I've been away for a while, and I'll likely be away for at least a little while longer. Actually it's been excellent timing to take a hiatus since nothing really significant has happened during the last few months...just the already well-recognized themes playing themselves out.
I have to say that I greatly appreciate the encouragement I've been getting, and still continue to get. The site continues to get several hundred hits a day--and not all of them are Googles--so evidently a lot of you haven't given up on me too easily. It's quite humbling. I also need to apologize if I didn't respond to any emails sent to me during the first couple months of down-time here--I hadn't accessed my email account at all for several weeks, and evidently Lycos deems that if you don't sign-in at all for a month they should permanently delete your entire email file, both saved and new. That's undoubtedly the kind of visionary policy-making that made Lycos nothing more than an also-ran during the early web-portal wars.
Anyway, things are going very, very well for me right now (fingers crossed), and I feel like I've made beneficial choices in my life-changes. We haven't found the right piece of land just yet, but everything else I could possibly care about has come together quite nicely. In fact I'm surfing "the good wave" lately ("la buena onda"), as so many things seem to be just falling into place of their own accord. In all my talk of preparation here on Deconsumption I've tried to hold to the philosophy that whatever decisions I might make for the future, they should only be one's I'd want to make anyway, regardless of what may actually come to pass in the world. In this way I might turn negative emotions like worry and fear into the positive energy needed to overcome all the distractions, habits and simple inertia that keep me rooted in place. And I'm relieved to find that that philosophy seems to have been a pretty helpful one so far.
But to get to the point of this post, one minor benefit to being away these past few months is that it gave me a chance to read "The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age" by Marc Widdowson (downloadable for free at the author's website The Coming Dark Age). I ran across a strong recommendation of it somewhere awhile back, maybe two years ago or more, and I'd even gone so far as to print the entire book out (in 4 parts and probably over 400 pages). But maybe the dark title turned me off a bit....and the fact that it was a free e-book may have dissuaded me as well from taking it too seriously. At any rate, I tucked it away in a drawer for a later date when I'd have more time.
Well I finally found the time, and I'm absolutely floored by it. It's head-and-shoulders above any other study of social collapse that has emerged in recent years. It's a classical study in every meaning of the term, and monolithically referenced to boot. At some point The Phoenix Principle will likely form one of the cornerstones for a new field of socio-historical science that seems to be emerging around the study of social collapse. (And as a side comment, I think it's imperitive that such a study does emerge, since it would likely prove of greater benefit to humankind than almost any other study modern science has yet undertaken--revealing to ourselves exactly why it is we continually walk the path of self-destruction. But that, as they say, is a whole 'nother subject).
Actually, the tone of "The Phoenix Principle" isn't dark at all, aside from some of its implications. Widdowson presents a fascinating and truly sweeping view of major historical empires throughout world history, and offers an analysis of exactly what special confluence of forces allow a certain rare few of them to suddenly rise-up so dynamically as to set themselves apart as true "empires" in domination of the rest. From this starting point he begins to outline a broad but concise set of theorems to help define the social dynamics (both internal and external) that drive this endlessly recurring theme of growth, ascendency and the inevitable collapse of such human civilizations.
On a personal note I'd point out that long-time readers of Deconsumption might recall an early series of posts I'd grouped together under the title "The Cycle of Man" in which I tried to similarly outline the over-arching "framework" of civilizations, and how we might thereby recognize the aged-ness and degeneracy of this framework in our American empire, serving to show that a major, global cycle had already ended and was beginning to unravel. I eventually pulled those posts from the site. I'd gradually lost interest in examining things that seemed to me to be glaringly obvious, and I also felt it wasn't possible to communicate this kind of study well in the cursory style of an internet weblog. And it's undoubtedly for the best, since "The Phoenix Principle" works directly in that vein and is admittedly far superior to anything I would have come up with if I'd persisted. Plus, it written several years earlier.
But it's comforting (if only to my ego) to know that Widdowson identifies exactly the same framework I have. To my mind there were three essential structures which, if properly maintained and brought together in the right relationship, serve as the catalyst to launch an otherwise sedentary and balanced society off on an unstoppable rampage of growth. I termed these Government, Enterprise and Culture. And Widdowson observes the exact same elements, naming them as "power relations, commercial activity, and moral and aesthetic sensibility". He shows that by accustoming oneself to the study of these macro-forces it's possible to diagnose the true health of a civilization...and to fade the "white noise" produced by the almost incomprehensible number of smaller-scale and shorter-term movements going on within it, which distract the greater mass of society from recognizing their true predicament.
"The Phoenix Principle" is an inspired study, and virtually every page of my copy has been highlighted with insights and observations that struck me as novel, significant and enlightening. Generously, the full text is offered free of charge at the author's website The Coming Dark Age, which also provides an ongoing news-feed documenting our present collapse, similar to what this and many other websites nowadays are doing. Unfortunately, however, the current format is not at all reader friendly (it's in a plain-text MS Notebook-y file), which makes for a pretty awkward read. At the very least you'll want to open the .txt files with OpenOffice or Word or some such, then export them as a .pdf and read them that way. The formatting will still be a mess, but it won't scroll endlessly off the page. Widdowson promises us a .pdf version soon, and I certainly hope that happens, but right now he's got server troubles to contend with first. Strangely, the copy I printed a couple years back was in .pdf format, and is well laid-out. But for all that I tried to Scroogle (Google without control issues) up another one, I couldn't find any other .pdf versions online. If anyone knows where a better copy is being housed I'd greatly appreciate the link as I plan to add this to the Deconsumption Reading Room.
At any length, I heartily recommend it as a worthwhile read, at least until I can get Deconsumption up and running on a regular basis once again....
Cheers everybody!
Steven
