Peak Energy & Resources, Climate Change, and the Preservation of Knowledge

I’m reading “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” which is one of the best books I’ve read in years, and a very hopeful one – this 700 page book is full of evidence that agriculture, capitalism, slavery, greed, and the unfair distribution of wealth we have today globally are not inevitable. There is no inevitable evolution of tribe to chiefdom to monarchy to state.  Better societies once existed and might in the post carbon future. Plus the latest on dozens of new archeological sites found in the past few decades of forgotten civilizations.

French Jesuits and other explorers recorded the ideas of natives before they were destroyed by the onslaught of settlers.  Their insights, political sophistication, and understanding of their cultures were written up into best sellers in Europe, and Rousseau and other philosophers stole their ideas without attribution that gave rise to our modern ideas about freedom, egalitarian societies and more.

Today with 8 billion people, the planet is full, more than full, it isn’t possible to travel so easily as it was before fossil fueled civilizations and find a better tribe or start your own experiment.

And to my surprise, travel was possible in the past. In America, sign language allowed natives to travel widely even if they didn’t speak the tongue of the villages they encountered, and it vastly expanded the ability to trade goods over long distances. The same was true in Australia, see Bruce Chatwin’s amazing book “The Songlines“.

People throughout time and places have always been conscious political actors.  Another aspect of this book that gives me hope for the post fossil fuel world is that many societies deliberately rejected agriculture as their only sustenance, perhaps growing food part of the time seasonally, but then moving to hunting and gathering grounds another time of the year, often with huge celebrations of thousands of people.  Burning Man is not new…

People treasured freedom above all. The freedom to move somewhere else, the freedom to not obey commands.  In some of the quotes of native americans, they were horrified by European culture. For example:

Mi’kmaq natives in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort said they ‘considered themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; while as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbor.”  And consequently the Mi’kmaq insisted they were as a result, richer than the French. Yes the French had more material possessions, but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.

And like the Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’

The Wendat were also unimpressed by French habits of conversation. One Frenchman was surprised and impressed by the Wendat eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; while the Wendat often remarked on the way Frenchmen seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall not showing themselves to be particularly bright. People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it; it is hard to avoid the impression that Americans saw the French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all’.

This book is too huge to do a review. In this post I want to cover just a small part of it, of how people deliberately avoided kings and authoritarian leaders by governing with councils.

So no need for kings. But it’s complicated. Many of the large towns that have been recently found weren’t occupied year-round.  The past was full of  festivals, often spiritual in nature, where thousands of people gathered and then dispersed.  But some of these cultures, some of the time, did have rulers during the festival time, but even so, people still had plenty of freedom.

Before moving on to how councils might be one of the ways to cope with energy decline, consider rulers whose scope of power was absolute — but also very limited. And how councils could try to contain such a leader if it happens.

This book gives me great hope that after energy decline, we can reinvent societies to have more freedom, give women the political and economic power they once had, and not return entirely to agriculture and consequent loss of freedom and often slavery and brutal leaders as Scott writes about in Against the Grain (the authors point out that Scott never says this is inevitable in his book).

Kings who could only kill

[The authors posit there are three aspects to state power: The control the knowledge, the right to kill, and a bureaucracy to enforce commands.  Here they give one of many examples where a king has the right to use violence with impunity but doesn’t control knowledge or have the bureaucracy to exert their will over the territory or competitors to deal with]

French accounts of the Natchez of southern Louisiana in the 18^th century seem to describe this sort of arrangement.  The Natchez are the only undisputed case of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande. Their ruler enjoyed an absolute power of command that would have satisfied a Sapa Inca or Egyptian pharaoh; but they had a minimal bureaucracy, and nothing like a competitive political field. As far as we know it has never occurred to anyone to refer to this arrangement as a ‘state’.

A French Jesuit, Father Maturin Le Petit, gave an account of the Natchez in the early 18^th century. He was especially struck by their religious practices which revolved around a settlement called the Great Village, with two great earthen platforms separated by a plaza. On one platform was a temple; on the other a kind of palace, the house of a ruler called the Great Sun, large enough to contain up to 4,000 people, about the size of the entire Natchez population at the time.

The temple, in which an eternal fire burned, was dedicated to the founder of the royal dynasty. The current ruler, together with his brother ‘the Tattooed Serpent’ and eldest sister ‘the White Woman’, were treated with something that seemed very much like worship. Anyone who came into their presence was expected to bow and wail, and to retreat backwards. No one, not even the king’s wives, was allowed to share a meal with him; only the most privileged could even see him eat. What this meant was that members of the royal family lived out their lives largely within the confines of the Great Village, rarely venturing beyond except for major rituals or times of war.

French observers were particularly struck by the arbitrary executions of Natchez subjects, the property confiscations and the way in which, at royal funerals, court retainers would – often, apparently, quite willingly – offer themselves up to be strangled to accompany the Great Sun and his closest family members in death. Those sacrificed on such occasions consisted largely of people who were, up to that point, immediately responsible for the king’s care and his physical needs, including his wives who were always commoners.  Many went to their deaths voluntarily, even joyfully. One wife remarked how she dreamed of finally being able to share a meal with her husband in another world.

A paradoxical outcome was that, for most of the year, the Great Village was largely depopulated. As noted by Father Pierre de Charlevoix, ‘The reason which I heard for this is that the Savages, from whom the Great Chief has the Right to take all they have, get as far away from him as they can; and therefore, many Villages of this Nation have been formed at some Distance.’

Away from the Great Village, ordinary Natchez appear to have led very different lives, often showing blissful disregard for the wishes of their ostensible rulers. They conducted their own independent commercial and military ventures, and sometimes flatly refused royal commands conveyed by the Great Sun’s emissaries or relatives. Archaeological surveys of the Natchez Bluffs region bear this out, showing that the eighteenth-century ‘kingdom’ in fact comprised semi-autonomous districts, including many settlements that were both larger and wealthier in trade goods than the Great Village.

The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yet the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis.

The problem with this sort of power from the sovereign’s vantage point, is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king’s sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see or be carried. Within that circle it is absolute. Outside it, it attenuates rapidly. As a result, in the absence of an administrative system (and the Natchez king had only a handful of assistants), claims to labor, tribute or obedience could, if considered odious, be simply ignored.

Even if one does develop an administrative apparatus (as they of course did), there is the additional problem of how to get the administrators actually to do what they’re told – and, by the same token, how to get anyone to tell you if they aren’t.

French saw the Natchez court as a sort of hyper-concentrated version of Versailles. On the one hand, the Great Sun’s power in his immediate presence was even more absolute (Louis could not actually snap his fingers and order someone executed on the spot); while on the other, his ability to extend that power was even more restricted (Louis did, after all, have an administration at his disposal, though a fairly limited one compared to modern nation states). Natchez sovereignty was, effectively, bottled up.

The Natchez case illustrates a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by. Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that ‘High Gods’ are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings.

For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces.

So far, then, we have seen how each of the three principles we began with – violence, knowledge and charisma – could, in first-order regimes, become the basis for political structures which, in some ways, resemble what we think of as a state, but in others clearly don’t. None could in any sense be described as ‘egalitarian’ societies – they were all organized around a very clearly demarcated elite – but at the same time, it’s not at all clear how far the existence of such elites restricted the basic freedoms we described in earlier chapters.

There is little reason to believe, for instance, that such regimes did much to impair freedom of movement: Natchez subjects seemed to have faced little opposition if they chose simply to move away from the proximity of the Great Sun, which they generally did. Neither do we find any clear sense of the giving or taking of orders, except in the sovereign’s immediate (and decidedly limited) ambit.

For some readers, the idea of a dead monarch sent off to the afterlife amid the corpses of his retainers might evoke images of early pharaohs. Some of Egypt’s earliest known kings, those of the First Dynasty around 3000 BC, were indeed buried in this way. But not just Egypt: In almost every part of the world where monarchies established themselves, from the early dynastic city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia to the Kerma polity in Nubia to Shang China. There are also credible literary descriptions from Korea, Tibet, Japan and the Russian steppes. Something similar seems to have occurred as well in the Moche and Wari societies of South America, and the Mississippian city of Cahokia.

We might do well to think a bit more about these mass killings, because most archaeologists now treat them as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way. They follow a surprisingly consistent pattern. Almost invariably, they mark the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom, often being imitated by rivals in other elite households; then the practice gradually fades away (though sometimes surviving in very attenuated versions, as in sati or widow-suicide among largely kshatriya – warrior-caste – families in much of South Asia). In the initial moment, the practice of ritual killing around a royal burial tends to be spectacular: almost as if the death of a ruler meant a brief moment when sovereignty broke free of its ritual fetters, triggering a kind of political supernova that annihilates everything in its path, including some of the highest and mightiest individuals in the kingdom.

This sovereign power in tiny kingdoms and miniature courts always existed with a core of blood relatives and a motley collection of henchmen, wives, servants and assorted hangers-on. Some of these courts appear to have been quite magnificent, leaving behind large tombs and the bodies of sacrificed retainers. The most spectacular, at Hierakonpolis, includes not only a male dwarf (they seem to have become a fixture of courtly society very early on), but a significant number of teenage girls, and what seem to be the remains of a private zoo: a menagerie of exotic animals including two baboons and an African elephant. These kings give every sign of making grandiose, absolute, cosmological claims; but little sign of maintaining administrative or military control over their respective territories.

In summary, the Natchez Sun, as the monarch was known, inhabited a village in which he appeared to wield unlimited power. His every movement was greeted by elaborate rituals of deference, bowing and scraping; he could order arbitrary executions, help himself to any of his subjects’ possessions, do pretty much anything he liked. Still, this power was strictly limited by his own physical presence, which in turn was largely confined to the royal village itself.

Most Natchez did not live in the royal village, indeed, most tended to avoid the place, for obvious reasons.  Outside it, royal representatives were not treated seriously. If subjects weren’t inclined to obey these representatives’ orders, they simply laughed at them. So while the court of the Natchez Sun was not pure empty theatre – those executed by the Great Sun were most definitely dead – neither was it the court of Suleiman the Magnificent or Aurangzeb.

There are no signs of Kings, violence, walls built for defense and protection in dozens of new towns and cities that have been discovered the past few decades.  Greece was not the first democratic state, it appears that civilizations were ruled by local councils.  Those examples would take hundreds of pages to elaborate on, so let me cut to the chase, what it might mean for our future.

I’m also reading Bill Bryson’s outstanding 2018 book “The Body: A guide for occupants”. In the pandemic chapter he talks about how scientists worry the about bird flu, since these can kill up to 60% of people who catch it. We were lucky with covid-19, the death rate wasn’t high enough to prevent most essential workers from showing up. But in a bird flu, or other pandemic with even a 10% death rate, society would grind to a halt.  No one would go to work. Stores would run out of food. Fires burn out of control.

No doubt inspired by both Graeber and Bryson’s books, I dreamt the bird flu had arrived, and to cope,  the progressive neighborhood group I’m part of got together and went door to door to enlist people to grow food, especially potatoes. If a household was unwilling then we asked if they’d let others grow food in their yard in exchange for getting half of what was produced, and found people willing to do so.  All within the neighborhood to keep trust high.  We also asked for any extra potatoes or seeds to start growing them immediately to share with the neighborhood.

Ideally we’d have already started these councils to cope with overshoot, and be doing many projects, such as planting fruit and nut trees, installing water storage tanks that also insulate homes, and much more, explored at greater depth in Transition Towns, permaculture, and organizations such as resilience and postvcarbon.org.  Local cities, the state, and federal government would work with neighborhood councils to supply seeds, water tanks, food, and more.  Today cities have task forces to make recommendations, perhaps these would become councils or existing departments given more power to give citizens more control in governance and hold chaos and violence at bay.

And then this morning, I read about dreams in “The Dawn Of Everything”.  Here’s how one Native American tribe saw them:

In 1649 Father Ragueneau wrote that the Wyandot people of Lake Ontario believed that secret desires are communicated in dreams in an indirect, symbolic language, difficult to understand, so they spent a great deal of time trying to decipher the meaning of one another’s dreams and consulting specialists. This was long before Freud wrote about dreams in 1899, seen by many as one of the founding events of 20^th century thought.

‘Dream-guessing’ was often carried out by groups, and sometimes in the winter a town devoted itself to organizing collective feasts and dramas to make some important man or woman’s dreams come true.

Most traditions are not documented. Many other societies were entirely destroyed, or reduced to traumatized remnants, long before any such records could be written down. One can only wonder what other intellectual traditions might have been forever lost.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts