I’ve mentioned more than once in these essays the foreshortening effect that textbook history can have on our understanding of the historical events going on around us. The stark chronologies most of us get fed in school can make it hard to remember that even the most drastic social changes happen over time, amid the fabric of everyday life and a flurry of events that can seem more important at the time.

This becomes especially problematic in times like the present, when apocalyptic prophecy is a central trope in the popular culture that frames a people’s hopes and fears for the future. When the collective imagination becomes obsessed with the dream of a sudden cataclysm that sweeps away the old world overnight and ushers in the new, even relatively rapid social changes can pass by unnoticed. The twilight years of Rome offer a good object lesson; so many people were convinced that the Second Coming might occur at any moment that the collapse of classical civilization went almost unnoticed; only a tiny handful of writers from those years show any recognition that something out of the ordinary was happening at all.

Reflections of this sort have been much on my mind lately, and there’s a reason for that. Scattered among the statistical noise that makes up most of today’s news are data points that suggest to me that business as usual is quietly coming to an end around us, launching us into a new world for which very few of us have made any preparations at all.

So there I am on a long plane flight home, in need of something to watch. Hailing as I do from the Global Dashboard stable, the preferred option was clear: a disaster movie. And lo, what should be playing on BA routes this month but the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

My expectations were along the lines of I am Legend or The Day After Tomorrow. You know how it goes: massive catastrophe, civilisation collapses, a veritable smorgasbord of SFX, a couple of doughty folk live to fight another day, and (as the credits roll) the prospect of a gradual rebuild.

As it turned out, this was not the case.  In a nutshell: Keanu Reeves is an alien. He has been sent here by a confederation of highly evolved alien civilisations to “save the earth” – by wiping us out, given that we’re cheerfully running our own mass extinction event. Pretty scientist Jennifer Conolly, initially part of the US government scratch team of scientists (“We need you to come with us right away, ma’am. It’s a matter of national security”) comes to befriend the alien, and must persuade him of humanity’s case; and so it goes for the next hour or two.

Where it gets fun, though, is when she takes Keanu to see her mentor, a Nobel Prize-winning uber-scientist – played, somewhat improbably, by John Cleese – whereupon the following dialogue ensues:

Boffin: Well, there must be alternatives. You must have some technology you have that could solve the problem.

Alien: The problem is not technology. The problem is you. You lack the will to change.

Boffin: Then help us change.

Alien: I cannot change your nature. You treat the world as you treat each other.

Boffin: But every civilisation reaches a crisis point eventually.

Alien: Most of them don’t make it.

Boffin: Yours did. How?

Alien: Our sun was dying. We had to evolve in order to survive.

Boffin: So it was only when your world was threatened with destruction that you became what you are now.

Alien: Yes.

Boffin: Well, that’s where we are. You say we’re on the brink of destruction, and you’re right.  But it’s only on the brink that people find the will to change; only on the precipice that we evolve. This is our moment – don’t take it from us. We are close to an answer.

That’s right, readers: I spent ten minutes doing pause and rewind on British Airways’ crappy touch screen entertainment system, juggling a laptop and an economy class meal, and I did it all for you. Why, you ask? Because when was the last time you saw a movie that expounds the necessity of crisis for global-level non-zero-sum co-operation – and uses Basil Fawlty to do so?

Admittedly, John Cleese is not the first person to expound this theory.

Robert Wright sets it all out very neatly in his Non-Zero: History, Evolution and Human Co-operation, in which he notes that historically, the main reason humans have co-operated more has been war. So “when social organization moved to the supravillage level of the chiefdom, fighting very often, if not always, figured”; it took a war to prompt the US to begin its confederation; World War Two led to the European Union, and indeed to the UN.

But now that we’re running a globally interdependent world, he wonders, what will be the prompt for further co-operation? (Or as he puts it, presumably having watched the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, ”If space aliens don’t attack the planet, yet it nonetheless moves towards firm supranational governance, the transition will be without known precedent.”) But in fact,

As it happens, the end of the second millennium has brought the rough equivalent of hostile extraterrestrials – not a single impending assault, but lots of new threats that, together, add up to a big planetary security problem.

GD readers are well aware of the list that follows, so I won’t quote it in full. But here’s the thing:

The timing is convenient. With economic organizatin reaching the global level, and governance showing faint signs of doing the sme, the great historical congealer of governance – an external enemy - disappears by definition. Meanwhile, a whole slew of non-zero-sum problems arise that are rather like an external enemy; they push people together, to escape common calamity.

Wright’s key point is the same as the Nobel boffin’s in the movie: as Wright puts it, “trauma has a way of making the unthinkable widely thought”. He gives the example of how during WWII, Arnold Toynbee persauded future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles – a conservative man by instinct – to sign on to a document proclaiming that

“As Christians we must proclaim the moral consequences of the factual interdependence to which the world has come. The world has become a community, and its constituent members no longer have the moral right to exercise ‘sovereingty’ or ‘independence’ which is now no more than a legal right to act without regard to the harm which is done to others.”

Wright argues that all this points ultimately towards a hopeful conclusion. He says:

Whole new species of chaos will indeed arise, but – assuming we respond to them wisely – they will drive the world to a new level of political organization that is capable of preserving order. What the “chaos” theorists fail to see is that chaos is just a non-zero-sum problem, something people are good at solving. [emphasis added]

Once again: enough with the collapse narratives. More about transformations and renaissances.

Monbiot is definitely the more upbeat of the two, in that – cheery chap that he is – he reckons that it’s on balance a good idea to avoid the total collapse of civilisation:

I’m sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement … I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows. However faint the hopes of engineering a soft landing – an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy – might be, we must keep this possibility alive.

Pah, says Kingsnorth: our current economic system can’t be tamed without collapsing - ”and who wants it tamed anyway?”  – so we must grow up and let go of the idea that our predicament can be fixed (whether through clean technology, through co-ordinated interntional action, or whatever).

The challenge is not how to shore up a crumbling empire with wave machines and global summits, but to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse.

As you might expect, all of this is deeply exciting for other collapse gurus, some of whom just can’t resist adding their own two-pennyworth. Like the Archdruid, for instance, whose blog is reliably full of (always readable) musings on our imminent demise. Rather fabulously, he dismisses both Monbiot and Kingsnorth on the basis that both of them are unduly optimistic:

Both men are proclaiming the gospel of a better future; their disagreements are simply about what form that future will take and how we will get there. Both assume that we can have, and ought to have, a future that’s even shinier than the present …

We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that. If this sounds like fatalism, it may be worth remembering that once a car goes skidding off a mountain road into empty air, it requires neither a crystal ball nor a faith in predestination to recognize that nothing anybody can do is going to prevent a terrific crash.

One can only imagine the sort of inverse euphoria induced by spending one’s days in this kind of competitive auction of doom with other collapse gurus – perhaps this is what it’s like to take ketamine. Either way, I wish to place on record a discordant note.

Not about the facts; I don’t disagree with any of the three on the gravity of the situation.  Anyone who looks hard at the data on climate change, energy security, food scarcity and so on recognises that we’re potentially in for a much rougher ride than mainstream political discourse is yet prepared to recognise.

Instead, I disagree with their approach.

All this talk of ‘descent’, ‘collapse’, ‘decline’, of ’hopes … however faint’ makes me feel rather… well, impatient. One imagines the three of them in the pub last night, downing pints to drown their sorrows about England being knocked out of the World Cup, three hours before kick-off.

We are, it is true, playing for high stakes in the civilisational stakes. We live in interesting times. It might all go terribly wrong. But it might not. And we do, after all, have some agency in the matter.

It’s often observed that there’s a lack of political will for dealing with the big global risks, and this is true.  More specifically, we’re lacking leadership (too few policymakers willing to grasp the nettle); political space (not enough public consent to really radical action); institutional bandwidth (our national and global governance systems are bad at dealing with complexity); and ideas on what sort of ‘shared operating systems’ we need to be aiming for (see David and my paper on The Resilience Doctrine for more on these).

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.

When David and I wrote the report on global institutions (pdf) that Gordon Brown commissioned from us for the 2008 Progressive  Governance summit, we called it Shooting the Rapids because we thought this metaphor captured the essence of the challenge ahead. In small boat; rocks and choppy water ahead; risk of capsize; manageable if paddle together; pleasantly shaded pool at far end.

You could write a book on why it is that we lack these narratives. For my part, I think a lot of the answer has to do with a prevailing cultural relativism in the west that has the effect of sapping people’s confidence in thinking or talking at what you might call the ‘macro-historical’ level. Short-termism is certainly part of it, too – I’ve always liked Danny Hillis‘s 1993 observation that,

When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. Now, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life.

But regardless of the reason, it’s time we sorted this out. And where that starts is with the people who are thinking most about the challenge ahead – whom I think have a responsibility to articulate the challenge in a way that implies the possibility of shooting the rapids successfully.

And so, a small plea for a little less about collapse, descents, powerdowns and the rest – and a little more about renewal, transformation and renaissance. What, after all, have we got to lose?