Perhaps it started with a place called Manti, located in the
countryside outside of my home town of Shenandoah. It had a small pond for
fishing and a cemetery. The untended gravestones from the late 19th
century lay overwhelmed by the exuberant grasses and weeds. You could walk
among those gravestones, looking at the dates of birth and deaths of those long
dead residents, and then look around and you see nothing but Nature. A
village of the dead.
I’m not alone in holding a fascination with the sense of
ruin. Visits to Anasazi ruins in New Mexico; to Mayan ruins in the Yucatan and Guatemala;
to those of the Incas in Peru; to the abandoned Moghul city of Fatehpur Sikri in
India; to the Coliseum and Forum in Rome—one never finds oneself alone. Crowds swarm
through the grand ruins. We behold and contemplate. The list of ruins is like a
school’s honor roll of deceased alumni and serves as a haunting memento
mori writ large. For us, for our civilization.
For those interested in decay, decline, collapse—the terms
vary, but the experience remains—the sources are legion. Plato and Aristotle,
St. Augustine, Machiavelli, and just about every serious political thinker in
the Western canon addresses this issue. Medieval Islam gives us the insights of
Ibn Khaldun, while the Enlightenment provides us with Gibbon. In the 20th
century, we have Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin among a host of others, many of
them writing today, such as Peter Turchin. Francis Fukuyama will publish a new
volume at the end of this month entitled Political Order and Political Decay:
From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy. The parade of
reflection on this phenomenon continues. Some—those with the courage to look at
our present situation and consider the real binds that we face—have a grim
message for us. Such is the case with William (a/k/a Patrick) Ophuls.
I recently reviewed Plato’s Revenge, which assumes the decline of our contemporary industrial civilization and that provides a
guidebook of sorts about how we should model the successor to our civilization.
In Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (2013) Ophuls argues that decline is
inevitable—discoveries of new fossil fuel reserves or reductions in climate
change magnitude notwithstanding. It’s here. It’s happening. It’s happened
before. And there are several reasons why. It’s like going to the doctor
feeling young, fit, and trim, and she concludes the exam by telling you that
you’re going to die. That’s an inarguably true statement. Sooner or later,
you’re going to die. The difference with Dr. Ophuls is that he believes that
his patient (industrial civilization) has already reached civilizational
senility and that we’d best get our affairs in order to make life better for
our heirs. He’s right.
Dr. Ophuls—and he really is a doctor—of the Ph.D. in
political science variety—identifies several disease processes that doom our
civilization as they have doomed those before us. Ophuls does not develop any
new or unique theories of civilizational decline in his book, but he does an
excellent job of identifying and arguing the existing theories. Also, as a sound
social scientist or historian, he doesn’t wed himself to a single, grand
theory, but he appreciates that multiple causes drive the process of change.
He begins his diagnosis, as he began Plato’s Revenge, with the basic science
involved.
Entropy, ecology, and complexity all entail natural,
physical limits on human capacities. Each level of analysis—physical,
biological, and social—faces tangible constraints. At the most basic level,
entropy requires any life form to feed upon outside sources of energy. Whether
for our bodies or for our machines, we must continuously tap new sources of energy.
But the law of entropy establishes that energy degrades when used (chaos
replaces order) and that eventually, traditional energy sources will not yield a
sufficient return on the investment needed to gather and use the energy. As
Ophuls notes, Joseph Tainter builds his entire theory of civilizational
collapse on the increasing marginal cost of a unit of energy, or conversely, on
the declining energy return on investment (EROI). Complexity may delay, but
cannot avoid, this conundrum. But complexity, too, has its limits: those
implicit in the environment and in the human brain.
As Ophuls notes:
. . . . [O]ur minds and language are linear and
sequential, but systems happen all at once and overwhelm us intellectually:
Systems surprise us because our minds like to think about single causes neatly
producing single effects. We like to think about one or at most a few things at
a time…. But we live in a world in which many causes routinely come together to
produce many effects.
. . . .
In short, limited,
fallible human beings are bound to bungle the job of managing complex systems.
What they can neither understand nor predict, they cannot expect to control, so
failure is inevitable at some point.
Ophuls, William
(2012-12-28). Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (p. 37).
CreateSpace. Kindle Edition.
In addition to our limited cognitive ability to encompass
the complexity of systems, we also have the problem that we’re incarnate human
beings with some—shall we say—unfortunate traits that are only overcome—if at
all—through a great deal of effort. And effort, the struggle for civilization,
for civility, invariably decreases as civilizations grow more prosperous. Add
to this the common traits of humans, and we can see our problem. Ophuls quotes
Edmund Burke:
History consists, for
the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition,
avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train
of disorderly appetite.
Ophuls, William
(2012-12-28). Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (p. 54).
CreateSpace. Kindle Edition, quoting Burke (citation in notes)
Add to this the fact that humans are “are not innately wise,
especially in crowds” (id. 41), to put it mildly, and that democracy, at its
worst, crowdsources difficult political problems to a less than qualified and
informed electorate. With this situation, you have the making of a cascade of
troubles on the horizon. Politicians are driven to the lowest denominator of
popular prejudices and provide bread and circuses, entitlements and inflation,
to stave off discontent. The ability to say “no” and to reason together all but
disappears. Sound familiar?
Ophuls concludes his reflections about the Ponzi scheme of
civilization (“as a process, civilization resembles a long-running economic
bubble.” Id. 9.) with the observation that our civilization—industrial
civilization—is nearly universal. This near universality (well, really speaking
just of Earth) means that nowhere in this world of ours will we find an apparent
successor of equal power and glory to replace industrial civilization. No Rome
to replace Greece, no Byzantium to preserve Rome. We face a new Dark Ages. Can
we avoid this?
Ophuls notes that Ian Morris, in his Why the West Rules—For Now (the title belies the scope, magnitude, and sophistication of the work)
concludes with the idea that we will either gain “The Singularity” of technological
and cognitive control of our environment and our history, or we will descend
into the collapse of “Nightfall.” But before plunging into Morris, ThomasHomer-Dixon, or Joseph Tainter (if you haven’t already)—or even if you have—I
recommend this brief and incisive primer about how we’re in for a rough ride
ahead, just like our ancestors.
rev'd 08.14.19
rev'd 08.14.19
