July 29, 2013
IMAGINE DRAGONS:
Dark Age Politics : Energy Austerity A Return to Feudalism (Michael Lind, 7/26/13, The Breakthrough)
[O]ur hard-won knowledge of human nature forbids you to imagine that a neo-agrarian economy will be organized along the lines of the pleasant village socialism imagined by William Morris in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890). Sorry, but you can't have Dark Age economics without Dark Age politics, including feuds, plunder, and rape by the post-industrial equivalents of Homeric warlords or Viking chieftains.The ultimate dystopian nightmare would be the delusory utopia of many Greens - a world in which biomass once again became the major source of energy for heating, cooking, and industrial processes like smelting. Farms and forests once again would become the equivalent of oil and gas wells and objects of brutal competition within nations as well as among nations. Except where small societies of armed yeoman farmers could preserve their independence in mountains or on islands, brutal elites would control farmland and farmers alike.In a neo-agrarian, photosynthesis-based economy, the modern idea of democratic national self-determination would go out the window and imperialism and colonialism would revive. In the post-industrial future, as in the pre-industrial past, it would pay to wage zero-sum wars to control rich farmland that could support large numbers of tribute-paying peasants, slaves, draft animals, and livestock.Peaceful, consensual back-to-nature communes, along with small, labor-intensive countercultural farms, are luxuries that can be afforded by well-policed, urban industrial societies with mechanized agriculture and manufacturing powered by cheap and abundant energy. If we return to a Malthusian economy, its political corollary is less likely to resemble the Shire in Tolkein's Lord of the Rings than the anarchic, feudal Westeros of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2013 6:46 PM
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