From John Michael Greer:

America and Russia, Part One: Stirrings in the Borderlands

Petroleum is a finite, nonrenewable, and irreplaceable resource, and we’re burning it at a rate of some 93 million barrels every single day…

With each passing year, the hunt for new oil reserves to replace those that have already been exhausted turns up less and less—at this point, annual discoveries are around 11% of annual consumption.

In a sane world, we’d be cutting back on our petroleum consumption year by year and giving up the extravagant habits of energy use that were briefly fashionable at the peak of the Age of Oil, and we’d be fine. We don’t live in a sane world, though. We live in a world where the only response to the inevitable exhaustion of the world’s oil reserves that anyone’s willing to consider is to keep on consuming, pedal to the metal, while insisting at the top of our lungs that someone, somewhere, has to come up in a hurry with some replacement for the irreplaceable energy resource we’re wasting so profligately. That’s what drives the cycle that’s gearing up for its third leap at the throat of the global economy…

Central to Spengler’s theory, and just as central to the spluttering denunciations leveled at him by the defenders of the conventional wisdom ever since his time, is his recognition that “progress” is a mythological concept rather than a historical reality.  Classical civilization—Apollonian culture, in his terminology—was not a step forward beyond the mark left by ancient Egypt; what Spengler called Magian culture, the great cultural upsurge in the Middle East that culminated with the Islamic Caliphate in what we call the Middle Ages, was not a step forward beyond Apollonian culture, and our Faustian culture is no more advanced than any of those I’ve named…

However far afield a great culture may extend its power during its period of imperial expansion, it remains rooted in its original homelands, and once the inevitable age of empire suffers its equally inevitable decline and fall, its far-flung extensions fall away and the original homelands of the culture hold onto what’s left of it until some later culture brushes it aside. Faustian culture had its origins, as already noted, in western and central Europe; in its time of empire, between 1492 and 1914, it surged out of Europe to conquer and pillage most of the planet; though its prestige is still high enough that privileged classes over most of the world still wear clothes of European style and maintain governments of European type, it’s very much a waning power at this point…

In the east, the Magian culture began to take shape long before Rome fell, and succeeded in absorbing the Byzantine empire into its own ambit and cultural forms once the western empire was gone. In the west, where the collapse of Rome had much more drastic impacts, a long and difficult dark age passed before Faustian culture began to emerge. In each case, though, the emerging culture started out borrowing a set of existing forms inherited from an older great culture.
Spengler calls this process “pseudomorphosis…”

And Faustian culture?  It also had two eras of pseudomorphosis. The first, as already noted, drew on the heritage of Rome; the second, later on, drew on Magian culture. From the Middle Ages to the early modern period, it’s no exaggeration—though it’s a blow to European pride, no doubt—to see the quarreling little countries of Europe as simply a western extension of the vast and immensely prosperous Magian cultural sphere, which extended from Morocco to Pakistan…

Faustian culture also has two major borderlands, one to the east of its heartlands, one to the west, and from those we can probably expect the rise of two more great cultures in due time…

Those borderlands?  Today we call them Russia and America: specifically, as we’ll see in the next post in this series, European Russia west of the Urals, especially the region centering on the Volga valley, and North America west of the Appalachians, especially the region centering on the Ohio valley and the Great Lakes…

Russia passed through its first pseudomorphosis a good many centuries back, when it absorbed potent cultural influences from the Byzantine Empire, at that time an important part of the Magian cultural sphere; it began its second pseudomorphosis in the days of Peter the Great, when a new set of cultural influences from the Faustian west swept over Russia; and it’s currently in the early stages of the inevitable reaction, which will see both the Byzantine and the European influences give way to the first bold statements of a distinctively Russian high culture. I expect that to begin sometime in the twenty-second century.

America, by contrast, received what Magian influence it had at second hand, by way of Magian elements retained by Faustian culture, and its first pseudomorphosis began in the early seventeenth century when the first waves of European settlement surged across a landscape mostly depopulated by the cataclysmic impact of Old World diseases on the native peoples. The second pseudomorphosis hasn’t happened yet, and it’s an interesting question which of the rising cultures of the next millennium will be responsible for that challenging stimulus. It’ll be after the second pseudomorphosis sparks the inevitable reaction that the first bold statements of a distinctively American high culture will appear, perhaps in the twenty-sixth century.

America and Russia, Part Two: The Far Side of Progress

In Magian culture—the great culture that emerged in the Middle East as Apollonian culture peaked and began to fade, hit its cultural stride during the Abbasid caliphate and metastasized under the Ottoman Empire—this vision found few takers once the Apollonian pseudomorphosis faded out…

Faustian culture—the great culture that emerged in western Europe around 1000 CE, which hit its cultural stride in the Renaissance and metastasized in the gargantuan European empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—still carries remnants of Magian culture with it, which were picked up through the normal historical process of pseudomorphosis and remain more or less fossilized in place…

Since, by definition, progress is what brought us here out of the squalor and ignorance of the benighted past, and since, by definition, continued movement in the same direction is going to lead us onward and upward to a shining techno-utopian future, any attempt to revisit the scientific community’s dogmatic rejection of spiritual experiences can only be seen as a surrender to the forces of superstition and ignorance that alone can deny us all our destiny among the stars…

It’s when the onward march of progress falls flat on its face, in turn, that the downside of the Faustian narrative becomes painfully clear, because it has no way to deal with failure…

The I Ching, the great Chinese textbook of time theory, identifies sixty-four basic conditions of time, each of which can morph into any of the others by way of specific transformations…

Someday the Messiah or Christ or the Mahdi or whoever will show up and transform the world utterly, but no one knows when, and in the meantime the faithful must expect to have their faith tried in the flames of worldly disappointment and suffering…

The Faustian sense of time requires progress—continued triumphant movement in the same direction. When that movement stops, or even slows down noticeably, the widening gap between what’s supposed to happen and what’s actually happening becomes a source of massive cognitive dissonance, and if that condition keeps going for more than a little while, people start to wig out…

We’re starting to see articles in the media insisting that the end of the world will follow promptly now that the self-anointed “good people” have failed. If supporters of Donald Trump know their way around the history of ideas, they’re reading these articles with glee, since—as noted above—such diatribes are the death rattle of a modern social movement…

The difficulty that the Faustian culture has never grasped is that any attempt at continued movement in the same direction is subject to the law of diminishing returns…

The entire narrative of human expansion into outer space is perhaps the most typically Faustian of all our dreams, the ultimate expression of a culture that loves to imagine itself zooming out to infinity in all directions.  Scientists have known for decades that it’s not going to happen—outside of the Earth’s magnetosphere, space is so full of hard radiation that prolonged exposure to it will guarantee death by radiation poisoning..

Thus technological retrenchment, not perpetual progress is the wave of the future…

Expect world-class meltdowns as that reality begins to sink in…

Thus I expect Faustian culture to undergo the same kind of catastrophic disillusionment that swept the Apollonian worldview into history’s dustbin…

Many of my readers have already been through the tectonic shift that follows when it sinks in that the future really isn’t going to be better than the present. (The rest of you might want to brace yourselves, since you’ll be having the same experience soon enough.) 
 

America and Russia: Tamanous and Sobornost

We can expect plenty of self-congratulatory handwaving next year, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon; I wonder how many people will remember that the same year will be the forty-fifth anniversary of the last human bootprints on lunar soil, or notice that since that time no human being has even gone beyond low earth orbit…

And it’s uncomfortably clear just how absurd it is to insist that Andy Warhol and John Cage represent any sort of advance over, let’s say, Rembrandt and Bach…

Like the other classic writers on the cyclic nature of history—Giambattista Vico and Arnold Toynbee—[Spengler] holds up the past as a mirror in which the future can be glimpsed:  a future marked by the exhaustion of creative potentials; the winnowing of the past to produce an enduring canon of scientific, literary, and artistic achievements; the coming of irreversible economic and political decline, and the rest.

On the far side of that trajectory lies the emergence of new cultures with their own values and insights and ways of understanding the world. Thinkers over the last century or so have pointed out that two of these will likely emerge in parallel regions to east and west of the European homeland of the Faustian culture: in European Russia, and in particular in the Volga river basin; and in eastern North America, and in particular in the region that includes the Ohio River basin and the Great Lakes…

The tribal cultures of North America and Siberia are related genetically and culturally by way of the vanished Bering land bridge, and their impacts on the expanding cultures that partly supplanted them and partly absorbed them had important parallels…

Russia’s great era of frontier expansion took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; America’s took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries…

In New York and Saint Petersburg, the intelligentsia and the privileged classes go through the motions of European culture; away from the centers of power, in farm towns along the banks of the Ohio and the Volga, the European veneer is very thin where it exists at all, and something rooted far more deeply in the soil (and the soul) of the countryside comes close to the surface…

To the Faustian mind, the landscape is a blank slate waiting to be overwritten by the creative will of the heroic individual whose deeds are the bread and butter of Faustian mythmaking…

The central theme of Faustian culture is infinite expansion. Notice the way that any Faustian thinker who comes up with a new political cause or a new diet instantly assumes that everyone, everywhere ought to embrace the cause or take up the diet; notice the way that so much of our technological prowess has focused obsessively on the quest to erase distance. From square-rigged ships to trains to cars to airplanes to rockets, from semaphore to telegraphy to radio to television to the internet, it’s all about extending a straight line to infinity, which is not surprising in the only culture in history to use linear perspective in its art…

In a culture of sobornost, what lies at the heart of each person is not some unique essence, but a link with the whole. It’s for this reason that traditional Russian villages were arranged in a series of concentric circles with a holy place at the center, houses around that, gardens around that, fields further out, and the forest sweeping away into the distance beyond: each part of the village has its place in a pattern that makes it formally equal with the others…

Tamanous—that’s pronounced “tah-MAN-oh-oose,” by the way—is the guardian spirit of the individual, and also his luck and his destiny. In a great many Native American cultures, finding and establishing a sacred relationship with one’s tamanous, via various traditional practices, is the primary religious act a person can engage in, an essential part of achieving adulthood and thus something that most people do as a matter of course. The result is a religious vision unlike any other, in which the personal relationship between the individual and an equally unique and individualized spiritual power takes center stage…

It’s the homegrown American versions of Christianity that call believers to take Jesus as their personal savior, through a process of personal transformation that, generation after generation, comes more and more to resemble a Christian vision quest—and is there really that much difference between a personal savior and a tamanous?.

The mythic narratives of Faustian culture all revolve around the conflict between the visionary individual who knows the truth, and the ignorant and superstitious masses who must be forced to accept it…

The next few centuries will see a newborn Russian great culture shake off or radically repurpose the inheritance of Europe in the service of a wholly different vision of humanity and the cosmos, in which sobornost will emerge as a central theme…

There is no one right way for everyone. That’s the message, or one part of the message, that the American land has been whispering to its human residents for a very long time.

The Twilight of the Intelligentsia

Where Spengler supported himself quietly as a high school teacher and pursued his polymath’s banquet of studies in deliberate obscurity, Toynbee was a member of Britain’s governing caste, working as the managing secretary of a prestigious nonprofit with close ties to the British governments of his day, and his historical research was carried out with the support of elite groups in Britain and America…

When it came to the fine details, though, Toynbee was the more precise and thus in many places the more useful…

In the process, one of the things he highlighted was the role in such encounters of an intelligentsia.
That’s a Russian word originally, by the way, but it came into being—as plenty of words in many languages come into being—by taking a word from one language and slapping onto it a grammatical suffix from a different language.  This is roughly the process by which an intelligentsia comes into being, too. The intelligentsia, in Toynbee’s terms, are those people who belong to one culture but who are educated in the ideas, customs, and practices of another…

The intelligentsia are the foot soldiers of pseudomorphosis. They’re the ones whose task it is to take the foreign cultural forms they themselves have embraced and impose them, by persuasion or force, on other members of their society…

They never succeed either in converting the masses to the ways of the foreign culture they’ve embraced, on the one hand, or in being fully accepted by the people who belong to that foreign culture on the other…

It’s normal for the education system of a mature society to train far more people for managerial positions than the society’s institutions can absorb. In a society of the kind we’re discussing, the numbers of the intelligentsia inevitably balloon far beyond what the job market for schoolteachers, minor bureaucrats, and other similar positions can take in. The result is an explosive far more dangerous than mere dynamite: an educated underclass that has been cast aside by the system, after its members have been trained in all the skills necessary to understand their position and organize opposition to the existing order of things…

The first thing that happens then is that the educated underclass, composed of people who have been trained for the intelligentsia but failed to claw their way into the jobs for which they have been prepared, makes common cause with the laboring classes. Look at the twilight years of Europe’s Third World colonies and you’ll find that dynamic at work. What pushes things over the edge into rapid change is that members of the intelligentsia who aren’t part of the underclass, who got the good jobs and the prestigious positions under the colonial regime, notice what’s happening, weigh their options, and side with the underclass and the masses. You’ve probably heard of a man named Mohandas K. Gandhi; read the first half or so of any good biography of him and you’ll see that dynamic written in letters ten feet tall…

North America and Russia are still, culturally speaking, European colonies…

We’ve got our cosmopolitan elite class, wallowing in the absurd displays of extravagance common to any empire in its diminuendo phase; we’ve got our intelligentsia, caught in the usual bind, fretting at their exclusion from the classes above them, and unable to convince the classes below them to adopt the European ideas and habits that are their only stock in trade; and we’ve got the vast and sullen laboring classes who regard the intelligentsia and their ideas with the usual mix of hatred and contempt, and whose pushback against the pseudomorphosis being thrust on them has become a political fact of immense importance…

In America, it’s essential to the self-concept of the intelligentsia to pretend not to be American, and to make a studied show of contempt for their own cultural and ethnic background…

Europe is going through its own hard transition right now, driven by conflicts of a sort we also have over here—the inevitable struggle, discussed at some length by Spengler, between elitist plutocracy disguised as democracy on the one hand, and populist Caesarism backed by the masses on the other. (May I risk a spoiler?  In the long run, this isn’t a struggle the plutocrats can win…)

We live in the interval between a death and a difficult birth.