The End of Our Civilization

 

I recently heard an interview with Eric Utne, founder of the magazine The Utne Reader, where he expressed a viewpoint I would call “civilization existentialism.” His position is a recognition that civilizations have lifespans just as any living thing. Every civilization will eventually face a challenge that it is unable to overcome that causes its end.

Utne discussed the idea because he felt our current civilization is in its twilight years. If we consider what caused other civilizations to end - overuse of resources and changes in the environment both natural and man caused – it's not too difficult to see how we are facing the same challenges.

What is frustrating about the situation is how this impending doom can be avoided if enough people are willing to make changes to their lifestyle. We can slow global warming/climate change if a majority of people converted to a mostly vegetarian, better yet, vegan, diet to curb the amount of greenhouse gases produced in animal agriculture. Ocean acidification and dead zones can also be reversed with similar changes in lifestyle currently caused by farm waste running off into our rivers and creeks and ultimately the ocean. We can limit the plastic debris in the ocean by using less plastic packaging and forgoing bottled water when the water coming from the tap isn't much different. We can burn fewer fossil fuels if more office workers were allowed to work at home, which the pandemic has shown is more possible than executives had been willing to admit previously, or if more people were willing and able to live near their work that commuting by vehicle was less necessary.

Yet, the pandemic has revealed that these changes will not happen at the scale they would need to for us to prevent a collapse. People's response to COVID-19, a clear and obvious killer with fairly simple safety measures to limit its spread, has shown that no amount of evidence is going to get enough people to change their ways, even temporarily. Here in the U.S., the unwillingness to adapt to circumstances has led to 240,000 deaths as of the time of writing and each day brings a new milestone for the number of new infections. A recent study using anonymous cell phone data suggested that the most common places the virus is spreading are the bars, restaurants, places of worship, and gyms that health experts have argued should be closed because of the high traffic leading to passing on the infection. People are simply unwilling to forgo these activities in order to keep themselves and community members save. Addressing the overuse of the Earth's resources will take more than temporary changes in behavior and those changes are more extensive. If people aren't willing to change during this pandemic, they aren't going to for climate change or other threats to our global civilization. So our civilization will come to an end, despite the fact that the causes are known and reversible. Too many people are either in denial of the extent of the threat or are unbothered by it.

The positive side of Utne's position was a lack of despair. Just as Camus argued against suicide in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Utne suggests we can still live our lives with love and compassion. We can continue to act to try and prevent the collapse, even if we know it is doomed to fail just like Sisypus's rolling of the rock up the hill with no hope it would stay. There may not be hope, but there can still be joy and meaning.