Death Cults, Doomers and an End of a Civilization
Death Cults, Doomers and an End of a Civilization
I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Having a high-tech society is a one time offer in any intelligent species life. Something which is bound to have a beginning, a high point and an end, as resources run out and pollution takes over. Without accepting this simple fact of life we are preparing our children for a future which is physically impossible to bring about.
And therein lies the flaw. The whole piece is built on an assumption that the author takes as an absolute and dismisses any potential to challenge.
Maybe he's right but maybe he's not.
The Roman fallacy is a good example. Roman society went into decline but civilization did not collapse. The idea that the dark ages were an age of decline is overdone; some things went backwards but others pushed forwards. New civilizations were built in Europe. It wasn't an extinction event.
Meanwhile the Mayan collapse was also not a collapse. We don't know why their society changed so much but the Yucatan region thrived and gave birth to new cultures and civilization.
The idea that our own civilization is on an inevitable path to collapse is a misreading of history. We have never reached this level of technological achievement - how can we say this is a "one time" thing, and also how can we know where it will end?
It is very easy to doomsay but actually there is a tremendous amount of cognitive bias about how bad things are. Poverty is down globally, deaths from disasters and wars are down globally, deaths from.disease are down globally. These have been continuous trends over the last 100 years.
As bad as 2 degrees climate change is, there was a time when we were headed for 5. We can and must do more, but the idea that nothing is happening or changing is a fallacy. Things are changing and can be changed.
I don't disagree with the author that we should open our minds to the idea of decline and death. But I do disagree that civilizations decline is inevitable or that it is even declining despite the challenges we now face. Our species has faced challenges continuously for all of history. Yet over 40000 years we have emerged from a nomadic agregarian society to a global civilization.
And the idea this is a "one time" thing is based on zero evidence. In fact every civilization that has "collapsed" in history has been eventually replaced by one that has progressed even further - ours.
It is not a hypothesis without merit. Those civilizations were not built on the meteoric extraction and burning of fossil fuels, which will not be replenished for millions of years, if that. If we exhaust those fuels, or any resource really, at a global-industrial scale, it becomes dubious whether or not a follow-up civilization will be able to leverage those resources for their own advancement.