Throughout human history new civilisations have emerged and become powerful and innovative, only to fall and be replaced by others that are more dynamic, inventive, and better organised. Or, on occasion, simply more violent and aggressive. Whenever one powerful society failed there was always another to take its place, even if there was a considerable gap between the collapse and the emergence in a particular locality.
A world on the brink
We live in different times. We have a global civilisation and a global economy. We are also butting up hard against the constraints of a global ecology. If our society descends into chaos and confusion, there is no alternative civilisation in some hidden corner of the planet that can take its place. After a collapse, recovery is unlikely to be quick and easy, as there is no place on the planet that will be immune to the consequences.
It’s important, therefore, that we reflect hard and long about the existential risks that surround us. Undoubtedly, there are some optimists who believe that things are bobbing along very nicely thank you, and that we are living in a time of great security, with all the signs pointing to a stable economic future and social success.
More and more people sense something is seriously wrong. It is hard to share the naïve optimism that the pursuit of profit will lead to ever-greater prosperity and happiness. At times it feels more as if we are living in an era similar to the late 1930s, when signs of impending disaster were becoming increasingly clear.
The drivers of the modern sense of insecurity are manifold. We are trying to deal with ecological, economic, societal and political problems that are global, at a time when nationalism is on the rise and effective international government is almost completely absent. We have been warned often enough about the consequences of this development. So far, there has been little evidence that these warnings have been taken seriously.
Remember the global financial collapse?
Consider, for example, the global financial collapse of 2007–2008, when banks went under, assets that were once thought highly valuable become worthless overnight, and panic spread rapidly. A few traders dealing in obscure financial instruments took excessive risks and the consequences of their failure spread with astonishing speed and horrible consequences.
Only the mass printing of money, provided free of charge to the institutions that had caused the problems, saved us from a complete catastrophe. Meanwhile, the national debt doubled, and years of gruelling austerity measures were imposed on those who had nothing to do with creating the problem, such as nurses and teachers.
What exactly is to prevent this from happening again? How would another global financial crisis be managed in the current atmosphere of global discord? Financial traders are already up to some of their old tricks of gambling with other people’s money, and the British chancellor has decided that it is fine to ease the regulations on them in the hope of accelerating growth.
Multiple ecological crises
The threats to our obscure and complicated financial systems ought to be solvable if the political will were there. It is much harder to see how we tackle the multiple ecological crises we face without triggering massive economic and social problems. The deterioration in the stability of our climate is becoming ever more evident and ever more costly.
This year, the world shot past the 1.5 degrees mark in global surface air temperature warming and the officially sanctioned international plan will see temperatures continue to rise for another 25 years. All those cars washed down the streets in Valencia, their occupants helplessly calling out for assistance, don’t come cheap. The destruction of an estimated 100,000 cars there will have increased insurance costs by well over £2bn. Added to that is the even larger cost of all the destroyed homes, businesses and lives.
Disasters are becoming more extreme and a changing climate is expected to trigger serious crop failures. The strain of increasingly frequent weather extremes, food and commodity shortages, plus the flow of desperate refugees, could easily overwhelm an economic system already struggling with the more esoteric problem of poorly run financial trading institutions.
The risks of more pandemics and antibiotic resistance
And then there is the increased risk of pandemics. All of us wish Covid-19 had disappeared and that it will be a very long time before anything similar re-emerges. That is not a given.
There is much more reason to believe that pandemics could become more frequent and more deadly, than to comfort ourselves with the illusion that we’ve had a rare run of bad luck that is unlikely to be repeated any time soon. Highly deadly bird flu has already mutated to the point where it has infected cattle and a few humans who have come into regular contact with it. The risk of the pathogen evolving to spread from human to human is real.
Added to this are the risks associated with the overuse of antibiotics, which are systematically rendering them ineffective. Our civilisation continues to cut down rain forests and penetrate deep into new territories where we are encountering rare species with rare diseases for the first time, and international air travel can spread any new infection at great speed.
Governments and private businesses continue to play with complex biotechnological experiments that put us all at risk. The most recent example is the mirroring of bacterial life in ways that scientists have warned us could create organisms to which no one is immune.
Civilisation on the brink of collapse
Does anyone believe that our global institutions and political consensus is strong enough to deal with another severe pandemic? Does our society feel strong enough to cope with another financial crash? Are we really able to endure the full impact of climate change?
There are, of course, answers to all these problems. A strong society is built upon strong communities with powerful local networks. A weak one sucks more and more power and money into the hands of a few oligarchs and breeds resentment. A successful civilisation respects the environment in which it lives. A fragile one destroys wildlife, cuts down forests, dumps microplastics into the ocean and burns fossils that can never be replaced.
We have allowed our society to become dominated by those who selfishly pursue the acquisition of money and have allowed ourselves to be hypnotised by an ideology that preaches that the market will solve every problem, even though the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.
Humanity became a successful species because it was good at co-operating and people could see the value in working together for a common cause where everyone benefited from the collective effort. We are at risk of collapse precisely because we have forgotten these values and replaced them with the strange notion that greed is good and the pursuit of profit benefits all.
We can but hope that our society remembers the values that built it – before the values that jeopardise it get so out of control that they leave a devastated wasteland as their global legacy.
