204 Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (W. W. Norton, New York, 2001), Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (W. W. Norton, New York, 2007), Why American Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline (John Wiley, New York, 2011).
205 Berman,
Dark Ages America, as above, p. 6.
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almost 30 percent of the US population believes that the sun revolves around the Earth or is unsure of which revolves around which.
Berman’s specific critique of the United States is that the
“American dream” is based on a hustling paradigm that is not about working hard and playing fair, so that one can have a better lifestyle than one’s parents in a wholesome community, but rather about hustling, cheating, swindling, conning and manipulating the system.
One aims to get more than one’s fair slice of the “pie” and to hell with ethics, compassion and the community. Self-interest and greed have replaced the idea of the common good because there is little
“common” now which is good. Consequently, Berman sees America as doomed because the social capital necessary to sustain society has been eroded. By implication, other nations, including much of the West, based upon the same values of economic selfishness and crude utilitarianism, also face implosion or rot and decay.
Journalist Robert D. Kaplan in his “coming anarchy” thesis, gave a perhaps bleaker vision of humanity’s future.206 Here the interplay of environmental disintegration and social unrest could lead to a breakdown of societies as has occurred in West Africa in failed states such as Somalia. Kaplan says that the United States may not survive the 21st century in its present form and states that although “the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racial y hybrid globalized man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities.”207 He does not explain how “globoperson”
will arise, especial y as conflict, polarization and segregation may increase if economic decline and ultimate economic col apse occurs.
Robert Harvey,208 for example, sees the possibility of “doomsday-global anarchy” occurring unless America and the West prevent it.
206 Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism and Disaster are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1994, pp. 44-76, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Vintage Books, New York, 2000), “Why So Much Anarchy?” February 5, 2014, at https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/why-so-much-anarchy.
207 Kaplan,
The Coming Anarchy, as above, pp. 49-50.
208 R. Harvey, The Return of the Strong: The Drift to Global Disorder (Macmil an, London, 1995); R. Harvey, Global Disorder, (Constable, London, 2003).
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However, if the conservative pessimists such as John Derbyshire, Thomas Chittum, Morris Berman and Mark Steyn are correct about the decline and fall of America, and by a domino effect, the rest of the West, Harvey’s “doomsday-global anarchy” is essential y “in the bag.”
Niall Ferguson in The Great Degeneration,209 argues that Western institutions are already exhibiting evidence of decay. French New Right intellectual Alain de Benoist in his article “La fin du monde a bien en lieu,”210 puts the case that the world has already “ended”—
that is, a Traditional world based on communities of meaning—to be replaced by a cultural y fluid world where the only fixed meaning is the religion of self-gratification and consumption in the global supermarket and where profit and greed trumps all values. Such a world, which seems overwhelming and invincible to Traditionalist Right thinkers, will I argue, itself be smashed by the stronger forces of ecological scarcity.
In his book Immoderate Greatness Why Civilizations Fail,211
William Ophuls puts the case that civilizations inevitably breakdown and col apse because of human hubris or what Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire described as follows:
[t]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.212
209 Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economics Die (Allen Lane, London, 2012).
210 Alain De Benoist, “La fin du monde a bien eu lieu,” Eléments, no.146, January-March, 2013.
211 William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (CreateSpace, North Charleston, 2012). The discussion to follow is greatly in debt to this superb book, especial y for some references.
212 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited and abridged by David P. Womersley (Penguin, New York, 2001), p.435.
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Col apse was thus inevitable after a certain point of decay; instead of asking why Rome fel , Gibbon wrote, “we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”213 Civilizational destruction is thus often a form of suicide; as Will Durant has put it: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”214
Ophuls gives a general theoretical argument for civilizational breakdown that I expand and develop in this chapter. First, there is the problem of ecological resource exhaustion and the limits to growth. Prosperity may be a short-term wonder, but in the long-term, it results in the destruction of a civilization’s basis for its own sustainability, because economic systems mask environmental decline: the economy can grow and bloom while the ecology dies. Conventional economists, in particular, have an inability to understand exponential growth and how col apse can sneak up on a society. The human mind is still essential y Paleolithic, hardwired for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and is not well adapted to understand the concept of entropy, a trend towards increasing disorder and breakdown as available energy over time is transformed into less useful forms.215 The “thermodynamic vicious circle” of civilization is that high civilization means high production and consumption and the larger the entropy increase the greater the “depletion, decay, degradation, and disorder” in the system. At some point “a civilization exhausts its thermodynamic “credit” and begins to implode.”
Second, civilizations are complex (“complexity” referring to both the quantitative size of the number of interrelationships as well as the qualitative dimension), and no past civilization is as complex as ours is. The growth in complexity leads to a compounding of problems, and even though more people does mean more problem-solvers, it also means more problem-creators, a situation of problem overload and an
“ingenuity gap,” a lack of ability to solve problems. Problems that were 213 As above, p. 435.
214 Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization, vol.3, (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1994), p.665, cited from Ophuls, as above, p. 4.
215 N. Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1971).
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once seemingly separate “begin to coalesce into a “problematique,” a nexus of problems that mutual y aggravate each other.”
Complex socio-ecological systems are also non-linear and exhibit
“chaotic” behaviour, making accurate prediction impossible. Such systems become unstable after a certain critical threshold is reached and are subject to catastrophic col apse. Ophuls gives a general theoretical argument is his book Immoderate Greatness in support of this proposition, but evidence is presented in this chapter, which indicates that the Earth’s ecosystems are fast approaching such critical thresholds.
Another human factor leading to the col apse of civilizations is that humans are not supremely rational problem-solvers, but typical
y
“muddle through,” making suboptimal decisions. The ruling elites of the society may know that the system is decaying and dying, but may not act because they do not want to endanger their share of the loot.
They will have comfortable lives, for a time, while the great unwashed slowly suffer. Ultimately, the heads of the elites’ rest on the chopper.
Moreover, beyond this, most people, especial y “intellectuals,” are blindly and unthinkably committed to the ruling ideologies of the day and move to punish free and critical thinkers. Chris Hedges in an article “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” powerful y sums up this point:
[t]hose who doggedly challenge the orthodoxy of belief, who question the reigning political passions, who refuse to sacrifice their integrity to serve the cult of power, are pushed to the margins. They are denounced by the very people who, years later, will often claim these moral battles as their own. It is only the outcasts and the rebels who keep truth and intellectual inquiry alive. They alone name the crimes of the state. They alone give a voice to the victims of oppression. They alone ask the difficult questions. Most important, they expose the powerful, along with their liberal apologists, for what they are.216
216 Chris Hedges, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” March 31, 2013, at http://www.uruknet.
info/?p=96437.
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Civilizations, as Oswald Spengler and Ophuls have proposed, are like organisms, going from birth, to adolescence, to the prime of their lives, and final y to twilight and ultimate death. Put alternatively, civilizations go through a rise and fall from an age of pioneers and/
or conquest, to an age of commerce, affluence and intellect, before suffering moral decay and disintegrating in an age of decadence. In the beginning a people believes in itself and the virtues of sacrifice, courage and determination, which eventual y leads to success, riches and luxury. But when the love of money replaces the love of honor, courage and the in-group, greed and selfishness begin to kill off society as the exuberant growth of weeds might strangle a once ordered vegetable garden. The society begins to wither and decay from within. With a loss of identity, mass immigration is undertaken, with the influx of eager foreigners cashing in on the existing affluence.
The result, as Ophuls puts it “is an increasingly polyglot population that no longer shares the same values. This diversity overload alone poses a substantial challenge to social sustainability.”217
Combine biophysical entropy and moral decay and one has, Ophuls concludes, over-determination, more than enough factors for col apse. As our techno-industrial civilizations is now global, col apse will be global, with a vast die off of the human race. The loss of life will be so high because human hubris being what it is, most people even if they believed that a col apse of civilization was inevitable, and soon, would not prepare.
Ophuls is not the only one who has said this; writing about the zombie apocalypse, Jonathan Maberry says that humanity is ill-prepared for a global catastrophe of this magnitude. The odds are against most of us surviving:
We have become fatal y soft, weakened by the technology that has allowed us to conquer the rest of the planet. The weaknesses come from being continual y resource-rich in our daily lives. We have clothing, multiple forms of transportation, medicine, readily available food sources, deliveries of foods, affordable repairs or 217 Ophuls, as above, p. 86.
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replaceable parts, and access to virtual y endless information via cell phones and internet. ... The fact that we are surrounded by structure encourages us to believe in its effectiveness and permanence.218
When systems fail, people no longer know how to adapt because “the average person in a post-industrial society is not skilled in repairs, combat, farming, emergency medicine, outdoor survival, general mechanics, or other useful trades.”
Ophuls in an earlier book, Plato’s Revenge, expressed hope that an ecological politics of consciousness will develop, ushering the world into a “smaller, simpler, humbler vessel”219 from the doom-bound Titanic which humanity is presently on. He wants America to return to a Jeffersonian, limited republican government, basical y what is was like in the beginning. America, as I stated earlier in this chapter is more likely to spiral into “Civil War II,” and ultimate destruction.
Complexity, Chaos and Col apse
One of the themes running through the col apseology literature is that complex systems are vulnerable to col apse because complexity itself means that there are more components that can break down.
Roberto Vacca in his The Coming of the Dark Age thought (so far, wrongly) that a col apse of modern civilization would occur in the early 21st century because technological systems are becoming so complicated that they are reaching “critical dimensions of instability”220
and becoming uncontrol able. Thus, a “chance concomitance of 218 Jonathon Maberry, “Take Me to Your Leader: Guiding the Masses through the Apocalypse with a Cracked Moral Compass,” in James Lowder (ed.), Triumph of the Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen (Smart Pop/
Ben Bel a Books, Dal as, 2011), pp. 15-34, cited pp. 18-19.
219 William Ophuls, Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011), p.208.
220 Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age (Doubleday, New York, 1973).
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stoppages in the same area could start a catastrophic process that could paralyse most developed societies and lead to the deaths of millions of people.” The deaths of substantial numbers of the scientific and technological elite would contribute to this paralysis, and spiral down, and if enough of the elite died, the end of science would occur: “[a]lmost no one will be free from immediate burdens and able to think with detachment about abstract and general issues.”
This great die off will leave plenty of houses “once the corpses have been removed,” but ultimately the world as we know it will crumble away due to lack of maintenance.
In this context, both the United States and India’s infrastructure, to cite but two examples, are “on the brink” of col apse. In July 2012, the electricity grid supplying electricity to half of India col apsed in a cascading failure. The failure was due to the inadequate response of the government to have enough power capacity to meet India’s demands from its rapid industrialization. India’s power grid, like its road and railway infrastructure, is poorly constructed and constantly tottering on breakdown.221 The United States’ infrastructure received a
“D” grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers, its drinking water infrastructure a “D-” aviation a “D,” energy a “D+” and roads a “D-.” Bridges have col apsed and the power infrastructure failed during the July 1-3, 2012 heatwave. Beneath the streets of most cities in the West, water and sewerage pipes continue to age, many being over a century or more.222
Ancient Rome’s concrete structures lasted over 2,000 years but ours will be crumbling in under a century. High strength (Portland) concrete structures are falling apart twice as fast as pre-1930s concrete structures. The concrete cracks and erodes, leading to air, moisture and chemicals oxidizing the rebar, which then expands in diameter, wrecking the rest of the concrete. Infrastructure across the world is crumbling, including highway bridges, sewer pipes, 221 Mike Adams, “Grid Down Catastrophe Strikes India; Half the Population Stranded with No Electricity,” NaturalNews.com, July 31, 2012 at http://www.
naturalnews.com/036640_India_power_grid_failure.html.
222 American Society of Civil Engineers, http://www.asce.org/reportcard/.
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plumbing stations and so on.223 The West real y is in an advanced state of decay.
Infrastructure deficiencies in the US already cost US $129 billion a year from decaying roads, railways, bridges, and transit systems and an investment of US $1.7 trillion is nee
ded to stop costs growing exponential y. This infrastructure is unlikely to be repaired in the crisis times ahead, so watch America literal y fall apart.224
Vacca, while seeing the cities as we know them ultimately crumbling away, predicted in the short term that dwellings would become fortified citadels, manned by armed inhibitors and security guards. Cities such as Johannesburg today confirm this prediction.
Sieges, he also thought, will become common. There will be a return of man the warrior:
[t]hough modern firearms will be available, physical strength will also be important. It will be necessary in man-to-man combat, in trifling day-to-day emergencies once dealt with by machines, and also in handling obstacles caused by nature or the enemy.225
A number of scientists and thinkers have defended the idea that the complexity of modern civilisation is a vulnerability that can lead to col apse. The cover story edition of New Scientist, April 5, 2008 “The Col apse of Civilization: It’s More Precarious than We Realized,”
featured an article by Debora MacKenzie, “Are We Doomed?”226
summarizing the ideas of theorists who can see breakdown and col apse as inherent in societies once a certain point of complexity is reached. The work of Professor Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist 223 Alice Friedemann, “A Century from Now Concrete will be Nothing but Rubble,” January 19, 2014, at http://energyskeptic.com/2014/enough-energy-left-to-rebuild-concrete-infrastructure.
224 “ASCE: Infrastructure Delay Costs Billions Each Year,” July 28, 2011, at http://
www.think-harder.org/think-concrete-blog/11-07-28/ASCE_Infrastructure_
Decay_Costs_Billions_Each_Year.aspx.
225 Vacca, as above, p. 191.
226 Debora Mackenzie, “Are We Doomed?” New Scientist, vol. 197, no. 2650, April 5, 2008, pp. 32-35.
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at the University of Utah and author of The Col apse of Complex Societies,227is highly relevant. Tainter believes that complex societies can col apse because of the diminishing returns of increased complexity. His position is that: (1) human societies are problem-solving organizations; (2) socio-political systems require energy for their sustainability; (3) increased complexity results in increased costs per capita; (4) investment in social complexity as a problem-solving response to problems yields declining marginal return.228
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