…the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city.

— St. Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel

St. Jerome’s lament of Rome is often provided for context in discussions of Rome’s collapse; “the whole world perished in one city” is offered as an indication of how apocalyptic the collapse was. What followed was a period of time so despised even its name conjures up how terrible it was: the Dark Ages.

This concept of a “Dark Age” was first created by Italian humanists and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Later historians expanded the term to include not only the lack of Latin literature, but a lack of contemporary written history and material cultural achievements in general. Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope. The rise of archaeology and other specialities in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized. Most modern historians dismiss the notion that the era was a “Dark Age” by pointing out that this idea was based on ignorance of the period combined with popular stereotypes: many previous authors would simply assume that the era was a dismal time of violence and stagnation and use this assumption to prove itself.¹

For most of the Empire’s population, its collapse was hardly worth noticing. The Romans hired “barbarian” foederati, but then reneged on their payment. The “barbarian invasions” were primarily a matter of Rome’s own unpaid soldiers demanding compensation for their services; Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 CE, the attack that St. Jerome is specifically talking about in that famous quote above, was the end of precisely such a revolt. For the peasants and lower classes that made up most of the Empire’s population, collapse simply meant that taxes went to a local barbarian warlord, rather than a slightly more distant Roman patrician, and that it was to be delivered to hillfort, rather than a villa (and often, not even that much difference, as the barbarians were fond of occupying the same sites as Roman nobility in most areas).

The continuity between Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period has been greatly underrated. Ken Dark’s Civitas to Kingdom emphasizes the continuity of this period with a particular focus on Britain. Rather than radical departures, many of the trends of “the Dark Ages” were more continuations of existing trends already evident in the later empire. An excellent example would be the feudal system, wherein serfs farmed a lord’s land, and in return were provided protection from the predations of other lords. This was hardly a fair bargain, though, and the lord’s obligations to his serfs were primarily theoretical. This makes it very similar to the Roman patronage system, which was similarly the basic underlying system of the Roman empire—patrons had theoretical obligations to protect their clients, which were as lop-sided and serious as the feudal lord’s obligations to his serfs. Though there were some differences between the two systems, it is the similarities that are most striking.

Within the “peaknik” community—the people aware of and actively dealing with Peak Oil—there is a segment often called “Doomers,” who see Peak Oil as the end of our civilization. In thesis #18, I laid out how peak oil could be a proximate cause of collapse, and though avoiding “petrocollapse” seems increasingly unlikely, I can’t rule it out entirely. This has classified me as a “doomer,” and so I’ve become aware of a very widespread “doomer” concern: the return of feudalism.

In the absence of any large-scale organizing feature—federal government itself being a manifestation of cheap oil—America will descend into neo-feudalism, where plowmen will be a lot more useful than IT directors. Put another way: It’ll be Amish with guns.²

Or, as a commenter on this very weblog put it (we’ve had this discussion several times now):

A collapse is never going to eliminate society. Look what happened when the roman empire fell. Farmers would possibly be the worst off, but this is as they would be subjugated by warlords with stockpiles of pre-collapse weapons.

Think about it—you are a raider warlord with lots of guns. You come across a community of defenceless farmers. Surely it would make more sense to subjugate them and have an empire and stable supply of food than kill them and get a limited amount. If other raiders come, you shoot them. If other raiders beat you, theyd take over your empire.

Whilst bullets etc will run out, small patriarchal/feudal societies will be created first. These guys will eventually triumph over raiders through their economic advantages.

They would be ruled by power hungry nasties and will be expansionist - possibly justifying this as eliminating raiders. It will be just like the middle ages (not the peiloscene) and within 200 odd years of the collapse the entire earth will be under the heel of a despot. There would be slavery, organised religion and it would be terrible.

To truly reestablish primitive ’society’ a night-watchman state would be required.³

If I believed that, the “doomer” label would certainly be much more appropriate. For most “doomers,” Peak Oil truly is a cause for great despair. But is this a realistic possibility, or a flight of fancy born from our worst nightmares? Human imagination is prone to extremes of utopia and dystopia almost equally. Let’s take a moment to step back and consider this, first by taking the above commenter’s advice and looking to an example I spent years studying before our contemporary situation was a concern for me—the fall of the Roman Empire, and the “Dark Ages.”

Our commenter is correct that “a collapse is never going to eliminate society.” This has, in fact, been one of my premises. The problem is the unspoken assumption that “society” is a synonym of “civilization,” and that some form of governmental control is a necessary aspect of society. If humans cannot form societies without rulers, however did we survive the first two million years of our evolution, before the Agricultural Revolution kindly provided us with something so crucial to our survival? Indeed, in crisis scenarios, we instinctively revert to anarchic cooperation.⁴ Obviously, leaders are not a necessary component of human society, and the archaeological and ethnographic record bears that out. Foragers live in egalitarian bands, and we have no evidence of rulership until the Agricultural Revolution.

As we’ve discussed elsewhere, hierarchy is a form of complexity. Feudalism organizes society into a a pyramid, whereby the base is the only segment of society involved in procuring the resources necessary for survival; higher levels live off their labor. This means that those at the bottom must be capable of providing for more than just their own subsistence needs, they must also provide for the levels above them. In other words, any hierarchical system is a luxury afforded by easy, cheap energy. Yet it is precisely the lack of such energy that lies at the heart of the problem of peak oil.

Feudalism was a more military-oriented version of Rome’s patronage system, but it was as dependent on agriculture as any civilization before it. Feudalism worked because there was arable land and a climate conduscive to agriculture, making it possible for serfs to produce a sufficient crop to keep not only themselves, but their lords, alive and fed. A new feudalism would require the same inputs: arable land, and a climate conduscive to agriculture. Many “peakniks” assume these will be available simply because they were available before the petroleum age, but this neglects the very reason why we turned to the Green Revolution in the first place: we ran out of arable land. As we saw in thesis #29, agriculture is simply no longer possible without petroleum, except in very rare exceptions.

The Fertile Crescent was not always a cruel joke. It was turned into a desert by agriculture in the very same way. At the moment, 40% of the earth’s surface is covered in farmland; most of that is no longer arable after being farmed for so long. Of the 60% that remains, most of it was never arable to begin with–that is why it was not farmed. The domesticable crops are a small subset of all the plants that exist, and they are disproportionately cereal grains, making them both small in number, and lacking in diversity. They tend to be low in nutritional content, and extremely tempermental, requiring very specific climate and soil conditions. Beyond simply lacking the soil they require, they will not have the climate they require, either.

In thesis #6, we made reference to Ruddiman’s “long Anthropocene” hypothesis, arguing that the Holocene interglacial was artificially extended by the deforestation caused by early agriculture. If Ruddiman is right, then an interruption in agricultural production would result in the resumption of hte Pleistocene ice age. However, that case is complicated by the more recent trend of global warming. Mounting evidence suggests that the massive increases in the scale of anthopogenic atmospheric change introduced by the Industrial Revolution may not simply have offset the earth’s natural cooling trend, but may have begun to reverse it. Regardless of which scenario follows the collapse, ice age or global warming, the one thing that will not be possible is a continuation of the status quo. No matter what follows, we will see the end of the Holocene, and with it, the end of any climate capable of supporting agriculture on any significant scale.⁵

No doubt, many will naïvely attempt to farm without oil. There will spend their labor clearing fields, plowing, setting down seed, fighting off pests, wondering why their crops aren’t growing, wasting their effort on irrigation ditches hooked up to streams that run dry, and ultimately perishing as they succeed in farming nothing but dust, or abandoning farming for the easier and more reliable lifestyle of foraging.

Collapse does not happen overnight. Its opening acts look like the world today: recession, depression, wars and rumors of wars and so forth. Even a rapid collapse takes place over a span of at least a decade. This slow squeeze may allow for a few feudal powers as a transition, but ultimately, feudalism is a form of civilization every bit as resource-intensive as capitalism or communism. It requires resources, and those resources are simply not going to exist any more. “Amish with guns” requires guns—which requires bullets and gunpowder, which requires mines, resources that haven’t been depleted, and quality ores close enough to the surface to still be exploited. These things simply do not exist anymore. As Sir Fred Hoyle wrote:

It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.⁶

Hoyle’s use of the term “high intelligence” to describe mere complexity is an unfortunate artifact of the chauvanism of his time, but the point remains: industrial civilization has so depleted the earth’s resources that it takes an industrial civilization to retrieve the necessary resources any more. That precarious situation means that any interruption will not only end that civilization, but cut off the possibility of any other industrial civilization until geological time has passed.

In fact, when we actually do look at previous examples of collapse, including Rome, we see that it is the elites who suffer from it most; the lower classes are either untouched, or actually benefit.

The Roman Empire was initially successful because stolen goods from each conquest financed the next one. The broad logistical limits of the process were reached by the time of Augustus. Thereafter, territorial changes were minimal. Without further loot (a sort of primitive accumulation of statist capital), Roman rulers had to defend vast territories out of current revenues drawn from a contracting economy. In general, the Roman state crippled and ruined the developed east (Greece, Egypt) so as to hold onto the less productive west. Making citizens of all free men in the Empire (212 AD), in order to tax them, acknowledged the decline.

Faced with rising costs and declining revenues, emperors debased the coinage while trying desperately to extract taxes out of a demoralized people. But by the third century, taxes were eating up citizens’ capital and savings. In the following two centuries, further imperial inroads brought about “a drop in actual output.” Later emperors, from Diocletian onwards, undermined society’s capacity to pay at all. …

The Germanic kings who replaced the empire in the west were better at defending their (smaller) territories against invaders and could do so more cheaply than the overextended empire. In North Africa, the Vandals (victims of a bad press) lowered taxes and economic well-being grew, until Justinian brought back Roman rule and, with it, imperial taxes. “Investment” in this lower level of political “complexity” paid for itself, so to speak, by being less costly. Collapse is not all bad: a disaster for the state apparatus may not be one for people as a whole. Devolution of power to smaller geographical units is “a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.”⁷

Let us take a moment to consider the hypothetical posed: imagine that we have decided to use the military means we’ve happened to fall upon, in order to extract the means of survival from others, rather than simply providing for ourselves. We decide to go out and carve out a small feudal kingdom with serfs we will compel to obey and serve us. Let us even suppose we find some people trying to do this, and we have even gotten as far as the beginnings of our kingdom. The serfs bring in their tithes for us to eat, but the climate is changing, and the soil—already depleted a century ago—will not produce more than a few more seasons. The crops are getting smaller and poorer. Our serfs are dying of starvation, and even we are eating less and less.

There is a forest adjacent. We decide to clear some of it for farmland, hoping to increase our harvest. Instead, we find why even at peak energy, no one tried to farm this land: it is too poor for wheat, fine for trees, but entirely unsuited to agriculture. We’ve wasted our energy on a fool’s errand, when energy is precisely what we’re quickly running out of.

Deeper in those woods, there are foragers. We decide to raid them; when we eventually do track them down (and let’s give ourselves the benefit of the doubt here as well and suppose we win), we take all the food they’ve stored up—only to find that food storage is something farmers do, not foragers. They don’t have any food for us to steal: they keep their food stored all around them, in the ecology, and in the form of a reciprocity network with one another. There’s nothing there for a raider to steal. We’ve now wasted our precious energy once again.

How long would it take for such a neo-feudal system to collapse? A few months? A few years? Even that may be overly optimistic. The crucial assumption of a feudal nightmare is farming, but it is precisely farming that will no longer be possible. Without that, feudalism is not possible, either.

When the confluence of events described in this article occurs, it will be very difficult to maintain order and control in our society and the world. Once the stun of reality wears off, the bonds of social order will be loosened. Authority and power, as they are today, will be at risk. For those who hold power and authority, these will be turbulent, dangerous times that our rulers believe will require strong laws and the use of strong police power. For the many of us who have neither power nor authority, this will be a time when our own community and ingenuity and will to survive will be tested. We will be tested as much by the times to come as by the control mechanisms that will be imposed upon us in response to them.

George Bush himself may or may not believe that he will be raptured up into Heaven at the time of a preordained Apocalypse. George Bush, however, does not set the policies or designs of his administration. Those who do, most probably do not believe in an apocalyptic end of time. Rather, they see time continuing. Only they see a meaner time that lies ahead, without plentiful, cheap energy to fuel endlessly-expanding capitalism; a feudal, medieval world of harsher climates and hungry, thirsty people, and desperation and disease. And they intend to have, by hook or by crook, what they need to survive those times.⁸

This is the strategy that our contemporary elites, and perhaps even our military, appear to be employing—assuming they have any strategy at all—but it does not reflect well on them. “Turtling” is all but an assurance of destruction, since any store, no matter how complete, will eventually be diminished. Bunkers offer protection from a passing tribulation, but hiding in them because the world has changed ensures your isolation, irrelevance, and ultimately, as even the largest store of supplies dwindle, destruction. When the world changes, we must eventually learn how to live with that, or perish.

Feudalism is still a fairly complex form of society in the grand scheme of things, and complexity is a function of energy. With declining energy, feudalism simply cannot be maintained. The happy fact of the matter is that we cannot afford feudalism—we’re going to live sustainable, happy lives in close-knit, fulfilling communities whether we like it or not.