Do I Want Civilization to Collapse?
Do you? The answer might surprise you.
[Letter #012]
Good morning, son.
A couple of days ago, your mother informed me that she had been speaking with a coworker about her pregnancy. Neither uncommon nor surprising. Her colleague, however, suggested that we have two children, rather than just one. She said that siblings tend to adjust socially better than only-child kids and that they can entertain each other as they grow. Your mother smiled and advised her colleague that she and I are both 40 years old, a bit on the late side for one baby, let alone two. Her colleague, an attractive and youthful-looking lady, confided that she was actually 44 and had two small children herself, the younger being a 5-month-old baby. It was a compelling argument for your mother.
To my own surprise, this didn’t really faze me as I might have expected. It took me years of agonizing and deliberation to decide on having just one child, and now we were considering the option of two. But, honestly, I’m open to it. I suppose, for me, it was all about the binary of children versus child-free. Now that we’ve embraced the former, the quantity (within good reason) seems fairly inconsequential. We’ll see how the pregnancy goes this time around. Of course, if we do end up deciding on two, I’m going to have to figure out some other way of addressing these letters. Dammit, you kids aren’t even born yet, and already you’re complicating my plans!
I’m titling this letter with a question: “Do I want civilization to collapse?” That’s a pretty heavy question, I admit, but I think there’s a lot more to it than what it might seem at first. If someone were to ask me something like that a decade ago, I might have believed they meant something more like human extinction or planetary annihilation, perhaps a la dinosaur-ending meteor impact. I know a little more these days about both subjects, nihilism and civilization, and I’ve come to the conclusion that neither are particularly desirable. Bear with me as I try to explain.
There’s a whole lot of misunderstanding surrounding the concept of “civilization,” but I think it’s important to get a decent grasp of something as ubiquitous as this in society. A buzz phrase these days is “civilizational collapse,” as it feels like more and more folks are starting to sense that there are some serious and unresolvable issues happening out there. I just don’t think they really grok the meaning of what “civilization” is or how it’s collapsing. Here I am making another reference to Heinlein, according to what Google tells me. I guess I really need to read his books, as this is the second time he’s come up in our letters.
I think if I were to ask the average person on the street, “What does ‘the collapse of civilization’ mean?” they would probably give it a couple of brief moments of consideration before responding with a terse, “Please leave me alone, sir, or I’ll call the police.” But, let’s say someone far less threatening, such as your mother, were to do the same. She might receive a response resembling the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” with an almost certain inclusion of Mad Max blended in somewhere. Could be some references to The Walking Dead or other post-apocalyptic fiction. Well, it ain’t that.
What civilization is — you know, there’s really little reason for me to reinvent the wheel here. I’m going to quote a long section because it covers a lot of info fairly concisely, and it seems to do so better than I could. This is from Bright Green Lies, which is a really good book that doesn’t include any of Derrick Jensen’s transphobia (yes, I’ll mention it every time).
Agriculture is what creates the human pattern called civilization. Civilization is not the same as culture — all humans create culture. A culture is, broadly, the set of customs, traditions, and values particular to a group of people. Civilization is the word for one specific way of life: people living in cities. Most definitions of city reference permanence, population density, and division of labor as a city’s salient features. Rarely stated is the reality of the people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources: city dwellers need more than the land can give. Food, water, and energy have to come from somewhere else. From that point forward, it doesn’t matter what lovely, peaceful values people hold in their hearts. The society is dependent on imperialism and genocide because no one willingly gives up their land, their water, their trees. … Over and over and over, the pattern is the same. There’s a bloated power center surrounded by conquered colonies, from which the center extracts what it wants, until eventually it collapses.
– Jensen et al, Bright Green Lies [emphasis mine]
To further drive the point, here’s aboriginal philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta describing a city.
Growth is the engine of the city — if the increase stops, the city falls. Because of this, the local resources are used up quickly and the lands around the city die. The biota is stripped, then the topsoil goes, then the water. It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilisations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn’t desert before that.
– Yunkaporta, Sand Talk [emphasis mine]
Or, an even quicker summary, perhaps falsely attributed to Chateaubriand.
“Forests precede people; deserts follow them”
– François-René de Chateaubriand, attrib.
That’s the meat and potatoes of the problem right there. That’s what “civilization” is. It’s humans living together in cities, a behavior that has long-term consequences and is fundamentally unsustainable. Anything that requires constant growth in order to survive, incessantly chewing up finite resources, is by definition not sustainable. That’s the model of a cancer cell, and it’s the antithesis of what is natural and healthy.
For a couple hundred thousand years, homo sapiens just ran about the world in smallish tribes, hunting and gathering, chasing or being chased by various other sorts of animals, with the occasional gardening thrown in. This was probably the last time that humanity lived fully within sustainable bounds of the planet. We didn’t need to clear cut forests or strip mine the earth. We didn’t try to force our will upon nature itself (well, we might have tried, but it wouldn’t have mattered at that tech level). We spent our days much like every other animal on the planet: eating, sleeping, procreating, playing, and expelling waste. We weren’t civilized because we didn’t live in cities. There was no civilization.
Joseph Tainter taught us that when a society encounters a problem, it often attempts to solve that problem by adding complexity. You don’t need civilization to add complexity, as any group of people can do that together. However, if you do have civilization, then complexity is requisite.
As a quick aside, an example of people outside of civilization adding complexity would be that if there was a dispute over which person gets to claim the kill on a hunting trip, tribes may add a rule about who shot first, who delivered a coup de grâce, or maybe they split the credit or something. I enjoy how the !Kung San people do it, where they credit the person who owned the arrow that got the kill, even if that person didn’t go hunting that day. By the way, the exclamation point before “Kung” above means that you make a clicking sound with your tongue before saying the rest of the name.
So anyway, some ten or so thousand years ago, pre-civilization cultures across the planet began facing a similar problem. Some evaded the problem for far longer than others, but it seems to have caught up with nearly every society up to present. That is, there would eventually be too many people and not enough food. The reasons for this problem seem to vary whenever and wherever you look, whether it’s extended famine, drought, prey extinction, or something climate change-related, but the consequences were roughly the same. In the “old world,” cultures seem to have encountered it sooner than those in the Americas, but eventually they would also have to deal with it.
The complexity added to ameliorate the problem? Farming, of course. Christopher Ryan is quick to point out in his Civilized to Death that this isn’t something that humans took to very quickly. Farming sucks! No one wants to have to rely on it. It’s hard work, and sometimes the crops fail anyway. Not to mention that when they first got started, no one had yet bred crops to have large, sweet edible bits and not thick husks or woody fibers. Grains were not much more than roadside grasses like you might find off the highway today — more fiber than digestible sugar.
When I grew up, school taught us that it was an “agricultural revolution,” which suggested that someone invented it and it just spread like wildfire across the globe. Ryan says that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Apparently, it took something like a thousand years to catch on and become a regular institution around the world. Even so, people didn’t just hear about it and immediately throw down their spears and take up a plow. It took a lot of false starts before it became a regular part of people’s lives.
I get that. I like gardening and all, but it would truly suck to live and die at the mercy of the harvest. Much better if lunch was simply a trap or fishing spear away. I mean, if hunting and gathering wasn’t a superior system, I doubt humans would have kept using it for the vast majority of our existence. But, when there are just so many humans concentrated together, you gotta do what you gotta do.
Complication begets complication though. Once you start thinking in terms of harvests, events that take place only once or twice a year, you then have to start thinking about how food will last until the next harvest. When we gathered berries and hunted game, the best place to store extra food was in your neighbor’s stomach. Security comes from knowing that your tribe is well-fed, as they will probably be feeding you in turn for quite some time in the future.
When it comes to harvests though, you have to think about preserving food. Since you can’t easily carry an entire harvest around with you everywhere you go, and since you often have to stay with land that you’re actively farming for the next harvest, it makes sense to settle down the nomadic lifestyle and set up a village to store up the excess food and other resources. This isn’t the way it always worked out, but it seems to have been common enough. From here, villages can grow to cities. This is where civilization begins.
Now, the complication has reached new levels entirely. With cities, you have to figure out city planning. Where are new structures built? How are they built? What happens to the stored food and how is it distributed to everyone? Does everyone farm for food, or are there some who still hunt and gather? Are there those who don’t work to acquire food at all? What about the children and the elderly? Who decides the answers to any of these questions?
That last one is probably the biggest one to me, for obvious reasons. When food is stored up, it becomes a resource. If you place a person in front of the storehouse with a weapon, it becomes a restricted resource. If you restrict a resource from people who need it, and they can’t just acquire it somewhere else, then you are asserting a hierarchy, and the weapon suggests that you’re willing to employ violence to enforce that hierarchy. Now you have power, and to answer the final question of the previous paragraph: the person with the power decides how questions are answered.
This was the birth of the first god of my new pantheon, Hierarchy. This was the beginning of classes, kings, and the point at which our species first learned (and were forced) to kneel in deference to their “betters.” I don’t think civilization will necessarily always lead to Hierarchy, but it certainly seems to trend that way.
Then, layers upon layers of complexity are created to manage how humans behave when we’re concentrated in the city. Tainter says that this is how every civilization has behaved so far, ours included. Complexity increases to address each new problem, becoming progressively more byzantine, until the civilization reaches a breaking point. Then, the whole system collapses like a house of cards, and the cycle starts over.
A large part of that system-destroying complexity is the ever-increasing demand for resources and the environmental destruction that results from it. Usually, after a couple hundred years of hunger for energy and minerals, a region is left completely wasted. Without the wealth of the land, a civilization can’t continue.
In the past, these collapses were regional. During the period when the Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures were collapsing, China was doing fine under the Shang dynasty. During the European “dark ages,” civilizations thrived in Mesoamerica. Hypothetically, if a person had the means, they could traverse the globe from a failing civilization to another that might enjoy spectacular growth for another couple of centuries, untroubled by the problems of someone else’s dark age.
The empires of the past few centuries got clever though. They learned that instead of destroying their own lands in search of resources to exploit, they could conquer a different part of the planet, steal their resources, and ship it all back to the imperial core. This might crash the colonial holdings, but it would allow the core to remain wealthy, so long as they could keep finding more wealth to import. If that meant spreading the empire’s control to more colonies, then so be it.
These days, the “city” is represented by all of the modern empires collectively, the US still holding onto its seat as the king of the mountain. Although, for only being two and a half centuries old, the American Empire is showing obvious frailty of age. Even so, the wealth-pump machine of any empire continues regular operation until it self-destructs.
That is to say, the obvious consequence of international trade, which is of course the mechanism by which wealth is transferred from “client” states to the imperial core, is effectively a united planetary civilization. All empires are tied together, whether or not they approve of that condition, and all of their colonial holdings are bound with them. This is why, for instance, that “trade wars” between empires never really do much. The global powers cannot survive without each other. When modern civilization goes down, it’s going to go down for everyone on every continent.
In fairness, it probably won’t go down everywhere all at once. I’m sure it will appear more like a series of sharp drops intermixed with periods of flattening out or possible slight recoveries, and that will vary by location. The system will do everything that it can to survive and recover, but the overall trajectory will be down. This is unavoidable, as that’s just how civilization has always worked and appears to be working out this time.
That brings me back to the question of this letter. Am I anti-civilization? Do I want it to collapse? The answer is a massively qualified “yes, but.”
I once heard that the first person to invent the automobile was also, by default, the person who invented the automobile crash. In order to reduce the occurrences of accidents, complexity was added in the form of laws about how cars are to be operated on roads. To enforce these laws, you have to have patrol officers who drive around and punish citizens who don’t follow them. This is all much more complicated, I presume, than what the inventor of the first automobile had in mind. Yet, all of these levels of complexity now exist because the car was invented.
Pardon my nonsense thinking, but the above paragraph also implies its reverse is true. One surefire way of getting rid of all car crashes forever would be to simply get rid of all cars. Let’s hypothetically assume this is possible with our magic wand. With a wave, we’ve removed all auto-related problems, all auto-loan and insurance payments, and all traffic stops. We’ve also dramatically reduced the level of complexity in society. Great, right? For some, it certainly would be, and I’m sure that the environment would have nothing but positive reviews for such a plan.
However, suddenly zapping all cars out of existence would wreck everything that we’ve built the world’s infrastructure on, especially in the US. You could still walk on the roads, but without long-haul trucks to deliver absolutely everything from raw goods to finished products, every aspect of commerce would cease instantly. We’ve constructed just-in-time supply lines for everything. Stores don’t actually have “storage” anymore.
The knock-on implications here are pretty devastating, to be honest. With supply lines shut down, there’s no food in any store after about three days. Restaurants wouldn’t hold out much longer than that. Patients would be going without medicine and suffering complications and deaths from that within a month. Schools would cease to function completely, simply because getting the students to the campus would be impossible. Actually, governments at all but the most local levels would become wholly inconsequential, since they would be strained to breaking if they expected any degree of compliance or enforcement (again, at least in the US).
Ok, so that’s terribly silly, right? Actually, it may not be by the time you read this, but today it still sounds silly. But, that’s what I’m getting at. All of our systems are built around these technologies. If cars just ceased to be, or more realistically ceased to be useful, then everything that relies on automobiles would also cease.
What if, though, we substitute something else in there instead of cars. What if we demanded that everyone just stop using oil? We’d get basically the same effects as above, but we would also no longer be able to build anything, operate heavy machinery, or produce any plastic goods at all, including medical devices. Another major complication that those folks don’t think about is that we wouldn’t be able to construct these “renewable” energy systems they love so much. We don’t build those using renewable energy. We build them with good old-fashioned fossils. No oil means no solar panels either.
Just today, I was reading through an article wherein the author was grumbling that our president had the gall to sign more approvals to mine for natural gas in the US. How could he?! After he pledged that climate change was our most pressing concern and how the US would be a leader in the fight against climate change! He must be the most corrupt politician in DC! Grumble, grumble, mumble, mutter.
Indeed.
What this author is essentially saying is, “What if we just stopped digging up and burning natural gas?” A noble thought, if you’ll allow the dad joke. We would instantly stop causing more damage to the environment, that’s for certain. But, what else would we stop in this process?
Considering how important it is to the folks in power that the supply continues uninterrupted, notwithstanding their interests in improving their bank accounts, we could presume that natural gas, much like coal and oil, is ever-present in virtually all aspects of our lives in ways that we simply can’t quantify. Ways that we probably won’t recognize until it’s gone. I do know that it’s used directly in heating households and for producing fertilizers to feed Earth’s massive human population. So, let’s just short-hand this by saying that if we “just stop natural gas,” then countless people are going to die. Same as oil. It’s all built on fossil fuels.
I suppose some folks might say I’m presenting a straw-man argument here. That if we “stopped” using oil or natural gas, that we would actually phase it out slowly, replacing it with better sources of energy along the way. Considering that there’s nothing available to shift to, as “renewables” all require fossils to produce and replace and nuclear simply can’t be built out fast enough, I’ve got no other option to consider except that this will just mean less and less energy available over a longer period of time rather than instantly. That would simply make the suffering stretch out over years, as some people would continue to get service and others wouldn’t.
I’ll give you three guesses who will have and who will have-not, at least until the tap fully runs dry and everyone is a have-not. Therefore, what I’m saying is that we can accept neither stoppage nor reduction. The supply must flow, and seeing as the population is ever growing along with the rest of the system, it must increase over time. Otherwise, London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady. I don’t like it at all. It’s a predicament.
With that, we’ve got a moral quandary. We’ve got civilization, which is people living in cities, which has developed into empires affecting the entire planet. We built out the entire wealth-pumping extraction machine on technology only possible with cheap, abundant fossil fuels. The imperial machine is depleting all planetary resources in order to convert them into pollution and waste.
So, if we “just stop X” in the name of planetary preservation, then we’re seeing the end of civilization, and countless people will die because the systems that support us all will crash. If we don’t stop X, and we just continue business as usual, then we’re going to see civilization eventually collapse as Limits to Growth predicted, and countless people will die anyway.
The difference will be whether we cause civilization to end on our own terms, thus starting the mass die-off sooner and limiting our overall damage to the planet, or whether we simply wait and allow natural processes of unrestrained climate destruction to end our civilization for us, whereupon we’ll see a mass die-off a little later. It seems obvious when it’s all added up, yet we bristle at the suggestion that civilization is bad, actually, and maybe we’d be better off all along without it.
It’s a rhetorical question anyway. No one is going to ever “just stop X.” Humans have evolved to avoid discomfort as much as possible. Nothing could be more uncomfortable to the modern human imagination than to return to a pre-Industrial way of life, at least for most of us alive today. Myself, I think it would take a little acclimating, but it would otherwise be a pretty healthy and happy existence.
Even if we did successfully pull off a campaign to “just stop X,” we would just accelerate the mass die-off that losing that resource would cause. Gaia would certainly appreciate it, but there’s nothing pleasant about mass human casualties. And, could you imagine the blame we would place on the person or people behind the decision to effectively destroy civilization? I think “the new Hitler” would probably be an understatement. If nature destroys it for us, then there’s no one to blame except the species as a whole.
No, we’ll just keep on keeping on. Not solely because that’s what the powerful people need to happen in order to remain in power, but just because doing anything else would be to flip the table over, sending the game pieces flying everywhere. I don’t think anyone has the nerve to do that anyway, to be honest. Not with a bang but a whimper, and all that stuff.
Civilizational collapse has already started, and it’ll continue for the next few centuries. With it goes our access to these polluting resources, as well as life support for most of the eight billion humans alive today. It will take a long time for humans to establish a sustainable norm, but our journey there is inexorable. We might eventually just evolve into a different species of “human” altogether. Wouldn’t that be something? Maybe homo novus or something.
I would like us to do as little damage to the planet as possible on our way back to sustainability, but I know that it’ll be what it’ll be. It seems we’re destined to rage against the dying light. Go out the same way you came in, right? Naked, screaming, and bloody. Nothing I can really do about it. Nothing except to keep trying to grow things.
That’s it then. I’m anti-civilization. I don’t think we ought to have become “civilized” in the first place, but we did. I also think that on the long timeline, from a cosmic view, it will serve humanity best to end civilization. So, yes, I want it to end. But! I don’t look forward to the consequences of such an ending. I don’t want the human population to drop by billions. I don’t want people to suffer for lacking food, medication, or proper shelter. I think that our descendants, whoever survives all of this, will be much better off than we ever were. It just falls to us to deal with the complications that the predicament presents to us.
We just do what we can, right?
Oh, hey. My little woodchuck buddy emerged from his hibernation and I saw him today. I named him Charlie last year, and I like to watch him eat the grass outside. I hope his descendants survive our collapse. As a burrowing mammal, I like his odds. He’s a funny little friend, although he probably still thinks I want to eat him or something. I definitely do not though.
I love you very much, son. I’m not sure if I was very clear in this letter. Perhaps you’ll take away something useful anyway. I very much look forward to meeting you. Four months to go, if everything works out. Until then, I’ll keep talking with you here in these letters.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
