So… How “Doomed” Are We?

Five Levels of Ruin — And Where Our Civilization Ranks

Image Credit: NASA

One of the things that I find interesting these days, in a kind of sardonic way, is this. “Doom” has gone mainstream. You can read articles about it in the august pages of the New York Times. And those articles always have the same slant: “We’re not doomed!! Stop being such an alarmist!!” Remind you of anything? Any particular phase in history — or perhaps many? So “doom’s” gone mainstream. It’s painted the same way, sort of, as “woke.” Not a thing that good and proper people should believe in. Impertinent, impolite, dangerous. Much easier to…stick with the status quo. How’s that working out?

All this is, above all, fatuous. It hardly takes a genius to see things aren’t going well in the world or for our civilization.So to dismiss any sort of serious warning — which is what’s really going on here — immediately as “doom” — subtext, “alarmism,” fainting Victorian damsels, women, femininity, emotions, hysteria — is foolish. Because to conflate warnings that we are in serious trouble with “doom” is to caricature something. And caricatures are the enemy of clear thinking. They’re a form of demonization, in cases like this, really.

So let’s think about all this the way that media won’t, which is to say, seriously. Are we “doomed”? Nobody who’s warning that we’re in trouble is saying that we’re doomed. From me to the IPCC — textbook “doomers” amirite — none of us are saying that…I don’t know…the future ends in Thunderdome by way of Vikings. Our warnings are more subtle than that, and they deserve subtler attention, too.

Let’s distinguish between five levels of “doom,” to use, maybe reclaim, that word from those who want to use it, basically, as an insult, a slur, a coded way of saying someone’s an idiot.

Decline. What does it mean for a society to go into decline? A civilization? Well, it means many of the following things happen. Living standards fall, after a long, steady upwards trajectory. Progress flattens and goes into reverse. Incomes begin to shrink. Each generation does worse than the one before it. And all that seems to accelerate. Nothing seems able to alter the course.

Collapse. Because the core of a society or civilization — its economy — is coming undone, now the social and political dominoes begin to fall. Institutions stop working. There’s not enough of the basics to go around anymore. Food, water, air, energy, medicine. Prices begin to skyrocket. Incomes, meanwhile, keep stagnating and shrinking, because in the classic pattern, monopolists profiteer from this very collapse. Decline becomes collapse in this technical, formal sense: economic decline produces social collapse, as institutions fail to provide basics anymore. A simple example, of course, is America and healthcare, retirement, or even bodily safety, as in, good luck getting much.