Larvatus Prodeo

On Tuesday afternoon I attended Thomas Homer-Dixon’s public lecture at The Real University in Brisbane. This is a brief account of what he had to say.

His basic thesis, outlined in his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilisation is that systemic societal crises can, if members of those societies respond intelligently and catastrophe is avoided, be a source of renewal, innovation and progress. He began with an analogy with personal crises, which just about everybody will have experienced in one way or other by the time we reach a certain age. If we succeeded in coming through these crises, in the process we will usually have made beneficial changes to our lives which we probably would not have made voluntarily in the absence of the crisis. The same is true of civilisations.

Homer-Dixon argues that civilisations only experience potentially catastrophic crisis when a number of systemic stresses occur more or less simultaneously. However, contemporary global civilisation is facing such a scenario this century. The five key stresses identified by Homer-Dixon are:

* demography, specifically the expected growth in world population to 9 million people, with most of the increase coming in the poorer nations whilst wealthy nations plateau or even decline in numbers;

* energy shortfalls (peak oil was specifically discussed);

* environmental problems in developing countries, such as deforestation, land degradation and declining water availability and quality;

* climate change, especially as the most recent state of the art climate science is suggesting that this is happening faster and more seriously than the IPCC consensus suggests;

* growing global inequality.

The destructive potential of these stresses is exacerbated by:

* the growing interconnectedness of global civilisation (e.g. the Australian economy may well be about to take a couple of hits because of the knock-on effects of dodgy lending practices in the US and a horse catching the flu in Japan - my examples, not H-D’s);

* the capacity of non-state actors to inflict disruption and harm (H-D’s specific example being terrorists utilising weapons of mass destruction).

As a consequence the 21st century will be a period of global crisis. However it need not mean global civilisational collapse. Homer-Dixon made the point that discussions of this kind tend to assume that the two outcomes are either (in theological language, and again my words not his) dyscatastrophe or eucatastrophe - total collapse, or a miraculous transformation to a utopian future. In reality, the possible outcomes can be located on a spectrum between these two poles, with varying mixtures of destruction and renewal. The challenge we face is to find responses which minimise the likelihood of catastrophe and maximise the potential for renewal.

One source of difficulty societies face in responding to crises is that each systemic problem a society encounters is usually met in ways which increase the complexity of the society. Over time, however, solutions which increase complexity yield a diminishing return - typically because the easiest, most efficient and effective reorganisations are the ones which are done earliest in a society’s history, with subsequent responses being both more difficult and less efficient. A further difficulty which contemporary civilisation faces is that responses which increase complexity also require more energy, yet in the coming century we will be faced with having to make do with less.

Homer-Dixon believes that civilisation will need to change in the direction of greater decentralisation and self-sufficiency of individual components within overall global networks to minimise the harm wrought by knock-on effects within interconnected systems. This has potential for radically increasing democracy. He regards market economies as a good example of decentralised, self-organising systems, and favours the use of global emissions trading within an overall global cap on emissions as a policy response to global warming. At the same time he recognises that the growth imperative of post-Depression and post-WWII capitalism, geared towards assuaging the discontent of the less well-off in industrialised societies by expanding rather than redistributing the pie, is ultimately unsustainable in a finite planet. He spoke explicitly of the probable need to shift to a “steady-state” economy sometime this century, and of the tension between such a shift and the need for further economic growth in developing countries to alleviate poverty. This tension can only be resolved through the wealthier citizens and nations of the world being prepared to make do with less in purely material terms. He repudiates the “lifeboat” ethics - i.e. being prepared to abandon the world’s poor to continuing poverty in the name of global sustainability - espoused by some more conservative and authoritarian environmental thinkers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Some well-meaning people, including some LP commenters, mistakenly impute these views to environmentalists in general.)

A further difficulty in responding to civilisational crisis relates to the fact that extremists are often more decisive and more cohesive than non-extremist reformers in such situations (my pet example is Russia in 1917 - I will forebear to mention Russia later in the C20 to avoid provoking thread derailment by certain persons). Homer-Dixon quoted W. B. Yeats in this connection:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In other words the extremists invariably know what they want and how to get it. The challenge for non-extremist reformers is to reach agreement on non-extreme (but possibly radical) changes and to act decisively (but not extremely) to bring them about.

The book contains a range of proposals for policy solutions, which time did not permit Homer-Dixon to elaborate on at the lecture.

[NB: The foregoing is based on my recollection of the lecture. I was not taking notes. Any substantial misrepresentation of Homer-Dixon’s position is my responsibility entirely.]