How Everything Can Collapse

Rumblings of the potential collapse of our modern civilisation date back over 100 years to Oswald Spengler, then the work of Arnold Toynbee and Pitirim Sorokin, among others. Significantly, some leading French commentators are quoted from 2011 that a state of emergency 'will have no time for our slow and complex processes of deliberation. The West will be panic stricken, and will transgress its values of freedom and justice' – as indeed we have been seeing. The three parts address the harbingers of collapse, potential timing, and the nature of the emerging field of 'collapsology'. Many people are now feeling a sense of unease – even grief - at our prospects fed by acceleration and transgression of limits and boundaries, as witnessed by numerous scientific and demographic studies. These developments are not necessarily proportional in a foreseeable way, but they increase the risks of sudden, unpredictable and irreversible catastrophes as the systems not only become more complex but also locked in. Indeed, Joseph Tainter argues that 'this apparently inexorable tendency of society is to move towards greater levels of complexity, specialisation and sociopolitical control is even one of the major causes of the collapse of societies.' (p. 68)

The summary of Part 1 notes that we have 'dangerously undermined the conditions that formerly allowed (our) stability and survival' and that we are moving towards a very unstable, nonlinear future where major disruptions will be the norm but with diminishing social resilience, exacerbated by linear reductionism that fails to perceive the systemic nature of our crises, as Fritjof Capra pointed out in a recent talk on systems ethics. We are no longer in a situation of problems and solutions, but rather in a predicament with limited scope for manoeuvre, as also noted in the work of Jared Diamond. Due to nonlinear factors, it is hard to forecast exact timings, but denial seems to be built into our social psychology in spite of the available data – 'we tend not to believe in the eventuality of a catastrophe until it has actually happened.' The focus here is very much on environmental factors, and an important missing element is the influence of technocracy in relation to sustainable development. In their conclusion, the authors point out that the three states of approaching the limits, exceeding boundaries and increasing complexity are irreversible and create global systemic risks that are simply not amenable to normal policy options based on prediction and control. Any really creative initiatives will have to come from organised grassroots movements. A sobering assessment that rings only too true.