I did not begin this web site with a master plan or body of knowledge to communicate. Rather, this web site was born out of my strong sense of the need to respond to what the oil geologists were saying. The process of creating it has involved me with different aspects of  this response --- to a consideration of energy in itself, of what human being and human energy are, what is transcendence (or pseudo-transcendence: another important distinction for future exploration).

 

In brief, keeping up this web site has meant stitching the concern of oil to philosophy and metaphysics and larger spiritual questions.  To be sure it's probably a clumsy piece of work. But perhaps the very clumsiness also tells something about our age. For we are not used to thinking about ourselves from the roots, philosophically. We know so much! Why bother with roots? And then,  cheap energy made the question of human need (which is where the discussion about roots begins) seem to be merely a physical question, and therefore subject to physical or technical solutions.    And secondly, cheap energy also made us "comfortable in our skins" --  with our animal nature. For part of the much we have been learning about ourselves this past century is how close to the animals we really are.

 

But philosophy begins with discomfort. Historically, people who became uncomfortable sought to express their discomfort through words and ideas. They became intellectuals, of one sort or another. We have a superlative tradition of Eastern and Western philosophy stretching behind us, and it is anything but clumsy. On the contrary, in the pilgrimage through discomfort which that tradition is, human intelligence shows itself at its best.

 

But today, we are at the technological tip or end of this tradition of intellectual intelligence, and somehow, we've come to the edge of an abyss. How did it happen that intelligence failed to plan for the end of the age of oil? Oil depletion is about to whisk away the magic carpet we've been riding on for the past 100 years. And the sight of the abyss below is a little dizzying. We see plainly now that what we took for human wisdom and accomplishment was, in reality, a little share of human intellect applied to a much larger share of Nature's bounty.

 

There are, of course, plenty of people today who are betting on human intellect and still buying shares in it. But some of us have become dubious and are beginning to think that the commodity has claimed too much for itself while ignoring the basis of life which allowed it to flourish. .So our crisis is really of a different order than mere discomfort. It's discomfort with what used to be the means of expressing the discomfort.  

 

In the old discomfort, we at least had the comfort of knowing we could build a philosophical system that would prove to be inhospitable to "the enemy" -- whatever or whoever that was.   But in the new discomfort the enemy has taken up residence within, and we have to wrestle with our own intellect as Jacob once wrestled with the Angel.

 

For the oil crisis is, first of all, a crisis of intelligence.

 

 

Mr. Bakhtiari has kindly posted several philosophical essays on his website (www.samsambakhtiari.com) which explore  these themes: "Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?" (1998) "Sustainability" (2001) "Old and New" (2001) and "Quantity and Qaulity" (2003) -- in addition to writings about world and Middle Eastern oil capacity.

 

I call this literature "prophetic" or "apocalyptic"  because only such a mind -- nurtured in the literary and religious traditions yet disciplined by the study of empirical science --  is sufficiently awake to the multiple overtones of irony now besetting our modern condition. Indeed irony may kill us in the end. The age of cheap oil enabled us to transcend the normal human condition of scarcity and need on almost every level, but we used the new freedom to drive home the point -- in our science, in our education, in our literature -- that mankind is a species like any other. And so we acted like a species -- we over-fed, over-harvested, over-populated, we filled every niche. But the carelessness of mankind was not exactly comparable to any other animal species with the possible exception of the dinosaur.

 

In short, our carelessness was human, not animal. But calling ourselves animals relieved us from the burden of having to exert the effort to sustain a civilization, either spiritually or materially. And it is amazing, is it not, how neatly  and how conveniently complacency came to rule all the old virtues, to stand them on their head, as it were. 

 

The 'Animalic Era' -- for such was the materialist philosophies of the 19th and 20th centuries -- failed to get to the metaphysical roots of human nature. No wonder that cheap oil was the coup de grace for the civilizing instinct in man. Thus Bakhtiari says in his essay on "Sustainability" that

 

   "Whenever confronted [with] the vaguest sense of unsustainability

   Man will instinctively return to his roots. When stopped in his tracks

   by circumstances out of his control (e.g. curtailed petroleum supplies)

   he will have but one way out of his predicament: cling to what he has:

   his traditions, his history, his culture -- in a word, his roots.

 

And he adds:

 

   "In the end, the ultimate winners will be those with the deepest roots ---

   especially those who have had the foresight to tend theirs during the

   turbulent 20th century. And woe to the rootless . . ."

 

Mr. Bakhtiari's essay on "Liberating the Past from the Future? Liberating the Future from the Past?"  is a review and summary of different human attitudes and notions about Time and also an extended meditation on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The answer to the questions of the title is, probably, No -- or possibly, "only in exceptional individuals in exceptional mystical states." But for all practical purposes the arrow of time goes from past to future becauseof the Second Thermodynamic Law. This is the Law that states that energy flows from a more concentrated to a less concentrated state. And it underlies everything in the universe.

 

Bakhtiari illustrates the operations of the Second Law in many ways, and he quotes the Bhagavad Gita, that Time could be "the divine power to cause change." This phrase reminds me of Bergson's magisterial epigram: Time is invention or it is nothing at all. I think that Bergson's remark repays deep meditation. It is more than the fact that certain possibilities are available only at certain moments -- that we must "seize the day" -- a thought I have expressed elsewhere on this website.

 

I think something even deeper is percolating here. The question that Mr. Bakhtiari did not raise, but which is hinted at in his essay, is this:  given the universal truth of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in what sense is it possible for human beings to "create" a future rather than being automatically swept along into it? And I don't mean any kind of sci-fi vision by the term "creating a future."  I just mean the capacity to act in order to have a future instead of "just going along with what happens." 

 

I think with this question I have, as it were, stumbled upon the chief task or mission of this web site. And it is the question of whether the oil crisis that looms ahead will find us historically creative or historically stagnant. If we do not find the sources of historical creativity from within the answer to this question is all too grim and all too plain.

 

I feel sure that Mr. Bakhtiari is embarked on something of the same quest. He gives an interesting etymology for the word intelligence --- 'intus' and 'legere.'

"To read from within." I am not actually sure if his etymology is correct, as Skeat says that legere means "to choose" -- hence "intelligence" means "to understand, to choose between."

 

Nevertheless, Mr. Bakhtiari's etymology is spiritually accurate. The oil crisis will awken the prophetic sense within us, the ability to read the signs of the times in the unfolding events. It must awaken the capacity of the integrated mind, which has the power to act from its deepest roots and can create future.

 

_______________________________________________________

 

 

  

The Truth About The War and Oil: no19 bus. The Coming Global Energy Crisis. 1^st ed pub by Literary Workshop Ltd, Earthsure Foundation, Ditchling Common, West Sussex RH 15 0 SJ ; Sept 2003.

 

No19bus (vol 1) ]Novel] Published March, 2004.

 

          Stephen Hamilton-Bergin is an independent writer and thinker in West Sussex, England, who has produced a series of ten novels and an accompanying treatise dealing with the theme of oil depletion and its accompanying economic, political, spiritual and metaphysical implications. The novels, called No19 bus, follow the lives of forty or fifty characters from the year 2003 to 2070. They are thus an exercise of imagining the future – but not the distant future so beloved by science fiction writers, but the near and imminent future brought on by economic over-reach and energy resource depletion. Although this future is near, to judge by the common mindset of the present it might as well be  millennia distant, so far removed are the ordinary citizens of the United States from having any awareness of the seriousness of our energy situation.

 

As the author says, his reasons for writing about the future, the near future, are simple: “I am very worried about it.”  Although he began writing the novel in 1998, he chose as his theme a war in Iraq over oil – thus foretelling, some years into the future, what would actually come to pass. It is thus that his novels fall into the category of a prophetic literature.

 

Prophetic literature is something new. When something new comes into the world, it is likely to have rudimentary or even “primitive” features. Forget Trollope, George Eliot, James Joyce, the modernists, irony, ambiguity, the mythopoetic, the pathetic fallacy. As far as novelistic technique in the No19bus is concerned, it is as if the literature of the 20^th century never happened. With this novel we are back in a simpler world of narrative, perhaps mixed in with little touches of allegory. The characters represent the range of extremes that cheap energy has made possible in modern Western societies. And though the narratives are simple, the characters are interesting – brim-full, in fact, with human content.

 

There is Sir Jasper, rich and about to die; Alex De Ville, the nouveau riche arms dealer;  Bill Bradley, American soldier who is beginning to question Duty, Honor and Justice; Chloe, the distraught suburban mother whose child died in a horrible accident with an automatic car window;  Chuck Sackville, who can build anything and destroy a rainforest or Alaskan wildlife refuge in the process;  David Sadleigh, the salesman of cheap kitchen cabinet equipment,  unfortunately (though not, seemingly, unhappily)  wedded to a 34-stone tub of blub called Sheila (hint: she eats all the time while watching television); Debbie, runaway, pregnant at 14 (hint: abusive father; dysfunctional family); Dhaffir Mohammed, Iraqi doctor who spent more time “dispatching bodies to the overflowing morgues than doing life-saving surgery” (hint: this is thanks to the Americans); Desiree, aging bondage expert with a steady clientele; and Dolly, young urban female professional funds manager whose own personal finances mirror the larger financial chaos of modern high-energy states.

 

          This is the allegory:   Humanity-as-Entropy, the universe’s or God’s creation of a species that would test the laws of thermodynamics to their limit. Humanity is forever committing acts that exploit states of  more concentrated and ordered energy and blowing them off and dissipating them into states of less ordered, more dispersed, and unrecoverable energy. This negative balance sheet, so to speak, was “redeemed,” one could say, or at least disguised, as long as the high-entropy part of mankind (read: Western civilization) remained firmly committed to the task of civilization – a mission bound up, in good ways and bad,  with the Christian religion.

 

This civilizational commitment has become unraveled, and as a result, modern Western man can no longer justify his high-entropy presence with the defense that, well, all this waste, refuse, self-indulgence, etc. is the cost of civilization or the price of freedom  Modern Western man has become, in effect, a high-tech barbarian, and it is this process of barbarization that gives No19bus such a feel of familiarity. If science fiction is a form of imaginative writing that wants to transport you into an alternate or strange reality, prophetic literature is a literature that wants you to confront, with moral discomfort and stinging pain, what has become so familiar that you have stopped thinking about it, or even perceiving it.

 

  The cumulative effect of the different narratives gives a picture of a humanity that is simply unable to act in the light of any moral purpose. The “negative conversion”  depicted is that, finally, even self-interest no longer provides a coherent mode of action. For what is self-interest if human action merely revolves back and forth between an aggressive spontaneity and a passive mechanism?  The irony – if there is one – of the oil age is that human beings are finally unable to “convert” their own energy, and simply bounce from one disaster to the next. After all, it was the oil that did all that “conversion” for us! And we are only at the beginning of understanding what the Oil Age has cost us spiritually. To really “get” this--- that the problem of oil depletion is not just the depletion of “external” forms of energy – is to begin to grasp this new world of prophetic literature. And it is why this literature has so little to do with the historic evolution of literature as it has developed throughout the Modern Age. For that literature presumed the existence of civilization. This presumption is one that we can no longer make.

 

But there is also another side of the coin --- not that civilized consensus has totally collapsed, but that it persists in a form that has become rigid, sclerotic,  removed from real life and lacking vitality. Moral guidelines have no grounding in the world. As with Bill Bradley, the moral guidelines that he does possess are simply too far removed, in the reality into which he has been thrown,  to be of any good. And this in general is the problem of a spiritual philosophy, which Stephen Hamilton-Bergin elucidates in his companion volume. He says: “Spiritual philosophy and self-reflection… are mutually attractive but the problem with spiritual philosophy as it becomes more and more internalised is that it becomes further and further removed from the practical day-to-day economic realities of ordinary life.”

 

          The divergence between spiritual people and political leadership has never been greater or more dangerous than at the present. Those who are in political office are unable to reflect; and those who are not in office are unable to act. Western humanity is split at the seams and the most urgent task today is that of integration. But this task goes beyond that of  psychological  integration, important though that is. The century of cheap oil enabled us to explore our subjectivity and make use of a wide variety of integrative methodologies. But these integrative methodologies have yet to hit home with the question that must be asked of the human cognitive function itself. What is to integrate that which itself seeks for integration? What ultimately justifies integration itself?

 

   Stephen Hamilton-Bergin acknowledges that “Oil is a legacy left by the planet to help mankind along its evolutionary path.”  This view is  both dynamic and forgiving, and  is unusual among the environmentally aware, who are more apt to condemn humanity for its profligacy than to put that profligacy itself in an evolutionary context.  

 

 Cheap energy allowed vast portions of humanity to discover and consolidate its subjectivity. The question now is whether than subjectivity is to be directed towards a greater life-serving purpose or whether it will continue to be used and misused towards present selfish ends. I think it is likely that the “no19bus” will provide the answer to many of these questions. For I don’t know what it is that will bring all of these characters, in the end, to board that bus, but I think it will have something to do with Stephen Hamilton-Bergin’s motto: “The human journey cannot be taken alone.”

 

I should say a few words about The Truth about the War and Oil, the background research volume to accompany the novels. I would fervently like to see this book distributed in the U.S.,  for it is a veritable compendium of energy knowledge.  Covering seven-plus chapters on “The true story of the war and oil,” “Prospects for a global economy,” ‘How our opinions are manipulated,” “The environment,” “Alternative energy,” “Does God need a sex-change operation?” and “The coming global energy crisis,”  Stephen Hamilton-Bergin packs a remarkable amount of useful information in good, plain, conversational English. This is an advantage, for it shows future marketing potential for a wide audience. I think he dips occasionally into New Age fantasy, such as that about God and a sex-change operation; but fortunately such lapses are rare, and overall, the level of useful knowledge that is communicated (such as his chapter on the modern economy and its bewildering array of financial instruments) is very high. Almost worth the price of the book is his “Conclusions,” a sobering Afterword to the book which describes the author’s moments of spiritual doubt, his fear and despair. And the loneliness of being in large crowds in the tube in London, each commuter enclosed within his or her own world.

 

It is true that modern man has stopped being able to imagine a brighter future. Anti-futures and dystopian novels have been around for almost a hundred years or more.  The real challenge, as Stephen Hamilton-Bergin sees it, and with which I agree, is for us to confront our present in all sobriety.  And yet it is not enough just to confront it. We also need to call upon energies  of creative imagination that have been long dormant. For the past few hundred years almost all human energies of creative imagination have been directed towards technical innovation rather than sustaining civilization. And it has been our chief error to assume that civilization is sustained by material prosperity or force of arms. What actually sustains civilization, on the contrary, is a certain quality of self-belief tempered with imagination.

 

  Once we stopped sustaining civilization with imagination, our capacity to imagine the future lost its hold upon reality.  As a result, our imagined futures became  either  blissful  or bleak, but in either case it was not anything that real people wanted to welcome or work for.   It is to re-initiate processes of creative faculty that Stephen Hamilton-Bergin has undertaken to write this interesting series of novels and has published his summary of timely information about oil depletion. It is as much to say that the Real teaches us how  to imagine. This is a message of faith to humanity -- if it will hear it. 

Stephen Hamilton-Bergin's website is

http://www.no19bus.org.uk/ -- check it out

for book ordering information!