Looking back on collapse: another documentary

The Romans, the Maya, the Anasazi, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), Norse Greenland and many more: dozens of previous civilisations have reached a point where they have undergone more or less rapid and irreversible transition from high to low social complexity, usually known as societal collapse. I've blogged before about two of the best-known theorists of societal collapse, Joseph Tainter and Jared Diamond and have just come across a recent documentary called 2210: The Collapse? in which the ideas of Prof Tainter and Prof Diamond are quite usefully summarised into a 93 minute presentation. Some of the documentary's framing, with 23rd century archeologists trying to piece together the causes of the collapse of our present global industrial society (à la Age of Stupid), gets a little repetitive and gimmicky, but the ideas are important and the presentation lucid. We are not exempt from the brutal logic that placed temporal limits of previous civilisations. But we are in a unique situation: with a global economy, any future collapse will likely be global and with seven billion or more now alive, that's a lot of eggs in one basket. Put it on your "to view" list.

Thesis question articulation I: Societal unsustainability

Societal unsustainability: part one
The background for my project is the increasingly widespread perception of the unsustainability of the present order of industrial society. This belief is based on a wide variety of factors and takes a variety of forms, but uniting them all is the judgement that contemporary industrial society is undermining the material conditions of possibility for its own existence. Deforestation, soil degradation, water depletion, climate change, peak energy, biodiversity loss, pollution, sea level rises, mineral exhaustion, introduced species, pollinator decline, desertification and over-fishing: each of these challenges are caused or exacerbated by the industrialisation of much of human society over the last few hundred years. The scale of each issue is multiplied by the unprecedented population expansion that industrialisation has enabled. And each of them could sooner or later threaten significant social disruption. Many of these problems already cause widespread suffering and political tension, but taken together and in their bewildering array of interconnections, they drastically endanger the continued growth of industrialised society, and perhaps its very existence. Although ours is certainly not the first society to face a crisis that threatens the basis of its continued existence, nonetheless, the global extent and technologically-enhanced degree of environmental degradation are historically a novelty.

A number of thinkers, such as Jared Diamond, William R. Catton Jr. and Joseph Tainter, argue that, due to a range of converging reasons, the present way of life enjoyed by the developed world and aspired to by the developing world will reach the limits of its conditions of possibility within the next few years or decades. If so, then significant social changes are imminent. Whether accepted voluntarily or imposed forcefully by material conditions, total human population, production and consumption will not continue to grow indefinitely in a world of finite resources. A sustained or precipitous decline in the world economy may well bring with it the compounding difficulty of political and social instability. If the decline is as severe, permanent and global as these thinkers suggest, such instability is unlikely to be confined to the poorer nations or those usually considered volatile.

Whether such claims are accurate is a complex matter, and so are the analyses of the causes: the causes of the situation if the perception is accurate or the causes of the false perception if it is not. All these questions are important, but I would like to set them to one side. My concern is with the perception itself, its effects on thinking (specifically on moral reasoning) and possible responses to it.
This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one

Two attitudes towards extinction

You may know that biodiversity loss, while difficult to measure, is thought by a significant majority of biologists to be occurring at an alarming rate, possibly somewhere between 100 and 1000 times the "background" rate of extinction (taking a very long term view of such things). The causes are many, but almost exclusively anthropogenic (i.e. we're to blame): habitat destruction, hunting and poaching, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change. You may also have heard even more startling predictions such as this century being witness to the extinction of between a quarter and a half of all currently living species (how such estimates are calculated).

With this in mind, compare and contrast these two quotes:

"But biodiversity losses of small inedible species often provoke the response, "Who cares? Do you really care less for humans than for some lousy useless little fish or weed, like the snail darter or Furbish lousewort?" This response misses the point that the entire natural world is made up of wild species providing us for free with services that can be very expensive, and in many cases impossible, for us to supply ourselves. Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane."

- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, 488-89.

"The sadness which overcomes us when we hear about the extinction of hundreds of kinds of butterflies on a faraway continent has nothing to do with a loss of something useful. It doesn't even have anything to do with a reduction of aesthetic pleasure, since, more than likely, we would never have had a chance to see this type of butterfly. Nevertheless, we are poorer through its disappearance, since our own being is fulfilled in reference to every reality which we ourselves are not. Delectatio in felicitate alterius [delight in the happiness of others] - this formula of Leibniz overcomes the opposition between anthropocentrism and love of nature "for its own sake". To love something for its own sake is the specific form of human realisation.

- Robert Spaemann, Happiness and Benevolence, 118.

How do they each make you feel? Which strikes closer to home for you? Why?

In both cases, the author makes use of a narrative of loss, but where Diamond fears for our survival, Spaemann speaks of us losing part of our identity. Spaemann is convinced that survival (whether individual, societal or as a species) is not a particularly important goal. For him, there are more important things; I might save my life and yet lose my self.

The worst mistake in the history of the human race

According to Jared Diamond, author of the Pulitzer prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the worst mistake in human history was the adoption of agriculture. According to Diamond, it would have been better if we'd kept on gathering and hunting.

Confused? Ready to pick up a pitchfork or hoe and join a mob of angry farmers in protest? Give this a read.

After Christmas

Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

- Arnold Lobel  

Some of the books I received for Christmas: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel by R. Alan Culpepper, Guns Germs and Steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years and Collapse: how societies choose to fail or survive both by Jared Diamond, 666 and all that by Greg Clarke & John Dickson and Surprised by Hope by N. T. Wright. Feeling jealous yet? My wife says my beard is already too long.