“’Progress’ is just a label for whatever choices happen to have been made by governments and corporations, with or without input from the rest of us.” – John Michael Greer

Of the various thinkers and observers whose work helps us comprehend the crisis and imminent decline of modern industrial civilization, I would place John Michael Greer at the forefront. His writings sparkle with erudition, panoramic breadth, and wry humor. He is a reassuring guide as we navigate the impending journey into an uncertain future, acknowledging unpleasant realities head on while maintaining a sure step and even a mischievous gleam in his eyes.

Greer has produced a series of illuminating books that chart the decline of modernity and lay out the challenges before us, based on his remarkably wide-ranging research into the histories of diverse civilizations. The Long Descent appeared in 2008, followed by Decline and Fall (2014), After Progress (2015), and Dark Age America (2016). In related titles, he considers more specifically how we might successfully adapt to the new realities and construct a truly sustainable culture: The Ecotechnic Future (2009), The Wealth of Nature (2011) and Green Wizardry (2013).

In addition, Greer writes a great deal of speculative fiction (i.e. alternative futures) and edits collections of such work by others. His weekly blog (formerly “The Archdruid Report,” now “Ecosophia” at www.ecosophia.net ) has for years been an exuberant fountain of provocative ideas and lucid commentary.

Greer’s newest book, coming this September from his regular publisher (New Society), is The Retro Future: Looking to the Past to Reinvent the Future. He argues that despite the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the modern age and the promises of never-ending “progress,” the actual quality of our lives is declining; work is unfulfilling, products are shoddy, systems and infrastructure are unraveling, and daily life is increasingly insipid and boring. We do not need more of the same, he declares, and in an age of declining energy supplies and other resources, we will soon be unable to afford more of the same in any case.

Greer points out that “technology” is not a monolithic cultural production that can only progress toward perfection or regress back to the stone age. This simplistic dichotomy, he argues, is wielded by apologists for technological complexity and the corporate interests that profit from it. Instead, Greer offers a nuanced portrayal of technological “suites”—specific clusters of related tools and resources—and urges us to assess the social and ecological costs of any given set. He pays particular attention to the externalization of these costs—the ways they are hidden by passing them off to workers, consumers or taxpayers, or onto the natural world. Our failure to account for externalities contributes directly to systemic collapse, because we do not receive accurate feedback about our economic and technological choices.

Following the advice he has given in previous writings—“collapse now and avoid the rush”—Greer in this book proposes “deliberate technological regression as a matter of public policy.” Knowing that economic growth and technological complexity are running smack into ecological limits, we should be making thoughtful choices about which technologies to use. Instead of blindly celebrating “progress,” we should carefully assess which tools genuinely serve human needs at a sustainably affordable cost. In the most intriguing passages of the book, Greer suggests that technological suites from the 1950s, 1920s, and even the Victorian age successfully met social and economic needs using a fraction of the energy and resources that today’s “must-have” gadgetry consumes. He lists seven specific suites that we ought to reclaim and develop at this time of transition: Organic intensive gardening, solar thermal systems, sustainable wood heating, sustainable health care, letterpress printing, low-tech shortwave radio, and noncomputerized mathematics (think slide rule).

Greer contends with the dominant cultural belief that “any future that isn’t defined by the endless elaboration of already overelaborate technologies must somehow involve going back to the caves or sinking into medieval squalor or being gobbled up by any of the other hobgoblins of the past with which the religion of progress threatens unbelievers. These reactions have deep emotional roots.” Later he asserts that “it’s necessary to replace attitudes, values, and expectations that are solely suited to machines —  and nearly the entire modern worldview can be summed up in these terms — with the very different attitudes, values, and expectations that produce good results when applied to human beings.“

Another provocative strain in Greer’s analysis is his understanding of the imperialistic tendencies of modernity. He argues that “economic life in the industrial world these days can be described, without too much inaccuracy, as an arrangement set up to allow a privileged minority to externalize nearly all their costs onto the rest of society while pocketing as much as possible the benefits themselves.” Later in the book he picks up this argument again: “Despite the rhetoric of universal betterment that was brandished about so enthusiastically by the propagandists of the industrial order, there were never enough of any of the necessary resources to make the extravagant lifestyles of the recent past possible for more than a small fraction of the world’s population, or for more than a handful of generations.”

Indeed, the cult of progress serves to confirm the concentration of wealth and power: “’Progress’ is just a label for whatever choices happen to have been made by governments and corporations, with or without input from the rest of us.”

As in all of Greer’s writing, there are too many layers of analysis and pithy observations to contain in a brief review. Who else could provide historical perspective on revolutions in modern technology, while going into some depth about steampunk literature, Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, Conan the Barbarian, and a book by computer theorist Stephen Wolfram on postindustrial scientific thinking? Someone who has not read much Greer previously will find The Retro Future compelling, stimulating, and subversively irreverent.

As an addition to his rapidly expanding body of work, though, I find that this volume illustrates his own point about the law of diminishing returns: it is increasingly difficult for Greer to continue delivering knock-your-socks-off, paradigm-shattering insights. Much of what he writes here has been covered in his earlier books, and even within this one he serially repeats his arguments and sometimes specific phrases. As well, in this book the author’s own personal vexation about modern life competes with his careful, historically informed analysis, as when he skewers those who criticize his choices not to use television or cell phones. This is a worthwhile (and fun) book, but to fully appreciate Greer’s holistic analysis of the crisis facing modern civilization, one needs to go back to The Long Descent and his other earlier work.

Ron Miller, co-editor of Most Likely to Secede, has written or edited several books on educational alternatives. He currently runs an adult learning program in Woodstock, Vermont.