At the time I am writing this, the global
coronavirus pandemic, which everyone had hoped and expected would finally be winding
down in 2021, has roared back to life - beginning in mid-summer with the rise
of a new variant of the disease. And now
there are news reports of shortages appearing in stores and supermarkets again,
similar to those that shocked and alarmed everyone when the pandemic first
became serious in early 2020. Back then,
the shortages began with toilet paper, and then spread beyond paper products in
general to soap and disinfectants, and finally to certain foods, like
eggs. When I observed how quickly these
shortages appeared last year, I realized just how silly so many of those science
fiction movies are which show the survivors of some sort of apocalypse periodically
returning to abandoned grocery stores to restock their supplies of canned goods
and other things. The blunt fact is that
if we ever have anything like a real apocalypse (and I am hoping that this present
pandemic is not leading to one), then store shelves will be cleared of
everything very quickly.
What I’m about to describe is not for the squeamish, and if you are one of those, then I recommend skipping this paragraph and moving on to the next one. A real apocalypse, brought on by some kind of massive, debilitating, and irreversible crisis, would probably play out along the following lines. There would be initial attempts by the government to rein in general panic by putting some kind of civic programs in place to address the crisis in a systematic fashion. But as people began to fear for their personal safety and that of their families, they would proceed to stock up on things: essentials first, and then just about everything. The appearance of shortages would spur panic buying, exacerbating the shortages, until long lines of people formed at stores hoping to buy whatever was still available, perhaps at greatly inflated prices. What would follow would be a complete breakdown in social order. People would hunker down inside of their homes, hoping that their stash of canned goods, water, and other supplies would sustain them until – somehow – this crisis finally passed. At some point, however, as these stashes began to dwindle, roving bands of armed thugs, or just desperate people, would begin to raid other homes, perhaps systematically, in search of whatever supplies they still had, and would be willing or driven to even kill any families that resisted them. In the end, even these raiders would not survive, because there would be fewer and fewer families to raid. Only those who produced genuine food sources, such as farmers, might survive longer, and only if they had the capacity to defend themselves from a surrounding mob of desperately hungry people. Of course, if anything like a government managed to remain intact through an extreme crisis such as this, then perhaps some semblance of order could be restored or maintained through military means, but if the supply chain of goods and services has been irreparably destroyed, then even this source of order will not be able to be maintained.
What could cause such a general
breakdown of that magnitude? A large-scale
nuclear war, and the nuclear winter that followed, is one obvious possibility, the
threat of which has hovered ominously over us for more than half a
century. But widespread devastation could
come from natural sources as well, such as a massive asteroid strike. One or more environmental catastrophes might
lead to a general and irreparable breakdown of the global food chain. A pandemic, more serious than the one that we
are presently plagued with, might do it.
And even something as subtle as a widespread, powerful electromagnetic pulse,
arising naturally from a solar flare, or intentionally as a form of warfare or
terrorism, could suddenly make most of our electronic devices inoperable,
including our cellphones and computers, which in turn could produce widespread
chaos. We don’t like to think of any apocalyptic
scenarios, but the occurrence of any of these is very plausible, and in some
cases are becoming increasingly plausible.
It is even more unpleasant to consider
the long-term consequences of such a catastrophe. Our civilization is one massive,
interconnected network, and the things which we use and consume come from sources
that are often far removed from us. Much
of the raw materials come from other countries, and many if not most of the end-products
are manufactured somewhere else, and imported here. I don’t even have any idea where the nearest
farm is to where I live. I couldn’t
imagine where I could search for food if I couldn’t find it in a store. And so much of our daily lives is contingent
on a steady supply of electricity and water that the permanent interruption of
these would be enough to constitute a devastating cataclysm. We might think that we could adapt, and learn
to manage without these – returning, for example, to pencils and paper to keep
records and conduct rudimentary business.
But who would be able to manufacture pencils once our existing supply
became exhausted, or paper, for that matter?
It is a very real possibility then,
that such an apocalypse could send the survivors into a state of barbarism. Even the rudiments of civilization would be
lost, and literacy itself might fall into a general – if not complete –
decline. When I consider such a
scenario, it reminds me of a story that the philosopher Plato told in the Timaeus
about a conversation between the Athenian statesman Solon and an old Egyptian priest. Solon had brought up the subject of the Great
Flood (the ancient Greeks, like the Hebrews, had their own flood legend), and
was speculating about when it actually occurred. The priest replied, scornfully, “O Solon,
Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old
man among you.” When Solon asked him to
explain what he meant, the priest continued:
There
have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many
causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water,
and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. . . . Whereas just when you
and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other
requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven,
like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are
destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again
like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among
us or among yourselves.
Plato’s account has inspired many fanciful imaginations to
conjure up elaborate theories about ancient civilizations that existed
thousands – perhaps many thousands – of years ago, with technologies like our
own, or comparable to our own, possessing the capabilities of flight or
levitation, weapons of mass destruction, and lifestyles characterized by luxury
and material abundance. Plato himself,
in the Timaeus and another work of his, the Critias, introduced
the legend of Atlantis, which has since become the archetypal lost
civilization.
But history has given us real
examples of civilizations that have fallen into barbarism, the most prominent
being that of ancient Rome. After the
Roman Empire fell to Germanic invaders, much of the culture and technology that
had evolved in that civilization and the Greek civilization that it had
inherited was lost, and for centuries, the most tangible evidence that it had
once existed was the network of old Roman roads that survived and spanned much
of western Europe, including the British isles.
Fortunately, the legacy of those civilizations was not completely lost, thanks
in large part to Christian monks in western Europe who retained and preserved
the writings from that era, along with literacy itself, and Islamic scholars in
the East. Earlier still, before the rise of the Roman Empire, the ancient Greeks themselves had
come out of a Dark Age that had lasted for centuries, during which the entire population
had even forgotten how to read or write.
This had come about when an earlier civilization, called the Mycenaean,
met its downfall around 1200 BC, probably due to either invasion or internal
societal breakdown, and it was not until 450 years later that literacy
returned, and ushered in the classical Greek civilization which began with
Homer and Hesiod and culminated with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Could a downfall of that magnitude –
a complete loss of civilization as we know it – actually happen in our own time? In his book Why Information Grows: The
Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, physicist Cesar A. Hidalgo
argues that the growth and maintenance of our economic system and its complex
products and services depends upon the accumulation of knowledge and knowhow
that far transcends the capabilities of any individual, and therefore requires the
establishment of interlocking networks of people, businesses, and other institutions. These networks can collectively accumulate
and use the necessary knowledge and knowhow which makes the creation and
application of these products and services possible. But if the networks don’t exist, or if they
are destroyed, then it simply becomes impossible to maintain the necessary infrastructure
to support civilization and its continued evolution. Hidalgo writes:
As a thought experiment, consider sending a group of
ten teenagers to a desert island equipped with indestructible solar-powered
laptops containing full copies of the entire Internet and every book and
magazine ever written. Would this “DNA” be enough for this group of teenagers
to unpack the information contained in these sources in a matter of five to ten
generations? Would they be able to evolve a society that embodies in its
networks the knowhow of metallurgy, agriculture, and electronics that we take
for granted in our modern society, and which is described in the information
that lies dormant in the books and websites they carry with them? Or would they
be unable to unpack that information into productive knowhow, failing to
re-create a society holding any considerable amount of the knowhow that was contained
in the society that sent them on this strange quest? Of course, reproducing
this “Lord of the Flies” scenario experimentally is unfeasible, but there are
examples in our past that tell us that knowhow is often lost when social groups
are isolated, and that the knowhow available in some locations is hard to
reproduce, even when the attempts to do so are fantastic.
It is remarkable to consider just how dependent we have become
in recent years on smartphones, the internet, and personal computers to carry
on our day-to-day activities, even those involving recreation and leisure. Without these many of us – particularly those
who have never lived in a world without them – would be completely lost and disoriented. But, as Hidalgo argues, even if we could somehow
retain the basic functionality of these devices in the wake of a great
cataclysm, they would ultimately be insufficient to help us preserve or restore
civilization, if the social and economic networks that were responsible for
bringing about their existence and supporting them have been obliterated.
There have certainly been people
who believe that a complete societal collapse is possible. In the early 1980s, when Cold War hostilities
between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had reignited after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
and the election of the hawkish Ronald Reagan, and the U.S. economy had been in
a state of extreme economic stagnation for more than a decade, many feared that
a general collapse was imminent, either due to a complete economic breakdown,
or an apocalyptic world war, or both. A
new movement emerged called survivalism, which had actually begun in response
to Cold War and economic fears in the 1960s, but steadily grew in popularity
and peaked in the 1980s, with books like Life After Doomsday by Bruce D.
Clayton and Live Off the Land in the City and Country by Ragnar Benson. Survivalists believed that they could weather
a general catastrophe by forming intentional communities – often in isolated areas
– which learned how to grow their own food, build their own shelters, and practice
other basic survival skills which would enable them to preserve their existence
indefinitely. These communities usually
also accumulated and learned how to use weapons in order to defend themselves against
any stragglers in the chaotic, post-apocalyptic world that might try to plunder
what they had. This movement was satirized
in the 1983 movie The Survivors, starring Robin Williams and Walter
Matthau, where Robin Williams’ character joins one of these communities, only
to discover that its leader is secretly profiting from the fear and paranoia
that he has engendered among his followers.
While the movie’s depiction of survivalists verged on the cartoonish, it
did reflect a misgiving on the part of the general public about groups like
these. They seemed to be not so much
interested in preserving civilization in general, but rather just people like
themselves, whether this similarity was along religious (often cultish), racial
(generally white), or political (usually extremely conservative) lines. In fact, these groups often believed that the
very collapse of civilization would be a verification that it had followed a
wrong course, and that a future course along the same destructive lines could
only be avoided if they could recast civilization in their own image of what a healthy
one would look like: an image reflecting themselves and their particular beliefs.
Still, the survivalists might have
been onto something. If we ever have a
complete collapse of civilization, its eventual restoration will probably be
contingent on the continued existence of certain pockets of survivors, who have
managed to weather the worst of the catastrophe, or series of catastrophes, and
developed the means to sustain themselves and their offspring. As these pockets grow and begin to form new
networks, a basis might form that will support the growth of economy and
technology.
In the electricity industry, a new
term has become popular in recent years: resiliency. Traditionally, the quality of electricity
service has been measured in terms of reliability, which is the
percentage of time that customers have access to electricity. While the industry generally maintains a very
high standard for this measure (well above 99%), there has been a realization –
particularly in the wake of extreme weather events such as Superstorm Sandy in
2012, which left large parts of New York City and surrounding areas without
power for several days – that there is more to providing reliable electricity
service than repairing downed power lines from time to time. In the face of catastrophic outages, which
could cripple power plants and transformers, in addition to downing power lines,
a more general strategy needs to be in place for restoring service. This strategy would involve a phased approach
for literally rebuilding the electric system – at least in places – in order to
resume service. It would entail making
sure that equipment redundancies, back-up systems, and elaborate restoration strategies
– often involving a coordinated and concentrated effort among disparate and
even widely dispersed entities – are in place to handle such potential extreme
disruptions.
Perhaps we should start thinking
along the same lines about civilization in general: about preserving its
resiliency, in the face of a potentially crippling wide-spread catastrophe, or
series of catastrophes. It might involve
something like the following phases:
1. Ensuring that at least part of the general populace, if
not most of it, or ideally all of it, has knowledge of how to form autonomous,
self-supporting survival pockets that will enable them to weather long-run
disruptions in food supply, water supply, and electricity service.
2. Storing the vital information of our civilization in a
way that ensures both its survival and its general accessibility, even under
the worst circumstances, so that literacy is maintained among the survivors.
3. Having a plan in place to guide the general formation
of networks among individual pockets of survivors, concomitant with the phased,
gradual restoration of practices and technologies that will enable the return
of civilization, such as mining and metallurgy, basic industry, the
establishment of larger trade networks, and the resumption of utility services,
including water and electricity.
I suspect that the politically powerful and wealthiest members
of our civilization already have some sort of plans in place to protect
themselves. But, as with the survivalists,
such plans would be self-serving and ultimately short-sighted if they don’t
provide a framework for the restoration of a broad-based infrastructure that
would be essential for preserving or bringing back our civilization. Without this, we could see a future not unlike
some dystopian science fiction novels, in which a band of relatively primitive
human beings only have dim memories of some lost golden age when their
ancestors could fly through the air, live in complete comfort with abundant
food, and enjoy entertainments that now seemed possible only through some sort
of magic. This is certainly a future
that we would not want to leave to our descendants – even our distant
ones. I’m sure that all of us instead would
like to believe that the distant future of humanity will be a “Golden Age” that
will make the present one pale by comparison.
And so the old adage, “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst”
should be a philosophy that all of us – both individually and collectively –
should take to heart . . . and put into practice, before it’s too late.
