This is the second of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — the remnants of the human species might be unrecognizably different from how we behave and think now. But they may be also ‘recognizably’ similar to how we know, deep down inside, we really are, and always have been. The series is not intended to provide hope, or solace, or a prediction, or least of all a pathway to change. Just a speculation about how the world, with a smaller number of us, or without us, might look long after those of us living through the fall have gone.
What’s the point, I have been asked, of writing speculations about the world after civilization’s collapse, especially when it appears likely that the current collapse is likely to continue for centuries?
I think the ‘point’ might be as an act of forgiveness. And we all need a little forgiveness.
For 20+ years I’ve been trying to explain why the accelerating collapse of our civilization was/is inevitable (that’s just how complex systems work) and that it’s not our ‘fault’ (we have no free will and our behaviour is entirely conditioned).
Unlike those who approach this realization with a sense of immense grief (with commensurate processes and rituals for dealing with it), I’ve always tried (and been conditioned) to approach it with a sense of equanimity, the way I think wild animals do. I’m more drawn to the social forgetting process than the truth and reconciliation process. I see dragging up past trauma, assigning blame, and insisting on confession and apology, as an inherently western religion-based pathology, one dependent on belief in intrinsic sinfulness and free will. It is easier to forgive, and to forget, when one accepts that everything that has happened could not have been otherwise.
from the membrary
Assuming it will take centuries, perhaps even millennia, for the current collapse to play out (given the unprecedented size and complexity of our current civilization), what might our post-civ human societies look like?
I think, based on the preponderance of evidence I have read, that there’s an uncomfortably high likelihood that the post-civ world will not have any humans in it. We are, after all, a fragile species, naturally suited only to the relatively scarce environments of tropical rainforests and hence utterly dependent, since we left them, on a completely synthetic, prosthetic ‘human environment’ for our survival. There will not be the resources left to construct such synthetic environments after collapse, and in any case post-civ natural environments are likely to be much less stable and more hostile and volatile than they have been for the past few millennia.
So my sense is that, if there are any human societies left, it will be because they have avoided the tendencies that have doomed our current civilization. One of those tendencies is a proclivity for the kind of specialization that enables the growth of larger and more complex societies at the cost of individual competence, independence and resilience.
The collective recognition and selection of certain of us as being ‘better at’ doing some things is understandable, and has likely been part of the reason we survived as a species once we had been forced to leave our ancestral forest home. But the purpose of that recognition is to enable the rest to learn from watching and emulating that person.
That specialization however is fetishized in modern society, to the point most of us have become completely incompetent at doing most of the things that are absolutely essential to our survival and health, and hence utterly dependent on those who are competent (if you can still find them), and on the massively complex systems that enable (increasingly feebly) the competent to do things for us that we need done. This dependence is abnormal and completely unsustainable. And those with wealth and power relish and exploit our complete dependence on these massive systems that they control and draw ‘rents’ from.
If, as I suspect, any post-civ human societies will necessarily be much smaller than today’s, they will of necessity also become more egalitarian, and they will not be able to afford dependency. If person X is the only one who knows how to do essential function Y well, then X had better teach the rest of the tribe all about Y before he gets eaten by a creature higher up in the food chain. The upshot is that post-civ humans will, I think, inevitably be competent in everything they need to know to do to survive and thrive, not to be independent, but to be interdependent with their tribe-mates, ensuring maximal capacity and competence for the entire tribe. If they aren’t, then our species will quickly go extinct.
A second human tendency that I think has led to our current civilization’s demise is a strange and seemingly uniquely belief that life is more important than health, pleasure and happiness. This is, again, an entrained human belief inculcated by most human religions, as well as by loony spiritual cults like Musk’s Longtermism.
Most wild creatures, when they lose their health, opt to go off by themselves to die, rather than burden their tribe with support needs that endanger the safety and viability of the whole. And wild creatures (contrary to prevailing and IMO adversarial and wrong-headed ‘selfish gene’ memes) naturally balance their numbers and the extents of their habitats for the benefit of all life in their environments. That’s because they do not conceive of themselves as separate from, or inherently threatened by, the rest of life in their environments. The goal, built into millions of years of evolution, is the survival and thriving of the whole.
Could our species somehow evolve, after collapse, without this traumatizing, horrifically destructive sense of separation and superiority to the rest of the planet’s life? That’s probably the question that fascinates me the most these days. I’ve argued that this sense evolved as an accidental spandrel of our species’ evolving large brain and specifically the entanglement of parts of our brain that are entirely separate in other species’ brains. It would also seem that this entanglement and its traumatizing consequences (including what we call ‘consciousness’) are recent developments in our species, and co-evolved with language and settlement in large numbers (greater than Dunbar’s number).
The development and use of language is a huge, high-maintenance and energy-consuming component of our human metabolism. That language use occupies (and re-wires) a large proportion of our brains’ circuitry, and hence ‘crowds out’ a lot of other brain functions that we have lost in our recent evolution. Recent research suggests we evolved language to strengthen social connections as groups got larger, and not because we ‘needed’ it for our survival. In fact, there is considerable evidence (see Ludovic Slimak’s book) that H. Neanderthalensis didn’t need it or develop it, and that we exterminated them because their ‘difference’ terrified us, while our difference from them didn’t faze them at all (all just part of the whole).
I think it is conceivable that, if and when we cease needing abstract language, and our brains once again begin developing from infancy for their primal purposes (maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, to oversimplify), that we will once again become, like all other life on Earth, creatures that communicate via obvious instinctive gestures and not by complex hard-to-learn abstract language. And maybe, just maybe, our future descendants’ brains will then again become incapable of learning abstract languages (see Noam Chomsky et al’s work on how children not taught such languages by adolescence become incapable of learning them afterwards — their brain structures have evolved in incompatible ways).
And without language, I think, all of the conceptual baggage that sits on language’s scaffolding — including the very ideas of ‘self’ and ‘separation’ and the terror and trauma that those concepts inevitably sparked in us — will likewise cease to arise. We will, at last, be as emotionally healthy as the rest of life on Earth. And, with that superior emotional health, we will cease obsessing about sustaining our (conceived, imagined, separate, desperate) lives regardless of our physical health. We (or at least our bodies) will become (like some indigenous peoples still are) far more careful not to endanger our physical health than we are now. A healthy life will become more important than a long one.
So, I think it’s possible, or perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, that any post-civ societies, as necessarily smaller and simpler than ours as they will be, will be far more competent and far more healthy than our horrifically dependent, narrowly (if at all) competent, sickly species. And they will just be part of the larger organism of all-life-on-Earth.
That hope, that tentative belief, allows me to forgive myself and others for this civilization’s collapse and all the damage it has produced and will continue to produce.
After us, the dragons. And if there are some of our species left, we will in any case not be dragon-slayers. After all, there is no separation between us and the dragons. And in any case there is no such thing as a dragon.
