David Flemming
The coming oil shock is not the only reason why the prospects for the global market economy and for civilisation as a whole look poor. A complex system, such as a car or a human body, tends at the end of its life to fail in many different ways at about the same time. A second sign of systems failure is climate change. Thirdly, there is the complex and still poorly-understood issue of how a mature market economy can, even under ideal conditions, sustain the perpetual economic growth which is an essential condition for its stability: along with Richard Douthwaite and others I argue that it simply cannot do so. Fourthly, there is the increasingly intense phenomenon of disengagement a failure of participation, consent, shared values, social cohesion in short, a failure of social capital which ultimately matures into insurgency, both from dissidents on the outside of modern society and from within it. The system is failing in many other ways: soil fertility, water, hormone disruptors, the collapse of fisheries but that is enough for now. If we put all these together, then we find ourselves looking at the climax of the market economy, followed by its comprehensive failure, very high unemployment and an atrophy of government revenues, leading towards what could be called hyper-unemployment – that is, unemployment so high that government cannot fund subsistence payments and pensions. Unemployment on this scale means no income. No income means no food. No food means the collapse of urban populations on the scale experienced by former civic societies the Romans and some two dozen other accomplished civilisations in the closing phase of their life-cycles. I hope I am wrong or, rather, that it doesn’t come to this. But it does seem obvious to me that the opportunity is rapidly passing in which it will be possible to avoid the high levels of mortality that have been associated with the collapse of other civic societies. … When the market economy, with its nice, regulating price mechanism, has broken down, it will be necessary to rediscover social order and social structure from first principles – not to build a Utopia but to recognise the absolutely undisputable fact that there has to be a social order in the future. The market won’t be there to do the job. And the first principle of society is that, while it can be imposed, or be led, or guided, from the top down, it has to be constructed from the bottom up. I see four layers of lean society. First, there is the primary group, essentially the extended household on a scale of around six adults. It can consist of several families, next door to each other, or round a “turning” as they used to call it in the East End of London. This is the essential building block of social order. Secondly, households are located within what I describe as the precinct, the size of which is around 150 active adults, a scale which is one of the most persistent features of social order in the anthropological record. It is possible, within the precinct, to sustain cooperation without exchange systems such as local currency. It may not be possible to do so now, because we are not used to it, and we do not have the necessary structure of social order. But it is a skill which is embedded in our human personality and it is there to be developed. And above that layer, there is the parish, and above that, the nation.
more…