Back to basics: averting global collapse

The logic of these mathematically-based finance systems came to outweigh all other concerns. Culture, religion, family, nature, even war became subordinated to the need to make and keep making money. This, some people said, was the end of history and our fate for ever more.

Recently, however, another product of this great civilisational project, modern science, has been sounding a warning. Basically, science tells us, there are now so many people using so much of the Earth’s natural resources, the world is running out of essential resources and space to put the waste products. The rapid depletion of fresh water and fossil fuels are the resource problems most identified, and atmospheric and oceanic pollution leading to global warming is the worst environmental problem.

Science also tells us that the complexity of our civilisation is causing basic problems. Mostly that complexity comes from the scale of our global socio-economic system, the sheer numbers of diverse people and things involved. In particular, the interconnected systems we have created to control and power this civilisation are increasingly at risk. Electrical power grids, the Internet and the global economy share a similar vulnerability to accidental or deliberate systemic damage.

There are also threats from the products of science itself. The construction of super weapons, nuclear, biological, and so on, is one aspect, but the overall risk added by advances in things like genetic manipulation of species (including humans) and machine intelligence also loom ever larger. We are reaching the point where we can no longer understand let alone control the technologies we build.

So far the logic of seeking profit has outweighed the logic of averting collapse, and little or nothing has been done about these threats. Our various institutions - some of which, like the family or religions, are millennia old, while others, like the state or business firm, are only a few centuries old - are unable to respond.

Most importantly, those institutions which were tasked with generating and interpreting new information and decision-making - academia, the media and governments - have become moribund. They were captured by vested interests pursuing profits, and steadily neglected their proper roles as they made their own grab for wealth and status.

What we need is a new balance in all aspects of life. We need to end the human population explosion, and the associated growth in exploitation of resources. We need to develop a new economy not based on endless growth. We need to bring as many people as possible into information flows and decision-making processes. We need to recover a sense of meaning, of social solidarity, beyond material gain and social status.

Fortunately, there are a multitude of good ideas out there about how to do these things (such as those of our own Geoff Davies), but we must immediately start to really invest our best efforts.

We are an extraordinarily wealthy civilisation, and we can solve all our problems and create a new and better world. But we cannot do this without radical change, without fundamentally new ideas, and we must act now. Otherwise, we will lose everything we have created over the long millennia.

The Germans called 1946 the Year Zero. Huddling in their ruins, once the most civilised people on earth, they had fallen to irrational beliefs that exploited their fear. Too many young men were dead, too many young women were prostitutes, everyone did what they had to to survive. And they all wondered how it could have come to this.

But the German people at least had the Allies to help them out of the mess. Dying in the billions as the complex natural systems reset themselves under the weight of climate change, as food supplies collapse and water dries up, as even more die when desperate states fight over the remnants of food and oil, we won’t have any one to give us a hand. There’ll be no second chance for our civilisation, and so we’d best get on with saving it.