Date: 2024-04-29 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020338
Sustainability
Civilization is Self-Destructing
Umair Haque ... This is How Our Civilization is Self-Destructing ... The Real Economics of Our Civilization Say It’s Going to Implode
Peter Burgess
This is How Our Civilization is Self-Destructing ... The Real Economics of Our Civilization Say It’s Going to Implode
Image Credit: Mary Cummins Rehabilitation Center
It should be plain to see to anyone remotely sane or thoughtful that our civilisation has reached a crisis point. We face a solid three to four decades of escalating catastrophe now. The 2030s, when climate change becomes severe, tearing apart economic and geoplanetary stability, megafires and megafloods and mega hurricanes and drought and famine and shortage become grim daily realities. The 2040s, when mass extinction rips apart the basic systems of our civilisation, from food to water to air to medicine. And the 2050s, the decade of the Long Goodbye, when the final collapse of ecologies leaves a dead planet in its wake, soil turned to dust, oceans to acid, harvests fallow, rivers run dry.
That’s the trajectory we’re on now. And while we’re making minor league attempts to change it — decarbonizing our economies at a nonexistent pace, for example — we don’t quite seem to understand the scale of apocalypse that is now upon us. And that’s because we don’t have the mental tools, the concepts, the frameworks. We’re trapped mentally — and socially — in industrial age ideas of productivity, efficiency, and so on.
What we don’t have, but we need, are measures of how positive and negative our civilisation really is. In the biggest possible sense. Life and death. I call one of those the Thanatos Factor. It’s named after Freud’s “Thanatos,” or death drive. It asks the question: how destructive is our civilization, really? How much death, despair, and ruin does it cause, for each life it creates? Have you ever wondered how destructive our civilisation really is? By now, I’m sure you have — even if your mind tries to run away, because it’s a profoundly uncomfortable thought. Maybe you saw pictures of animals burning to death in megafires. Maybe you saw photos of scarred forests, or polluted rivers. Maybe you’ve read about the extinction of the bees and insects and fish. Maybe you live in a place that’s been toxified, physically, or a country that’s been poisoned, politically and socially and economically. All that is Thanatos. We don’t add it up. We think of these things as disconnected. But they are the same thing, really — ruin, death, destruction — and we should add them up. What happens when we do?
Don’t worry about the precise, exact math — that’s for future generations of economists. Right now we are just going to think about this question, conceptually, philosophically. It’s a big question, a difficult question. But if we don’t wrestle with it — then the path we are on, the path of runaway catastrophe, remains the only path there is. One way to think about Thanatos is that over the last five decades, the human population has roughly doubled, from four billion to eight billion. But at the same time, there’s been a mass extinction of every other kind of life. Four billion humans were created. But to create them, it required our civilisation to kill off trillions of beings, animals, fish, trees, insects, and so on. That’s a massively, massively negative Thanatos.
Another way to think about Thanatos is in terms of how many lives we still enslave, in order to slaiughter. I mean, of course, animals. In terms of biomass, farm animals now vastly outstrip wild animals by orders of magnitude — meaning there are billions more lives that are simply enslaved and destroyed by our industrialised systems for food, medicine, and agriculture. That, too, is a massively negative Thanatos, at least if you believe that animals deserve to live with a little dignity, too, not just caged and slaughtered.
Here’s a startling statistic. In terms of matter, biomass, 36% are human, 60% are livestock, and just 4% are wild. That means that 36% of the biomass on earth — us — is killing another 60%. And just 4% is allowed to live free. Is it any wonder there’s a mass extinction going on?
There, we could even begin to quantify Thanatos — it’s 36 minus 60 plus 4, which is negative 20%. In terms of mammal biomass, Thanatos is negative 20% — meaning that we destroy 20% more mammalian life than we create. Any wonder our planet is dying?
And we treat mammals relatively well. We at least feed them and house them, before we slaughter them or test our drugs on them and so on. The rest of life? The oceans and rivers and mountains and forests? We don’t care for them at all. Following that logic, Thanatos for non-mammalian life, which is the rest of life on earth, insects, fish, trees, and so on, should be far more negative than minus 20%. And it should be even worse than that for abiotic matter — soil, oceans, and so on, matter that supports life, but we don’t consider alive.
And that’s exactly what the evidence shows. There’s a mass extinction ripping through the natural world, the first artificial, human-made one, and it gets worse the further away from mammalian life you get. Insects, fish, bees — bang! Being killed off at startling rates. Then there’s the desertification of topsoil, the erosion of water tables, the pollution of the oceans, the drying of rivers, and so forth — all accelerating. This is another kind of extinction, the death of ecologies, not just species. Do you see how, well, frightening all this is when you really think about it?
Let me connect all those dots. Thanatos is a very serious and very real problem for our civilisation. It destroys vastly, vastly more life than it creates. How much more? For mammalian life, roughly 20% or so. For non-mammalian life, the number is harder to estimate, but we know it’s far, far worse — probably in the hundreds. And for abiotic matter, stuff we need to live that isn’t considered alive — water, air, soil — it’s even worse than that. Our level of Thanatos is off the charts.
And that’s just to everyone and everything else. What about to ourselves? Thanatos, too, can and should measure our own self-destruction. How might we do that? Pretty simply. Norway is one of the world’s happiest countries — and it has one of the world’s highest life expectancies, at 82.6 years. America has the 40th, at 78.5 — and is way less happy than Norway. Norway’s happiness comes in at about 7.5 out of 10, and America’s closer to 6.5. That means that annually, there are 33 million life-years of a whole point of happiness lost in America. No wonder America’s plunged into hate, violence, brutality, and cruelty — despair makes people lose their minds, as trauma’s fight/flight/freeze response kicks in.
I know this is all abstract and challenging. Take your time and chew on these ideas. What I think is badly, badly wrong in our civilisation is the way that we conceptualise and think about the world. We do it in an economistic way — we look at “costs” and “benefits.” But costs and benefits were a calculus created for the industrial revolution — not the world of today, of climate change, mass extinction, ecological collapse. Using an obsolete paradigm doesn’t seem to be getting us very far.
Our statistics and measures are all badly outdated. GDP doesn’t even measure carbon emissions. Carbon emissions, meanwhile, don’t really measure how much they affect life. And so on. The result is that economists and pundits look at obsolete data, like GDP and “profits” and “incomes” which don’t carry much information anymore, and tend to think that things are doing OK. In other words, they have a massive optimism bias, commit a fallacy of thinking positively, because they are not looking at numbers that represent truth very well anymore. Sure, GDP is rising, but only at the cost of everything that matters anymore, from democracy to sanity to the planet to life on it. We don’t measure all that stuff, but we should.
Why? Not just to play intellectual games. But to create the jobs and industries and careers of the future. If we had working measures of say, sanity, democracy, life, the planet’s health, and so on, then we could create industries and jobs to manage them. That’s happening, albeit far too slowly. We need whole careers like “planetary economics managers” and “human impact developers” and “ecology designers” and “systemwide potential engineers” and so on. I know those are cheesy titles — they’re cheesy precisely because we’re doing so badly inventing them that they still sound like science fiction mostly.
All that is a little bit about why Thanatos matters. We can’t go on as a civilisation anymore. Blindly. Pretending that we aren’t getting it badly wrong, as the world around us begins to collapse — simply because our obsolete paradigms and numbers don’t capture that truth, because they were never meant to. We can’t stay this blind for much longer. We have maybe a few years left, at best, and the longer we stay blind, even now, all that will happen is that we will be all that much more shocked when the now inevitable dislocations of climate change, mass extinction, and ecological collapse thunder down on us. Covid is just a tiny, tiny hint of all that.
So you tell me. How destructive do you think our civilisation really is? When I make even back of the envelope attempts to calculate this number I call Thanatos — life, happiness, possibility, over death, despair, and ruin — I shudder. We’re used to glorifying our civilisation as the smartest and most inventive and richest in history. But it’s also the most destructive, violent, and ruinous.
We have to change that, my friends. Now. In these next few years. Or else our civilisation does not have a future.
If Thanatos is negative — if a civilisation creates more death, despair, ruin than life — then a civilisation is too destructive to survive. If it’s positive, on the other hand — if a civilisation creates more life, happiness, and possibility than death, despair, and ruin — then it might just make it.
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