Histories

[degringolade]

(Note:  Started this a while ago, been beating on it for a while now and I still am not completely satisfied with what I write here, but, I think that this is where I just give up and move on).

This post came about as a morning of drinking coffee and reading the cognoscenti of the internet.   Specific to this post is Aurelian, who, while not supplanting JMG as my preferred internet guru, is giving the Archdruid Emeritus a run for his money.  

This is the phrasing that caught my attention and led to this post (Bold Mine):

Perhaps the most obvious point to start from is that It Was Different Then. All modern societies have great difficulty in accepting this, because they live in an eternal present, where the past, if it nonetheless differed slightly from our more blessed present state, was clearly advancing towards it. This may be compared with the traditional, pre-Enlightenment, view that the world was better in the old days, and that we have been in a state of continuous decline ever since. At least until a couple of hundred years ago, older was better, and the wisest and more knowledgeable people had lived, by definition, the longest time ago. And of course there are many societies that view human history itself as patterned or cyclic. (Western attempts at that—Toynbee, Spengler—seem inherently unconvincing to me, because they try to construct ambitious theories on a very fragile evidential base, where we have no certainty that the future will be like the past.)

Yet common sense tells us that it was different then, and often the changes are quite rapid. When you have racked up a certain number of years on the odometer of life, you quickly realise that changes have taken place even within your own lifetime. So it seems clear, for example, that the much-vaunted relative openness and tolerance of western societies was in fact a historical exception that lasted in its mature form from the 1970s to the 2000s, before slowly reverting to the generally intolerant nature of the past.

This post came at the end of a 6mg gummi and a long walk.  So its actual provenance cannot be blamed on the good Mr. Greer, but rather my current lifestyle and socioeconomic status.  Mr. Greer started me thinking about the seemingly simple process of “Frugality” and my piece here is the growth from that seed and the relationship between the piece by Aurelian noted above and the piece from Greer. 

I think that the single most important thing that one can do to enter into the “age of frugality” is to come to a clear-eyed understanding of the past from where we come.  

JMG refers to this as the “Heresy of Technological Choice”.  I think of it as understanding the awkward path we have taken to get from where we were prior to the age of oil to the wretched land of  commercial excess that we inhabit now.

Actually, if nothing else, this reading and thinking exercise takes minimal effort.  It is just a way to evaluate where you stand now and the options open to you in the future.  The current commercial dream is that the oligarchs will sell you the things you need to get by in the age of frugality.  This is a false myth, based on their need to keep sales up, but that path is closing day by day.

As a seeming tangent, lately I have been watching an odd little YouTube channel named “Townsends”.  The guy is in love with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  I admire his immersion and his passion for that particular period, and I get the impression that he has done some serious research into the century and the attending culture. I suppose that this guy is a pacifist version of civil war re-enactors.  I suppose that the guy has (or had) a job somewhere that paid for the hobby, and if he managed to “monetize” his hobby via the youtube channel and associated “store”, then kudos to him for optimizing the digital society.

Don’t think for a moment that I am advocating a return to the lifestyles and the attitudes of that period of time, nosireebob, I am content with being fat, dumb, happy, and old.  I am in a continuing process of stripping down my life in a pale imitation of a Stylite monk circa 450 A.D. (a very pale imitation indeed, and you can rest assured that mortification of the flesh has been completely purged from the curriculum).  

But this guy's (Townsend) hobby made me think.  We are an arrogant and spoiled lot.  As a culture we think that our lifestyles and our desires are the culmination of centuries of progress and are actually better than what came before us.  I think that a person who really looks at things can perhaps realize that the luxuries that we have come to believe are necessities are actually luxuries.  It is my firm belief that defining your luxuries and accepting them as luxuries is the first step to the brave new world we inhabit.

But as a society, we see obtaining and maintaining these erstwhile luxuries as defining who we are and our place in the social structure.  We are materialist in the extreme.  But as a society, we are just now realizing that access to these luxuries will progressively become more limited as time goes by.  The loss of empire, the steady degradation/competition for limited energy resources, the ongoing crapification of the world will continue to limit your choices and your freedom of action.

So my simple advice is to choose a period of time where you think that our culture will resemble in fifty years.  Start there and figure out how folks lived then and ponder what you need to do to get from where you are now to the technological/lifestyle suite of technologies and habits that you think that you will need to inhabit.  

As a useful tangent, I think that it is important to remember that it was a process and a staircase to get from then to now.  It will be a process and a staircase (maybe the risers of the stairs will have greater height, maybe not) so trying to get there tomorrow just makes you look kinda silly.  This is the real intolerance discussed by Aurelian above and the long ago post by Greer that dovetails with Aurelian.  What is referred to as intolerance in our society is the majority's inability/unwillingness to consider the idea that our current tastes and beliefs don’t quite add up.  So if you start down the path of rejecting materialism (and isn’t that the whole point of frugality?) remember that all the stuff that you are rejecting has an intellectual/ideological/historical framework that needs to be addressed.

Another thing to consider is how you estimate your  lifespan in relation to the changes that you expect.  Because at the end of the day, what you own is always paid for by the minutes of your life.  If you are a youngster, and you are flush with minutes, it might be worth it to you to trade minutes for luxuries.  As you get older though, applying a cost-benefit analysis to your luxuries might yield different results than the decisions you would have made in your salad days.

But overall, remember that the future will be as different as the past.  We can take from the past where needed, but the future won’t be either the present or the past.  Look for strategies, frugality is a tactic, what is your strategy?