Remember Tewdrig

Mass migrations, or more specifically mass culture replacement, is one of the more troubling aspects of peak energy. Doubtlessly the perspective of witnessing one’s civilization slowly declining is nothing to be relished. It is not without its charms, however. Even though it has been largely dethroned by the instant apocalypse meme, the theme of decline was at the core of romanticism, the first modern revolt against the industrial world and its disenchanted conception of reality. It infuses, for instance, the work of Tolkien. Indeed, The Lord of the Rings can be read as a long elegy upon the passing of the old glories. It has always been a minority taste and I suspect the rise of apocalyptic thinking has made it more so, but it has always been present and it is likely that a significant part of those, who care about Peak Oil share it. I surely do.

Envisioning the complete erasure of one’s culture is another thing altogether. As social primates with a regrettable tendency to die before our hundredth birthday, we often take some kind of collective as a projection of our self toward eternity. The two most likely candidates for this role are of course culture / nation and family. We are aware that both can be changed beyond recognition by the advent of peak energy, but as long as they survive, even if nobody remembers us, the trace of our contribution to the history of humanity lingers on.

We know that culture replacement happens, and this knowledge has fed apocalyptic fears of the Camps des Saints variety, especially but not only in the far right. Most of the time, they are the consequence of a rise in societal complexity, whether it manifest through naked imperialism or through the growth of trade networks. Periods of decreasing societal complexity, however, often result in cultural fragmentation, with previously well integrated areas developing their own autonomous culture and identity, and the replacement of Roman political authority by Germanic warlords during the fifth century did not result in local versions of Latin dying out.

In fact, it was the invaders’ languages and cultures, which disappeared, sometimes very early. Gothic, Burgondian and Old Frankish are all dead languages, while the inhabitants of what used to be their kingdoms speak some form of (admittedly evolved) Latin. It is easy to see why. The invaders did not move into a vacuum. Even though the Empire was collapsing, at the provincial and local level, roman institutions, and notably the Church, retained a lot of strength. Even those barbarians which were not catholic (the Goths, Vandals and Sueves, who followed a different brand of Christianity) were forced to fit within post-roman society to control it (and harvesting its not inconsiderable wealth). This doomed their cultures and languages to extinction. Even the Franks, whose empire included Germanic speaking populations, ultimately merged with their Romance speaking subjects in what was to become France, probably during the ninth century.

The main exception, of course, was Britain. There, the invaders (who were not really invaders as they had been hired) found not a still functional post-roman society but a collection of tribal states ruled by warlords. Roman institutions, including the Church, were weak and the tribal conflicts frozen by the Roman occupation had flared up again, leading to endemic warfare.

Of those wars we know little but the ill-forts and the defensive dykes, which dot the West

Country testify of their violence. This was the perfect environment for upwardly mobile warlords and for foreign mercenaries, who, from the point of view of said warlords, had the not so negligible advantage of not caring about local politics – well, at least in theory.

A few mercenaries became warlord themselves, setting up petty kingdoms – Hengist, for instance. Others remained loyal to whatever polity they served - it seems it was the case of Aella, who according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle never assumed the title of king. Ethnicity appears to have been pretty irrelevant to the politics of the time, however. It was mostly a mater of tribal post-roman polities fighting each other on old grudges and of powerful individual using the chaos to become “kings by their own hands”.

Not all of them were immigrants, by the way, and the early history of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms is replete with Welsh Kings. This was the case of Wessex, the Kingdom which would later unify England (Cerdic, Cynric, Ceawlin, Ceadwalla) and of Mercia (Pybba, Penda, Peada). On the other hands, Irish and Germanic warlords ruled what would later become Celtic kingdoms. Stuart Laycock once suggested that the legendary Arthur was in fact a Germanic mercenary called Earðhere, son of another Germanic mercenary named Uthere Se non è vero è bene trovato, as they say in Italian.

More interesting is the case of Tewdrig ap Teithfallt. Twdrig, whose story is related in the Book of Llandaff, was king of Glywysing, a petty kingdom in South Wales during the sixth century. He had abdicated in favour of his son Meurig and retired to live a hermitical life, but came back to fight Saxon invaders. He was victorious but died a short while after from his wound.

Curiously for a Welsh saint, he had a fully Germanic name: Theodoric. So did his father, Theodebald. Some people suggested he was a Goth, the leader of a Visigoth fleet stranded in Britain after the fall of the Kingdom of Tolouse in 507. Nothing proves it, or disproves it for that matter. The only thing we can say for sure is that he was some kind of Germanic warlord, who had set himself up as the petty king of the Cardiff region.

Yet the area was not germanized – no more than the neighboring Dyfed and Brycheinog were gaelicized despite having been founded by Irish warlords. The kingdom of Glywysing endured until the Norman conquest.

The reason for that was probably that Wales had only superficially romanized and was still a closely knit tribal society in which any warlord had to fit if he wanted to last. In the more romanized East, however, the eroded tribal solidarity and the localized nature of the warlord’s power meant that a culture shift could happen in a mere couple of generation. There simply was no strong institution the native culture could anchor itself on. Besides, the Saxons were mercenaries, often of mixed tribal origins, which means they were quite welcoming to any native boy able and willing to wield a sword., provided he accepted the values of the band. That is probably what Cerdic and his likely numerous imitators did.

Immigrants, even armed, powerful immigrants, are not conquering armies. They are rather

destructured groups of families and individual trying to better their lot. In a healthy society, that means fitting in socially and culturally. Of course, some amount of culture loyalty has to be expected in the first or even the second generation, but on the long run, assimilation is the norm. Tewdrig ap Teithfallt is, of course, a case in point.

In a collapsing society, however, the best way to rise in ranks is to use one’s community of family relationship as a leverage. This is what the barbarian leaders of the fifth century, Ricimer for instance, did. They tried to use their position in tribal societies to get charges within the imperial power structure. Of course, in such a situation, playing down one’s ethnic or tribal ties is counterproductive.

What that means for us, fifteen century after the fall of the Western Empire, is that culture shift is less dependent upon the number of immigrants than upon the health of our society. Mass migrations are pretty much unavoidable during the long descent which will follow peak energy. As the USA and its vassals lose the power to prop them up, the African and middle-eastern government dependent on them will collapse, or at the very least lose the control of a great part of their territory. At the same time European countries are bound will be less and less able to stop the flow of refugees from the south.

The goal of those immigrants will not be to create some kind of Islamic Republic, but to better their lot. Of course, this will become more and more difficult as the economy contracts and the way to power and wealth becomes narrower and narrower for those not born in them. It will result in immigrants choosing unpopular careers (which, in France, includes the military) and in sharpened competition between natives and immigrants (and their children) for low-paying jobs.

Naturally, this will feed extremism on both sides, weakening the very fabric of the society. In fact it already does: we have had riots near Paris after the Police checked a veiled woman, probably in not so gentle a way. Needless to say, our elites’ behavior, combining contempt for the lower class’ concerns, self-righteous promotion of mostly irrelevant societal issues, and ambivalent attitude toward the immigrants’ religiosity, doesn’t help.

We may have islamic (if not downright islamist) warlords somewhere down the road. We may also have anti-muslim pogroms or quasi-apartheid policy. We may even have both, depending from the time or the area, and both would be equally disastrous from the point of view of cultural continuity.

Opening wide the gates of immigration in this age of decline is pretty stupid – it makes the upper-middle classes feel good and lowers wages, which explains why the idea is so popular among societal leftists and laissez-faire right-wingers are so fond of this idea. Now, if you want to preserve some kind of cultural continuity – and it certainly is a worthy goal – you should better make easier for immigrants and their descendants to fit within your community. Their chances of being ultimately absorbed will be greatly improved and the skills they’ll bring will certainly help. Tewdrig’s certainly did.

So next time you’ll see an immigrant of north-african descent in a European street, remember King Tewdrig... sorry, King Þeodoreiks Þeobaldsunus, in the hills of Glamorgan, defending, sword in hand, his welsh fellow countrymen against the Saxon hordes.

And while you are at it remember that the leader of those Saxon hordes may very well have been a native.

Corruption and privileges

Just before tearing itself apart about whether gay people should be allowed to marry, France has gone through another political financial scandal. This is not an uncommon occurrence. We tend not to care very much about our politicians cheating on their wife, or even, like one of our former president, having two families complete with a hidden daughter. We tend to be less tolerant with embezzlement and tax fraud, which does not keep them from happening with a troubling regularity

In this particular case it was Jerome Cahuzac a socialist minister, in charge of the budget, who discovered to have a secret account in a Swiss bank, for tax fraud purpose. Jerome Cahuzac being the political head of French IRS, it was, let’s say, embarrassing. Of course, Jerome Cahuzac was "advised" to resign, both as a minister and a Member of Parlement. After another round of "advices", he has finally decided not to run in the coming by-election in what used to be his constituency.

Politics being what it is, the affair prompted a round of half-hearted reforms, with ministers forced to disclose their fortune, then faded out of the headlines in the wake of the gay marriage controversy. This, however, only a matter of time before another scandal surfaces. As I have said, those scandals are relatively common in French history and Frenchmen somewhat expect their politicians to use their position to get, if not rich, at least wealthy.

When the regime is weak, however, or when the country goes trough a crisis, this can lead to drastic changes in government. I don’t think this will be the case, directly, for the Cahuzac affair, but the general climate it breeds certainly will pave the way for it. There are, indeed, certainly precedents for this in French history.

The first to come to my mind is, of course, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which prepared the French Revolution. In 1772, Louis XV had ordered for his mistress, Madame du Barry, a diamond necklace costing some 2,000,000 livres – a huge amount of money, even for a king. Louis XV, however, died before the necklace could be completed and Madame du Barry was banished from the court, so the jeweler found themselves with a hugely expansive jewel on their hand and nobody to sell it to, the new queen having refused to accept a necklace designed for a courtesan.

In the meantime, a con-artist, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, "Comtesse de la Motte”, manipulated her lover, Louis René Édouard de Rohan known as Cardinal de Rohan into believing the queen was in love with him and arranged a meeting between him and the said queen a prostitute passing off as a queen. She then “borrowed” a lot of money from the Cardinal, and bought her way into the high society.

She was then contacted by the jewelers who wanted to use her to sell their necklace. She accepted and told the Cardinal that Marie Antoinette wanted to buy the necklace; but, wanted him to act as a secret intermediary... this worked well, until the Cardinal failed to paid the agreed upon amount and the jewelers complained to the queen about him. Let’s say Marie Antoinette was not amused.

Jeanne de la Motte was condemned to be whipped and branded then sent to life imprisonment in the Salpêtrière. She escaped, however and fled to London where she ublished a book entitled Memoires Justificatifs de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte, which attempted to justify her actions while casting blame upon the queen. the Cardinal de Rohan, for one, was acquitted.

A lot of people where convinced the Queen had indeed a hand into the whole affair and had used La Motte as an instrument to discredit the Cardinal de Rohan. Rohan’s acquittal, of course, did not help and the queen’s approval rating plummeted, with the consequences we all know.

Another, less known, example is the Stavisky affair in 1934. Alexandre Satvisky was a French con-artist who had managed to put himself at the head of the municipal pawnshop of Bayonne. He used his position to sell worthless bonds, with fake emeralds as a surety. He used his political connections to avoid trial and continued his scams until December, when, faced with exposure, he fled. The police finally found him, mortally wounded, in January in Chamonix. He apparently had committed suicide, albeit in a bizarre way since the bullet had traveled an inconvenient three meters before hitting his head.

He had an extra-long arm, you see.

The affair finally went public and grew into a full-blown scandal, leading to the resignation of premier Camille Chautemps from the Radical-Socialist Party (which was neither radical nor socialist, by the way). His successor Édouard Daladier, dismissed the prefect of the Paris police, more to the right than Atilla the Hun Jean Chiappe. The result was a violent demonstration which degenerated into a coup attempt by various far right organizations such as the Action Française, the Croix-de-Feu and the Mouvement Franciste. Fourteen people were killed in the night of 6–7 February 1934. The Republic survived, barely, but but Daladier had to resign and the left faced with an immediate threat from the far right united, which led to the 1936 victory of the Popular Front.

The Stavisky affair also triggered the founding of a far right terrorist organization La Cagoule an a general erosion of democratic values which would pave the way for the Vichy regime.

Of course, nobody has tried to storm the parliament in the wake of the Cahuzac affair. Its effects are more insidious but can be every bit as deleterious.

France is indeed facing a two-pronged long-term crisis which is slowly but surely destroying its social cohesiveness. Like all human societies, it suffers from the systemic effects of peak energy and peak complexity.

As the amount of net energy available to the society shrinks, it becomes less and less able to both maintain its infrastructure and actually do things. The result is that our infrastructures, both material and immaterial, decay, as does our ability to effect positive change. Besides, our usual ways of dealing with problems, that is increasing the complexity of the society, is becoming more and more counterproductive.

As always, in such a situation, the top tiers of the society, preserve their position by grabbing resources from those located lower in the hierarchy. In democracies, this mostly done in indirect ways, by dismantling institutions which benefit mostly the lower and middle strata of society: welfare, public education and services, collective transportation, subsidized medicine...

Moreover, we are slowly losing our privileged position as a first circle ally of the current world hegemon. Not only are the United States losing ground to China, but the center of world economic activities is drifting away from the Atlantic, making us more and more peripheral in world affairs. That means that our ability to profit from the imperial system set up by the USA (and from the remnants of our own Empire) is slowly dwindling.

In such a situation, elections become more and more about gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana and less and less about wages and taxes. Mainstream politics sound then more and more like empty noises to the working class and to a significant part of the middle class.

This creates a disconnect between the population and the political class which grows more and more parasitical as the resources of the society diminish. This disconnect is bound to increase as various elites are forced into resource grabbing by the shrinking economy and competition between the various strata of the society sharpens.

In normal times, scandals, even though they can end the career of the politicians involved in them, do not undermine the legitimacy of the regime. Neither the Panama Scandals nor the Oil Sniffers Hoax or the Urba Affair threatened the survival of the Republic because, outside far right circles, they were seen as bugs, not as features. Globally, the system worked, and even if you disagreed with the party in power, you could hope for things to get done your way once your pet team in the government.

The problem is that it does not longer work that way. Our economies cannot function without a solid growth, which is more and more becoming a thing of the past. As the governments lack the means to do anything but further the status quo, the policies of the left become indistinguishable from those of the right and their ideology focus away on societal issues to preserve the fake dichotomy so central in our political system.

Of course, people are not fooled and see more and more their political class not as the promoters of such or such policies but as professionals fighting to advance their career. It becomes, by the way, more and more true, as the younger generation of politicians internalize the constraints of the system and focus on secondary, bobo, issues such as feminism or voting right for foreigners.

In such a situation, careerism, greed, and ultimately corruption become features of a political system more and more cut off from the day-to-day realities. Outright fraud remains rare, but privileges abound. I certainly enjoy some of them despite my low status and my position as an outsider, even though the main one – I can’t be fired – come not from my being a politician but from being a civil servant.

The occasional scandal will then be considered by a large part of the population as the proof that the whole political class is corrupt and that only extremists are sincere. In 1780, that ultimately meant the Jacobins. In 1934, that meant the Communists or the various far right sects which would later founded the Vichy regime. Now, it meant caesarist parties such as the French National Front or Populist / leftist ones such as Mélenchon’s Parti de Gauche.

That makes corruption far more dangerous than in more prosperous times as it increase the already strong preference of our declining societies for authoritarianism. Fueled by an ever growing thirst for an effective political action, but similarly lacking in means, this authoritarianism won’t be less corrupt than its democratic rivals. In fact, it may be more, despite a few show-trials, because of a greater control of judicial institutions by the government – corruption-ridden China is a case in point. It will also be less efficient at mobilizing remaining resources since its legitimacy will be based not on its origin but on its supposed ability to solve the problems faced by the society, something it will be very unlikely to be be able to do.

What authoritarianism will do, however, is destroy what will be left of the democratic tradition and replace it with a mythology of charismatic leadership which will pave the way for warlords later in the game. This can be disastrous. Democracy as an idea is probably going to survive or at least to be revived at some point, unless we lose writing, which is quite unlikely. Democratic tradition at the local level, however, with the network of associations and local institutions it depends, would be shattered by a period of brutal authoritarianism.

This is why it is vital for the future to eliminate corruption as much as possible, and to reduce, as much as possible again, the privileges of the political class. It’s not because they are bad - they are, but it is inevitable that the political class grabs some privilege and that some of its members go over to the dark side : that’s what human do. It’s because they reinforce a trend already strong in all declining societies which leads to runaway resource grabbing by self-appointed elites which would make the present political class almost competent and responsible in comparison.

We need to go robespierrian on corruption, lest a new Robespierre shows up.

Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the risks of activism

Even if it is hardly a priority, I suspect that a significant minority of my readers have heard about the Notre-Dame-des-Landes question. For those who haven’t, I will summarize it. Notre-Dame-des-Landes (Our Lady of the Moors in English) is a rather unremarkable village in the southern Breton countryside, which happens to have been chosen as the location of a future airport. Locals have predictably been upset about that choice and saying that the project has met with some resistance is the mother of all understatements. Things have turned even more messy when Jean-Marc Ayrault, mayor of nearby Nantes, has been appointed as Prime Minister of France with clashes between protesters and the anti-riot police making the headlines of the national papers.

The atmosphere has somewhat cooled down, but the project is still highly controversial, with a lot of people investing a lot of mythology in it. Of course, the promoters of the project live in a world which already no longer exists. Building a new airport while oil production has been stagnant for nearly a decade is patently absurd and only the prevalence of the mythology of progress in our society makes possible for this weird idea to be still defended.

Yet the opponents have their own set of issues, which are actually causing the support for them to erode. As always in such cases, the core of the opponents to the project are locals, with mostly local issues. Those can greatly vary. In some cases it is pure unadulterated not-in-my-backyard-ism, in others it is peasants clinging to their lands or villagers unwilling to abandon their rural lifestyle. Many elected officials refuse a project which will strengthen the already strong influence of nearby Nantes over the area and favor a distributed network of mid-sized cities over the center-periphery model so characteristic of French geography.

These reasons are perfectly legitimate, including the not-in-my-backyard-ism. The whole point of local democracy is after all to provide peripheries with the wherewithal to defend their interests. This is, for instance, what happened in Plogoff at the very end of the seventies.

This village had been chosen as the site of a nuclear plan – a public interest project according to the state and to the departmental council. Locals were not exactly enthusiastic, and protested with the help of ant-nuclear activist from all over Brittany. It was ,in many ways, the defining fight of a generation, and local mayors and councilors were at the forefront of it. This is probably why the struggle to keep the Baie des Trépassés plutonium-free was not highjacked by ambitious would-be ministers or militant professional revolutionists. This is also why when François Mitterand won the 1981 presidential election, he swiftly canceled the project.

Unfortunately, the fight against the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes is unlikely to go the same way. Even if the project is canceled after the resignation of Jean-Marc Ayrault as a prime minister (probably in 2014, after municipal elections which are likely to go badly for the conventional left), it will left a bitter aftertaste in many people’s mouth, and not only its promoters’.

France uses a two rounds voting system, even in elections with multiple winners, so smaller left parties have a strong incentive to ally with the dominant socialist party if they want to have elected officials. The Greens are no exception, but in the context of the Notre-Dame-des-Landes area, they also they also need to push the fires of contest to gather votes and support. The result has been rather schizophrenic. The Greens sit in every executive body supporting the project, from lowly municipal councils to the Government of France while vocally opposing it in the field. Of course, except for a few local mavericks, they will never vote against socialist candidates, and of course, their ministers won’t resign from the government.

The most likely response in such a situation is noisy tokenism. Politicians tend to love tokenism as it is a cheap way to get votes, at least for a time. Greens are more vulnerable to this temptation since they are basically a revitalization movement, the whole point of which is to perform symbolic acts so as to turn our society into a sustainable one without having to pay the price for it.

Of course, abandoning one’s core values for a few seats in a government or a municipal council has also a price. It tends to breed distrust. In France this process is already fairly well advanced, to the point that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leading figure in French political ecology and Member of the European Parliament could recently write :

We exist in the Senate, in the Parliament and in the Government but no longer in the society at large. Our institutional successes are not associated with a dynamic among citizens, quite the contrary. Our image has become detestable. We have failed where we wanted to restore hope by doing politics another way. Today we embody the unbearable lightness of arrivism [...] When we see her in a documentary film, brandishing her pen and swearing she will never sign an agreement with the PS if it does not include the abandonment of nuclear power, then, of course, we sign it because it is a good agreement, it is devastating.

I might add it is also devastating for whatever cause they defend, even if they are sincere.

Radicals are another problem. There is nothing wrong with radicalism per se. I am quite radical in many ways and one can argue that the true radicals are the defenders of the status quo since their stated ambition is to go against the most basic laws of the universe.

There is however a difference between being a radical and being obnoxious, and this line has been crossed many times in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Fitting in, being a good neighbor is a big part of preaching by example. It is not ego-flattering, however. Being right against the rest of the world is quite a pleasure and I certainly did indulge in it at some point of my existence. It is a good way to alienate potential, or even actual, support, however, as nobody enjoys being at the receiving end of in your face self-righteousness.

This is why so many radical movements, from feminism to atheism, accumulated such an embarrassing surplus of bad press despite what they claim to be their basic tenets having becoming mainstream.

This is also why there is a widening rift between the local opponents to the Notre-Dame-des-Landes poject and those who have come from elsewhere to “help” them. Those activists have come from all over France, and even, albeit in smaller numbers from abroad, to occupy the area where the airport is scheduled to be built.

They have had some success, and their clashes with the police earned them a significant amount of media time. They have, however, failed to integrate within the local community, as, I must say, was to be expected.

The zadistes, as they are called here, are radicals living in the margins of society, with mostly an anarchist background and a relatively high level of education. They certainly have to be lauded for putting their mouth where their money is. Beside clashing with the police, they have created a kind of communal counter-society with “non-hierarchical decision-making processes”. It tend to be skeptical of these. Private property has bad press, at least among left-winger, but in really hard times, it is an insurance against starvation and homelessness. As for “non-hierarchical decision-making processes”, well, we are pack hunters and hierarchy is a part of our genetic heritage. We can and must tame it, but trying to suppress it entirely is as efficient – and dangerous – as denying the existence of the panther which has just sneaked inside you bedroom.

That’s not the problem, however. The problem is that setting this micro-counter-society put them at odd with the locals who don’t intend to share their house with anybody but family and think that sitting in a district committee is a lousy way of spending an evening.

There is nothing wrong with living apart from the main body of society. Buddhist and Christian

monks have done that for a very long time. These, however, don’t want to reform society, and while they may consider the lifestyle of the majority to be somewhat inferior, they don’t deny its legitimacy.

The zadistes themselves are here to fight “capitalism” (which has become pretty much a snarl world in the French radical left, by the way), and that means ipso facto, denying the legitimacy of the values of the community around them. This has led to weird incidents, such as when zadistes decided to cut barbed wires around locals’ meadows... because of their symbolic values. Needless to say, said locals were not amused. There are also stories of reprisals against those who, to quote Brecht, “don’t take part to the struggle” and notably to its financing.

More important, this breeds an hollier than thou attitude which unfortunately runs rampant in radical organizations. This is an easy to fall in trap. After all, setting oneself as a member of a kind of vanguard ideological elite, miles ahead of the crowd, preparing the shape of thing to come and / or fighting against all odd a corporate behemoth or another, is quite a temptation, especially if you are a small minority in the general population. Feminists, marxists, local nationalists, radical right wingers have all given into it, so it is no wonder that radical environmentalism has done it too.

It is, however, a self-defeating attitude. Of course, it won’t make opponents to the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport become its staunch supporters, albeit it may sway a few undecided people the wrong way, but it will make your cause more unpopular than there is any need for. The struggle against the airport may or may not be won, but unless you believe, as some do, that the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport not being built will induce some paradigm shift, bring “Capitalism” to its knees and magically provides us with a sustainable society, you’ll agree that the decline of the industrial civilization will continue unabated.

In fact, one can argue that whether the airport is built or not is pretty much irrelevant to the fate of the area. In hundred years from now it will be a forest ruin locals will search for scrap metal. In a region which will at least partially flooded by the rising sea and lies downstream from a couple of nuclear plants, it probably won’t matter on the long run.

What will matter is whether we will be able to soften the coming long descent, among other things, by preserving survival techniques and by teaching them to those who will need them when the really hard times will come. This won’t be possible without trust. This trust can be achieved many ways, depending from the local culture. I am pretty sure however that instrumentalizing local struggle to grab political power or public subsidies is not conductive to that, and neither is insulating oneself in an self-righteous ivory tower.

We are social animals and pursuing our goals outside the community won’t get us anywhere.

In memory of the Bank of Saint-George

There have been a lot of talks about banks lately in France, both because of the Cypriot debacle and because the minister in charge of the French IRS has been caught red-handed hiding a substantial amount of money in some Swiss bank. This has given renewed impetus to the fight against tax heavens and bank secrecy – which is indeed a good thing – and a renewed credibility to the many narratives, which present banks as some kind of vampires’ conspiracy bent on sucking all the world’s economies dry.

Those narratives are old and, as often happens, they were promoted by the far right – and notably the Larouchies – before being adopted by a part of the left, and, of course, they are totally wrong.

While banks have some leverage and can influence governments int adopting measures favorable to them, but so does the entertainment industry, or the Unions. More important, this leverage, like any power center’s in our societies, is highly dependent upon the continuity of the system. Should it collapse, or change in a sufficiently dramatic way, banks, and more generally, the finance industry, would lose their power nearly overnight, as the (not so) sad story of the Bank of Saint-George shows.

The Casa delle compere e dei banchi di San Giorgio was founded in 1407 by a number of Genoese oligarchs, among whom the Grimaldi and Serra families (yes, those Grimaldis). The Republic of Genoa was a merchant republic, under the control of a handful of noble and trading families. It had been a major power in the Western Mediterranean during the crusade era but had lost most of its positions to Venice, then to the nascent Ottoman Empire, and was progressively becoming a French and Milanese protectorate.

As the Republic became feebler and feebler, the Bank acquired greater and greater power For a time several Genoese provinces – notably Corsica and Southern Crimea – were even ruled directly by the Bank – the strapped for cash republican government had simply pawned them. The bank’s influence was such that Niccolo Machiavel could write :

On the other hand, as the city had at first conceded the customs, she next began to assign towns, castles, or territories, as security for moneys received; and this practice has proceeded to such a length, from the necessities of the state, and the accommodation by the San Giorgio, that the latter now has under its administration most of the towns and cities in the Genoese dominion. These the Bank governs and protects, and every year sends its deputies, appointed by vote, without any interference on the part of the republic. Hence the affections of the citizens are transferred from the government to the San Giorgio, on account of the tyranny of the former, and the excellent regulations adopted by the latter. Hence also originate the frequent changes of the republic, which is sometimes under a citizen, and at other times governed by a stranger; for the magistracy, and not the San Giorgio, changes the government. So when the Fregosi and the Adorni were in opposition, as the government of the republic was the prize for which they strove, the greater part of the citizens withdrew and left it to the victor. The only interference of the Bank of St. Giorgio is when one party has obtained a superiority over the other, to bind the victor to the observance of its laws, which up to this time have not been changed; for as it possesses arms, money, and influence, they could not be altered without incurring the imminent risk of a dangerous rebellion. This establishment presents an instance of what in all the republics, either described or imagined by philosophers, has never been thought of; exhibiting within the same community, and among the same citizens, liberty and tyranny, integrity and corruption, justice and injustice; for this establishment preserves in the city many ancient and venerable customs; and should it happen (as in time it easily may) that the San Giorgio should have possession of the whole city, the republic will become more distinguished than that of Venice.

In 1528 the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V allied with Genoese Admiral Andrea Doria and ousted the French, restoring the independence of the Republic under Spanish protection. The Bank began then to finance the Spanish monarchy, acquiring considerable influence in the process. Spain, ruled by the Hapsburg, had become very wealthy from the pillaging of the Inca and Aztec Empire. American gold and silver had, however, to be transported across the Atlantic to be of any use – a lengthy and dangerous process, which pirates and privateers soon made yet more lengthy and dangerous.

The Genoese bankers provided therefore the Habsburgs with fluid credit and a dependably regular income. In return, they took the lion’s share of American silver and accumulated, quite predictably, an indecent amount of money in the process.

The Bank used this money to invest in colonial ventures, competing with Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, and was a major player in European economy up to the end of the XVIII^th century despite the decline of Spain... then evaporated overnight.

Genoa happened indeed to lie uncomfortably close to revolutionary France. It was invaded in 1797 by a French general called Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte turned Genoa into a French client, the Ligurian Republic. In 1805, the same Bonaparte, who had become an emperor in the meantime, annexed the area.

Bonaparte had also created what would become the Bank of France in Paris, and given it a monopoly on money printing. The idea was to create a stable currency and a reliable source of cash for France’s foreign ventures. Bonaparte happened to be a major shareholder and, being practically-minded, he quickly understood that concurrence was bad for business – his own anyway. The Bank of Saint-George was therefore told, politely but firmly, to please cease operations as soon as possible, which it did – French emperors tend to be very convincing, especially when their words are backed by an indecent number of infantry divisions.

It was not, however, French military power that enabled Napoleon the First to annex Genoa and dissolve the Bank of Saint-George, but the fact he was not a traditional monarch and was not bound by the traditional rules of statesmanship. The problem, indeed, with owing one’s throne to tradition, was that you had to obey traditional laws, lest you undermine your own legitimacy. The French kings could boast as much as they wanted about being the State, their actual power was fairly limited. They couldn’t, for instance, raise new taxes without the assent of the États Géneraux.

Napoleon, on the other hand, was the heir of a violent revolution. He based his power on military force, but also upon a variant of the enlightenment which emphasized equality, rationality and national sovereignty – albeit not freedom of the press and electoral democracy. It was not founded on tradition and therefore was not bound by it. Of course, that also meant he was not protected by it either and could be only as strong as his last victory.

Our situation is, mutatis mutandis, similar to the ancien régime kings. Even though we are theoretically in position to severely restrict or control the activities of the banking industry, or of any other sector of the economy, we are, in fact prevented to do so by a corset of self-imposed rules.

This is partly due to the diffuse nature of power in developed societies. Power centers are so numerous and so balanced that it is becoming increasingly difficult to effect meaningful change. The resistance Gay Marriage is meeting today in France, while it is a painless reform, is a case in point.

This is also partly due to the effects of peak energy, both because governments increasingly lack the means to implement reforms and because, since the energy surplus available to actually do something in our societies is dwindling, those who want to become rich shy away from industry and flock into finance and banking, aka summoning of imaginary wealth.

Add to this the rise, after the eighties, of laissez-faire ideologies exemplified by Reagan or Thatcher, and it is easy to understand why the finance industry has become so powerful. By the way, and ironically, the come back of those once discredited laissez-faire ideologies originated from the left moving away from social issues such as wages or working conditions during the seventies and adopting a generally more individualistic and anti-authoritarian stance – what we call in France the 68 thought.

This power is, however, as brittle as the Bank of Saint-George’s, perhaps even more. Bankers and traders have no army and command no loyalty. They can’t even hire mercenaries like the Bank of Saint-George did. The cost would bankrupt them and they would probably be quickly defeated. Their power lies in their ability to use and manipulate the corset of rules our society has given itself and to influence politicians who belong more or less to the same world.

Should society decides to play by other rules, or should political elites distance themselves from the finance, their influence will just disappear. You does not necessarily need a revolution for that, by the way. Franklin Delanoe Roosevelt and French President Charles de Gaulle both made sweeping changes in their countries’ policies without using violent or unconstitutional means – De Gaulle came into power through a quasi coup, granted, but he did not use violence and the regime he installed was, and is still democratic.

What matters is not the supposed power of such or such economic power center but our collective ability to accept the idea that the ultimate sovereignty belongs to the political and that private and factional interests prevail only because we allow them to do so.

That does not mean, of course, that you can wish away the political and sociological consequences of peak energy or, for that matter, that it is a good idea to oppose bare-handedly a government both able and willing to use force against you – those who have tried have gotten into real troubles.

What that means is that the finance industry is not the nearly invincible behemoth described by far left (or far right) mythology. It has not the means to coerce the society and deprived from the support of those who can, it will prove as brittle and evanescent as the theoretically all-powerful Bank of Saint-George.

If you want to curb its power, I suggest you go to your nearest congressman and tell him about the Bank of Saint-George... and of the man on the white horse who decreed it out of existence... and of the way he got into power... and of what happened to those who got in his way.

He might listen.

Cultural diversity

Modern societies like cultural diversity, preferably when it is far away, reasonably photogenic and does not inconvenience them politically. They also like to marginalize minority cultures and transform them either into folkloric caricatures or into assimilated ghosts of their former selves. During the last two centuries, modern civilization has absorbed most of Earth's cultural diversity and is currently quite busy assimilating or destroying the rest while multiplying the subcultures in its midst. It is a typical case of replacing geographical cultural diversity by internal heterogeneity. It had to be expected from societies which had, until recently, accumulated an embarrassing surplus of cheap energy, but that is still a bad idea, and one which will become really problematic as our energetic surplus dries up.

Contrary to what many people think we aren’t a fangless, clawless maladapted ape which only its intelligence saved from extinction. We are superb long distance runners and walkers. We are very good at throwing things at mobile targets – for instances sharpened sticks at antelopes. We have a very good cooling system which makes us very heat-tolerant and a remarkable eyesight which makes us highly effective predators in an open or semi-open environment.

We are tropical savanna animals, at home in steppes and prairies provided there are at least a few trees in them but ill at ease in dense forests, where a predator can strike without warning. It is not by chance that we wrestled the world from our competitors at a time when most of Eurasia was covered by cold steppes. The outcome would have been very different in a warmer, wetter climate.

It is obvious, however, that we don’t all live in tropical savannas. In fact, a significant part of the human population lives in ecosystems totally unsuited for our species such as swamps (where our cooling system kind of underperform) or tundras (remember, we are tropical animals). We have to some extend adapted our bodies to those new environments but this remains limited. People living in cold climates are lighter-skinned, not fur-covered.

In fact, humanity has a very low genetic diversity, to the point it could become a problem should a really nasty bug arise, and the diversity which matters (for instance the prevalence of haemochromatosis in north-western Europe) is most of the time totally unrelated to today’s ethnic and cultural realities.

During most of our history, we have adapted to new environments, or to changes in our environment, by developing new technologies or social devices. Thus, when the climate changed 12,000 years ago and the herds which kept our paleolithic ancestors fed and clothed retreated northward, the tribes of Western Europe adopted the bow, a weaker but more accurate weapon than the spear-thrower, to hunt in the dense forests which soon came to cover Europe. Their cousins in the middle-east gathered around fields of wild cereals, changing their social structure to adapt to their new situation.

This is by now way a foolproof process. The native population of Kangaroo Island, or, more recently, the Greenland Vikings failed to adapt to a changing environment and went extinct, as did the first inhabitants of Palau.

Developing and maintaining a technology or a set of customs is costly and in small populations even basic technologies can be lost. The natives of Sentinel Island, for instance, no longer know how to make fire and the Mesolithic tribes of Western Europe quickly discarded the spear-thrower when reindeer were replaced by more elusive deer and roes.

Indeed, human groups tend to discard technologies they no longer need. After the late bronze age collapse, for instance, the highly organized Mycennian kingdoms were destroyed and replaced by a collection of independent villages too poor and too small to need a bureaucracy. The royal scribes became peasants and writing was forgotten in a mere generation.

The result has been a specialization of human groups, a trend reinforced by linguistic and cultural drift – inevitable in a low-tech environment – but also by our tendency, as social animals, to build our collective identity around cultural markers. Of course mergers, more or less voluntary, happen as does cultural diffusion but even a cursory look at a linguistic map of pre-industrial Europe or of pre-contact America will show that their effects have been temporary at best.

A wave of newcomers could unify culturally a large areas, as the Indo-Europeans did in Europe, the Bantus in Africa and the Pama–Nyungan in Australia, but they will soon fall to the combined forces of specialization and cultural fragmentation.

The advent of cheap and plentiful energy changed the rules of the game, however. Long distance conquest and tribute extraction are probably as old as empires, and in no way a Western specialty. Imposing one’s culture in an ecosystem to which it was not suited was quite another matter. European invaders could conquer the precolombian American states, which, by definition, were located in areas suited to agriculture. They could colonize the eastern seaboard which has roughly the same climate as Western Europe. Permanently occupying the rain forests, the deserts or the pampa was far more problematic. Those areas remained under effective Indian control until very late in the game. It was even worst (or better, depending from your point of view) in Africa where diseases played against us.

Fossil fuels, however, enabled us to fit the environment to our culture rather than the other way around. This is not an uncommon occurrence in nature and something very similar happens every time we flood a meadow with manure. This sudden glut of nutrients favors fast-growing weedy species which will soon smother out more efficient but less profligate plants, leaving very verdant but quite monotonous grass meadows. A similar process has been happening all over the world since the beginning of the industrial age, causing growth-oriented variants of European and East-Asian cultures to spread to areas where, in normal times, they could not have thrived. It also has caused the rise of a global meta-culture characterized by a common faith in progress.

The other, more specialized cultures, survive only in margins and should industrialism have proved sustainable, they would have had to choose between dying out and becoming a mere variant of the the global culture.

We know, however, that industrialism is not sustainable. Earth’s innards holds only so much recoverable fossil fuels and we have already extracted the best part of it. Production of crude oil has plateaued and it is only a matter of time before other fossil fuels follow suit. Ultimately our civilization will be left with only what wind sun and water can provide. While this does not mean that all our technologies will become unsustainable, our current strategy of adapting our environment to ourselves clearly will.

Add to this that the environment itself is likely to drastically change thanks to our deplorable habit of dumping truckloads of CO2 into the atmosphere, and it becomes quite obvious that cultural diversity will come back with a vengeance. Western – and East-Asian culture will have to retreat from areas unsuited to their preferred lifestyle, or change so much in the process that it will amount to the same. The poster child for this will probably be American desert cities such as Phoenix or Las Vegas, but northern China or the Southern Spain are prime candidates for such an evolution too. Whoever will inhabit those areas two centuries from now will have to adopt the same lifestyle as preindustrial desert tribes.

The problem is that those who have kept the technologies, both social and material, needed to thrive in ecosystem hostile to European or East-Asian style agriculture are likely to be early casualties. Even when they still form viable cultural units, they are too specialized to survive intact the effect of global warming. Besides, they are militarily extremely weak and would be destroyed without the protection of modern nation states – even the Sentinelese, who have made an habit of shooting down everybody sailing too close to their island will be soon overrun when Indian policemen will stop protecting them.

This means that we will have to rebuild a cultural diversity anew by acquiring skills and social habits adapted to ecosystems which do not yet exist at the exact moment the few people who still master those skills are on the verge of cultural extinction. Moreover, those people won't profit in any way from our collapse for the world we will left will be different enough that , to survive, they will have to completely reconfigure their culture. The Inuits, for instance, may still exist two centuries from now, especially in Greenland, but they will be more likely to raise cattle than to hunt seals, they will have horses, not sled dogs and the place of snow and ice in their culture will have been seriously reduced.

Even so, rebuilding cultural diversity is by no mean an impossible task. As a species we are very good at borrowing technologies and cultural features from our neighbors and calling them our own. Here in Brittany we eat a very typical buckwheat pancake called “galette”, yet buckwheat is a Chinese, which was never cultivated in Western Europe before the XIV^th century.

In fact, the internal diversity of our own society, doomed as it is, can be an asset in that matter. While I fail to see the point of most of our subcultures, their sheer number means that there always will be someone to document or perpetuate the technological and societal skills of some half-forgotten tribe. Whether it will be enough, however, is quite another matter as it means preserving a knowledge which will be quite irrelevant to our everyday life until quite late in the game. This implies a serious amount of geekery and self-marginalization and definitely won't get you money or influence.

A bit like copying Latin books in Dark Age Britain.