I can’t promise a return to regular blogging here, and even this post will be much abbreviated, but Greer’s latest (”The Age of Salvage Societies“) is making me positively itch. This is something we’ve talked about plenty of times here, so seeing blatantly untrue statements like these not only going unchallenged, but recieving a round of praise for their “insightfulness” is really grating for me. So, some quick facts to keep in mind if you read Greer’s article.

Despite his penchant for axe-grinding against primitivists, I actually agree with John Michael Greer on far more than we disagree. He generally doesn’t like to be reminded of that fact, as it gets in the way of the regular primitivist hate-fest to be reminded that you’re alike in far more ways than you’re not, but for the most part, I keep up this regular series mostly in the hope that he might one day be willing to actually discuss those differences we do have. But this week’s post, “Cities in the Deindustrial Future,” summarizes everything that I take issue with in Greer’s work. A full rebuttal is necessary, and I hope it manages to reach as many people as Greer’s offering of pablum, if only to provide an antidote to the delusions, confusion, and misconceptions that his article has spread this week.

There’s not much to say about this week’s story, “Tillicum River,” that I didn’t already write about Adam’s morbid fantasy in general. Overall, I could see a town like Tillicum River springing up, at least as a transitional form. Already down to 500, and presumably continuing to decline, with gardens and localized currency and a good mix of cultural forms converging, Tillicum River could become a sustainable, horticultural village.

Of course, peppered through is Greer’s usual pessimism, generally grounded in a distinct lack of understanding of how ecologies work, or how past collapses have transpired. Take this, for example:

This week’s Archdruid Report is actually really good. “Culture Death” starts off with an invaluable summation of the mythological nature of “the Nation,” and how that myth took root and flourished with the rise of fossil fuels, though the lack of emphasis on the printing press, and standardized language as just one of several factors rather than the clearly dominant factor are differences of emphasis between Greer’s summary and most of the leading scholarship. Thus, as with most things, deindustrialization promises the reverse process: the end of “the Nation” as the locus of group identity. Greer still ignores bioregionalism as the force drawing the new fault lines for the end of the “Nation” myth, but his analysis of the problem is solid enough. It’s the solution where things start to get a bit wonky.

We missed last week’s article, “Imaginary Countries,” but that’s all right, because this week’s installment of Adam’s morbid fantasy covers much the same ground: the prospect of shifting political boundaries, and the fact that the United States won’t last forever. It’s a relief that for once, Greer has taken some time off from trashing primitivists, but it’s unfortunate that we can’t offer a little more depth to his analysis. Greer’s points are fine enough, but they’re shallow. He largely misses the much bigger and more important underlying phenomenon at work here: bioregionalism.

This week, Greer covers the second trend of deindustrialization he’s outlined, migration. As readers will notice, I’m agreed with Greer here in principle. Earlier this week, I published the “Mexamerica” entry for our continuing Nine Nations series, and flatly said that Mexican culture would dominate what’s now considered the southwest. The main problem I have with Greer’s analysis is that, for all his claims to be taking his cues from history, he’s ignoring history, and making much more of this than there actually is.

This week, the Archdruid Report continues “Adam’s Story.” The first installment, published three weeks ago, was “Twilight in Learyville,” wherein Adam left behind the former tourist town in the Pacific Northwest where he’d grown up after the deaths of his sweetheart and his father. This week’s installment, “Nanmin Voyages,” deals with the consequences of waves of Japanese refugees crossing the Pacific to North America. Greer has said that these fictional narratives are tools to help put the situation in perspective, and I heartily agree that fictional narratives can be helpful in that way. But in order to achieve that goal, they need to portray what’s likely, not simply indulge one’s own morbid fantasies.

This week’s Archdruid Report, “A Depopulation Explosion,” focuses on the same general theme Greer’s been on for the past three weeks: how wrong “apocalyptic narratives” are (by which he generally means primitivists, and not people who actually believe in a coming apocalypse, like Evangelical Christians). If anybody was expecting the collapse of civilization to wipe out every city on earth overnight, then Greer’s article provides a great counter-balance, but since that’s a straw man that no one’s actually espousing, his point is somewhat less compelling. As we’ve seen in the recently-concluded “Unfolding Collapse” series, we’re not at the beginning of collapse, but well into it now. Greer’s viewpoint of the “long decline” isn’t wrong, nearly so much as it’s academic. Historians have the hindsight to trace the trajectory of a long decline; those who live through those events invariably experience them as a sudden crash.

John Michael Greer’s post of last week, “Glimpsing the Deindustrial Age,” was a very good one, and it led to a very interesting discussion about the role of agriculture in a sustainable community, one that attracted some attention. I would have liked to continue the discussion there, but after a particularly long post in which I answered the strongest claims fairly conclusively, and even brought the subject back around to Greer’s prefered topic of myth and narrative, my response was deleted. In it, I had suggested that Greer’s comparison of primitivism to mere apocalyptic cults was a caricature, as useless as me highlighting the shared history his worldview has with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. He took this out of context, and invoked “Godwin’s Law” to delete a thorough post that answered all of his strongest points. Obviously, this is an important discussion to have, but it is equally obvious that Greer will not tolerate open and fair discussion of it on his blog, instructing me to “post elsewhere in the future,” so I am forced to make my response here—and I feel compelled to respond, because already far too many of these points are being taken as “true.”