Five Projects Our Civilization Needs to Start — And Finish — If It Wants to Survive
Will Our Civilization Survive the 21st Century?
Civilization. You know and I know that ours is in trouble — big trouble. Civilization is a project. A series of endeavors, and beneath them all lie certain beliefs. I’ll come to those. The question before us — thinking people — is how to ensure a future for our civilization, or at least for civilization.
When I think about the future of civilization, I see five great projects. I’m going to go through them one by one, with a few examples.
Project One
Right about now, many parts of the world are about to be plunged into famine. David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program, has warned of a “looming catastrophe.” Meanwhile, in Britain, the population’s preparing to choose between heating and food in the winter. And in America, of course, authoritarianism keeps on rising. What links these three things? Money.
What would it take to avert the coming famines? $6 billion. To give Brits heat? $50 billion. Why did America’s working and middle class become one vast underclass of newly impoverished? Because the gains were concentrated at the very top, as the merely rich became super and then ultra rich. Today, a Bezos or Musk has enough money to stop global famines and heat entire countries….and still be a billionaire a hundred times over, with more money left over than they can ever spend in a lifetime.
Project One for civilization is redistribution and investment. Our civilization has grown far, far too unequal. And it should be self-evident why inequality causes collapse from within: even if economies “grow,” the gains are had by a tiny few, who use them to reinforce their own power and fortune, and a vicious cycle takes hold, inequality feeding on itself. Meanwhile, the average person grows resentful, angry, and afraid. Societies this way become petri dishes of the human spirit in which demagogues breed scapegoats.
Meanwhile, because gains are concentrated at the top, societies suffer underinvestment — which is the true killer of civilizations. How did Rome fall? Underinvestment. Too much war, and too little bread. How did the French nobility come to an end? Why did ancient civilization after civilization perish? The story is always the same: underinvestment, the flip side of inequality. You can only build so many gold-plated palaces and hoard so many stunning objets d’art. In the end, a civilization which underinvests implodes from within, through social ills like rage, through disease, poverty, infighting, fascism, theocracy — all the ills of human history recur, as they are now.
Our civilization needs to redistribute and invest on an historic scale. There is absolutely no other way out for us. Or we go on collapsing as we are now — into fascism, at the hands of Extinction, as democracy shudders, as people lose confidence in themselves and one another, and peace and justice give way to hate and spite. In what do we need to invest? How are we to to do it? That brings me to the next set of projects.
Project Two
If Project One for our civilization is a new economic paradigm, where everyone gets a fair share of investment — and we’ll come back to what “fair” means — from people to forests to rivers to species, then Project Two for our civilization is biophysical reinvention. What do I mean by that?
Our planet is heating up faster than at any point in human history. That is because, of course, we are still a civilization powered by fossil fuels — almost exclusively. Our civilization operates in the following morbid way: we take carbon left behind from dead things, burn it, and use it to power everything from factories to planes, it becomes the asphalt on our roads and roofs. We don’t know how to make fertilizer or glass or steel or cement — which means everything from clothes to buildings to homes to crops — without this morbid transformation of dead matter into the material fabric of our lives.
The biophysical basis of our civilization is obsolete. We can’t go on this way for much longer. This is only 2022 and every corner of the world’s just suffered record-shattering heatwaves, while five “once in a millennium” floods just hit the US — all of which is adding up to skyrocketing inflation, recession, and a wave of unemployment around the corner, as crops fail, rivers dry up, and shortages mount…so now imagine 2025.
We are going to have to reinvent the biophysical basis of our civilization. That means, in plain English, that we can’t be a civilization which basically takes dead things, burns them, and hopes to survive — because our planet will heat up far too fast. That transition is beginning, but it’s happening far too slowly. The truth is that we have no real sources of clean, cheap energy which can reach global scale nearly fast enough to prevent the calamity already occurring. We are going to need to invest in those we have, and invent entirely new ones, far far faster than we are right now. Or else. The future is going to be very much like the last few years, only in an accelerating trend line of “worse every day.” We are going to need to become a civilization which doesn’t feed off of death, in the final analysis.
We need — and I’ve said it before, but I still don’t think the message really hits home enough — the greatest wave of investment in human history. Not just in new sources of clean energy, or in scaling up those we have, but in far, far more radical projects, too. Like reviving dying ecosystems. Like creating whole new forests and rivers — which can become lungs and veins of sustenance for us un turn. Like discovering how to let all kinds of species thrive. We don’t even have words for this kind of work yet. What do you call “reviving an ecosystem”? What’s that job, role, title? What do you call someone who’s creating a whole new one?
That we don’t even have words for the work we need to do yet only points to far how behind the curve of collapse we really are. And yet begin to do it we must — sorry, I don’t mean to sound like Yoda. It’s just a fact. See all those young people with nothing much to do? Bright, educated kids…working at crap, go-nowhere jobs, or worse, gigs, or worse, sitting at home, feeling like losers, and then getting radicalized by the far right? That cycle only stops with giving them something — something real, meaningful, important, worthy, necessary — to do. Not just making psychotic billionaires even richer.
Project Three
The real work of the future — reinventing the biophysical basis of civilization — matters. Not just for what it does, but also what it accomplishes, and what it doesn’t. We need Great Projects again to revive our dying, failing middle and working classes. To stop what’s at this point four to five generations of downward mobility. As a bulwark against the feelings of hopelessness and rage that the far right exploits, and points at scapegoats for. It’s not just our material survival as a civilization which depends on doing this work — it’s our social, economic, and cultural survival, too.
That’s Project Three. We need to breathe life back into our societies. They’ve become deeply, profoundly unhealthy places. Socioculturally, we are turning into warped, stunted things. Let me give you an example. I read an article — it’s a sad article, I imagine it’s supposed to be funny — about a lady wasting a decade of her life on Tinder. On Tinder. I’m all for sexual liberation, but wasting a decade of your life on Tinder is just that: wasting a decade of your life.
Our culture is failing us, in incredible ways. Have you noticed? Young people have given up on the future, and they’re glued to apps on screens. Marvel Movies and superheroes have replaced any kind of engagement with issues of genuine importance.
Meanwhile, the structure of our societies and politics is imploding by the day. I’ve already talked about it a little bit, but only touched on it. This time, I want you to think about it. We have five generations of downward mobility. Five generations! That’s…terrible. It’s Romanesque. Gen X did worse than Boomers, Millennials worse than Gen X, Zoomers worse than Millennials, Gen Alpha worse than Zoomers, and the pattern will just…continue.
Now, note the following relationship: each generation has also grown more politically apathetic and silent than the one before it. See the link? Downward mobility has grave political consequences: it takes democracy with it. In a subtler but no less pernicious way than the rise of fascism — each downwardly mobile generation is that much more resigned to failure, greed, inequality, extinction, doom, catastrophe, poverty, the end as we know it, than the one before it. Democracy dies with a bang at the hands of the bad guys, the fascists and lunatics and theocrats — but it dies with a whimper at the hands of intergenerational downward mobility.
Spatiotemporally, our civilization’s social structure is in profound disrepair. “Temporally” means downward mobility over generations, or across time, as a megatrend. “Spatially” mean that where once there was a healthy bell curve — a small number of rich and poor, neither group too extreme, and a broad middle, which captured most of the gains from growth, that curve now resembles a camel’s double humped back — which is an easily broken thing. The middle’s fallen away, and there’s no sign more dangerous than that, because, that, too is how democracy dies — when middle classes and working classes begin to go the way of the dinosaur. In our societies, now, too many of them, the class structure of modernity — rich, middle, working, poor, concentrated heavily at “middle” — is vanishing. It’s being replaced by something that sounds poisonous and weird, because it is: ultra rich, super rich, rich, indebted, impoverished — heavily concentrated at “indebted.”
A civilization can’t function with that misshapen, deformed social structure. At least not a modern one. Why not? Because when most people are in the “indebted for life” class, they’re not capable of doing the things that civilization needs most. Sharing in a surplus, out of which generous taxes are paid, to fund the great projects of science, art, letters, thought, innovation, creation. Participating in self-governance becomes difficult for people in such straits — if not a contradiction in terms itself, for perpetually indebted people to really self-govern at all. And self-directedness — making the most of your own life — becomes a distant goal, after hoping hopelessly to pay off all those debts, which means your human potential goes to waste, working three crap jobs, instead of making that world-changing discovery, or penning that life-changing novel, poem, song.
Our class structure is actually going backwards: it’s beginning to resemble the Victorian Age, or bygone feudal ages, more than that of free, modern societies. It’s a sure pathway to civilizational collapse.
This, too, requires investment. I wasn’t kidding when I said “the largest wave of investment in human history.” We don’t just need it in clean energy and ecosystem and species. We need it in each other, too. There is absolutely no good reason — none — that the entire planet shouldn’t be like Denmark, where young people are paid to go to university. There’s no good reason, again — none — that every single young person on the planet isn’t born with “basic assets,” a small trust fund that’s invested for them, and matures as they do, which can seed a business, further education, a family, more investment, for them. There’s no good reason that we aren’t investing in all the things we so clearly need, right here, right now, at a planetary scale — education, healthcare, transport, good media, for every single human being on the planet, every American, every young person.
Project Four
There is a bad reason we aren’t doing all those things. And you know what it is. Politics. Our politics is trapped in a vicious cycle of doom, too. It goes like this: liberalism concentrates gains at the top, there’s a backlash in which people turn ultra-conservative, demagogues rise to power, and bang, before you know it, democracy’s backsliding around the globe.
We need to change that, and we need to change it by getting radical. Thoroughly and deeply impractical. What do you think democracy will look like, say, three centuries from now? I’d bet that it includes everyone from oceans to rivers to animals to the just-born to the dead. I’d bet they all have a voice in democracy. We need to begin designing democracies like that, right now. Not just settling for the dumb, tedious low-hanging fruit of fighting whichever fascist’s having a Twitter tantrum today. That gets us nowhere, except going backwards to hell, tangled up in ball of hate with idiots. We need to push forward. Drag our broken democracies forward. And that means really thinking about the question: what does democracy look like a century or three from now? What’s different, better, more functional about it? What will history say we weren’t so democratic about?
The fascists win when we stop asking questions like this. Because then there’s nowhere left to go, except to bicker with them, which is precisely what they want. What they’re really afraid of is a better world.
Project Five
That brings me to the Fifth Project, and this is a big one. Maybe the big one. It’s hard to express, so bear with me. What’s civilization been about, from the beginning? About forming a moral community. First, the moral community was the tribe or clan, pitted against the next one. Then, the nation, against the next one. And so forth. And there, we seem to have stopped.
The journey of civilization has always been about enlarging our sense of moral community. It’s been about learning to love. Even those we once hated. Not so long ago, different kinds of people from the majority were considered subhumans — whether in the form of racial chattel slavery, or in Asia’s caste mechanisms. Civilization in the small scale and short term was about who you hated — but in the long term, it’s been about learning to love, in truer, nobler, more beautiful, bigger ways.
Only our journey seems to have stopped. And we need to continue it. So let’s call this last one, the Fifth Project, the spiritual one. The ocean of love that the human heart voyages on, and has travelled through the generations across. We’re in an age where the journey towards a higher, better love has completely broken down. Instead, we’re turning to hate, spite, contempt, rage — backwards to violence, aggression, and hostility.
Why is that? Well, in a very real sense, the 20th century’s paradigm of spirituality failed. First, modernity told people to find meaning in buying stuff, in toys that conferred status, that made you feel superior to the next walking ape. It might have been better than making war on the next guy because your deity was superior — but it still didn’t work very well. It left people empty and hollow, undeveloped emotionally, psychologically, relationally. And as they failed to share in the gains which were concentrated among the very top, the results were catastrophic: the failed working classes reverted to fundamentalist religion. That was true from America to Russia to the Muslim World to India — across the globe.
It’s not that humankind will every really transcend religion. But religion is just the journey of love. Ours has broken down precisely because we are baffled and confused by where to place our life-force, our libido, our energy towards love, now. Is it…each other? Is it…things? What about…some kind of ancient exotic spirituality? Is it outer space? How about Going to Mars With the Billionaires?
Human consciousness needs to mature now. Our moral sense needs to expand, dramatically. It hungers to, as it always has. That is why this age feels so empty, hollow, so numb, even amidst all the trauma and pain and fear. If the human moral sense doesn’t expand, it contracts, right back towards violence and hate and rage. The way our needs to expand is hidden in plain sight. To encompass all creation. All of it. I discussed the other day how spiders appear to dream. How little Snowy, my dog, does. Who’s to say that all these beings don’t feel as exquisitely and poignantly as we do? So where is our morality for them? For the oceans, rivers, forests, animals? Are they really just “things” — all these beings — for us to consume? Haven’t we all heard them whisper to us that all lives are connected, intertwined, one, in an eternal braid of being? Isn’t that the great truth inside all religion, the water inside the grail, the ocean all rivers meet at?
The Fifth Project is about human consciousness. And the truth is that I’m not really sure we’re capable of it. We, as in our civilization. Maybe it’ll take the next one to get there. The other Four Projects — economics, society, culture, politics? They all depend on making the quantum leap in human consciousness first, towards a higher love, a far higher state of being, a connection between us and life and the cosmos that’s felt in the heart with far, far more pain, joy, empathy, truth, and compassion. Imagine the same idiotic, dumb, horrifically stupid passion we have for dead things — the way Instafluencers show off designer sneakers — but for living ones.
I didn’t say our civilization would survive. I just said that civilization could. Will, I think. But what is in its spirit, I’ve come to understand, is the greatest of all the challenges it has ever had.
Umair
August 2022
