Is the Collapse of Civilization an Unprecedented Opportunity?
Collapse is not the end — it’s the beginning. The fear and uncertainty of this time signals the obsolescence of old ways of being. As we step into the unknown, truly new ways of being are emerging. Our challenge is to seize on and amplify these opportunities. 29 AUG 2023, systems-thinking by Nafeez Ahmed
For the correct answer, read the above link. Or read on for the wrong answer (from the point of view of all Anthropocene enthusiasts).
“What is the general answer? Eject economic expansionism, stop growth, use available energies for cultural conversion to steady state, seek out the condition now that will come anyway, but by our service be our biosphere’s handmaiden anew.” — Howard T. Odum 1973, Energy, Ecology, & Economics
A new age is the condition that will come anyway. Sooner could be better (especially for life on Earth). Whether it will include humans or not remains to be seen, but the Anthropocene will end.
Collapse is the precondition for the emergence of new evolutionary structures, but all prior complex societies (with one possible exception), those that somehow managed to sidestep extinction, failed to renormalize as K-strategists, as evolvable subsystems of Gaia. Instead, we expansionistic, obligate, opportunistic invasive species that became empire building omniscient conquerors unto overgrowth/overshoot as dissipative structures, e.g. whirlwinds to supercells and hurricanes to civilizations, may be full of sound and fury, but are non-evolvable. Playing the panarchy game eventually selects for dissolution.
New societies that rise and fall may emerge after collapse, and often grow at a faster rate than what went before to thereby more quickly repeat the pattern of ecological (Catton), overcomplexity (Tainter), overdensity (Calhoun), civilizational (Nelson) overshoot and descent to repetition (about a 20% chance) or extinction (about 80% chance) post-climax.
Empire building may be overrated by empire builders. The only way to win the panarchy game may be to not play it.
The first stage is the exponential growth phase (r above) as driven by energy (food/wood/hydro/wind to empower agrarian forms of civilization, and fossil fuels/nuclear/PV added to extend our technology/energy dependent growth hegemon past its use-by date).
At some point the rate of growth begins to decline. This is an inflection point, knowable only in hindsight as downturns can be temporary and trends may emerge slowly. The end of growth becomes hinted at.
When the rate of growth slows (the start of the second stage), every effort is made (e.g. war) to keep the economy growing, to conserve wealth (energy) production, to keep on kicking the can down the road. With climax, every effort will be made to slow the rate of degrowth (e.g. by war) to again ‘grow’ the economy. Such can-kicking resists decline until further can-kicking fails, and the overcomplex system collapses.
The second phase is typically a period of increasing uncertainty and chaos as the system’s rate of growth begins to decline and transitions to degrowth. We are still adding over 80 million humans to the planet each year. When the death rate (currently about 60 million/year) exceeds the birth rate (about 140 million/year), then degrowth begins leading to the third stage, another inflection point, the rapid dissolution to extinction or reorganization phase.
The third stage, a release phase, ends in dissolution or reorganization to repeat the pattern.
Overcomplex systems fail at the end of the third stage. The parachy model assumes that collapse leads to a fourth stage, a reorganization phase, to an unprecedented opportunity to do better on the next go-round, that if dissolution occurs, it is due to a failure to reorganize to repeat the pattern.
But Rome collapsed. It did not fail to reorganize. There was a reorganizing phase among the remnant population after about 500 years of environmental recovery (e.g. forest regrowth and soil reformation), but apart from some information transfer, thanks to some monks and emigrants from the fall of Constantinople, remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire, in 1453 CE, Roman society ended as usual.
Despite its name, the reorganizing of emerging principalities with organized religion’s support was not Holy, Roman, nor an Empire (initially just a wannabe empire). Roman society failed to persist apart from a few Roman elites ruling over their country estates for a time after the last Emperor was deposed by outliers in 476 CE, when the rotten door was kicked in.
One view of the current cycle is as below. The words and dates in black are from the article being considered, and no agreement is implied. I added the words in blue as straight up historical fact. The modified graphic is from a different article, From Panarchy to World-Ecology
For the first time we expansionist form of human, 50k years in the making, are repeating the panarchy cycle globally. There are no colonies on Mars nor orbiting space colonies. A global collapse without possible conquest from without (i.e. so far as is known, there are no Klingons out there to enslave us, save us from our dissolution).
The Late Bronze Age collapse and Indus Valley collapse to regional extinction may or may not resemble our collapse event. But over fifty data points for regional collapse/descent events should be of concern, i.e. about 20% reorganize (after a dark age) and 80% do not (i.e. go extinct after a darker age).
Perhaps some humans should wake up from their dogmatic slumbers and smell the data, listen for the ring of truth amid the error, ignorance, and illusion of our post-truth culture. As for what to do, the short of it is “understand or die.” The condition of “understanding” is choiceless obedience to the nature of things.
“The domestication of plants in the food sector was instrumental in the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies,” which we Anthropocene enthusiasts see as a good/great thing. But as Jared Diamond notes, this shift was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race,” i.e. was not obviously another progressive, inevitable development in the advance of civilization pathology, one that can never by treated because it shouldn’t be. Renormalizing implies a civilizational paradigm shift in worldview/mindset.
“We are for the first time able to see and understand [our problematique as it unfolds] in real-time. We can recognise the risks of decline and collapse in a way that no society in history has ever been able to do.” — Nafeez Ahmed
Yes, for the first time some humans have the potential to understand the dynamic we serve, and perhaps to thereby be delivered from it (our modern techno-industrial form of civilization).
Whether we understand the remorseless dynamic we are and are part of or die (go extinct), should be of some concern to a few humans, even if the techno-Pollyannas huffing hopium are right. For posterity’s sake, some few should maybe help posterity pay the overshoot debt we Anthropocene enthusiasts have incurred (and deny responsibility for).
Some semi-sane humans should work now, while there may still be time enough, to “prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing” just in case.
For another view of maladaptive cycles, consider:
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Dark Ages (little or no history recorded for a time)
- Old Kingdom of Egypt Dark Age, 126 years, 2181–2055 BCE
- Middle Kingdom of Egypt Dark Age, 100 years, 1650 BCE — 1550 BCE
- Mycenaean Greek Dark Age, 350 years, 1100 BCE — 750 BCE
- New Kingdom of Egypt Dark Age, 405 years, 1069 BCE — 664 BCE
- Irish Dark Age, 200 years, 100 BCE — 300 CE
- Parthian Dark Age, 84 years, 91 BCE — 57 BCE
- Han Dynasty Dark Age, 361 years, 220–581 CE
- Britannia Dark Age, 400 years, 400–800 CE
- Roman/European (Early Middle) Dark Age, 500 years, 476 CE — 10th century
- Byzantine Dark Age, 150 years, 630 — late 8th century
- Dark Age of Khmer, 432 years, 1431–1863
On average, 290 years on the downslope, 11 to 12 generations, before reorganizing/rebuilding/regrowing (for a time) to repeat the pattern. But collapse without conquest and with no recovery/rebuilding is four times more common. A global empire has no outliers to subsume it (assuming the Klingons don’t show up), so collapse to dissolution without recovery is a more than possible future.
If no recovery (see below), dissolution to local extinction takes longer, so maybe the downslope without recovery takes 20 generations (500 years), but as no history is written, the time needed for a global civilization to collapse to recovery/reorganization, extinction, or renormalization (if possible) is unknown.
Darker Ages (collapse/descent, no conquest, no history, no recovery)
- 7370 BCE Göbekli Tepe
- 5700 BCE Çatalhöyük
- 3800 BCE Nebelivka
- 2500 BCE Malta
- 2550 BCE Flinders Island
- 2250 BCE Liangzhu culture
- 2154 BCE Akkadian Empire
- 1900 BCE Bactria–Margiana
- 1800 BCE The Norte Chico civilization
- 1700 BCE Indus Valley Civilization
- 1500 BCE Erlitou culture
- 1450 BCE Minoan civilization
- 1200 BCE — 900 BCE Sea and Land Peoples of Late Bronze Age collapse
- 1180 BCE Hittite Empire
- 612 BCE Neo-Assyrian Empire
- 200 BCE Chavín culture
- 400 BCE Olmec
- 100 BCE Paracas culture
- 220 CE Han Dynasty of China
- 650 CE Lima culture
- 800 CE Nazca culture
- 800 CE Moche
- 900 CE Izapa
- 900 CE Maya civilization (Classic Maya collapse)
- 900 CE Zapotec civilization
- 900 CE Quimbaya
- 907 CE Tang Dynasty of China
- 1000 CE Tiwanaku
- 1000 CE Wari
- 1125 CE Pueblo at Chaco Canyon
- 1130 CE Mimbres culture (collapse followed by 320 years to self-extinction)
- 1290 CE Pueblo at Mesa Verde
- 1300 CE Cahokia
- 1400 CE Great Zimbabwe
- 1431 CE Angkor civilization of the Khmer Empire
- 1450 CE Norse colony on Greenland
- 1450 CE Original Polynesian civilization on Pitcairn Island and Henderson Island
- 1500 CE Pre-Columbian complex societies in Amazonia
- 1500 CE Hohokam
- 1650 CE Rapa Nui
- 1700 CE? Malden Island
- 1760 CE Munhumutapa Empire
Collapse of empire not followed by conquest (often quickly) by an outlaying upstart empire builder has about a 1:5 chance of collapse to a Dark Age with (some) recovery (before repeating the pattern), and a 4:5 chance of collapse to a Darker Age ending in local extinction. The collapse of the Euro-Sino Empire, the first global empire (quite possibly the last global empire), will not be conquered from without by Klingons, and local extinction will be an on-Earth extinction.
But if Elon Musk retires on Mars, he and his servants may be the only humans left (but I’m hoping for extinction) or some humans endeavoring to renormalize may manage to persist.
If a marauding horde culture develops during collapse, and the dynamic of the downslope death-spiral lasts 200 to 500 years, any remnant populations of quasi-functional renormalizing humans who somehow manage to persist for 50-200 years, will be viewed as resources for the taking by our BAU descendants.
The remnant population may well be so dysfunctional as to fail to reproduce after 8 to 20 generations on the downslope, unless humans are different in kind from rats. The Indus Valley Civilization’s darker age was the largest collapse event known. The next will be global and duration of downslope likely to compare to that of the Indus Valley’s 600 years on the downslope leading to complete dissolution after 24 generations.
Going from over 8 billion to whatever, if any, may take longer than we can imagine. How many generations on the downslope the last literate Harappan lived (failed to pass on their literacy) is unknown. Of course I/we know nothing, and I at least would like to be wrong about everything (but data does go away because ignored).
Nature doesn’t care what I believe, so why should I? Data speaks. Listen.
“Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.“ — Albert Einstein
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Understand the dynamic we are trapped in. Choicelessly walk away from Omelas (doing so is evidence of understanding, but not sufficient). Those who memetically walk away will auto-organize. Those having a life-driven purpose, as their ancestor had — who thereby became ancestors, may come to persist within a potentially viable form of civilization. Or fail.
“If society does not succeed in changing attitudes and institutions for a harmonious descent, the alternative is to prepare information packages for the contingency of restart after crashing.” — H.T. Odum
Oh, but why bother to do anything when we can all remain 13 year olds and change our names to Alfred E. or Alfreda E. Newman? Doing so will have as good a chance of helping posterity have a successful transformation towards renormalization as all the other pretend solutions piled high and deep.
Final offering: I view a failure to recognize the difficulty of mitigating posterity’s ghastly future as the greatest existential threat to the persistence of any form of functional human on the planet, and any future as a techno-Borg-like form of civilization to be worse than extinction. Any listening to primate prattle, including mine and the subvocal voice in your head, is a distraction at best. Listen to Nature instead (and selectively to those who endeavor to listen to Nature, be they engineers, poets, seers, or scientists). In all due humilitus, listen to the sound trees make when no wind blows.