I
WALKING ON LAVA
The end of the human
race will be that it will
eventually die of
civilisation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who witness extreme social collapse at
first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human
existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is
to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much
stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric.
How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability
that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are
able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about
too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or
natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many
of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting
needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers
report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can
unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling
of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile,
beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis
of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which
sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an
awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.
‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896,
‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and
their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of
their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by
European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in
the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their
capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the
irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its
police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by
the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them.
Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under
skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.
Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s
worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought
of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin
crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary
sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a
simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an
intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief
in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and
order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.
Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse
of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later,
is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after
the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose
certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there,
deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the
desire for meaning.
Pedro Cuiça © Pico (2017)
It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to
experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up
short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an
age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations
snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we
were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would
never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of
Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a
familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire
corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long
time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that
people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.
This time, the crumbling empire is the
unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy
being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice
we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its
failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically
to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little
restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are
being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine
is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps
they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether
they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them.
Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers
group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to
do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world,
discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in
as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the
political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are
rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics
as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its
place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
As the financial wizards lose their powers of
levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new
explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of
the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been
promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx,
writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and
anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts
into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Draw back the curtain, follow the
tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the
engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress.
The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess
was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors:
without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western
Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an
Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could
take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than
the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way
is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should
remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.
Recent history, however, has given this
mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a
descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the
prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed
to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and
consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer
hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social
background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown,
overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future
will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class
and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law,
surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is
better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody
wants to look.
Most significantly of all, there is an
underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the
cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the
machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad,
Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that
Western civilisation — which has set the terms for global civilisation—was
never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine,
fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of
lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and
which they have all trained themselves not to see.
© da net (?)
