how to save the world

I am reposting, in their entirety, the ten articles I wrote that were published in SHIFT magazine (which is now on hiatus) between 2013 and 2015, since some of the links have changed and so that my blog contains the full text of these articles (useful for searches etc.) Thanks to SHIFT for the graphics (much better than my originals), and for publishing and editing my work.

image licensed cc-by-2.0: NOAA National Ocean Service via flickr

The title of this article comes from an interview earlier this year with the distinguished biologist and philosopher Richard Lewontin. Richard has fought for years (often alongside his more famous colleague Stephen J Gould) with scientific absolutists of every stripe, from genetic determinists like Richard Dawkins to the neo-phrenologist pop neuro-“scientists” who would have us believe that we will soon understand what it means to be human (and accordingly understand and be able to modify all human behaviour) by deciphering the patterns of coloured lights in brain scans.

Richard, now in his mid-80s, begins the interview by asserting “You can’t be overly humble.” We all want to know the truth, to have something we can believe (and believe in) with certainty, but Richard is here to tell us the limitations of science and the dangers of believing we will ever know more than a tiny fraction of the whats, hows and whys of our lives and our world.

And while the new cult of scientism produces louder and louder assertions of grand theories of everything and promises of immortality and singularity, scientists and philosophers who know “you can’t be overly humble” marvel at the mystery of how the more we know and learn and examine with a critical and open mind, the more mysteries and inextricable complexities we discover and the faster absolute knowledge of anything retreats from our grasp. As Marshall McLuhan famously said: “Learning creates ignorance.”

Richard’s work is steeped in an appreciation of complexity. In his book The Triple Helix he argues that attempts to determine causality in complex systems fail to acknowledge the difficulty of separating causality from agency — stress, for example, is an agent that appears to trigger many auto-immune diseases and other increasingly-prevalent modern chronic illnesses. But stress is not the cause. Determining the possible causes requires a more nuanced, patient and holistic study of the entire system and all its inter-dependent parts.

He explains, for example, that 90% of the drop in rates of infectious diseases between 1830 and 1960 occurred before 1910 — before the emergence of understanding of germs or the use of isolation procedures, and long before the development of modern antibiotics. Why such an astonishing drop in the rates of these diseases? Nothing to do with science or medicine at all, he says:

The most plausible explanation we have is that during the nineteenth century there was a general trend of increase in the real wage, an increase in the state of nutrition of European populations, and a decrease in the number of hours worked. As people were better nourished and better clothed and had more rest time to recover from taxing labor, their bodies, being in a less stressed physiological state, were better able to recover from the further severe stress of infection. So, although they may still have fallen sick, they survived. Infectious diseases were not the causes of death, but only the agencies. The causes of death in Europe in earlier times were what they still are in the Third World: overwork and undernourishment. The conclusion to be drawn from this account is that the level of mortality in Africa does not depend chiefly on the state of medicine but on the state of international production and exchange.

Still, today’s scientists pore over the model of the human genome in the unquestioned belief that most if not all human diseases will soon be cured by finding and fixing the “defective” genes. It is perhaps not surprising that brain scan images look much like modernistic crystal balls.

Richard’s appreciation for complexity comes from the realization, as he explains in his book Biology as Ideology, that science’s — and notably biology’s — modus operandi is to disconnect, separate, and study things “in isolation”. When you study biological systems you discover that they are inextricable — there is no clear and functionally distinct boundary between genes, the organisms they seemingly comprise, and the environments within which we imagine them located and moving about as discrete things. Genes, organisms and environments co-evolved. Early living creatures exuded an oxygen-rich environment which then evolved other living creatures (including, unremarkably, humans) that thrived as part of that environment and evolved it further.

Likewise, the study of permaculture teaches you about succession, and that in order to create the most abundant garden you may have to encourage some plants that are ultimately of no use either in our diet or in the “mature” garden that evolves from these intermediary agents. Alas, even many permaculturists lack the patience and humility to spend decades studying and learning about the local ecology before they can understand how to intervene effectively, starting from today’s desolated soils, the legacy of ubiquitous catastrophic agriculture and, carefully following nature’s own sometimes convoluted and inexplicable pathways, yield an edible forest garden that — surprise! — thrives without further human intervention in precisely those ecological areas humans evolved to thrive within.

What complicates the role of the scientist in the 21st century is that they are tethered to the modern ideology of progress. Just as politicians and economists would have us believe that life is, on the whole and over the long haul, getting better and better, scientists have now been sucked in to believing and asserting that human knowledge, and hence our ability to apply that knowledge to solve problems, is getting better and better.

As Richard’s friend and colleague Stephen J Gould spent a lifetime demonstrating, there is no evidence for evolution being a “progressive” process. Evolution, we are learning (slowly) is a process of experimental adaptation and exaptation — full of the emergence of unexpected consequences of random variations that could never have been predicted or even imagined.

Evolution is not from lower to higher, or from less advanced to more advanced, or even from simpler to more complex. There is nothing progressive or intentional or foreordained about it. Humans are not the crown of creation or the culmination of any inevitable and extraordinary evolution — we are just one tiny new branch in the tree of life, a species whose only remarkable feature has been our inability to appreciate the necessity of living in balance with the rest of life on Earth, and our commensurate large-scale destruction of the very environment of which we are a part.

Of course, science doesn’t like to acknowledge that. That would require humility. It would require acknowledging that for all our learning the most important thing we’ve discovered is how staggeringly little we know and how unlikely it is we will ever really understand anything beyond the absurdly simplistic models of reality we have cobbled together so far. It would require admitting that we aren’t progressing, and aren’t likely to. It would require an admission of necessary ignorance.

What might happen if we were to emulate Richard Lewontin’s complex-systems approach to scientific exploration, discovery and appreciation?

What if we were to look at our feeble scientific models of reality with humility, and appreciate that we can’t hope to fully understand anything we study? What if we took a nuanced and holistic approach to complex phenomena, the type of analysis that leads to the discovery that the best approach to eliminating devastating diseases is probably political and economic, not medical?

What if we were to give up trying to control our genes and our people and our environments and instead sought to increase our adaptability and resilience and mobility, and to liberate ourselves from dependence on large centralized industrial systems — including the health-care, pharmaceutical, agricultural, educational and high-technology systems that currently fund, employ and draw their value from the scientific community?

Sooner or later, we are going to have to face the fact that our economic, energy and ecological systems are unsustainable and will, unevenly but inevitably, collapse, probably sometime in this century, in the lifetimes of our grandchildren if not our own. The Union of Concerned Scientists has already said this, and you can read it on the faces of climate scientists, even if they dare not say it in front of their employers, or to audiences not ready for the truth.

How might scientists shift their role from servants of a bankrupt industrial civilization to scenario planners, teachers of complexity, imaginers of possible ways to adapt to extreme and unpredictable change? What if we could put all those minds together, not to plan an escape from the planet or to conduct some reckless adventure in geo-engineering, but rather to look as cultural anthropologists at the collapse of past civilizations, and help us discover how to bravely, intelligently, creatively and even joyfully embrace and adapt to the hard road ahead. As a journey in humility. For our grandchildren.

We should ask them.

I am reposting, in their entirety, the ten articles I wrote that were published in SHIFT magazine (which is now on hiatus) between 2013 and 2015, since some of the links have changed and so that my blog contains the full text of these articles (useful for searches etc.) Thanks to SHIFT for the graphics (much better than my originals), and for publishing and editing my work.

I’m not spiritual. Really.

image: from a video made by a fan of Deva Premal’s Moola Mantra, original source uncredited

People often ask me if, in my self-proclaimed state of joyful pessimism and contemplative gratitude, I’ve finally discovered spirituality.

I insist that I have not.

Just about everyone I know who self-identifies as “spiritual” also believes our civilization will somehow be ‘saved’ from collapse (by science or technology, or the market, or wise leadership, or human ingenuity, or by a god or gods, or by a massive human consciousness-raising). What good is a ‘spirit’, after all, if he/she/it can’t save you from perceived disaster?

No thank you, no salvation needed here.

I’d like to think that most non-spiritual people have moved on, as Derrick Jensen puts it, “Beyond Hope” for saving our culture and our species. Tom Robbins says we now have no choice but to “insist on joy in spite of everything”.

We who are resigned to the inevitability of civilization’s collapse strive instead to be unattached and equanimous, but not nihilistic or depressed about it. We humans can only be who we are, and who we are is ignorant of complex systems and preoccupied with the needs of the moment. So it is. Life is wonderful and worth living every minute anyway. No soul or striving or sacredness required.

But a little voice inside me says: “That sounds kinda spiritual to me. Borderline Buddhist even. Are you sure you’re not spiritual? You throw around the word Gaia as a shorthand for all-life-on-Earth, but it sounds pretty Goddess-like. You have a picture of her in your mind, some kind of wise, wild, beautiful meta-creature?”

And I must confess that my belief that complex systems are unfathomable, and cannot be known or understood or ‘managed’ or predicted or changed or controlled by humans, no matter how rich or powerful or organized or skilled or motivated, sounds not dissimilar to the faith that some ancient peoples had in some higher, invisible, awesome power.

And I am on a journey these days to try to really see what I know intellectually – that my self, my mind, my sense of being all-of-a-piece, my sense of separateness, my sense of self-control and my sense of time are all illusions, conceptions, ideas that are extremely useful in surviving day to day, but ultimately false. If that truth-seeking isn’t a spiritual journey, what is?

Although it’s defined a thousand ways, spirituality is ultimately about belief, and faith. For most who call themselves spiritual, it is about belief in something larger and more important than ourselves and our species, and faith that there is a purpose to our struggle and a meaning to our lives.

I don’t understand the need of spiritual people for purpose or meaning or something larger than everything-that-just-is, the need for something to strive for and to progress towards.

My great-great grandfather, who lived through the Long Depression (which lasted from 1873 more or less until 1896) wrote in his diary about his duty to do whatever was necessary to leave things better for his children than they had been for him. This was the era of robber barons, urbanization caused by bankruptcy of family farms, and child labour, an era which followed a period of relative agrarian prosperity and equality. He was spiritual. He had faith that his struggle and belief would be rewarded in the afterlife and through increased opportunity for his children. He never lost his faith. His children and grandchildren would contend with WW1 and the Great Depression. Whether he was rewarded in the afterlife is anyone’s guess.

We boomers were really the first Western generation in recent history to challenge that faith en masse. Many of us became secular humanists in youth, and believers in the gods of money, markets and technology in middle age. Or were “born again”. Most of us have now become salvationists of one kind or another, seeing the world through very different evolved worldviews, and defining life’s meaning and their purpose accordingly.

These days we also have the advocates of scientism whose faith is, paradoxically, in scientific certainty and the knowability of everything. Science, its advocates contend, can ultimately solve any problem, reduce everything that can be known to simple equations and perfect models, and allow us to transcend our bodies and live anywhere, forever. It’s the new salvationist religion of science that, preposterously, self-identifies as atheistic. The myth of progress expresses itself in many different ways, each with its fervent and unshakable believers.

But every generation has its skeptics, and I think the boomers, the first generation whose rebelliousness was largely celebrated rather than suppressed, has retained more than its share. And just as we have politically moved Beyond Hope, we have culturally and philosophically moved Beyond Belief.

Stephen J Gould argued in Full House that the emergence of vertebrates (let alone humanoids), even in a physical environment ideally evolving for life as we know it, was a one-in-millions long shot. If we manage to render life on this planet extinct, he said, there is very little chance of it re-emerging in any fathomable time span, and even if it did re-emerge, it would almost certainly be unrecognizably different from the web of life that emerged from the primordial soup a few billion years ago. Our search for extraterrestrial life (at least in the sense we define the term) is foolish, he would assert, and the search for extraterrestrial “intelligence” (some form of life we could communicate with), is absurd, and based on nothing but faith, a will to believe in something in spite of its staggering improbability.

This does not sit well with people who argue that life tends to emerge and grow in complexity and resist “death” tenaciously whenever and wherever it can. Life, these believers assert, is predestined, the will of all existence. No matter that such belief is tautological.

So what does it mean to be “Beyond Belief”? It means appreciating and embracing complexity, and accepting that we cannot ever hope to fully know, predict or control complex systems (including our bodies and the microcosms within them, and social and ecological systems, and our planet, and all the macrocosms beyond it). It means accepting that in our study of science and technology (including the so-called “social sciences”) we may devise interesting and useful, within limits, models of reality, but that these are only absurdly simplistic and limited representations of reality — stick men on cave walls.

It means challenging everything you are told, everything you believe and everything you want to believe. It means appreciating and accepting what is without pretending or hoping to fathom it. It means becoming humble. It means learning to live without the need for meaning or purpose or progress or something larger and more important than the miracle of what just is, what has evolved from the universe’s infinite random walks through possibility.

OK, I used the word ‘miracle’. That’s pretty spiritual, isn’t it?

Nope, afraid not. ‘Miracle’ comes from the proto-Indo-European word meaning to wonder and to laugh. That is what awaits those who can let go of their beliefs and faith. To wonder, and to laugh. To notice. To really see. To really be.

Beyond belief, that is all that you need.

I am reposting, in their entirety, the ten articles I wrote that were published in SHIFT magazine (which is now on hiatus) between 2013 and 2015, since some of the links have changed and so that my blog contains the full text of these articles (useful for searches etc.) Thanks to SHIFT for the graphics (much better than my originals), and for publishing and editing my work.

image by the author; click on image to view full-size

If you’ve contemplated the possibility of civilization’s global collapse, you probably envision its social and political consequences to be violent and chaotic — a world dominated by struggle to fill the power vacuum, leading to despotism and ruthless ethnic, class, intertribal and inter-gang warfare.

A study of history, and of collapse scenarios, suggests however that Mad Max, Taliban, clash-of-civilizations, and history-going-in-reverse outcomes (like those portrayed in Jim Kunstler’s wild-west-again cli-fi novel A World Made by Hand) are improbable. If the prognostications of futurists and sci-fi/cli-fi writers seem imaginatively impoverished, perhaps it’s because our global human civilization is now so all-pervasive and homogeneous that even creative writers can’t imagine a future radically different from our present, or from our recent colonial and industrial past, projected forward or run in reverse.

If you want a more nuanced sense of what politics in a post-collapse future might look like, here are a few things to consider:

1. Cultural homogeneity is abnormal and maladaptive: For at least 1000 millennia, up until just a few millennia ago, our planet probably offered a staggering diversity of human cultures, behaviours, languages, and political systems. There was likely very little contact between these cultures, since human population was less than 1 person per 30 habitable acres, and not perceptibly growing, so even ‘adjacent’ human cultures would likely have been unrecognizably different in their social and political makeup. Most collapsnik demographers envision human population quickly falling back to these levels, and similarly low-complexity, low-tech, low-interaction, widely-divergent societies emerging.

2. Politics is a very recent human phenomenon: The whole idea (and even the etymology) of ‘politics’ came about with the evolution of fortressed city-states: high-density, high-hierarchy, resource-scarce societies where the need for arduous work, slavery and repression of human freedoms meant that the powers of decision-making and law-making needed to be delegated to expert, elite ‘representatives’. The concept of politics was unknown in pre-civilization rural areas, where, presumably thanks to abundance of space, resources and leisure time, politics was simply unneeded. Anarchy worked just fine. Unfortunately, the repressive, political city-states quickly colonized and destroyed the surrounding apolitical societies, and warred with neighbouring political states, until politics became endemic to human presence on the planet.

3. Political states are extremely costly to run and inherently unsustainable. They require massively complex systems to be constructed, and massive levels of security, repression, bureaucracy, law enforcement, maintenance, concentration of wealth and power, and continuous expansion to acquire ever more resources. These needs grow exponentially as size increases linearly, so political states and civilizations (urban-centric social-political-economic states) will inevitably collapse.

4. Despots, warlords and gangs require the machinery of a still-functioning political state to operate. They need weapons, security forces and armies, which in a collapsed society are too expensive to manufacture and maintain. They need access to wealth when, after collapse, the preponderance of pre-existing wealth, being either paper or resources (like gold) with no intrinsic utility, will be worthless. They need access to people in power they can bully, bribe and corrupt, but since collapse bankrupts governments there is no one, after collapse, with power to do much of anything. When the collapse is a global one, and everyone is broke, poor, and powerless, there is nothing to do but cooperate with one’s equally destitute neighbours to just get by. The collapse of a global civilization culture means, essentially, the end of politics.

5. Collapse does not happen all at once — in a week or a year or even in a single ‘fall from grace’. Whether collapse is ultimately brought about by the end of the unsustainable growth economy, the end of affordable energy and resources, or the end of stable climate, or a combination of all three, we will likely see periods of partial collapse and then partial recoveries, until the crises begin to pile on faster than our reeling civilization can cope with them. We will have at least a few years to learn how to deal with collapse, which means we will be able to learn from some of our mistakes. That won’t prevent or mitigate collapse, but it will at least psychologically prepare us for it, so that rather than panicking, most of us will be able to accept it with some equanimity.

Past collapses and prolonged depressions provide some clues as to how humans will behave in a global collapse. In areas where there remains a huge inequality of wealth and power between rich and poor, there is a motivation for the rich to defend their wealth and repress the poor, and a motivation for the poor to seize the wealth of the (presumably unfairly) rich. But in areas where everyone is left poor, and there is little inequality, human nature, it turns out, seems to be to share and help each other.

This behaviour was evident during the Great Depression. Farmers whose monoculture, no-longer-viable farms had to be abandoned in favour of work in the city, left their homes and property open to the homeless and to other farmers.

In many of today’s third-world slums (where collapse has already happened), whole collaborative infrastructures spring up to provide needed resources and utilities, and to defend against (wealthier and powerful) outsiders. Crime statistics repeatedly show that rates of violent crime are highest not in poor communities, states and nations, but in communities, states and nations with the highest levels of inequality of wealth and power.

My recent work with intentional communities has made me a fan of direct decision-making by consensus, rather than representative democracy where decision-making is delegated to elected officials. Direct consensual decision-making doesn’t scale — it probably only works in radically relocalized situations with small numbers of people. But that’s what I think the post-collapse world will be mostly about — there will be no centralized governments, distribution networks or economic systems to make decisions about, because they’re just too complex and costly to sustain.

I see direct consensual decision-making as essentially a tribal form of anarchy. It worked for many indigenous cultures before we colonized and destroyed them. Anarchy is, after all, just the absence of governance, of hierarchy, of “power over” and inequality. It is not essentially violent. It can in fact only exist in the absence of power structures, which are inherently violent. In the absence of overcrowding, resource scarcity, and other stresses, such power structures are unnecessary and unsupportable. In a future with many fewer humans, we can and will live without such structures.

Far from being disordered and chaotic, an anarchic society is one free of coercion. It’s not amoral — anarchy does require a prevalent respect for the freedom and life and well-being of others. This is why misanthropic conservatives believe ‘peaceful’ anarchy is impossible. We will show them they are wrong.

Anarchy is a state of reality — the absence of inequality of wealth and power and hence the absence of the abuses that inherently stem from that inequality. (This is in contrast to anarchism, which is the ideology that espouses, somewhat ironically, that anarchy be nurtured and managed).

For those of us who have grown up in a culture of massive and self-perpetuating inequality — one that rewards and prides itself on the relative ‘successes’ of its rich and powerful, and which looks dubiously on the poor and powerless as somehow lazy or weak or stupid — the end of politics and a future of unimaginably diverse anarchic societies seems inconceivable. But the issue, I think, is not the viability and inevitability of such societies emerging after collapse (that is, if our species survives collapse at all) but rather the issue of how we can, relatively painlessly, get there from here.

We know that, as collapse worsens, the rich and powerful will retrench and do everything in their power to protect themselves and their wealth and power base. We know that those who suffer most from collapse (as always, the poor and powerless) will, at once, resent and envy the rich and powerful (and strive to join their ranks). That process is already visible everywhere.

So what happens next? Here are the questions we need to be asking now, I think, as we plunge inexorably off the collapse cliff:

1. A duty of activism?: Is there any point to creating or joining activist groups trying to reduce political and economic inequality now, and reform these teetering systems before collapse levels the political and economic playing field? If we don’t join the ranks of activists, what should we do instead?

2. Fight the rich or smash the system?: As the actions of the rich and powerful to insulate themselves from collapse become ever-more extreme and abhorrent, and as the situation worsens and demagogues arise prescribing various extreme ideological panaceas for our growing malaise, should we try to take them down? Or should we instead work to take down the economic system they depend on (and, if so, how do we best do that)?

3. How to prepare for an unknowable future?: When we can have no idea what post-collapse society will ultimately look like — what forms of governance will last the longest, what power will devolve to who, what resources will disappear and what infrastructure will collapse first, where we will live (after probably a series of migrations to avoid some of the worst crises of cascading collapse), and what skills will be necessary wherever we may find ourselves — how can we best prepare now to be of use to those with whom we will find ourselves living, no matter how collapse unfolds?

Dmitry Orlov’s recent essay on collapse and climate change suggests that the various ‘camps’ of collapsniks depicted in the New Political Map above seem to be converging and coalescing with remarkable speed. I find this encouraging — together we constitute a significant, educated and growing minority of the human population. The recent Great Debate between several collapsnik factions held at the Melbourne Sustainable Living Festival also demonstrated this convergence.

The last time I can recall a similar global phenomenon was in the 1960s, when we grew large enough and loud enough to be noticed, and for awhile at least everyone jumped on the bandwagon and claimed to agree with us. And we weren’t even really very coherent.

We collapsniks all agree, I think, that politics has now all but given up the pretence of being representative and has devolved to being theatre: today’s politicians are entertainers, distracters, actors reading the scripts written for them by their corporate sponsors, for our consumption, not for our consideration.

It might be useful, now, to try to figure out how the energy and momentum of the 1960s got so lost in the 1970s and 1980s. If we can get our act together again, so that preparing for collapse is taken seriously in public discourse and in social, political and economic decision-making, we don’t want to blow the chance again. We can be sure to face opposition, as we did in the 1960s, from those who want to crush us, jail us or co-opt us. This time, we can’t afford to let the deniers and salvationists re-take the political centre-stage.

The various ‘flavours’ of collapsniks, from humanists to near-term extinctionists, bring different viewpoints and answers to the three questions I pose above, but they increasingly understand and appreciate these differences. We could be formidable and awesome allies.

Not that this is likely to change the endgame, but it could make the final chapter of our civilization less psychologically devastating, more civil, and a lot more interesting, and might get the survivors of collapse off on a better footing. Regardless of how each of us would answer the three questions above, we owe them that.

I am reposting, in their entirety, the ten articles I wrote that were published in SHIFT magazine (which is now on hiatus) between 2013 and 2015, since some of the links have changed and so that my blog contains the full text of these articles (useful for searches etc.) Thanks to SHIFT for the graphics (much better than my originals), and for publishing and editing my work.

“What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
in an age which advances progressively backwards?”
— TS Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

Only a decade ago, I was part of the Strategy and Innovation Core Team for a huge multinational consultancy, and writing exuberantly on my (then-new) blog about innovation and technology and how they could possibly save the world. The image above, from the Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum Synthesis, describes a universal “technology development process” popular at the time. One of the leading business speakers in those heady days was Chris Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, whom I more or less idolized.

And then something happened. My own research into the history of innovation and technology suggested that, rather than being the result of rigorous process, excellence and inventiveness, most enduring technologies of any value seemed to be the result of fortuitous accidents, or were the throw-away byproducts of massive, outrageously expensive military programs. Complexity science was by then throwing serious doubt on a lot of accepted theories about how change actually happens in organizations and societies. Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress and similar works by Jared Diamond and others argued that ‘progress’ was an illusion, and that all civilizations inevitably collapse (taking the capacity to support their technologies with them).

We actually likely lived healthier, happier (and often longer, when we weren’t eaten by predators) lives in prehistoric times, it seems, way back before the inventions (or more accurately discoveries) of the first great technologies (the arrowhead, fire, the wheel, and then abstract language and later, agriculture (which Richard Manning in Against the Grain says should more accurately be called “catastrophic agriculture”), enabling the unnatural human evolution we call “settlement”. Settlement brought with it a blizzard of new problems for technology to solve (most notably infectious and emotional diseases), and each well-intentioned new technology has produced yet more problems, arguably greater in number, size and intractability than the benefits the earlier technology provided.

Nothing is new in any of this. Back in 1994, in his book Beginning Again, David Ehrenfeld described our civilization’s technological underpinning as a ragged flywheel, over-built, patched and rusty, spinning faster and faster and now beginning to rattle and moan as it inevitably comes apart.

In the past decade, disillusionment with innovation and technology has grown. Christensen’s work has been largely discredited by a review (by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker), with the benefit of hindsight, suggesting that “innovative” companies don’t ultimately fare any better than those they “disrupt”. A recent study by Peter Thiel in MIT Technology Review claims “technology stalled in 1970”. As global corporate power is consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, he explains, there is less and less motivation for innovation and more wealth to buy it out and squelch it, with the help of armies of IP lawyers.

My own research in recent years substantiates this claim. My greatest learning from 35 years in (and studying) organizational culture has been that size is the enemy of innovation and that most of the useful and creative things that happen in large organizations happen through workarounds by people on the front lines, in spite of, not because of, the cultural tone and processes established at the top. Looking back at hundreds of expensive strategic and change-oriented programs and projects I was involved with (including not a few that I led myself) there is almost nothing left to show for them ten, or even five, years after they were conducted.

The most damning critique of the Kurzweilian technophilia that so many bright people now embrace comes from John Gray, who devotes an entire chapter of Straw Dogs to deconstructing the idealistic and uncritical notions that technology, in the long run, steadily and sometimes astonishingly improves our lives. He writes:

If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it. If it becomes possible to clone human beings, soldiers will be bred in whom normal human emotions are stunted or absent. Genetic engineering may enable centuries-old diseases to be eradicated. At the same time, it is likely to be the technology of choice in future genocides. Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can only do so because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies, but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags. Humanity’s worst crimes were made possible only by modern technology.

Whether we believe that innovation and technology ultimately make the world better or worse, there is now overwhelming evidence that they are unsustainable in any case. Between economic over-extension, energy over-dependence, and the ruination of our atmosphere and other environments by our civilization and its technologies, it is now almost inevitable that we will soon see a collapse that will make the Great Depression, and perhaps even the five previous great extinctions of life on Earth, look like nothing.

This collapse is going to require us to live a much simpler, more local and more diverse and place-dependent life. We are destined to be very nostalgic for the good old days of modern technology as soon as it is gone, and that’s likely to happen soon. Modern technology requires cheap energy, and, notwithstanding the recent power games between the US and Russia temporarily and artificially driving down oil prices, we are quickly running out of it. Modern technology requires massive standardization and globalization, and without cheap oil, cheap foreign labour and cheap raw materials, none of which is sustainable, we cannot expect it to last much longer. A barrel of oil replaces six person-years of labour, and when those barrels become unavailable or unaffordable, the vast majority of what we all do is going to change drastically.

But at least, you may insist, the Internet will survive and it will allow other technologies to continue to thrive even if they must be manufactured and operated more frugally and locally. Dmitry Orlov, as he explains in The Five Stages of Collapse, clearly doesn’t think so, and the staggering cost and time required to keep the Internet afloat when the economy is in free-fall seems utterly unsustainable as server farms become luxury items and people’s time is diverted to living sufficiently in the real world.

Likewise with other technologies we pin great hopes on for our future, or have come to take for granted: solar panels and other expensive and resource-dependent goods; the private automobile; non-emergency airplane travel; the miraculous products of the pharmaceutical and plastics industry (including synthetic fibres); industrial agriculture; the mass media, and anything that depends on a reliable and consistent electrical or communications grid.

What will life look like without oil-powered technologies? It will vary hugely from one increasingly-isolated community to the next. Much will depend on the state of the land (the quality of the soil, its capacity to produce sustainable food, the proximity to abundant healthy clean water, its vulnerability to drought, floods, pandemics and natural disasters induced by climate change), the number of people in the community that must be supported, their cohesion as a community and their physical and mental health, essential skills and capacities.

It will depend on our collective ability to live sufficiently, not extravagantly, and to be resilient to change. Dmitri Orlov, in Communities That Abide, says such communities need three qualities: (1) self-sufficiency, (2) able to self-organize and recover in the face of calamity, and (3) mobility: not being tied to any one place. Most modern technologies don’t fit well with such a model.

Ronald Wright not only wrote the aforementioned A Short History of Progress, but also the novel A Scientific Romance, which depicts life in the present-day UK centuries after collapse. When I read it, I was struck by how much our ancient human nature (as scavengers, more like crows than fellow mammals) comes out in his vision, and how much the world he describes resonates with the world described in Pierre Berton’s book The Great Depression. Both books describe worlds that are accepting (or even resigned), self-supportive, full of struggle and joy, and only occasionally (and briefly and spectacularly) violent.

Both books describe people initially trying to perpetuate their technologies, to make them work illogically in a world where the underlying infrastructure can no longer support them. And both books describe how people finally let go of these technologies, and free themselves from dependence on them.

It is not so terrible, a world without modern technologies and the Internet. It is the world hoped for in Mark Kingwell’s The World We Want and Thomas Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency, though it will not come about as elegantly as their authors would have hoped. Technology has always offered us false hope, and continues to do so (the latest technological “miracle” sold to us was fracking). The sooner and more gently we let go of it, and our dependence on the systems that it underlies so precariously, the sooner and more gently we can begin to make our way to a more resilient way of living.

Crows, a spectacular evolutionary success both with and without us, have much to teach and show us in this regard. They have almost no technologies, and those they have discovered (e.g. the elaborate use of hooked sticks) they hold lightly, using them for non-essential, amusing tasks. They have a sophisticated sense of fun, and creatively use their leisure time joyfully and exuberantly whenever and wherever it’s available. They love, support and teach each other without expecting reciprocation. They adapt themselves to places, instead of foolishly attempting to adapt their chosen places to them.

Technology’s false hope can bring us only disappointment, sorrow and suffering. It’s time to learn to let it go, gradually but starting now, and give up our dreams of “smart” technologies that are too smart for our own good. In so doing, we will embrace not progress and the wisdom of crowds, but resilience and the wisdom of crows.

I am reposting, in their entirety, the ten articles I wrote that were published in SHIFT magazine (which is now on hiatus) between 2013 and 2015, since some of the links have changed and so that my blog contains the full text of these articles (useful for searches etc.) Thanks to SHIFT for the graphics (much better than my originals), and for publishing and editing my work.

image by the author; click on image to view full-size

As we wade into discussions about the consequences of collapse, and the most effective ways to become resilient in face of it, most of us would prefer to avoid getting mired in discussions about morals (personal standards of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’) and ethics (collective standards of ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ behaviours). It doesn’t matter whether climate change is human-caused, we assert, we need to focus on how to deal with it, not who to blame for it.

Alas, it is not so easy to avoid the issue, because our worldviews are inevitably rooted in our beliefs, including our moral and ethical ones. Libertarians have tried to avoid such issues for centuries, and have failed utterly, which is why “left libertarians” and “right libertarians” have so little in common (mainly the shared belief that laws should only be imposed when absolutely necessary) that the word, unmodified, becomes meaningless. They will never agree, for example, on whether the exclusion and discrimination, by a group of racists, or a group of radical feminists, of those not of their colour or gender or creed, should be illegal or not.

When it comes to preparing for collapse, as much as we might want all of the different groups who have come to accept the near-term collapse of industrial civilization as inevitable (or at least requiring immediate and drastic action to avert), these various different groups’ worldviews are rooted in different moral and ethical standards that, I would argue, are almost irreconcilable. That makes collaboration, or even agreement on what to do, fraught with difficulty if not impossible.

In the chart above, I’ve identified several such groups, each of which has come to accept that our civilization either may not or will not be ‘saved’ from collapse. They are in that regard distinct from the many ‘old-style’ political groups, and from some new age groups that I call (without meaning to be disparaging) ‘salvationists’ (groups A through E on the chart above). They believe, for a variety of different reasons (listed on the chart) that civilization can and will be ‘saved’ from collapse.

In contrast, there are five groups (groups H through L on the chart above) whose members no longer harbour serious doubts that industrial collapse is either imminent or already underway, and that this collapse is unstoppable; I call them ‘collapsniks’. They differ in how they believe we (all of us) should be preparing for the fall (these reasons are also listed on the chart). Both ‘salvationists’ and ‘collapsniks’ fall along a spectrum that indicates how strongly they believe in humanity’s capacity to change (higher in the chart, stronger the belief in that capacity). See the value judgements creeping in here already?

In addition, there are three groups that straddle the salvationist/collapsnik divide – they aren’t sure (groups F & G) or don’t care (group M) whether collapse is inevitable or not.

Few of us ‘fit’ neatly into any of these groups – we migrate among them as our learning and context evolves and shifts, much as many old-school politicos have come to embrace social liberalism and economic conservatism, and then may flip to the opposite as they get older, more fearful and more dependent.

I have argued that we ‘collapsniks’, including the Humanists and Transition/Resilience movement fence-sitters – everyone, in other words, who shares some of the worldview of any of groups F, G, H, I, J, K, and L – need to work together if we are to have any hope of being at least somewhat prepared for the collapse to come. At one point or another over the past year I would describe myself as being in fundamental agreement with each of these seven groups, and I am constantly inspired by articulate speakers (notably at the moment Charles Eisenstein, Rob Hopkins, Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, Paul Kingsnorth, John Gray and Guy McPherson respectively) espousing these seven diverse worldviews.

The different moralities and ethical beliefs underlying these seven worldviews surface pretty quickly, and these differences have driven wedges between us and made us, to some extent, our own worst enemies. Consider these questions:

• Is it acceptable to use violence when pacifism seems inadequate to the task of confronting the most devastating aspects of industrial civilization, of getting the job done?
• Are large public protests an essential means of raising awareness and political pressure, or a useless distraction from the real work of preparing for economic and political collapse?
• Is social justice and the end of inequality of wealth and power an essential precondition for collectively addressing climate change, or just a proposal to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?
• Would we be doing the world, and human society, a great service or a great disservice to deliberately provoke a collapse of markets and the economy in order to reduce consumption and energy use?
• Is giving up on environmentalism and attempts to bring about large-scale change in our response to climate change, and focus instead on local initiatives and personal and community preparedness, a realistic and pragmatic strategy, or dangerous, irresponsible defeatism?

On all these questions, and more, there is strong disagreement among collapsniks. This disagreement stems in part from different interpretations of what we know about what is happening in the world and what is technically possible, but it stems I think principally from different worldviews informed by different moral and ethical beliefs on what is humanly possible.

Humanists, for example, tend to have a worldview that suggests humans are, essentially, good, and that hence by sheer force of numbers (say, 99%?) we can accomplish anything we put our collective minds to, even at this late date. Reform the systems by popular demand and save the world. Others will argue that the 1% don’t have nearly the power that is commonly presumed, and certainly not enough that their conversion or demise can prevent the juggernaut of industrial civilization from its acceleration off the collapse cliff. Still others will argue that the so-called 1% are doing their best, like the rest of us, and that the enemy is all of us (leading to a wide variety of prescriptions on what that realization might lead us to do, if anything). And others will argue that the 1% are psychopaths, and that the only thing that will work is to smash the systems that they lead (and, presumably, hope that what fills the resultant power vacuum will, perhaps improbably, be significantly better).

There is no ‘right’ perspective on these issues, no answer that is certain or even highly probable. There are too many variables, too little appreciation of the sheer unknowingness of the massively complex systems industrial civilization has (perhaps with the best of intentions, perhaps not – it doesn’t much matter) produced, and the reinforcing feedback loops that have evolved to perpetuate it to our peril, and hence the impossibility of knowing how, or even if, we can intervene in these systems effectively.

If that weren’t enough, the two ‘newest’ groups on the collapsnik spectrum, the Voluntary Human Extinctionists (group K on the chart) and the Near Term Extinctionists (group L) add a whole new layer of moral complexity for collapsniks to deal with. The Voluntary Human Extinctionists would have us believe that (see if you can detect any moral judgement here) the human species is inherently violent, aggressive and destructive, and hence the world will be much better off if and when we vanish from the planet. The Near Term Extinctionists would have us believe that climate change is accelerating at such a pace that the human species will be extinct (i.e. not one of us left) as soon as mid-century, along with most complex life forms on the planet.

If the world would be better off without us, does that mean we should do nothing, or even try to accelerate our demise (perhaps by working on some new viruses)? If the human species is doomed in our lifetimes anyway, does that mean we should party like it’s 1999 (or perhaps 2049)?

Every time I find my worldview shifting along the group F-to-L spectrum, I find myself asking myself all these questions, and apologizing to the true believers in different places along that spectrum with irreconcilable worldviews and action (or inaction) plans. And apologizing to myself for my earlier, and recurring, foolishness. I’m living in a philosophical, epistemological, ontological and moral minefield, navigating it as my viewpoint constantly shifts.

Guy McPherson’s ‘Near Term Extinctionist’ advice is to act to make a better world even though people are not going to be part of it, for the sake of those species that might survive. He has also said that we should act as if the Earth is in hospice, and treat it with commensurate respect, and honour its decline by living full, joyful, responsible and meaningful lives. How many people do you know who could handle doing that?

John Gray’s book Straw Dogs is my favourite treatise on the current state of the world and the actions available to us as we face collapse. He says unequivocally that have not changed and cannot change what we are, what we do, how we behave or what we value, and that we are doomed by the coding in our DNA to continue along our inexorable path of self-destruction, and to inflict large-scale but ultimately transitory damage on our planet in the process. He writes:

A human population of approaching 8 billion can be maintained only by desolating the Earth… [Quoting Reg Morrison, The Spirit in the Gene] If the human plague is really as normal as it looks, then the collapse curve should mirror the growth curve. This means the bulk of the collapse will not take much longer than 100 years, and by 2150 the biosphere should be safely back to its preplague population of Homo Sapiens — somewhere between a half and one billion…

Climate change may be a mechanism through which the planet eases its human burden…[or] new patterns of disease could trim the human population…War could have a major impact…weapons of mass destruction — notably biological and (soon) genetic weapons, more fearsome than before…It is not the number of states that makes this technology ungovernable. It is technology itself. The ability to design new viruses for use in genocidal weapons does not require enormous resources of money, plant or equipment… By ceding so much control over new technology to the marketplace, [governments] have colluded in their own powerlessness…

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction… What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species? It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter…

Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

I found John’s book liberating and exhilarating, though most of my collapsnik friends found it negative, unconvincing and depressing.

But recently, reading his more recent works, I’ve begun to wonder whether John’s brilliant intellect was being steered by an unstated worldview, a profound misanthropy that might be rooted in part in some trauma he has suffered through, some indignity in his past that has coloured his thinking. Is he really a Voluntary Human Extinctionist, or is he rather a wounded and disillusioned Humanist or Existentialist?

This month, in his new article in the Guardian John builds further on this pessimistic view of the human species. He writes:

It’s not that [western leaders] are obsessed with evil. Rather, they don’t really believe in evil as an enduring reality in human life. If their feverish rhetoric means anything, it is that evil can be vanquished. In believing this, those who govern us at the present time reject a central insight of western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians: destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance that it never goes away.

No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved.

Paradoxically, this belief in the evanescence of evil is what underlies the hysterical invocation of evil that has lately become so prominent. There are many bad and lamentable forces in the world today, but it is those that undermine the belief in human improvement that are demonised as “evil”.

As radical as my beliefs may be, I can’t quite accept that “evil” is a propensity that is humanly universal. I think what is missing from Gray’s argument is that, yes, we are an inherently destructive and aggressive species, but only when we are suffering from chronic and severe stress. I believe (perhaps I have to believe) that, like the bonobos, rather than the chimps, when we are free from stress these traits of destructiveness and aggressiveness are recessive, unneeded and therefore unexercised.

John would probably laugh this criticism off, and likely provide more forceful arguments for this being naive and faith-based thinking than I could muster in its defence. But I would also argue that we can’t know, because civilization has been an incessantly stressful experiment (likely evolved in response to some great natural stresses like climate change), and because we therefore have no credible data to show, or know, what we are like in the absence of great stress.

Robert Sapolsky has studied baboons in the wild for twenty years, and admits he doesn’t like them much – they’re violent, arbitrarily cruel and self-traumatizing creatures. But he tells the story about one baboon troop whose alpha males all died from eating tuberculosis-tainted meat from a garbage dump. The survivors quickly evolved into a peaceful, gentle, egalitarian matriarchy and remained so generations later.

Gabor Mate has similarly argued that almost all human violent behaviour and stress is rooted in childhood trauma, suggesting that a human ‘reboot’ (perhaps after a collapse), allowing children to grow up trauma-free, might produce a human society so gentle, healthy and egalitarian we might hardly recognize it.

So unlike John I continue to use the word ‘evil’ very cautiously, either to describe the inherent nature of individuals or the propensity of groups and our entire species. When we are ill, I think, we are not our true selves. And our species has been ill, and getting more so, for 30,000 years. We can’t know or remember who we were when we were well. And though it may be wishful thinking or faith, rather than profound instinct, I believe that when we were well, and when the descendants of the survivors will be well again after the dust of collapse has settled, humans were and will again be good to each other and to the world.

I’d like to believe that’s a pragmatic and rational perspective, a healthy one. But I may be deluding myself. Those who believe the Earth will be better off without humans may well be right. Those who believe the Earth will be without humans within a short few decades, centuries or millennia (an instant in the planet’s long history) may well also be right.

But I don’t believe they are. I can’t believe they are. My worldview can’t accommodate such beliefs. And therein lies our quandary, fellow collapsniks. We need to open our minds, and hearts, to a much broader range of possibilities, including those we may, in our quiet moments, think ‘impossible’, if we are going to be able to prepare, together, for anything.