This is the tenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode confronts the bargaining plea: can’t we keep all the stuff we like about modernity and just get rid of the stuff we don’t like?
As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.
Introduction
This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself, and the topic of this episode (can we keep the “good” and eliminate the bad?) as part of our effort to put modernity into context.
Trappings of Modernity
We use this term, trappings, to indicate the outward signs of success: the bells, whistles, conveniences, and conspicuous consumption of our culture. But it’s a pyrrhic kind of success: superficial; itself leading to failure. I like that the word also has “trap” built into it. Modernity offers many alluring perks that act like monkey traps: we grab the banana and won’t let go, even to our detriment. The hidden costs become too great to bear, in the end.
Back to the Stone Age?
My conclusion that modernity will turn out to be a failed experiment—ultimately unsupported by the forces of ecology and evolution—trips a circuit breaker for lots of people. Do I propose a return to the Stone Age? Fury wells up at all the lost benefits such a reversion would entail. What a monstrous proposal!
Firstly, I am making no proposals: just pointing out that modernity can’t be the answer, and we don’t possess the power of choice to maintain something that is fundamentally unsustainable. We similarly can’t decide to ignore gravity and float through the room.
This anomalous period of rapid inheritance spending in a one-time draw-down of ecological health has given us the false impression that we can do anything we want—that it’s all a matter of choice. We therefore live in a fleeting fantasy world in which our mental models don’t match the broader reality. The temporary excess of this moment makes us poor judges of what’s possible in the long term.
Our Likes and Dislikes
Let’s start a table—admittedly incomplete—of the things we like, just to build a flavor. We’ll also add a column of the downsides: things we dislike and might want to eliminate. The columns are not matched, row-for-row, but constitute two independent lists.
| We Like | We Dislike |
|---|---|
| Medical Care | Pollution |
| Food Ease | Deforestation |
| Transportation | Biodiversity Loss |
| Climate Control | Extinctions |
| Hot Showers | Climate Change |
| Smart Phones | Landfills |
| Video Entertainment | Market Domination |
| Computers/Internet | Traffic/Parking (overcrowding) |
I’m sure you could add to both columns (science would be an appropriate Like, for instance).
The Big Perks
An aside on the first two Likes… A common one is that “I and/or someone I know and love dearly would not be here without modern medical intervention.” I can say nothing other than I am glad to have you/them with us, still. I happen to love and admire people (not a misanthrope). Eight billion people, in fact, are awesome. Just not when all here at once. Spread it out, maybe, and then we can talk about more than 8 billion, distributed over time. But we can’t change the facts, and I do not propose harming any human already here through no fault of their own. We need to get through this crunch and learn from our mistakes.
The next big perk is access to food. About 5.5 billion people in the world enjoy food security, having enough money that food is not particularly problematic to obtain. Fed people naturally see this as a good thing.
Political Leanings
Political movements sometimes focus on both columns, but it seems more attention goes to “what do we want?” (more perks) than to eliminating negatives that are more conveniently pushed aside and ignored. Campaigns tend to work better on positivity and promise than on the ills that need to be reduced or eliminated. It’s worth being aware of this bias in the context of Likes and Dislikes.
A Brilliant Plan!
Here’s how a lot of people work (myself included, at times):
Hey, I know what to do. I’ve given it a whole two seconds of thought, and it seems to me that we just need to dump all the bad stuff and keep the good stuff! Because nobody likes the bad stuff, right? So why keep it around?
I’m sure nobody has ever considered this before, so thanks for that!
As obvious as this is, there must be a reason we still have the bad stuff. If it were easy to jettison, it would have been done long ago. For something this important, it does not serve us to be glib, offering only “why can’t we just…” sorts of poorly-examined proposals.
Double Elimination
But, let’s entertain this simple proposal for a moment. What if we became truly disgusted with the “Dislike” items on the list above and fully committed ourselves to complete elimination of those problems: a moratorium on the damaging activities. What is the result?
We eliminate all the things in the “Like” column in the same swoop. The bottom line is that we simply don’t know how to have one without the other—or we’d already be doing that! Yet, here we are, not only suffering the same old thorns, but often seeing them get thornier and adding new ones. The Dislikes have stubbornly remained problematic, despite major concerns for decades or centuries.
Our culture has instilled a frightening degree of faith in technological capacity. We tell ourselves, with fevered conviction, that we can do anything we set our unlimited minds to. What absolute rubbish! Do these people even hear themselves? It’s delusional, yet ubiquitous in our culture.
Two Sides of a Coin
The Likes and the Dislikes go hand-in-hand. They are a package deal; two sides of the same coin. If you don’t like the fact that your coin has a back side, shaving it off still leaves a back side. Want to live but without the inconveniences of eating, sleeping, pooping, or dying? I’m sure if you just think really hard with that precious head of yours…
Pick a Team!
The crux of the matter is: if these pros and cons are inseparable, then liking the Likes amounts to liking the Dislikes. Conversely, if you more strongly dislike the Dislikes, you effectively dislike the Likes. Pick a team: accept/embrace the Dislikes as part of the Likes (along with its necessary self-termination), or be prepared to set aside the things you thought were good because in full consideration, they are actually bad on the whole, when considering the full context. Unfortunately, we have been well trained to isolate, reduce, simplify and decontextualize into discrete problems that have tidy solutions. It’s easy to do when ignoring the complications from the wider—but ever-present—world, and these tendencies do not serve us well.
Inseparable?
The above framing contains what some may consider to be a “big if,” which may be less than obvious. Consider, however, that we have a world of evidence for how the Likes rely on the Dislikes, but lack any evidence of supporting one without the other. Also, wishing them to be separable has no effect on the reality of the situation.
Asymmetric Situation
Acceptance of the bad stuff might be okay if it didn’t undermine life on Earth, ecological viability, and set up a sixth mass extinction. In a cost–benefit analysis, the relative magnitudes are important. But more pointedly in this case, tolerating the Dislikes eventually leads to a collapse that destroys the Likes anyway. When it comes to ecological health on one side and human material comforts on the other, consider that one absolutely needs the other, while the reverse is certainly not true. We don’t really get to choose.
A Tangled Diagram
When I drafted this presentation, my first instinct was to make a table: what requirements (dependencies) do each of the Like items require of the world, and how do those trace to the Dislikes? Other than hitting on a nearly universal theme of materials (thus mining), energy, waste, and pollution, I recognized that it’s a much more tangled story than a table can show. So, I came up with this crude diagram.
Every Dislike—such as biodiversity loss and extinctions—is traceable to the Likes. While the diagram is not perfect, every arrow has an explicit and reasonable rationale. Blue arrows are dependencies/requirements (sometimes double-ended) and red arrows are products. Dashed ones indicate “sometimes true” conditions. For instance, many forms of energy contribute to climate change, but not all do—at least not directly.
For all its apparent complexity, this spaghetti diagram is vastly oversimplified: the real world is more tangled, still. For one thing, I left many possible arrows off whose presence I’m sure readers could justify. Yet, it need not be perfect to make the overall point.
Process of Elimination
If wanting to get rid of a Dislike, any arrowhead pointing to it has to go as well, and whatever that arrow connects back to is eliminated, curtailed, or otherwise impacted. Then, any arrowheads connected to that entity will likewise be impacted.
For example, if wishing to eliminate deforestation, then agricultural clearing of land is no longer possible. Materials collection—whether forest products or mining—involves land use and deforestation. Some energy resources must clear land to operate. If prohibiting deforestation from mining, the resulting eliminations ripple into impacts on energy, manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. From here, every Like is impacted—which is to say that every Like has a route to deforestation (most frequently through materials and energy).
Key Notes
Two things jumped out at me after completing this diagram. One is that climate change is perhaps the easiest to eliminate. Only one arrow points to it, from energy, and its a dashed one, at that. Eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix and the primary driver of climate change goes away. We know this already, and this simple observation has led to the dream of replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy. The fact that climate change is the easiest of the Dislikes to eliminate might have some bearing on how much attention it gets. As intractable as it seems, it’s the simplest of the lot—which should give us some pause.
The other alarming outcome is how many roads lead to biodiversity loss and extinction. Eliminating this Dislike quickly tears down the infrastructure of modernity and kills the Likes. This is, to me, seems to spell game over for either modernity or ecological health (and thus modernity).
Material Reflections
This section was part of the original slide set, but was eliminated before recording for time reasons. I leave it here, and will touch on this again in future episodes.
Modernity requires material elements that are, in an ecological sense, “not of this world,” in that the materials are not woven into the web of life, integrated into the various nutrients in circulation. The community of life has no business with these sometimes harmful agents. Meanwhile, the requirements of modernity rip up habitat and deliberately eliminate “pests” who are “not of” our artificial and temporary world.
As you look around and walk through life, ask if the various materials and practices you encounter tuck into the web of life. Does the community of life embrace these things and know how to incorporate them into its practices? Or, are they “alien” elements that are “not of the ecological world?” Has evolution built built a community around these presences, or are they temporary intruders with no place?
But Renewables and Recycling?
This section was also eliminated from the video, but is left here as a bonus. The next installment will be devoted to this topic. Here, I offer a brief treatment. First, “renewables” and “recycling” are just words that are far short of being magic wands capable of making problems disappear. Limitations and new complications arise, of course.
Renewable energy flows tend to be diffuse and require a bunch of material to capture. This means mining, manufacturing, pollution, and all the usual, inseparable, negative consequences. Panels and turbines don’t last and need to be replaced—indefinitely. Copper mining would have to increase over today’s levels and stay up indefinitely, somehow (which it can’t do).
Besides perpetrating the widespread deployment of materials that are alien to the community of life, recycling only delays the inevitable, being well short of 100% recovery (must also repossess the distributed equipment, which will never be perfect). Even 90% end-to-end recovery—well beyond present practices—allows only 7 cycles before dropping below half the original resource, or 22 cycles before diving below 10%. We’re talking decades or centuries, not millennia. That’s an absolute flash in ecological and evolutionary terms. Modernity will therefore starve itself of its requirements—requirements that themselves erode the foundation of life. Where’s the win?
More to come on this topic…
Club of Life Board
Recall from the sixth installment the concept of a Club of Life, in which we are lucky to be members. Imagine that a review board is assembled from the biodiverse community of life (the Committee of Life?): plants, mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, etc. You approach the board with a proposal for one of your “Like” items, and have to make the case.
Let’s say that you want advanced medical care. The pros are:
- Longer lives for humans (at least for those who can afford it);
- A larger, healthier human population (due to lowered mortality);
- Greater potential for innovation and engagement in the market economy.
Board: Hmmm. Okay, what will it cost?
- Mining, and its associated deforestation, land use, mine tailings, introduction of “alien” materials;
- Energy, which is either fossil fuels (thus CO2 and climate change) or renewables which means land use, mining, manufacturing, pollution, waste;
- Waste, in the form of a mountain of disposable, individually-packaged, hermetic implements—plus the stream of “normal” waste from hospitals, for instance;
- Chemicals: the pharmaceuticals get into the environment, not to mention the chemical waste from their creation and the manufacture of all the medical paraphernalia;
- Pollution into air and water and soils from the medical industry and associated manufacture.
Oh, and we may be forgetting some of the costs because we’re simply unaware of the impacts of what we do, if you can imagine we might be so ignorant and careless! Aren’t we adorable!
The Board: And tell us again how this proposal benefits the community of life, whom we represent?
Well, we’re members of the community of life and the benefits we enumerated below apply to us, so that’s good, right?
Board: Sure, there’s some sense in that, and we can all celebrate lives well-lived. But given your track record and portfolio of activities, it looks like a net negative to the entire community. More healthy humans engaging in your market economy seems to be the last thing we, as a whole, need in the interest of distributed access to life. We’re supposed to all be in this together, right? Humans are not somehow separate from the community of life. If humans always “win” in the short term at the expense of the rest, then we actually all lose—humans as well.
Unless you can demonstrate how this helps the entire community, and not just yourselves at the expense of the rest of us, then we’re afraid the proposal must be denied.
Viable Substitutes
If we had to admit that the Likes on the list are incompatible with long-term success of humans as part of an ecological community, it may seem overwhelmingly devastating: a huge loss of all that we’ve worked to achieve. Yes: I can definitely sympathize. I’m a product of modernity, too, and am accustomed to various expectations that seem to be unjustified and unsustainable, ecologically. I know too little of other ways.
But if our goals have been utterly ecologically unsustainable, then they have no future anyway. It’s not necessarily the case that humans are fundamentally rotten. We have just been conditioned by our culture to crave inappropriate things—things that have no permanent place in this world; things that are not supported by the broader ecology. Maybe any lamentation should be over the fact that we went down this dead-end path in the first place, rather than over the unavoidable fact that we must abandon the destructive path and pick a new one.
Reportedly, people approaching death tend not to regret the material things they didn’t acquire, but the more deeply meaningful relationships that they might have tended to more thoughtfully. Our fondest memories are of connections we make with other living beings, and may involve laughter, singing, dancing, loving. A fulfilling life involves unconditional support for and by the community: sharing in all directions for the fitness of both the individual and the whole. A sense of awe, respect, and gratitude are powerful and appropriate. None of these things necessitate the list of Dislikes caused by materials, energy, waste, and pollution in the way of modernity. As in the monkey trap, we simply closed our hand around the wrong set of Likes, and are best-advised to let go.
Importantly, we’ve managed to live without the problematic Likes/Dislikes package before—in fact for most of our time on this planet. I don’t want to come off as believing some delusional tale that we can live on love and laughter in biophysical detachment from the ecological foundation. Of course not. I’m simply suggesting that we might pursue more ecologically “normal” needs that have long-standing built-in support from the community of life.
Closing, and Do the Math
Next time, we will tackle a bit of a digression as to why renewables and recycling are not going to get us out of this mess. I also include the customary encouragement to check out this written version of the episode for a parallel take (with bonuses).
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Thank you for this, and the diagram. However, you write: "One is that climate change is perhaps the easiest to eliminate. Only one arrow points to it, from energy, and its a dashed one, at that. Eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix and the primary driver of climate change goes away."
Land is about half of climate change. When we change the land ("land use change" – meaning pave over a wetland, deforest, build roads, cities, etc.) we change the climate.
Here's an excellent series that explains this: https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/p/millan-millan-and-the-mystery-of
Follow that with https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/p/are-ecology-and-climate-the-same
and
https://theclimateaccordingtolife.substack.com/p/the-climate-beneath-our-feet
Thanks so much for this great series.
Ah–thanks for reminding me of this: I failed to recognize it in my hasty compilation of the figure. The world is always more complex than our mental models, and perhaps my simplification will still be useful to jar people away from the notion that replacing fossil fuels with solar panels will rid us of ecological problems.
You illustrate the fundamental problem when you remark that this isn’t a political manifesto and you’re not standing for public office as we all know how that would turn out. Sadly that means we are consigned to carrying on down the same road of 8.2+ billion humans conditioned to crave modernity and wealth to make their own life fulfilling and memorable. We are not content with the world or indeed ourselves.
AC Grayling’s ‘The Mystery of Things’ (2004), the final chapter on the Future of Humanity compares the outlook from two behavioural standpoints; John Gray’s ‘The Straw Dogs’ and Martin Rees’ ‘Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the 21C?’. Both are pessimistic in their outlook, but I am reminded of Tony Grayling’s conclusion with your third para from the end of this post. He wrote:
“It is dispiriting that Rees’s pessimistic suggestions about how mankind can save itself are so infused with realism, in the sense, that is, that they do not include the possibility of humanity’s maturation, of growth in moral sensibility of the kind that would bring humankind together into a fraternity intent on saving itself and improving its mutual lot. For this to happen Reason and kindness would have to flourish at the expense of superstition, tribalism, enmities, greed and fear – a hopeless-seeming prospect, and one therefore that Rees doesn’t consider. And yet it remains the sole true hope for the future, which is why some of us – like the pianist still playing as the ship sinks – will not give up the theme.”
Unfortunately, the last two decades has given more weight to Straw Dogs. Keep on playing your piano, Tom. Perhaps one day..
Superb series thank you.
There are many people who (want to) believe that we can still get some of the likes, while reducing the dislikes. These proposal can be considered "reformed modernity", or "modernity lite". These efforts won't be sustainable in the long run, but they could be a bridge to efforts to wind down modernity.
The lists of likes and dislikes is inevitably subjective, so some people may provide a different list or may just put "modernity" on the dislike list due to its consequences to life on this planet. I'm close to doing that myself. However, I do realise that I could not survive without modernity so there is a conundrum.
Are there likes that we could discard and still have the rest of modernity? Likes that may significantly reduce our impact, if they were removed (not that a reduction implies sustainability)? Given the role medical care has had in overshoot (by doubling average life spans) maybe that would be the silver bullet? Almost no-one would vote for that but one wonders what our situation would be like if medical care had stuck to just what is available in nature, some willow bark for pain relief, some branches for splints and crutches, maybe? Lifespans would still have increased but possibly only slightly.
Regarding the dislikes, the point may be moot with 8.2 billion people, but isn't it also a matter of scale? If the damage to the environment was at a level that the environment could assimilate, then that would be a sustainable level. A dream, of course.
I think you may be over estimating the effects of medical care. Most of the improved life span probably comes down to sanitation, access to food and decent uncrowned housing.
I remember reading an interview with Arthur C Clark in which he likened humanity’s use of technology to having a tiger by the tail. We can’t let go and manage the current population, but long term we can’t hold on to the tiger. The human population will peak and then decline drop along with our use of resources. It’s possible to imagine a managed decline with minimal suffering, but it’s much more likely to be a series of collapses with mass suffering.
For example look at the current statements by Musk and JD Vance on folks being childless and overall low birth rates.
Yes: I like this metaphor and often use it in another form that I've heard: having the wolf by the ear. Same conclusion. Basically, an unfortunate situation with no harmless resolution.
It is fascinating to see growing awareness/acknowledgment about looming population decline as a guaranteed consequence of plummeting birth rates. These guys are reacting to something very real. But their reaction is a panicked and delusional effort to keep the unsustainable in midair, which won't work and will only make the fundamental problems worse. They have a firm hold on the banana in the monkey trap, and will likely keep doubling-down as long as they live, their heads in a fantasy utopia that can never be.
Climate change might have only one arrow, but I wouldn't put it in the "easily solved" box. Energy is fundamental to the whole shebang, as you know, and around 82% or more of total energy use is still fossil fuels. Art Berman had an energy analysis on his blog recently, and it gave Fossil fuel use at 86%, unchanged since 2000.
We're living in a bubble , the question is when will the bubble burst ?
You are basing this on the premise that fossil fuels are the only possible way of driving a high energy lifestyle. Ignoring PV in 2024 is absurd when the only thing required for 95% of humanity to increase their useful energy budget is a €300 critical-mineral-free balcony PV system weighing under 80kg.
The conclusions you draw by ignoring PV are very different to reality, and by doing so you discredit those who agree with your central thesis by setting the bar for sustainability about an order of magnitude from where it needs to be. This leads to a very different space of possible solutions to the problems that historic attempts at exponential growth have caused.
I note you sometimes cite the quadrennial energy review. This means you are basing your conclusions on what someone shilling for fossil-hydrogen had a gut feel that an old solar farm from the 90s required when they walked past it in 2004. Although this passed the DOE's standards for "science" when they were using it to argue for nuclear power and fossil gas in 2015, it does not in any way lead to correct conclusions about reality.
If you are not using this in bad faith (or other sources that use the same trick of laundering ancient data to conclude that a modern PV system is 500% copper, 50% silver and 10000% concrete) I am more than happy to discuss it further either here or in private.
My main premise is that a high energy lifestyle (by any means) keeps us in the ecological nosedive. The goal isn't to power modernity (and increase energy use!), but to pull back from destroying the foundation. The story is much broader than kWh. Other life matters (even for purely selfish reasons).
As for the DoE data, I have not independently verified the methodology, but have no reason to reject what came out of a conservative body well into the Obama administration. Your characterization is amusing, but comes off as less credible than the DoE publication (backup?). Still, it's pointless to drown in minutia, as the overall argument does not hinge on some threshold number. Maintaining high-energy modernity will require a constant stream of material input to the continued rapid detriment of ecological health, until it can't continue (and we saw it coming).
Yeah, this is where you lose me Tom.
I can't necessarily argue with you on the math – I think and hope you're incorrect about all this, but you've done the math and I haven't. But even if everything you're saying here is true, I don't believe that you fully considered the implications of what most of humanity being doomed to die means, especially in the absence of modern medicine. And that's because I believe that the ethical imperative to the whole "pick the good and get rid of the bad" scenario is that it doesn't matter whether its impossible or not – we have to do our best to make it work for as long as we can in any case, because the alternative (at least where food and medicine are concerned; I grant we can live without iPhones) is literally mass death.
And we will not know for certain if it's impossible until we have actually hit that brick wall.
Giving up in advance, as you're ultimately doing here with that "board proposal" scenario, is a lazy value judgment against billions of lives, because there is no abstract community of life capable of making that kind of judgment – there are only humans who can use it as a metaphor for their own. Regardless of intent, that's what you're actually doing with this post.
Because we are ALL here at this time on this planet, human and non-human, I think it’s more important to thread the narrow balance that we believe has the best chance of benefitting the good of ALL of us (keeping in mind our natural tendency to skew the result in our favour), rather than trying to determine in advance what that balance might be.
If the cost of trying to maintain billions of human lives is the loss of trillions of lives (and accelerating extinctions), then I question the true value. I don't see the goal as saving human lives at all costs, because I think that leads to a loss of all human lives as well, via ecocide. Some costs are just too high. Relatedly, next week I'll have the episode on human supremacy.