How Western Civilization Could Collapse
bbc.com
bbc.com
In the first place, economic growth slows down and reverses from time to time. Society doesn't collapse. People paint the Great Depression as having been "saved" by WW2, not as a sequence of events that all fed into each other. In other words, if the Great Depression and subsequent world war wasn't a perfect example of the worst that could possibly happen, I dare you to point out a plausible worse scenario.
No, nuclear war doesn't count, even the worst nuclear war imaginable won't be as bad as WW2 was. Nuclear winter is a myth, the particles fall out of the air too quickly, and the inverse square law greatly limits direct damage. Most civilian population centers won't get hit, unless we start another arms race, so we're looking at a few decades at most of economic disruption in the worst possible case.
Finally, the Roman Empire was in no way comparable to the current global regime. The political systems seen by Rome were downright primitive compared to our representative democracies, multi-state unions, and trade federations. The Anglosphere is in no way vulnerable to dictatorship, and while Europe was once capable of fascism in the past, the days where a would-be Hitler or Mussolini could whip populations into a murderous frenzy are long gone. The worst that can happen is sovereign devolution AKA Brexit, Grexit, Scottish independence et al.
The might of Western hegemony is going to slowly fade away and new regional orders will slowly gain strength. The EU will slowly evolve along those orders and the world will stumble towards a new, multi-polar equilibrium, out of which a new global governing body will emerge, fail, then emerge again.
Rome "collapsed" by spreading across Europe, Western civilization will "collapse" by spreading across the globe.
It wouldn't take that many major cities to get past the death toll of WW2. The "worst nuclear war" would easily have more civilian casualties than WW2. How on Earth can you even say this?
The only reason major population centers were targeted in WW2 was because those centers were also major military targets, destroying them would have been crucial to the planned amphibious assault. Had we not had nuclear weaponry on hand, they would have been conventionally bombed like all the others.
Warfare has changed, materiel is now located outside of population centers, on military bases. Putting countries on war footing would take 18 months and it's unlikely any major conflict would last that long.
Strategic materials are the ultimate limiter to high-tech warfare like we see today. We just don't have enough to keep pumping out weapons.
In the end, the very stakes of warfare keep local conflicts from escalating. It's in everybody's best interest to keep the cash flowing. Trade was far more regional 80 years ago.
Like Dresden? Beer factories and civil industry, all reduced to rubble by carpet bombing. Do read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Not your average anti war book.
Here's [1] a declassified JCS report from 1961 estimating over 200 million deaths from a US attack alone, not including the counterattack. This was with lower target populations and a China which had yet to urbanize. And I don't think it includes the longer-term death toll, e.g. from starvation as transportation webs collapse.
Here's [2] another report from 1956:
> the authors developed a plan for the “systematic destruction” of Soviet bloc urban-industrial targets that specifically and explicitly targeted “population” in all cities, including Beijing, Moscow, Leningrad, East Berlin, and Warsaw
That one aimed 179 nukes at Moscow alone. You don't think 40 aimed at NYC was plausible?
Yes, many nukes would hit military targets outside urban areas, but many wouldn't. If you're right and the war was a relatively short affair that mostly targetted (and presumably decimated) opposing militaries, the long-term postwar strategic advantage would go to whichever side could rebuild fastest. That means aiming for economic advantage, which means that long-term nuclear strategy includes attacking economic targets, which in large part means population centres.
Would WW3 result in entire continents glassed over and the extinction of all life on Earth? No. But I'm pretty sure it would be a lot worse than WW2, and this assumption that "it wouldn't really be all that bad" strikes me as absolutely terrifying. Yes, "It's in everybody's best interest to keep the cash flowing." There was exactly the same consensus before WW1. Actors don't always act in their own best interest, even if they're rational.
[1] https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/u-s-war-plans-wou...
[2] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear-...
The argument is over whether nuclear war could end Western civilization. While for a short time this might have been true circa 1960, it no longer remains so now. Sure, it'll royally suck. It's on the same scale as WW2. But not the end of the world. I'll point you again to Rotty, whose job it is to know these things.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-fatalities-would-there-be-in-...
What about collapse of the ecosystem due to global warming?
Lots of people's livelihoods are threatened, but humanity isn't.
It will be very expensive, but not an existential threat.
That's semantics, and highly irrelevant. Everything you could define as an ecosystem on this planet is threatened by global warming. That includes the places where your food is grown. Same goes for everyone else's food. When food stability is threatened, societies collapse.
Let's do some math. Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed ~100,000 people, making it 50,000 per bomb. The US has currently 31,175 nuclear weapons at its disposal. If it were to even use 5% of its arsenal, assuming they have the same power as the bombs from '45 (which they don't), it would amount to 150,000,000 deaths. This is 2.5 times more than the total casualties of ww2, without even accounting for the nuclear weapon use of the opposing side.
He isn't. He is assuming 5% of bombs will be dropped on population centers.
> Removing your enemy's ability to wage war will always take priority over non-military targets.
You are applying conventional military tactics in a nuclear war. They don't apply. See MAD[1], the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
And I don't think it was ever the official policy of the USSR; their planners believed that even all-out nuclear war was both survivable and winnable. (Which made the whole concept distinctly iffy as the foundation of deterrence.)
MAD is a convenient fiction that politicians and the military use for political purposes. It has zero bearing on any actual military strategy because it is not a real scenario. There aren't enough strategic weapons in the world to bring about such an outcome.
To learn more about how the military community thinks of nuclear warfare, follow this guy on Quora:
(For example, every single ocean port is a military target, war time industrial capacity is a military target, etc)
War is the ultimate test of political systems. In France alone, the First Republic, First Empire, Second Empire, Vichy France, Third Republic, and Fourth Republics all collapsed due to strains of war. Similarly, loss in WWI proved the end of several strains of government. In the United States, the American Civil War prompted Lincoln to more or less tear up the Constitution (although it should also be noted that many provisions only apply in times of peace).
Merely asserting that Western governments are immune to the foibles of fascism and dictatorship is folly. While I agree that many countries have fairly strong checks against reversion from democracy, a prolonged period of weakening could still very well happen.
> Merely asserting that Western governments are immune to the foibles of fascism and dictatorship is folly.
The goalposts keep getting moved back. The world survived the Nazis and Holocaust and eventually became more stable. What could be worse than that?
From a moral standpoint, little that I can imagine. From a human-cost standpoint, howabout unchecked and cascading climate change? If the world's powers retrench into regional hegemonies, and trust erodes along with trans-regional communication, then we're less and less likely to do anything on a global scale -- and we need to. If we let the ball get away from us here, we're talking about potentially billions of lives lost to war and famine, not to mention the billions whose way of life will be lost.
And the worst part is, we don't even need fascism to get us there. We get there easily enough through the direction the status quo is bending towards.
Just yesterday Donald Trump called Turkey's Erdogan to congratulate him on seizing nigh-dictatorial powers in his country.
Somehow I feel we're _very_ vulnerable to dictatorship right now....
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Unexpected or rather unexpected to those on the far-left of the political spectrum, who very much like their far-right counterparts often live in echo chambers.
Growing dissatisfaction against globalism and feeble governance didn't happen overnight.
Those who failed to notice it simply were not looking in the right places.
Which planet are you living on? Noam Chomsky predicted the election of someone like Trump six years ago [1]. You have it backwards: it's the milquetoast neoliberal part of the spectrum that didn't see the rise of fascism coming. Socialists, communists, anarchists, etc. have been concerned about the rise of fascism ever since World War II.
[1] http://www.snopes.com/noam-chomsky-predicted-trumps-presiden...
Yes, they have. They have predicted nine of the last zero fascist dictatorships (with one awaiting further evidence).
Nobody failed to notice economic dissatisfaction, but many were surprised that the President's particular brand of speaking to it was as successful as it was, especially coming from a Republican.
http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-full-transcript-econ...
> one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception.
It's not just a matter of supplying the raw power to keep everything running. It's also the sheer amount of continually supplying human effort and willpower. Much more nebulous concepts, but arguably more important.
Too much will stop anything.
For humans, this can be both a good thing and a bad thing. E.g. the "anti-fragile" nature of some decentralized endeavors vs. an unstoppable crazed mob during a fever pitch social or political crisis.
Indeed. We have no shortage of reasons to bash one another over the head, but this one is surely one of the most prevalent. Diversity (of fundamental values and identity) breeds distrust, and distrust erodes social capital and institutions.*
What these doomsday articles don't discuss is what exactly the West collapses into? I mean, we're still going to be here among the ruins even if the pillars of society collapse. What then?
Perhaps we'll collapse up, into a more equitable, fairer society.
* http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/...
I wonder how automation changes the balance here.
However, inequality increasing itself is not a bad thing (in fact you need inequality for capitalism to work) if the overall quality of life for the bottom improves. If we can reach a point of diminishing marginal returns of just owning wealth (if it's true that people stop caring about collecting wealth once they have enough), than yes I think automation can help stop a collapse because working population won't care because they have enough wealth to be happy.
However, it is human tendency to base satisfaction and happiness RELATIVE to others (look at equity theory from management) so we may still end up in a situation where the quality of life for everyone has improved, but the working population still views that they're still inequal relative to the top (even though they're both better off) and we lead to instability. You can argue that has happened in our modern world today.
Yea I thought that historically inequality has lead to violent uprisings due to general resentment and anger, but the article seemed to imply that the elites collapse because they still implicitly need people to be willing to work for them, and that's less true with automation.
I wasn't thinking abundance at all. Frankly the term "collapse of the elites due to absence of labor" is pretty vague.
Unfortunately, some experts believe such tough decisions exceed our political and psychological capabilities. “The world will not rise to the occasion of solving the climate problem during this century, simply because it is more expensive in the short term to solve the problem than it is to just keep acting as usual,” says Jorgen Randers
It uses Syria to make case that climate change was responsible butterly effect:
> . Syria, for example, enjoyed exceptionally high fertility rates for a time, which fueled rapid population growth. A severe drought in the late 2000s, likely made worse by human-induced climate change, combined with groundwater shortages to cripple agricultural production. That crisis left large numbers of people – especially young men – unemployed, discontent and desperate. Many flooded into urban centres, overwhelming limited resources and services there. Pre-existing ethnic tensions increased, creating fertile grounds for violence and conflict. On top of that, poor governance – including neoliberal policies that eliminated water subsidies in the middle of the drought – tipped the country into civil war in 2011 and sent it careening toward collapse.
Which is shockingly accurate.
It makes parallel case for the rise of populism in US and EU becoming an increasingly less welcoming region as it faces the full pressure from collapsed countries in the middle east.
tl;dr: learn Mandarin or Russian because they are far more likely to survive a global economic collapse.
I want to take this seriously, but I'm dubious of any argument that uses doubt of its veracity as evidence of its correctness.
Of course the article shows its bias more clearly here:
> Whether in the US, UK or elsewhere, the more dissatisfied and afraid people become, Homer-Dixon says, the more of a tendency they have to cling to their in-group identity – whether religious, racial or national. Denial, including of the emerging prospect of societal collapse itself, will be widespread, as will rejection of evidence-based fact. If people admit that problems exist at all, they will assign blame for those problems to everyone outside of their in-group, building up resentment.
This is using a lot of loaded language to suggest that it's primarily the right guilty of these things, but identity politics is a mainstay of the left, at least in the US. Could it be that eliminating identity politics is more important than redistributing wealth?