Patrick Deneen writes that modern liberalism – “the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., bio-technological improvement of the species)” – rests ultimately on our ability to exploit fossil fuels. All that freedom, autonomy, and material progress is a one-shot affair since the reservoir of energy that made it possible took hundreds of millions of years to build up.

Deneen says that the view of life that underlies liberalism is profoundly anti-natural:

Oil has been the silent but world-altering source of our collective delusion that we could live in this way and get away with it. It has allowed us to contrive a civilization based upon a theoretical fantasy, and to make it functional for about a century, during which time we took the exceptional for the ordinary, the unnatural for the given, the hubristic for the norm. We have reshaped the world to accord with a self-delusive fantasy, with the only stipulation being that there continue to be unlimited quantities of this external power source that would let growth and its attendant power over nature go on forever. Most of us assume there’s no problem with this basic presupposition – except that we are about to discover that you can only defy gravity for so long, as the example of Icarus ought to have served as a reminder.

Conservatism, while a salutary reaction against the excesses of liberalism, usually fails to grasp the underlying economic realities that make those excesses possible:

Conservatives rightly decry the decline of culture, the assault on the family and the unlimited infanticide of our abortion regime, but find nothing else wrong with the basic arrangement and largely do not question whether our political and economic arrangements have contributed to what we denounce. Books will be written about how this could have happened. But, perhaps we are not long from the day when conservatives will realize the fantasy they have themselves been purveying, and will demand that we prepare ourselves now for a post-petroleum reinstatement of human culture, cultivation, and tradition.

I take peak oil and global warming catastrophists with a grain of salt if only because their predictions of what will happen post-catastrophe seem to align so neatly with the kind of society they would like to see. Still, the fossil fuel binge does seem like it will have to come to an end at some point, so it’s well worth thinking about what that implies.