A recommendation — Fall of Civilizations TV
Fear Of A Dying Planet
I’ve been worried the world might be ending. I mean, of course I know it isn’t, (it isn’t right?), but I’ve been worried about society as we know it ending. That’s a catch-all enough term for the answer to the question is society as we know it ending to always be yes; yes, society as we know it is always ending, in a way. But it feels a little different now, in 2021. With new strains, and armed insurrections, and renewed lockdowns, and humanitarian crises hitting mainstream news the world over, it’s started to feel like someone’s left a fire alarm running nonstop for the past 12 months. Was the turning point the Australian wildfires? Or covid? Or record economic devastation? What was the turning point for me? Being locked in all alone for half a year because of a pandemic that seemed to shapeshift constantly: don’t wear masks, wear masks, wear gloves, don’t wear gloves, don’t go out, go out but don’t be indoors, and on and on and on. Was the turning point suddenly having time to myself and not having to think about work for half a year? Only talking to old friends on a screen and therefore having my darkest thoughts run amok with my life online providing little to no resistance, in fact often encouraging vivid nightmares of crumbling buildings and gas-masked goons baton-ripping running children for years-old pocket-candy? Probably all of it.
Doomsday Predictions
By now, it must be clear that this isn’t a 2021 is the year things will finally look up sort of post. This is a the damage done to human civilisation since 2008 is non-trivial sort of post. A strong case can be made that we never really recovered from what was for many people around the world was a cataclysm. It’s easy to forget this because of the black swan event that is a global pandemic that continues to keep a significant number of us locked down, but we’ve had some or the other iteration of the world is ending thrown at us at an alarming rate since the global financial meltdown. In September of 2008, there were those that worried that money would become nothing more than digits on a screen and bad toilet paper. Then, people worried about the Mayans being right about December 21, 2012 maybe? In the years that followed, as the governing apparatus of one country after another either capitulated or completely collapsed, our news asked if the age of globalisation was coming to an end. Throughout these crises, a larger one loomed: climate change. It’s too late, the papers told us: cities would drown, storms would swallow our settlements whole, forests would be engulfed in flames, rivers would dry up, the poorest would starve. Billionaires were talking colonies on Mars, bunkers in New Zealand. Do you have enough saved up to make it out of here alive?
Of course there was no shortage of doomsday stories in the decades that preceded all of this. When South Asia became nuclear capable, when Russia and America became passive aggressive, when the world wars raged; all of these world events caused naysayers to say maybe the Seventh Day Adventists are right after all. But this time, somehow it feels different to me. When I’m no more anxious about impossibly dark futures than everyone else, I know there’s something wrong. It was with this creeping fear of impending doom that I approached Fall of Civilizations TV, the audiovisual presentation of the Fall of Civilizations podcast by Paul Cooper. To be clear, I recognise these fears as paranoia. I don’t actually think the world is coming to an end. But do I believe we’re at an inflection point as a civilisation? I do. Our civilisation may not be collapsing around us, but the way we live is certainly changing irrevocably. For a vastly interconnected global civilisation, isn’t the capitulation of a world order comparable to what the Sumerians would’ve felt like when their civilisation fell (albeit with a lot more loss of life)?
The Fall of Civilisations
What must it have been like for the Aztecs to see their way of life crumble in the face of elements they must’ve seen as entirely out of their control? Within generations, the Easter Islanders must’ve gone from seeing theirs as the only way of life to feeling a sort of gravitational pull of fate dragging their proud civilisation down. It must have been terrifying. It must’ve been heartbreaking.
From the doom and gloom of fallen civilisations emerges some reason for optimism. For one, if those that don’t study their history are doomed to repeat it, what surer way of beating our certain fate than by studying our history? Within each collapse covered in the Fall of Civilisations lies little nuggets of wisdom applicable to this modern age. Don’t underestimate your enemies. Try to dominate nature at your own peril. There’s no such thing as constant growth. But most importantly, this: within the veins of every human alive today courses the blood of millions of ancestors who made it. My fingers, tapping away at this MacBook keyboard, are evidence of the story of human civilisation being one not of collapse, but one of resilience through cycles of collapse and recovery. It’s true that every collapse took with it something irreplaceable. Sometimes entire peoples were brutally killed off or succumbed to alien diseases. Great cultures met calamitous destruction in the hands of brutal colonising powers. But on particularly bleak days (such as today) I can’t help but think that every one of us is someone who made it through the darkest millenia in human history. Maybe it’s been repeated to the point of cliche, but it’s important to remember that we live in the least violent time in all human history. Despite the covid crisis, we live in a generation that has seen less senseless death than any other. Now I can’t say that it’ll always be this way, and I don’t know if we’ll make it, but I’d like to think that history suggests that if we play our cards right, most of us, not only our would-be martian overlords, will.
