John

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 our gracious host a run for his money.

This is the phrasing that caught my attention and led to this post:

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.

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.

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.

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 and you can rest assured that mortification of the flesh has been completely purged from the curriculum).  

So 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.

A final thought.  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 getting there tomorrow just makes you look kinda silly.

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?