https://eand.co/have-we-reached-the-limits-of-human-civilization-5f930a23420b
Have We Reached the Limits of Human Civilization?
The Three Great Challenges We Face Now — And Why We Might Be Destined to Fail Them
umair haque

This year, he’s made best friends with my mom. Snowy and mom eat…digestive biscuits…together…for breakfast. Go figure. Mom’s fallen head over heels for the little guy. Why? Well, because. Like me, she never had a dog before. Even remotely considered having one. You can thank my Republican farmer father-in-law for converting me, slyly, to a dog person. But Snowy? He’s irresistible. Aren’t they all? And yet if I had to describe him, I’d say: he’s funny, very smart, curious, playful, incredibly protective, fiercely loyal, nervous, scared, afraid. Of a lot of things.

I stay up all night. It’s a consequence of being a real-life vampire. I kid — maybe by now you know that the sunlight can kill me. Snowy? He stays up with me. We take walks through the neighbourhood at 3AM. It’s just us. And things that go bump and howl and screech in the night in the woods. Snowy barks, a fierce little ball of protection. Then he leaps up at me. Dad — I’m scared. Hey, kid. It’s alright, I laugh. Just a fox. Just an owl.

But sometimes? I’m a little scared, too. And in those moments, I feel something true that sets a kind of white fire to my bones. All we have is each other. What do I mean by that?

When I think about our civilization, I see something ominous happening. We might just have reached the limits ofhuman civilisation.

What do I mean by that? I know, this essay’s not going well. It’s going to be deep, dark, and discomforting. Things that howl and screech in the night.

Way back in the 70s, a group wrote a report called The Limits to Growth. It was based on a computer simulation. What would happen to a civilisation aiming for exponential growth on a planet of limited resources. Overshoot and collapse. Guess who took it seriously? Nobody much in power. Presidents and Prime Ministers ignored it. My people, economists, mocked it. But guess who turned out to be right?

You can see it beginning to happen. We’ve reached those limits of growth. Ecological, economic, industrial. Decades of climate catastrophe beckon. A Great Dying is already upon us. Guess how many people are already dead of Covid and climate change? More than fifteen million.

And yet even that’s not what I mean by “we may have reached the limits of human civilisation.”

There are three tests that we have to pass at this juncture in human history as a civilization. If we fail them, everything collapses, into more of the dystopia we’re already surrounded by — pandemics, megafires, megafloods, the corruption and fascism a Great Dying is already breeding, the final failure of our most basic systems of air, food, water, and medicine. Bang. Game over.

What are those three tests? The first is the test of species level cooperation. The second, the test of interspecies level cooperation. The third, the test of supratemporal cooperation. Big words. Let me explain them one by one.

If we’re going to survive the climate catastrophe that centuries of industrial capitalism have now ignited, then we need to cooperate as a species. For the first time, really, in human history. We need to cast aside all the stupid and narrow differences of nations and tribes and all the rest of it, and take collective action at a species level.

We have never, ever done that before. We don’t have a single species-level system. For example, we don’t have a system to give every human child healthcare, sanitation, food, water, medicine. We do not know how to cooperate as a species at all. This is the very first time in history that we really have to do it. The rest of history? It’s been tribe against tribe, empire against empire, nation against nation, war after bloody war. This time? It really is different. No species level cooperation? No future. For any of us.

Except maybe billionaire narcissists.

That brings me to the second test: interspecies level cooperation. We have to learn, too, to cooperate with the rest of life on this planet. Not just compete with it, prey on it, annihilate it. Do you know how much wild biomass is left, after centuries of industrial capitalism? 36% of biomass is human, 60% is livestock, and just 4% is wild. That means that 36% of the biomass on earth — us — is killing another 60%. And just 4% is allowed to live free.

I think of Americans, eating their gigantic Cheesecake Factory burritos. Big enough for a family. Half eaten, thrown away.

If we can’t pass the test of interspecies level cooperation, we will collapse and implode as a civilizaiton, too. We’re in the midst of the first human made mass extinction — the first one for millions of years, just the sixth in all the history of life, period. We made it happen. But the fish clean our rivers. The insects turn our soil. The trees give us air to breathe. The plants — still — give us medicine. No life for them, no life for us.

Think for a moment about how starkly that lies in contrast to the way we treat life. Americans are voracious consumers. Maybe the hunters are a little more thoughtful about killing than the idiots in the burbs who never have to look death in the eye. Or maybe not. Our civilization’s consumption rate is 80%. No wonder life on earth is being annihilated. But we’ve reached that limit, too. Soon enough, the soil will aridify, the oceans acidify, the rivers turn dry, and so forth. No harvests. No medicines. Fire and flood and plague. Life is taking its revenge on the pandemic of us.

I’ll discuss the third test briefly — it’s the most abstract one. What do I mean by “supratemporal cooperation”? I mean that we have to learn to cooperate with the dead and future generations, too. Across species, no less. Whose planet is it? Whose world? It’s theirs, too. It does us little good to focus just on the generations which are here and now. We must value lives forwards in the future, and backwards in the past, too.

That’s a little abstract, so let me put it this way. Every flock and herd and group of animals should be seen as a collective that has rights, space to live, resources. Their future generations should count, too. Just as our kids, and our kids’ kids, and so on, should count in our political and social decision making. Our kids are depressed, and the next generation is going to be even more so, because we’re not providing them much of a future. If we don’t value and respect the dead, learn their lesson, across species, we end right back at annihilation and extinction.

Valuing the dead, too, matters. That’s a strange thing to say. Why do I say it? Well, think of what fossil fuels really are. Just…decaying organic matter. Bodily fluids of corpses from another age. Leave them alone. Let the dead rest in peace. See the value I’m trying to point to, here? Maybe that way, we wouldn’t have relied on fossil fuels so heavily in the first place. For us, too, valuing the dead matters. Americans don’t seem to care that more people die in a few days of Covid than of 9/11. They don’t value life because they don’t care much about death. They do not understand cooperating temporal boundaries. I learn the lesson of your death. I honor your life that way.

(By the way, no — I don’t include the dumb argument that there’ll be billions of lives in some computer uploaded consciousness machine, so no life matters now. I’m arguing the precise opposite.)

So. Cooperating across three new boundaries. The greatest ones in history. Across our species — the whole of it — the key to surviving climate collapse. Across species, period — the key to stopping and reversing the mass extinction we’ve created, which ends with our own. And across time, among species — so that the dead are honored, and the next generations have a chance, a future.

The question is: is it even possible?

And the more I think about, the more I think it might not be. Not in the political sense. But in the sense of who we are.

What does that mean? Well, who are we? We’re much less than we think we are. We are a species that is about 300,000 years old. It’s had maybe 5000 years of a thing now called civilisation. Maybe 300 of a thing called industrial-capitalist civilisation. All that is the blink of an eye. It’s nothing at all.

And now much, much more profound questions are raised.

Are we — walking apes with primate minds — capable of cooperating at the scale and scope we need to now? The evidence is pretty grim. So far, we’ve never been even remotely capable of such a thing. Instead, our primate minds take over. We organise ourselves in hierarchies of violence and power. We call them “empires” or “nations” or “corporations.” We create fictional identities and invent Gods to justify them. We’re happily seduced into them by the consumerist toys industrial capitalism dangles before us. We can cooperate at the level of a few million people “following” an “influencer” — but, sadLOL, that’s about it.

So far, we walking apes only seem capable of cooperating at something just past a primate pack level — maybe on the level of a “country” or a “city” or a blue-tick Twitter account.

But at the level of a species? Of all species?

I have begun to doubt very, very much that we can pass these tests of cooperation. I don’t think it’s in us. I have begun to believe that we are “wired” to cooperate at a much lower intensity of scale and scope that we need to to survive.

Let me make that concrete. Take the example of America again. It demonstrates pretty clearly the limits of human cooperation. It’s a society pitted against each other. Millions of people, maybe can cooperate — if they’re given some fictional identity, god, and enemy. Maybe, at the outer limits, in a great war, or huge disaster, that number can rise to the tens of millions.

But beyond that? Human cooperation doesn’t seem possible at the scale and scope it needs for us to survive as a civilisation and a species.

To put that more formally, we need now collective action that numbers in the billions and trillions. Billions of us need to take collective action to save a dying planet. We need to tend to trillions of lives — trees, fish, animals — to complete the job.

Feeling a chill yet? You should, perhaps, because nothing remotely close has ever happened in history. Indications that it could ever happen are just the opposite. In the absence of a fictional identity, god, or enemy, there is nothing that seems to spark collective action and unify us walking apes. Our primate minds, ruled by fear, seek power, and shelter in the safety of dominance hierarchies. We happily submit to the most violent, as long as we are protected.

But what if there are no enemies? What if the enemy is us? Our own worst selves? Our primate minds and their submission to hierarchy and power in the name of violence and dominance?

Then, my friends, the game is over.

This is as far as human civilisation goes. Ever. Because of who we are, bio-existentially. I’m not one for biological determinism, I have to admit. But in this case, I’m chilled. Because when I seek the truth of us humans, and put it against the challenges we now face, a disturbing truth seems to emerge. We walking apes are probably not capable of cooperating as a species, let alone with all species, let alone across generations. We’re just not made for it. We are far, far more backwards and limited than that.

Maybe you and I recognise it, and strive to transcend it. But the average person? Take a look around — they are quite happy with a kind of primate life, living in packs which are organized according to hierarchies of violence and power, called “nations” and “corporations” and “religions,” and they will never seek anything else. If you try to get them to, they turn on you, and fascism erupts. And what is fascism but the primate mind, the pack, one hierarchy of violence and domination, against the other? Maybe it has the added patina of human illogic — “my pack is the chosen one! God said so! It’s in our blood!” — but that’s about it.

If I’m right — and I don’t want to be right — then these are the limits of human civilisation. We are an evolutionary dead end. We are capable of savaging the planet and life on it — but not tending to it and nurturing it. We are limited to only ever be able cooperate the level of a pack, and a pack can only ever be so big, and united by violence, hate, fear, and dominance.

That is a dismal view of humanity to take, I know. It hurts to write it.

So I think about Snowy. My mom. Eating their biscuits together. A year ago? I said: Mom, we’re coming to spend some time there. With our dog. LOL. She… freaked out. A dog? Never! And now? Snowy’s not just her new best friend. He’s her latest grand…kid…dog…buddy. She understands, deep down in her bones, that Snowy is as real as she is, as full in his humanity and personhood as I am. He has a complex and sophisticated emotional life. He’s far more socially aware than me. Mom laughs with delight every morning as Snowy greets her with goofy yelps of joy and big wet doggy kisses.

Now she knows. She has learned to love something in a new way. I bet she thought it could never happen. But it did.

If an old woman — sorry, mom — and a bastard like me can learn to love a little dog…well, then who knows? Maybe anything’s possible.

At the end of our story — our human story — lie two endings. In one, we learn to love in a wholer, nobler, fuller way. To love each other, ourselves, all life. We expand our capacities for love in a way that shatters history. Which puts an end to all the violence and stupidity and dominance there ever was, and replaces it with kindness, grace, truth, goodness, one life tending the next, healing its broken bones. Camus’s great insight — love as the ultimate rebellion against death, the terrible fear and pain of just existing at all — is forever true.

The other way our story ends is in hate. Brutality. Stupidity. Violence. Those old demons, those old foes. Those old friends. Who have always defined the course of human history. We don’t transcend them. We never unite and take collective action. We can’t. Our only future — limited by our primate brains — is to be seduced into hierarchies of power and dominance by glittering things, gods, identities, toys, enemies. Violence and hate — the violence and hate in us, which we celebrate with our primate pack mentalities — annihilate life on earth — and eventually take us with it.

This ending? We’re a dead end. The next great life form that comes after us will be the one capable of what we weren’t — higher-level cooperation, nobility, kindness, grace, dignity, nurturance.

Yes, life will survive, in some form. But us? We will have learned — and shown — the truth of us.

Which ending will our story have? A higher, truer love — or the bottomless depths of hate? This time, there’s very little middle ground. It’s one or the other.

One side of me thinks — contemptuously — it has the answer. The other looks at Snowy, and remembers how I feel picking his tiny body up when things howl in the night. Dad — I’m scared. Hey, little guy. It’s OK. A fierce and strange rush of love surges through me like an ocean. A man and a little dog at 3AM, holding onto each other in the darkness. And I can’t say, yet, that I know.

Umair
December 2021
Eudaimonia and Co