This is part 13 of a series on world-building Climate Change scenarios for fiction.
Once upon a time, HG Wells predicted the collapse of civilisation.
The Shape of Things to Come is one of Wells’ lesser known works (for good reason – the film version is more digestible than the novel). In the story civilisation takes a bad turn, collapses into the barbarism, before at last being saved by the rational scientific people who create utopia.
HG Wells published the book in 1933 (the film was 1936). He accurately predicted World War Two would start around 1940 between Germany and Poland over Danzig. After that his predictions go down the toilet. The Great Depression and the War causes the nations of the world to disintegrate. Plague kills off much of humanity. Civilisation plunges into the Dark Ages. The 1980s include such fun things as the “revolt of the sea pirates”.
HG Wells rightly looked at his world and saw that things were fundamentally screwy, and therefore it would all end badly. In that he was correct. Many people today are writing works similar to The Shape of Things to Come. They too look at our world and see that things are fundamentally screwy, and therefore this will all end badly. In that they are also likely correct. Then, they too predict that civilisation will collapse.
It might be a good idea to investigate just how valid that prediction really is.
Conceptually, this entire notion of “The Collapse of Civilisation” turns out to be a wee bit squishy (and frankly, more than a wee bit racist).
What is Civilisation Anyway?
The term “civilisation” originated during the colonial era. Civilisation was a word to distinguish cultivated civilized folk from barbarian savages. Civilisation allows the ranking societies in the great chain of human progress.
The way Things to Come (the film version) uses the term “civilisation” is very telling, and serves as a good example of the origins of this entire double concept of civilisation and its ever threatened doom.
In the film, at one point an Enlightened Engineer visiting a Barbaric Feudal Chiefdom refers to his Brotherhood of Engineers as the trustees of Civilisation. He says this in a context which is clearly still an urban society, indeed a semi-industrial society with modern (albeit rusty) technology. This society however is not Civilisation. It is Barbarism. Thus, Civilisation is a set of moral judgements, an idea, an ethical principle.
Civilisation is civilized. Barbarism is barbaric.
That’s how we know if civilisation still exists or has collapsed. The Chief is barbaric, ipso facto, no Civilisation here. Only globalized rational technocratic order counts as Civilisation. Civilisation is common sense, sanity, law, science, order, trade, the unification of the planet under a single hegemonic quasi-fascist World State that shall usher in utopia. That’s Civilized.
Paradoxically this utopia shall be created by precisely the same methods that destroyed it - massive applications of technological force, indeed military force, only good this time. The goal of this Civilisation is to annex or conquer all barbaric savagery. That Barbarism shall be stamped out, like some kind of atavistic parasitism. A disease.
Next, the savage Earth itself shall be blasted and excavated, conquered and put to work in the service of this industrial utopia. The film gets so extreme in this vision that people celebrate the end of windows. Buildings don’t need windows in utopia. Going outside is barbaric. Plants live in pots. Trees only grow alongside motorways. This is civilised.
Industry, technology, progress itself triumphs over all, culminating in the conquest of the Moon, of the infinite savagery of space itself. Infinite growth. Infinite progress. Infinite conquest capable of conquering even war. Forever. Conquest beyond conquest. All the universe or nothing. There is no alternative. Which shall it be? Civilisation or Barbarism?
This is the question the film gives its viewers.
So then...
Welcome to Civilisation, otherwise known as colonial capitalism, otherwise known as the status quo, or technocracy, or whatever name you wish to give it. Welcome to the root causes of climate change and ecological catastrophe. We have found civilisation’s enemy, and it is Civilisation.
Except, in this civilising view that’s not right.
The only threat to this utopia are irrational anti-science artistic luddites who long for a return to savagery, or at least some sense of stability. It is these irrational folk who cause civilisation to collapse. The threat they pose can only be fixed by yet more application of the civilising effects of State power and technology. Military technology. Just why so many people are so keen on rioting to tear down this utopia is left deliciously unexplored by the film. Presumably they have been insufficiently conquered, or have an irrational lust for windows.
This “civilising” worldview is an inherently apocalyptic vision of the world. Its growth requires constant destabilisation, a crisis machine, paranoid about collapse, fixated upon an ever enlarging utopian future. This is a secularized Christian theology, seeking to create the Kingdom of God on Earth via infinite conquest against a backdrop of the eternally recurring apocalypse.
Apparently this system knows that human nature cannot truly bear it, and therefore must be constantly enforced upon savage humanity by Great Men of Vision least the rabble tear progress and Heaven down again. Civilisation is always ending. Civilisation is always triumphant. This is Civilisation’s inherent paradox.
This vision today, 100 years later, has lead us again to the fear of an imminent “Collapse of Civilisation”. It is the same vision of “civilisation” which is threatening to break down. The same fear. The same dynamics as in HG Wells’ time.
Our dodgy colonial history with this entire concept is alone good reason to be suspicious about any feared “Collapse of Civilisation”.
Less Racistly World-conquering Definitions of Civilisation
Despite the history, clearly the word “civilisation” refers to an actual phenomena of some kind. That colonial civilized-barbaric definition is subterranean today, influencing the framing of the entire discussion, but not the definition most people would consciously use.
More robust definitions of civilisation are about having a specific set of cultural and technological features, specifically (take your pick): writing, or agriculture, or state power, or hierarchy, or urbanization, or legal systems, or philosophy, or.... etc. It’s an improvement, but this is often still a checklist for “Is this Europe?”
At the other extreme another definition says civilisation is just a synonym for a people or culture. The French civilisation, Chinese civilisation, African civilisation etc. But then we get awkward situations. Are Aboriginal Australians a civilisation? Some would say they are the world’s oldest civilisation. But aren’t nomadic hunter gatherers the very archetype of the not civilisation? The answer then comes that Aboriginals practiced sophisticated forms of land management, we might even consider it agriculture.
This appears to be a symptom of how those unconscious colonial definitions linger on, even though no one would dare explicitly say they believe them today. Our culture has several Superior-Inferior dichotomies, of which Civilisation-Barbarism is one. Rather than throw out the dichotomy, people have a habit of derailing discussions by arguing that this or that belongs in the Superior category, and therefore is worthy of respect. For example:
Hunter-gatherers actually had agriculture (Civilisation - Barbarism).
Indigenous knowledge is actually science (Science - Superstition).
Plants are actually intelligent (Rational Man – Natural Resource).
This is not to say that these claims are false, rather people get fixated on these issues to an unusual degree. Why can’t we just respect a rock as a rock, rather than try and prove it’s similarity to the British Aristocracy?
The most value-neutral definition of civilisation I can find is that of “complexity”. A civilisation is a society with a high level of complexity. More people, more specialized, more interconnected. Civilisation is “busy” in a way less complex societies are not. Collapse therefore is a rapid loss of that complexity – a simplification – and not necessarily, say, a failure of the White Man’s Burden before the savage Asiatic hordes plunging us into Dark Age barbarism.
Do Civilisations Even Collapse Anyway?
Turns out this is an open question. What is a collapse, really?
The pop-culture answer is that collapse is when almost everyone dies, all technological abilities are lost, and we fragment into warring cannibal tribes duking it out on the ruins of the Before Time. In other words, Civilisation-Barbarism.
Technical definitions are more about breakdowns of political and ideological systems, the loss of centralized power structures and hierarchies, abandonment of urban centres, or declines in material production and population (various losses of complexity).
Perhaps the simplest definition of collapse is this: society was really busy doing something, then we stopped. Sometimes that “Thing” we were doing was being alive. Most of the time that “Thing” was some variety of politics.
It’s important here to distinguish Civilisation from Political-Economic systems. Full scale civilisational breakdown is fairly rare. In contrast, the collapse of Political-Economic systems happens all the time. The last big one was in the 1980s.
The Soviet Union collapsed when people stopped doing Communism, causing that centralized authority to fragment into smaller parts. Of course, civilisation is very much still present in Russia and Eastern Europe. Putin, for all his desires to return to the good old days, does not live in a cave and hunt deer with a pointy stick (but, maybe, one day).
Ironically the very Political-Economic order which threatens to collapse on us is our very notion of Civilisation in that colonial sense. Our Civilisation might collapse conceptually as well as physically.
So... will our “civilisation” “collapse”? How would we even answer that question? Typically we come up with some model of collapse dynamics.
Humanity vs Yeast
A common analogy for our predicament is that of yeast in a Petri-dish. The yeast consumes the nutrient broth, undergoes a population explosion, depletes the food resource, then chokes to death on its own waste. This is the core argument for collapse from “Limits to Growth” style systems thinking.
At one level this yeast analogy is true. We are feasting on a source of energy, fossil fuels. This has aided a population explosion. We are now depleting the resource. We are suffering from the consequences of the waste by-product (i.e. Climate Change).
On another level the yeast analogy is complete utter nonsense. This yeast did not get into their predicament due to a complex mix of economic, cultural, and political forces resulting in one group of yeast building a Petri-dish then convincing or coercing all of yeast-kind to move there. Yeast cannot see beyond the dish. Yeast cannot travel beyond the dish. Yeast cannot revolutionize their mode of organisation and life within the dish. Yeast cannot transform the dish itself into something else.
But human beings might.
System’s models are extremely important (I’ve used them professionally – modern environmental science wouldn’t work without them). However, as the saying goes, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful”. Here we might say, “Even a useful model is still wrong.”
Yeast (and systems modelling) do teach us some important lessons about the basic rules of ecology. We are subject to such rules. But this model leaves a lot out, such as, everything that makes us unique as humans. That collective mass of excluded factors might be end up being more important than our similarity to yeast. Maybe. We don’t know yet.
Our current moment has no historical precedent. The human species is unique in the history of planet Earth. No true cross-species analogy exists. We don’t truly know the full set of systems rules that apply in our situation. For all we know, what we are doing right now might be the first time this has ever happened in the history of the galaxy.
We do not know how this ends.
Complexity Collapse
Another model for the breakdown of civilisation is Joseph Tainter’s model of a collapse via diminishing returns on complexity.
The argument goes like this: History throws problems at society. Problem solving requires making society more complex. We go for the low hanging fruit first, therefore this added complexity eventually is not worth it. One day society reaches a point where it can no longer solve problems. Society collapses, shedding complexity and returning to a simpler condition. This death of civilisation is an inevitable process that can only be escaped temporarily via growing the energy supply.
With climate change Tainter’s complexity dynamic would include building sea walls, instituting carbon trading markets, and producing IPCC reports. All these adaptation and mitigation activities have a cost. This also feeds into Peak Oil concerns. It is possible that future energy supplies will be going down, not up. Under Tainter’s model, that means civilisation will collapse.
Again, as with Humanity vs Yeast, some models are useful and even useful models are wrong. This too leaves a lot out, things which may prove more important than what is included, such as our ability to solve problems by subtraction as well as addition, or to reinvent the rules of the game entirely.
The model gives us reason to be cautious – but it is not divine prophecy. Human society cannot be easily modelled, except in very limited and general terms.
Other models of impending decline and fall
The above models are more modern incarnations of much older ideas. To be brief...
Life cycle metaphors: civilisations are not animals with a genetically determined pattern of birth, growth, and senescence. It’s a nice metaphor, but that’s all – a metaphor. Things do have beginnings and ends, but that is also true of rocks.
Malthusian catastrophe: people are not rats. If we were rats then I’d be more worried, but humans are able to make reproductive choices (not to mention technological innovation, or the role of social forces in endlessly complicating the tidy Malthusian model). Also, Malthus is once again preaching Christian theology. Through suffering God lifts man to perfection, over the bodies of dead poor people etc etc.
Moral degeneration: and now we are back to Civilisation versus Barbarism. Time to move on.
The Problem with Historical Comparisons
Much of this debate about collapse focuses on the past. What happened to the Easter Islanders? Are we a new Rome?
The answer: no.
We are not Rome.
And we sure as f*** aint Easter Island.
If you scale something up large enough eventually it becomes something new. A very large grain of sand becomes a boulder becomes a mountain becomes a planet. New laws of motion and action come into play.
Likewise with societies.
The Roman Empire was more than merely a very large tribe. Modern global society is more than merely a very large Roman Empire. Comparing modern planetary civilisation with 4000 Polynesians on a tiny island is absurd.
Seriously, what would even the Roman’s have learned from studying Easter Island? Would it have taught them anything useful at all? Anything actually relevant to their true problems? Like... how to manage Imperial succession, debased currency systems, overextended borders, and a multi-ethnic military?
No.
Will we learn the answer to globalised financial systems, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, or the renewable energy transition by studying the Romans?
Probably not.
Those factors did not apply to the Romans. History provides many insights, but it has some serious limits.
The modern world is profoundly different than anything that has come before. We are an anomaly on almost every measure. Our demise, if such a thing is to happen, is likely to be profoundly different than anything that has come before. We are yet to see which of the old rules still apply to us, which ones don’t, and how many new forces and laws of motion will now come into play now for the first time in history.
The genre for our times is not historical stories, but science fiction.
The limits to our knowledge are profound.
Alternative Framings
“The Collapse of Civilisation” is a somewhat dodgy notion. However, this doesn’t mean everything is fine. Yes, many things might stop. Yes, that might include certain people being alive. But this idea of collapse seems more trouble than it’s worth.
People repeatedly fall into cliché apocalyptic narratives, while either engaging in a nostalgia for the present that clings to an oppressive system that claims for itself the exclusive title of “Civilisation” or a pessimistic misanthropy that condemns all humanity to Hell. They might not intend that message, but it’s a repeated undercurrent due to history and baggage these concepts carry.
Let’s try and find some better (or at least “cleaner”) ways of framing the issue...
Discontinuities
The end of something is often the start of something else, a point in time where the future radically breaks from the past. We’ve all lived through such events already, such as the COVID pandemic, or the emergence of the internet.
Discontinuity, this stop-start, gets us the away from the controversy, clichés, and value judgements of collapse. We can focus more clearly on the fact that something changed.
Here a few random possible discontinuities that might be coming, things that could from the basis for a better story than simply saying that “Civilisation Collapsed”.
1) Mass migration and resulting demographic and cultural shifts.
2) Conflict. From local fights, to civil wars, to great power rivalries and world wars.
3) Loss of cultural coherency and resultant cultural dysfunction e.g. due to migration, loss of home. Perhaps similar to the experiences of colonized people.
4) Failed states.
5) Failed economies e.g. like the end of Soviet Communism.
6) Breakdown of globalisation e.g. like the World War One/Two era.
7) Crossing of adaptation thresholds. A sea wall has a finite height. If the water goes higher than that, then the sea wall fails. Every system has multiple adaptation thresholds. Climate change will cross a lot of thresholds.
8) Emergency measures e.g. like we’ve seen with Pandemic lockdowns.
9) New technologies e.g. a switch to renewable energy.
10) New forms economic, political, and social arrangement e.g. the end of capitalism as we know it, new forms of direct democracy, new working arrangements, universal basic income etc.
...and so on, and so on...
The Global Animal vs The World Plant
Civilisation might not “end”, but it could flip into a different structural form. I like to think about this in terms of Centralized Specialization vs Decentralized Modularity, or Animals vs Plants.
An animal is a centralised, specialized, and fully integrated system. All the parts connect and are necessary. The system operates under a single unified command. This unlocks amazing capacities at the cost of vulnerability. An animal can run, jump, and build spaceships to the Moon. But if you remove both its kidneys then it dies.
A plant is a decentralised and modular system. The parts are connected, but only loosely. All the leaves are basically the same. We can cut the plant in half and re-grow two new plants. This modular growth is extremely resilient, but plants have yet to build spaceships.
For most of history civilisation has been very plant-like. Right now, global civilisation is extremely animal-like. If things get really bad then that animal might die. Maybe.
The death of this “Global Animal” means civilisation might flip to becoming a “World Plant”. More local, less connected, more modular, less specialized.
Done poorly, this transition would be a collapse, in the cliché sense. Populations dependant on the “Global Animal” for food might experience famine. Likewise economies might experience resource shortages, as we’ve seen during with supply disruption in COVID. The world could fragment into disorder.
However, such a transition could also be done well. The whole genre of Solarpunk seems, in part, to be an attempt to figure out how to create a “World Plant” that doesn’t suck. A utopian “World Plant” might in fact become more animal-like in some key areas where the current “Global Animal” is still fairly brain dead, such as international cooperation. Therefore we could retain those animal-like special abilities where we need them. In core areas, like food production or manufacturing, the “World Plant” would be localized and modular, making it resilient in a changing world.
Neither “animal” nor “plant” is inherently good or bad. They are different forms of system organisation, best applied where best suited. However, when we talk about a “collapse”, we are usually talking about a dead animal. They make the most noise, and if you remove their kidneys they die.
Your Fun New Zealand Post-apocalyptic Refuge
Lastly, as a New Zealander I have to go here.
New Zealand as the last refuge at the end of the world is a long established science fiction trope. Even the Victorians fantasized about future New Zealanders exploring the ruins of London (an occurrence which does now happen, just not as the Brits anticipated).
Here’s something to consider before you build your bunker in New Zealand:
Firstly, when empires break down they retract to the imperial core. The places on the periphery are the first to be let go. Geographically, New Zealand is about as peripheral as it gets. The boats will stop coming. No one will hear from us ever again. Farewell.
Secondly, everywhere on Earth does in fact exist on Earth. In part 7 we looked at one New Zealand town, Invercargill, and saw how climate change might actually feel minor in that location. While that might be true locally, it will exist in the context of extreme global changes.
Take COVID as an example:
As a New Zealander, our experience of COVID has been fairly minor (in comparison). But the global situation has meant we’ve lived with closed borders, uncertain supply chains, economic disruption, spill-overs of international conspiracy thinking and a riot outside our parliament (they set a playground on fire. Fun times). Eventually the virus got loose, and we’ve had large outbreaks too. If New Zealand only had to deal with New Zealand, then we might’ve been okay. But New Zealand exists on Earth, just like everyone else.
It is the same with climate change.
Conclusion
The Collapse of Civilisation is a troublesome notion which may or may not happen. What we can be sure about is that the world is changing, and rapidly, and in many ways unpleasantly. Where it all ends up though is anyone’s guess.
Next time, how imagining the loss of our present day world can interfere with our ability to imagine any future at all.
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