The 1920s were a watershed decade in so many ways. They remain, in many ways, the tragedy to the farce of the 2020s, according to Karl Marx’s “first as tragedy, then as farce” aphorism. Among other things, it was the first decade in which we can truly say that the oil industry began functioning more as a horizontally integrated cartel, in contradistinction to its previous sixty years as part of vertically integrated industrial production systems, its interests largely subordinate the manufacturing sector it served.
It is as a horizontally integrated cartel and not as a set subordinate extractive corporations dominated by the manufacturing sector that it made its alliance with the auto industry and began its long-term project of shaping and controlling public opinion in North America. Ideas and practices that would culminate in the “car culture” of the 1950s began being shaped in the 1920s.
Given that the Greenhouse Effect been discovered by Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s and passed peer review for the first time in 1896 and Standard Oil and its Rockefeller owners were among the most hated entities of the American corporate world by the 1920s. Even a century ago, America’s oil men already felt a strong impetus to build new tools to control public opinion. And so they did.
One initiative of America’s oil men was a monthly journal, mailed free to every Evangelical, Pentecostal and non-denominational church in America, covering a wide variety of issues, designed to provide independent clergy with little education or denominational support, a Christian analysis of the issues of the day, to assist them in their preaching. The journal was called The Fundamentals and it is this journal’s impact that introduced the term “Christian fundamentalist” to our lexicon.
In 1925, against the backdrop of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Fundamentals broke with the mainstream Christian belief that read the six days of creation described in Genesis metaphorically as referring to periods of millions or billions of years of slow geological change, often inclusive of evolution, as long as evolution did not pertain to or explain human beings. Instead of backing this reading, as propounded by Scopes prosecutor, three-time Democratic presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, the editors of The Fundamentals took a more audacious position.
Back in 1844, one of the most popular religious movements in America was the Millerites. Pastor William Miller, their founder, believed he had calculated the precise date of Christ’s return. On that date in 1844, thousands of Millerites donned white robes and stood on their roofs waiting for Jesus to descend from heaven on a big disc. A day came and went and the bewildered Millerites tried to make sense of their lives. Ever since, October 22nd, 1844 has been known as “the Great Disappointment.”
As with most movements caused by social contagions that experience a concurrent crisis of popularity, visibility, humiliation and failure, most former Millerites came down off their roofs, folded up their robes and went back to their former lives and mainline churches. But a handful devolved into tiny warring factions that sought to explain the failure and come up with a new date for Christ’s return. Two survived into the twentieth century (and, for that matter, up to the present day), the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists.
Unlike the Witnesses, the Adventists have developed a whole pseudoscience to underpin their worldview including something we today call “Young Earth Creationism,” invented by George McCready-Price, an Adventist minister in rural New Brunswick. It is McReady-Price from whom we get the idea that creation was precisely one hundred forty-four hours long and that dinosaurs cohabited with humans but were not loaded aboard the Ark (no doubt due to space constraints).
From an obscure denomination numbering only a few thousand adherents, at the very margins of Christianity, the oil men cherry-picked this doctrine, which they saw as the beachhead for inculcating anti-science belief favourable to the fossil fuel industry. As Young Earth Creationists believed (and still do) that fossils can be formed in a decade or two, the geological science underpinning the creation of oil and coal could be occluded from the worldview of the devout.
Another aspect of oil industry propaganda that formed part of a larger whole was the repackaging of petroleum dependence as rugged individualism, independence and autonomy. In the 1920s, when Anglo America had a comprehensive and effective rail grid that provided frequent passenger train service both within and between communities, most of our forbears did not need automobiles to meet their transportation needs.
Furthermore, it would be another three decades before the Eisenhower Administration created the Interstate highway system, meaning that the network of properly paved and maintained roads was smaller than the area covered by the continent’s rail grid, much of which had been financed through government subsidies. The oil industry’s response to these three entwined challenges, a) a comprehensive passenger rail system, b) a road system substantially inferior to rail and c) ongoing government subsidies to repair and expand the rail grid, was ingenious.
They marketed the car as a nostalgic return to the age of the horse, the autonomy, the freedom, the ruggedness, etc. The marketing campaign that introduced sport utility vehicles at the end of the Cold War was just a pale retread of the original automobile marketing strategy. Magazine and movie palace ads in the 1920s depicted first-generation rubber-tired automobiles parked in improbable locations, overlooking stunning vistas of natural and pastoral beauty.
In other words, from the beginning, the auto industry was pivotal, instrumental and first-on-the-ground in re-narrating the era of the Anglo American frontier from being an embarrassing, poverty-stricken, hardscrabble life from which people had escaped into an imagined idyll of valour, beauty and, most importantly, independence—autonomy.
America is full of idylls, of imagined pasts, of utopias unrealized. But such utopias often wither with time. The idyll of Joe Rockefeller and the oil men who gave us fundamentalist Christianity persists, sometimes existing in our collective cultural unconscious and sometimes bursting to the surface, as it is today with Western Canada’s autonomist movement.
“Autonomism” entered the Canadian political lexicon in the early 2000s, following the defeat of Québec’s second independence referendum in 1995 and the proclamation of the Clarity Act by the Jean Chretien government in 2000. Action Démocratique du Québec, the province’s third party, staked out this position, which its successor party, Coalition Avenir Québec, inherited and rode to victory at the polls in 2018. This was hardly the first time in Québec history that a party had won an election on a platform of increasing the province’s power and independence. Indeed, this was the rule in twentieth-century Québec politics, rather than the exception, since the 1930s, from the premierships of Maurice Duplessis to Lucien Bouchard.
This desire for greater independence within the Canadian federation has not been confined to Québec. Voters in Alberta and, to a lesser extent, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have long mirrored the Québecois desire for greater autonomy. However, these movements have proven less politically successful for a variety of reasons, chief among them, their populist stoking of anti-Québecois bigotry to win seats in the rural West. Alliances between Western and Québec movements for greater independence have been as short-lived as they have been numerous, generally ending in betrayal, fragmentation and resentment, such as the Anglo-Québecois split in the federal Social Credit Party in 1963, to the collapse of the Gang of Eight in 1982.
Today, however, we see a different situation. Danielle Smith, the autonomist premier of Alberta and Scott Moe, the autonomist premier of Saskatchewan are conducting themselves differently than the Western decentralists of the past.
First, rather than seeking to form a common front with a large coalition of provincial and federal politicians inclusive of leaders outside the West, Moe and Smith show little interest in reaching outwards beyond their region or upwards into parliament. A key reason for such coalitions in the past has been a tendency on the part of mainstream Western decentralists to use methods recognized by the Canadian Constitution to increase their powers, i.e. a coalition of at least seven premiers to amend the Constitution or a majority of parliamentarians to cede a federal power to a province.
Second, even though the primary site of conflict with the federal government, for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Québec is energy policy and Québec’s government holds polar opposite views to those of Saskatchewan and Alberta, an apparent shared social conservatism among the three governments appears to have restrained autonomists from bashing the people and governments of other provinces.
Third, and most importantly, unlike Québec, which uses legal, constitutional tools like international law concerning partition referenda and the Notwithstanding Clause to advance separatist and autonomist agendas, Alberta and Saskatchewan have passed clearly unconstitutional laws through their legislatures that are best described as “nullifier” bills, the kind of legislation Anglo America has not seen since South Carolina’s efforts to unilaterally nullify the federal government’s jurisdiction over tariffs and trade two hundred years ago.
I believe that this fantasist nullifier approach to law-making is part of a larger epistemological problem. Although I am currently making major revisions to it, my 2011-12 writing on the epistemology of “authenticity” bears repeating here. While it is not the newest, most popular or most pernicious deviation from Enlightenment rationalism anymore, “authentic” epistemology dominates the United Conservative and Saskatchewan parties from which Smith and Moe hail.
In addition to being closely aligned, financially, with the fossil fuel sector, the prevalence of authentic epistemology means that Western autonomists tend to believe that any abstract claim made by untrustworthy people must, axiomatically, be false. If untrusted, corrupt and/or industry-captured public health officials say Covid-19 is a danger, it must, axiomatically, be relatively harmless; if these officials state that vaccines mRNA vaccines are effective in reducing mortality, they must be either useless or dangerous. Similarly, if Justin Trudeau, Greta Thunberg and Klaus Schwab state that anthropogenic climate change is a genuine and immediate threat to life on the planet, it must, axiomatically, be true that climate change is not happening, if it is, it must not be human caused and, if it is human caused it must be necessary and good that we change the climate’s planet as fast as we can.
It is in this environment of woolly thinking and dysfunctional epistemology that modern Western autonomism has emerged. Central to this thinking and helping to culturally and economically bind it together is its adherents’ nigh-mystical conflation of fossil fuel use with freedom and independence, in other words, autonomy not only at the level of the state but of the individual and society.
Amplifying tropes of autonomy, individualism and self-assertion that have suffused a century of oil and auto industry propaganda, the movement reasons about personal prosperity and freedom and the horizon of possibility for an autonomous Western Canada in a way more akin to sympathetic magic than any recognizable theory of causation.
The autonomous region of Alberta-Saskatchewan, whether inside or outside the Canadian federation, believes that it can make the price of oil rise by flooding the global market with more of the gnarliest, shittiest, greasiest, hardest-to-mine oil on earth, the cost of extraction often becoming prohibitive when oil prices fall, as they do when production levels go too high.
Subscribing to the broadly-shared fallacy that the laws of supply and demand apply to everything except whatever Canadians are most upset about that day, be it oil or housing, these folks seem to think that a bunch of wells that are not currently profitable at today’s oil price will somehow become so if only they increase the supply of oil, despite the fact that—as any freshman economics student will tell you—doing so has a 100% chance of doing the opposite.
Perhaps, one might think, that this oil could be made marketable and its by-products (i.e. plastics) manufactured into industrial goods with an aggressive campaign of state-financed import substitution industrialization. One would think the autonomists would be proposing government loans and grants to build oil refineries, plastics plants, etc. and begin working towards true autonomy and independence. Such a plan might even be financed some sort of tariff on industrial goods from the hated Greater Toronto Area, which seems to have been passed the baton of hate by Québec in the minds of discontented Westerners.
But no. These governments are interested in just two forms of industrial investment: carbon capture boondoggles and more oil pipelines for unrefined bitumen and fracked natural gas. In other words, the only things for which autonomists support industrial investment are things that forestall the emergence of a local industry by subsidizing the extraction of raw fossil fuels. And, to further inhibit the growth of an industrial sector, they favour lower tariffs on foreign manufactured goods. In other words, the whole thrust of the industrial strategy is to make the region less economically independent, less autonomous.
Another thing high on the wish list of autonomists is paring back not just the size of the region’s protected areas but the list of prohibited activities therein. Already, UNESCO has warned Canada we are already in imminent danger of Wood Buffalo National Park losing its World Heritage Site designation due to pollution of the park from fossil fuel extraction upstream. This downstream damage is happening all over Alberta, with local oil wells and fracked gas wells befouling farms and ranches and trapping local farmers and ranchers in a vicious cycle of permitting a new wells on their land to replace the lost revenues from declining yields.
In other words, not only do autonomists favour less industrial independence; this desire to become nothing more than a single-industry state extends to all areas of economic activity. And so, autonomists plan to intensify and accelerate policies that are already hammering other industries. You see: the tourism, hunting, ranching and farming sectors are just places where people work, not places where people interact with the material manifestation of freedom itself.
And it should surprise no one that these almost petrosexual beliefs about oil are concentrated in the regions where Young Earth Creationism and other venerable pseudosciences are most popular.
In other words, total abject dependence on and control by one industry is the so-called “autonomy” Alberta and Saskatchewan want, absolute thrall to a hated and unstable industrial complex, prone to boom-bust cycles and more strongly implicated than any other sector in the extinction event we are causing. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.”
Or so it would seem. It turns out, from talking with many autonomists, that my representation of these ideas mistakes fanciful thinking for hypocrisy. As first observed in 2009 by a political analyst whose name escapes me, the Tea Party movement and its relatives, the Trump movement and today’s Prairie Autonomists are the first social movements since the death of Mao Zedong to believe that backyard steel mills were both desirable and possible. Several folks with whom I have spoken appear to imagine that oil wells will be like drinking water wells, effacing questions of scale or refining. They imagine, because they are imagining their aspirations for freedom, that petroleum, because it is freedom, will be abundant and available for use by regular folks.
In other words, autonomists are not really imagining a real place. Because I believe that, lurking within the movement is a deep reservoir of post-political despair. Like so many other political movements, autonomist policies are synodal, in character; they seek to describe the order of heaven, not to change the order on earth. And that is why, unlike the government of Québec, their self-emancipatory laws are not really about emancipation from Canada but from reality.
