Losing the key to survival

I tried in vain to phone people who might have a set of the same keys, but there was no reply from any of them at that hour of the night. Eventually, I resigned myself to squatting in the garden until the morning. Luckily (or so I thought) I had my laptop with me and powered it up to do some work to while away the hours that lay ahead of me. And as I began to work (and seemingly all the biting insects in the garden had arrived to feast on my flesh), the idea for this article came to me. One little thing – the loss of my keys – had brought me to this pass. I still had the internet to keep me company. But what if there was no internet? Not only would I have nothing to do, but wouldn’t all the communication networks around the world and the entire global financial system go down? Not to mention how difficult it would be to research and write an article like this. And so my mind switched from the (I suppose) relatively minor setback of losing my keys to the terrifying what-if of a world that had suddenly and permanently lost the internet.

This calamitous hypothesis also led me to ponder even darker scenarios. With global warming set to reach tipping point in the not too distant future, economic recessions making a comeback, the rampant growth in inequality, demagogues whipping up intolerance and anti-science views every- where, conspiracy theories spreading like wildfire, unending conflicts in all parts of the world, the general angriness and unhappiness that everyone seems to suffer from these days, and, of course, present and future pandemics... are we in fact in heading for the total collapse of civilisation as we know it? A new Dark Age – or even a Stone Age?

History is littered with precedents – the fall of the Roman Empire, the Late Bronze Age collapse, the mysterious disappearance of the Mayans, to mention but a few. Why should our more globalised version of these civilisations be any different? According to the research I undertook that night, academics in this field, which is known as collapsology (a term I learnt while marooned in my garden), coalesce around the view that societal collapse is generally due to the failure of the complex systems we devise to govern populations. Although collapses can be triggered by natural disaster, climate change, invasion, disease, famine and other ‘four horsemen’ type scenarios, it’s when the systems of governance fail that the whole thing comes crashing down. So, in fact, civilisations tend to accidentally kill themselves, rather than expire as the victims of outside factors. Such systems, whether they are political, religious, technological or whatever, experience diminishing returns throughout the life of the civilisation: they can be highly effective at organising society in the early days, but no matter how much we strive to improve and build upon them, we inevitably make them even more complex and unwieldy, and eventually they cost more to run than they produce. The Roman Empire, for instance, exhausted itself once it had reached its geographical limits through having to maintain the military machine that had built the empire in the first place. In such cases, society then finds itself facing new problems it simply doesn’t know how to resolve, being too attached to a model that no longer works. The financial crash of just over a decade ago was perhaps only a foretaste of similar things to come: an impenetrable lending system that was allowed to become unsustainable because even the people working in it didn’t understand it any more. One illuminating metaphor that I encountered that night is that building a civilisation is like climbing a poorly-constructed ladder on which each rung breaks behind us as we step off it. So if the rung in front of us breaks as we hold it, we’re in for a nasty fall – and the higher we’ve climbed, the more catastrophic the fall is going to be.

Looking at our present situation, it’s clear that we’re not coping or adapting fast enough to the challenges we’re faced with. The latest IPCC report came with a ‘code red’ it’s-now-or-never warning that time is almost up to do anything about global warming. And yet we’re still addicted to the fossil fuel burning that has led us to this point, since doing precisely this is what our civilisation is built upon. So we find the transition required difficult and thus make excuses for inaction or even go into full denial mode – buying into conspiracy theories that climate change is just a myth, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Long after the sun had risen, when someone finally arrived to let me in, all these gloomy thoughts were still going round in my head. As I climbed into bed, I took one last look in my bag for my keys – only to immediately see them staring straight back at me. Which only goes to prove the main point of the collapsologists: it’s human stupidity that will finish us off.