The shadows of the bagaudae

Most people hardly noticed, but the recent Spanish elections have been troubled by a series of demonstrations. A relatively high number of demonstrators have gathered in major Spanish cities during the months of May and June, demanding radical but curiously unspecific changes in Spanish politics. There have been similar protests in Portugal and in Greece, all of them about the austerity measures taken in those countries in response to the debt crisis. Of course, the French far left has seen in these protests the premises of the revolution it has been waiting for throughout the last fifty years, but what strikes me most about those protests is their pointlessness and their conservative nature. In that, they may well be representative of the political climate of the early decades of energy descent.

The revolutions of the early industrial area aimed at changing the rules of the game. The change in question could be moderate, as in the American Revolution or the Indian or Irish independence struggle; or it could be radical. The result could be a resounding success or an abject disaster, but the rhetoric was always the same: there was something wrong with the world, and the revolutionists were going to fix it. This rhetoric was so pervasive that even counter-revolutionary movements adopted it, and when Adolf Hitler attempted to seize power in 1923, he yelled "Either the German revolution begins tonight and the morrow will find us in Germany a true nationalist government, or it will find us dead by dawn!" – unfortunately for us he did not find death at dawn, but that’s another story.

The European protests, however, are aimed at conserving the advantages of the welfare state. Protestors don’t even blame their country’s political class for allowing themselves to go so much into debt; they blame them for not having continued to do so, so that they could enjoy a little bit longer the privileges granted to them by the welfare state.

This is not an uncommon theme in Europe, and there is no shortage of politicians, and not only on the left, to try and capitalize on it. Some people want to repeal the 1973 law which prevents the State from printing its own money. Others want to put the European Central Bank under political control (theirs, of course), so that they may go on a money-printing spree. Others, last but not least, want to drop the Euro altogether, get back to national currencies and, well you guessed it, go on a money-printing spree.

The rationale common to all those proposals is always the same: the privileges we enjoy today are our birthright. We are entitled to their indefinite continuation and anybody pointing out that you cannot sustainably spend more than you earn must be an agent of some sinister elite group bent on world domination – in some variants he must also have a really big nose.

These narratives have historically emerged out of the far right, among the local Larouchites (yes, we have a few of them, and they don’t like me) or in national-revolutionary circles such as Alain Soral’s Egalité & Réconciliation, then have spread to the mainstream left through crossover groups we call “republican” – that is, left-wing social conservatives with a strong nationalist bent.

This is relatively rare in France. Here the far right are not a bunch of mostly harmless lunatics – that’s the far left’s position – it is the remnant of the dark hordes which nearly destroyed the continent seventy years ago. These people are loathed, and while it is acceptable to have been a member of some far-left group in your youth, having been in a far-right group is, well, shameful. The same goes for ideas. The very fact the far right loudly agitates for something – for instance immigration control – disqualifies it.

So the fact that themes originally from the far right have found their way into the reasonably mainstream left is very telling. It shows that our societies have become so entitled that they are ready to listen to anybody with a “solution”, no matter how shady his background, provided he gives them even a faint hope of retaining their privileges.

It also shows how desperate they are.

We face two convergent trends, both of which place our societies on a declining trajectory. The first one, well documented by Tainter, is the diminishing return of investments in social complexity. We have reached the point where any solution involving an increase in social complexity – new laws, new structure, new procedures – is likely to be counterproductive and to yield only marginal gains at a great cost. Only decreasing social complexity could provide our society with some room for maneuver, but that is unthinkable since it would mean curtailing a number of services we have come to consider our birthright.

The second one is, of course, peak energy, which will shrink the economic surplus available to fund said complexity. This means it will be harder and harder for European states to fund the services their citizens are accustomed – and feel entitled – to.

In an ideal world, we would acknowledge this and organize the retreat as best we can while making sure the rich bear most of the burden.

Unfortunately we are not in an ideal world. Partly this is a result of the power structure of modern democracy. Contrary to what one might think, the power does not belong to a small elite clique. It does not really belong to the government. It is shared by a number of interconnected and somewhat overlapping power centers. The MEDEF (the French organization representing business interests) is one of them, but it is hardly the only one and its demands are routinely ignored by the government. The unions, the farmers, and the teachers can have more pull, especially when fighting defensively.

The end result is that budget cuts will initially concern those without any political clout: the unemployed, of course, but also the youth, small businesses or crucial but unpopular or low-key branches of the government – the police or the military, for instance. It is not an evil scheme, by the way; only the result of the politicians’ natural reluctance to engage in unnecessary fights.

The walking disaster that European economies have become is one of the results of this reluctance. Rather than face the structural threats posed to the welfare state model by the limits of complexity, we as a society have decided to play the borrow-and-spend way out, hoping that “growth” would somehow bail us out. We now turn to scapegoating and invoke the revolutionists of old, so that we can retain our privileges a little longer.

This is not an unprecedented attitude. Late Roman historians make frequent reference to an obscure social movement call the bagaudae. The word is Celtic and probably meant “combat group” – it is relatively close to the one we use for pipe bands. We don’t know what they stood for, but they were apparently considered subversive, far more so in fact than the various usurpers who roamed the country at that time. Apparently they were able to control parts of the Empire during extended periods of time, notably Armorica. According to the British historian Ken Dark , they may even have taken power in Britain, which would explain Zosimus’ rather cryptic reference to a revolution in 409 and the sudden disappearance of the local, villa-dwelling and still pagan, aristocracy.

One hypothesis – the one I favor, obviously – is that the bagaudae were, at least in part, people who revolted against the Roman Empire because they wanted to keep the advantages of being Roman citizens. Paradoxically, this could mean seceding from the Empire and setting up one’s own local variant if the official one is not up to the task. This happened during the Third Century crisis with the so-called Gallic and Palmyrene Empire, and at the very end of the Empire with Syagrius’ enclave.

The bagaudae were probably less conventional than Zenobia and her followers, and did not have the same kind of elite support, but the basic rationale was the same: if the people back in Rome can’t do their job, let’s do it in their stead.

The results were, how to state it, disappointing. Nearly everywhere the bagaudae and their Roman dreams were stomped down by brutal tribal warlords; as for the places where they apparently triumphed, well, their leaders eventually turned into brutal tribal warlords who stomped down whatever ideals they had at the beginning – that or they hired bearded foreigners with a funny accent and a weird religion.

It wasn’t just another case of revolutions failing and of power corrupting. Trying to retain some civilized order in a small region in the middle of an imperial collapse is not, per se, an unattainable goal. Countless Chinese kinglets reached it at the end of the Han and Tang dynasties. They succeeded, however, mostly because they were facing a maintenance crisis, a slight imbalance between the maintenance costs of the society and its sustainable resource base.

What the Western Roman Empire faced was a catabolic collapse; that is, an imbalance between maintenance costs and the sustainable resource base so huge that some kind of stability can be attained again only after most of the society’s infrastructure has been destroyed. Any attempt to stabilize before the bottom is reached is doomed to fail because the destruction of infrastructure only temporarily frees resources but permanently harms your ability to exploit your environment.

The Roman Empire was essentially bankrupted by military and administrative costs, but when the army and the administration began to unravel, its ability to extract resources from its neighbors and citizens significantly decreased, which in turn made it quite difficult to fund a working army and administration.

And, of course, it made it virtually impossible to keep a Roman-like level of civilization, because Roman civilization itself was a part of the problem.

In case you haven’t noticed, we are in a similar situation.

European countries have been able to build their impressive welfare states because fossil fuels have enabled their economies to produce huge surpluses – and also because somebody else has been paying for their defense.

The problem is that fossil fuels will dwindle away, and so will the huge economic surplus built on them. There is no way we can keep the kind of public services we have now with ever-diminishing resources. We probably can’t even keep them with stagnating resources.

What this means is that there is no way the Spanish or Greek protestors can get what they demand so loudly: that is, a continuation of the welfare state. What they could get is an equal sharing of the price of decades of overspending, but that is very unlikely to happen. What we’ll probably get will be a lot of angry speech about how shadowy “elites” conspire to deprive the people of its birthright to bring about some kind of New World Order – and a lot of people on the far right as well as on the far left trying to take advantage of it.

Of course, the elites are hardly blameless, but their faults are the same as ours: shortsightedness, ideological blindness, faux radicalism, conformism…The protestors, and those who want to use them to get at the top, are every bit as guilty of these, often more. More important, by considering their opponents as the devil incarnate, they pave they way for authoritarianism.

We have seen a lot of that in Europe in the last two centuries, and it always ends the same way: with a very substantial body count and a self-appointed liberator who does his best to prove that no matter how bad things are, it is always possible to make them worse.

Moreover, in a time of decline, the kind of entitled populism which could emerge from the European protests is likely to make the descent far messier and steeper than it needs to be. In the same way as the bagaudae made it more difficult for the Empire to extract the few resources it had left, the protestors and the political regimes which might emerge from their actions will make it more difficult to free the resources necessary to adapt to energy descent. In the European tradition, they are likely to add new layers of complexity and control – a candidate to the French presidential election is even proposing a planned degrowth, complete with a French version of the Gosplan. Of course those would divert still more resources toward unproductive uses – mostly to the bureaucracy but the security apparatus is also a popular choice – and away from the maintenance of vital infrastructures. Under-maintained infrastructure tends to degrade fairly quickly, and in a technological society that means that our ability to extract resources from the environment  will be diminished - the Roman syndrome at its best.

Note that not all plebeian revolts are harmful. Those born in times of expansion may lead to reasonably progressive regimes – especially when they fight a foreign occupation, which diverts them from class war. Some of those born in times of decline did the right thing; that is, destroy the civilization itself and return to a simpler way of life. The people of Teotihuacan apparently burned down the temples and the palaces of whoever ruled them, then went back to the fields. Closer to home, the large Neolithic proto-state which dominated southern Brittany was apparently toppled by a similar revolt, since the victors took great care to destroy its ceremonial center of Gavrinis but did not build anything afterward.

This won’t happen in Europe because, whatever we think of ourselves, we are not plebeian. At the global level, we are the equivalent of the pampered pre-1789 French aristocracy: a disempowered upper class, whose main preoccupation is to defend our doomed privileges.

Maybe we should hire bearded foreigners with a funny accent and a weird religion instead.

Gender Issues

As you can guess, the French press has been abuzz with the … ahem... legal troubles of our former president-to-be. The … re-ahem... difficulties of Dominique Strauss-Kahn may turn out to have the same historical impact as the rape of Lucretia – that did not change the fact that some pan-Mediterranean Empire would eventually emerge, but it did make sure its language would not be Etruscan or Punic. DSK’s tribulations have, however, a more immediate interest, as they highlight what may be of particular importance as we slide down Hubbert’s curve: the troubled relationship between gender and power.

We, as a civilization, have decided that genetic differences were irrelevant to politics. It is a decision I support, both because it is the decent thing to do and because it is grounded in facts. As a species we are very homogeneous – dangerously so, in fact. There is less genetic diversity in the whole human race than in a single band of chimpanzees. Besides, the diversity that matters (the high prevalence of iron overload among Bretons, for instance) is generally invisible.

The problem is that our species is also sexually dimorphic. There are obvious biological differences, not as big as among sea elephants, mind you, not even as big as among robins, but still significant, and some of them are behavioral. Most men are physically stronger, more aggressive and technically-minded, more concerned by the big picture rather than by details, and tend to compete more fiercely for resources – basically, those traits which make one an efficient predator. Most women are physically hardier, less aggressive, more socially minded, more concerned by details rather than by the big picture, and tend to compete for attention – basically those traits which makes one a good steward. The key word, of course, is most. Human sexual dimorphism is a continuum and there definitely are strong, aggressive women competing for resources – think Margaret Thatcher – and weak, passive men competing for attention, such as, well, myself before I realized it was a bad idea. Besides, cultural expectations play a role too – the West has, for instance, a strong tradition of female empowerment, even if the actual status of women has varied with historical circumstances.

Those biological, hardwired differences point to an ancient division of labor, probably dating back to the beginning of our history as a species. Basically, men did the dangerous jobs such as hunting or spearing off predators, and competed for leadership; while women cared for children, gathered roots and fruit, and competed for the attention of the top hunters.

It probably was adaptive then. It is not necessarily so today, but we have to deal with the hard-wiring we have got.

After the discovery of agriculture, societies became more complex and hunters turned into warriors. Warfare was and is still a man’s job, because men are stronger physically but also because they are expendable. In a world where the ruler is first and foremost a war leader, politics and warfare were bound to become inextricably linked; women and the activities they had specialized for were removed from the sphere of power.

As with everything human, there have been many variations on this theme and many exceptions. There have been female warriors: Joan of Arc, for instance, or Hua Mulan. There have been all-female armies, generally expensive status symbols, but not always – the Dahomey amazons, for instance, did fight, with some success, the French colonial army. There were female rulers, mostly but not only in the West: Athaliah of Judah, Irene and Theodora of Byzantium, Seondeok of Silla, Zenobia of Palmyra, Wak Chanil Ajaw in the Maya kingdom of Naranio, Suiko of Japan, Wu Zetian of Tang China, and Maria Theresa of Austria, to list only a few.

These definitely have been a minority, however, even if their social background has been more diverse than that of their male counterparts. Catherine I of Russia, for instance, was an illiterate farmer’s daughter and Theodora of Byzantium a bear trainer’s.

Women’s suffrage was not unknown to medieval and early modern civilization either. In medieval Europe, voting for city and town assemblies and meetings was open to the heads of households, who could be women.

The advent of industrial civilization changed the rules of the game. First, it was detrimental to women. The replacement of the textile cottage industry which thrived in early-nineteenth-century England by huge cloth factories basically downgraded a whole class of professional woman to the rank of mere cogs. The displacement of the nobility, which began with the French Revolution, also lowered the status of women, or at least that of a significant subset of them. Even though they were socially subordinate, noble women had an important cultural role in XVII^th- and XVIII^th-century France. Many of them ran salons frequented by renowned philosophers and some became authors themselves, Madame de La Fayette for instance. One only has to compare, say, the world of La Princesse de Clèves and that of Balzac’s Human Comedy to see how fast the status of women plummeted after the French Revolution gutted the old aristocratic order.

Yet at the same time, the ideas of the French Revolution could be applied to the situation of women. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which stated:

All citizens including women are equally admissible to all public dignities, offices and employments, according to their capacity, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.

De Gouges, who had written "Women have the right to mount the scaffold, they must also have the right to mount the speaker’s rostrum," was not very popular among the Jacobins and was beheaded in 1793. Her ideas had only a limited impact upon the French left – with the exception of the far left, which briefly imposed universal suffrage during the Commune of Paris. In fact, it was the moderate left which resisted women’s suffrage the longest, mostly because it feared the Church’s supposed influence upon them.

Her British counterpart Mary Wollstonecraft was sensible enough to flee the Jacobin madness in time and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, albeit more conservative, had a central place in the English debate about the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft was not a feminist in the modern sense of the word – she considered men to be superior to women – however, she believed that women had to be educated to fulfill their role in society.

She was at the origin of a long tradition of activism focused upon the political and civil equality of women. The members of this tradition were not necessarily what we would call left-wing today. While Margaret Fuller, whose seminal Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major American feminist work, was an abolitionist, Frances Willard, who was instrumental in the passage of the nineteenth amendment, came from conservative Christianity, and wrote in 1890: “… nor is it fair that a plantation Negro, who can neither read nor write, whose ideas are bounded by the fence of his own field and the price of his own mule, should be entrusted with the ballot.”

Gradually, nearly all Western countries granted voting rights to women during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century – France was, by the way, particularly late and waited until 1944. Full civil equality – especially in family matters – came later, but by the mid-seventies women had, legally speaking, reached full equality nearly everywhere in the West.

This was made greatly easier by the rise of the industrial society and the glut of essentially free energy which coal and then oil provided. This enabled our societies to generate considerable surpluses, which, in turn, enabled them to create a wealth of mid-level administrative or commercial jobs that earlier cultures simply could not afford. Besides, in an era of essentially free energy, manpower – especially skilled manpower – was a limiting factor and keeping half of one’s population out of the workforce was every bit as maladaptive as sending one’s womenfolk out onto the battlefield was in preindustrial societies.

This helped destroy the domestic economy and made women both more independent – they no longer need a husband to support them – and more vulnerable: as families became more prone to break up, the number of impoverished single moms exploded.

Feminism, which had essentially won all its battles, took an unexpected turn after the fifties. After Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, it began to claim there were no real differences between the two sexes and that those which were observed in the real world were due to social conditioning. To quote de Beauvoir, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". This led to the idea of patriarchy, which quickly became to feminism what capitalism is to the far left: an ill-defined but all-encompassing notion which basically includes everything a given author doesn’t like and which can become a convenient tool to disqualify the struggles he or she is not interested in.

This has had far-reaching political and social consequences, however. According to this logic, if both sexes are identical, then the fact that they tend to choose different career paths must be due to the influence of "patriarchy", an influence which must be overcome through the force of law if necessary. Thus in France, women must represent 50% of the candidates fielded in party-list elections, which of course hasn’t changed the fact that women, as a group, don’t go into politics, but makes life far easier for those few who do and far harder for small parties, who struggle to find the required women. By the same logic, campaigns are regularly run to encourage women to choose such or such a relatively high status career path where they are few in number, to enter politics or sport or to become more "visible" in executive functions. This results in faster career advancement for those few who do, but subtly brands the others as failures. At the same time, measures which would profit women, such as the maternal salary, are staunchly resisted because it would mean giving official recognition, and therefore some prestige, to traditionally feminine activities and would imply that the way of the mother and of the housewife is as valid a choice as the way of the CEO (or more probably the cashier).

By choosing to push women into traditionally masculine domains rather than promoting traditionally feminine activities and fighting for giving them a higher status, feminists made a mistake which will prevent women from ever reaching full equality. Indeed, by decreeing that a woman’s success should be measured by the same – masculine – criteria as a man’s, they turned women not into another kind of human, but into another kind of man. This, of course, amounts to submitting to the patriarchal values they claim to despise and leads many of them to focus on the career problems of the top ten percent of the population rather than on the livelihood problems of the bottom ninety – not an uncommon occurrence in today's left, by the way.

While this evolution does not bode well for working class women, it does not lead to a non-viable society. Evolution, after all, means change concept and while our Paleolithic hard-wiring is likely to get in the way for quite a long time, it could eventually be bypassed or even rewired through cultural conditioning: the West has, after all, been quite successful at imposing monogamy even though our species seems to be naturally polygynic.

The problem is that we don't have that kind of time.

As our civilization begins to slide down Hubbert's curve, a number of things are bound to happen, all of them detrimental to the status of women.

First, as I have already said, the middle class and a sizable fraction of the working class will disappear. There will be no place in the de-industrial future for a plethora of commercial or administrative jobs. While future societies will probably have teachers – in notably reduced numbers – they certainly won't have any human resource managers, marketing executives, or cashiers: the resources to support them simply won't be there anymore. A large part of the industrial or agricultural sector will be absorbed back into the domestic economy, a domestic economy which is very likely to become once again a woman's realm.

Second, war will become again central in politics. We may not like it, but in a world of dwindling resources organized violence may become the only way for a society to ensure its survival. As long as the economy is growing, it is more adaptive to compete economically than militarily – at least against somebody who could put up a decent fight. This will no longer be true in the post-peak world, where the advantage will go to those who can seize and keep scarce resources, through force if necessary. This is likely to induce a shift in the balance of power toward the military... until the military is all that remains of the government. And as we know, warfare, especially low-energy warfare, is a man's job.

Third, contraception and safe abortion will become things of the past. By enabling women to control their own fecundity, they gave them considerable freedom and enabled them to pursue careers which would otherwise have been considerably hindered by pregnancies. Of course, birth control will still be available to post-peak societies, but it will be done through far cruder means – unsafe abortions, infanticide, strictly enforced monogamy associated with the removal of excess population through war or exile into a monastery – and none of those methods are particularly empowering for women. Besides, in a world without retirement, the only way to be sure you won't starve in old age is to have a lot of children, most of whom will die in infancy. For women, the choice between having a family and having a career will become an existential one.

Finally, societies will become simpler, sometimes greatly so, and organic solidarities tied to family, clan, or neighborhood will progressively replace the welfare state. While this won't necessarily eliminate divorce – several past civilizations had it – it will make it far less appealing from a woman's point of view, as it would mean breaking up with a vital network of relatives and endangering equally vital inter-family solidarities. Unless some kind of mother-centered family structure evolves, always a possibility, the social pressure against divorce is likely to become stronger and stronger as industrial society unravels.

This need not necessarily result in a lower status for women, even if that outcome is a distinct possibility. One fifth of all Scythian warriors’ graves were women's – a minority, but hardly a freak occurrence – and we are likely to see their equivalent during the twilight years of our civilization, including a few warladies right out of a Miyazaki anime. We may also have high priestesses, and not only if some variation of Wicca becomes dominant – a few Islamic traditions have female imams.

This will concern only a small minority, however. Post-industrial societies won't have the resources to support a large upper or middle class of any gender. For a very long time most women will work in the domestic economy. Their status relative to their male counterparts will be heavily dependent upon the prestige their specific contribution to the domestic economy has. It will matter little to a farmer's daughter in Bocéliande country two centuries from now that the castle of Pontivy or Dinan is held by a woman if her daily work is looked down upon. What will matter is whether she is respected within her community and can make her own decisions under the strict constraints of her time. Unfortunately, late-twentieth-century feminism, with its constant valorizing of masculine traditional role and values, did not exactly pave the way for this outcome.

As for DSK... well. Support for his candidacy collapsed nearly overnight, with only a few public figures speaking for him – a leading feminist among them, by the way. The leading socialist candidate is now François “regular guy” Hollande, whose motto is “I am a normal candidate”. Everybody hopes he will indeed be one.

Wishful delusions

During the last political campaign I attended a conference by a representative of the French left-wing organization Attac. I was tired and, to tell the truth, it was boring. It was one of the things you have to do when you are into politics. The theme of the conference was "building a new world" and the speaker was particularly keen to convince us that the people from the Third World rejected our way of life and were ready to adopt, if not degrowth, at least some kind of voluntary frugality.

A few weeks later at work, I had a conversation with a cleaning lady from Congo-Kinshasa. She told me that she planned to get French citizenship, and that the main problem in France was that you could not make money in France because taxes were too high (she also told me she was a good housewife, but that's beside the point). At about the same time, the Tunisians, who had just got rid of their dictator, began to cross the Mediterranean in makeshift boats to have a taste of European prosperity.

They land on an Italian island, Lampedusa, then head to France, where they hope to settle. This has triggered a kind of diplomatic crisis, as France suspended the Schengen agreement and closed its border with Italy to non-Europeans, stranding a lot of Tunisians in the Torino region. Needless to say, this did not amuse the Italian government.

One could not imagine more striking a contrast between the delusions of the intellectual and the reality of the common people.

Even though the intelligentsia is fairly young as a class, the intellectual is a fairly old figure. Whether he was called shaman, high priest or philosopher, he provides society with meaning, cohesion and legitimacy. In times of change and danger, they provide it with choices and possibilities. The plural is important here, for when a culture is under stress, it turns to its intellectuals for a response, and even though those responses generally spring out of the culture's tradition, they can be dazzlingly varied in nature.

Thus, when the ancient Israelites, whose political ideal was theocratic, were faced with the hard reality of occupation by a pagan power, they developed a variety of answers. Some decided to cling to the traditional sacerdotal order and reach an agreement with the occupiers. Some decided to use force. Some retreated into the desert to wait for God to intervene and fix the situation. Some disconnected God and the people from Jerusalem and the temple and built a community in exile. Some disconnected God from the people and brought it to the pagans.

Most of theses movements were dead ends. Others were counterproductive, drawing the wrath of the Roman Empire upon the very people they were supposed to defend. A few were successful – what we call rabbinic Judaism, karaite Judaism and Christianity – and opened up a host of new perspectives and possibilities both for the Jewish people and the world.

As you probably have noticed, we are in a similar situation.

Since the triumph of Christianity, the Western World is based upon the idea that history has a meaning and a direction. Our world was considered transitional, a mere waiting stage before the second coming of Christ and the Advent of the eternal Kingdom of God. History was no longer a cycle or a haphazard succession of events, but a march forward during which the Church's role was to guide and prepare the people for the end times. Islam, by the way, is quite similar in that perspective.

The Enlightenment and the various ideologies born from it got rid of God but kept the Christian vision of history by repatriating the Kingdom of God and making the building of some utopia the ultimate goal of mankind. Of course, that meant we had to find a terrestrial substitute for Christ – not an easy task to say the least. Some, for instance the Saint-Simonians, chose the scientist and the engineer – this is the vision of the world which pervades Jules Verne's Promethean novels. Others chose the entrepreneur – that was Ayn Rand but also the laissez-faire crowd, which dominated world affairs in the eighties. The most popular choice among the intellectuals was, however, the proletariat.

Western intellectuals were indeed faced with a paradox. Although theoretically committed to equality and progress, they had, as Raymond Aron demonstrated in his seminal work L'Opium des Intellectuels, an essentially aristocratic way of life. Marxism offered an answer to this predicament.

Marxism, especially in its Leninist form, is essentially a repackaging of apocalyptic Christianity with the proletariat in place of Christ, the Revolution in place of his Second Coming, and a lot of pseudo-science to make it palatable. From the intellectuals' point of view, it had the advantage of providing them both with a cause worth fighting for and a leading role in the fight.

Indeed, while it was the proletariat which was supposed to make the Revolution, the Communist Party, and therefore the intelligentsia, had a crucial role in helping it to forge its “class consciousness” and elaborate “revolutionary theory”. For mid-twentieth century intellectuals it was very seductive and a lot of them jumped onto the communist bandwagon; Aragon, Sartre, Gide, and Bernard Shaw, for instance.

Marxism was already dangerously out of touch with reality by the time of the Russian Revolution and, even though its victory against Nazism gave it a new legitimacy, this could only increase with time. The contrast between the claims of Communist propaganda and the sordid reality of the Soviet Union became too big for even the intelligentsia's famed voluntary blindness to cope with. From the early fifties onward, intellectuals progressively left mainstream communism. First, they turned to various Marxist heresies: Maoism (very popular in France during the late sixties), Trotskyism, Eurocommunism...

This proved short-lived, however, and as the body count mounted, the intellectual support for Marxism collapsed. This did not stop the intelligentsia’s quest for a messiah apt to usher in the Better World which is still central to its vision of the world. While some former leftists went the neo-conservative way, on both sides of the Atlantic, most preferred to give their attention to other worthier groups.

By not bringing about the Communist utopia, the proletariat had failed the intelligentsia and deprived it of what it thought was its historical role. In the intellectuals' collective mind, the proletarian hero became the “beauf” — a French word which could be translated as “redneck” or “white trash” — forever guilty of not being progressive enough. Instead, the intelligentsia focused on various fringe groups, whose main advantage was being fringe... and who'd better remain so.

Of course, the fate of all minorities is to assimilate or integrate into the mainstream; or, for territorial minorities, to create their own separate mainstream. By doing so they betray the faith intellectuals put in them and are instantly relegated into the “beauf” category. Immigrants, marginal tribes or inhabitants of the Third World, preferably far away, are better targets for the intelligentsia's projections. Of course, they are just ordinary people trying to improve their lot and make the best of an admittedly bad situation, and most of them don't share the revolutionary delusions of the intelligentsia... when they don't actively reject them.

Third-worlders and immigrants don't want to bring down the affluent western democracies; they want to live in them, and are ready to risk their lives to do so. Immigrants, when they manage to settle in a rich country, aim to integrate and climb up the social ladder... and in the long run they succeed, or at least they have succeeded as long as essentially free energy has enabled Western societies to provide their citizens with a plethora of reasonably well-paid jobs.

The intelligentsia's delusions can, however, become frankly counterproductive as the beginning of the energy descent plunges industrialized economy into quasi-perpetual depression. Migrations to and within the industrial world won't stop anytime soon. In fact they will probably increase as political chaos spreads in the Third World. No matter what we do or want, we will have to deal with them.

Unfortunately, we are stuck between two equally unhealthy visions : that of the left intellectuals, who see immigrants both as victims of “capitalism” and as a kind of new proletariat ushering in the long promised “better world”; and that of the populist right, who see them as a barbarian horde right out of the Camps des Saints. Caught in the middle, governments, whether national or local, try to clean up the mess without infuriating the fanatics of their own side. Most of the time, this means publicly burning a few trees to hide the forest.

Needless to say, tokenism won't get us anywhere in a world of growing problems and dwindling resources, and the people – those whom the intelligentsia has come to consider an annoying irrelevance – are painfully, if obscurely, aware of it. They feel that the “better world” is a delusion but remain prisoners of a worldview based on it. This makes them only too vulnerable to the scapegoating tactics of the populist right.

The result is that instead of a peaceful integration within the general framework of French society, we have a growing polarization between natives and immigrants. This polarization is fueled both by the demonizing rhetoric of the populist right and the wishful thinking of the intellectual left. Both prevent the immigrants, and some of their most salient cultural features such as Islam, from integrating into the mainstream. Both force them into a ghetto.

In a world of dwindling resources, and therefore of increasing competition, this is a recipe for disaster. At some point, either the populist right will seize power by stigmatizing the immigrants and their descendants, or the government’s party will adopt their policies to stay in power. The immigrants – and their offspring, most of whom have never seen their supposed homeland – will then be forced to choose between being victims and becoming conquerors. This is not the first time this has happened, and we have only to read the words of the British priest Gildas to be reminded how deep and destructive the divide between natives and immigrants can become:

Then all the councillors, together with that proud tyrant Gurthrigern [Vortigern], the British king, were so blinded that, as a protection to their country, they sealed its doom by inviting in among them like wolves into the sheep-fold), the fierce and impious Saxons, a race hateful both to God and men, to repel the invasions of the Northern nations. […]

But in the meanwhile, an opportunity happening, when these most cruel robbers had returned home, the poor remnants of our nation (to whom flocked from divers places round about our miserable countrymen as fast as bees to their hives, for fear of an ensuing storm), being strengthened by God, calling upon him with all their hearts, as the poet says,—"With their unnumbered vows they burden heaven," that they might not be brought to utter destruction, took arms under the conduct of Ambrosius Aurelianus, a modest man, who of all the Roman nation was then alone in the confusion of this troubled period by chance left alive.

Gildas was quite biased and most probably oversimplified a complex situation – the first kings of Wessex were British, after all – but his and his fellow churchmen's rabid rhetoric certainly did not help. The delusions of his successors won’t be more productive.

The impotence of politics

I have just finished a round of elections which have kept me from writing for a while – that and a rather nasty breakup. Overall, it turned out the way I wanted – the election, not the breakup. I didn't get elected, but then that never was the point. The second round opposed the Greens to the old socialist party, which was quite an event in itself, and by openly supporting the former, I put myself in a good position for the 2014 municipal election. This required a lot of advance planning, but it has worked so far.

If this sounds cynical, it's normal, at least in part. That's only a part of the story, however.

Activists and radicals are prone to dismiss mainstream politicians as cynical and self-serving, but this comes from a distorted view of what politics are and can do. We may live in offices and eat processed food, our social behavior is still rooted in our evolutionary history as pack hunters and primates. Archaic human societies were ruled by coalitions, most of the time a strongman and his lieutenants, with a number of social devices designed to make sure he is dependent upon his followers for his continued dominance.

With the Neolithic revolution, our societies have grown far beyond what a single coalition could reasonably manage and have become fractal as a result. Modern societies are a hierarchy of nested coalitions all built upon the same model, from your average nuclear family to the G8. Inside those coalitions, everyone is jockeying for position and fighting for access to scarce resources. This the way all human groups work, even anarchies. In fact, it is far more brutal among anarchists – especially the Randite subtype – because by rejecting institutionalized power, they destroy the various social devices our species evolved to check the pack leader's dominance.

A consequence is that our leaders' power is utterly dependent upon the support of their allies and followers. The chieftain of a Cro-Magnon tribe could theoretically browbeat his fellow hunters into submission. A modern politician must give his supporters what they want – or at least tell them what they want to hear – lest they desert him. That means he must cater to the delusions and obsessions of his electorate if he does not want to become a very lone voice crying in a very empty desert.

That is why even the few politicians who know the truth about our situation cannot do anything meaningful about it. If they did they would soon find themselves out of a job, in the manner of Ben Ali.

The Greens, which I supported, are basically a revitalization movement. The closest historical example – at least from an American point of view – was Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa's confederacy. Quitting drinking and opposing a united front to the settlers was clearly a good idea, but even a total success on that front would not have been enough to keep the settlers at bay. Piling up symbolic acts – even if some of them are actually good ideas – won't prevent, or even significantly slow, the decline of industrial civilization, not this late in the game. The only thing which could have some effect, that is deliberately diminishing our consumption, is every bit as unthinkable among the Greens as it is in the other political parties – including mine, it has to be said.

I am, in fact, quite sure that at least some Greens (as well as some of us) are aware of this. The problem is that going so blatantly against the wish and expectations of their (and our) electors will make them run away in less time than one needs to say “Mubarak”.

Even those who officially support degrowth are forced to disguise it as progress, lest they lose whatever small support they have. There is no way to support extensive public services without an industrial economy, yet degrowthers feel obliged to claim the contrary because most of them come from the left and being on the left here means maintaining that state funding for your lifestyle is an inalienable right.

Should a left winger (or anybody else for that matter) state the truth — that is, that the years of affluence are nearing their end and that we, as a people, are going to have to live with far less — he would be immediately branded as a dangerous extremist and an accomplice of whatever conspiracy is fashionable at the moment.

In fact, politicians' options are far more limited than laymen's.

Acting openly to prepare for the future is impossible – we would be quickly out of a job. We can, of course, prepare covertly for the future. I am persuaded that a few leaders, and at least some services, do this. The problem is that the changes needed to adapt to the end of the industrial society are so drastic that one cannot implement them stealthily. Moreover, even a gradual implementation is likely to be met with fierce resistance... and there would be no shortage of would-be presidents to capitalize on that.

In France, the most likely winner would be Marine Le Pen – think Nick Griffin with a brain, and a skirt.

The role of intellectual exile is another option, and a tempting one. Walking out of the political scene and writing for the future enables you to keep your intellectual integrity. It may also give you a greater influence upon the future. After all, Augustine of Hippo's writings have had a far greater impact than the actions of the Western Emperor Honorius or the Vandal king Geiseric. The problem is that not everybody is Augustine of Hippo, and that whatever you write is far more likely to end up in a recycle bin than in a neo-monastic library.

Besides, politicians are often dependent on the power structure for their livelihood. They are as free to leave as your average middle manager – especially after a nasty and costly breakup. Incidentally, this is also true for radicals. Could a Marxist or the head of a women's studies department diverge from the party line without endangering his or her job? Hardly.

The end result is that those of us who are aware of the situation just muddle through, and try to quietly advance policies we know might help without jeopardizing the social order or our ability to pay our mortgages.

And sometimes, we think of Augustine of Hippo.

A vision of the future : In the Mothers' Land

Feminist science-fiction, like all militant literature can be godawfully bad; it can also, occasionally, turn out surprisingly well and reach beyond its original intent, asking all sorts of hard questions about our society and our future. Elisabeth Vonarburg's In the Mothers' Land is one such work. I must avow, to my great shame, that when it first came out in France, I hesitated to buy it because the summary presented it as a book about gender relations. Gender issues are indeed important in Vonarburg's work, but what made me read on beyond the first chapters is the setting. In fact, the world of In the Mother's Land is one of the few credible descriptions of what a realistic ecotechnic society could look like, and this description does ask hard questions about our future and our vision of it.

The world of In the Mother's Land is ours, several centuries down the line. After the collapse of our society, for reasons never clearly stated, surviving elites have retreated into high-tech refuge cities where they have slowly gone extinct while the outside fell into chaos – those events are described in Vonarburg's debut novel The Silent City. This chaotic situation did not last, however, and a new society has built itself upon the ruins of the old one.

Due to global warming large areas have been lost to the sea, and most of Europe is now a poisoned wasteland – the Mauterres. A genetic mutation causes women to be 70 times more numerous than men – a literary device also used by Ursula Le Guin in a somewhat weaker short story, The Matter of Seggri.

The warlord states and survivalist communities which formed the background of The Silent City have coalesced into ferociously patriarchal kingdoms: the Harems. Run by a tiny all-male elite lording over an enslaved female majority, they finally fall to a revolutionary wave triggered by the coming of a messiah-like figure – Garde – but led by a covert revolutionary movement dating back to the failed revolt described in The Silent City.

Like most revolutions, this one did not exactly bring peace and freedom. While the deposed kings fled north to their stronghold of Wardenberg, the victorious revolutionaries turned their kingdoms into queendoms, every bit as tyrannical and warlike as their predecessors: the Hives. Yet it is from these hives that the world of In the Mother's Land evolved after another revolution, relatively peaceful this time.

The world in which Vonarburg's heroine Lisbeï is born is hardly an utopia, but it is a working society. It is a loose confederation of provinces, themselves loose confederations of autonomous city-states: the Capteries. Those relatively small communities are ruled by hereditary captes who represent them at the provincial assemblies. They share a common history and culture but are diverse in language and ideology, ranging from hardline fundamentalists – the Judites – to progressives.

The Mother's Land is beset by problems caused by resource scarcity and gender imbalance. Most children die young from a mysterious genetic disease. Research and recuperation of scrap metal and devices left over by our civilization is a major industry, and indeed the heroine's job. Yet The Mother's Land's knowledge of its own past is extremely limited. All that remains of our time, aside from a few miraculously recovered texts and artifact, are heavily distorted fairy tales – including Ys – and barely recognizable cultural items. In fact, The Mother's Land barely cares about what is for it a distant and irrelevant past; and of Lisbeï’s discoveries, the one which causes the most turmoil is about the much more recent and more important fall of the harems.

The real ecotechnic societies which will emerge out of the ruins of our time will, of course, bear little resemblance with the carefully crafted Mother's Land, but this does not mean that it has nothing to teach us.

Its first lesson is that real ecotechnic societies will be very different from our societies. They may not share our hopes and values. They may even consider them abhorrent or, even worse, irrelevant. They will be, of course, our children, and their societies will have been shaped by the decisions we make now; but those decisions, and the spirit in which they will have been made will have long forgotten. It is not only somewhat vain to try to impose our ideologies upon a distant future, it is futile.

When we make a choice about what we want to preserve and transmit – or not transmit – we must remember our descendants may have a very different agenda. We all know that a large part of Greco-Roman culture was lost during the Dark Ages, but what we often fail to realize was that this loss was in fact a choice. Faced with very limited resources, early medieval monks chose to preserve Justin Martyr's apologies rather than Claudius' Etruscan grammar. We may disagree with this choice – I certainly do – but we can rest assured that our descendants will make similar ones.

The second lesson is that future societies will be as fluid as ours. We often see traditional societies as immobile, set in their ways, and without a history. The truth is that they often claim to be so, because they draw their legitimacy from tradition. That is what led Saxon kings to engineer convoluted genealogies going up to Woden Himself, or Chinese historian to grant imperial legitimacy to the most unlikely claimants so that subsequent dynasties might have somebody from whom to be bequeathed the Mandate of Heaven.

Real societies do change and the same way Vonarburg's Harems became Hives, then Capteries, which, in turn will undergo a number of change over the course of the novel, so future societies will continuously evolve new languages, philosophies and religions. Even after the tragedy of collapse is played out and something of a stable way of life is achieved again, countries and people will continue to compete for scarce resource and civilizations will develop new ways of inventing themselves until mankind itself fades out and goes extinct. That means that there is no point in trying to bring out any kind of heaven on Earth, not only because such an endeavor generally results in a very convincing hell, but also because societies never stay put and even a successful utopia is bound to eventually evolve into something else.

There is no timeless Republic, no Kingdom of Heaven, and all our efforts to bring them about are pointless. What we must promote, preserve and transmit is not some kind of social organization but concepts and values: the equal dignity of all men, rule of law and government by consent. We must do so aware that their 21^st century embodiments are every bit as transient as the Athenian democracy or the old Icelandic Althing. The Mother's Land is very far away from what we would consider a democracy and it definitely has its share of injustices, yet it is based upon the same principles as our modern liberal societies. Our job, now, as the night falls, is to make it, if not certain, at least likely that this will be as true of the real future ecotechnic societies.

A vision of the future: Simon du Fleuve

Claude Auclair is, I presume, quite unknown outside of the French speaking world; and even there, he is mostly remembered for his reinterpretation of the legend of Ys in Bran Ruz. Those who spent most of their youth in public libraries, as I did, will remember fondly his other masterwork: Simon du Fleuve (Simon of the River in English). Simon du Fleuve is a realistic comic book series in the Franco-Belgian tradition depicting a rather classic, if somewhat idealistic, post-apocalyptic world. It is not without its flaws, but it explores better than others some aspects of the more advanced stages of the coming energy descent.

Simon du Fleuve takes place several decades after the collapse of our society. The reasons for this collapse are not altogether clear, but it seems that peak oil was involved. Anyway, at some point the crisis became so severe that a world state was created. It quickly fractured, however, into a host of military factions based in the main cities. As a result, the world Simon – the main character – lives in is divided into two very distinct parts. The Masters of the Cities, who still have access to technology, hold a few urban centers which they rule with an iron fist, while in the countryside reconstituted tribes live in harmony with nature, or rather would do so but for the occasional raid from the cities or the violent gangs which roam their outskirts.

Of course this setting is Manichean to the point of caricature. We never know, for instance, who leads the Masters of the Cities and what their projects are. They are basically a blind, faceless force of nature, whose only function is to plunder and destroy. The tribes, on the other hand, whether they live off farming, herding or craftsmanship, are peaceful, egalitarian, and relatively prosperous. They never wage war on each other, never compete for land and never oppress their members. There are violent, armed groups, but they belong, like the military factions, to the world of the cities. Like them, they belong to the old order and like them will ultimately succumb to their own violence. This certainly weakens the series as a work of art or a story – nobody likes to be preached at – it, however, tells a lot about our own ideological bias.

The opposition between tyrannical, decadent and ultimately doomed cities and the virtuous countryside is an ancient one. It appears in the Bible with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, probably a memory of the time when the ancestors of the Hebrew herded their sheep in the shadow of the powerful late Bronze Age city-states. In its modern form, however, it dates back from the French Revolution. Before 1789 the city-dwelling aristocracy despised uncouth peasants while somewhat fearing them. Peasants were the revolutionary class then, or at least was thought to be. Their refusal of the old feudal order had fueled the large revolts which had regularly shaken Western Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the modern age.

The French revolution changed that. It was a very urban affair, led by a new aristocracy of lawyers and traders. The Jacobin government put feudal taxes and duties into the compost bin of history, while proceeding to destroy local institutions the peasantry relied upon for representation. It no longer had anything to gain from another revolution, and the horrors of Jacobin rule were still fresh in its memory. As a result, it became the conservative class, in which the very aristocracy which so much despised it before placed all its hope of ever regaining its former preeminence. All those who, for one reason or another, fought the French Enlightenment developed a mysticism of the countryside, peasants being described as the true people, virtuous, pious and true to their national tradition in opposition to the cosmopolitan and decadent urban crowds. This vision is pervasive, not only in the bitter rantings of the far right writers who gave fascism its intellectual foundation, but also in the works of the Romantics who were so influential in saving the marginalized cultures of Western Europe.

As often happens, this theme shifted from the right to the left during the late sixties, under the influence of both Maoism and Political Ecology – quite a newcomer in French radical politics, by the way. As in America, communes were set up by enthusiastic young people from the cities, and as in America most of them failed. A few localized successes, such as the successful opposition to the building of a military base on the Larzac Plateau helped to create links between the activist and peasant worlds.

Of course, this “back to the land” ideology has little to do with the reality of agrarian societies. Subsistence agriculture is a back-breaking job and the communities based upon it are often oppressive, united by a set of traditions one disregards only at one's own peril. They are not even particularly virtuous. Prostitution was a thriving business during the European Middle Ages and single mothers were not particularly uncommon in rural Brittany, especially at the bottom of the social ladder. Class relationships were often brutal, especially between land owners and landless hand-to-mouth workers.

Hardly the egalitarian utopia described by Simon du Fleuve.

It is true that in the final years of some civilizations, rural areas were politically separated from cities, but this was only temporary and due to the inability of some “barbarian invaders” to storm walled towns. Thus in some outlying parts of the Western Roman Empire, isolated urban centers held out, for a time, while the countryside was overrun by Germanic tribes. Interestingly, this happened mostly in areas where Roman culture did not survive. Having no access to cities, the invaders built their own tribal orders outside their walls. When finally both societies merged, it was on the tribesmen’s cultural terms. The same way, when the Nubian kingdom of Makuria, once a major African power, fell during the closing years of the 14^th century, its king’s power barely extended beyond the walls of their capital Dongola, while the rest of the country was under the control of desert tribes.

This was, however, the result of a very particular kind of collapse, one where invading tribal groups play a major role. It won't be our fate. Except maybe in some remote parts of Sudan, there are no longer any powerful warrior tribes around, and those that remain, in Amazonia or in Papua New Guinea, are likely to be early causalities. What threatens us and might lead us to a much darker version of Simon du Fleuve's world is more insidious.

As the resources available shrink, our societies will tend to reserve them to what they consider “vital functions”, very much as a human body plunged into icy water will focus its remaining resources on keeping the vital organs warm, even if this means losing a toe... or a limb. In real life this will mean, and already means in some areas, the quiet abandonment of marginal regions. Roads fall into disrepair; railroad lines are closed; vital public services such as schools or post offices are withdrawn; courts are rationalized away to big urban centers; law enforcement withers due to budget cuts; and welfare, vital to the more marginal population, erodes away.

Slowly the administrative networks which held the national territory together fall apart.

The modern state basically exchanges services such as law and order, defense or welfare against the taxes and the legitimacy it needs to function. When it fails to provide those services or restricts them to an ever smaller minority, it becomes parasitic and no matter how much ideology it feeds its subjects, it will sooner or latter lose its legitimacy. Thus in 378 CE, when Athanaric's Visigoths ran amok in the Balkans (they were not invaders, by the way, but refugees), they were joined by local miners. Those were not barbarian sympathizers, they were just overtaxed by a government which did not really protect them. It was, by the way, for the same reason that so many people became monks or hermits in that time: there were no tax collectors in the desert.

Over time the state will become a foreigner, then an enemy, in the areas it has abandoned and other power centers will grow in the cracks. They certainly won't outgun the state, not until the process of decline is fairly advanced, but by putting themselves in the center of local networks of solidarity and survival they may take over its role in everyday life. In the western world this will happen mostly in urban ghettos, but as the states loses its ability to administrate its territory it will happen in the countryside as well. The result will be that some rural areas will be basically left to their own devices and their impoverished populations forced to self-organize to survive.

If nobody takes over the way the Germanic tribes did during the fifth century, we will end up with something relatively close to Chad or a Taliban-less Afghanistan. The central government will still control cities and economically important areas. It will still be able to project its force anywhere in its territory, but the countryside will be an administrative desert. This, of course, will be a temporary phenomenon. The “focus on the center” strategy works only during a transient crisis. Should the problem prove permanent – and we know it will – the state will slowly shrink away, not a necessarily peaceful process by the way. Elites, whether they be local or global, old or new, will fight to keep their status and as their resource basis dwindles, this fight will become increasingly savage and desperate.

Simon du Fleuve may therefore not be wrong in imagining military regimes entrenched in decaying cities preying on the countryside. Where Auclair is wrong is when he pictures a countryside essentially free from this phenomenon. There are no reasons why even neglected areas could not develop elites of their own, and no reason why those elites should be less oppressive than the city-based ones. Those elites may grow out of local administrators, wealthy landowners or gang leaders, but also former freedom fighters turned warlords or even sustainability activists taking over out of necessity, then growing into the role. No matter their origin, the circumstances and the necessities of post-peak life will push them along the same way followed by the originally relatively democratic, Anglo-Saxon local leaders after the collapse of Roman Britain.

Our problem is to build resilient local institutions, so that they can remain democratic even as the state apparatus erodes away. This is not an easy task, and in many places we will fail, but picturing the countryside as a place of redemption, a kingdom of virtue, opposed to morally bankrupt cities, certainly won't help.