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 (www.RemnantNewspaper.com)
The price of gold has surpassed $1,600/oz. Now, gold is
not like any other commodity; in fact, it is not really
a commodity at all, in the sense that its price does not
reflect demand for some product for which it must be
used. Gold really has only two markets: jewelry and
fear. Jewelry is doing alright, since the rich are doing
better than ever, but the real growth market is fear.
The last time this happened was in 1971 when Richard
Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard for
international trade. Many were convinced that the world
trading system would collapse, and gold bubbled up to
$666.75 in September of 1980 (equivalent to $1,846 in
today's money) before itself collapsing to trade in the
$350-$450 range for the next 20 years, before again
beginning a steep rise in the early part of this
century.
What this history illustrates is that neither demand nor
inflation drive the gold market, but fear. Many people
believe that when money is worth nothing, gold will be
worth something. Whether or not one agrees with this
theory, one cannot deny the level of fear which drives
it, and the fear right now is of a general economic and
social collapse.
Are these fears justified? I believe they are. Indeed, I
do not believe that constitutional government, or such
of it that remains to us, will survive to the end of the
decade, and that the Union, and the world with it, will
not fracture into many pieces. And if that is the case,
then the great question for the readers of this journal
is, “What's a Remnant to do?”
What I wish to do here is to examine the causes of the
coming collapse and the shape it might take, and then to
examine the resources the remnant can bring to the
world. And most especially, I want to examine the one
factor that makes this collapse unique in all of
history, and that is the presence of the zombies, and I
want to answer the question posed by popular culture,
namely, “Will there be any zombies?”
Let me start by noting the whole problem of the collapse
of complex societies. Certainly, we live in an extremely
complex world, one which we have difficulty
understanding. Now, social complexity itself begins as a
way to make systems more robust, and to incorporate as
many elements of society as possible into a coherent
system. But as time goes on, parts of the system that
were designed for one purpose get used for another, and
usually inappropriate, purpose. Each little part of the
system acquires its defenders who will not let it
change, or will change it in complex and inappropriate
ways. When this happens, systems become extremely
brittle, and by “brittle,” I mean that a failure in a
small part of the system will cause massive failures in
large parts or even of the whole system.
We just saw a perfect example of this in the financial
markets. There, a failure in one small part of the
system, the sub-prime mortgage market, caused a failure
of the whole financial system. The sub-prime market was,
at its height, worth about $1.4 trillion. Most analysts
understood that the market was failing, but they were
not particularly worried about it, since the market was
so small in the overall scheme of things. What they
failed to understand was that a comparatively few
mortgages had been magnified by the miracle of financial
hedging to make the whole system brittle. The sub-prime
market reached default rates of 16%, and the whole
structure fell apart, and achieved the positive miracle
of causing $30T in losses in a $1.4T market. But beyond
these losses of nominal wealth, there was the recession
in which people who had no involvement in this elaborate
structure lost their jobs, their homes, their positions
in their communities, and perhaps even their marriages
and self-respect.
Here we see how complexity works, or fails to work, in
its brittle stage: a small failure in a small market
causes massive failure throughout the system. Nor can
such systems be easily repaired, as we are discovering.
Despite all the pundits and politicians, brimming over
with good advice and simple fixes, it turns out that the
system can only be “fixed” in one place by breaking it
in another; every patch weakens the whole, and every
“solution” is its own recipe for disaster.
When we go through the catalog of our economic,
political, and social structures, we find a network of
the same brittle systems, all of them ripe for failure,
and any of them sufficient to cause the failure of the
whole. Our systems of trade, defense, education,
entertainment, agriculture, housing, transportation—you
name it—turn out to be fragile, dysfunctional, and
beyond repair. They are all systems of inter-locking
fragility, such that the whole system is brittle and on
the verge of collapse.
Take energy, for example. Our entire industrial
civilization for the last two or three centuries has
been predicated on cheap energy, first coal and then
flow-able oil. But oil prices have quadrupled in the
last 10 years, and supplies of cheap oil are
diminishing. But so many other systems are dependent on
this cheap, flow-able oil. For example, when the price
of oil was driven by speculation to $140/bbl, the price
of shipping a container from Shanghai to Los Angeles
went from $2,000 to $6,000, which wiped out any wage or
regulatory advantages that the Chinese had, and
companies made plans to bring their production back to
our shores, which would have devastated the
export-dependent economies of China, India, and others.
The crisis passed, but the lesson was clear: at
somewhere between $120-$130/bbl, the world trading
system breaks apart, and we are not far from that.
A second dependency is agriculture, which is largely
oil-based. Now, Americans have largely given up on
eating food, or at least anything our grandparents and
great-grandparents would have recognized as food.
Increasingly, our diets consist of highly processed and
manufactured food-like substances, composed mainly of
corn syrup, starches, fats, salt, and the chemical
compounds necessary to keep the whole thing from
instantly rotting. And the farms themselves have become
extensions of the factory food system, where the soil is
no longer used to grow food. Rather, the soil, or what
remains of it, is merely used to hold the plants in the
ground, while a variety of petrochemical substances are
applied to stimulate growth, fight disease, and ward off
pests.
The crops are planted and harvested with a large array
of capital and energy-intensive equipment, to produce
standardized products, most of which were unknown to man
or God a generation or two ago. As the price of oil goes
up, the price of food must follow. Nor can most farmers
return to pre-petrochemical days, as they have destroyed
their own soil, and it will take years to get it back.
We do not have machinery for making soil; that comes in
God's own time with man's own care. And if we don't
care, it won't happen.
I could go on with this analysis through system after
system, but I think you get the idea, and I would like
to turn our attention to another and more serious
problem, namely the problem of culture and religion. It
is here, I believe, that we confront a situation for
which there is no precedent in human history. Here my
thesis is very simple: culture has been subordinated to
the needs of commerce, a commerce that has exhibited
some rather peculiar and even demonic needs. Now, at
many times in the past, the merchant has moved culture,
and this was not always a bad arrangement. Commerce
sought to ennoble itself with culture, and the merchant,
through his patronage of the arts and the Church, sought
to lift up his fellow citizens, ennoble his city, and
obtain honor for himself.
But what is happening today is something quite
different. Although something of the old spirit of
patronage remains, in the main the vast engines of
culture have been turned from uplifting the citizen to
degrading him. Indeed, the whole point of the exercise
is to turn each of us from being a citizen into being a
pure consumer; that is, from being a person who takes
responsibility for himself, his family, and his
community, into being a person whose self-respect is
invested only in what he buys, and who is directed only
by unregulated and easily manipulated passions.
Marketing has displaced philosophy to become the
preeminent integrative science of the modern age. At one
time, we relied on the philosophers to put together all
the knowledge that was, and to advise princes,
merchants, and soldiers on the proper way of the world.
But today, the philosophers have become second-class
citizens—even within the academy—and it is advertisers
who put together all the knowledge of the world for
their own ends. That is, advertisers hire the best
psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, musicians,
composers, writers, actors, and artists, and their work
directs the engineer and the scientist to push the
limits of product and surveillance technology. But this
patronage of the arts and sciences has a quite different
end from, say, the merchant dukes of Venice or Florence;
marketing patronage seeks to destroy the intelligence
and play on the vices. That is to say, it seeks to
create zombies, people whose lives and brains have been
destroyed, and whose only object is consumption.
The young have recognized that the marketeers have
succeeded; this is why the image of the zombie, so silly
on its face, resonates so much in popular culture. The
young know, at some intuitive level, that we are already
in the midst of the apocalypse, that the world wishes to
strip them of their minds and their hearts and make them
pure consumers, mindlessly but relentlessly pursuing one
product—The advertiser's dream! They know, in their
heart of hearts, that the world is out to get them, and
means them no good. They have seen a deeper truth than
anyone cares to admit.
In the past, the whole point of literature and the arts
was to educate the young; to inculcate in them the
values of their place and culture; now, its sole object
is to destroy them in the name of a monetary gain. No
civilization has ever committed such crimes against its
own children. Or perhaps there is a precedent. The
Carthaginians, under siege from the Romans in 146 BC,
thought they could revive their fortunes by sacrificing
their children; 300 children were thrown into a furnace
to the god Moloch, but the city fell anyway, the
inhabitants sold into slavery, and the ground sowed with
salt so that nothing would grow there, so deep was the
Roman revulsion with the city. Carthago delenda est,
and no city more deserved its fate.
But what of our fate? Have we not, in a way, committed
the same crime to be condemned to the same fate? Have we
not condemned our children to be sacrificed to the fires
of a commercial Moloch, and must we not suffer a fate
much worse than Carthage? Well, after all of this, I
have a rather odd message: be of good cheer. We can get
through this; we can do this, and perhaps it is only us,
only a remnant, who can do it. I believe that if we keep
our wits and our faith about us, we can show our
neighbors how to live—once we relearn the art ourselves.
We start by asking what happens in a collapse. The first
thing is that the center cannot hold. That is, the
central government—and centralized production
companies—can no longer provide services to the
periphery. At some point, the periphery simply refuses
to obey orders or to remit funds. States like
California, which remit to the federal government far
more than they receive in benefits, will simply stop
remitting funds, and use the money to solve their own
problems.
If it seems strange to say that large entities will stop
paying taxes, consider the fact that large corporations
have already done so, albeit by a series of legal and
quasi-legal means. Despite the stated tax rates, the
actual rates paid are minimal. At some point, ordinary
citizens will simply “forget” to pay their federal
taxes, and there is not much a bankrupt federal
government will be able to do about it, since all laws
depend on a high level of voluntary compliance; when
that is gone, so is the law.
But the large corporations will be having their own
problems, and their failure to support the state
financially is the commercial equivalent of killing the
goose that lays the golden eggs. Corporate power depends
on government power, and both will go down together;
they are part and parcel of each other. Without a
powerful federal government to enforce patents, people
will use the knowledge they have to make the things they
need. Without subsidized roads, the Wal-Mart
distribution model will be shown to be expensive and
inefficient. Without a big government to pick up
externalized costs or provide large subsidies, corporate
collectives will go the way of all collectives, whose
very size condemns them to inefficiency.
But what shall we do, when there is no longer a remote
government to care for us and a large corporation to
feed us? How shall people get their daily bread when
they discover that bread doesn't grow on grocery-store
shelves? Modern life, after all, is dependent on complex
networks for electricity, water, sewer, transportation,
gas, education, security, banking, food supplies,
medical care, and so forth. Almost all of these are
allocated by an exchange for money in market or
quasi-market systems. Money, however, will be the first
thing to go. Money is a social product, and never any
stronger than the society which issues it. There will
either be (and you can pick your favorite theory on this
one) hyper-inflation or hyper-deflation; that is, money
will either be too plentiful to have value or too scarce
to be useful.
Our problem will be to restore each of these services on
a community-by-community basis, and to find a variety of
ways to distribute them, ways that will range from a
circulation of gifts to barter, to local and ad hoc
currencies. But will there be anything to exchange,
either as gift, as barter, or for money? The first
problem, of course, is food. If the mega-farms fail, can
large populations be fed on the “three acres and a cow”
approach the distributists are said to favor? Check out
this short film about growing 1 million pounds of food,
10,000 fish, and 500 yards of compost on three acres. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng)
It is a simple system, using aquaponics, where water
from tanks of tilapia is distributed over gravel beds
where vegetables are grown. With greenhouses, the system
runs 12 months/year, and the only heat source necessary
is the compost bins. The system is “low-tech,” requiring
only one pump and gravity to run the whole thing. That's
what you can do on three acres, and you don't even need
the cow. In fact, you don't even need the three acres,
since the same system would work on the roof of an
apartment building in the midst of the city.
But some crops, such as wheat, do indeed require larger
scale farming to be practical, and at present, such
farms require capital-intensive machinery. And most of
the requirements of modern life are, or are connected
with, manufactured things, and we assume the
factories in which these things are made are large and
expensive. Does a collapse mean that we must return to a
pre-modern and more primitive standard of living? Look
at this film from Marcin Jakubowski of Factor E Farms,
who developed his own low-cost and highly robust
alternative, a tractor that could be built in six days
from widely available materials, and for $4,000 (http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html).
But it is more than a farm tractor, because he also
built a detachable scoop, which makes it a
front-loader, and a hoe that makes it a back-hoe. It has
power take-offs to power other machinery, such as a
brick press capable of 5,000 bricks per day, enough to
build a house. Indeed, the same farms are developing
plans for the 50 of the most important machines for
industrial civilization, plans that allow these machines
to be built from a variety of materials, and built to be
long-lived with low maintenance costs.
But the key terms are not machinery and technology, but
“families” and “neighborhoods”; the mechanical stuff our
culture can handle, on scales large and small. The
problematic areas are the ones involving human
relationships. Indeed, the family today is often a
temporary arrangement, enduring only until we can get
the kids out of the house, and we often get them very
far out of the house indeed, across the country or
around the world. Even with all of our “social”
technology, we often find it difficult to retain close
relations even with our closest relations. And
neighborhoods are often nothing more than collections of
habitats characterized more by their anonymity than by
anything that could be called neighborliness. It is this
neighborliness, more than any technical or
physical quantity, that will be the scarce commodity in
any effort to rebuild.
Neighborliness, is the exact opposite of self-interest
understood as desire, as the pursuit of a private
passion. Neighborliness requires a certain degree of
sacrifice, of true caritas, that is, a
willingness to see our own good in the good of our
neighbors. But is this possible in a world of zombies?
Would not the zombie see no other good than his own,
recognize no other truth than his own? Here I would like
to offer a rather strange suggestion: A world of zombies
may prove to be an advantage, if we can use it
correctly. Let me offer a case to make this rather
surprising point.
The familiar world order collapsed with the first world
war, and the world between the wars was full of good men
of passionate intensity. Seeing the obvious disorder,
the collapse of all that was customary and familiar,
they wished to find some universal truth that could save
the world. The men who opted for communism, or fascism,
or Nazism, or Liberalism were, for the most part, good
men who had gotten hold of the worst kind of lie: the
half-truth. They committed great crimes in order to save
their half-truth from all the other competing
half-truths. But there is no danger of this happening
with the zombies. The modern world has destroyed the
whole notion of truth, even, or especially, the notion
of the half-truth. What the zombie knows, and knows with
mathematical and moral certainty, is that he has been
lied to. He knows this because everything the world has
told him—and told him 24/7—is in fact a lie.
Men for the last 200 years or more have filled
themselves with empty ideologies; the zombies alone are
truly empty and waiting to be filled with truth. But
this “truth” they yearn for cannot be just another
ideology, another ism. Indeed it cannot even be
Catholic-ism, for this too is just an ideology, perhaps
the worst. That is to say, it cannot be a Catholicism
that is merely the spiritual support of some political
ideology, be it the liberalism or constitutionalism of
Scalia or Woods on one hand, or of the liberation
theologians and political liberals on the other.
So what will the zombies do in time of collapse? I don't
know, but I suspect the answer will depend very much on
what we do. If we show the zombie a truth, rather than
just preach one, we may release him—and ourselves—from
his prison. By showing him a truth, I mean showing him
a community, a community that functions economically,
socially, and, I think it important to add,
liturgically. Communities are by themselves tools of
evangelization. For example, the California missions
were not just churches where one could preach to the
Indians, but communities where a Christian way of life
could be demonstrated, could be made visible and
concrete to the Indians, something they could compare
with their own lives.
The technical problems of rebuilding the world, the
problems that seem insurmountable, will turn out to be
trivial: there is enough knowledge and resources to
accomplish that task. But whether we are able to do it
is another thing. The modern world begins by
discovering—or rather inventing—the autonomous
individual; the self-made made man who has no
connections save contractual ones freely chosen and
broken at will, for indeed there can be nothing higher
than the individual will. Such a man is already half-way
to being a zombie. And we must admit to ourselves, that
we are all zombies, to some degree we are influenced by
the technologies of persuasion and “need-creation.” We
are all people who feel a need to work to buy what we
don't need, and then to discover new needs, which we
must work even harder to fill. The modernist project
ends with post-modernism, and with the true zombie, that
is, with the creation of emptiness.
On a practical level, we need to first prepare
ourselves. We must know what we really want and buy—or
make—only what we really need. Growing a tomato is an
act of resistance; fixing a car rather than buying a new
one throws a wrench into the system. And making your own
music defeats the entertainment industry, while
entertaining your children and your neighbors defeats
the whole wicked world. Educating one's children defeats
both government and industry. And all of these provide
the seeds from which a new economy, and a new
civilization, a liturgical civilization, can be built,
one that will fill the zombies and make them human
again, and us as well.
We need to be looking around our neighborhoods and areas
for resources to solve all the problems when the
professional problem-solvers no longer can. If we look
closely, we are likely to find more than we suspect. But
mostly, we need to be looking at our neighborhoods to
find our neighbors; all too often our neighborhoods are
not at all neighborly, but rather anonymous and
temporary housing, not real places but only real estate.
By finding real neighbors, we will find real solutions.
To conclude, I say again, let us be of good cheer. To be
sure, we must be realistic about the dangers we face and
the hardships we will, no doubt, endure. There will be a
certain madness abroad in the world, and this is
unavoidable in times like these. People, deprived of
comfort and customs, and anxious over the next meal or a
place to sleep, will at least be mad, and likely prone
to madness. But they are unlikely to fall victim to mere
ideology, and we may have it in our power to calm their
anxiety. And I suspect that we will discover that the
things we will have to give up are not things that we
really wanted anyway, and that what we stand to gain is
what we were always looking for. And what we gain, we
may give, and give to our fellow-zombies, who in their
true emptiness of heart want only to be filled with the
truth. This, I suspect, is our vocation, our calling,
and this is our moment. |
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