An End to Literacy

You may be surprised to see this topic in this blog.  If you are a long time reader, you have rightly come to expect basically uplifting posts about possible positive futures.  On the face of it, this topic can seem quite discouraging.

Let me first state, I am talking about an end to literacy, or more exactly, one possible end.  This is not like the death of tyranny, where the outcome is like that for cancer that has metastasized; the question is not whether the cancer will live, the question is whether it will kill the patient in its process of dying.  Nor am I talking about the complete extinction of literacy; like calligraphy after the invention of the printing press, writing may go from a major industry to a rare hobby.

Nor do I view literacy as a bad thing, or even as a needless luxury.  Tripp Tibbetts wrote a good post on the role of books in the preservation of knowledge; the Leibowitz Society is an excellent if infrequent blog on that general topic.  What made literacy so special was it allowed the transmission of knowledge from one person to another without being in the same place and time.  As energy availability declines, the second part may grow greatly in value.  It is quite conceivable certain knowledge will be forgotten only to be learned again from books.  Not having to travel to meet in the same place is also an important consideration; after all, everyone reading this blog probably is literate.  If this was a podcast, I couldn't be quite as certain.

Therein lies the key.  Knowledge no longer needs to be printed to be transmitted.  Videos are more complex than books and are more likely to decline with the availability of energy.  Once books are made and distributed, using them takes little energy, at least during daylight hours, but the costs of production and distribution are not trivial, and they are subject to mildew.  However, while audiobooks require much more storage space than ebooks, they are much smaller than regular books, and earpieces are much smaller, simpler, and more resilient and energy efficient than screens.  As long as we retain the technology to crystallize the abundant earth of silicon and print circuits on it, we should be able to continue make audiobooks.

On the Long Ascent, your MP3 player might just be your library, too.

The Forgotten Sister

Remember the HMHS Britannic?  If not I'm not surprised, very few people have even heard of her.  She was the slightly larger sister to the Titanic, a name which is familiar to most, especially after the film by James Cameron.  The third ship in the White Star line, the Olympic, had a long career, but the Britannic was sunk in its first year of service -- not quite as spectacularly short as the Titanic's, but still quite short.

Why then is one a tragedy of epic proportions and the other a minor footnote in the annals of World War I?  Because every single person was able to get off the Britannic.  Now, 30 unfortunate souls in 2 lifeboats did die when their crafts were caught in the propellers, but there were 1036 survivors.  They had redesigned the craft so that there were more than enough lifeboats for everyone: 48 lifeboats capable of carrying 75 people each, or 3600 total.  They even designed it so that all the lifeboats could be launched from one side of the ship, in case the ship was leaning to one side.

What was the real difference?  What made the sinking of the Titanic a tragedy and not merely an accident was the faith that it was "unsinkable".  Once the shipbuilders realized that their design could sink, it wasn't too hard to make the ship survivable.  They did also add a double hull, a standard in still in use today, but while they work great for icebergs and rocks, torpedoes and mines pretty much ignore them.

This blog is not about history, however, and this is not just an interesting anecdote.  We stand at the same juncture, and this time billions of lives are at stake, not thousands.  Others will tell you we face a dark future ahead, and to be honest, that is likely to be true.  But all that really stands in our way is our faith that our civilization cannot collapse.  We still have the capability to make a smooth transition, but it requires people to stop thinking we can keep going as we have.

We all can make the Long Ascent if we choose to.

The Death of Tyranny

One year ago today I started this blog.  The choice of a date was purely a coincidence. Originally I intended it to use it as an entry in John Michael Greer's contest for short stories depicting a future of declining energy usage.  However, I am not much of a fiction writer, but I do love writing essays, and for decades I've been crafting a vision in my head of a possible positive future with greatly reduced resource usage.  I've slowly been revealing bits and pieces to you during this past year.  Since today is a special day I wanted to share a special piece

Aaron Copland wrote a wonderful piece of music called "A Lincoln Portrait".  No matter what you think of his actions, Lincoln did have a powerful way with words.  My favorite quote is from the middle of the piece, from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of October 15, 1858:

When standing erect he was six feet four inches tall, and this is what he said.
He said: "It is the eternal struggle between two principles, right and wrong, throughout the world. It is the same spirit that says 'you toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation, and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Brandon Smith wrote an excellent article a couple weeks back on Alt-Market entitled "How to Defeat Tyranny".  Very importantly, he did not entitle it "How to Defeat a Tyrant".  That is fairly easy.  We have witnessed it at least twice in the past decade, in Iraq and Libya.  But if you just get rid of one man another will frequently take his place. (My apologies to any other female dictators out there, but tyrants do tend to generally be men.)  What Brandon talks about is defeating the spirit of tyranny.  As such it is very much a spiritual striving, a crusade or jihad in the best senses of the words.  As Lincoln said, if you want to force anyone to do your bidding so that you may benefit at his or her expense, you have a tyrannical spirit inside yourself. 

Neither Lincoln nor Brandon Smith went far enough, though.  They can be excused for only facing the most immediate struggles.  However, that is not what this blog is about.  One of the most important themes Daniel Quinn has in his classic book Ishmael is the story of the Takers and the Leavers.  I don't want to go too far into that now, but the Takers are about, as Paul Wheaton so colorfully puts it, "making Mother Nature your personal bitch."   The Leavers try to change things as little as possible.  What Quinn misses is that there are two antonyms to "take".  Not only do you have "take it or leave it", you have "give and take".  So in addition to Leavers and Takers, you can have Givers.  If you can manage to give back more than you take, there are no limits.

This brings us back to the tyrannical spirit.  People are beginning to understand now that ethics does not just apply to how you treat other people.  If you just take from Nature without ever giving back, you still have the same tyrannical spirit.  IT DOES NOT WORK.  IT HAS NEVER WORKED.  IT WILL NEVER WORK.  The difficulty is that the problems accumulate over generations.  Unless you have the correct perspective, you may think it is working, like someone falling out of a building saying "See? I'm not dead!" as he passes every floor.  Nature only has so much to give.

I just want to say here that I am saying this not as someone who has won the war over that tyrannical spirit within myself, over even as one who wins more battles than he loses.  I just know that it is a fight that needs to be fought, and while I may frequently need to pick my battles, I always keep fighting.

Victor Hugo said, "There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come."  I say there is nothing so dangerous as an idea whose time is about to pass.  It is time for the very idea of tyranny to die.  The thought that you can get something without giving something back must be extinguished.  And it will be, whether it takes the deaths of 7 people or 7 billion.  Like drawing money out of a bank account, if you take it out faster than you earn interest, it doesn't matter how large it was to begin with, eventually you must go broke.  Nor does it matter how many #10 cans you store or how many cases of ammo you cache.

So what is the opposite of tyranny? Husbandry.  From the bacteria in our guts and the fungi on our skin to the food webs in the rain forests and the oceans, we must care for all forms of life, helping them so that they may in turn help us.  This is the only way we can survive.  This is the way we will thrive.  This is the Long Ascent.

On Earth As It Is On Mars

"A day on Mars is a little longer than a day on Earth: 24 hours and 40 minutes.  A year on Mars is less than two Earth years: 686 Earth days, or 668 Martian days.  Mars is 6,787 kilometers in diameter, compared to Earth's 12,756 kilometers.  Its gravitational acceleration is 3.71 meters per second squared, or just over one-third of Earth's.  The atmospheric pressure at the surface of Mars averages 5.6 millibars, about one-half of one percent of Earth's.  The atmosphere is largely composed of carbon dioxide.  Temperatures at the "datum" or reference surface level (there is no "sea level", as there are presently no seas) vary from -130 to +27 Celsius.  An unprotected human on the surface of Mars would very likely freeze within minutes, but first would die of exposure to the near-vacuum.  If this unfortunate human survived freezing and low pressure, and found a supply of oxygen to breathe, she would still be endangered by high levels of radiation from the sun and elsewhere.

After Earth, Mars is the most hospitable planet in the Solar System."  --Greg Bear, Moving Mars

Some people see exploring outer space as a colossal waste.  Any numbers associated with outer space truly are mind-boggling.  Light, which could circle the Earth more than 7 times in one second, takes over two seconds to go to the Moon and back and over 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth.  Mars is 50% further away than the Earth, so you would have to wait from 8 to 40 minutes to get a reply.  Sending a package to Mars today would take at least 6 months and cost well over $10,000 a pound.  Even if you devised some technomagical teleportation system that just had to overcome the Earth's gravitational pull, at today's prices for electricity it would cost over $7 to send a gallon of water to the Moon.

Most people will agree that satellites have improved life here on Earth.  Many people use Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) to navigate.  Satellite TV is a popular option.  And virtually everyone who gets a weather forecast benefits from weather satellites.

Beyond satellites, though, the short-term benefits are dubious at best.  Even Gerard K O'Neill, one of the biggest early proponents of solar power satellites, projected that it would take at least 20 years before the program produced as much energy as it consumed.  Other projects have even worse economic projections.

Not all benefits can be measured economically, though.  There are the spin-off technologies such as photovoltaics, of course.  Some people fantasize about finding another Earth-like planet and finding a faster-than-light way to get there.  Even if that were remotely possible, it still wouldn't solve any of our problems.  But look at the threats facing us, and then compare them with what life on Mars would be like.  Nuclear meltdown?  EMP weapons?  Massive solar flares?  Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, you would need that kind of shielding everyday.  Desertification?  Mars is a desert.  Sea level rise?  Deforestation?  Loss of wildlife?  Loss of arable land?  Loss of industry?  Running out of oil?  Mars doesn't have any of those to begin with.

Every conceivable problem we face, short of a rogue black hole, would be much worse on Mars.  Logically, this means, if we can solve those problems so we can live on Mars, we can solve those problems so we can live on Earth.

Sometimes doing things just because they are hard makes the Long Ascent easier.

The Road Ahead

I've been working out the map for the Long Ascent for a long time. Tripp, over at Small Batch Garden, is ahead of me on the actual journey, which he documents well in his blog.  I highly recommend reading it if you want to see what everyday life on the Long Ascent is really like.  He recently posted on his blog an excellent piece, "Starting at 40", that maps out the future pretty well.  The last paragraph gives a wonderful explanation of why I call the road ahead the Long Ascent.  Coming from someone who truly lives it makes it truly meaningful:

I've modeled my activity around these trends and around permaculture principles more generally for the past 4 years, and can say, first-hand, that it is a joyful and rewarding way to live, whatever the time frame for energy descent turns out to be.  It's hard sometimes - automatic dish and clothes washers are pretty awesome tools when one wants to spend their time doing something else.  And let's face it, who doesn't want to spend their time doing something other than washing clothes and dishes by hand!  It's a lot more deliberate, living in power down mode; the number of things one can accomplish in any given day declines dramatically without those excellent fossil fuels working constantly behind the scenes to free up our time.  But there is a certain elagance, a kind of da Vincian sophistication, that can only be found in a life lived simply.  Hardly a day goes by now when either I or my wife don't utter the phrase, "I love our life," and how many people, fossil-fueled or not, can say that?  There is a real and tangible silver lining in energy descent, but it has to be experienced first-hand.  It can't be lived and written about by proxy.  I mean, it can, obviously, but it won't mean much until you own it for yourself.  It's not a lesser life, it's not even a lateral move, it's actually better this way, because it's the way we have always lived and done business.  Realigning with a more classical way of life is normal, peaceful, and fulfilling.  It's the last couple hundred years that are the strange bit.

That's why overcoming our addiction to fossil fuels is the start of the Long Ascent.

The Ratchet Effects

For those who don't know tools, a ratchet is a device which allows something to move in one direction but not the other.  A ratcheting screwdriver, for example, will only turn the screw in one direction, so you can twist it back and forth without having to let go.

When a technology is introduced that expands the capacity to produce food, population grows to use all that extra capacity.  People don't generally voluntarily reduce population size, so the adoption of that technology becomes irreversible.  (I would like to thank Garrett Hardin for introducing me the ratchet effect.  It really is just an extension of Thomas Malthus's ideas and is central to Jevon's Paradox, that increasing efficiency in using a resource increases the overall use of that resource.  Hardin was specifically concerned with food production, but the ratchet effect applies to many other endeavors.)

Just because people don't choose to do something, however, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.  Technologies can be lost and populations reduced without any intention.  When they cut down the last tree on Easter Island, being a lumberjack was obsolete.  The bubonic plague significantly reduced the number of Europeans.

Going back to the tool analogy, a screwdriver which only tightens or only loosens screws isn't very useful.  That's why ratcheting screwdrivers have a switch: flipped one way it tightens, flipped the other it loosens.

There also is an reverse ratchet effect.  Extinction is a 100% phenomenon; a species is not extinct until every male or every female of a species is dead or incapable of reproducing.  So too is it with technology.  As long as someone somewhere in the world knows how to do something, the technology is not completely lost.  With the key technologies that allowed populations to expand, this leads to a ratchet effect on the downside.  Those who still have those technologies will have an advantage over those who don't, and they will grow in proportion to those who don't.  (Please note I am talking about relative percentages, so if one group loses 50% of its population and the other loses 75%, the first has doubled in relative proportion to the second.)

No matter how bad things get in the short term, the reverse ratchet effect will determine where we resume the Long Ascent from.

Prepaid Arbitration

How do you settle disputes in the absence of a legal system? Or more bluntly, how do you get people to uphold their end of a deal without pointing a gun at their head?

The best answer I've found came from someone who named his avatar Judge Jude.  His avatar and the project we were mutually involved in passed into the aether long ago, so I can't provide any references.  I also haven't seen this idea anywhere else, but I only claim copyright for these words, if anyone wants to take the idea and implement it, please feel free.

There already is a mechanism for settling disputes without resorting directly to the legal system: arbitration.  All the "judges" you see on television, whether they were judges previously, are technically acting as arbitrators.  One feature of most arbitration is that the arbitrators only get involved after a dispute is arisen.  This can make it a contentious and expensive process.

Judge Jude's innovation was to get involved before the contract was signed.  His fee was a certain small percentage of the contract.  (How small can be an area of competition between different arbitrators.)  The contract wasn't binding until both parties and the arbitrator signed off on it.  This makes for great incentives.  The arbitrator has a huge incentive to make sure that everyone understands and agrees to exactly what they're getting into, so there won't be a dispute later on.  The better he does this job, the more satisfied his clients will be, the better his reputation, and the more he can charge.

What if a dispute does come up, and someone does not want to comply with the arbitrator's decision?  That person then gets blacklisted: the arbitrator will no longer adjudicate any disputes or sign off on any contracts for that person.  If they do that several times, they will soon find no one wants to do business with them.

Settling disputes before they arise will be key to prosperity on the Long Ascent.