CIVILIZATION
It’s A Circle, Dummy!
Lines, Circles, Curves, and the Illusion of Eternal Progress
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a fan of progress. Perhaps it was all that sci-fi I was reading and watching. Perhaps it’s a natural tendency for children to dream of the wonders of the future. Perhaps it took me half of my life to realize that I might be wrong.
Certainly, my gobbling up the books of Jules Verne, many of whose predictions came true in one form or another, was proof for me that more modern sci-fi authors’ predictions would also be realized. Of course, at that tender age I was neither allowed to read nor was I entirely able to understand George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. I grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek, which taught me that morality, wisdom, and reason would always win, in the end. I had yet to read H.P. Lovecraft or Douglas Adams, who obviously took a very different approach to showcase the same fundamental idea: that the universe we inhabit is inherently absurd and uncaring.
Our imagined self-importance, which we assign ourselves based on the (completely delusional) idea of human superiority over nature, is the vehicle that would propel us ever forward, to a future where our species abandons its petty struggles and concerns and dedicates itself to the peaceful exploration of the galaxy, through empathy, knowledge and reason. No more hunting for profit and exploiting everything in sight. No more inequality, poverty, and starvation. No more wars and unnecessary deaths.
Surely by now, we should know better than to engage in wars for land and spoils, as was the norm throughout human history. The greatest war of the 20th century, after all, was fought for ideological reasons. Or so we were taught to think.
It might sound cliché, but with age came wisdom, and the realization that not only is history much more complex than I thought, but by extension, the future was also much more uncertain than is generally advertised.
A study of past civilizations taught me that the great empires of yore crumbled to nothing and most of their accomplishments were gone because the ways with which knowledge was preserved and spread were extremely limited. A combination of linguistic, religious, and cultural barriers, a lack of widespread education, sometimes even the absence of a writing system, the often violent end of empires, and the inherent limitation of the available media (stone and clay are hardy but impractical, papyrus and leather are too fragile) all contributed to a fragmentation of knowledge and technology every time a great empire collapsed. The lucky survivors (if any) or the successor empire would pick up some of the pieces and start the cycle of progress again.
Take Rome for example. Although the Eastern part of the Empire survived for a thousand years longer and maintained enough of the wealth of ancient Greek thought and culture, the Western part came under the possession of a series of conquerors, most of whom attempted to continue its legacy in some diminished form. It took centuries for some aspects of life to reach the same level of sophistication and the further west one went from Rome the more pronounced the gap became between what came before and what survived after the collapse. In other cases, entire civilizations vanished entirely and the ruins that they left behind were a mystery until the science of archaeology became sophisticated enough to decipher them, when that is even possible.
Writing and the preservation of written records, accounts, and literature have always been the most important medium for the survival and continuation of progress.
From the printing press to the Internet, a long series of innovations brought this seemingly endless cycle of progress and regression to an end. Today, the idea that an entire culture would suddenly vanish is unthinkable. Even if, somehow, an entire country were to vanish from the face of the Earth, it would leave behind a wealth of information about its culture, its history, and its contributions to technology. We would know with great detail what these people wore, what they ate, what their language sounded like, and what their particular customs were. Our vast, digital repository of knowledge and research seems now impossible to erase. Technology moves forward at an almost alarming rate, with society often struggling to catch up.
With all that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine that human progress is now a straight line going on to infinity and leading, inexorably, to the stars.
At least, that was the idea, and many still cling to it.
Unfortunately, the climate crisis and the pandemic have exposed the glaring faults in our foolproof plan. A large percentage of the population demonstrates paranoia and mistrust towards science and rational thought in general. Long suspecting (and not without reason) that we are being habitually lied to by our politicians and the “elite”, a sizable part of humanity, especially if lacking critical thinking skills, has lost all confidence in the generally accepted interpretation of reality and is veering off towards strange ideas that were abandoned centuries or even millennia ago. I’m certain that Orwell would smile ruefully if he heard the expression “alternative facts”.
At the same time war, although mostly divorced now from the idea of conquest and the forming of empires, has turned into something even more insidious: a business. This aspect of warfare was obviously there from ancient times, but today there seems to be no focus at all on archaic notions, such as the exchange of land, the acquisition of slave labour or spoils, or even the prestige offered by victory. Modern war has been normalized as both an investment and a geopolitical tool, with only the slightest veneer of ideology to justify it. From ancient times and perhaps until the final collapse of the British Empire, any empire was focused on winning as many wars as possible. Today’s empire is content to only wage them constantly, regardless of the outcome, which is usually poor.
It doesn’t matter anyway, since all wars are fought well outside the borders of the U.S. As long as no bombs fall on home turf and no foreign boots step on it, the powers-that-be can claim victory, even if their troops were forced to leave a country in a terrible hurry.
A regression towards ignorance and the advent of endless war are two things that fly in the face of the idea of human progress as a straight line, angling out to infinity. This is starting to look again like a circle. If we visualized this circle as the face of a clock, we’d now be past the midnight apex, gradually accelerating toward the bottom.
I have to admit that I slightly mislead you, dear reader. Although I called it a circle in the title, this present course seems more likely to me to be a bell curve. I will explain.
We talked about how empires rose and fell, and how others rose in their place, either independently or by scooping up the remains of their predecessors, and using what they learned. These examples, these endless cycles are useful if we mean to look at the reasons behind the collapse of an empire, but not so much if we are focusing on what sprung up again from the ashes. The reason for this is simple: our globalized civilization is far from homogenous, yet extremely interconnected. It’s not a mass of land and people fused by force of conquest, but a group of countries brought together by an elaborate global web of trade and the influence of a single, dominant culture.
If we want to see what happens when not one, but a group of civilizations collapse in a domino-like fashion, we need look no further than the Bronze Age collapse. Tellingly, that event was connected with environmental shocks, mass migration, and the destruction of cities as a result of the two previous factors. Furthermore, the victims of this collapse were interdependent to a great extent. This makes our current predicament eerily similar to what these ancient peoples experienced, with one very significant difference: the root cause of the environmental shocks we are experiencing today is also the lifeblood of our civilization.
Fossil fuels.
That’s why I am talking about a bell curve, rather than a circle. After the lost civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean were gone, a Dark Age followed, but four or five centuries later new civilizations took their place. In our situation, there will be no new cycle. Why? Because our civilization has squandered the resources needed to get to and maintain our technological level. The only thing Bronze-Age civilizations needed to get back on their feet was truly renewable energy (manual and animal labour), stable weather for agriculture, and resources, which were still ample, especially considering that technology transitioned from using bronze to using iron as the metal of choice for weapons and tools.
We will have none of these things.
Today, we can do very little without burning fossil fuels, the weather is getting increasingly hostile, and resources are getting rarer every day, despite assurances to the contrary. In defiance of our best hopes, the production and assembly of renewable sources of energy are dependent not only on fossil fuels but on an array of rare earths and other minerals which are, unsurprisingly, also finite. It’s not just that all these resources will either run out or become unsustainably expensive to exploit, it’s not just that our continuing dependence on fossil fuels is destroying our ecosystem, on which we depend for survival but also that the unavoidable cycle of destruction and rebirth will deplete and/or compromise a large part of what is left.
Furthermore, the seemingly ubiquitous nature of our knowledge, thanks to the powers of the Internet and digital storage, can be gone in a second, once power runs out.
Unfortunately, our over-reliance on technology has made most of us unable, not only to survive but even to contemplate a post-technological world. We have lost touch with our physical reality, with the inherent fragility of our supply chains, which were put to the test by a relatively mild pandemic and still haven’t recovered fully, with the vulnerability of our intricate infrastructure, vividly exposed whenever a large natural disaster strikes. Years after major floods, fires, or earthquakes, many of the people who lost their homes are still homeless or staying in “temporary” lodgings. Insurance companies are pulling out of areas experiencing extreme weather, and the severity, reach, and frequency of these events is only going to increase and would do so for some time, even if we managed to drive emissions to zero today. Sooner or later, we will have to cut our losses and abandon the land where living will become unsustainable due to floods, droughts, hurricanes, fires, and, eventually, sea level rise. Sooner or later and unless we reverse our course, the world will be divided to areas that are unlivable due to weather extremes and to others where life will be a constant struggle.
We know that the goal of reaching net zero emissions, if it is even voluntarily achievable, is in fact decades away. It’s time that we don’t have and, yet, there seems to be no will or ability to accelerate any attempt at transition. The recent COP28 summit was just more proof of that fact. Current evaluations show that most countries still have vague plans about net zero targets by 2050, but are dragging their feet when it comes to concrete action.
2050 will be too late.
There will be no coming back from this circle. Magical solutions, such as CCS, are little more than wishful thinking. Even the best-case scenario will require great sacrifice from our side, a sacrifice that few people would be able to willingly accept. It’s not a choice anyone will be happy to make. But if the choice is made for us, the transition to a new paradigm will be unplanned, chaotic, and violent. Not unlike what happens in nature.
As much as it hurts me to admit it, we must abandon the childish fantasy of eternal progress. It’s almost as utopian as the one of eternal growth. Is it possible to do that in a world that has been practically infantilised by technological progress?
We’ll see.
