violence. Hence it is forbidden for Christian clerics to draw blood, and it is considered a sin to strike them.
  So however much mental and volitional discipline can be learned within a martial art, that path is contrary to the nature of a Western monastic.

  7/7/10, 1:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...

  Geoffrey, good to hear from you! Save a bottle for me.
  Ruben, thanks for the links! These are good.
  Timewalker, you're reminding me of a passage from the Mabinogion.
  Chris, as time permits.
  Michael, if you want to try to bring something like that into existence, great; go for it. If you want somebody else to do it, well, let's just say you may be waiting for a long time. One of the lessons of this moment in history is that actions are more valuable than ideas.
  Loveandlight, my experience is that this isn't the sort of thing you can communicate in a single post, because you have to walk the person through the places where today's conventional wisdom fails to deal with ecological reality. That takes time and patience. My book The Long Descent is about as concise as I've been able to make a written version of the process.
  Danby, if as devout and conservative a Catholic as J.R.R. Tolkien could find wizards congenial company, I don't think you have anything to worry about! As for western monasticism, though, there were the militant orders of the Middle Ages -- the Templars, Hospitallers, and so on, who did combine life under a Christian monastic rule with the profession of the warrior. Since I'm not a Christian I'll leave it to those who are to debate whether that was appropriate, but it did happen.

  7/7/10, 2:36 PM
S.L. Æris said...

  I'm in.

  7/9/10, 10:07 AM
Beaver Creek Farms said...

  Chef fistfight over the term
  "local" re pig in contest.....
  really funny:
  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us/09local.html?_r=1

  7/9/10, 2:55 PM
Aurora said...

  This sounds much better than Hogwarts! I'm in.
  I had a real surviavlist/self sufficiency bent as a kid and always imagined that I would grow up into hard times. Shame I put it on the back burner, with the total lack of outside validation for my fears through the boom. Looks now like I was a smart 9 year old.
  Revisiting your blog after a prolonged absence to find this is surely serendipitous. Today I have been looking for books on hand and solar powered kitchen and craft tools. I have also been editing my library to reflect the kind of future we are headed for; and was thinking of all the different topics I would need to have covered. Sounds like you have done the groundwork for me!

  7/15/10, 2:26 PM
Aurora said...

  P.S. I also found this the other day which looks like it may come in useful.
  http://www.appropedia.org/Portal:Green_living

  7/15/10, 3:02 PM

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