A Whole New Way to End Our Civilization

What if everything goes right?

In The Single Family Space Colony Part I I talked about frame innovation and the idea that seemingly insoluble problems can sometimes be made manageable by finding a new metaphor for them. This shouldn’t be an occasional activity; it can be how we habitually think. For example, take the idea of the end of the world. What happens if we reframe that?

There are lots of ways the world can end: through nuclear apocalypse, plague, asteroid strike, ecosystem collapse due to climate change, or simple divine intervention. Without denying these possibilities, let’s narrow our focus to the end of our civilization. That could come from an AI takeover, the conquest of the planet by a 1984-style dystopian autocracy, economic collapse, etc. I should throw in a zombie horde to round out the apocalyptic tone. —Because these are all negative, aren’t they? There is in fact an entire industry devoted to generating post-apocalyptic stories, as books, movies, computer games… When we look past the end of our civilization, what we see is either existential despair, or simply nothing at all.

This is because we’re using a set of framings for endings that are intrinsically negative. But there are positive ones. For example, rather than focusing on the death of this civilization, we could focus on the birth of the one to follow it. To push the metaphor further, we could think of our civilization as the parent of that new one. As parents, what dreams and ambitions might we have for our child?

Birthing a new civilization is a great idea—and we actually do imagine doing this off-world. If we follow through on the idea of post-colonialist space settlement, then we wouldn’t be conquering other planets and extending our existing culture and economy to them. We’d be shifting the narrative away from the imperialistic and extractive connotations of 'colonization' to a model of nurturing the independent development of cultures and economies that we know will ultimately be different from our own.

New civilizations don’t have to be built on other worlds. We can create them here, by following through on our Enlightenment commitments to democracy, decolonialization, reconciliation, plurinationalism, etc. The current ecological crisis is pushing us powerfully towards replacing the Westphalian nation-state with overlapping, interpenetrating jurisdictions of shared responsibility (for example, over watersheds that cross current national boundaries), and towards a circular, zero-growth or ‘donut’ economy, at least at the global level. A zero-growth strategy is not “poverty for all,” quite the opposite. Two good books I suggest on the economics of it are Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson, and Managing Without Growth by Peter A. Victor. Ruthanna Emrys describes such a future in her excellent novel A Half-Built Garden. So we can imagine birthing two sets of new civilizations, a permaculture on Earth and an expansive, growth-oriented one off-world.

What I find interesting is that this parenthood framing suggests stages in our relationship with our child cultures:

1. Birth: This could be the settlement of space, or an encouraged emergence of a distinct cultural or societal group on Earth. This 'birth' would be marked by establishing independent governance, culture, and identity.

2. Raising the New Civilization: An established society might nurture a nascent one, providing it with knowledge, protection, resources, and guidance but not interfering with its fundamental goals. This could involve sharing technologies, cultural exchange, and economic support.

3. Post-Retirement Relationship: …Wait, what?

Hmm. There seems to be another framing hidden in the parenthood metaphor. This is something I haven’t seen discussed anywhere (possibly because at first blush it sounds crazy): the idea of the deliberate retirement of a civilization.

What if we recognized that our extractive, colonialist, capitalist culture has served its purpose by raising billions of people out of poverty, extending lifespans, and giving us access to unprecedented knowledge and personal agency? There is still work to do, to ensure that everyone benefits, that wealth and opportunity are justly distributed, and that the sins of our forefathers are undone insofar as that’s possible. But if we accept that what results from that process is necessarily going to be a global community that’s not like the one we have now—because our planetary boundaries require it and this particular civilization has too many means of self-destruction at its disposal—and if we recognize that we are close to having the technical know-how needed for permanent, peaceful co-existence on this planet (the politics of it being another matter, which I’ll talk about later)… then why shouldn’t we contemplate retiring?

Deliberately dismantling our civilization in favour of a better one changes the focus of our ambitions in really interesting ways. For instance, let’s push the metaphor right over the edge, by imagining that it follows the pattern of an individual person’s retirement. This phase of societal development might have some of these characteristics:

• End of colonialism: Just as a person may stop climbing the career ladder, economic and geographical expansion can’t be the primary goals of an earthly technological society, not forever, and probably not for the near future granted what’s happening to the planet. Instead, we could focus on the stabilization or overlapping of territorial borders, a plateau of industrial activity on Earth, and a shift in focus from growth to the maintenance of our beautiful home.

• Emphasis on leisure and culture: We could prioritize the arts, philosophy, and the pursuit of knowledge over economic or territorial gain. A 'retired' civilization might foster a golden age of creativity, intellectual exploration, and spiritual pursuit.

• Steady-state economics: Permaculture has to be the policy, but it doesn’t mean going low-tech; quite the contrary. I’ve put it this way: that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. High-tech means zero-waste; so the human economy would increasingly resemble the earthly biosphere in its efficiency—and achieve true permanence.

• Support Without Control: Like a retired parent providing support without imposing control, the retiring culture would offer resources and assistance without asserting dominance, allowing the new civilization to make its own decisions.

• Legacy: The metaphor also suggests a continuation of the human legacy, with Earth entrusting its future to the new civilizations it has 'birthed', much as a retired individual looks to their children to carry forward the family name and values.

• Planning for the future: Just as individuals plan for their retirement to ensure their well-being, we could start now to plan for a deliberate phasing-out of the social drivers and beliefs that are driving us to saw off the branch we’re sitting on. Arguably, we’re doing that, but not in a coherent way. We may be fighting against resource overshoot and mass extinction, but we are not fighting for an agreed-upon alternative. In other words, we are not yet consciously designing the post-crisis world. But we could start now.

Oh Please Stop

This is about as far as I can push this metaphor before it breaks. It’s easy to overdo it, in fact pretty much any book-length popularization of some grand new idea about managerial methods, self-help, or actualization operates by doing precisely that. So does a lot of science fiction. Let’s tread lightly, therefore, around this concept. It’s mostly a further example of how startling ideas can emerge when you reframe the terms of an accepted paradigm. It provides a new lens that you can take up and look through, then put down as needed when thinking about our collective future. Maybe we are hurtling towards a zombie apocalypse. But if not, if we squeeze through the eye of this particular needle, what awaits us? What’s the proper ambition of industrial, technological civilization when it’s run its course?

What if humanity actually was in control of its own destiny? How would we act? What if everything didn’t go wrong, but it actually all went right?

We can frame this question in other ways; to take a musical one, what if we’re in the confused second movement of our symphony? What then would make for a satisfying climax and resolution of the current human project?

What do you think, should I write a story or novel around this idea? And maybe call it, say, … Coda?