Collapse: the movie

Given this blog's interest in doom, I felt duty-bound to see the recent documentary Collapse, which has gotten some attention in the mainstream media. I was not very favorably impressed.

First, stylistically it feels like a cheap knockoff of Errol Morris. It consists entirely of a single interview interspersed with clips from stock footage, and focused entirely on one man, the doomer (and blogger) Michael Ruppert. Even the music felt like second-rate Philip Glass, also a Morris signature. But whereas Morris usually manages to make the obsessions of his subjects come to life, the camera here renders Ruppert mainly pathetic.

And he doesn't seem that interesting -- he seems like a wholly ordinary member of the American crank stratum -- a lonely, isolated, autodidact who has figured out the Grand Scheme of the World. He's not that crazy -- no really wild theories, just the kind of guy who believes you need to stockpile gold bullion. His blog/newsletter is called "From the Wilderness" and you get the feeling that he is used to being an outsider. He's got a troubled personal life, he's the subject of some sexual harrasment lawsuits which he claims are part of a conspiracy to silence him...and maybe it is, who knows. That's the thing about this type of person, he's only slightly fringy, many of his theories are plausible or better, but he also has a tendency to exaggerate and distort, and winnowing the truth out is a time-consuming chore.

Ruppert's main claim is that Peak Oil and other trends will soon converge to produce a near-total collapse of civilization. There are, to be sure, enough troubling signs on the horizon to make this somewhat plausible. But Ruppert's take on this is panicky and not illuminating.

One of the thing that leads Ruppert astray is a sort of innumeracy, or unwillingness to think in any sort of quantitative terms. For instance, the factoid that there are seven gallons of oil in every automobile tire is repeated at least three times, as evidence to support that our civilization is doomed. A moment's thought would reveal that that is a trivial amount of petroleum in the lifecycle of an automobile -- about 2 tanks of gas. Now, there is obviously a much larger total amount of oil that goes into the construction of a car, and should be figured into its total oil cost -- but one has to produce a number for that, if only a guesstimate. In a similar vein, there is a total lack of any sense of scale or magnitude, exemplified by this quote: "what I see now is the end of a paradigm that is as cataclysmic as the asteroid event that killed almost all the life on Earth, and certainly the dinosaurs."

There seems to be an unstated assumption that Ruppert and other Peak Oil theorists use, which is that the oil is going to dry up and disappear all at once. Obviously that's nonsense. At worst, Peak Oil means that petroleum products will get progressively scarcer and thus more expensive. That can certainly have serious consequences, especially given the dependency of our food supply on petroleum. But it's not like the economy suddenly falls off a cliff. Oil getting expensive has an upside of sorts -- it will reduce consumption and thus reduce carbon emissions, and it makes alternative forms of energy more cost-effective.

So all civilizations collapse eventually and ours may be due, but I am not convinced by this particular chicken little. I paradoxically came out of the movie feeling actually less doomy -- it's not a very valid form of inference, but if I can see that some doomsayers are demonstrably and obviously talking nonsense, then it lessens my own tendencies in that direction. Maybe, just maybe, things will be OK. We are intellgent and adaptable and capable of revamping our systems to meet new conditions. The era of easy motoring may indeed vanish -- there are no known substitutes for petroleum that match its energy density -- but we can live without it. Alternative sources of energy can be brought online (nuclear included, and fusion seems to have taken a step forward recently). Humanity (some of us) will get through almost any conceivable future collapse scenario.

Some more background on Ruppert here.

Proteus

Due to a major (positive) life event I have had in the past couple weeks numerous old friends, old photographs, old possessions, and old ideas all turning up unexpectedly. A few weeks back I cleaned out the garage and dug up several boxes of old records, this week I managed to get the turntable hooked up and listened to some tracks that have been following me around unheard of for two decades or more. Old Rounder Records disks (Vassar Clements' Crossing the Catskills, obscure Robert Fripp projects, Roland Kirk Live in Copenhagen 1963, Siegel-Schwall Band. Sweet stuff. Listening to it after all these years felt odd. Most of it I still liked, but not necessarily for the same reasons I liked it back then. I am not the same person I was back then, though he and I obviously have some things in common.

Some weeks before that I stumbled upon the documentary film Proteus which brings together a bunch of my old interests -- form in nature, Coleridge, reconciling science and religion. It is primarily centered around Ernst Haeckel, known mainly today for his exquisitely trippy illustrations of radiolarians and other natural forms, but who was actually one of the major figures of 19th century biology. Large parts of the film are rapid-fire animations based on his drawings. These interests of mine, like the records, have been effectively sitting around in boxes getting slightly musty and mildewed, and it is with mixed feelings that I unpack them and examine them after so many years.

Oddly the film did not touch on the more controversial issues surrounding Haeckel -- his advocacy of eugenics, anti-semitism, and source of Nazi ideology, and accusations that he falsified some of his famous drawings that were a staple of evolution textbooks for decades. The former set of accusations seems exaggerated, since in fact the Nazis banned Haeckel's works along with others advocating "œthe superficial scientific enlightenment of a primitive Darwinism and monism", but it's still an unsettled issue among historians.

My attraction to this stuff has an ambiguous quality. I am fascinated by form and by the various holistic, romantic, or platonic currents of thought at the margins of science, but feel like I can't quite grasp it or devote myself to it wholeheartedly as some do (I dabbled in computer graphics and generative art but don't really have the artist's sensibility). Such stuff almost always seems to veer off into an unproductive self-righteousness and navel-gazing, or worse, cultishness. My background is in quite the opposite direction, but I am unsatisfied with it as I am with all belief systems.

Balance

If you watch 24, as I have to admit I do despite it being a really crappy show (junk food is addictive) you are thereby morally obligated to watch these too:

Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure

Taxi to the Dark Side

Torturing Democracy

Alfred McCoy interview (author of A Question of Torture

And read What to Do About the Toturers? from the NYRB.

I am a science fiction character

I happened to rewatch 2001 on DVD the other day. Although I've seen this film probably a dozen times, I never before noticed that my real surname appears in the dialog (well, background sound). It's in the scene on the space station when Haywood Floyd is calling home on the At&T Picturephone. During this there is a a PA announcement that says: "Will Mr [x] please contact the Met Office...". Which just goes to show, you can rewatch something you know practically by heart and still pick up something new.

In addition the surprise of finding myself in this world of the future of the past, I was also surprised to find myself moved almost to tears by the Blue Danube sequence -- also very familiar, but just so beautifully done. Also learned from the commentary tracks that when the thrown bone-club turns into a spacecraft in the famous 4 million year jump cut, that craft is supposed to be some sort of orbital weapon. Which makes sense, but how was anybody supposed to know that? I have a hard time imagining what it's like to view this movie for the first time, without having the benefit of having read the novelization so you have some idea about what is going on. For instance, the movie doesn't make a single mention of the reason behind HAL's malfunction and its connection with the mission, which leaves that whole storyline untethered to anything else.

A more significant use of my name occurs in J. G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, which is structured as a series of vignettes, most featuring what appears to be a single character whose name varies between Traven, Talbot, Trabert, Tallis, [x], and other variants, who wander through desolate landscapes of obscurely-purposed research institutes. I used to have this quote posted on my door in grad school where I was getting into conflicts with the administration:

...the director watched [x] with his unpleasant eyes. His aggressive stare had surprised [x] - seeing himself confused with the psychotic patients was too sharp a commentary on his own role at the Institute, a reminder of his long and wearisome dispute...

What these two very different pieces of imaginative fiction have in common, besides using my name, is that they are radically uncompromising works. Kubrick and Ballard don't give a fuck if they've left the viewer/reader in the dust. Such is the privilege of genius.

My name is neither very common or very uncommon (it's ranked at about the 4900 most common in the US, with about 2.85 occurrences per 100,000 people), so it's hardly a big deal to see it around. There are a 2 or 3 fairly famous holders of the name, but they are no relation to me since my father pulled it out of a hat when he emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Britain as a youth.