How and when will our civilization die?
Now, I return to the collapse theme. In the first article in the series, I defined what I meant with collapse and identified the factors I believe are most important for the future development. I noted that globalization already is in reverse. In the second article , I discuss if this also apply to capitalism and to what extent capitalism is a major cause of a coming collapse.
This series of articles are essays in the original meaning of the word, derived from the French essayer, to try, to attempt...
The Finnish Oracle
Here I want to turn to how events can unfold. Before I come to my own thoughts, I want to point to what my neighbours on the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia say about the matter. Finland’s official “Report on the Future” outlines four different scenarios for the state of the world in 2045. The four scenarios are World of Cooperation, World of Tech Giants, World of Blocs and Crumbling World. The World of Cooperation is as rosy as it sounds. In the World of Tech Giants they “create their own conditions to dominate the system, eroding democracy in many countries”. They foresee an even further take over of government services by giant corporations. A situation which might lead to a marriage between them and the state. It makes you think about China and also the Trump-Musk situation. The World of Blocs envisions tight-knit alliances built around national interests, in which rival blocs battle for control over natural resources, technological supremacy and geopolitical influence. The climate crisis is causing significant economic consequences and significant migration to Europe. The worst-case Crumbling World scenario describes a world mired in chaos, internal conflicts and rampant authoritarianism, in which global warming has become irreversible.
The report also identifies a number of wild card/black swans such as the African economic miracle; a new Ice Age in Europe, triggered by the collapse of the Gulf Stream; extreme longevity, in which medical breakthroughs make it possible for people to live to the age of 160; the end of free internet (was it ever free?), and the collapse of Russia.
One interesting observation about the scenarios is that things are, mostly, either all good or all bad. In the rosy World of Cooperation, everything is good including all social, economic and ecological factors. The economy is thriving and is fair and green and humans thrive within the planetary boundaries. In the Crumbling World, the economy is crashed, dictators are ruling and the environment and the climate are in dire straits.
My view is different. I am not very convinced by win-win-win or people-planet-profit and other sustainability narratives where societies score well on all counts. For sure, there are some positive feedback between the social, human, economic and ecological spheres but there are also competing interests, in particular between the economy and the ecological context within which we live. It seems to me that also in the World of Cooperation, global warming can easily become irreversible and it is even more likely than in the Crumbling World as economic growth still is the main driver of green house gas emissions and bio-diversity destruction. And, after all, the rapid increase of green house gas emissions is a result of a world of cooperation based on the Washington consensus, UN, WTO and other international institutions. The notion that Western style parliamentary democracy is a prerequisite for a happy and content people seems to be negated by the fact that the Chinese seems to be more satisfied with their society than any other people. Just to mention two examples.
I find it telling that there are many things that change in the scenarios, but capitalism prevail: ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ as the saying goes. In my previous article I ended with:
“I believe this global capitalist civilization is doomed from a number of contributing factors, internal and external, biophysical and social, material and ideological. They are linked together so there is little point in saying that the global capitalist civilization will collapse due to any of them alone.“
Where are we now?
A longer historical view will help when gazing into the future. Where are we now and what led us (us=humanity, as if we had a common agenda, which we don’t, but we do seem to have a common destiny) here?
The land based feudal system supported smaller social systems than the Roman Empire which was built on mobile silver, soldiers and slaves. Even if feudal lords sometimes came together under a common flag, the centre was weak and often disputed. Gradually nation states formed and strengthened their power (more knowledgeable people than me can explain the drivers of that process). With fossil fuel and capitalism, land became less important and mastery of the machine (capital) and the market became the key to power. Lately, even the machine is less important.
The neo-liberal revolution of the 1970s tried to get rid of excessive government regulations, but when public services were privatized, the net result was an increase in regulation as governments had to regulate the services in more detail than they had before. The agenda of the neo-liberals also led to the spread of New Public Management to public services. It was intended to make those more like businesses, but it seems to result in a marriage where the worst aspects of both business and government were combined. The neo-liberals also promoted markets to regulate all kinds of things from ecosystem services to social conditions for workers. This resulted in a array of new, allegedly voluntary, systems for certification, standards and reporting. Things normally regulated by the public sphere entered into the operation of business. This was, finally, re-integrated with governments and some of the voluntary systems became referenced or embedded in regulation, such as sustainability reporting or inclusiveness policies. The end result is an enormously complex business environment which is very hard to manage and where the line between business and government is as blurred as ever.
As a result of this complexity, control of information and the management of abstractions such as money seems to become more important. Markets are transformed from being about the exchange of goods into the exchange and control of information. In this process, capital has to some extent lost its power and it has become a lot more anonymous, with vast financial capital amassed in pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds and venture capital. The classic capitalism with surplus value created by doing smart deals or by the extraction from productive process has moved up to another level of abstraction.
The increasing complexity is the basis for managerial capitalism
We could talk about, two rather parallel, but interdependent, spheres of financial (rentier) capitalism and a managerial capitalism*. The latter phenomenon seems to explain the widening gap between payments to capitalist CEO superstars, not only compared to workers but also compared to capital owner and other high-income earners. The emergence of managerial capitalism is a sign of the growing complexity of society, where the ability to manoeuvre in the complicated territory is the most important talent. Of course, in a similar way as the first transformation into fossil capitalism didn’t free us from the dependence of the land-based food production on a system’s level, managerial capitalism is still dependent on land, labour and capital. Without them, everything will fall apart. Even it is not visible for the eye, this whole system is also underwritten by fossil energy.**
The many dimensions
When discussing society, it can be helpful to discuss the various dimensions and how they belong together. One dimension is the external conditions, the climate, the Earth, the water, the living world. The second dimension is how the human interaction with these external conditions is organised, the metabolism including the human population. The third dimension is how we organize ourselves to accomplish this, the economy. A fourth dimension is constituted by all the institutions, the culture and society at large. Fifth and finally, we have what humans think and which believes they have, this includes how we look upon the other dimensions, or relationship to the living world, to other humans, the genesis etc.
For all dimensions there are various “technologies” developed. Technologies in turn impact the dimension and our view of the dimension. Even the fifth dimension is impacted by stories of the spoken and written word (’in the beginning was the Word’ (John 1:1)). The transition to an agrarian economy was not only a matter of digging and sowing, it implied another view of nature and new societal relationships and led to new technologies, such as writing and counting, which in turn was used for new purposes. The often heard statement that technologies are in some way “neutral” and devoid of meaning is simply nonsense. Not even a hammer is a technology without meaning and a bigger story.
There is a constant interplay between these dimensions and they impact each other. Even conditions that we call external are influenced by us at least to some extent. It is quite well established that humans have impacted the climate and rainfall for millennia, also before burning fossil fuel, and now we engaged the turbo. The composition of the living world has certainly been heavily influenced by us (remember mammoth and bison). Real external factors, which are none of our making, would be an asteroid crashing into our home planet.
The organization of the metabolism also influence all other aspects of society. A foraging society and an agrarian society will never be the same, even if the simple dichotomy of equal foragers versus patriarchal and hierarchical farmers is far too simplistic. Clearly, to organize global supply lines of both inputs and finished goods require a very different governance than more localized systems, in particular if you want to control the process and capture value all along.
It can be useful to use these dimensions as the lens by which we discuss the current status and the development in the near future.
Most of the problems or challenges we encounter are about how the various dimensions interact and the dissonance that appear when different dimensions pull or push in opposite directions. We cause global warming because we want to keep warm or cool or use machines to do the heavy lifting or to just churn out more stuff. We exterminate species because we need more land for farming or need more wood for board, houses or toilet paper. We feel lonely and without cause because the capitalist production process alienate us from the social and material conditions we live in. Markets help us to organize distribution but create inequality, increase the loss of bio-diversity and has severed the connection between people and the land. The quest for profit and growth embedded in capitalism has been an engine for remarkable accomplishments, but it also carries inherent contradictions both social and environmental.
Markets help us to organize distribution but they create inequality
The external factors are undoubtedly very important and are perhaps what most people think about in terms of collapse. Energy sources is of outmost importance for the workings of modern societies**. The use of fossil fuels should be phased out or radically reduced to halt global warming. But even if that wasn’t the case, they will not last so much longer, or rather, the cost for extracting them is increasing so much that they will not be as useful as they were earlier. For sure, there are other energy sources, but none of them is so versatile and abundant as fossil fuels have been. Energy sources in the future will be more stationary, land based and less flexible, which will call for a more decentralized and diverse localized metabolism.
A changing climate and loss of bio-diversity will also increase systemic risks. Some might believe that increased risk would point to the need for a more globalized system to ensure that for example food would be transported from surplus areas to areas hit by natural disasters. But we have seen that such a system is itself very vulnerable. Instead, a primary focus on risk reduction will lead to more self-sufficiency and less dependence of distant trade. The fact that global transportation also will become for costly is another factor to consider. Note, however, that already long before fossil-powered shipping, sailing ships transported even staple foods quite far, e.g. from Egypt to Rome and later from North America to Europe (until the steamers took over towards the end of the 19th century). Still, there is a question of magnitude and relative importance.
I envision that collapse will be both a top-down process and a bottom-up process. The system will de dismantled from the top. The most complex components are shed first, such as most of the financial system, global governance, extremely fragmented and modular supply-chains etc. As complexity unwinds, financial crises will hit again and again. So will also political crises as they are very much tied to each other. Here, the collapse of the EU and the USA as political entities is quite possible and even more devolution of authority from central governments to regions and/or indigenous populations a process already visible in many countries.
More important, perhaps, are the bottom-up processes where I see a number of features. First, even if it is hard to imagine another system than capitalism, it seems to me that there is a revival of ideas that are if not anti-capitalist, at least agnostic towards capitalism. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but the ideas of self-sufficiency, working less and de-growth seem to gain traction. Another important factor is that, as discussed in the second article, part of the elite is losing faith in capitalism. It is like having priests without religion, only going through the motions. The success of Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics is another example, as is the Transition movement. They don’t challenge capitalism openly, but their messages are, if taken seriously, anti-capitalist. They are based on the assumption that humans seek other values than profit maximisation and they promote ways of organizing distribution and services that are essentially non-capitalism.
Many people question the meaning of life embedded in capitalism, or rather that there is no meaning of life embedded in capitalism. It is a system without a higher purpose and its only moral doctrine, if any, is the (flawed) notion that all will be better off if we just think about our own interest.
there is no meaning of life embedded on capitalism
How all this will impact the institutions (in a wider sense) is the trickiest question. Even if they have material manifestations, money, bonds, shares in limited companies, private property, parliaments are all abstract creations of our imagination and they are all based on unspoken justifications or foundational myths (such as that money evolved from barter, that land ownership was “earned” when somebody made the land productive, or that the Parliament express the will of the people). In scenarios for a radical change of society there is often a debate if there will/should be reform or revolution, or perhaps a coup, resulting in dictatorship. We hardly hear the fourth alternative: that people just “walk away” like deserters in a war or vagabonds or go walkabout, as some people always had throughout history. That might imply leaving the dependency of both the market and the state behind.
Some die fast....
Some see collapse as a rapid process. Ugu Bardi refers to the Seneca Effect named after the Roman philosopher Seneca who wrote that “fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”. That may very well be true in many cases, in particular if the system has overstretched dramatically. But in my view, a rapid ruin is more often a result of a rapid growth. In the world of company startups this is the rule nowadays. An enormous boom and then a spectacular bust. But of course, a company startup is not a ”society” or a civilization. But also there, we see examples of rapid growth. The Mongol expansion was very rapid and their decline was fairly rapid as well, at least as a Mongol empire. The nazi ”civilization” of Germany or the expansion of the Japanese Empire between 1895 and 1942 are other spectacular boom-bust examples.
...some die hard and slow
The favourite collapse-case, Rome, actually shows that collapse can be slow. Even if described as a “fall”, it was a protracted business stretching over centuries. On the political side, despite being smaller and the capital relocated, the Roman Empire survived thousand years as the Byzantine Empire. (As a funny footnote: both the Ottoman Empire and Russia have claimed to be successors to the Roman and Byzantine Empires after the fall of Constantinople in 1453). More important than this is the long lasting impact of Roman culture, language and law. Not to speak about the most important Roman innovation, concrete, still lasting today (it is also an interesting examples how technologies and society are linked, the knowledge of concrete was not lost with the fall of Rome, but the use almost vanished). Instead of focusing on a fall, one could also consider how great influence the legacy of Rome has had until today.
My take is that some components of the current global capitalist civilization may very well fall very rapid. As I wrote in the first article, the globalization component is rapidly disintegrating, already. Perhaps it will resume as the late 19th century globalization resumed, but I am not convinced. The resumption of the globalization was very much a result of a fossil fuel driven economy. An economy built on less energy, more stationary and less flexible energy sources will have another logic.
How the world might look afterwards, when the dust has settled, is the topic of my next article.
* I use the term managerial capitalism without knowing if I put the same meaning into it as other writers, as I have not explored the literature on the topic. I will, in the future.
** In my view, there is a tendency to overstate the role of fossil fuels among collapsniks. For sure, they are important and have been the fundament of the global capitalist civilization. But I still find that some put a bit too much attention to the role of energy, apart from the apparent conclusion that without energy everything stops. For example, the frequent reference to the second law of thermodynamics as some kind of killing factor seems overstated. For sure, the economy is a dissipative system which produce high-entropy, but so are all processes depending on which scale you apply. Having said that, let me repeat that energy is very important and that fossil fuels have been a radical game changer. And there seems to be no equally abundant and versatile energy source within reach.
Good to hear you talk about the coming decades, without the illusion of eternal growth on our way to the stars.
I recommend a book by the historian Bas van Bavel "The Invisible Hand" about rise and fall of market economies throughout the last 1500 years. It shows how the market arena is part of the state, and how wealth tends to concentrate through monopolies. He also shares very interesting counter-forces, like the medieval guilds and 20th century workers unions.
I lived for a year in Russia in the 1990s, and it was a society where, within a couple of years, unemployment went from 1% to 50%, inflation was more than 100% on a yearly basis and lots of men drank themselves to death. Life expectancy for men dropped from 75 years to 55 years.
Collapse can be quite quick.
At the same time, the rest of the world was booming and was pouring money into the Russian system to restart the economy (and purchase extraction rights).
When the global dollar system crumbles, there is no outside world that can pour resources into the wreck.
Collapse has already arrived to many places on our planet, like Syria, Libya, Yemen...
In my village in South West Sweden, nowadays we only get postal service every second day, and there is no more physical newspaper delivery. In town the police station is almost never open. There is almost no fish in the river anymore. Does that count as the early stages of collapse? What do you think will be next to disappear? What makes sense to you?
We sure live in interesting times.
Thanks for the essay. Could you elaborate here on why you think energy and the second law are overstated? I think you're wrong about that. Yes, most systems are dissipative, but the dissipation of natural systems is related to the energy of the sun. Our globalized system of 8.3 billion people is completely dependent on fossil fuels. It is impossible to even imagine supporting this machine with anything other than oil, gas, coal, etc. There was not enough land or wood, for example, to transport all the goods by horses and sailing ships, to cook and heat with wood, to support businesses, servers. What is the value of the Internet, electricity, the supply of water to cities, goods, waste disposal and recycling, and embodied energy, in buildings, three-story buildings, etc. If the Internet disappeared tomorrow, everything would collapse in a year.
We are too connected, too complex, too fragile and large. As for the second law - it works regardless of desire. So you can make an antikythera mechanism in 5 years with the help of firewood and charcoal, as well as abilities and intelligence, but he alone, embodied an incalculable amount of energy, but it is useless (cannot be returned to the system in the form of work). You can get electricity from burning gas, so the amount of energy will be less than the gas consumed. And also much less than the calories consumed by the people who made it, the energy embodied in devices and structures (gas turbine, repair, mining, etc. up to plants and bacteria that, for example, concentrated metals or non-metallic raw materials. In the end, the energy of electricity will be irretrievably spent on screen light, battery heat, speaker sound and transmission inefficiency. It will become useless.