The Future of Books

The New Criterion: The digital challenge, I: Loss & gain, or the fate of the book
by Anthony Daniels

In a post-carbon world... is anything certain? I was reminded of this post by Damien Perrotin: The importance of handwriting.

Items of Interest, 24 April 2012

What Must Leaders Know to Wield the “Five Swords of Imagination”? by Barbara J. Elliott

Ron Paul attacks CISPA in urgent call to oppose 'Big Brother' bill

New Law Makes Protesting Near the President Illegal; Judge Napolitano Calls It an ‘Assault on Free Speech’

FBI: Hundres of Thousands May Lose Internet in July

Libertarianism, Conservatism, and Egalitarianism by Carson Holloway


Hawaiian Libertarian: This is Your Brain, This is Your Brain on Porn

Obama on soldiers who posed with Afghan corpses: ‘Reprehensible’ conduct merits probe

Are we really more civilized than that? Or have we thrown our soldiers into an insane situation?

Damien Perrotin, Party Politics (EB)

Wendell Berry, American Hero by Mark Bittman
Wendell Berry in D.C. in Two Venues - Wendell Berry at National Cathedral

Economics:
The Exodus of American Manufacturing
Money and wealth: How to heal the disconnect by David Boyle (EB)


Farming:
WATCH: Joel Salatin on Building Resilience into Agriculture
The Value of Our Produce

Peak Oil and Energy:
A Snarky Guide to Peak Oil
Deepwater what?

Catholic:
The First Mass of a Young Ordinariate Priest: Fr. James Bradley
Pope: Women Have Key Role in Building Up Church in America
The statement is a little too facile and brief? Unless "Catholic feminism" has prevailed and dominates the thinking of Uhmerican Catholics on the roles of women.

Feminism:
"Marriage is For Losers"
But how many marriage counselors and therapists are biased towards women? What about respect for the man as a man and his authority as husband and father?
Anna Quindlen Over 50 and Having Plenty of Cake
Jack Donovan, Men in Uncomfortable Shoes

Diet and Health:
MovNat Will Change You: Commentary by Instructor Kellen Milad
Mark Sisson in South Africa
Let's Put an End to Dietary Tribalism

Movies:
Trailer - My S.O. Has Depression (Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashite)


Music:
Steep Canyon Rangers:


Instrument Interview #3: Carolina Chocolate Drops


Katherine Jenkins & Mark Ballas - Samba - Week 6

Items of Interest, 29 March 2012

Two on the subject of empire:
John Michael Greer, America: The Two Empires (EB)
Damien Perrotin, Disunited kingdoms (EB) - he discusses Scottish independence.

Jim Antle, Constitutional Contempt
Time-shifted live-blogging of this morning's Obamacare oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court.

A Burke for Our Times by Mark A. Signorelli

Bill Kauffman, Peckinpah Country

Philosophy As Therapy

FNC: Hemmer interviews Obama surrogate: hijinx and anti-Catholicism result

Karen De Coster, Why I Am Not a Libertarian

Vox Day: Working Mothers Harm Children
Day Care and the Middle Class

District Holds Second Amendment Applies Outside the Home, Strikes Down Ban on Gun Transportation During

A review of The Holistic Orchard.

Catholic:
Christendom College: Va. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to Speak at Christendom College

Energy:
The Myth of Peak Oil by GEORGE WUERTHNER
The author misjudges how feasible, economically and otherwise, it is to produce oil from alternate sources.

Feminism and Courtship:
TPM: Constant, Unending Attention

Find a Ukrainian woman! haha.

Younger Women Turning to Domesticity

How To Survive College a Virgin

Diet and Health:
The LLVLC Show (Episode 562): PaleoFX Founders Keith And Michelle Norris Reflect On Their Inaugural Event (mp3)
Robb Wolf, MovNat! On the podcast!
Why Barefoot is Best

Mark Sisson: 6 Books I Am Reading Right Now (plus the Official Release Date of The Primal Connection)
Some of the books sound rather goofy, but what can you expect when it involves recreating the past and the "primitive" psyche?

Music:
The full version of "Hold On"




Someone who participated in Operation Market Garden: Tributes as brave war hero dies at age of 92

TV:
PBS - Gillian Anderson on Great Expectations

A liberal links feminism to cheap energy

The view from Brittany: Gender Issues

In comparison with the prognostications and recommendations of someone like Sharon Astyk, the author's post is more in tune with the perspective of a traditionalist. But it may also be a bit more inconsistent? Like Astyk, he links contemporary feminism to cheap energy and the destruction of home economies by the industrial system. But he also agrees that feminism has adopted standards of what it means to be a successful woman from the world of men. (Thus, feminism is misogynist.) I think Perrotin admits to more differences between the sexes than Astyk and that in other political economies, sex roles have been founded upon those sex differences, even if they may no longer be "adaptive." He however does not address the question of leadership within a marriage and family, and even maintains that there is a possibility that a "some kind of mother-centered family structure evolves." Is he saying that this has not been attempted before and found to be successful (that is, abiding)?

One does not wish to be crudely reductionistic, as if the respective roles of men and women in intercourse lead to the patterns of psychological dynamics that exist between men and women (though there is some causation). The female yields to the male, and the initiative that the man takes in sex is mirrored in the marital sphere as a whole. Most women would be dissatisfied if the situation were otherwise, and it does explain in part the hypergamy of women, who do look for a male who is better than (or dominates) them.

Ideological feminists who have healthy female desires may nonetheless deny this is so, but if a man is too yielding to her will, she will become dissatisfied with him. What woman is truly satisfied with a man as a tool? Someone who doesn't like men, or looking for complete control in a relationship in order to avoid a repeat of past hurts (childhood problems linked to the father, or poor past relationships).

Assertiveness is not leadership, but some think that all one needs to be a leader is to assert one's will over another.

The View from Brittany: The impotence of politics

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.

What, then, have they been doing? When conspiracy theorists in the U.S. typically about covert preparations in the U.S., they are referring to martial law, internment camps, and so on. So if these leaders are not doing what is necessary to decentralize power, then what other preparations could they be doing, uless it's stockpiling resources. Perhaps there are leaders at the local level who are aware of how bad things are, and they are the ones who are muddling through. But those who have more power? I doubt it, and I don't see any reason why the few who know cannot do much cannot at least use the office to make the public more aware of these issues. Why else would they want to have the job? Unless they are biding their time and hoping that when things get really bad, they will have more power. Or, they just like having the title.

Barbarian invasions, by Damien Perrotin

(original)

Peak energy makes things more complex, however. As the net energy available to society decreases, so will its capacity to support complex hierarchies. We can count on the ruling elites to pressure everyone and his dog so as to stay at the top, but ultimately they will fall. In the meantime , however, it will be the lower and middle classes which will hit the hardest. What that means for immigrants is that they will no longer be able, except for a few lucky individuals, to advance in society and will be permanently locked in underclass status. They will then have no reason to abandon the very real advantages of community solidarity for a more and more empty promise of integration.

Impoverished natives may and will then join immigrant culture – or rather what it will have become since it will quickly grow quite different of what it was at home – for protection and some form of advancement. This process is clearly at work in French society, even if it is marginal – racism and scapegoating is still the most common reaction.

As the crisis deepens and the middle class slips into permanent poverty, we may have a rather interesting “culture war” between whatever emerges from urban ghettos and a racism which in France may put on the mask of secularism – those who read French and will have look at this supposedly left wing blog will understand what I mean.

At some point in the process of decline, this is bound to generate a deep fracture in European societies, fracture which may take a territorial form, as it did in Britain, with an immigrant-based cultures prevailing in some areas and more native ones holding on in some others. Islamic polities may very well emerge in some French regions and large parts of Germany may very well become Turkish-speaking after the ultimate collapse of today's European states and of the elites which draw their power from them.

This is not necessarily a bad outcome. These futures societies and polities can become as rich and cultured as England did despite its rather troubled origin. The problem is that this process, probably inevitable at this point, will meet with a lot of resistance from natives, and more specifically from those authorities who will draw their legitimacy from today's polities. Racism and ethnic cleansing are bound to show their ugly head and make the unraveling of our civilization far messier and bloodier than it needs to be.

Ironically, it is the very refusal of the native majority to make place to immigrants and to integrate a part of their culture into their own which make this outcome all the more likely. This means, of course that ethnic regions – the Celtic Fringe for instance, but that is only an example – may be less vulnerable. Whatever polity emerge from them will likely draw its legitimacy from a supposed – even if often more fantasized than real – resistance to the state it is a part today. This may enable them to integrate large section of immigrant culture, as a part of a necessary culture change, without endangering themselves. An emirate of Britanny may exist in the future and, even if I'd prefer a Wiccan democracy, it would be as Breton as today's French region.

Even here, however, it is far from a forgone conclusion. In an atmosphere of nationalist ranting and stigmatization, it seems that the likes of Gildas will have a field day, paving the way for those of Cerdic and Creoda.

If what Mr. Perrotin predicts comes to pass, then he has presented the case why immigrants of different cultures and religions should not have been admitted into society in the first place. What can be done about it now?

Energy Bulletin:
Cultural hegemony
Damien Perrotin, The View from Brittany
2010 might very well be seen in retrospect as the year when Peak Oil became, if not exactly mainstream, at least something of a subject for the powers that be...Yet very little of it transpired into mainstream press and we can be quite sure, as Matthieu Auzanneau himself acknowledges, that a lot of water will run under the bridges of Paris before any kind of policy is implemented to address the problem. And there are unfortunately very good reasons for that.
(original)

Out of our Ego Houses, into the Collective Intelligence
Andrew MacDonald, Radical Relocalization
Communal life - our tribal past - valued the group over the individual. We left our communal past to put the individual's benefit (and especially material benefit) before the common good, in the process losing much of our memory of community.
(original)

Bill McKibben: The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely
Bill McKibben, Speaking Truth to Power
Community may suffer from overuse more sorely than any word in the dictionary. Politicians left and right sprinkle it through their remarks the way a bad Chinese restaurant uses MSG, to mask the lack of wholesome ingredients. But we need to rescue it; we need to make sure that community will become, on this tougher planet, one of the most prosaic terms in the lexicon, like hoe or bicycle or computers. Access to endless amounts of cheap energy made us rich, and wrecked our climate, and it also made us the first people on earth who had no practical need of our neighbors.
(original)

The failure of republics

Damien Perrotin, The View from Brittany

There were elections in Brittany yesterday. The result was, let's say, interesting for us, but that would be hard to understand for people not familiar with the French voting system and with the arcana of Breton politics. To make a long story short we ended up a left wing opposition to the left wing president of the regional council. This local oddity is not, however, the main lesson of yesterday's vote. The very low turnout is, and this tells a lot about the way our political system does and will react to the ongoing energy descent.

(original)

One of the problems, as my girlfriend insightfully stated, is that mainstream parties basically all say the same things while demonizing each other over small policy differences. Even the green alliance, of which we are a part, remains within the “business as usual” paradigm. They don't question the unsustainable exuberance of industrial civilization. They just want to power it with renewable technology and, of course, preserve the equally unsustainable individualistic lifestyle of the urban upper middle class.

Needless to say, it is impossible. The coming peak energy means that the resources available to society to fulfill the need of the population are decreasing. Moreover, the fact that all governments on the planet are committed to growth means than none can willingly disengage from globalization. It would be tantamount to unilaterally disarming in the middle of a war : an economical and therefore political suicide. All the ruling elites can do is try to stay afloat in more and more troubled waters and delay the crisis while hoping that growth will somehow save them.

As for the sensible thing : planning for austerity and resilience... it is ideologically and politically impossible. Any politician putting forward such an agenda would immediately relegate himself into the fringe. Besides, politicians are not different, ideologically speaking, from the population they represent. It is only in the mind of conspiracy theorists that senators and councilmen conspire to hide the true state of the world from the people and enslave it into some nightmarish New World Order. In the real world they are every bit as mired in the business as usual ideology as anybody else.

The problem is that this quasi-systemic impotence becomes more and more obvious to the layman and that more and more people become convinced that no matter whom they vote into office, nothing will ever change, or only for the worse. This feeling is bound to become more and more widespread as the crisis deepens and the rift between the voluntarism of the speech and the impotence of action becomes more and more apparent.

This may fuel the growth of extremists groups, but also disillusionment and a slow retreat toward private life which will progressively reduce republics to empty shells. Of course, this can happen only because those institutions which once participated in the formation of public opinion have either disappeared or degenerated into lobbies controlled by their own internal bureaucracy. Even here, in Brittany, where collective life has been better preserved than elsewhere, we are more and more bowling alone.

The results for our political systems is likely to be devastating. Of course, soldiers, policemen and civil servant won't cease obeying because the president has been elected by only 10% of the population, but it will be very easy for extremist or regional groups to contest the legitimacy of the state. Besides, as the effective support of the population becomes less and less obvious, the various factions vying for power within the framework of the institutions, will be more more tempted to resort to violence, and more and more likely to succeed, should they do so.

Damien Perrotin, Family Values

Family values
Damien Perrotin, The View from Brittany
Every debate has its blind spots and the one about community in peak oil circles is no exception. It is fascinating to see how little discussion there is about what is, after all, the most basic community in all human society : family. There are, of course, good reasons for that. Few among us have any sympathy for the family values crowd, a species unfortunately every bit as widespread and nefarious on this side of the Atlantic as on the other one and we certainly don't want to be put in the same basket as they. This is however unfortunate, for, no matter how polluted it is by religious non-issues, the family question and its evolution is of the foremost importance if we want to make sense of the post-peak world.

(original)

As I said in this post, liberals who promote relocalization and defend the family as the basic unit of society will do so in their moral framework and sanction all sort of organizations, citing various examples taken from all over the world to back up their stance. Here we see Mr. Perrotin using the example of the Mosuo -- he does claim that it is an example of a functional matriarchal society, but he's wrong. But don't let facts get in the way of promoting radical egalitarianism. Still, since he is in France I don't have to worry about forming a sort of alliance with him -- the French agrarian traddies do. He is just one spokesman; how much influence would he have in a deindustrialized society?

If resources are limited and one part of a community perceives that it is sharing an unjust burden in order to placate the other part's demands for just treatment how long can such a community last? (I am thinking of claims by "alternate" families for government support and so on.) Even if decentralization does take place, liberals may still demand the complete suppression of Christianity and traditional Western morality. Will Christians remain the passive sheep that they've become? Or will they resist?

Farewell to the moon
Damien Perrotin, The View from Brittany
It is a strange moment when you see an once cutting edge technology die. Of course, the common wisdom of our age – the so-called myth of progress – claims it cannot happen. Technologies may be made obsolete, they can turn out to be impasses, but it is unthinkable for a whole avenue of progress to simply close down. That is exactly what has happened, however, when President Obama canceled the Constellation Program, and that tells a lot about the fate of technology in a energy poor future.


(original)

Obama Scrubs NASA's Manned Moon Missions

Perhaps the only sensible thing he's done so far, though he hasn't eliminated NASA completely, and there are still grandiose plans of going to Mars, the asteroids, and so on.

NASA - Constellation
Ares

EB: Richard Heinberg: Peak Coal and Blackout (book review)
Damien Perrotin (translated from French by Laura Bennett), damienperrotin.com

The French blackout and the Byzantium delusion
Damien Perrotin, The View from Brittany
The American press probably hardly noticed but southern France has experienced a major blackout around Christmas and in my own region – Brittany - local authorities have urged people to reduce their power consumption, lest the whole regional grid catastrophically fail. The lights are still on in the small Breton village I am writing this from, but it is probably a matter of time before they go off.

(original)

Progressivism without progress by Damien Perrotin (original)

He discusses Alain de Benoist with respect to progressivism:

A number of thinkers on the fringes of the radical right have remained, or become again quite sceptical of progress. Americans will think of the Southern Agrarians or of modern paleoconservatives. Being an European, I will rather speak of the so-called New Right and of its leader : Alain de Benoist. While the New Right was born from an attempt of the far right to break with the string of defeats it experienced since the fall of the Petain regimen de Benois himself can hardly be called a fascist or even a traditionalist. He claims not to be a racist, and I have no reason not to believe him – a politician can lie about his opinions for electoral gain, not an intellectual whose only aim is to found a philosophical school. What de Benoist advocates is a world of local communities based upon non-mercantile values and with a renewed relationship with nature. Each one of those would have an inalienable right to its own culture and local, concrete, liberties inside the general framework of a loose European federation. He has recently written a book to support the idea of degrowth, which shows he understands, somewhat, the predicament of industrial society, even if his support for large-scale geopolitical constructs proves that he does not yet understands all its consequences.

The question is, of course, why do I fee so ill at ease reading him ?

I am hardly the only one in this situation. Supporters of degrowth were horrified by de Benoist's endorsement of their ideas, but for bad reasons. One can hardly blame de Benoist when he refuses to follow the degrowthers when they claim that by implementing their pet political project, they will get the perfect, classless, society two centuries of leftist revolutions consistently refused to give them. The fact is that degrowth is very bit as infused with progress mythology as the growth ideology of the old, traditional, left. They just differ on what is should be measured by.

The problem is elsewhere.

The ideology of de Benoist and his ilk may not be racist – at least in its pure form, most of its supporters definitely are – it is definitely anti-egalitarian. We tend to assume that anti-egalitarianism is necessarily racist, because it is how it manifested itself during the last century. It is a mistake, however. You can base your anti- egalitarianism on virtually anything and de Benoist bases his own upon the idea of an intellectual elite, whose supposedly innate superiority would have its root in genetics. This means, of course, that he refuses democracy, since democracy is based upon the idea that every man is, at least in theory, able to formulate an informed opinion about the way public affairs are run.

It is also a celebration of closed society. Every society, must have some kind of closure, lest it dissolves away and it is likely that post-peak societies will be more closed than our own. There won't be any large state apparatus to hold them together, so they will have to rely upon organically enforced shared values for cohesion. There is however a difference between accepting this as a lesser evil and turning every culture into a kind of ethnic island where any departure from tradition would be ruthlessly punished.

De Benoist's utopia, is in fact Sparta reborn, with its insular economy and culture, its heroic, freedom-loving, armed citizenry... and its helots.

Most peak-oil activists, even those who consider themselves conservative, would find De Benoist's project abhorrent, and that is where lies the possibility of progressivism without progress. In a world of scarce resources, it is no longer possible to dream of the shining futures of the last century. It would even probably dangerous to do so. This does not means, however, that must renounce the ideal of a common human dignity beyond and above cultural, religious and political boundaries. By this, I do not mean the false universalism and real ethnocentrism the West imposed upon the world, and which is still popular down here, just this very simple idea : every man should be respected as such, no matter his condition.

This is this idea which lies under the failed utopias of the left and no matter how bad the coming decline turns to be, they are still worth defending

Does an authentic republican require egalitarianism? Does it always involve the political participation of all? The classical and medieval conceptions of republicanism would seem to answer no to these questions. Aristotle holds that a republic is a government by the many, not by all. Apparently Machiavelli would agree with him. (Is this true of the other civic humanists? That is likely.)

Though I have been reading Mr. Perrotin's blog for only a short time, nothing that he writes here is unexpected.

Nouvelle Droite - New Right - English articles
French Philosopher Alain de Benoist Believes that the EU is more Atheist than the Former USSR

Peak energy and cultural fragmentation

Damien Perrotin, The View from Brittany

Last week, I went to Paimpol with my girlfriend to attend the Sailor Songs Festival...As we were strolling along the wharves amidst a joyful crowd, she told me me “we're no longer in France”. The fact that the greater part of what makes the region so un-french is fairly recent does not make her remark less pertinent. In fact it makes it even more so as it highlights a particularly important factor in the coming energy descent : cultural differentiation.

(original)

The demise of the middle class
by Damien Perrotin (EB)

It makes one wonder what Aristotle is talking about, when he refers to what is translated as the "middle class." Are members of Aristotle's middle class also slave owners? How large is their household, and what do they produce? What sort of property do they have, and what are their sources of wealth?