Peak civilization anachronism

Peak Civilization Anachronism is a term first coined by visual artist Horatio Holzbein in his 1989 book "Zurück in die Zukunft: Anachronistische Perspektiven für bildende Künstler " (Back to the Future: Anachronistic perspectives for Visual Artists). By extension, a Peak Civilization Anachronist is the term used by Holzbein to describe a person who believes that the technological advance of civilization based on the use of finite resources (i.e. carbon fuels) will necessarily reverse in proportion to the decline of that finite resource. A peak civilization anachronist, therefore, opposes the view that viable technological alternatives will be found to either sustain or prolong the infinite upward trajectory of technological advance.
Long before any enforced reversal of technological civilization materializes, Holzbein is of the opinion that anachronistic subcultures will emerge by choice, which may embrace the fashions, music, art and even the values and ethics of former periods in human history....
"If the promised life improvements of ever higher technological sophistication are not forthcoming, certain groups within society may decide to reject mainstream contemporary culture altogether and return - through lifestyle choices and decisions - to a point in time (and technology) in which they feel either psychologically more comfortable or simply less alienated."
Overview
Using the condition of current western civilization as an example, Holzbein states that - based on a logical extension of "Peak Oil" theory - as the availability of oil declines, so too will the technological advances that have been made possible as a result of the use of that finite resource ...
"For instance, high-technology requires the use of huge quantities of plastic and plastic is synthesized from oil. Although we all remember from our school chemistry lessons, that the first plastics were synthesized from fast growing organic materials (i.e. grass), there isn't enough grass in the world to sustain the plastic based technological needs of current, let alone future predicted levels of human population growth"
In general terms, Holzbein believes that after the technological peak of a civilization has been reached, the future will begin to look more and more like some point in the past. For example, cargo ships once powered by oil will be forced to utilize wind power, jet engines on aircraft will be replaced by more fuel efficient propellers (especially on smaller aircraft over short distances) until finally, with no sign of a viable alternative, powered flight may disappear altogether .
On Alternatives
Because of the plastics issue, Holzbein states that none of the currently suggested alternative support structures of modern, hi-tech civilization are truly credible:
"without plastic, we are left with the technology of the 18th and 19th centuries and you can't keep an electricity generating solar power station running on the technology of those era's, let alone a nuclear power plant" .
Seeing as how plastics were not used in critical equipment in industry until well after the 1950s, the question of how power plants - and industry - functioned from 1880 to the mid-1960s remains unresolved, and plastics are not used to a large extent today in critical parts of nuclear power plants.
Shortages of oil for purposes of plastics and essential transportation are quite solvable; for example, biomass conversion to syngas, following by syngas reprocessing using the Fischer-Tropsch process can provide feedstocks for the plastics industry. Assuming sufficient arable land and forest resources were placed into production, enough oil to provide for a fully-functioning plastics industry would be assured in perpetuity. Further, substitutes for oil have been discovered. Biotechnology is being used to grow algal oil crops in tremendously less space and with less time than conventional biomass can be grown in.
Energy problems can be solved by the use of nuclear power, which can provide extremely high levels of power well in to the far future, as it is not constrained by uranium supplies, but by political bans on reprocessing used nuclear fuel into new nuclear fuel or political bans on breeding to turn natural uranium into new fuel. There exist other possibilities of developing fusion energy, or even development of solar-powered self-replicating machines, which could turn vast expanses of deserts into solar power plants using in-situ resources.
If sufficient energy is made available, previously wasteful methods of transforming carbonaceous materials - both fossil in nature or biological in nature - into oil for plastic manufacture - become possible. Higher energy processes could even allow silicon - common sand - to be turned into plastics similar to those available today.
Timescale
Holzbein suggests that - barring a change in human attitudes and other external factors - the decline in hi-tech civilization will lag some way behind the decline in the resource that made that civilization possible:
"Although easily extractable oil might well run out sometime in the first half of the 21st century, there will be enough remaining pockets of oil and recyclable plastics to sustain quite a high technological standard of living for some time after that: perhaps well into the 22nd century" (p.45)
Voluntary Anachronism
Holzbein suggests that attitudinal change may favour a voluntary return to previous modes of living;
"When oil becomes scarce and expensive, people will be forced to find alternative forms of transport. If no viable high-Tech alternative has been found, this will mean the horse, the cart and our own two feet. People might actually discover that they enjoy the slower pace of life, the lack of intrusive noise and the feeling of safety engendered by not having to be constantly on the look out for life-threatening vehicles travelling at high speed.
If humans decide to re-examine the logic or desirability of frequent travel or even the need for high speed travel and find them wanting, then a voluntary deceleration is entirely feasible." '(pp. 87-88)
Anachronism as a Lifestyle Choice
Holzbein advocates peak civilization anachronism as a positive lifestyle choice because he believes it will lessen the impact of the decline in finite resources;
"If we continue consuming at our current rate until the day that the oil companies say "sorry folks, there's no more oil", then the effects on the human population of the world will be truly apocalyptic; basic needs will not be met, food will not reach consumers before it is unfit for consumption, fresh drinking water will become even more difficult to find than it is today in large areas of the globe.
If, on the other hand, we pick and choose the areas in which we are happy to see technology reversed - in the sphere of travel and transport, local food production, or in the realm of conspicuous consumption, for example - we may well be able to slow the rate of decline to something approaching 'comfortable deceleration' . This slower pace of deceleration could well postpone the period of total technological reversal for at least a few centuries and make the inevitable difficulties partially manageable."
A manifesto for artists
In the introduction (p. 3) Holzbein points out that his book was initially conceived as a manifesto to explain the motivation behind his own artistic output and as a source of inspiration to other artists but that the idea of peak civilization expanded until it eventually took on a philosophical life of its own.
In the concluding section of the book, Holzbein suggests that artists are well positioned in society to communicate not only the concept of peak civilization but also the advantages of managed deceleration and voluntary anachronism.
Types of artistic output
Holzbein describes the following three types of artistic output which could emanate from artists inspired by the notion of peak civilization anachronism:
* The Classical Anachronist
* The Parachronist
* The Prochronist
The classical anachronist
"A classical anachronist would be an artist who chooses to simply revisit knowledge and relearn skills of some former era. The motivation for doing so could be purely aesthetic, such as a firm belief that the work produced by artists of the past is aesthetically and / or technically superior to the work being produced by artists of the present.
Historical precedents for classical anachronism would include the painters and sculptors of renaissance Italy, who set themselves the task of relearning ancient knowledge (that of the Greeks and Pre-dark age Romans) and ancient artistic skills.
The classical anachronism of the renaissance eventually encompassed the revisiting of everything from ancient religions, poetry, philosophy to the canons of the idealized human body and working methods which had been laid down by the ancient Greek schools of art ".
The parachronist
In Webster's dictionary, parachronism is defined as "an error in chronology, by which the date of an event is set later than the time of its occurrence" . .
"Thus, a 'voluntary' parachronist would be an artist who consciously chooses to suspend disbelief and be inspired by theories, ideology, philosophy, etc. that scientific or ideological progress may have long since discredited.
Icarus believing that he could fly (too close to the Sun) by sticking feathers to his arms with wax is a concept discredited by not only advances in the science of aerodynamics, but also by the advances in our understanding of cosmology - but what a great subject for a painting!"
The prochronist
According to the Hutchinson Encyclopedia, prochronism is the "error of assigning to an event a date before its real date" .
"A prochronist / anachronist would be an artist who may either deliberately cast modern concepts and visual depictions into an earlier context or, inversely, represent aspects of some theoretical or technological point in the past in present or future contexts.
Those who cast forward, can choose to ignore technologies or concepts which post-date them. For example, clockwork technology could become the automotive force in vehicle propulsion instead of the petrol driven internal combustion engine. An artist might imagine a television powered by some Archimedean principle or even steam, instead of electricity and the cathode ray tube - and so on. There is no reason why the manifestation of artistic expression should be confined by latterly established rules of logic, reason or scientific principle!"
"There currently exists a fashion among car designers, to include features which are retrospective in appearance. Presumably, they do this in order to tap into our conscious or unconscious associations between the aesthetic values of the past and happy memories of, for example, childhood vacations. These designers could be described as practical, prochronist - anachronists. " .
Concluding Section
These are just three examples of .... "possible sub-sections of anachronism which could inspire the artist. Others might include metachronism, anatopism, etc, each of them a deliberate choice, each subtly different but each employed with the ultimate aim of communicating the general idea that technological civilization may peak and that the future modes of human life may have more in common with the past than we might otherwise expect."

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