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The first circle of Hell is Limbo, and it is a place "of perfect natural felicity". That is, it is our world when all the bad things are solved - war, sickness, poverty, greed and so on. But it is without hope. It is deprived of the supernatural, of the vision of God which is what the enjoyment of the saved and blessed consists of.
It is true that the Church has softened on Limbo and really you never hear of it anymore today. But it was never formally a doctrine (something that has to be believed); rather, it was grappling with the problems of justice and mercy; if infants die before they can be baptised, how can they be condemned to Hell? What about the virtuous pagans and those who never got the chance to hear of God?
On the other hand, if you can be saved just by living a good life, then there was no need for the Incarnation and, crucially, the Crucifixion. If you can be saved without believing in Christ, without ever hearing of Him, then what does that mean for the Great Commission?
So Limbo was a technical solution: a human paradise (for the righteous but unsaved) without the supernatural.
Which is why Limbo, in the Divine Comedy, is on the outskirts of Hell and is a place of sadness, even though there is no pain or sickness or the rest of our earthly woes there. They can never enjoy the bliss of the Divine Vision. And why Purgatory, even though the souls there (by one reading) suffer pains as grievous as the damned in Hell, is a place of hope - because it is where the saved work off the earthly penalties for sin, before they go to Heaven (and it's not a matter of "second chance" or 'earning a place in Heaven' - the souls in Purgatory are already saved).
C.S. Lewis had a somewhat different take on it in his The Pilgrim's Regress, but he too took the view: a place not of suffering, except the suffering of being without hope.
I've often thought about the contrast here - we on earth want an earthly paradise, no more tears or grief or loss, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And the Church says "yes, you can have that - but it's in the map of Hell, not of Heaven. You can have the secular ideal, but never the supernatural one."
And some people probably would be very happy with that bargain. I never watched The Good Place, but a while back there it was all over social media. And my understanding - SPOILERS - is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.
It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.
A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.
I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.
Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.
To them I say:
How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?
And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?
A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.
Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.
Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.
Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.
And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.
The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.
Quite right. How can all these authors diss immortality? They've never even tried it! Nobody's tried it.
Our revealed preference is to spend enormous amounts of time and effort extending our lifespans in the health sector, despite rapidly diminishing returns in quality of life. Our revealed preference (or at least the revealed preference of governments and thought leaders) was to make considerable sacrifices during COVID lest a few years be shaved off the lifespans of geriatrics and the obese.
It's hypocritical to be so contemptuous of immortality when we go to such huge effort for far lesser fruits.
Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output. I know I'm preaching to the choir with you but there's a fairly large cult of 'growth must slow' when it's the opposite that we need. There's a great deal of unused real estate on Earth - tundra, deep ocean, desert, ice and massively more in the rest of the Solar System.
By all means, preach to the choir, they're going to be in attendance by default haha.
It does deeply reassure me that that people like you exist, who I consider fundamentally sane in a manner that makes me willing to tolerate a great deal of discord in other fundamental values when we see eye to eye on the really big ones (not that I'm aware of such differences!)
Decrying immortality is the epitome of luxury beliefs, since nobody really has a glaring example of it that can be shoved in their face. I'd like to see their hypocritical walkbacks when they begin to argue that no, it's different this time, and we didn't actually mean to dunk on immortality now that it's on sale.
I like what you mean by fundamentally sane, it fits a concept I've been thinking about but couldn't articulate. There are a lot of people who have bizarre ideas about what could be possible visions of the future. I recall an exchange on twitter. Someone like Roko or Alexander Kruel was saying 'oh we could easily fit a trillion people on Earth based on these technical factors' and one of the trad-rightists said something like 'so what, that has nothing to do with the good life, they aren't needed to be squires or knights in the small bands of bodybuilders roaming across the American plains on horseback'.
On the left there are those EcoSophia declining-efficiency of energy production people who think peak oil will eventually result in civilization collapsing down to mid 19th century level forever and that this is a good thing, since it'll reduce human arrogance and get us more in touch with the environment. I particularly dislike the psychoanalytic tone they take, saying that nuclear power and so on is a cope that people clutch to so they can hold onto their preferred incarnation of decadent modernity. The figures don't bear that out.
Now there are all kinds of formidable technical and socio-political problems in achieving our vision of the good life, sovereignty amongst posthumans. I think it's a very long shot, that there are competitive pressures that lead to autocracy or monopoly of a very few. Yet we can't turn back now and play Cowboys and Indians or Trad Farmers. There is no going back, no unilateral disarmament of industry, wealth and power. Much as I might prefer that AI development be paused for many decades so that we can upgrade ourselves steadily and establish a solid political/technical/social foundation, I recognize that it's not practical to hold back, competition won't allow it.
The bodybuilders on horseback would get pummelled by riflemen circa 1870, let alone the drone swarms of 2070. If their vision of the future doesn't include massively more technology than we have now, they're going to get crushed. Likewise with immortality and massive cognitive enhancements. If they're even on offer, we're doing well.
As one of the people who most commonly link to Ecosophia on this site, I don't believe you have an accurate understanding of the claims being made. The first reason is your placing of Ecosophia on the left - where exactly on the left does pro-Trump Burkean conservatism lie? Your post here isn't just counter to what JMG actually believes but I believe it contains a misreading that he was complaining about having to clear up back in 2011, specifically the idea that the collapse will be sudden or immediately noticeable, like a sharp fall off a cliff which leaves us back in the 19th century forever (though I freely admit I may be misinterpreting you here).
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-01-20/onset-catabolic-collapse/
JMG has not been talking about the coming zombie apocalypse where a giant cataclysm completely and dramatically upends the existing order of things - the Long Descent lies outside the "apocalypse/star trek" dichotomy that's so prevalent in modern society. And on the topic of technology, here are some of his actual words on the subject.
https://unherd.com/2022/03/we-are-the-authors-of-our-decline/
Look at what happened to the technology of past civilisations that ended up collapsing. Some Roman architecture still stands to this day, and plenty of the advancements that were made during the Empire were preserved and helped make sure that the dark ages afterwards were a bit more tolerable. The collapse of Rome didn't leave humanity doomed to pre-Roman technology for all time, and the collapse of modern Western civilisation won't do the same either. It's highly likely that bicycles and a lot of the other technology we've developed will be used well into the future, assuming that those skills and ideas are preserved through the decline.
More importantly, the collapse that JMG has been writing about for the last two decades isn't some far-off "eventually" - it is happening now, right outside our windows. In huge swathes of the US you can just look outside and see exactly what he's talking about. To wit:
The collapse of Rome was not evenly and equally distributed - the Byzantines kept on going for quite some time, and it is highly likely that parts of the modern west will do the same. On that note, you've also missed one of the other central points of his hypothesis - that another civilisation will eventually be born on the other side of the dark ages we're headed towards. The fall or collapse of a civilisation is not a permanent end to human history, but another iteration of a process that we have an increasingly accurate understanding of.
I agree with you about what he predicts I think, it's just that it's hard to summarize a quasi-ideology in a single sentence. A lot is riding on the 'eventually' in my sentence. I did read a couple of posts from him where he says 'no the collapse won't be sharp but a steady decline, perhaps accelerating at some points under various competitive pressures'. Also, is he not on the left? I thought the whole 'archdruid' thing and a fairly anti-capitalist tint shone through his work, along with the ecological emphasis. Maybe left-right isn't so clear with these unusual ideologies. Also, since when was he pro-Trump? I never saw anything like that.
This is just bad management of resources and bad politics. If the US decided to criminalize drug dealing as opposed to leaving these festering open-air drug markets... If the US and most of the West wasn't 'investing' in inefficient renewables as opposed to nuclear energy... If the US and West generally didn't decide to send our manufacturing base overseas to China...
Look at the actual predictions he made from the 2011 link:
And then we had the fracking boom! US oil production reached a record high in 2019, contra Greer. Likewise with global oil production. COVID hit and then we had the war in Ukraine which have thrown things out of whack, yet these crises don't stem from energy problems, they stem from human stupidity in geopolitics and biomedical research. The West's leaders have been working around the clock to sabotage the fossil fuel industry, shut down pipelines like Keystone, ban exploration, shut down power plants, impose punitive taxes, engage in lawfare against coal mines.
I said that civilization would collapse down to 19th century standards, I got the sense that he predicted permanent stagnation. Did he not deride all alternate energy sources, including nuclear, as cope? What is left to build back on if there's no fossil fuels, nuclear or anything? Hydro alone seems rather limited. You can definitely maintain civilizations with 19th century tech, use charcoal and so on. Yet technological civilizations like ours need more power IMO.
Anyway, my primary disagreement with him is that we are not short of energy. There's plenty of uranium and thorium if only we bother to use 50-year old, simple technologies like breeder reactors, if only we get rid of all the red tape that slows down construction. The state-sponsored sabotage of nuclear energy is staggering - see https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Likewise, sulphate aerosols could reverse climate change in a matter of years, if only we chose to deploy them.
Nuclear energy is actually cheaper than coal for electricity in technical terms, it's just that we choose to make it more expensive. More broadly, all the time we're finding new efficiencies, new sources of power, new ways to accelerate development. Fracking is just one example. Peak oil was supposed to come in 1974, 2006, then 2011, it still hasn't come and it won't mean anything more than 'peak whale oil' ever did when it does come, since we'll be onto gas, nuclear fission and fusion, or solar if it ever becomes economically viable. That is, provided our leaders are wise enough to do their jobs correctly, as opposed to flailing around like children. That's what was going on with Rome and Byzantium, their energy sources were stable but their leadership became incompetent.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-kek-wars-part-one-aristocracy-and-its-discontents/
I am honestly surprised that you have read his work at all if those are the conclusions you drew from it. His articles about Trump were some of his most popular and he wrote an entire book on the subject (a good read, in my opinion). Yes, he does care about the environment, but that's not really unexpected for Burkean conservatives and was in fact traditional for conservatism for a large portion of history. He quite literally has a Master Conserver certificate, and Conservation and Conservatism both share a root word after all.
"If the US decided" - how exactly is that going to happen? The political deadlock and inability of the state to solve these problems ARE collapse! Yes, the US government could just decide to turn around and fix a lot of the problems that society is facing, but this is like saying alcoholism is easy to fix - after all, one just needs to stop drinking and the problem is gone. There's a galaxy of competing interests and power-politics that get in the way of actually resolving the hard problems that face complex societies, and this gridlock is one of the common features of declining empires.
Allow me to quote the man himself on the topic:
Fracking isn't a new technology - when Greer spoke about and evaluated his predictions, he mentioned that he didn't expect the flurry of financial gimmicks that ended up allowing the fracking boom to take place. That said I don't have a citation for this one, and I can't find the evaluation he did because it is on his older, archived blog.
He did not predict permanent stagnation at all - and in fact he even points out that the ragged curve of decline will include periods of recovery and prosperity as society is forced to reduce energy expenditures. As for deriding nuclear, yes he did... and while I would very much like him to be wrong, I haven't seen any evidence that he is.
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-the-peak/
Show me the functioning nuclear power plant that generates energy in a sustainably profitable way (this includes taking waste handling into account) and I'll be overjoyed and freely admit that he was wrong. Oh, and remember that if you are trying to make a proposal for a future plant you can't just instantly vaporise the existing US government and replace them with a squad of enlightened technocrats - if you want to get rid of that regulation you have to explain how you're going to do that from within the confines of the current political system, and all the graft and corruption that entails.
The same renewable energy sources that powered every empire before the age of fossil fuel usage and extraction - the sun, human and animal muscle, hydro, wind and a few others. You're right when you say that technological civilizations like ours need more power - which means that when we no longer have that power, we no longer have the technological civilization like ours. Renewable energy is indeed unable to power an incredibly wasteful and environmentally ruinous society like our current one, but being unable to support modern society doesn't mean they're useless. Of course the problem is that in order to achieve a smooth transition to renewables the date we have to start making the change is, iirc, about 1974 - but while we've missed that boat, renewables will definitely play a part in the future.
My mistake, I found his look at fracking: https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
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