What can we actually predict about the future of civilisation?

[UndercoverElephant]

Civilisation as we know it is fundamentally unsustainable -- that much we can say with absolute certainty. But following with that with "so it is going to collapse" is far too vague. It means too many different things to different people. Does collapse have to be fast? Does it have to be total? Does it apply to the whole world, or just parts of it? As soon as you try to answer these questions you get pulled in different directions at the same time and the result is a great deal of disagreement and confusion.

For me, the crux of it seems to be growth-based economics. There's a fundamental problem in academia, in that economics, which ludicrously claims to be some sort of science, is detached from physical/ecological reality. The reasons for this are socio-political and psychological. In other words there is a fundamental clash between the physical state of the Earth's ecology (and I use "ecology" in its broadest sense) and the entire economic-political system within which modern western society operates. That is why economics can't just change, even though it is based on an assumption which becomes ever more obviously a fantasy (ie that there are no limits to growth, or that we don't have to worry about them because we're nowhere near them).

We can surely predict with certainty that this situation cannot continue forever, and that when it does change then that economic-political system will also have to fundamentally change.

And yet as hard as I try, I seriously struggle to imagine how such a change is going to take place. What will actually force academic economists to admit their entire discipline is based on a non-sensical premise? How could that process play out? Will it be forced on them by political pressure coming from the general population? Will it happen because the monetary system collapses? Will it be because we end up in a situation where the majority of the population is hopelessly trapped in debt?

"Post-growth economics" is in itself a very simple idea, but the implications are so huge that they border on incomprehensible. Which is exactly why so many people end up just throwing their arms in the air and declaring that we're f***ed. Of course we're f***ed, but there are many different kinds of f***ed and the differences between them matter.

Maybe it is impossible to make any meaningful predictions, but it seems to me we can and must try to do better than the bubbling cauldron of confusion that is https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/.

[Ralphw2]

I think a good starting place is to look at currently failed states like Haiti or Somalia. Although they are hard to generalise from, the key take away is that the central control of society rapidly gets replaced by local, competing and violent systems, either gang based, tribal or religious. Internally the gangs or tribes try to present and provide some sort of social service to the local population, but fight for control of surrounding gangs and any remaining vestiges of state services, and other resources. Individual people stop believing in the state promoted social contract and increasingly do whatever they need to provide and protect family and neighbours. Basic infrastructure like electricity , water and sewage becomes less and less reliable, and health services and education become ever more limited, if not actively targeted by some ideologies as symptoms of repressive state control.

The old, sick and young die in increasing numbers, but deaths become increasingly undocumented as they have been for the poor throughout history.

Some jobs will provide very steady employment. Hair dressing and grave diggers come to mind.

It took a hundred years for the Western Roman Empire to collapse, and a thousand for the Easterrn. The poorest countries and the poorest classes will always die first and will be least documented, but the suffering will be just as great. The only difference in the wealthy areas will be the level of cognitive dissonance . At the end of the Soviet Union, loyal party workers kept turning up for ‘work’ in empty offices for months after they stopped being paid and sat wondering what to do.

[UndercoverElephant]

I think a good starting place is to look at currently failed states like Haiti or Somalia. Although they are hard to generalise from, the key take away is that the central control of society rapidly gets replaced by local, competing and violent systems, either gang based, tribal or religious. Internally the gangs or tribes try to present and provide some sort of social service to the local population, but fight for control of surrounding gangs and any remaining vestiges of state services, and other resources. Individual people stop believing in the state promoted social contract and increasingly do whatever they need to provide and protect family and neighbours. Basic infrastructure like electricity , water and sewage becomes less and less reliable, and health services and education become ever more limited, if not actively targeted by some ideologies as symptoms of repressive state control.

But those are examples of places where there has never really been a stable state in the first place. Are they really informative models for what is likely to happen in the West?

It took a hundred years for the Western Roman Empire to collapse, and a thousand for the Easterrn.

I'd argue it took longer than that for the Western Empire to collapse, and that the Eastern didn't really collapse at all -- rather it was conquered by hostile forces (so was the Western Empire, but in that case the conquerors didn't have try very hard because the empire was rotten to the core).

From your post in general you just think things are going to collapse, The End. But surely that is not going to be what happens. There is clearly going to be a period of chaotic breakdown, but it doesn't seem realistic to me to believe this is going to mean the final end of civilisation, to replaced by anarchy forever. Something will come out of the other side of the process, will it not?

[northernmonkey]

Industrial civilisation just happens to be especially quantitatively efficient at taking us towards collapse. But, that's all. There is no essential, qualitative difference between any civilisation 's tendency towards eventual collapse. Firstly, politically and economically and then ecologically.

CIVILISATIONS are unsustainable. ALL civilisations. Unsustainability is the defining feature of civilisations.

[Ralphw2]

I suspect we will see a global version of the long descent as favoured by Greer, with mass starvation and mass migration caused by climate change, resource depletion and warfare in some areas, and more gradual decay in others, with better resources and/or better military. Financially most governments will opt for hyperinflation to inflate away their own debts, and when that becomes unsustainable, they will either do a financial reset of their currency linked to a more stable option (US, Chinese, or major rouble?) or just abandon local currencies altogether. The stable geographically defined nation state is a bit of a myth, historically speaking, and I think it will not survive long going forward. Ditto any real form of democracy.

I cannot see any stable alternative system of society emerging until the hydrocarbon age is finally over - any such fledgling society would be immediately attacked or invaded by any remaining vestige of the nation state system that still had a functioning military. The world is becoming increasingly right wing and xenophobic as the fight for resources hots up. Old grudges and injustices are coming to the fore as the age of plenty can now longer cover the cracks in the system.

I hope we will not see larger scale warfare than we are already seeing in Ukraine, where high tech precision is coming up against mass mobilisation and quantity, leading to stalemate, at least for present. Russia, at least, is pissing away its military stockpiles as fast as it can, in the hope its large resource base can sustain the war long enough to exhaust the West. The best chance for Russia would be a surprise attack by China on Taiwan, which would both involve the US directly in a hot war, and cut off the supply of chips that Western high tech weapons, drones and missiles need. I hope China keeps its head and doesn’t allow its current dictator to do what Putin has done.

Of course nuclear war would be a huge step down to total collapse, and right now the US seems the most likely to push the button, if it saw its global dominance crumbling in the face of systems collapse.

It is clear that all states will choose hydrocarbon fuelled climate destruction over rational adaption to a more sustainable economic or social models when bau is seriously threatened. The sixth great extinction is now well under way and irreversible. The climate will not fully recover for a few thousand years, or longer.

Ultimately, I do not see the human species reaching ecological balance with whatever natural environment survives on this planet. Any such society would quickly subdivide until one would emerge that was prepared to resort to unsustainable consumption to out compete any stable one, until the environment was degraded to the point of human extinction. It may take many cycles and thousands of years, but intelligence and the maximum power law of evolution are ultimately incompatible.

[UndercoverElephant]

Ultimately, I do not see the human species reaching ecological balance with whatever natural environment survives on this planet. Any such society would quickly subdivide until one would emerge that was prepared to resort to unsustainable consumption to out compete any stable one

I think this is the most important statement in your post, and I am not sure whether or not it is actually true. It's true now, but that may well be dependent on the fact that fossil fuels are very much still available. I don't think it has been true for most of human history, apart from in the sense of one civilisation/nation "consuming" its neighbours. Rome was just fine as long as it kept growing, until it had grown too big to govern and defend. That is a form of unsustainability, but its not the same as the unsustainability of the modern world, which is much more to do with ecological limits (including non-renewable resources of all sorts). What I'm trying to say is that in the future it may well be the societies/states which continue to attempt to behave in a radically unsustainable manner who will be the losers, and those who are more ecologically advanced who are the winners. In a world where all the easy non-renewable resources are gone, maybe there is no military advantage to an unsustainable strategy.

[BritDownUnder]

I think History will show the way. People always think it will be different this time. Here in Australia we are being urged to buy houses before they get unaffordable next year.

Rome was fine when it could seize the treasuries of relatively advanced states or mine their gold and use this to pay their military. I think they expanded into Dacia and had a hard fight with little to reward them after it was subjugated, and this was the first province that they voluntarily evacuated. Another problem they had was the unusually long frontier on the Rhine and Danube rivers that was difficult to police. They would have been better trying to get to the Bug-Dniester line that was much shorter but the lands between were heavily forested and had little resources and lots of wild people.

I think being in the Americas will be the best bet for the future long descent. Lower population density, good resources, lower percentage of Muslims and difficult to migrate to using non-fossil fuelled technology from the rest of the world.

Well ordered and complex societies seem to fare worse and have a shorter lifetime than caveman societies.

[adam2]

I predict a steady decline as being most likely, with a small but real chance of a sudden undoing prompted by nuclear war, plague, or natural disaster.