Are collapsitarians socially inadequate? Alex Evans

July 5, 2010 | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks | 17 comments

Poor old collapsitarians. It’s bad enough spending your days convinced that you’re one among a small band of Cassandras burdened with the foresight to see civilisation’s imminent collapse looming ever closer. (Like those cheerful fellow over at the Dark Mountain Project, whose manifesto proclaims such perky sentiments as:

That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.

It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming.)

But the burden does not end there. Turns out that their grim tidings turn out to be less than fertile soil for relationships, too, as the New York Times reports:

Mr Angelantoni said his concern with peak oil had strained his relationship with his spouse, creating an “unbridgeable” distance between them.

Ooh! That’s gotta hurt! And now, just to really add insult to injury, Mickey Foley argues (h/t Futurepundit) that Doomers are Doomers because… they’re socially inadequate!

The Doomer is motivated by much more than a perverse sense of altruism. He mainly desires to see everyone brought down to his level. His fondest wish is for everyone to be as emotionally crippled as he is, and, if they could also be paralyzed fiscally, that would be great too. The argument for the necessity of disaster is merely an excuse for his vindictive fantasies.

This is the Doomer’s Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity’s best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.

Tee hee hee … “light blue touchpaper and retire to a safe distance”, as I believe the phrase goes. I’m with Foley all the way. Could all you Doomers just shut up about collapse, find some better narratives, and generally just man up a bit?

17 comments »

@leashless on July 5th, 2010 at 7:26 pm:

Oh, this should be fun!

As somebody with a fundamental hand in the http://collapsonomics.org group, and as one of the authors featured in Dark Mountain, I'd like to take this one, please.

In March of 2009 we published a series of articles on managing the UK with 20% across the board cuts. We did not go after meaningless gibberish about public service innovation, we went after the hard stuff: end of life healthcare costs, prison policy, energy strategy and more. Stuff that could scale from 20% cuts to the 40% cuts which are now being discussed.

My own record as a merchant of doom goes back further. In 2002 I started to worry about a global financial system meltdown, and put the outer horizon of that event at one decade. We've come very, very close – certainly close enough that a 2002 fear was rational, and those who followed my advice at the time have profited from it. In 2005 I figured out the biofuels-food price spike issue, and that it would lead to civil unrest in the developing world, and started to raise hell about it in the appropriate circles, years before the action got moving.

So at this point, I have a fairly simple risk of issues to watch: anarchists in Greece pushing it into a new kind of state failure, where the currency stays up, but the government becomes patchy. Contagion pushing Spain, Portugal and Italy into a similar mess, with resulting political pressures on the euro. The US dollar coming under concerted attack as governance risks in the US exceed acceptable levels as individual States like California break their societies through service cuts. China stalling economically, and then experiencing political problems as a result. A rebalancing of the political umbrellas generated by the world's nuclear stockpiles.

And, finally, in the latter part of the decade, a world with two billion people with broadband internet access and no toilet begins to evolve dangerous, possibly violent, new ideologies.

I'd say the odds for most of the items on this list are about 50/50. We'll see about half of it, hard to say which half. A lot will happen that isn't on it – I've been deeply surprised by the ferocity of the gulf oil spill. But a good deal of the stuff on this list will happen, I don't think it's anything other than basic realism to say so.

Thoughts?
c ellis on July 6th, 2010 at 10:26 am:

you mean you want more of a "can do" and positive approach?
Dougald on July 6th, 2010 at 12:07 pm:

Hi Alex –

For a better sense of the conversations going on around Dark Mountain and http://collapsonomics.org – here's the interview I did with @leashless for the first DM book:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30711287/Dougald-Hine-B…

Look forward to your next post.

Dougald
@alexevansuk on July 7th, 2010 at 9:31 am:

OK, OK, sorry for implying collapsitarians are socially inadequate. Some of my best friends are collapsitarians! I just thought it was a funny article. (Come on, it WAS a funny article.) I’m laughing at myself as much as anyone, as I have collapsitarian tendencies of my own; my wife is still dining out on how, after the credit crunch, I bought Tesco's entire stock of red lentils to prepare for the impending demise of western civilisation. (They’re still haunting our kitchen cupboard like a high-protein Banquo’s ghost.)

But when all’s said and done, I’m not a collapsitarian – and at the risk of relighting the blue touchpaper, I think collapsitarianism is actually straight up irresponsible.
I agree with collapsitarianism on quite a lot. I think most people (and just about all policymakers) *drastically* underestimate the risks that trends like resource scarcity or climate change pose. I’d go so far as to agree that the risk factors are substantial enough to threaten a generalised collapse of globalisation as we know it (as David and I argued in our Brookings paper in January and our Chatham House paper last month – http://is.gd/dirBD and http://is.gd/dirCR respectively). I agree very much that this makes it imperative that we spend a lot more time thinking about resilience.

Above all – and here's where I and the Dark Mountain project are as one – I think that the key issue in all this is *narratives*. As the Dark Mountain manifesto (http://is.gd/dhPwh) puts it, "It is through stories that we weave reality". Or as David and I argued in our work for the UK Foreign Office on theories of influence (http://is.gd/dhaj3), "only compelling narratives and visions of the future can animate networks over the long term". Framing really, really matters.

But if we agree that collective narratives are deeply powerful and creative things – engines for self-fulfilling prophecies, if you will – then surely it follows that weaving stories about “collapse”, “descent” or (heaven help us) “uncivilisation” introduces the potential for positive feedback loops that tend heavily towards downside rather than upside scenarios.

We're about to go into a period of very pronounced turbulence. It'll be full of political opportunity, but also the risk of panic and kneejerk measures. Remember what it was like after 9/11, or after Lehman Brothers. What happens after big shocks is that suddenly, vast swathes of public opinion become aware of risks they hadn't really considered or taken seriously – and start looking for *narratives*.

In such circumstances – and again, we agree that we ain’t seen nothing yet – the risks will be multiplied if the narratives lying around are all variations on the theme of “we’re all gonna die”. Millennarian movements have existed throughout history, and are not generally noted for playing a terribly helpful role. Conversely, there will be a huge premium on ambitious stories about transformation, renewal, renaissance etc (as I’ve argued here before – see for example http://is.gd/dhQsq and http://is.gd/dirXo).

As I say, I used to tend towards collapsitarian thinking myself. These days, I’m more chirpy. I do think we’re headed for a rough time, and I do worry that existing governance structures (especially international ones) are going to creak heavily when they come under more serious pressure.

But I also think humans are at their best under pressure; that we’ve already developed a whole lot of the tools that we’ll need to deal with the challenges we’re increasingly facing; and that the key determinant of success will be the degree to which we can tip towards non-zero-sum cooperation rather than zero sum competition, above all at the global level. Towards seeing, if you will, a “larger us”.

Stories that support and develop that kind of cooperation are helpful.

Stories that don’t, aren’t.

I put ‘collapse’ in the latter category.
Dan Olner on July 7th, 2010 at 9:31 am:

Alex, at his last article about collapsy things: "Most of all, though, we lack narratives. Images. Metaphors. Stories that explain where we are; how we got here; where we might decide to go next; and how we might get there."

Funny, that's what dark mountain says.

Also, Alex, I note your "tee hee." You're clearly aware that this sorf of ad hom attack is, er, "naughty" – but, really, it's pretty indecent concluding other people are misguided because "socially inadequate." It's a shame, your last piece was interesting. This one is just flamebait – as indeed you note at the end.

Trying to bring it back to actual, interesting things: a nice ten minute summary of Barbara Ehrenreich's work on 'the dark side of positive thinking' –
http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/03/17/rsa-ani…

Note the end sections particularly – people sacked from finance houses for the temerity of being realistic about risk. Brilliant stuff: people being sacked while having "who moved my cheese" shoved in their gobs.

I'm a (hopefully) friendly critic of dark mountain; they're absolutely right that the space for stories is way, waaay too narrow. I'm a modeller; models are stories too, and they also are way, way too narrow. Alex, you seem to agree. You might want to try and find some common ground rather than deliberately riling people with personal insults.
@leashless on July 7th, 2010 at 9:55 am:

Alex, I think the key here is that the people who're facing the facts about the global situation – and David and you are clearly doing so – agree we're headed into major turbulence.

The question is "when does it settle down again? what does the world look like then?"

I think there's very, very little evidence of long term loss of social cohesion – the "mad max" narrative. Warlords mature into mayors given a generation or even 5 years.

On the other hand, the stability radiating out from the US-USSR nuclear polarization is gone. The decisive productivity advantage of the US economy is gone. The empires of Europe are gone. But the feeling that Americans and Europeans somehow run the world and are entitled to be rich while the rest of the world is poor is not gone.

It's the rebalancing of the global order – the global _financial_ order – to place wealth where true productivity is which is the core driver of the "rapids" period, and to people who aren't accustomed to generation-on-generation financial decline, a "collapse" narrative is the eeek-a-mouse! first approximation of "wow, we're getting *poorer*!"

We're getting poorer as a culture and as individuals. Real wages are down, housing costs are up, disposable income is down, governments are borrowing to pay for what they used to be able to afford, and the global middle class are all competing for the same iron, tin, oil and holiday destinations. The collapse risk is for the societies which absorbed huge risk and don't have a descent path. The US and China are the leading candidates, and in both cases it's internal political disunion that may get them.

Anyway, this is long and not to the point: the point being I think that it's extremely important to distinguish between financial decline narratives (likely true) and social collapse narratives (likely false, at least in Europe.) You can believe the former and deny the later, and I think most people watching the data do just that!
Kevin McGeary on July 7th, 2010 at 4:24 pm:

Larry the Cable Guy (a kind of American Roy Chubby Brown) said "depression is just anger without the enthusiasm." You can hardly call the Dark Mountain people unenthusiastic can you?
@chris_malins on July 8th, 2010 at 3:31 am:

I'm going to suggest that there are two outstanding points here, and that they are substantially both the same. The first question, coming off the lead article, is, 'Are collapsitarians socially inadequate?'. The second, coming off Alex's more considered response above, is, 'Need heaven help us from the narrative of uncivilisation?'
I posit that the answer to both of these questions is no, and that it is the answer to both for the same reason. As I understand collapsitarianism, and uncivilisation, neither concept is a nihilistic proposal to be afraid of – in the language of the 'Leading causes of life' (http://www.appropedia.org/The_FWD_BlueChris) both concepts hold anticipative life (hope) and supported life (connection) at their core.
Collapsitarians do not predict Armageddon and look forward in dark glee to spending their retirement years sitting in the shadow of a pile of skulls besides the throne of Bear Grylls, rather they foresee a fundamental shift in power relationships, economic relationships and patterns of living, and challenge themselves and others to build a narrative of hope, but a narrative that is hopeful not through its insistence on positing the continuation of what passes for modern civilisation, but through its recognition that out of collapse something wonderful can be raised.
Uncivilisation is not about vegan hermit survivalists (exclusively…), it is about recognising that so much of the things we call civilisation are not life affirming or necessary, and moving forward from that realisation.
So yes, the trailblazers of collapsitarianism may well be exercising their internal Doomers, but not in a way that courts social inadequacy – it is a movement that builds rather than despises relationships. And uncivilisation is not, as Alex implies, a narrative of despair and calamity that threatens self-fulfilling apocalypse. On the contrary, it aims to give us 'The Future We Deserve' (http://thefuturewedeserve.com/).

P.S. Collapsitarians with beards are obviously a different matter entirely, light blue touchpaper…
Simon on July 8th, 2010 at 9:06 am:

For narratives, making a distinction between *influence* and *analysis* is useful. If you're trying to influence the public a collapse narrative probably won't get you very far and may have negative spinoffs. I f you're doing analysis then framing it with a collapse narrative and looking for differences and subtleties can be useful. I find this more compelling than a "great transition" framing. As Joseph Tainter says "Societies don't transition, they collapse."
Vinay Gupta on July 8th, 2010 at 2:40 pm:

I’ve been right too early and too often to think that a narrative about hard realities will have any influence on the public discourse.

It’s hard enough to get policy makers to get their heads out of the sand, let alone the public.

But building a community of truth – where the facts can be discussed, and the news read, discussed and understood – that is worth doing.

And that can change the world.
The Guest on July 8th, 2010 at 3:56 pm:

Small ground-dwelling mammals were inadequate… by dinosaur standards.
Dougald on July 9th, 2010 at 11:07 pm:

Hi Alex – thanks for coming back in less troll-like form. And, since I was quick to seek umbrage after your original post, sorry it's taken a while for me to respond in kind.

We can agree on the importance of narratives, although I'll come back to the differences between our understandings of this. But only a rather skewed reading of the Dark Mountain manifesto can represent it as claiming that "we're all gonna die" – except in the sense that, unless you're a believer in The Singularity, we *are* all going to die.

DM is not a "millenarian movement." One of the key claims of the manifesto is that "the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop." As you say, we are about to live through "a period of very pronounced turbulence" – or, in the more resonant rhetorical register to which DM is inclined, "an age of global disruption." The ways of living with which we are familiar will not magically become sustainable. We are likely to find ourselves saying goodbye to much that we grew up taking for granted. In a real sense, we face the end of the world as we have known it.

A great deal of "collapse" writing is an attempt to articulate clearly an apprehension of the scale of the coming disruption. Where it gets into difficulty is that it has swallowed the contemporary assumption that life without all the trappings of "the world as we know it" is unliveable. (When Marks & Spencer proclaim "Plan A: Because there is no Plan B," I ask, for whom? For upmarket high street retailers, or for liveable human existence? Or did we stop making the distinction?) Part of the reason, I suspect, for the phenomenal success of Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic vision, 'The Road', is that it appears to validate this questionable assumption.

Where the DM focus on stories diverges from yours is that, besides seeking to construct narratives which give us a better chance of living well through difficult times, we also seek to interrogate the deep narrative assumptions that have got us into this mess. Thus, "uncivilisation" – which you seem to interpret as us being gung-ho for a Mad Max future – is clearly defined in the manifesto as a conscious unweaving of a set of myths and ways of understanding the world which have served us badly. Not least, the mythic opposition between "civilisation" and "barbarism", which underlies our concepts of progress and "development", making it as difficult for us to learn from those "less developed" than us as it would be for a Victorian clergyman to take theology lessons from an African villager.

Without this kind of radical unweaving of the stories we have inherited, the lessons that @leashless draws from Kerala and elsewhere are unintelligible: however clear the data he presents, people cannot incorporate it into their worldview. Without such interrogation – without, for example, a radically more honest acceptance of the fact that, in a non-apocalyptic sense, we are all going to die – whatever new narratives we construct are likely to be founded on wishful thinking. This is a different kind of project to yours – it exists at several removes from the policy world – but we should be in dialogue with, rather than caricaturing, each other.

Where we agree, I suspect, is that we both have a great deal of faith in the basic human ability to muddle through. Also that the stories we tell about scarcity (and thus cooperation/competition) are particularly critical to how good or bad a collective job we are likely to make of navigating the unknown world we're heading into.
Dan Olner on July 10th, 2010 at 11:27 am:

Dougald: "navigating the unknown world we're heading into."

I've only just watched the Pianist for the first time; it's been about 12 years since I last had such a gut-strong sense of the people that actually lived through (and died in) the horrors of the 20th century. (Phew! Nearly said "nazi" then!) Going back and reading about it, I wonder, when one pulls historical focus, what is going to be exceptional about the coming century? Every time is unique. But that's kind of the point. I wonder if we're cultivating an unncessary exceptionalism – except an historical, rather than nation-state one?
c ellis on July 11th, 2010 at 9:01 am:

think alex's central point here is about real human sensitivity versus pretend human macho-ness. think he's implying that once we all admit our need for stability, continuity and security, we can then quietly go about ensuring that such conditions will carry on.
c ellis on July 12th, 2010 at 10:17 am:

would say that the above criticism is probably most fairly aimed at supernationals, as they, once in the 'corporate' environment, seem to lose all social responsibility and exploit and rape the earth violently and aggressively, leaving it barren. This is thought to be acceptable behaviour because it's in search of profit . Such pursuit is believed to be a virtuous (or at least adaptive/pragmatic) endeavour, by certain capitalist -theory-supporting economists, as they concur that without the incentives of profit, nothing would happen in the world, leading to its economic (and consequently societal etc) collapse.

Of course, the problem with the above capitalist argument is that it does not take into account the fact that the earth has finite resources: it does not magically replenish itself with them every millenium. Surely, this fact renders capitalist theory immediately invalid?

Therefore, i posit that supernationals are the really socially inadequate, because they operate under a status of societal respectabilty, whilst their theories are invalid and, moreover, destructive of our habitat and global society.
@nicoj on July 27th, 2010 at 7:41 am:

I laughed. Loud. And sent it on to my psychologist partner to have a laugh at my expense. Seriously, when collapsitarians can't laugh at articles like this anymore, we're doomed.
Paul Kingsnorth on August 1st, 2010 at 6:42 pm:

Now here is something very interesting: nobody on this thread has mentioned climate change.

This is what throws everything up in the air. This is what renders all assumptions about the future questionable. Everything is moving faster, and deeper, already, than the science suggested it would. There is already enough carbon locked into the system to create major chaos, and much of that is already being created. I recommend Bill McKibben's new book 'Eaarth' as a useful corrective.

One of the key challenges of Dark Mountain is this: we need to learn – and really understand – that humans are not at the centre of the world, and need to stop being at the centre of our narratives. We are not in control of the world we are creating. Nature is going to be a lot harder on us than she has been for 10,000 years. The interregnum is over. Climate change of more than a couple of degrees – and that now looks almost inevitable – means that many, many bets are off.

I've never met a 'collapsitarian'. This sounds to me like name-calling, of the kind that is generally a substitute for having to look facts, or likely outcomes, in the face.

Tags

17 comments »

About Global Dashboard