I spend a fair bit of time asking myself the question: Am I crazy?

I mean, without really wanting to do so, I seem to have landed on a fringe view within our culture, which is not a comfortable place for me in a social sense. I don’t love it. The easiest—seemingly most likely—explanation for the glaring mismatch is that I’m the one off kilter.

My statement: Modernity (even if defining starting 10,000 years ago) is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.

Common response: That’s crazy. Just look around you! We’ve created a new normal. Humans have transcended the bounds of nature—no longer mere animals. Ingenuity has unlimited potential, and we’re really on our way now. This changes everything, and we will never lose our technological mastery, now that we have found it. Modernity is our destiny—and kind-of the whole point of it all.  It’s what makes us truly human.

But let’s look at evidence: like evidence that modernity is a new normal that can go on at least as long as our species is around (relevant timescales are 10^6±1 years, or a million years plus-or-minus an order of magnitude).

What’s that? Zero evidence? Of course we can’t know. The future is not kind enough to present evidence to the present. Hmmm—maybe that’s because we’re so mean to the future, frantically robbing its lives of Earth’s bounty and biodiversity.

The basic observation that we can receive no evidence from the future cuts both ways, of course. I have no future evidence that modernity will begin shutting down within a century.

However, we are not completely in the dark, here. We know some things (see my previous post on things about which I can be relatively certain).  As obvious illustrations, we can be super-confident that day will follow night in a consistent cycle throughout our lives, that we will each die someday, and that the sun will render Earth uninhabitable on its way to spending its fuel.  In a similar fashion, we can lay claim to a host of other near-certainties even without evidence from the future.

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Image by Victoria from Pixabay

I struggle to strike a balance between certainty and circumspection. Our culture has a tendency to favor certainty, while one of my favorite and frequent fall-backs—seldom wrong—is: “we don’t know.” Certainty is often the hobgoblin of decontextualized, rigid, (only) logical thinking: an artificial by-product of incomplete mental models. That said, I feel that I can do more than throw up my hands on every issue. I can be fairly certain that I will never perform a standing jump to the moon or breathe underwater (without apparatus) like I often do in dreams.

Thus, I write this post in full appreciation of the red flag around certainty. Yet, in full consideration, I can indeed identify some elements of reality about which I can be fairly certain—to a reasonable degree. At the very least, these things would appear to be consistent with a robust account of how the world appears to work.

I’ll skip an exhaustive list of certainties, and stick with points that have some bearing on the meta-crisis of modernity.  But for illustration that certainty is not misplaced, I think most would agree that we can function under certainty that in the next billion years, say, gravity won’t turn off; the sun will continue to shine; Earth will keep rotating to produce the familiar day/night pattern; if I pound my fist on the table my hand won’t sail through it, etc.  We are justified in “taking these to the bank.”  The items below are not all as completely iron-clad, but are helpful in forming a basis.  I have asked myself for each one: “could I be convinced otherwise?”  Generally the answer is “yes, I suppose,” to varying degrees, but some would be a tough pull, requiring solid evidence.  Most of the content is a repackaging of points I have expressed before, but I hope in a useful, consolidated form.

So let’s get to it: here are things I am reasonably (functionally) certain about:

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