Slough of Hope
From Information Habitat
At the CCCC in San Francisco, this past March, I happened to see Patrick McHugh from the University of California at Santa Barbara give a presentation he titled "Peak Oil, Apocalypse, and the Rhetoric of Hope". I had not gone to that session to see McHugh, nor was I especially interested in his topic or the session at large. Nonetheless I was struck by McHugh's talk - though as much, if not more, by his own rhetorical moves as those he was critiquing. If the contrast between apocalypse and hope is remarkable, so too is the decision to employ it.
Critiquing a talk is an odd business for the modern rhetor, accustomed to ready access to a primary text to refresh memory, confirm impressions, and cite for evidence. Purely oral argumentation and refutation is still a part of our daily lives but far less often of our scholarly ones. I took few notes while McHugh spoke; I may well have misunderstood him then, or be misremembering him now. Consider this, then, a reading of my recollection of ideas prompted by my experience of him then, a twice-mediated text like the story you relate to a friend of the narrative you constructed on waking of an odd dream - third-hand testimony from the only witness. (But wouldn't rhetoric suggest that misinterpretation or false recollection reflects as much on the rhetor as on the audience?)1
McHugh's presentation was a bit of fresh air, particularly compared to two of the preceeding panelists, one of whom operated in the time-honored genre "overlong paper delivered in a breathless monotone", and the other in the similarly venerable "random collection of ideas on poorly-formatted, unproofed PowerPoint slides" mode. He was articulate and rehearsed; his slides were attractive visual punctuation, not a reprise of his text. His manner was affable, engaged, casual - he even suggested the afternoon might have better been spent surfing, perhaps an appealing disavowal of academic ego.
The object of his attention was a series of popular responses to "peak oil", a theory propounded by certain geologists and energy experts. Peak oil suggests that we have found all or most of the easily-accessible oil; oil production can now only decrease or become more expensive. A corollary explored by many of the peak-oil proponents is that all feasible alternative forms of energy are at least as costly - inevitably so, because even at unreachable levels of efficiency they can't match the (soon to be former) low cost of oil over its entire lifecycle. Thus the planetary energy budget will, at some point in the not-so-distant future, fail to sustain either civilization, or a population of several billion humans, or both. Hence apocalypse.
This is in itself an interesting rhetoric. Of course there have always been economic and technological doomsayers (counterpoint to the mystical variety), broadly of two stripes: the prophets of our abrupt self-destruction through hubris (and by means of nuclear weapons, the Large Hadron Collider, etc), and those who felt our end would be more a sin of omission - of failing to restrain our appetites. And of course just because Malthus underestimated how much could be coaxed from the land does not mean that in the long run he won't be vindicated. And its eschatological chiding, grounded extensively in the hard physical sciences, is a refreshing antidote to Lockean market worship and technophilic fantasies of "alternative energy".
McHugh, however, was not interested in celebrating the schadenfreude of civilization's downfall in itself. Indeed the first part of his thesis was that the rhetoric of apocalypse is unproductive, that it offers no ground for political action, and in fact is so offputting for most audiences that they prefer a fantasy of continued cheap energy, or choose to devote their attention to problems that appear tractable, such as global warming. Instead he described, approvingly, a counternarrative which has appeared in popular treatments of peak oil: the narrative of hope.
This is not the upward-and-onward hope of the technophiles, nor the compromise appeal to cautious reason of "sustainability". It's the hope of the survivor's sublime: that the failure of the energy budget will destroy civilization and humanity as we know it, but those who remain will see a new day free of gross overconsumption and its attendant evils, such as people who don't worry about gross overconsumption. The authors McHugh quoted made predictions along the lines of perhaps an 80% drop in the world population over the course of a few generations, and described life afterward as a humbling, and thus edifying, existence within local conditions and immediate means. Of course we know such a life is morally superior, by virtue of asceticism, or living "close to nature", or through enjoyment of life's simple pleasures,2 or simply because it would annoy "consumers" who fixate on artifacts and availability rather than on the body and its (limited) ability to transform its environment through unalienated labor.
Survivor's sublime is a favorite modern narrative, inspiring one of the first novels (Robinson Crusoe) and appearing innumerable times since. The eschatological anxieties of the twentieth century, prompted by the World Wars, the Cold War, influenza pandemic, genocide, etc, led to a raft of survivorship fantasies, indeed a whole sub-genre of science fiction (Earth Abides, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, The White Plague, Yokohama Shopping Log, and many more). Unlike the shipwreck and explorer fantasies of previous centuries, now vacated by apparent human dominion over the global landmass, these are depopulation narratives just like the peak-oil hopefuls. The solution they posit to conflict (among humans or between humans and their environment) is to reduce human population density; they are visions of a handful of adventurers discovering a world made new, colonialism by transformation rather than transportation. They are the narratives of space exploration turned inward.
And it is no accident, of course, that survivor-sublime narratives so often look to "natural causes", particularly plagues, to cull the herd. Certainly it appeals to a Darwinian principle of population control, of the inherent cybernetic nature of the biosphere to constrain organisms to the niche in which they can be successful. One of the many dichotomies which marks speculative fiction is the tension between a transhumanist belief that humanity can exceed its own limits, and an essentialism which insists it cannot; the idea of an orderly nature correcting human excess validates the latter. But more importantly natural depopulation avoids the ethical quandary of enjoying mass misery. It is leibensraum with the agency of genocide delegated to nature. Andrew Ross rightly cautions us against delegating our agency to nature, or more properly to those appointed to interpret the requirements of nature, as an abdication of our political responsibility and effectivity. But it is equally true that such delegation can be liberating in a fashion that is all too familiar, because it is the fashion of imperialism.
Ross also teaches that the rhetoric of crisis is generally deployed in the struggle of hegemonic power to reconstitute itself - a process that often involves the ascendancy of one subgroup over another. Peak-oil rhetoric reclaimed as hopeful is an assault on the technophiles who have of late dominated many ideological spheres. Its sublimity arrives hand in hand with a very mundane epicureanism, an appeal to a good life defined as moderate participation in good behavior. I don't remember whether McHugh explicitly invoked the "slow food" movement, but there was clearly a shared sense of purpose. Survivors might lack automobiles, but that leaves more time for surfing. It is not hard to see what motivates this move. Technocrats got the money; then the financial crash came, and there was no money left for anyone else. The fantasy of a more sweeping energy crash promises to redefine wealth in a way that makes these new epicureans the richer.
Whatever we might think of that struggle, and that redefinition, it is hard to accept it uncritically. It might be suggested that there is something morally suspect in the rhetoric of sublime hopefulness around peak oil. In fact I will suggest it: it is obscene to hope for the deaths of some seven billion people in order to ascend to a life of homespun purity, and believing those deaths to be inevitable does not alter the moral imperative to account for them.
But what is the alternative? Granting provisionally that peak-oil theory is correct, or even that it is a possibility, we are stuck with a Hobson's choice. The energy budget will crash. There will not be sufficient resources to sustain the same number of people, at the same average level of consumption. Something has to give, and however appealing it might seem at first to make the biggest consumers (the wealthy of the industrialized world, particularly in the US) pay first, that seems neither morally justifiable nor remotely achievable. Nor would it change the terms of the problem.
Because the real problem is the dichotomy of hope and apocalypse itself. Peak oil is apocalypse, or it is the hope for a sublime redefinition of wealth; alternative energy is the next step in unbounded human progress or a scam; depopulation is widespread human misery or the chance to renew the world. By identifying so neatly how despair is reinscribed as hope, McHugh demonstrates the arbitrariness, contingency, and instability of the relationship between despair and hope, on the one hand, and other low/high dichotomies on the other. And the hope/despair relation itself is relativistic; it depends on the observer's frame, not just on the relative appeal of automobiles and medical care versus surfboards and gardening but on complex ideological networks of value and belief regarding the present and the future, the world and the self, group and individual, death and survival and the possibility of the latter (shades of Calvinist election), and so forth.
Inverting the rhetoric of apocalypse to one of sublime hopefulness is a step in unmasking the contradictions in the apparent bind of peak-oil theory and its forecast of a collapsing energy budget. But it does not offer a tenable place to stand, because the very terms of peak-oil apocalypse foreclose the possibility of any such place. McHugh is entirely correct that the rhetoric of despair is largely unproductive, and that there is considerable rhetorical - and hence political - advantage in appealing to epicurean survivorship. But we must move beyond that and recognize that hope and despair are inextricably linked. They are defined in contrast to one another, opposing perspectives on the differentials of opportunities.3 The ground shifts continuously; hope and despair are visions of destinations that will change before we arrive at them. The solution is not to invest in either as a telos, but rather always regard them as masks for concepts that have not been adequately interrogated.
1. It's a convention of the genre - the rhetoric essay - to begin with disclaimers: the "errors are mine" confession following acknowledgements, the demurrals of incompleteness and imprecision that accompany theoretical generalizations, and the like. I prefer to find more novel ways to undermine my own argument at the outset and proleptically deflect rebuttal.
2. These would apparently include, say, hiking in the mountains - which I believe McHugh mentioned specifically - and not, say, reality television. We should not discount the real joy of finding food before succumbing to starvation, or of recovering from illness without the crutch of scientific medicine.
3. And it is of course that difference which defines wealth, and so grounds capitalism. The epicurean-survivor triumph is only meaningful as long as it can be contrasted with an alternative, less-desirable state of affairs.
-- Michael Wojcik
