The biggest obstacle to coming to grips with our energy and climate situation is our faith in progress: “Oh, they’ll think of something.” No matter what, the future will be richer, better, brighter than today. Ironically, our faith in progress relieves us of the responsibility to act.

We believe that history as a whole moves inevitably in a single direction, and we call that direction “progress.” The ideologies of our time – capitalism, communism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism – share this underlying faith, the latter even encapsulating the myth in its name.

John Michael Greer points out that this miasma has a name: historicism. This is the belief that history as a whole moves inevitably in a single direction that can be known in advance by human beings. We are captives of historicism. It is so pervasive that we are unaware of its existence. Blind to its existence, we are blind to reality.

It hasn’t always been so. Cultures have more often seen history as cyclical rather than linear. Just as the seasons follow each other year after year, years of plenty are followed by years of privation – so don’t ever get too full of yourself in the good times, prepare for the worst which is sure to follow. On a larger scale, civilizations rise, peak, and then decline and even disappear. We see theories seeking to explain the rise and fall of civilizations related in the works of Tainter and Diamond.

America’s founders were well versed in the history of Rome, of its theme of decay from its peak as a republic, to empire and corruption, then to decay, defeat and dissolution. They were under no illusion that this new country, which aspired to the glory that was Rome’s, was immune to Rome’s temptations or fate. But as Tainter pointed out, there is only a tenuous connection between any concept of “progress” and the rise and fall of a civilization. Most of the people who lived within the bounds of the Roman Empire were either unaffected by or were actually better off as a result of its demise.

History has no direction, at least none that can be foreseen. At best, like evolution, any “direction” can be discerned and described only in retrospect, and it makes no sense whatever to describe that direction as “progress” – or even “decay.” It simply is what it is.

Where we are in history can never be known. This civilization which we think so inevitable, so real, will inevitably vanish – as will humans as a species, the Earth, the universe itself. How the future unfolds – at least our little piece of it, our time on Earth – is our story, our history. The author of that story – the “they” in “they’ll think of something” is us. We’ll see.