Most of the popular alternative economy proposals I read about, hold out hope we can return to simple living as the source of security it once was.  But how would we actually reduce the complexity of society and return to self-reliance, while somehow keeping our modern culture and character?

Can we really go ahead to the past?  Everyone seems to want to.

I really don’t think that’s remotely possible. There’s no sliding scale of time. The future can only be built from the the present.

I also hear a lot of criticism of the “sweeping technology solutions”, and would tend to agree with criticisms of things like high speed rail.  They’re proposed as if meant to have the economic impact that new highway systems did before.  It’s inappropriate to think change can now proceed by ever bigger steps as before.

There’s also a tendency to promote things like home energy conservation as an economic stimulus, but that is not in the least bit like discovering a new cheap source of energy, for example.  Trying to imagine how societies can change dramatically seems to bring out a lot of incomplete thinking.

It’s as if the question conceals a real lack of imagination these days. I think there’s a lot of evidence we’re grasping at straws.

Still I’d agree with those who point to how humans can achieve amazing things sometimes, and that our variety of character, diversity of talent and audacity of imagination go back thousands of years. What we seem missing is the new way to apply it to getting out of our present circumstance. The environments we have called home at various times, and the cultures that taught us who we were and how to live, have changed dramatically, and I don’t think they show us much about our present quite unique problems. We have new problems, and they’re unfamiliar.

Over history as time brought about irreversible change in the tools we used, how we organized our lives and the challenges of both our physical and cultural environments, the living organization by which things worked before was continually being erased, too. That I now see so many social planners who don’t seem to quite realize that’s how the organization of our world keeps changing touches a bit of a sore point with me.

Knowledge is both a personal construct and a cultural one, people cannot help but be creatures of their own evolutionary moment in time. Because culture is passed down by reproduction, the same way biological information and systems are, it’s not physically possible to return to any point in the cultural past. That’s just not how the past got there itself. There simply is no direction of change but forward. There is our nutty logic of things that goes backwards as well as forwards, yes, but that seems more to demonstrate to us how superficial our understanding of how things work really is.

I remember when my son wanted to try snowboarding once, having become a passable skier over several years. He assumed it would be easy, he would know all the moves he thought, as he was so very good at them in his computer games. Not a bit of his computer joy stick knowledge was transferable to the slopes though. They were parts of two entirely different forms of learning, given the same name. Boy was that painful!

I’d grant that humans can rise to some occasions in amazing ways and do remarkable things, but one of our main mistakes is thinking that we can accomplish things just by conceptualizing. There’s no blacksmith in town where I live, and most of that complex art is lost and gone like an extinct species, ending after many hundreds of years of gradual development.

My community is also missing the rest of the complex combination of inherited family structures, personal temperaments and practical skills that self-reliant lives are built around. Actual woodworking is all but gone as well, along with the woods that used to be used for it, etc. There’s a way to replant the forests, but there’s no template for a life of being immersed in all the lost arts. That’s the only thing that made it possible for the people we came from to learn them. We’re also missing our societal memory of the intermediate organizational steps from there to here, as that has been erased by time too.

We’ve got different stuff now, and would have no choice but to work with what we have. I for one don’t think a junkyard of modern stuff would be at all useful for learning the old arts of living. Modern people all seem to have their heads in the clouds, and to never even have looked closely at how anything was made.

I think we’re in real trouble if we don’t protect and defend the organization of our society and the physical continuity of its inherited complex design. So many people seem to believe in time travel, as if the physical organization of our society were casually disposable, like if you’re bored with it or something. Is that from watching too much TV and dwelling in virtual realities composed of nothing but images? It would seem to be a symptom of our just not paying much attention to what changes with time.

So, I actually have looked very closely at how lots of things are made. I’ve also looked especially closely at how nature builds the physical organization by which her systems work, by accumulative “everywhere at once” creative design. A trick like that is just NOT done by logical transference, and there’s not anything like a gear called “reverse”. I’m extremely worried, when after 30 years of working with others in the large sustainability and appropriate technology communities, so many people seem to think that going back to the past would be a little like changing channels.

I think there’s no conceivable way we could operate our world or pass on our culture without computers and cars and things, for example. A “we” couldn’t exist without maintaining the highly complex specialization of our global culture as it changes. We can’t just pick up the needle and put it down on a different track. There really do seem to be strong signs we think that way though, and could allow a considerable breakdown in the growing complexity of our society by letting it become unaffordable as a whole.

I think we’re in danger because our culture is so clearly enormously out of touch with the reality of our situation, trying to multiply our resource use as our resources are in ever more rapidly decline, for example. If that way of thinking were to continue as we break down, those who follow us might find we had no ideas or purposes of any use to them at all, leaving us without cultural descendants. Whether those who follow us use some of the artifacts we leave behind or not, they might not feel any connection whatever with our dreams. That’s the way these impasses for unresponsive complex human societies seem to have gone frequently before.

With nearly everything we use needing unique inputs from everywhere in the world, if we tried to return to the self-reliant communities so often celebrated in theory, we’d actually have no idea where to start to begin making anything. I think if people tried to live in ways they they just couldn’t make work that way, if they didn’t go on rampages they’d just loose heart and give up, like the remnants of Rome and the Mayans and the others before.

So, I think we might just as well keep our complex society…  but drop the notion that we don’t need to use nature’s design method (that we haven’t studied) to adapt it to our radically new environment (that we haven’t studied) to do it. It does present an unusual challenge. The one hope I do see is that nature is actually full of examples of complex systems that meet a life or death crisis not entirely unlike this at the end of their initial growth spurt… something to study!