| 4.) | Wizards of the past, and perhaps the future |
Sent to me from a friend named 'Feral':
"Wizard Culture"
by Richard Greer
Perhaps the most interesting responses to recent discussions I've had about of
mass movements have been those that insisted that the only alternative, either
to a mass movement in the abstract or to some specific movement, was defeat and
despair. That's an odd sort of logic, since mass movements are hardly the only
tool in the drawer; I suspect that part of what drives the insistence is the
herd-mindedness of our species - we are, after all, social mammals with most of
the same inborn habits of collective behavior you'll find in any of the less
solitary vertebrates.
Still, the pressure toward some such movement has another potent force driving
it: the awkward fact that the vast majority of people today simply do not want
to hear how difficult their future is going to be. It doesn't matter how good
your evidence is or how well you make your case, most of your listeners will
simply look uncomfortable and change the subject. Why this should be the case is
an interesting question; I suspect that much of the blame lies with the cult of
positive thinking Barbara Ehrenreich anatomized in a recent book, though I'm
quite willing to hear alternative explanations.
Still, for whatever reason, an extraordinary blindness to the downside has
become crazy-glued in place straight across contemporary culture. From
economists who insist that the bubble du jour (right now, in case you haven't
noticed, it's government debt) can keep on inflating forever, through technology
fans who believe devoutly that their favorite piece of drawing-board vaporware
will necessarily solve the world's problems without side effects and with spare
change left over, to millions of ordinary people who can't or won't imagine a
future without the material abundance of recent decades, we seem to have lost
the collective capacity to recognize that things can and do go very, very wrong.
It's not merely a matter of blindness to the "black swan" events Nassim Nicholas
Taleb made famous, either; we're just as bad at seeing white swans coming, even
when they've been predicted for decades and the sky is so thick with them that
it's hard to see anything else.
It's an appalling predicament: how can a community prepare for a troubled future
if most people tune out even the slightest suggestion that it might be troubled?
It's for this reason, seemingly, that many people in the peak oil scene have
chosen to downplay the difficulties and insist that we can have a bright, happy,
abundant future if we just pursue whatever baby steps toward sustainability we
all find congenial. I've been assured by some of the people making such claims
that they're perfectly aware that the situation is far more difficult and
dangerous than that, but that the need to get as people involved in some kind of
movement toward sustainability is so great, they say, that waffling on that
point is as justified as it is necessary.
As it happens, I think they're making a hideous mistake. The question that
remains is whether there are any viable alternatives, and that's the question I
want to address here. To explain the option I have in mind, though, it may be
useful to borrow a metaphor from history.
I don't know how many of my readers know this, but my most recent publication is
a translation of a very strange book from the Middle Ages. Its title is
Picatrix, and it is one of the sole surviving examples of that absolute rarity
of medieval literature, a textbook for apprentice wizards. Those of my readers
who grew up on stories about Merlin, Gandalf et al. take note: those characters,
legendary or fictional as they are, were modeled on an actual profession that
flourished in the early Middle Ages, and remained relatively active until the
bottom fell out of the market at the end of the Renaissance.
By "wizard" here I don't mean your common or garden variety fortune teller or
ritual practitioner; we have those in abundance today. The wizard of the early
Middle Ages in Europe and the Muslim world, rather, was a freelance intellectual
whose main stock in trade was good advice, though admittedly that came well
frosted with incantation and prophecy as needed. He had a good working knowledge
of astrology, which filled roughly the same role in medieval thought that
theoretical physics does today, and an equally solid knowledge of ritual magic,
but his training did not begin or end there. According to Picatrix, the compleat
wizard in training needed to get a thorough education in agriculture;
navigation; political science; military science; grammar, languages, and
rhetoric; commerce, all the mathematics known at the time, including arithmetic,
geometry, music theory, and astronomy; logic; medicine, including a good
knowledge of herbal pharmaceuticals; the natural sciences, including
meteorology, mineralogy, botany, and zoology; and Aristotle's metaphysics: in
effect, the sum total of the scientific learning that had survived from the
classical world.
Now it may have occurred to my readers that this doesn't sound like the sort of
education you'd get at Hogwarts, and that's exactly the point. Whether you
believe that the movements of the planets foretell events on Earth, as almost
everyone did in the Middle Ages, or whether you think astrology is simply a
clever anticipation of game theory that gets its results by inserting random
factors into strategic decisions to make them unpredictable, you'll likely
recognize that a soothsayer with the sort of background I've just sketched out
would be well prepared to offer sound advice on most of the questions that might
perplex a medieval peasant, merchant, baron or king. Nor, of course, would
someone so trained be restricted in his choice of active measures to
incantations alone. This is arguably why so many medieval kings and barons had
professional sorcerers and soothsayers on staff, despite the fulminations of all
the dominant religions of the age, and why wizards less adept at social climbing
found a bumper crop of customers lower down the social ladder.
The origins of this profession are, if anything, even more interesting. Pierre
Riché's useful study Education and Culture in the Barbarian West showed in
detail how the educational institutions of the late Roman world imploded as
their economic and social support systems crumpled beneath them. In Europe -
matters were a little more complex in the Muslim world - they were replaced by a
monastic system of education that, in its early days, fixated almost entirely on
scriptural and theological studies, and by methods of training young aristocrats
that fixated even more tightly on the skills of warfare and government. Only
among families with a tradition of classical letters did some semblance of the
old curriculum stay in use, and Riché notes that while that custom continued,
those who learned philosophy, one of the core studies in that curriculum, were
widely suspected of dabbling in magic. It's not too hard to connect the dots and
see how a subculture of freelance intellectuals, equipped with unusual knowledge
and a willingness to stray well outside the boundaries set by the culture of
their time, would have emerged from that context.
All this may seem worlds away from the issues raised earlier in this essay, but
there's a direct connection. The wizards of the early Middle Ages were
individuals who recognized the value of certain branches of knowledge and
certain attitudes toward the world that were profoundly unpopular in their time,
and took it on themselves to preserve the knowledge, cultivate the attitudes,
and make connections with those who shared the same sense of values,or at least
were interested in making practical use of the skills that the knowledge and
attitides made possible. There was no mass movement to support the survival of
classical science in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, and no hope of starting
one; the mass movements of the time - when they weren't simply stampeding mobs
trying to get out of the way of the latest round of barbarian invasions -
embraced the opposite opinion. How much of a role wizards might have played in
the transmission of classical learning to the future is anyone's guess, since
records of their activities are very sparse, but it's clear that they were an
intellectual resource much used during an age when few other resources of the
kind were available.
I've come to think that a strategy of the same kind, if a bit more tightly
focused, might well be one of the best options just now for an age when very few
people are willing to make meaningful preparations for a difficult future.
Certain branches of practical knowledge, thoroughly learned and just as
thoroughly practiced by a relatively modest number of people, could be deployed
in a hurry to help mitigate the impact of the energy shortages, economic
dislocations, and systems breakdowns that are tolerably certain to punctuate the
years ahead of us. I'm sure my readers have their own ideas about the kind of
knowledge that might be best suited to that context, but I have a particular
suggestion to offer: the legacy of the apppropriate technology movement of the
1970s.
This was not simply a precursor of today's sustainability projects, and the
differences are important. The appropriate tech movement, with some exceptions,
tended to avoid the kind of high-cost, high-profile eco-chic projects so common
today. Much of it focused instead on simple technologies that could be put to
work by ordinary people without six-figure incomes, doing the work themselves,
using ordinary tools and readily available resources. Most of these technologies
were evolved by basement-shop craftspeople and small nonprofits working on
shoestring budgets, and ruthlessly field-tested by thousands of people who built
their own versions in their backyards and wrote about the results in the letters
column of Mother Earth News.
The resulting toolkit was a remarkably well integrated, effective, and
cost-effective set of approaches that individuals, families, and communities
could use to sharply reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and the industrial
system in general. It was not, I should probably point out, particularly
esthetic, unless you happen to like a lively fusion of down home funk, late
twentieth century garage-workshop, and hand-dyed back-to-the-land hippie
paisley; those of my readers who own houses and are still fretting about their
resale value (and haven't yet figured out that this figure will be denominated
in imaginary numbers for the next several decades at least) will likely run
screaming from it; those who were incautious enough to buy homes in suburban
developments with restrictive covenants will have to step carefully, at least
until their neighbors panic. Apartment dwellers will have to pick and choose a
bit; on the other hand, those of my readers who will spend time living in
tarpaper shacks before the Great Recession ends - and I suspect a fair number of
people will have that experience, as a fair number of people did the last time
the economy lost touch with reality and imploded the way it's currently doing -
will find that very nearly everything the appropriate tech people did will be
well within their reach.
What's included in the package I'm discussing? Intensive organic gardening, for
starters, with its support technologies of composting, green manure, season
extenders, and low-tech food preservation and storage methods; small-scale
chicken and rabbit raising, and home aquaculture of fish; simple attached solar
greenhouses, which make the transition from food to energy by providing heat for
homes as well as food for the table; other retrofitted passive solar heating
technologies; solar water heating; a baker's dozen or more methods for
conserving hot or cool air with little or no energy input; and a good deal more.
None of it will save the world, if that hackneyed phrase means maintaining
business as usual on some supposedly sustainable basis; what it can do is make
human life in a world suffering from serious energy shortages and economic
troubles a good deal less traumatic and more livable.
This is the suite of technologies I studied as a budding appropriate-tech geek
during the late 1970s and 1980s, and it was central to the training program that
earned me my Master Conserver certificate in 1985. One teaches what one knows,
and I'm going to take the gamble of devoting much of the next year or so of
posts on my blog, Archdruid Report, to the details. My hope is that I can
encourage at least a few of my readers to follow the very old example mentioned
earlier, and become the green wizards of the decades ahead of us.
For that, I have come to think, is one of the things the
soon-to-be-deindustrializing world most needs just now: green wizards. By this I
mean individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn,
practice, and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills - the
skills of the old appropriate tech movement - and share them with their
neighbors when the day comes that their neighbors are willing to learn. This is
not a subject where armchair theorizing counts for much - as every wizard's
apprentice learns sooner rather than later, what you really know is measured by
what you've actually done - and it's probably not going to earn anyone a living
any time soon, either, though it can help almost anyone make whatever living
they earn go a great deal further than it might otherwise go. Nor, again, will
it prevent the unraveling of the industrial age and the coming of a harsh new
world; what it can do, if enough people seize the opportunity, is make the rough
road to that new world more bearable than it will otherwise be.
I also propose to have a certain amount of fun with the wizard archetype in the
posts to come. Still, that's an example of what the Renaissance alchemist
Michael Maier called a lusus serius, a game played in earnest, a dead serious
joke. The present time, as I've suggested here more than once, has plenty of
features in common with the twilight years of classical civilization, the age
that gave rise to the legends of Merlin and Arthur, and made it in retrospect a
poetic necessity for the greatest of all legendary kings to be advised by the
greatest of all legendary wizards.
Thus there's a certain lively irony in the fact that, back in the days when I
was sanding blades for a homebuilt wind turbine and studying the laws of
thermodynamics in Master Conserver classes in the meeting room of the old
Seattle Public library, one of my favorite bits of music was Al Stewart's
Merlin's Time:
Who would walk the stony roads of Merlin's time,
And keep the watch along the borderline?
And who would hear the legends passed in song and rhyme
Upon the shepherd pipes of Merlin's time?
In its own way, that's the question that I would like to pose to my readers;
we'll see what the answer turns out to be.
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