[julianj]

American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

“The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century”

Rating 4 stars out of five
Updated 2006 paperback edition

Short Summary:
One of the best books I have read on the impending fall of the US Empire, pulling in excellent and thoughtful historical research. The author also is aware of the implications of Peak Oil.

Review:

I was in NYC and needed a book to read on the plane back to London. Something about the title grabbed me and this book did not disappoint.

Kevin Phillips’ thesis is that the US Empire is not unique, and it is treading a well-worn path of imperial decline and collapse following the Roman, Hapsburg-Spanish (1400s – 1600s), Dutch (17th Century), and British Empires (18th and 19th Century).

The factors which bring each empire down are:

A popular sense of national decay – economic, moral or patriotic.

An intensification of religion (I was a little surprised at this relating to the British Empire but Phillips makes a very cogent case)

The conflict between faith and science, which blunts the Empire’s technological edge.

Imperialism and military overreach – a no brainer, there’s ample evidence that imperial wars drain even the biggest treasury and were a major factor in the decline of all four empires.

The burden of excessive debt – not comparable in Rome, but the other three empires were broken by debt.

The decline of industry and the rise of finance – “financialization” – where instead of manufacturing, the country relies on banking and financial shenanigans for its income, economists may call this a “mature” system, but without industry, the country is going to go down the tubes.

Reliance on one innovative energy source: applicable only to Dutch, British and US empires, Phillips shows that the Dutch mastered water and wind technology for ships and windmills, then the British supplanted them using coal, while the US’s oil reserves powered it to the top of the heap more recently. [Peakers will note that EROI is going up each time]

“The economic, military, and financial parallels between America today and previous leading world powers are eerie” [P.96]

I’m rather simplifying a brilliantly-argued book. The author does seem to accept Peak Oil theory and he is a middle-of-the-roader: could be in this decade, might be 2025, but he cites people like Michael Meacher and ASPO. He is well aware of the complete dependence of the US on oil and how short-sighted this is. He also cites the euro rival to the petrodollar as one cause of the invasion of Iraq.

The bits about religious dogma eroding science competence, debt, and financialization struck home not just about the US, but also my country, the UK: (not quite the religious dogma bit, although Blair is a noted god-botherer, and propagates faith schools) but the erosion of science – Britain is producing few science graduates, is in debt, and manufacturing industry has been thinned out in favour of various financial wheeler dealings. I think the remains of the British Empire has further to fall…..

I thoroughly recommend this book. It is a bit of a brown-trouser read, though. The only criticism I can make is that the author quotes voting at the recent US elections as determining various trends, he does not acknowledge at all that 2000 and 2004 were stolen.

[rsch20]

I'm about a third of the way through this book.

It is dense reading, a bit of a struggle for me to get through and I don't usually have that problem with subjects I find interesting.

When I started reading it and encountered an explanation of Peak Oil in the first chapter I was pleasantly surprised, PO is becoming more and more mainstream, being mentioned in passing with a short explanation in another book is a good thing.

[julianj]

I have to confess I skimmed the bits where he goes into dense analysis of different American religious zealots - they seem all one bunch of crazed bigots to me.

But the part from page 220 onwards where he charts the deadening effects of religion on science and how this contributed to the decline of empires was fascinating. There are obviously considerable differences between the various empires he looks at but the factors involved seem remarkably similar.

I am seeing a nexus of broadly speaking, Collapse, from the combined insights of The Club of Rome, Tainter (the Collapse of Complex Societies) Jared Diamond (Collapse), and Paul Kennedy's Imperial Overstretch theory.

Given that the UK is the US's sock puppet (more crude analogies come to mind but there may be sensitive souls reading this) we (Britain) will be hit by the fallout/blowback from the US empire's fall and our own eco damage and overshoot problems.

Not that I'm a doomer or anything

[TheDude]

What, no disease or global warming or nuclear war or infrastructure failure?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') thoroughly recommend this book. It is a bit of a brown-trouser read, though.

[julianj]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Q')ue? You mean the reader will crap his pants? Speak American!

[gg3]

Ha, I got the same take on "brown-trouser read." Read the book and poop in your pants.

The pernicious influences of religious extremists should not be under-rated, and y'all would do well to pay particular attention to those parts, including discussions of apparently subtle distinctions between these groups.

For example the distinction between pre-tribulation and post-tribulation eschatologies. One holds that holds that TSHTF first, everyone suffers, and then Jesus returns to found the kingdom of God here on Earth. The other holds that the righteous get lifted up to heaven first, and then TSHTF and everyone left behind suffers.

As late as the 1970s, believers in these two respective eschatologies didn't talk to each other, and each side felt the other was deeply wrong. Then along came the various organizations that united all the religious righties to support Reagan. Somehow they managed to put their differences behind them, with the results that we see to this day.

Yet the differences between eschatologies remain, and could be expoited with significant results if there was a sufficiently well-organized effort to do so.

This is the kind of stuff that changes the outcomes of elections.

---

Monasteries and knowledge.

In the long-ago past, monasteries served the function of centers of learning that were later served by universities. The advantages of a monastery are that it's simpler to found than a university, it can have a fairly low profile if it chooses, and it has the social protections accorded to a religious institution. The disadvantages include a degree of disengagement from peer review, and the potential to be targeted for being on the "wrong side" of local religious biases.

However, under conditions of resurgent theocracy, monasteries could provide "cover" for preservation of knowledge, including knowledge that would otherwise be considered "heretical."

That being said, I wonder how much storage space would be required to preserve core scientific and technical knowledge? Consider both digital storage and physical media particularly books. What size library would be adequate to hold the books needed to restart a technically capable society?

What I'm getting at here, is that the task may be manageable by a small but well-organized group.