JOHN MICHAEL GREER

Last weeks’ post attempted, with the help of the ancient Greek philosopher Polybius, to trace out the trajectory that democracies—and in particular the United States—tend to follow across time. The pattern that Polybius outlined, and that American politics has cycled through three times so far in the course of its history, begins with most of the nation’s political power concentrated in a single person, and follows the diffusion of power to the point that the entire political system settles into a gridlock only a massive crisis can break.

It's time to talk instead about the things that actually matter in the age of limits that's coming on the heels of the age of excess now ending -- about what can be saved, what must be let go, and what options might enable individuals, families, and communities to make it through the troubled years ahead. That's the conversation that needs to happen now, as the age of limits begins, and it's the conversation a number of us hope to launch and to foster at the Age of Limits conference this Memorial Day weekend. (May 25-28, Artemas, Pennsylvania)

It's hard to think of any word more freely bandied about in contemporary political discourse than "democracy," and harder still to think of one freighted with a heavier burden of wishful thinking, utopian fantasy, and entitlement. As industrial civilization staggers toward its end, however, today's fashionable contempt for democracy as it actually exists may become a potent force driving societies in crisis toward far worse options.

In the wake of last week’s post, I’d meant to plunge straight into the next part of this sequence of posts and talk about the unraveling of American politics. Still, it’s worth remembering that the twilight of America’s global empire is merely an incident in the greater trajectory of the end of the industrial age, and part of that greater trajectory may just have come into sight over the last week.

A complex and self-justifying mythology has grown up around the process by which, during and after the Second World War, the United States made the transition from regional power to global empire. That sort of thing is common enough that it probably belongs on the short list of imperial obsessions—Rome had its imperial myth, as did Spain, Britain, and just about any other empire you care to think of—but the American version of it deserves close attention, because it obscures factors that need to be understood as the American empire hurtles down the curve of its decline.

Like all other human activities, warfare depends on energy sources, and the Second World War was the first major war in history in which victory depended on access to petroleum, and in which the possibilities opened up by petroleum-burning internal combustion engines were exploited to the full. It could as well be called the Gasoline War -- and its aftermath saw global power transferred to the United States, at that time the world's largest producer of petroleum. How that happened, and how it impacted an older empire dependent on other resources, is a crucial part of the story this series of posts is trying to explore.

Critics of today's American empire too often seem to believe that it's something unique in world history. It's hard to think of better evidence for the pervasive historical illiteracy of American intellectuals, for nearly all the charges leveled against America's empire today were made, with even better justification, against the British Empire that preceded it. The interaction between these two empires -- the British lion and the American eagle -- defined much of what we now call the modern world, and set the stage for the decline of American empire now looming in the near future.

There's a fascinating parallel between the rise of America's first overseas empire and the emergence of her petroleum industry. The age of oil, in fact, can be seen as an empire of time -- the exploitation of the distant past for the benefit of the present -- just as empire in the usual sense is an empire of space, the exploitation of distant countries for the benefit of one imperial nation. The two patterns would emerge together to drive a new mode of imperial expansion -- one with a sharply limited shelf life.

Understand the economics of empire, and you understand what drives the rise and fall of the imperial trejectory America is following right now. That understanding requires a willingness to let go of the economic notions of the mainstream as well as those of the alternative scene, to test received ideas against the touchstone of history, and to pay close attention to the gap between what industrial economies are supposed to do, and what they do in the real world. The late 19th century, as America moved toward global empire, offers a clear test case.

America's movement toward empire was anything but straightforward, not least because of the deep divisions among regional settlement patterns sketched out in last week's post. Those divisions drove an equally profound split between competing modes of expansion -- a split that finally exploded into America's most costly war. Ironically, the mode that won proceeded to make itself obsolete by running headlong into the limits to growth, and thus set the stage for the push for overseas empire that dominated American history in the 20th century.