Can Modernity Last?

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Image by Daniel Borker from Pixabay

Do the Math started out with a pair of posts about limits to growth. Galactic-Scale Energy pointed out the nonsense that results from continued growth in energy use, and Can Economic Growth Last? turned to the economic implications of stalled physical growth. This combination of topics later appeared in a dinner conversation between myself and an economist. The same pairing also evolved into chapters 1 and 2 of the textbook I wrote in 2021. And if that wasn’t enough, I published a paper in Nature Physics called Limits to Economic Growth based on the same theme. When I do podcast interviews, the hosts often want to step through this (powerful) logic.

Perhaps the result has me sounding like a broken record. It feels to me like the song “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Fans will not allow the band to perform a concert without playing this classic hit. There’d be riots. I’ve had a lot to say following those two posts in 2011, and have especially taken a profound turn in the last few years. But the point remains central to our modern predicament, and until we all have it firmly planted in our heads that growth is a very temporary phase that must end, I guess I could do worse than repeating myself to new audiences—and to veterans holding up lighters.

In this post, I echo the bedrock question of whether economic growth can last with the question of whether modernity can last (see the previous post for definition and possible inevitability). Okay, nothing lasts. The whole universe is only 13.8 billion years old. The sun and the earth are only about 4.5 billion years old, and will be around in recognizable form for a comparable time into the future. Species typically hang around for millions of years. Homo sapiens is a few hundred-thousand years old. Depending on definitions, modernity has been around for at least a century or as long as 10,000 years—brief in either case, in the scheme of things. Nothing is forever, but how long might modernity last?

Whether modernity can last is perhaps a more important question than whether growth can last. The fact that growth can’t last is shocking enough for many. But it still allows mental space for maintaining our current way of life—just no longer growing. But is that even possible? I can’t be as confident in my answer as I am for growth, since the question of growth comes down to incontrovertible concepts and, well, math. Still, I strongly suspect the answer to this new question is “no” as well, and in this post I’ll expound on my misgivings.

[Note: I had another post in 2021 enumerating reasons to worry about collapse, which is a relevant but—I would say—less enlightened precursor to this piece. Since then, I have become aware of the important role of human supremacy, the materials difficulties associated with renewable energy, the crushing numbers on loss of biodiversity, and have released my anxious grasp on modernity—having better appreciated the more-than-human world and our role within the greater community of life.]

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Was Modernity Inevitable?

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I seem to love asking questions that can’t be answered definitively. Yet, attempting to do so can yield useful insights. I am gearing up to post a sizable piece about whether we can expect modernity to last, but realized that it would probably be a good idea to first take a stab at defining modernity, and to explore whether this phase in human history basically had to happen.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I lean toward the conclusion that modernity was inevitable. My position is reasonably strengthened by the observation that we are, in fact, where we are. It would be much harder to argue the counterfactual that modernity was unlikely, and simply wrong to say that it could not have happened.

I am finding that a number of people reject any application of determinism to human affairs—the insulting notion that we might be subject to dynamics beyond our awareness or control. As with many things these days, I tend to suspect such reactions as stemming from a sense of human supremacy: “surely we humans have transcended base forces and bring full agency to all that we do…” I, however, am perfectly comfortable seeing humans and cultures caught in a current, so will proceed on those grounds.

In its broadest sense, we might say that the biggest discontinuity in human ways is between hunter-gatherer mode and agricultural mode, as permanent settlements, cities, and nations only become possible in an agricultural context. From this high perch, “modernity” might be interchanged with “civilization,” and therefore extend to earlier times, while those on lower branches might conceive that modernity started with televisions or smart phones. You can’t please everyone. One thing I have noticed is that people seem to be somewhat willing to accept the notion of modernity’s end, but react more strongly to the notion of civilization’s end. So some distinction lurks in the minds of people between these two—probably in how far back we would have to set the clock upon modernity’s failure (1980 isn’t so bad, but 10,000 years back?  Eeek!).  I will use the term modernity throughout, but personally am willing to substitute civilization much of the time.

The term “anthropocene” is often used to describe the modern age. This is meant to delineate a new geological era dominated by the presence of humans on the planet. The idea has definite merit, given the overflowing presence of humans on the planet and our devastating impact on climate and biodiversity. My main beef with the anthropocentric term is that I wonder if it makes sense to give an era (or epoch) name to something that may be over as quickly as it started.  We don’t have a name for the era between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic marked by the chaotic period in the aftermath of the comet impact 66 million years ago.  Likewise, this disruptive moment may simply delineate two eras, while the disruption itself is brief enough to appear like the thin black layer in the rock between two periods.  In any case, this post will partly lean on this human-dominance aspect in assessing inevitability.

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The Dawn of Everything

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Graeber and Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything keeps coming up in my life—especially as I dip an amateur toe into trying to understand human prehistory—so I thought I had better take a look. The title sounded promising, and I had heard that the book offers many pieces of interpreted evidence from humanity’s distant past. I like data.

I elected to “preview” the book as an audiobook borrowed from the library, jotting 32 pages of notes as I went along. 24 audio-hours later, I am ready to report. A key point from the authors is: it didn’t have to be this way. To which I say: but it is. Making a convincing case that it could have gone much differently is a tall order given a single—seemingly conclusive—global experimental run. But we’ll get to all that.

I will say up front that I am unqualified to supply a scholarly critique of the book. I can’t argue about any of the archeological evidence, but do find that I have a few bones to pick when it comes to logic and interpretation.

Before I got very far into the book, I wrote down some things I wanted to learn from it.

  1. Is my basic understanding correct: that agriculture leads straight to modernity, in time?
  2. Will the book provide insight into the emergence of human supremacy—a false sense of separateness or transcendence above nature that drives much of modernity?
  3. Does the book talk about animist belief systems and how languages embodied different ways of thinking?
  4. Does the book present our history in the context of one-time inheritance spending of, e.g., fossil fuels and ecological health?
  5. Is the “Everything” in the title broader than an anthropocentric focus on the last 10,000 years as civilizations arose?

I can say that the answer to all these questions is, disappointingly, no. But I’ll be a bit slippery on the first point, in due time.

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Married to an Axe Murderer

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The day you met your spouse, it was love at first sight. They were charming, witty, warm and affectionate, good-looking, complimentary, showered you with gifts, devoted time to you, pledged to look after you into your old age and even to help take care of your aging parents. They impressed you with their big dreams: raising a family, buying a big house, owning expensive cars, traveling the world, and they were inexplicably adept at putting meat on the table.

It goes without saying that you got married. What a lucky catch!

It didn’t take long before suspicions arose: unaccountable nocturnal absences; waking to the sound of laundry being done at 4 AM; an odd reluctance to move the axe out of the car trunk and into the garage with the other tools. But why spoil a good thing with awkward questions? Life for you is going great, so better not to rock the boat with silly notions of some monstrous secret. Plus, you’re in love!

But the cops finally caught up and your yard turned into a media-infested nightmare. It took ages to even accept the possibility that this was real—not a case of mistaken identity or wrongful framing. How could such a generous and loving partner really be a violent menace?

So here’s the thing: Modernity is an axe murderer, and we’re—unfortunately—married to it. It isn’t hard to see modernity’s fatal flaw of being constitutionally unsustainable, and that it’s on a violent rampage. Turns out it’s been out at nights murdering the planet.

So how do we react? What does this mean for us?

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Learning to Walk Again

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For many years now, I have made efforts to live differently—initially motivated by a sense of resource limits and the recognition that scaling back could have a dramatic effect if adopted widely. I was able to cut my domestic energy demand by a factor of four or five. I changed my habits of diet, travel, heating/cooling, laundry, showering, consumer activity, and much else.

Yet I remain firmly in the grip of modern ways. I am still a member of “normal” society, and don’t (yet) draw stares when I go out in public. I live in a house, drive a car (sparingly), buy food at a grocery store, and eat lunch at the university food court. Yes, I could shed more of these. I could try a living in a yurt, getting by without owning a car, and finding ways to get my food locally without scanning bar codes. But even though I have gone much farther than most, going “all the way” has always felt a little overboard to me. It edged up to seeming performative; to virtue-signaling; to those choices becoming the focus instead of a means. I often think of it in terms of trying to convince a group of hikers to make better progress: you don’t do it by disappearing over the horizon and losing influence. You’re better off staying close enough to encourage others along.

When reading the book Hospicing Modernity, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, I came across this great analogy:

There is a popular saying in Brazil that illustrates this insight using water… The saying goes that in a flood situation, it is only when the water reaches people’s hips that it becomes possible for them to swim. Before that, with the water at our ankles or knees, it is only possible to walk or to wade. In other words, we might only be able to learn to swim—that is, to exist differently—once we have no other choice.

I instantly had a new friend in this metaphor. In fact, it filled a gaping hole that had been present for many years. Sure, I could flop down and try to swim right now, but I would look a fool floundering in the muddy water. Yet, I can help prepare myself and others for the day when we must swim.

As much as I love this framing, one thing bothers me about it, and I have a proposed alternative, but it has the downside of requiring a longer telling.

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Our Time on the River

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A post from last year titled The Ride of Our Lives explored the game theory aspect of modernity: those who adopted grain agriculture and new technologies had a competitive advantage over neighbors who didn’t. The “winners” were destined to be those who followed the path that we now call progress.

In that post, I used the metaphor of a gentle stream turning into a swift river—by now a raging class-5 rapid—heading toward an inevitable waterfall as a feature simply built into the landscape from the start. In this post, we will examine this river more closely, pausing to pay tribute to the various tributaries that contribute to its estimable flow. I even drew a map!

Metaphorical map of modernity’s journey. The orange time references relate to the post: The Simple Story of Civilization. Click the image to enlarge.

Here is a PDF (vector graphics) version.  I suggest having this open in another window while reading the post.

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Ecological Cliff Edge

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The numbers had already left impressionable marks on me, and as they swirled in my head for some months I certainly had a sense for the urgent warning they wanted me to hear. But it wasn’t until I rubbed the numbers together that the message really rang out. Then plotting the historical evolution shook me anew.  I was staring at the ecological cliff we appear to be driving over.

Let’s build the punchline from a few facts that were already rattling around in my head. Human population, at 8 billion today, was 1 billion around the year 1800. At a global average human mass of 50 kg, that’s 400 Mt (megatons) of humans—matching the 390 Mt I had seen in a superb graphic from Greenspoon et al., shown later in this post. This same graphic shows wild land mammal mass at 20 Mt today. I also knew that wild land mammal mass was about 4 times higher in 1800, and 5 times higher 10,000 years ago.

Put these together, and what do you get? In 1800, every human on the planet had a corresponding 80 kg of mammal mass in the wild. Wild land mammals outweighed humans in an 80:50 ratio.

Today, each human on the planet can only point to 2.5 kg of wild mammal mass as their “own.”

Let that sink in. You only have 2.5 kg (less than 6 pounds) of wild mammal out there somewhere. A single pet cat or dog generally weighs more. Not that long ago, it was more than you could carry. Now, it seems like hardly anything!  I especially fear the implications for mammals should global food distribution be severely crippled.

The graph is even more alarming to me.

Mass ratio (left axis) and total mass (right axis) of wild land mammal mass per person on the planet.  Note the logarithmic vertical axis, as is necessary to show the wide range of values.

The vertical scale is logarithmic in order to show the enormous range involved. The precipitous drop in the present age is staggering. How can we look at this and think that we’re heading in the right direction? That’s modernity for you, folks.

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Fusion Foolery

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National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Great. The fusion hype is bad enough already. Now its resurgence is going to interrupt the series of posts I’m in the middle of publishing in order for this post to be “timely.”

The first (and much bigger) round of breathless excitement came in December 2022 when the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) announced a (legitimate) breakthrough in achieving fusion: more energy came out of the target than laser energy injected.

At the time, I brushed it off without even reading any articles because I already knew about the NIF’s purpose and limitations, and a few headlines told me everything I needed to know. Who cares how much laser energy went in: how much energy went into creating the laser energy? The laser I used for lunar ranging took 5 kW from the wall plug and delivered 2 W of laser power for a dismal 0.04% efficiency. Such is the cost for shaping ultra-brief pulses: lots of energy is thrown away. The headlines were clearly overblown.

Enough students in my energy class in Spring 2023 asked about the fusion breakthrough (doesn’t that mean we’re done?) that I dug into the details. Even so, I still deemed it unworthy of writing up as a post. But a few days ago, my friend asked me if I was excited about the recent fusion news. I hadn’t heard a peep, but after searching I found a new round of articles based on a second “net gain” laser shot and realized I probably ought to put out a quantitative post on the matter, reminiscent of my blogging origins.

In the end, the NIF fusion accomplishment might be called a stunt.  Stunts explore what we can do (often after an insane amount of preparation, practice, and failure), rather than what’s practical.  Stunts hide the pains and present an appearance of ease and grace, but it’s a show.

Quantitatively, it’s as if you spot a slot machine in a casino that looks very promising. You’re dying to play, because it just feels right—mysteriously appealing to your sense of self. It calls to you. You notice that it takes $2 tokens, but you have none. You go to the window to purchase a token, and are shocked to learn that one $2 token costs $400. Not wanting to look like an uninformed fool, you gulp and buy the token. This slot machine had better live up to its promise! You pull the lever, and surprise! You actually do win! You put in a $2 token and the machine makes very happy noises and flashes lots of lights as it spits out…$3 (and some neutrons, oddly). Queue the headlines! Want to play again?  Actually, this wasn’t your first shot: just the first success after years of trying (but hush!).

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Desperate Odds?

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Image by Kathrynne from Pixabay

In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, one of the dialogs I especially enjoyed was in Chapter 11 when the pupil expressed his anxiety around pre-civilization life. The mental image he shared was of a man running along a ridge in deepening twilight, hungry and following tracks on the hunt, while tooth and claw pursued not far behind. The man is “forever one step behind his prey and one step ahead of his enemies.” Ishmael, role-playing a hunter-gatherer, laughed off the concerns as being wildly off the mark.

I find similar expressions of fear from people when I challenge the viability of modernity. For many, losing modernity is a frightening prospect tantamount to certain death—either by starvation or violence by man or beast. The projection is that modernity is the only thing standing between us and a life of misery and anxiety. But since it’s not even a choice whether to continue modernity (unsustainable things fail), we may as well start to think about life without that particular security blanket.

How frightened should we be? Was pre-civilization life a miserable, desperate struggle, or did things seem to be pretty well in hand? I can offer some quantitative arguments suggesting that life could not have been that knife-edge, white-knuckle anxious.

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Call Me, Ishmael!

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To many, the name Ishmael brings to mind the narrator of the classic novel Moby Dick. To others, Ishmael is the eldest son of Abraham—of biblical fame—cast aside for the favored son Isaac. To me and to a cadre of others, Ishmael is a wise teacher in the form of a gorilla.

A 1992 novel by Daniel Quinn, titled Ishmael, burst out of the gate already graced with a half-million-dollar prize. A few friends over the years recommended the book to me, but not having much bandwidth for books at the time, the recommendations failed to percolate up the priority list for a while.

I finally read the book last summer (2022), and…wow; yeah. What he said… I think I was particularly struck by the resonance with many of the conclusions I had reached on my own, as was sketched in the last post. But the novel framed these realizations in an elegant way that I never could have done, added a healthy dose of ideas I had not considered, and on the whole brought me to a state of newfound clarity.

In this post, I synthesize a set of ten principles that capture my current thinking, unambiguously fortified and sharpened by the teachings in Ishmael. I want to encourage others to read the book, so will only relay a sense of the content here. My best recommendation is to set this post aside until you’ve had a chance to read it yourself. Perhaps the quickest route runs through your library, rather then FedEx.

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