uncivilization

When will industrial civilization begin to decline? How long before it is considered an historical relic? Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine’s 2009 essay Uncivilization, The Dark Mountain Manifesto argues that our industrial civilization faces a progressive and inevitable decline. Civilizations throughout history have come and gone, they point out, and ours will be no different. Indeed, Kingsnorth and Hine believe that decline has already begun. Critical resource depletion, exploding world population, global warming: any one of them could lead to a system failure; together they virtually guarantee it.

The following is a summary of Uncivilization, presumably written by Kingsnorth and/or Hine. This summary was originally published on the Dark Mountain Project website but is no longer available. For a counter perspective, see George Monbiot’s skeptical exchange with Kingsnorth Is There Any Point in Trying to Stave Off Industrial Apocalypse? published in the The Guardian in August, 2009.

“These are precarious and unprecedented times. Our economies crumble, while beyond the chaos of markets, the ecological foundations of our way of living near collapse. Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact.

We don’t believe that anyone – not politicians, not economists, not environmentalists, not writers – is really facing up to the scale of this. As a society, we are all still hooked on a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass protest are meant to save our civilisation from self-destruction.

Well, we don’t buy it. This project starts with our sense that civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse – which is already beginning – could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices.

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop.

Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of ‘progress’, of the conquest of ’nature’, of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world. We call this Uncivilisation.

Our aim is to bring together writers and artists, thinkers and doers, to assault the established citadels of literature and thought, and to begin to redraw the maps by which we navigate the places and times in which we find ourselves.”

There is, of course, some controversy about the prediction that our civilization will eventually decline. Much of this controversy surely stems from the fact that very few of us want to consider what seems to be such a terrifying outcome– that to name it is to somehow enable it. No doubt, this is a difficult subject for many to consider. But then so is death, and no sane person questions the inevitability of that. Indeed, it seems that resistance to thinking about either death or the end of civilization as we know it are rooted in the same psychological barriers. And given the magnitude of the consequences, it is reasonable enough to think that at least some of us will engage in a serious discussion about whether our civilization will decline, whether there is anything that can be done about it, and how we should best adapt to whatever it is that we think will happen.

There appear to be two basic lines of objection to the proposition that industrial civilization is going to unravel: 1) unlike all previous civilizations, we have the immense power of modern technology, and/or 2) the problems with our civilization can be solved incrementally, and we must do whatever is necessary to make the changes necessary to avoid collapse.

To the first objection, it should only need be said that technology is a dominant factor in how we got to this point; it stretches all credulity to argue that it will somehow save us from the mess it helped create. But then technology is ultimately just a set of dumb tools– it takes human intervention to use those tools for whatever purpose we choose. Humans are responsible for technology and how it is used. Technology can offer no magical solution to the problems confronting our society, and relying on faith in technology will only push us ever further into the destructive quagmire of technology run amok.

As for the second objection, we must hope that it is largely true, that we can indeed incrementally work our way out of the predicament we have put ourselves in.  Sadly, history does not provide much basis for optimism: the rate of decline appears to be greater than the rate of improvement, perhaps far greater.  Consider climate change, for example.  Anthropogenic global warming is real and hugely consequential.  One can reasonably dispute details about specific models and input assumptions, but only the willfully unaware dispute the overall conclusion that humans are rapidly changing Earth’s climate. We know that our industrialized society, particularly our carbon-based energy systems, are responsible for that change, yet we lack the political will to make any meaningful changes to reverse it.  It seems reasonable to believe that someday we will come to our senses, recognize that we are part of a deeply connected planetary system of life, and accept the fact that we cannot grow our way out of the problems we’ve created by our incessant pursuit of growth.  We will, someday, live within our means.  That day is likely a very long ways off, but cetaceans will be thankful when it finally arrives.