Consciousness of Sheep
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Today, “playing out” is recognised by psychologists as one of the means by which children come to terms with traumatic events. But the dark events themselves become lost in the mists of time, removing the trauma from the echoes they leave behind for our delicate, civilised ears. Consider children’s nursery rhymes. “Oranges and Lemons,” for example, refers to the London churches that a condemned man would pass on route to his execution. “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” refers to the reign of terror under “bloody” Queen Mary, which saw thousands of protestants burned as heretics. “Goosey Goosey Gander” refers to Cromwell’s goose-stepping Major Generals hunting down Catholic priests across England’s landed estates. And “Ring a Ring o’ Roses” refers to the effects of the plague – roses referring to the red blotches that appear on the victim’s skin, and the pocket of posies referring to the herbs used to mitigate the stench of the pustules – and last came the sneezing fit, “atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down… dead!” (The last word is usually omitted in the modern version).
Children’s stories often have extremely traumatic origins too. Consider Hansel and Gretel, the story of two children who get lost in the woods and are kidnapped by an old woman who wants to fatten them up so that she can eat them. Although popularised by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, the story has its origins in the Great Famine (1315-1321) which coincidentally weakened the European population, making them far more vulnerable when the Black Death arrived in 1346. The children didn’t just “get lost” in the woods. During the famine, adults would deliberately abandon children which they could no longer afford to maintain. And at the depths of the famine, people also resorted to cannibalism, for which children were the easiest – and likely the tenderest – victims to consume.
The two, intertwined, drivers of civilisation – war and trade – have historically been the means by which humans have sought to avoid such evils… drawing in those foods, resources and commodities which would otherwise be out of reach. But both war and trade have been limited by the energy and resources available to us to begin with. The size of an army, for example, was limited by the size of the population a kingdom’s land base could support. And in Europe prior to the colonisation of the Americas, there was the added burden that the energy source – wood – was also the main building material and an essential component of the ships needed for both trade and war. Nevertheless, the Atlantic trade resulted in a big increase in the calories available to the Europeans. And even though local famines persisted through the early industrial period, for those Europeans, along with their increasingly affluent American cousins, famine eventually became something which only happened in far off lands.
The additional energy from fossil fuels took war to new heights too. The battle of Towton – the bloodiest ever fought in England – during the Wars of the Roses, in which human muscle-power had to be used to hack, bludgeon or skewer opponents to death, some 65,000 fighters managed to slaughter 28,000 (43 percent) of their number. Fast forward to July 1916, and a similar number were cut to pieces by German machine guns in the minutes after going over the top at the battle of the Somme. And, at the apex of industrial warfare – so far at least – on the morning of 6 August 1945 around 50,000 people died in a flash at Hiroshima.
With global hegemony settled after 1945, and with an oil-powered USA taking over the role of world policeman once held by a coal-powered UK, western civilisation could return to its less destructive means of securing the food and resources required to avoid the descent into barbarism which has beset every civilisation before us. Following the reconstruction of the war-torn economies of Europe and Asia, the decades 1953 to 1973 were to see the most spectacular economic growth and trading activity the world has ever seen – those twenty years seeing as much economic activity than the 150 years preceding them. And during that period, the energy-hungry financial and economic structures of a truly global economy were put in place. Structures, indeed, so well-constructed that they were able to integrate the economies of the former Soviet bloc with relatively little disruption… allowing the conceit that we had somehow come to the end of history.
In reality, and only for a brief period, a relatively small fraction of the human population has been able to pretend that we had somehow transcended the horrors of famine and war. And – as always happens – growing affluence allowed us to pretend that our good fortune was entirely of our own making. Even today, with a large part of the western population seeing its living standards decline, most of us find it inconceivable that we might once again be on the cusp of a new age in which hunger and famine become commonplace.
And yet we have seen how quickly former empires can collapse in this way. It is not just the former Soviet Union which witnessed starvation and saw it average male life expectancy plunge below 50 years after 1991. The Stalinist regime’s attempts to end the hunger following the collapse of the Tsarist empire were much worse. Indeed, had Hansell and Gretel not already been published, a Ukrainian version – perhaps Ivan and Irina – might easily have emerged from the widespread cannibalism which took place in the wake of the attempt to modernise Soviet agriculture in the 1920s.
We might like to pretend that we are different, but that is just a fairy story we use to avoid thinking about what life might be like in a collapsing civilisation… like today’s. The western economies in general, and the UK economy in particular, have been in an accelerating process of decline since the mid-1970s. Like a slowly rising tide though, the process has moved from the periphery to the core at a pace that allowed most people to adjust. Initially it was just the old industrial areas mainly in the north of England and on the Celtic fringes which were affected. And even then, with North Sea oil and gas flowing onshore and with the City of London carving out its role as money launderer to the world, the UK government could borrow and tax sufficiently to maintain a social safety net. As time went by though, that tide kept rolling-in, affecting ever more regions of ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small-town rural Britain.
By the end of the twentieth century, the North Sea had peaked and the City of London was just eight years away from the first unravelling of the Ponzi scheme constructed on the back of that oil and gas. Things began to breakdown at a much faster pace in the wake of the first banking shock of the new century. And this time, there was no revenue from the North Sea to allow governments to ameliorate the collapse with a social safety net. Poverty and precariarity became the norm for millions of ordinary people across the UK, even as shrinking pockets of prosperity clung on in the suburban enclaves around the top-tier universities and centres of government.
The populist backlash was inevitable one way or another – Sanders if not Trump, Corbyn if not Brexit. And the fact that the modern day Eloi in those metropolitan enclaves still cannot see the reasons why the backlash occurred, points to a far more difficult collapse than it might otherwise have been… because the unfolding, second banking collapse will cause that rising tide to wash over all but the very wealthiest, making the Great Depression of the 1930s look like a trivial recession in comparison.
Nor do our problems end there. In the 1930s, we lived in a far less energy-hungry manner. Moreover, in the 1930s around a quarter of the population was engaged in growing food. Today it is less than two percent. Like so much else in the process of globalisation which followed the Second World War, agribusiness simply offshored food to those parts of the world that offered cheap labour and fewer regulations, condemning those who continued farming back home to incomes little higher – and often lower – than the legal minimum… although, so long as governments didn’t do anything really dumb – like phasing out fossil fuels before they had an alternative, shattering global supply chains, undermining the western financial system or driving up the price of fuel, fertiliser and food – a gradual adaption to falling living standards might have been possible.
For the time being, for the affluent sections of the population at least, food shortages have amounted to little more than a reversion to the seasonal availability of foods that was the norm prior to the spread of the supermarkets in the mid-1980s. In the UK this winter, for example, shortages of salad vegetables like cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes were blamed by the establishment media on poor weather in Spain and Morocco… mostly neglecting to mention that the reason supermarkets had been forced to import in the first place was because the cost of imported gas and fertiliser for the hydroponic farms in England and the Netherlands had risen so high that farmers couldn’t afford to grow winter crops – a problem that is unlikely to go away any time soon.
In any case, in a market economy, the first signs of shortage – which were visible to anyone paying attention in the wake of the 2008 crash – are not to be found in empty shelves, but rather in those at the bottom of the income distribution no longer being able to afford increasingly expensive food. That is, the spectacular growth of foodbanks across the UK, along with the more recent shoplifting epidemic, is an indication of the growing number of people no longer able to maintain an adequate diet.
Over the winter, even working households on relatively good incomes have resorted to foodbanks in the face of a 20 percent or more year-on-year increase in the prices of staples like bread, milk, and eggs. Superficially, this may seem like an issue of inequality alone. The assumption for many among us is that a switch to a different government with a more egalitarian and compassionate economic program is all that is required to reverse the trend. And, of course, there is some truth to this. Just as Marie Antoinette didn’t have to dress up and play shepherdess while Paris was starving, so our modern day kleptocrats don’t need to practice graft and rank hypocrisy as if the rest of us can’t see their price gouging. A degree of redistribution is still possible. Although its likely benefits are easily overstated.
The billionaire-funded corporate capitalist response to an emerging food crisis – as with its ecomodernist approach to climate change – is merely the latest greenwashed version of the age old power grab by global corporations. Nor are these responses separate. By undermining the energy system, western governments have created the energy shortages and price volatility which is now beginning to restrict both domestic food growing and the import of food from abroad. Meanwhile, the dystopian belief that we can “re-wild” the countryside – again a cover designed to bankrupt small farmers so that giant multinational agri-corporations can monopolise the food supply – because we can somehow manufacture all of the nutrients we need in ecomodernist food factories, threatens to turn food shortages into full-on famine… particularly if the dollar hegemony of international trade collapses and countries like the UK are forced to pay the real price of the food we import.
The hard reality is that the more energy-constrained and localised our economy becomes, the more expensive food processing gets. And it is no accident that the more complex processed foods are the first to become unaffordable, even as more of us are forced to learn to cook from raw ingredients once more. In such circumstances, even the big agribusinesses will be rendered unprofitable. And having sacrificed less energy-dependent local farming on the altar of corporate profits, we will have little left to fall back on. Not least because of the harm done to soil quality by the excessive use of artificial fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides.
In the UK, you would have to go back to the sixteenth century to find the last time the people were able to grow all of their food. And the population was less than a tenth of what it is today. Worse still, while almost everyone knew something about growing food in those days, almost none do today – and that includes the many who think they do but who would be lost without the same fossil fuel-derived chemicals that the giant agricorporations rely upon.
As with all of the crises now breaking over us, it would have been best if we had heeded the warnings in the 1970s when the first overt signs of a civilisational collapse could be seen. Instead, we embarked on the four decade long neoliberal debt binge which has left us ill-prepared to face the coming shortages. It is still theoretically possible to mitigate at least some of what is coming by switching to localised organic and regenerative farming. But because organic yields are initially far lower than can be achieved with fossil fuel derived fertiliser, the less time we have to make the switch, the greater the shortages are going to be.
With better food use and food management, a large part of the current mountain of waste could also be cut. Doing more bulk catering – such as returning to adequate school meals, works canteens and resurrecting a version of the wartime British Restaurants – would be a useful move in this direction, since the unit costs of bulk cooking are far lower than the cost of each household preparing their own meals.
It goes without saying that we will not in fact, be doing any of those things. Firstly, because the modern-day Marie Antoinettes in the establishment media and political elites have largely insulated themselves from the negative conditions experienced by an ever-larger part of the population they rule over. As a result, each time western civilisation takes a dive down the elevator shaft, they convince themselves that it is only temporary. Secondly, because what passes for an opposition these days is wedded to the repeatedly failed belief that salvation can only come by persuading those same Marie Antoinettes to change their minds. And thirdly, because the people most threatened by the gathering crisis have to spend ever more of their time working in shitty and underpaid jobs just to put food on their own tables, leaving them no spare time and energy to take to the streets in protest… still less to build up an alternative food growing system.
Left in the hands of the ungrounded technocrats who govern us, food shortages – and the rising energy costs which cause them – can only worsen. And with the western states in the grip of another banking crisis, the losses from which are already greater than those in 2008, there is every chance that famine is coming sooner rather than later. One can only wonder whether future story tellers – if a future civilisation can afford to pay such people – will tell an age-old story about two children kidnapped by an old woman who wants to fatten them up so she can eat them… except this time around, the story will be titled George and Charlotte.
As you made it to the end…
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