If you’ve ever wondered just how powerfully collective
thinking grips most members of our species—including, by and large, those who
most forcefully insist on the originality of their thinking—I have an
experiment to recommend: go out in public and advocate an idea about the future
that isn’t part of the conventional wisdom, and see what kind of reaction you
field. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll get some anger, some
argument, and some blank stares, but the most telling reaction will come from
people who try to force what you’re saying into the Procrustean bed of the
conventional wisdom, no matter how thoroughly they have to stretch and chop
what you’ve said to make it fit.
Now of course the project of this blog is guaranteed to
field such reactions, since the ideas explored here don’t just ignore the
conventional wisdom, they fling it to the floor and dance on the crumpled
remains. When I mention that I expect the decline and fall of industrial
civilization to take centuries, accordingly, people take this to mean that I
expect a smooth, untroubled descent. When I mention that I expect crisis before
this decade is finished, in turn, people take this to mean that I expect
industrial civilization to crash into ruin in the next few years. Some people,
for that matter, slam back and forth from one of these presuppositions to
another, as though they can’t fit the concepts of prolonged decline and
imminent crisis into their heads at the same moment.
That sort of response has become more common than usual in
recent months, and part of the reason may be that it’s been a while since I’ve
sketched out the overall shape of the future as I see it. Some of my readers may have lost track of the
broader picture, and more recent readers of this blog may not have encountered
that picture at all. For that reason among others, I’m going to spend this
week’s post summarizing the the decline and fall of industrial civilization.
Yes, I’m aware that many people believe that such a thing
can’t happen: that science, technology,
or some other factor has made progress irreversible. I’m also aware that many
people insist that progress may not be irreversible yet but will be if we all
just do that little bit more. These are—well, let’s be charitable and call them
faith-based claims. Generalizing from a sample size of one when the experiment
hasn’t yet run its course is poor scientific procedure; insisting that just
this once, the law of diminishing returns will be suspended for our benefit is
the antithesis of science. It amounts to treating progress as some sort of
beneficent fairy who can be counted on to tap us with her magic wand and give
us a wonderful future, just because we happen to want one.
The overfamiliar cry of “but it’s different this time!” is
popular, it’s comforting, but it’s also irrelevant. Of course it’s different
this time; it was different every other time, too. Neolithic civilizations
limited to one river valley and continental empires with complex technologies
have all declined and fallen in much the same way and for much the same
reasons. It may appeal to our sense of entitlement to see ourselves as
destiny’s darlings, to insist that the Progress Fairy has promised us a
glorious future out there among the stars, or even to claim that it’s
humanity’s mission to populate the galaxy, but these are another set of
faith-based claims; it’s a little startling, in fact, to watch so many people
who claim to have outgrown theology clinging to such overtly religious concepts
as humanity’s mission and destiny.
In the real world, when civilizations exhaust their resource
bases and wreck the ecological cycles that support them, they fall. It takes
between one and three centuries on average for the fall to happen—and no, big
complex civilizations don’t fall noticeably faster or slower than smaller and
simpler ones. Nor is it a linear
decline—the end of a civilization is a fractal process composed of crises on
many different scales of space and time, with equally uneven consequences. An
effective response can win a breathing space; in the wake of a less effective
one, part of what used to be normal goes away for good. Sooner or later, one
crisis too many overwhelms the last defenses, and the civilization falls,
leaving scattered remnants of itself that struggle and gleam for a while until
the long night closes in.
The historian Arnold Toynbee, whose study of the rise and
fall of civilizations is the most detailed and cogent for our purpose, has
traced a recurring rhythm in this process.
Falling civilizations oscillate between periods of intense crisis and
periods of relative calm, each such period lasting anywhere from a few decades
to a century or more—the pace is set by the speed of the underlying decline,
which varies somewhat from case to case. Most civilizations, he found, go
through three and a half cycles of crisis and stabilization—the half being, of
course, the final crisis from which there is no recovery.
That’s basically the model that I’m applying to our future.
One wrinkle many people miss is that we’re not waiting for the first of the
three and a half rounds of crisis and recovery to hit; we’re waiting for the
second. The first began in 1914 and ended around 1954, driven by the downfall
of the British Empire and the collapse of European domination of the globe.
During the forty years between Sarajevo and Dien Bien Phu, the industrial world
was hammered by the First World War, the Spanish Flu pandemic, the Great
Depression, millions of political murders by the Nazi and Soviet governments,
the Second World War, and the overthrow of European colonial empires around the
planet.
That was the first era of crisis in the decline and fall of
industrial civilization. The period from 1945 to the present was the first interval
of stability and recovery, made more prosperous and expansive than most
examples of the species by the breakneck exploitation of petroleum and other
fossil fuels, and a corresponding boom in technology. At this point, as fossil
fuel reserves deplete, the planet’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide and other
pollutants runs up against hard limits, and a galaxy of other measures of
impending crisis move toward the red line, it’s likely that the next round of
crisis is not far off.
What will actually trigger that next round, though, is
anyone’s guess. In the years leading up to 1914, plenty of people sensed that
an explosion was coming, some guessed that a general European war would set it
off, but nobody knew that the trigger would be the assassination of an Austrian
archduke on the streets of Sarajevo. The Russian Revolution, the March on Rome,
the crash of ‘29, Stalin, Hitler, Pearl Harbor, Auschwitz, Hiroshima? No one
saw those coming, and only a few people even guessed that something resembling
one or another of these things might be in the offing.
Thus trying to foresee the future of industrial society in
detail is an impossible task. Sketching out the sort of future that we could
get is considerably less challenging. History has plenty to say about the
things that happen when a civilization begins its long descent into chaos and
barbarism, and it’s not too difficult to generalize from that evidence. I don’t
claim that the events outlined below are what will happen, but I expect things
like them to happen; further than that, the lessons of history will not go.
With those cautions, here’s a narrative sketch of the kind
of future that waits for us.
*************************
The second wave of crisis began with the Ebola pandemic,
which emerged in West Africa early in 2014. Efforts to control the outbreak in
its early phases were ineffective and hopelessly underfunded. By the early
months of 2015, the first cases appeared in India, Egypt, and the Caribbean,
and from there the pandemic spread to much of the world. In August 2015 a
vaccine passed its clinical trials, but scaling up production and distribution
of the vaccine to get in front of a fast-spreading pandemic took time, and it
was early 2018 before the pandemic was finally under control everywhere in the
world. By then 1.6 billion people had died of the disease, and another 210
million had died as a result of the collapse of food distribution and health
care across large areas of the Third World.
The struggle against Ebola was complicated by the global
economic depression that got under way in 2015 as the “fracking” boom imploded
and travel and tourist industries collapsed in the face of the pandemic.
Financial markets were stabilized by vast infusions of government debt, as they
had been in the wake of the 2008 crash, but the real economy of goods and
services was not so easily manipulated; joblessness soared, tax revenues
plunged, and a dozen nations defaulted on their debts. Politicians insisted, as
they had done for the past decade, that giving more handouts to the rich would
restore prosperity; their failure to take any constructive action set the stage
for the next act in the tragedy.
The first neofascist parties were founded in Europe before
the end of the pandemic, and grew rapidly in the depression years. In 2020 and
2021, neofascists took power in three European nations on anti-immigration,
anti-EU and anti-banking industry platforms; their success emboldened similar
efforts elsewhere. Even so, the emergence of the neofascist American Peoples
Party as a major force in the 2024 US elections stunned most observers. Four
years later the APP swept the elections, and forced through laws that turned
Congress into an advisory body and enabled rule by presidential decree.
Meanwhile, as more European nations embraced neofascism, Europe split into
hostile blocs, leading to the dissolution of the European Union in 2032 and the
European War of 2035-2041.
By the time war broke out in Europe, the popularity of the
APP had fallen drastically due to ongoing economic troubles, and insurgencies
against the new regime had emerged in the South and mountain West. Counterinsurgency efforts proved no more
effective than they had in Iraq or Afghanistan, and over the next decade much
of the US sank into failed-state conditions. In 2046, after the regime used
tactical nuclear weapons on three rebel-held cities, a dissident faction of the
US military launched a nuclear strike on Washington DC, terminating the APP
regime. Attempts to establish a new federal government failed over the next two
years, and the former United States broke into seven nations.
Outside Europe and North America, changes were less
dramatic, with the Iranian civil war of 2027-2034 and the Sino-Japanese war of
2033-2035 among the major incidents. Most of the Third World was prostrate in
the wake of the Ebola pandemic, and world population continued to decline
gradually as the economic crisis took its toll and the long-term effects of the
pandemic played out. By 2048 roughly fifteen per cent of the world’s people
lived in areas no longer governed by a nation-state.
The years from 2048 to 2089 were an era of relative peace
under Chinese global hegemony. The chaos of the crisis years eliminated a great
many wasteful habits, such as private automobiles and widespread air travel,
and renewable resources padded out with what was left of the world’s fossil
fuel production were able to meet the reduced needs of a smaller and less
extravagant global population. Sea levels had begun rising steadily during the
crisis years; ironically, the need to relocate ports and coastal cities
minimized unemployment in the 2050s and 2060s, bringing relative prosperity to
the laboring classes. High and rising energy prices spurred deautomation of
many industries, with similar effects.
The pace of climate change accelerated, however, as carbon
dioxide from the reckless fossil fuel use of the crisis years had its
inevitable effect, pushing the polar ice sheets toward collapse and making
harvests unpredictable around the globe. Drought gripped the American
Southwest, forcing most of the region’s population to move and turning the
region into a de facto stateless zone.
The same process destabilized much of the Middle East and south Asia,
laying the groundwork for renewed crisis.
Population levels stabilized in the 2050s and 2060s and
began to contract again thereafter. The primary culprit was once again disease,
this time from a gamut of pathogens. The expansion of tropical diseases into
formerly temperate regions, the spread of antibiotic resistance to effectively
all bacterial pathogens, and the immense damage to public health infrastructure
during the crisis years all played a part in that shift. The first migrations
of climate refugees also helped spread disease and disruption.
The last decade before 2089 was a time of renewed troubles,
with political tensions pitting China and its primary allies, Australia and
Canada, against the rising power of the South American Union (formed by 2067’s
Treaty of Montevideo between Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay), and insurgencies in eastern Europe that set the
stage for the Second European War. Economic troubles driven by repeated crop
failures in North America and China added to the strains, and kept anyone but
scientists from noticing what was happening to the Greenland ice sheet until it
was too late.
The collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, which began in
earnest in the summer of 2089, delivered a body blow to an already fraying
civilization. Meltwater pouring into the North Atlantic shut down the
thermohaline circulation, the main driver of the world’s ocean currents,
unleashing drastic swings in weather across most of the world’s climate zones,
while sea levels jolted upwards. As these trends worsened, climate refugees
fled drought, flood, or famine in any direction that promised survival—a
promise that in most cases would not be kept. Those nations that opened their
borders collapsed under the influx of millions of starving migrants; those who
tried to close their borders found themselves at war with entire peoples on the
move, in many cases armed with the weapons of pre-crisis armies.
The full impact of the Greenland disaster took time to
build, but the initial shock to weather patterns was enough to help trigger the
Second European War of 2091-2111. The Twenty Years War, as it was called,
pitted most of the nations of Europe against each other in what began as a
struggle for mastery and devolved into a struggle for survival. As the fighting
dragged on, mercenaries from the Middle East and Africa made up an ever larger
fraction of the combatants. The final defeat of the Franco-Swedish alliance in
2111, though it ended the war, left Europe a shattered wreck unable to stem the
human tide from the devastated regions further south and east.
Elsewhere, migration and catastrophic climate change brought
down most of the nations of North America, while China dissolved in civil war.
Australia and the South American Union both unexpectedly benefited as rainfall
increased over their territory; both nations survived the first wave of
troubles more or less intact, only to face repeated invasions by armed migrants
in the following decades. Neither quite succumbed, but most of their resources
went into the fight for survival.
Historians attempting to trace the course of events in most
of the world are hampered by sparse and fragmentary records, as not only
nation-states and their institutions but even basic literacy evaporated in many
regions. As long as the migrations continued, settled life was impossible
anywhere close to the major corridors of population movement; elsewhere, locals
and migrants worked or fought their way to a modus vivendi, or failing that,
exterminated one another. Violence, famine and disease added their toll and drove
the population of the planet below two billion.
By the 2160s, though, the mass migrations were mostly at an
end, and relative stability returned to many parts of the planet. In the
aftermath, the South American Union became the world’s dominant power, though
its international reach was limited to a modest blue-water navy patrolling the
sea lanes and a network of alliances with the dozen or so functioning
nation-states that still existed. Critical shortages of nonrenewable resources
made salvage one of the few growth industries of the era; an enterprising
salvage merchant who knew how to barter with the villagers and nomads of the
stateless zones for scrap technology from abandoned cities could become rich in
a single voyage.
Important as they were, these salvaged technologies were
only accessible to the few. The Union
and a few other nation-states still kept some aging military aircraft
operational, but maritime traffic once again was carried by tall ships, and
horse-drawn wagons became a standard mode of transport on land away from the
railroads. Radio communication had long since taken over from the last fitful
fragments of the internet, and electric grids were found only in cities. As for
the high-end technologies of a century and a half before, few people even
remembered that they had ever existed at all.
In the end, though, the era of Union supremacy was little
more than a breathing space, made possible only by the collapse of collective
life in the stateless zones. As these began to recover from the era of
migrations, and control over salvage passed into the hands of local warlords,
the frail economies of the nation-states suffered. Rivalry over access to
salvage sites still available for exploitation led to rising tensions between
the Union and Australia, and thus to the last act of the tragedy.
This was set in motion by the Pacific War between the Union
and Australia, which broke out in 2238 and shredded the economies of both
nations. After the disastrous Battle of
Tahiti in 2241, the Union navy’s power to keep sea lanes open and free of
piracy was a thing of the past. Maritime trade collapsed, throwing each region
onto its own limited resources and destabilizing those parts of the stateless
zones that had become dependent on the salvage industry. Even those nations
that retained the social forms of the industrial era transformed themselves
into agrarian societies where all economics was local and all technology
handmade.
The negotiated peace of 2244 brought only the briefest
respite: a fatally weakened Australia was overrun by Malik Ibrahim’s armies
after the Battle of Darwin in 2251, and the Union fragmented in the wake of the
coup of 2268 and the civil war that followed. Both nations had become too
dependent on the salvaged technologies of an earlier day; the future belonged
to newborn successor cultures in various corners of the world, whose
blacksmiths learned how to hammer the scrap metal of ruined cities into
firearms, wind turbines, fuel-alcohol stills, and engines to power handbuilt
ultralight aircraft. The Earth’s first global civilization had given way to its
first global dark age, and nearly four centuries would pass before new
societies would be stable enough to support the amenities of civilization.
*************************
I probably need to repeat that this is the kind of future I
expect, not the specific future I foresee; the details are illustrative, not
predictive. Whether the Ebola epidemic spins out of control or not, whether the
United States undergoes a fascist takeover or runs headlong into some other disaster,
whether China or some other nation becomes the stabilizing hegemon in the next
period of relative peace—all these are anyone’s guess. All I’m suggesting is
that events like the ones I’ve outlined are likely to occur as industrial civilization
stumbles down the curve of decline and fall.
In the real world, in the course of ordinary history, these things happen. So does the decline and fall of civilizations that deplete their resource bases and wreck the ecological cycles that support them. As I noted above, I’m aware that true believers in progress insist that this can’t happen to us, but a growing number of people have noticed that the Progress Fairy got her pink slip some time ago, and ordinary history has taken her place as the arbiter of human affairs. That being the case, getting used to what ordinary history brings may be a highly useful habit to cultivate just now.
