It’s the end of the world as we know it

I recently had a conversation with a friend about what would most likely be the culprit if the world ended in the near future. I said nuclear or biological terrorism, he said peak oil. Whichever was more likely, I thought, we can expect to dodge both threats and move safely into the future.

Now the latest issue of New Scientist has just arrived, with a cover story on the collapse of civilization. It’s deeply unsettling to realize that Doomsday may very well be looming just around the corner, with no clear way to prevent it. Human civilization turns out to be far more vulnerable and far more fragile than I ever would have guessed – and major threats to its stability like pandemics, climate change, and the global energy crisis have already started to present themselves. I have long acknowledged, albeit uncomfortably, that human existence would eventually come to an end. Relatively shortly on the geological timescale, the Sun is going to expand until the Earth gets so hot that life is impossible and later it will engulf our planet whole. Eventually, the universe itself is going to come to an end, pretty definitively securing our mortality as a species. But a realistically possible Apocalypse in the next (say) 200 years? That was a shock that this happy optimist was not prepared to take.

The thrust of the two cover story articles is pretty well summed up by their titles:

IF THE PANDEMIC DOESN’T GET US…

…WE’RE DOOMED ANYWAY

The main theme of both articles is that human civilization is becoming increasingly like a set of dominoes or an intricate and fragile web. Even when it’s something as small and simple as a widespread power outage or blocked truck drivers, we see an eerie decay of order and regularity. MI5’s maxim is that Western societies are “four days away from anarchy”. A pandemic could cause large-scale and long-term disruptions for nations on every continent:

Hospitals rely on daily deliveries of drugs, blood and gases. “Hospital pandemic plans fixate on having enough ventilators,” says public health specialist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who has been calling for broader preparation for a pandemic. “But they’ll run out of oxygen to put through them first. No hospital has more than a two-day supply.” Equally critical is chlorine for water purification plants.

It’s not only absentee truck drivers that could cripple the transport system; new drivers can be drafted in and trained fairly quickly, after all. Trucks need fuel, too. What if staff at the refineries that produce it don’t show up for work?

The coal mines need electricity to keep working. Pumping oil through pipelines and water through mains also requires electricity. Making electricity depends largely on coal; getting coal depends on electricity; they all need refineries and key people; the people need transport, food and clean water. If one part of the system starts to fail, the whole lot could go. Hydro and nuclear power are less vulnerable to disruptions in supply, but they still depend on highly trained staff.

With no electricity, shops will be unable to keep food refrigerated even if they get deliveries. Their tills won’t work either. Many consumers won’t be able to cook what food they do have. With no chlorine, water-borne diseases could strike just as it becomes hard to boil water. Communications could start to break down as radio and TV broadcasters, phone systems and the internet fall victim to power cuts and absent staff. This could cripple the global financial system, right down to local cash machines, and will greatly complicate attempts to maintain order and get systems up and running again.

Even if we manage to struggle through the first few weeks of a pandemic, long-term problems could build up without essential maintenance and supplies. Many of these problems could take years to work their way through the system. For instance, with no fuel and markets in disarray, how do farmers get the next harvest in and distributed?

One positive thing about learning all this is that it makes a lot of things seem trivial. Instead of doing my homework this week, I think I’ll just hand my teachers a copy of New Scientist.

A dish best not served

“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
-Mahatma Gandhi

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Last night I watched a great movie: The Brave One, in which Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a radio host who, having recovered from the physical wounds of a brutal, random attack, struggles with her new life and becomes absorbed into a new persona: a self-loathing vigilante. There are several things I loved about the film, including its provocative tagline: How many wrongs to make it right?

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The movie got me thinking once again about revenge. Retributive violence is often called, with morbid irony, "justice". It is the only aspect of our culture that I can think of that justifies, if not encourages, taking pleasure from the misery or destruction of other human beings. Normally sadism is regarded as evil in its purest form – in fact, that is precisely why those who willingly inflict harm on others are seen as monsters in the first place. According to common wisdom, sadistic acts are a perfectly acceptable method of bringing closure or comfort to the victims of sadistic acts. Two wrongs really do make a right. Well, no they don't, says I.

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Retributive violence seems like it would have created a genetic advantage for our ancestors, so it seems highly plausible to me that the lust for revenge was hard-wired into our brains, coded into our genes. If that’s the case, it’s not surprising that revenge has been considered an accepted, even institutionalized, form of human behaviour for so long. It also means that revenge is not only deeply ingrained as a behaviour in our culture, but also as a primal urge – like hunger or sexual lust – in our psyches. In the movie I mentioned, Foster's character needs to avenge herself (and her fiancé, who also died in the attack) before she can regain her peace of mind.

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I should note at this point that most aspects of human psychology and behaviour can be traced back to our evolutionary heritage, the good and the bad. Explaining something’s evolutionary origin shows us why it exists in the first place, but it doesn’t give us any help in deciding whether it is beneficial to human well-being – or even whether it was beneficial to our ancestors’ well-being, rather than just their reproductive fitness. Revenge may be deeply instinctual and natural, but it is also deeply irrational and immoral.

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The Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, has written about the backwardness of revenge on Edge’s World Question Center:

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Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television’s hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn’t start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. “Right! I warned you. You’ve had this coming to you!” He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don’t we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn’t the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

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Along with our innate proclivities towards hatred, tribalism, greed, and blood lust, we should throw revenge into the trashcan of our primitive past – and that’s a death we can all take pleasure from.