Is Our Global Civilization Collapsing?
The whole thing rests on the shared idea of civility. And not only is civility disappearing — the very concept is under attack.
Maybe you’re familiar with the saying: civilization is never more than nine meals away from anarchy.
There are variations on this quote going back to, as best I can tell, the Roman Empire. Replace “civilization” with the empire, the kingdom, the country, society, humanity, the world and replace “anarchy” with chaos, revolution, catastrophe, ruin, etc., and somebody across the centuries has uttered it.
It makes sense. When people have un-met needs, the rules of civilization are about to disappear, and quick.
I’m no doomsday theorist. I actually have a lot of optimism for people banding together and figuring out solutions when times are tough.
But lately we’re seeing some disturbing trends.
Murder rates have soared in large cities. Arson is up. Carjackings are up. Violent altercations at airports have surged.
The equivalent of our town square, social media, has become a cesspool of vitriol and censorship. Ironically, the technology that was supposed to democratize knowledge and connect us all has driven us into us-versus-them identity groups, ad hominem attacks, and echo chambers. Social media algorithms are spectacularly designed to reinforce what you already believe. No one listens to or considers alternative viewpoints. As a species, we would now rather silence someone we disagree with than debate them.
When “civilization” is characterized by hateful attacks, protests and riots, silencing and violence, it’s hard not to wonder if civilization is taking its farewell bow.
So, are we on the verge of collapse?
Well, “collapse” is a tricky concept.
As the preeminent scholar on societal collapse, Jared Diamond, has said, the reasons for societal collapse are always complex and multivariate. Anyone who tells you it happens for only one reason is either lying or stupid.
Fair enough. But one of the themes he likes to return to often is the inability of a society to solve its problems owing to an inability to agree on a shared stake in solving that problem. Either short-term interests conflict with long-term interests, or the interests of the decision-making elite conflict with that of the masses, or one group sees its interests as more primary than another group, etc.
In other words, a society fails when we cease seeing ourselves as a unified society.
What we’re seeing today, unfortunately, is a breakdown in basic civility.
Civility, I think, means an ethics of shared circumstance. We agree that whatever differences we may possess, we are in this SOB together, and that we have a shared stake in the outcome of our decisions, and so we agree to certain baseline of respectful behavior toward one another, even if we disagree.
If you and I survived a plane crash on a remote island, for example, our “civilization” now has a population of two, and even though we might disagree on our best course of action — you think food is a priority, say, and I think shelter is a priority — we agree that our decisions are for both our benefit and that we each have a stake in the outcome. Our civility vanishes the moment we decide we are each going to grab up whatever we can for ourselves, and screw the other person and their outcomes. In that moment, our civilization ceases to be, and we become, in effect, two warring tribes or gangs.
Civility does not require across-the-board agreement. It is the underlying idea that even if we disagree, we nevertheless commit to civilization as a shared project that we each have a rightful stake in preserving. In a civil society, dissent and disagreements are to be expected and encouraged — so long as they are civil.
When civility goes, it’s Me versus You, Us versus Them, my gang versus your gang.
We cease to be a “civilization” in that moment. In effect, we enter into the world of Mad Max or the Walking Dead, where the object is not to preserve society but for the strongest warlord/clan/tribe to emerge as the victor.
There are disturbing signs the Mad Max reality is emerging.
When we start to see social media hashtags like #burnitalldown you don’t have to tease apart the hidden layers of meaning or subtleties of public sentiment. It represents a desire to unmake society.
Instead of banding together to try and figure out our collective problems we are undergoing massive schisms. Instead of co-operating, we are going to war, propagandizing for our “side”, attempting to silence any opposition.
The ability for me to communicate the contents of my head-casing to you, and for you to do the same to me, is breaking down. We are devolving into ire-filled gangs who do not hear each other.
It is exactly how the unmakers of society will get their wish.
Though, when Toecutter or Negan comes for them, they may think again.
What’s Really Going On: A Collapse in Our Shared Story
I recently watched a great interview with author Jamie Wheal, in which he described humans as basically “storytelling monkeys”. We don’t re-invent and re-discover the world anew each day. We economize. We develop patterns, habits, and ways of doing things (and ways of thinking about things) which seem to serve us, and we cling to them. We act out narratives about what we are doing, and why, and about our place in the world.
For many thousands of years, that narrative was religion. The story we acted out was that we are God’s children, doing His work on Earth so that we might enjoy eternal salvation in the afterlife. When we became confused, we had religious authorities to interpret God’s will and tell us what to do. This was the background narrative for all of one’s daily decisions — the story that served humanity and kept it going.
When that story broke down, as any unsatisfactory story is bound to do, we adopted a new narrative: each of us is a free and sovereign being and in possession of the same rights as everyone else. Inclusivity and freedom for everyone. Equal rights. Fraternity. No kings and emperors ruling over us. A brotherhood of man. We restructured society accordingly, and spent a couple centuries fighting many wars of liberation from medieval power structures. Independence, sovereignty, civil rights, representation, inclusivity, and civility became our shared project.
But society has come to find that story unsatisfactory, too. Old hierarchies have re-established themselves, and many feel dispossessed and excluded.
So, with no satisfactory narrative, the storytelling monkeys are telling a new story: divide and grab up whatever you can for you and your kind. Madness and tribalism is the only way.
Behold your news feeds.
At the same time, and perhaps as a logical reaction against the nihilism, there has been a widespread reversion to authoritarian thinking. On this story, as with the old religion story, only “authorities” get to make pronouncements or decisions or get to say what is true, and we must all fall into lockstep without questioning.
But, as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out, a mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. The Enlightenment genie is out of the bottle. We are well aware that we are free to question the authoritarian story, too.
Why should institutions and authorities have the only say? Shouldn’t we take the brightest and best insights from any walk of society? Why shouldn’t the answers to our collective problems come from outside our established institutions? Indeed, if those institutions have failed us, we should expect the answers to come from outside. (And we should expect those institutions to frantically protect themselves by insinuating that everyone who is not inside them is automatically, by that fact, wrong.)
So the question then becomes, if our institutions are a failure, can we question and modify our institutions without burning them down?
I believe the “burn it all down” sentiment is a catastrophic mistake. It is a bad response to an unsatisfactory story, not to mention a poor use of the organ that lives between your ears.
The only real world result of “burn it all down” will be the chaos of gang warfare. As Jamie Wheal points out, people who are ignorant of history don’t realize just how long it took to build up the institutions that we have. Basically, it took from the fall of the Roman Empire in 400 AD until the Declaration of Independence in 1776 AD — almost fourteen hundred years — for humanity to build itself back up to the same standard of living and understanding of democratic ideas.
Are you ready for fourteen hundred years of Mad Max? Do you really think you and your family will survive the first four months? Can we just skip ahead 1400 years or so, when we realize what a monumental mistake we made, and establish a liberal society again?
It took centuries of bloodshed to topple authoritarian rule and power structures and to establish rights and freedoms. And now people want to chuck those institutions and re-embrace authoritarian rule, with their gang or warlord sitting in the victor’s seat, imposing their will on everyone else.
A better response would be to tell a better story. Yes, there is much that is unsatisfactory about the modern world, but there is also much that is beautiful and worth preserving. Up until 2020, worldwide poverty was the lowest it had been in recorded history. Violent crime was at a historical low. Same with armed conflicts. More people had access to education than ever before. More people voted in elections than ever before. Are any of these things perfect? No, of course not. But consider that the story of freedom and individual rights and inclusivity for all is not a bad one — it’s just not finished. Acknowledge the progress that we’ve made. Just because the project of liberalism is not complete and perfect does not make it wrong.
What we need to do is write the next chapter of our story in a way that makes sense of all the good that we are capable of, and preserve it, and try to continue that project.
The alternative, quite frankly, is to cast our lot with one villain or another trying to make their Utopian story true. Historically, this has resulted in stories which map badly onto reality. Whenever it’s been attempted, civil society gets swift-ejected, and what you end up with are thugs and warlords trying to impose their vision on the rest of humanity, to the misery of all.
History does not lie. Utopias have a way of becoming dystopias.
In my view, we’ve taken a giant first step into one of those dystopias right now. We are attempting to act out a bad story. And because it is a bad story, people are dividing into warring gangs or turning to authoritarian figures for the answers. The hope for our civilization as a globe depends not on starting anew on some Utopian project, but on acknowledging and preserving everything good that we’ve built and continuing to build on it.
It’s not “burn it down”, or “build back better” or a “Great Reset”.
It’s stop fucking around with dangerous social experiments and get back to building our civil society.
Emphasis on civil.