“Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future”: Writing About the Long Descent, Practicing Green Wizardry. A Conversation with John Michael Greer

Abstract

“Looking CA & ASM: You are not officially an academic, but in our eyes your work on the critique of progress as a religion and on the opportunities and pitfalls of a “de-industrial” descent ranks among the most creative and exciting on the market—by a long shot. One remarkable aspect is that while dismantling the modern idea of progress, you doggedly refuse to slide down the other, twin slope of the modern imaginary—that of catastrophic collapse and apocalypse. You were an early witness to how the neoliberal backlash successfully halted the advent of appropriate technologies in the late 1970s and 1980s, and how the Overton window for a still relatively serene transition to sustainable lifestyles was abruptly shut (Greer, Green Wizardry ). This seems to have convinced you that “catabolic” decline is the actual path our industrial civilization is going to follow into a de-industrial future as it chronically overshoots the biosphere’s limits (to paraphrase William Catton, one of your intellectual mentors). You have called this the “Long Descent” and published one of your most acclaimed books under that title (Greer, The Long Descent ). What signs do you identify at present that this descent is clearly underway, and how do you fend off the twin objections that you’re ( a ) being pessimistic and ( b ) feeding hopelessness? JMG: I’d like to start my response by questioning the idea that the myth of apocalypse is in any way separate from the myth of progress. The connection between these two isn’t just a matter of shared heredity, though of course that’s a dimension worth examining; as Philip Lamy pointed out quite some time ago in his book Millennium Rage , these and most other visions of the future are “fractured apocalypses,” fragments