One of the things that reliably irritates a certain fraction of this blog’s readers, as I’ve had occasion to comment before, is my habit of using history as a touchstone that can be used to test claims about the future. No matter what the context, no matter how wearily familiar the process under discussion might be, it’s a safe bet that the moment I start talking about historical parallels, somebody or other is going to pop up and insist that it really is different this time.

In a trivial sense, of course, that claim is correct. The tech stock bubble that popped in 2000, the real estate bubble that popped in 2008, and the fracking bubble that’s showing every sign of popping in the uncomfortably near future are all different from each other, and from every other bubble and bust in the history of speculative markets, all the way back to the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. It’s quite true that tech stocks aren’t tulips, and bundled loans backed up by dubious no-doc mortgages aren’t the same as bundled loans backed up by dubious shale leases—well, not exactly the same—but in practice, the many differences of detail are irrelevant compared to the one crucial identity.  Tulips, tech stocks, and bundled loans, along with South Sea Company shares in 1730, investment trusts in 1929, and all the other speculative vehicles in all the other speculative bubbles of the last five centuries, different as they are, all follow the identical trajectory:  up with the rocket, down with the stick.

That is to say, those who insist that it’s different this time are right where it doesn’t matter and wrong where it counts. I’ve come to think of the words “it’s different this time,” in fact, as the nearest thing history has to the warning siren and flashing red light that tells you that something is about to go very, very wrong. When people start saying it, especially when plenty of people with plenty of access to the media start saying it, it’s time to dive for the floor, cover your head with your arms, and wait for the blast to hit.

With that in mind, I’d like to talk a bit about the recent media flurry around the phrase “American exceptionalism,” which has become something of a shibboleth among pseudoconservative talking heads in recent months. Pseudoconservatives? Well, yes; actual conservatives, motivated by the long and by no means undistinguished tradition of conservative thinking launched by Edmund Burke in the late 18th century, are interested in, ahem, conserving things, and conservatives who actually conserve are about as rare these days as liberals who actually liberate. Certainly you won’t find many of either among the strident voices insisting just now that the last scraps of America’s democracy at home and reputation abroad ought to be sacrificed in the service of their squeaky-voiced machismo.

As far as I know, the phrase “American exceptionalism” was originally coined by none other than Josef Stalin—evidence, if any more were needed, that American pseudoconservatives these days, having no ideas of their own, have simply borrowed those of their erstwhile Communist bogeyman and stood them on their heads with a Miltonic “Evil, be thou my good.”  Stalin meant by it the opinion of many Communists in his time that the United States, unlike the industrial nations of Europe, wasn’t yet ripe for the triumphant proletarian revolution predicted (inaccurately) by Marx’s secular theology. Devout Marxist that he was, Stalin rejected this claim with some heat, denouncing it in so many words as “this heresy of American exceptionalism,” and insisting (also inaccurately) that America would get its proletarian revolution on schedule.

While Stalin may have invented the phrase, the perception that he thus labeled had considerably older roots. In a previous time, though, that perception took a rather different tone than it does today. A great many of the early leaders and thinkers of the United States in its early years, and no small number of the foreign observers who watched the American experiment in those days, thought and hoped that the newly founded republic might be able to avoid making the familiar mistakes that had brought so much misery onto the empires of the Old World. Later on, during and immediately after the great debates over American empire at the end of the 19th century, a great many Americans and foreign observers still thought and hoped that the republic might come to its senses in time and back away from the same mistakes that doomed those Old World empires to the misery just mentioned. These days, by contrast, the phrase “American exceptionalism” seems to stand for the conviction that America can and should make every one of those same mistakes, right down to the fine details, and will still somehow be spared the logically inevitable consequences.

The current blind faith in American exceptionalism, in other words, is simply another way of saying “it’s different this time.”  Those who insist that God is on America’s side when America isn’t exactly returning the favor, like those who have less blatantly theological reasons for their belief that this nation’s excrement emits no noticeable odor, are for all practical purposes demanding that America must not, under any circumstances, draw any benefit from the painfully learnt lessons of history.  I suggest that a better name for the belief in question might be “American delusionalism;” it’s hard to see how this bizarre act of faith can do anything other than help drive the American experiment toward a miserable end, but then that’s just one more irony in the fire.

The same conviction that the past has nothing to teach the present is just as common elsewhere in contemporary culture. I’m thinking here, among other things, of the ongoing drumbeat of claims that our species will inevitably be extinct by 2030. As I noted in a previous post here, this is yet another expression of the same dubious logic that generated the 2012 delusion, but much of the rhetoric that surrounds it starts from the insistence that nothing like the current round of greenhouse gas-driven climate change has ever happened before.

That insistence bespeaks an embarrassing lack of knowledge about paleoclimatology. Vast quantities of greenhouse gases being dumped into the atmosphere over a century or two? Check; the usual culprit is vulcanism, specifically the kind of flood-basalt eruption that opens a crack in the earth many miles in length and turns an area the size of a European nation into a lake of lava. The most recent of those, a smallish one, happened about 6 million years ago in the Columbia River basin of eastern Washington and Oregon states.  Further back, in the Aptian, Toarcian, and Turonian-Cenomanian epochs of the late Mesozoic, that same process on a much larger scale boosted atmospheric CO2 levels to three times the present figure and triggered what paleoclimatologists call “super-greenhouse events.” Did those cause the extinction of all life on earth? Not hardly; as far as the paleontological evidence shows, it didn’t even slow the brontosaurs down.

Oceanic acidification leading to the collapse of calcium-shelled plankton populations? Check; those three super-greenhouse events, along with a great many less drastic climate spikes, did that. The ocean also contains very large numbers of single-celled organisms that don’t have calcium shells, such as blue-green algae, which aren’t particularly sensitive to shifts in the pH level of seawater; when such shifts happen, these other organisms expand to fill the empty niches, and everybody further up the food chain gets used to a change in diet. When the acidification goes away, whatever species of calcium-shelled plankton have managed to survive elbow their way back into their former niches and undergo a burst of evolutionary radiation; this makes life easy for geologists today, who can figure out the age of any rock laid down in an ancient ocean by checking the remains of foraminifers and other calcium-loving plankton against a chart of what existed when.

Sudden climate change recently enough to be experienced by human beings? Check; most people have heard of the end of the last ice age, though you have to read the technical literature or one of a very few popular treatments to get some idea of just how drastically the climate changed, or how fast.  The old saw about a slow, gradual warming over millennia got chucked into the dumpster decades ago, when ice cores from Greenland upset that particular theory. The ratio between different isotopes of oxygen in the ice laid down in different years provides a sensitive measure of the average global temperature at sea level during those same years. According to that measure, at the end of the Younger Dryas period about 11,800 years ago, global temperatures shot up by 20° F. in less than a decade.

Now of course that didn’t mean that temperatures shot up that far evenly, all over the world.  What seems to have happened is that the tropics barely warmed at all, the southern end of the planet warmed mildly, and the northern end experienced a drastic heat wave that tipped the great continental ice sheets of the era into rapid collapse and sent sea levels soaring upwards. Those of my readers who have been paying attention to recent scientific publications about Greenland and the Arctic Ocean now have very good reason to worry, because the current round of climate change has most strongly affected the northern end of the planet, too, and scientists have begun to notice historically unprecedented changes in the Greenland ice cap. In an upcoming post I plan on discussing at some length what those particular historical parallels promise for our future, and it’s not pretty.

Oh, and the aftermath of the post-Younger Dryas temperature spike was a period several thousand years long when global temperatures were considerably higher than they are today. The Holocene Hypsithermal, as it’s called, saw global temperatures peak around 7° F. higher than they are today—about the level, that is, that’s already baked into the cake as a result of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.  It was not a particularly pleasant time. Most of western North America was desert, baked to a crackly crunch by drought conditions that make today’s dry years look soggy; much of what’s now, at least in theory, the eastern woodland biome was dryland prairie, while both coasts got rapidly rising seas with a side order of frequent big tsunamis—again, we’ll talk about those in the upcoming post just mentioned. Still, you’ll notice that our species survived the experience.

As those droughts and tsunamis might suggest, the lessons taught by history don’t necessarily amount to “everything will be just fine.” The weird inability of the contemporary imagination to find any middle ground between business as usual and sudden total annihilation has its usual effect here, hiding the actual risks of anthropogenic climate change behind a facade of apocalyptic fantasies. Here again, the question “what happened the last time this occurred?” is the most accessible way to avoid that trap, and the insistence that it’s different this time and the evidence of the past can’t be applied to the present and future puts that safeguard out of reach.

For a third example, consider the latest round of claims that a sudden financial collapse driven by current debt loads will crash the global economy once and for all. That sudden collapse has been being predicted year after weary year for decades now—do any of my readers, I wonder, remember Dr. Ravi Batra’s The Great Depression of 1990?—and its repeated failure to show up and perform as predicted seems only to strengthen the conviction on the part of believers that this year, like some financial equivalent of the Great Pumpkin, the long-delayed crash will finally put in its long-delayed appearance and bring the global economy crashing down.

I’m far from sure that they’re right about the imminence of a crash; the economy of high finance these days is so heavily manipulated, and so thoroughly detached from the real economy where real goods and services have to be produced using real energy and resources, that it’s occurred to me more than once that the stock market and the other organs of the financial sphere might keep chugging away in a state of blissful disconnection to the rest of existence for a very long time to come. Stil, let’s grant for the moment that the absurd buildup of unpayable debt in the United States and other industrial nations will in fact become the driving force behind a credit collapse, in which drastic deleveraging will erase trillions of dollars in notional wealth. Would such a crash succeed, as a great many people are claiming just now, in bringing the global economy to a sudden and permanent stop?

Here again, the lessons of history provide a clear and straightforward answer to that question, and it’s not one that supports the partisans of the fast-crash theory. Massive credit collapses that erase very large sums of notional wealth and impact the global economy are hardly a new phenomenon, after all. One example—the credit collapse of 1930-1932—is still just within living memory; the financial crises of 1873 and 1893 are well documented, and there are dozens of other examples of nations and whole continents hammered by credit collapses and other forms of drastic economic crisis. Those crises have had plenty of consequences, but one thing that has never happened as a result of any of them is the sort of self-feeding, irrevocable plunge into the abyss that current fast-crash theories require.

The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. That’s all it is. Energy, raw materials, and labor are the factors that have to be present in order to produce goods and services.  Credit simply regulates who gets how much of each of these things, and there have been plenty of societies that have handled that same task without making use of a credit system at all. A credit collapse, in turn, doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.

This, in turn, governments promptly provide. In 1933, for example, faced with the most severe credit collapse in American history, Franklin Roosevelt temporarily nationalized the entire US banking system, seized nearly all the privately held gold in the country, unilaterally changed the national debt from “payable in gold” to “payable in Federal Reserve notes” (which amounted to a technical default), and launched a flurry of other emergency measures.  The credit collapse came to a screeching halt, famously, in less than a hundred days. Other nations facing the same crisis took equally drastic measures, with similar results. While that history has apparently been forgotten across large sections of the peak oil blogosphere, it’s a safe bet that none of it has been forgotten in the corridors of power in Washington DC and elsewhere in the world.

More generally, governments have an extremely broad range of powers that can be used, and have been used, in extreme financial emergencies to stop a credit or currency collapse from terminating the real economy. Faced with a severe crisis, governments can slap on wage and price controls, freeze currency exchanges, impose rationing, raise trade barriers, default on their debts, nationalize whole industries, issue new currencies, allocate goods and services by fiat, and impose martial law to make sure the new economic rules are followed to the letter, if necessary, at gunpoint. Again, these aren’t theoretical possibilities; every one of them has actually been used by more than one government faced by a major economic crisis in the last century and a half. Given that track record, it requires a breathtaking leap of faith to assume that if the next round of deleveraging spirals out of control, politicians around the world will simply sit on their hands, saying “Whatever shall we do?” in plaintive voices, while civilization crashes to ruin around them.

What makes that leap of faith all the more curious is in the runup to the economic crisis of 2008-9, the same claims of imminent, unstoppable financial apocalypse we’re hearing today were being made—in some cases, by the same people who are making them today.  (I treasure a comment I fielded from a popular peak oil blogger at the height of the 2009 crisis, who insisted that the fast crash was upon us and that my predictions about the future were therefore all wrong.) Their logic was flawed then, and it’s just as flawed now, because it dismisses the lessons of history as irrelevant and therefore fails to take into account how the events under discussion play out in the real world.

That’s the problem with the insistence that this time it really is different: it disables the most effective protection we’ve got against the habit of thought that cognitive psychologists call “confirmation bias,” the tendency to look for evidence that supports one’s pet theory rather than seeking the evidence that might call it into question. The scientific method itself, in the final analysis, is simply a collection of useful gimmicks that help you sidestep confirmation bias.  That’s why competent scientists, when they come up with a hypothesis to explain something in nature, promptly sit down and try to think up as many ways as possible to disprove the hypothesis.  Those potentials for disproof are the raw materials from which experiments are designed, and only if the hypothesis survives all experimental attempts to disprove it does it take its first step toward scientific respectability.

It’s not exactly easy to run controlled double-blind experiments on entire societies, but historical comparison offers the same sort of counterweight to confirmation bias. Any present or future set of events, however unique it may be in terms of the fine details, has points of similarity with events in the past, and those points of similarity allow the past events to be taken as a guide to the present and future. This works best if you’ve got a series of past events, as different from each other as any one of them is from the present or future situation you’re trying to predict; if you can find common patterns in the whole range of past parallels, it’s usually a safe bet that the same pattern will recur again.

Any time you approach a present or future event, then, you have two choices: you can look for the features that event has in common with other events, despite the differences of detail, or you can focus on the differences and ignore the common features.  The first of those choices, it’s worth noting, allows you to consider both the similarities and the differences.  Once you’ve got the common pattern, it then becomes possible to modify it as needed to take into account the special characteristics of the situation you’re trying to understand or predict: to notice, for example, that the dark age that will follow our civilization will have to contend with nuclear and chemical pollution on top of the more ordinary consequences of decline and fall.

12 Comments on "John Michael Greer: American Delusionalism, or Why History Matters"

FriedrichKling on Thu, 20th Mar 2014 10:21 pm 



The author states, “these other organisms (algae) expand to fill the empty niches, and everybody further up the food chain gets used to a change in diet.”

And the consequences of algae blooms are the creation of massive dead zones, like the dead zone that exists at the mouth of the Mississippi the size of Texas.

I have lost all respect for Greer. He should avoid commenting on issues about which he knows little or nothing. His environmental analysis is replete with glaring errors.

Makati1 on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 2:41 am 



Really Freid…? Many algae are beneficial. They process the pollution we dump into the biosphere in huge quantities. They are one of Mother Nature’s recyclers. The dead zones are created by humans. That their result is toxic is the fault of humans.

I have read ALL of JMG’s articles and agree with his observations 99% of the time. I suspect that the other 1% is just that I don’t understand it.

That you disagree indicates that maybe you just do not understand the direction he is coming from or you are biased to his comments.

vulcanelli on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 3:03 am 



Greer seems to by unaware of the writings of David Korowitz when he says

“A credit collapse, in turn, doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.”

Korowitz very succinctly explains the risk of recursive failure in the highly complex supply systems that the economy runs on and which require the economy to run. The movement of goods and services is dependent on the movement of goods and services. This movement is dependent on credit. A situation could arise that if something like loss of credit on a global scale and the movement of goods and services stops long enough it would be impossible to restart because it is dependent on itself. A massive collapse of credit would be a lot different in complex world of today than the historical examples he mentions.

FriedrichKling on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 4:14 am 



Yeah Makati1, really.

The fact that you agree with Greer’s observations does not make them correct. Case in point algae blooms. Greer believes it would be no big loss to lose the ocean’s shell forming organisms as they will be replaced, based on his analysis, by algae. His facile analysis fails to contemplate the cascading consequences of removing species from the web of life. An over-abundance of algae creates “Dead Zones.” This is a fact. Further fabrications exist via his assertion that mankind has survived rapid climatic changes as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions through vulcanism. Pure BS.

GregT on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 5:13 am 



I also agree with 99% of everything that I have read of Greer’s. This article is completely off base. He is oversimplifying our situation, and attempting to look at the parts separately, rather than as a whole system.

Sorry JMG, I would have to give you a D on this one.

Meld on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 8:51 am 



@Friedrich – Once again people are totally misunderstanding what he is saying. He’s not saying it’s “no big deal” what he is saying is that evolution will see to it that the planet doesn’t become completely barren of all life (like the climate change doomers are saying) and that humans could conceivably live through it (at a hugely reduced number)as they have done before. The climate changes, organisms adapt, if they don’t then they die.

@Vulcanelli – You are also misunderstanding what he is saying. He is saying that quite literally that resources and labour don’t disappear when credit does. If the financial system collapses then the resources are still there (including massive amounts of above ground scrap metal) which can be scavenged.

Greer neither believes in BAU or extinction . He believes that in about 200 years human population will be about 5% of what it is now and in the next few centuries we will observe the same kind of catabolic collapse that has destroyed every complex society since the dawn of man

Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 10:42 am 



vulcanelli said – Greer seems to by unaware of the writings of David Korowitz when he says:

Vulcan, I read Korowics and he has been one of my primary influences. Of all the people I read I feel he has an understanding of what is happening in the big picture from a systems standpoint. Studying systems is an important way to see this phenomenon in a holistic way. JMG bores me with his wordiness and tangents. He is a great guy with great ideas but hard for me to follow. We all have preferences like butt holes.

Meld says – Greer neither believes in BAU or extinction . He believes that in about 200 years human population will be about 5% of what it is now and in the next few centuries we will observe the same kind of catabolic collapse that has destroyed every complex society since the dawn of man

I buy into those thoughts meld but Vulcan and Korowics are right in the facts of the initial moments when the system breaks to a lower level of complexity. Let us hope it reboots for a soft landing or we will see wmd’s used and nuk pools boil.

meld on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 11:22 am 



@ Davy – Greer’s vision of the future (at least for the next 300-400 years) is astoundingly bleak. His argument though is that those that see Near term extinction are missing the ability of systems and the earth especially to rebalance itself.

For instance it has been common amongst the doomer side of the equation to announce that if oil prices went too high then the world would collapse into barbarism (mad max 2 style) Of course what really happens is nobody buys the oil and the oil prices collapse for a bit, the economy collapses slowly as people adjust. No doubt there are far more serious events along the timeline of catabolic collapse than the 2008 financial crisis, but each time pockets of society will localise.

Of course Infant mortality rates will rise significantly and most people will be luckly to live past 50 by the end of this century. Those two points alone will sadly kill billions of people but will not render the species extinct. Humans will find some way to adapt to the new limits imposed on it, probably until some big asteroid strikes somewhere off in the far far future. Then Earth will repopulate with some other sentient species and we will be a legend like the dinosaurs. I wonder how much evidence of our society there will be in half a million years?

Davy, Hermann, MO on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 11:40 am 



Meld, I buy into to that vision as a potential outcome. My worries are with wmd, nuk pools, and climate instability. These events could really shrink the population close to extinction. I hope your version is the version that occurs. The worst of the Bible are equally possible if bad decisions mixed with some bad luck. Again I hope your version is more apt to happen.

In 1000 years much of civilizations evidence would be swallowed by nature. It is amazing what erosion, deposition, and climate can do.

Makati1 on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 12:17 pm 



Life will not go extinct no mater what we do as there are bacteria that can even live in radiation that would kill all other life. He is simply stating that Mother Nature does not care if homo sapiens survives or not. Even IF some manage to survive the next 100 years, they will be back to prehistoric levels of living and a life span may only be 20-30 years. I agree with him on those points. A million years is nothing when the planet has 15,000+ of them to evolve and change.

Jerry McManus on Fri, 21st Mar 2014 4:35 pm 



If I’m not mistaken the blue green algae that Greer mentioned are cyanobacteria. The same bacteria that, when allowed free run of anoxic oceans, emit hydrogen sulfide in quantities large enough to drive global mass extinctions. In one example I think it was something like 95% of all species disappeared.

Anyway, Greer is indeed way off base here. In his typically ponderous drone he glibly glosses over the consequences of the converging catastrophes we face.

Does anyone really believe it will be anything but a disaster of biblical proportions when the world is faced with “reallocating” a fraction of the food we now produce with fossil fuels, a functioning financial system, and a stable climate?

Financial collapse. Ecosystem collapse. Climate destabilization. Resource depletion. Nuclear catastrophe.

Any one of those is capable of crashing industrial civilization as we know it, now we face all of them at the same time.

FriedrichKling on Sat, 22nd Mar 2014 1:00 am 



It’s not just climate change that is the issue, but a host of related environmental tragedies that will result in NTHE. Every 24 hours mankind is responsible forcing 200 animal and plant species, on average, extinct. More life is being extinguished now than at any other time in the past 67 million years. The entire ecosystem is imploding as evidenced by White Nose Syndrome, Chytrid, and Colony Collapse Disorder- these are the dying canaries in the coal mine.
Time will tell who is correct, but failure to plan for the worst will only contribute to exacerbate the Earth’s decline.