Five Levels of Ruin — And Where Our Civilization Ranks
Image Credit: NASA
One of the things that I find interesting these days, in a kind of sardonic way, is this. “Doom” has gone mainstream. You can read articles about it in the august pages of the New York Times. And those articles always have the same slant: “We’re not doomed!! Stop being such an alarmist!!” Remind you of anything? Any particular phase in history — or perhaps many? So “doom’s” gone mainstream. It’s painted the same way, sort of, as “woke.” Not a thing that good and proper people should believe in. Impertinent, impolite, dangerous. Much easier to…stick with the status quo. How’s that working out?
All this is, above all, fatuous. It hardly takes a genius to see things aren’t going well in the world or for our civilization. So to dismiss any sort of serious warning — which is what’s really going on here — immediately as “doom” — subtext, “alarmism,” fainting Victorian damsels, women, femininity, emotions, hysteria — is foolish. Because to conflate warnings that we are in serious trouble with “doom” is to caricature something. And caricatures are the enemy of clear thinking. They’re a form of demonization, in cases like this, really.
So let’s think about all this the way that media won’t, which is to say, seriously. Are we “doomed”? Nobody who’s warning that we’re in trouble is saying that we’re doomed. From me to the IPCC — textbook “doomers” amirite — none of us are saying that…I don’t know…the future ends in Thunderdome by way of Vikings. Our warnings are more subtle than that, and they deserve subtler attention, too.
Let’s distinguish between five levels of “doom,” to use, maybe reclaim, that word from those who want to use it, basically, as an insult, a slur, a coded way of saying someone’s an idiot.
Decline. What does it mean for a society to go into decline? A civilization? Well, it means many of the following things happen. Living standards fall, after a long, steady upwards trajectory. Progress flattens and goes into reverse. Incomes begin to shrink. Each generation does worse than the one before it. And all that seems to accelerate. Nothing seems able to alter the course.
Collapse. Because the core of a society or civilization — its economy — is coming undone, now the social and political dominoes begin to fall. Institutions stop working. There’s not enough of the basics to go around anymore. Food, water, air, energy, medicine. Prices begin to skyrocket. Incomes, meanwhile, keep stagnating and shrinking, because in the classic pattern, monopolists profiteer from this very collapse. Decline becomes collapse in this technical, formal sense: economic decline produces social collapse, as institutions fail to provide basics anymore. A simple example, of course, is America and healthcare, retirement, or even bodily safety, as in, good luck getting much.
Implosion. There’s a sense of pessimism in the air. People lose faith in institutions and systems, precisely because they’re not able to provide the basics of a good life anymore. Instead, they turn to fanatics and lunatics. Fascists, authoritarians, theocrats. Life is precarious, unstable, risky, and so an atavistic search for stability begins: maybe if we go backwards in time, thing will be better. Hey, at least in those old hierarchies, one knew where one stood: there was stability and safety and security there, even if it meant being under the thumb of an authoritarian. Social norms — democratic ones — implode, and bonds do too. Equality, justice, freedom, truth — they’re replaced by hate, Big Lies, violence, and extremism. Social bonds rupture, and people begin to hate — genuinely hate — their neighbors, at least those seduced by fanatics. And so the work of rebuilding a society — which takes collective action and cooperation — can’t be done.
Self-destruction. What lies beyond implosion? Well, making it all permanent. Imagine that your economy’s declined, you’ve ripped up your social contract, and there’s been a political implosion — people turning to fanatics. What else can happen? You can give the fanatics power, and they can use it to…destroy your very own society. A good example is Brexit. Britain’s conservatives have a) broken up with the EU b) destroyed the NHS c) shattered the BBC. Those things took the better part of a century to build. Britain will never have them again. Self-destruction proceeds like this. Lunatics are given the reins of power, and they use them to replace dysfunctional institutions with truly backwards one. So now, for example, Brits face vegetable rationing — LOL — meanwhile, the government’s top priority is deporting poor refugees to Rwanda, in violation of all kinds of international law. Joke? No, example.
Devastation. What lies even beyond self-destruction? World War. Another wave of a deadly pandemic. Sudden, runaway climate change. Atrocity, genocide, war crimes. Outsized, extreme stuff.
Apocalypse. Now we come to the last level, the cartoon one, really, so cartoonish I’d barely even count it. The Last of Us. Back to the Stone Age. Zombies. Etcetera. This is the stuff that’s meant by “doomer.” But is this what those who are painted with that brush are really warning of?
So. Where are we on this typology of “doom”? It’s true that we’re not at apocalypse, which is the kind of childish thing meant by “doomer!!” LOL, there’s no apocalypse out there, doomer. Nope, there’s not. But there are…all the other forms of ruin.
Where are we? Think about the world today. We’re already experiencing the first four levels of ruin. And they are getting worse by the day, because, of course…well, I’ll come to why.
Decline — falling living standards, mobility, intergenerational outcomes. We’re already there in spades — living standards are falling in ninety percent of countries. Collapse — institutions stop being able to provide basics. How much are eggs these days? Surely you’ve noticed by now that food prices are skyrocketing because we’ve hit the planet’s limits. We’re going to run out of water in the next decade — and the IPCC just gave us its final, horrifying warning on climate change. Implosion — a fascist wave is spreading around the world, precisely because our economies are in decline, and our societies are collapsing. And that fascist wave is making any form of meaningful progress on climate change next to impossible, because, well, fascists are only good at one thing, which is the next stage of ruin — self-destruction.
See us actually doing any of the stuff we need to be doing? The IPCC’s report summed it up nicely — here it is again.
There are feasible adaptation options that support infrastructure resilience, reliable power systems and efficient water use for existing and new energy generation systems (very high confidence). Energy generation diversification (e.g., via wind, solar, small scale hydropower) and demand side management (e.g., storage and energy efficiency improvements) can increase energy reliability and reduce vulnerabilities to climate change (high confidence). Climate responsive energy markets, updated design standards on energy assets according to current and projected climate change, smart-grid technologies, robust transmission systems and improved capacity to respond to supply deficits have high feasibility in the medium- to long-term, with mitigation co-benefits (very high confidence).
We’re barely doing any of that stuff. We’re doing it at the level of a joke, an empty gesture, a guy who buys his wife plastic flowers once a year on Valentine’s Day. That’s a long, serious list. Meanwhile, so far? We have one green steel plant in the world. LOL.
We’ve already crossed several stages of ruin. That’s not my opinion, by the way, these are just facts. Everything I’ve discussed with you is empirically grounded, proven by statistics, with links you can click. Progress really has flatlined and gone into reverse — the key indicator of decline. Institutions really are unable to provide basics, which is our economies are going haywire with simultaneous inflation, falling incomes, and shortages — the key indicators of collapse. Democracy really is in freefall, and social bonds really have ruptured — the key indicator of implosion. And self-destruction? More and more nations are getting there — making all the above permanent, by sealing the deal with lunatics and fanatics. Britain. India. China. Russia. America, in perpetual crisis, overrun by gun nuts and theocrats and bigots and supremacists. Europe, teetering on the brink of handing itself over to the far right. On and on it goes.
We’re already at advanced stages of ruin. And in that observation, you should also see what the IPCC warned of in its latest report. Risk cascades. Risks interacting with one another, to produce not 2+2=4, but nonlinear, runaway effects. What happens as institutions fail to provide basics — because the planet’s dying? People are all the more easily seduced by those who offer them scapegoats — just look at Britain, where you can’t get vegetables, but hey, it’s OK, because you have some poor refugee to hate. What happens as prices soar? Banks fail, which only increases prices that much more, because now investment is that much more expensive. What happens as crops fail and rivers run dry? Our economies go haywire, all of which only ruptures social bonds between people that much more. You can see risk cascades at work every single day, in more and more lethal ways.
Where we’re not at is the cartoon version “doom” meant by “doomer!” No, the Last of Us isn’t reality, it’s a TV show. Nope, there isn’t a thermonuclear world war. Sorry, no, sea levels aren’t going to rise three meters tomorrow. What’s that? Nope, no giant asteroid hurtling towards us at the speed of *gulp*. Where we’re not is apocalypse.
But we are at advanced stages of ruin. And ruin is a trajectory. It’s like a disease. If it’s not stopped, it runs its course. That course does end in apocalypse. It has, over and over again, in history.
You see, what the kinds of folks who use “doomer!” as an insult get wrong, badly wrong, is well, all of history. Most of human history is nothing but ruin. It’s the stages of ruin I’ve outlined above. Think of Les Miserables. Was that “doom”? I doubt you’d want to be on the receiving end of “let them eat cake.” What about the ages of empire and conquest? Was it “doom” when some random group of warlords and their armies showed up to raid your peaceful village? I guess New York Times columnists would dismiss it, but I’d bet it felt a whole lot like doom to see your family hacked to bits.
Or how about all those ancient civilizations that didn’t make it? Because their water sources ran dry, famines hit, local climate change effects made their irrigation techniques no longer viable, or they overfished, farmed, hunted? I’d bet that when your civilization was dying, when your people were abandoning their proud cities, when you were desperately pleading with your gods for water…that, too, felt a whole lot like doom.
Ask the enslaved, conquered, the peasants, the hunted, the demonized. Ask feudalism and empire and pogroms and famine, drought, and plague. The theme of human history is…“doom.” But not in the cartoon sense of the word that it’s begun to be used, as an insult, slur, impediment to thinking, misogynist subtext of “hysterical idiot sissy.” In the sense: ruin has been the operative principle of human history. It’s hardly been a cakewalk, has it? It’s only in the last three hundred years that living standards really began to rise much at all. That wealth grew to the point we could have institutions like modern hospitals and parks and universities and trains. Only in the last century, really, that democracy’s grown to include (LOL) women and minorities, not just a certain kind of man. This is how “doomed” history has really been. It hasn’t been easy. It’s been ugly, stupid, brutal, and mostly, made of self-destruction. Because if human beings had cooperated centuries ago, instead of killing one another for no good reason, just gold, gods, and glory — maybe we all would have been better off way, way sooner.
“Doom” doesn’t mean that everything goes back to the Stone Age tomorrow. That three hundred foot high tsunamis engulf the earth. It means empirical realities. It’s factual that our civilization is now hitting advanced stages of ruin, pulsing through decline, to collapse, to implosion, flirting dangerously with self-destruction. That’s obvious for anyone who understand the merest hints about climate change, mass extinction, the way they’re affecting the global economy, the politics of nations, to see.
Is there an apocalypse on the way? Of course there is. And now we come to the heart of the issue. Denialism. You see, to call someone a “doomer” is basically a form of that. It’s saying they’re an idiot, a believer in something untrue, a form of religious fanatic, basically. But in this case, there really is an apocalypse heading our way. In fact, we’re already ankle deep in it.
I shouldn’t have to spell it for you, and you shouldn’t have to spell it out for anyone. Human beings have existed for 300,000 years. In that time, we have never — ever — faced an existential threat like we do now. A series of them, really. Climate change, mass extinction, their economic, political, and social consequences. We have never killed the planet before — just little bits of it, which, yes, wiped out the civilizations who once lived there. We have never extinguished life on the scale of deep history before — just maybe wiped out a few species here and there, like the dodo. But this?
This is genuinely unprecedented. We really are at a turning point in human history. In deep history, in fact. All of it. Billions of years of it. Turn one way, and maybe we “overshoot” — meaning the temperature rises, and then it comes down, doing a whole lot of damage along the way. But turn the other? And mass extinction and climate change just roar on. Getting worse by the year. How much are eggs now? Want to guess how much they’ll be next year? Any idea what we’re going to do when the water runs out? When the next pandemic hits? What about as the banking system fails?
All that is very much an apocalypse. But not in the sense that “doomer!” implies, either. The outsized, fundamentalist-religious kind. No, sea levels won’t rise rise meters overnight. Just in a few decades. No, crops won’t fail all of a sudden, eaten by plagues of locusts. Just a few percent a year. No, the water won’t totally be gone — it’ll just be, LOL, a luxury. Sure, money will still function — the question will be if you can get any. No, there probably won’t be a killer plague (sorry if I jinxed us, guys) — just a new pandemic every few years or so.
Not the sudden hand of God, delivering divine retribution. Just a slow, steady accumulation of ruin. Slow to us, anyways. But on a historic scale? That much damage done in a few decades? History really will regard it as something like an apocalypse. You did what? You boiled the planet, killed off life on it, made water and food a luxury, and put the lunatics in power to boot, undoing centuries of hard work building modernity, democracy, prosperity, freedom? Good job, guys.
If all that’s not an apocalypse, then…what is? Does it have to be cartoon-level stuff? The aliens arrive, and they’re made of teeth. Oh no, the permafrost unleashed a killer zombie virus, and now my neighbor’s eating my brain. Wow, look guys, it’s the Antichrist. “Doomer” implies this sort of thing, this caricature. And so it’s a way of dismissing. Ignoring. Mocking. Denying. The warnings.
But nobody who is a thoughtful person right now will tell you that we are doing well.All of the best people in their fields will tell you how alarmed they are. Economists, about the economy. Social scientists, about society. Biologists, about the biosphere. Climate and earth scientists, about the planet. Scholars of democracy, about politics. All of them will agree that we are in dire, dire shape — so much so that they’ve begun calling all this, together, the “polycrisis.” That’s an academic way of saying: ruin. And it’s mocked in the mainstream now as “doom.”
But when the world’s best minds more or less all agree that we are crossing red lines we’ve never crossed before? We should probably listen. That doesn’t mean we’re doomed. But it does mean that the warnings should be taken much, much more seriously.
Umair March 2023
