Read Online The Long Descent by John Michael Greer - Free Book Online

stories as inevitably as they see with eyes and walk with feet, and the most important of those stories — the ones that define the nature of the world for those who tell them — are myths.
    Most ancient cultures took their myths directly from their religious ideas, using traditional stories about the gods and goddesses to make sense of their world. Our society does the same thing in a hole-and-corner way, dressing up an assortment of old religious ideas in the more fashionable garments of scientific theory or political ideology. Still, scratch the most up-to-date modern world-view or the most casually held popular opinion, and anyone with a nodding acquaintance with traditional myths will recognize the underlying story at a glance.
    Progress and Apocalypse
    The two competing visions of the future just mentioned are no exception. You don’t need to know anything about traditional mythology to recognize them. Unless you’ve been sleeping in a cave for the last three hundred years, you know them inside and out.
    The first is the myth of progress. According to this story, all of human history is a grand tale of human improvement. From the primitive ignorance and savagery of our cave-dwelling ancestors, according to this myth, people climbed step by step up the ladder of progress, following in the wake of the evolutionary drive that raised us up from primeval slime and brought us to the threshold of human intelligence. Ever since our ancestors first became fully human, knowledge gathered over the generations made it possible for each culture to go further, become wiser, and accomplish more than the ones that came before it. With the coming of the Scientific Revolution three hundred years ago, the slow triumph of reason over nature shifted into overdrive and has been accelerating ever since. Eventually, once the last vestiges of primitive superstition and ignorance are cast aside, our species will leap upward from the surface of its home planet and embrace its destiny among the stars.
    The second myth is the myth of apocalypse. According to this story, all of human history is a tragic blind alley. At one time people lived in harmony with their world, each other, and themselves, but that golden age ended with a disastrous wrong turn and things have gone downhill ever since. The rise of vast, unnatural cities, governed by bloated governmental bureaucracies and inhabited by people who have abandoned spiritual values for a wholly material existence, marks the point of no return. Sometime soon the whole rickety structure will come crashing down, overwhelmed by sudden catastrophe, and billions of people will die as civilization comes apart and rampaging hordes scour the landscape. Only those who abandon a corrupt and doomed society and return to the old, true ways of living will survive to build a better world.
    Both these myths have deep roots in the collective imagination of the modern world, and very few people nowadays seem to be able to think about the future at all without following one narrative or the other. It would be hard to find any two narratives less appropriate, though, for the future we are actually likely to encounter. Both of them rely on assumptions about the world that don’t stand up to any sort of critical examination.
    The faith in progress, for example, rests on the unstated assumption that limits don’t apply to us because the forward momentum of human progress automatically trumps everything else. If we want limitless supplies of energy badly enough, the logic seems to be, the world will give it to us. Of course the world did give it to us — in the form of unimaginably huge deposits of fossil fuels storing hundreds of millions of years’ worth of photosynthesis — and we wasted it in a few centuries of fantastic extravagance. The lifestyles we’ve grown up treating as normal are entirely the products of that extravagance. This puts us in the position of a lottery winner