THE SEDUCTION AND REALITY OF COLLAPSE - Center for Ecozoic Studies

*Herman Greene**

In this issue we begin a series on collapse, which we will expand on in our next issue. As Tim Crownshaw so well observes in his article “The Return to Solar Civilizations,”[1] when things reach a certain level of complexity we turn to narratives or stories to understand them. As Crownshaw puts it, this was an evolutionary adaptation:

Stories act as fast and frugal heuristics, facilitating the compression of complex information into simple rules and symbolisms essential for our survival. According to Gottschall, “Stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems, just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations.”

He then importantly continues:

This worked well when our natural and social environments were “mind-sized,” as they were for the vast majority of our evolutionary history. However, our stories are often less helpful in the modern context of a globalized, hyper-novel world. We frequently cling to preferred or established stories at the expense of new perspectives, even in the face of a preponderance of evidence.

Stories dominate the public discourse on our future. Civilizations have come and gone—anthropologists and historians have given different theories to explain why. Here is a broad overview of collapse from Wikipedia:

Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of social complexity as an adaptive system, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, economic collapse, population decline, mass migration, and sabotage or assimilation by rival civilizations. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.

Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity.[2]

The discourse on civilizational collapse has, however, shifted due to the rise of the meta-civilization of modernity. Instead of listing various civilizations like the Minoan, Mayan, or Roman civilizations that have come and gone, attention is given to three periods of civilization, and for some a coming civilization:

Hunter-gather societies (beginning with the emergence of Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago)
Agricultural civilization (divided into two periods, the early period beginning around 10,000 BCE, and the period of the classical civilizations beginning around 3,000 BCE with written language, the rise of cities, and increasing social hierarchies and complexity)
Modern Industrial civilization (also divided into two parts: the early modern period beginning around 1500 characterized by the rise of science, technological progress, secularization of politics, and the rise of the nation-state; and the late modern period beginning around 1800 as the Industrial Revolution shaped societies leading to today’s globalized industrial meta-civilization.

Due to rapid population and economic growth, the development of weapons of mass destruction, concerns about the effects of advanced technologies such as gene editing, social media and artificial intelligence, environmental concerns, especially regarding global warming, and signs of social breakdown, many now anticipate a new stage of civilization at the meta-scale (as in the list of three above).

Civilizational change at the meta-scale has not been a subject of widespread awareness except in retrospect until recently. Now facts and arguments are being assembled to project various outcomes by those who believe we are at such an inflection point. Their narratives include these:

Breakdown with rapid population decline and regression to simpler societies, and for some barbarism and even human extinction.
Hypermodernism with transformation of human capacities and extreme advances in artificial intelligence, genetics, and other advanced technologies such as nanotechnology and creation of artificial materials to replace depleted materials, clean energy breakthroughs, robots, and space travel and settlement.
Green sustainability paradigms with a blend of the modern technological and organic Earth sciences, progressive education and politics, and growth in human wisdom.
There are, also, those who accept the present as normal and extendable and for some apparently to be militantly defended.

There is a seduction about collapse, the first narrative above. Some people complain about the daily news being bad news and say because of this they don’t watch the news anymore. Based on my experience, however, bad news is the news. When we meet people and talk about our families and friends we report illnesses, accidents, and other problems people are having. I think this orientation to bad news as the news is because of our mortality and the fear and fascination we have with this. To be aware of the pitfalls in life is adaptive in many ways—it leads to precaution, care, prevention, and remediation even as it is unsettling and sometimes overwhelming.

There is however also a primitive aspect to this. We are drawn to destruction—we read murder mysteries, dystopian novels, and in every age there are apocalyptic narratives. I can’t remember a time in my life when people were not appalled by the state of the world and didn’t foresee great peril ahead. My early years in the 1950s were lived under the cloud of the nuclear threat, then there was the wildness of the 1960s, and so on.

The image on the cover of this issue says a lot: There is a seduction about collapse.

Then there is the reality of collapse. The four narratives above may each be seen as stories we tell as though the reality of collapse is not happening to us. The experience of being inside a collapsing building is very different from that of watching a building fall, and very different indeed from choosing to watch a planned, controlled demolition.

Civilizational collapse is uneven. It does not affect people at the same times or in the same ways. One can in reality be in civilizational collapse as though one is in the building and as though one is not in the building. If we are today in reality undergoing civilizational collapse, the stories we tell ourselves will deny or affirm that reality and they will affect our senses of direction, agency, and necessity.

Is this time really different? Are we truly undergoing the fourth meta-civilizational transition? An even bigger question is whether we are truly undergoing the first geo-biological change in the functioning of our planet in human history.

If we are, and we conclude that modern technological industrial civilization is at fault, what does that mean for us? This issue is devoted to an essay by Ruben Nelson, a distinguished Canadian futurist, who has concluded that “the processes of collapse of our MTI form of civilization have begun and that they are irrevocable.”

* Herman Greene is president of the Center for Ecozoic Studies and the Thomas Berry Scholar-in-Residence of the Earth Law Center.

[1] Tim Crownshaw, “The Return to Solar Civilization: Narrative, Aency, and Accepting Limits,” The New Ecozoic Reader, No. 5, June-December 2022, 46.

[2] Wikipedia contributors, “Societal collapse,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Societal_collapse&oldid=1154856875 (accessed May 24, 2023) (footnotes omitted).