I enjoyed “Are We Facing the Reality of Civilizational Collapse?” by Umair Haque, published on Medium on July 9, 2023. I mean, how could I not, considering the deck for the article was “The Hottest Days in 100,000 Years. How Long Do We Have, and What Does ‘Collapse’ Mean for a Civilization?”
The premise of the piece is that civilizational collapse is a long process, not a sudden apocalypse. This perspective is a valuable one and his arguments are sound and well-reasoned. One disturbing element of the essay, however, is his use of “LOL” exactly a half-dozen times, but considering the topic, perhaps this was an attempt on the author’s part to represent the entirely appropriate state of hysteria this subject rightly engenders.
The article was a call to action, albeit subtly presented and largely only in the concluding paragraph when he asks if the stakes at play will be widely understood while there may still be time to do something to address the causes and symptoms of impending civilizational collapse. The overall tone is pessimistic, not that I would judge this an incomprehensible or undue conclusion.
There were some telling and chilling facts presented, including the annual budget for the U.N., which he reports is $3.5 billion. He rightly points out this is a paltry sum considering the huge ambitions the U.N. undertakes, including, of course, the lead in the fight to lessen climate change:
To put it another way, our civilization’s only real civilizational level public good, which is something like the UN, doesn’t even have the resources of an…upper league billionaire.
A niggling point here, but these days $3.5 billion may be more representative of low- or mid-level billionaires.
I also appreciated his critique of apocalyptic stories using “The Last of Us,” a show we both agree is quality entertainment, which he uses as an example of the common take on collapse as a sudden shift into individuals’ isolation. He argues that the better analogue is the Roman Empire, where, as they say, Rome was not built in a day, nor, as history records, disassembled in a day either. Haque writes:
All that took more than five hundred years.
Civilizational collapse is more like that than the post-apocalyptic vision. It’s not a libertarian fantasy, where the hated government is suddenly revealed to be the bad guy. Above all, what you miss when civilization begins to collapse? LOL, it’s a functioning government.
I suspect that there will be little laughing out loud regarding the absence of a functioning government, but I love his point about a “libertarian fantasy” behind typical portraits of the post-apocalypse. The fever for post-apocalypse settings and those typical portrayals are a pet-peeve of mine, as it happens.
This article is a good and interesting one, but if I have a critique it is that counter-examples of anti-collapse societal actions go unmentioned. Haque talks about the absurd income inequality of today and the equally absurd chronic inattention to infrastructure, as well as declining medical services and rising climate threats, but he doesn’t really look back at other times in American history when (other than climate threats—admittedly, a big “other than”) many of the same threats were at least partially addressed. Back in America’s late 19th Century , known as the time of Robber Barons, the economy was gamed in favor of the extremely wealthy and so-called regulatory agencies like the Railroad Commission were captured (i.e., bought and paid for) by industry and magnates interests (Frank Norris’s The Octopus is a great example from the American Realism school of literature that covers the effect of the railroads on common people back then). There are striking parallels between then and now, including gross wealth concentrations and regulatory agency capture, not to mention the capture of The United States Supreme Court (search for Seldon Whitehouse’s series of speeches, “The Scheme,” from the U.S. Senate floor). What is missing in this article is acknowledgement of the effectiveness of the Progressive movement (e.g. Teddy Rosevelt) that broke up Big Trusts, and also the FDR era, which shifted America into much more equitable distribution of America’s leap in productivity.
Yes, okay, perhaps this is a rather slender reed to cling to today, considering the “other than” of climate change, which he devastatingly addresses:
What’s more realistic—right about now— is a portrait of civilizational collapse that happens…the way…it is happening. Creeping, punctuated by catastrophe. Simmering, turning into a slow boil. Democracies erode, and slowly, there’s a return back to imperial style autocracy, which of course we already see in places like Russia, and is very much on the cards in America. Economies stagnate and decline, not just because of climate change, but also because of the stunning lack of a plan to really do much about it, which means of course that things as basic as spreading crop failures and rivers running dry begin to happen. Systems buckle, break, and implode. You don’t have to be a genius to see that the combination of racing heat pushing the boundaries of what human bodies can take and straining electrical grids is going to lead to some very dark places.
Indeed, the question remains: Will enough of us understand the stakes and take the action required to brighten our future?