‘public servants’ discovered the hard way that loyalty has to be earned; it cannot be bought.
And religion? How could the ancient and mighty power of the one God, of Yahweh and Allah, be vanquished by…dragons? People of faith, perhaps it will be simpler for you to just regard us as animist pagans and heretics. It is true that under the irresistible call of the Eye, the pulpit and minaret have fallen silent. Perhaps we are a smaller people than we once were, less bold in our spiritual aspirations. A Renaissance thinker once wrote to his friend, a priest, “You follow infinite objects; I follow the finite; you place your ladder in the heavens, I on earth, that I may not seek so high or fall so low.”
And if I were to tell you that we have found your God in the silent, beating heart of the Eye? No matter, believe what you must and do as your conscience bids. Know only that we have done the same.
Thus, a system based on preserving the power and influence of the financial and technocratic elite by suppressing the will of the vast majority of the population was supplanted by something altogether more exotic and unpredictable: human values.
All this no doubt strikes you as improbable. But you live in a brilliant but shattered world, teeming with countless self-absorbed individuals, all of them desperate to get ahead, to express themselves, realize a fond dream, have their moment in the Sun. But that is no longer our world. And those who have not been able to adapt to the new state of affairs have met with the same fate as all other living beings who found themselves on the wrong side of evolution.
19
It is not quite accurate to say that all our needs were met by our new community and the strengthened Eye. People still had to eat, some amount of healthcare was necessary, and our children still needed to be educated in some way. For all of these requirements three concepts were, and remain, paramount: local, simpler, and less.
Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers were still mostly willing to take care of sick people. In fact, this is one of the few professional fields in which people are still active. In exchange for their services, these specialists are released from the Greening and other construction tasks. Of course healthcare is free, because everything is free. It’s undoubtedly true that people who suffer from rare diseases, or have some complicating health factors, do not receive the same level of care they would have in the pre-dragon era. (assuming they were wealthy enough to obtain it) On the other hand, basic care has been expanded to cover every single person on the planet. In countries where that would today seem tragically out-of-reach, we found that the personnel and material resources had always been there; indifference, corruption and greed had just kept them out of the people’s hands.
Our population stabilized some years ago and now seems to be declining. It’s difficult to be sure: global communications are beginning to break down, and even in our own regions the degradation of our computer records does not allow for precision in such matters. The exact causes of the decline are also unclear. Certainly the absence of organized religion has played a large role. Yet, one suspects far more significant has been the change in our psychological and material living conditions. We are simply happier than we used to be, far more relaxed and hopeful about the future. Having many children was often at some level an act of desperation for parents who couldn’t be sure the children they already had would survive. Finally, one irony of history is that it took an invasion of dragons for humans to achieve a genderless society. Women—all people—are equal in the Presence. And when women have power over their own bodies, the population usually drops to a more sustainable level.
Keeping that population fed was very difficult at first, especially in our largest cities. Global supply chains had broken down, which meant that the complex web of agribusiness and other food producers, transportation links and retail stores that had made our ‘just-in-time’ economy function was now severed. That didn’t matter anymore for stonewashed jeans or knickknacks, but it certainly did for food. There were some desperate months, and that first winter was terrible. But strict rationing and canned stores got us through, buying us just enough time for the Greening to begin to have an effect.
The Greening was the massive campaign of targeted de-urbanization that we embarked upon once all the governments had fallen. In plain English, we knocked down and cleared vast numbers of non-residential buildings and structures. Factories, stores, stadiums, government administration buildings, offices, and parking lots were demolished and the rubble carted off. If you couldn’t live in it, it was destroyed. But the main objects of our attention were roads and highways. Roads represented fast, frictionless mobility, the streamlined quantification and mechanization of humanity. Roads meant freedom as escape, as a solipsistic, opportunistic flight from responsibility and communal ties. They were everything we now hated, and we uprooted them methodically, gleefully.
Of course one of the first orders of business was to get rid of the global arsenal—a task every bit as dangerous and difficult as knocking down all those skyscrapers. You have probably heard that passage from the Bible about “beating swords into plowshares”? Well, that is what we did. The trickiest part was to disarm all those nuclear warheads. We had to act quickly, before records were misplaced or destroyed and our nuclear engineers had lost their skills. We were successful, almost unreasonably so. However, there were several submarines with tactical nuclear missiles that vanished during the chaos and fighting of those final days. They now lie, along with their crews, at the bottom of the oceans. May the Eye protect us!
Houses of worship were left mainly unscathed. It seemed somehow wrong to destroy them. Also, museums, libraries, some power plants and other vital parts of our infrastructure were spared. This forest of concrete was replaced with real forests—and farms, meadows, parks, and small garden plots, as well as fresh water in the form of ponds, canals, and artificial lakes. We live now surrounded by trees, gardens, and cool water. This, our simpler and more modest diet, and our incomparably healthier lifestyle, have allowed us to realize the cherished dream of creating an ecologically and psychologically sustainable civilization.
For the record, our addiction to meat has been greatly curbed if not entirely eliminated. This means that land is no longer being cleared for livestock grazing. And because our power consumption is only a tiny fraction of what it was, we have been able to build a power grid based solely on renewables. The last nuclear power plant was shut down about ten years ago.
Unfortunately, these changes were made too late to completely prevent climate change. We suffer under extreme weather, including unbearable heat waves, (vast parts of the American southwest and many areas in Africa and Asia are essentially no longer habitable) droughts, flooding, and hurricanes. The thermohaline ocean circulation system has been greatly weakened, paradoxically leading to colder winters in northern Europe, although overall it is warmer than before even there. Rising sea levels have already led to the loss of whole swathes of coastline, and the actual submersion of many low-lying islands. Countless species of plants and animals have disappeared. (rough estimates range from 25 to 40% of all terrestrial species) Entire ecosystems have been obliterated and replaced with monocultures—hardy but unvarying landscapes in which the complex web of life has been sadly reduced to a shadow of itself, with only a handful of plant and animal species. Centuries will pass before the Earth recovers from the fever humanity brought on. And so our children, and their children’s children, are fated to suffer because of the selfishness of a sick civilization that very nearly took the entire planet past the point of no return.
The following song, “Morning”, reveals more eloquently and concisely than any prose description ever could how we think about nature and our place in the world now.
One morning I woke up early
Got dressed and went outside.
The sky had just turned on,
And the stars had begun to hide.
I paced the sleeping town
With the heart of a joyful child.
And every single thing I saw
Seemed innocent, and wild.
A breeze blew crisp and cool,
Trees stood silent and serene.
Lakes lay deeply calm and blue,
I felt I wandered in a dream.
The east was now a gorgeous fire,
The sky had become one prayer.
My pain dissolved like snow in spring
And I bid farewell to care.
To wander now is my repose
As I heed the beckoning sky,
And all I know, and all I am
Rests in the Dragon’s Eye.
20
When it came to education after the Turning, we faced a problem. Simply stated, what and how should we teach our children? Every culture must solve this foundational challenge: it is arguably the most critical set of decisions a society must make. Children are the future, plain and simple. But normally this process plays out over decades and is built on the substrate of the former system. In our case there was no former system because we had just decisively and irrevocably destroyed it.
Clearly the traditional ‘factory model’ was no longer viable. That meant our young people sitting silently in rows like soldiers, being lectured at by an adult whose job it was to cheerfully pretend that every one of them