Inspirations from Past Civilisational Collapses - a metacrisis salon

[music] Hello, my name is Jen Bendel. I'm a recovering professor of sustainability leadership. I um quit that three years ago. Uh I now uh live in Indonesia um and work independently as an independent uh analyst and commentator and educator on uh matters of environment and society but broadly framed in terms of meta crisis and societal collapse. And I became known for that due to my work in 2018 on climate going viral, a paper called deep adaptation. And um this event came together uh because I was talking with Rupert Reed uh about how to mark the fifth anniversary of the book we co-edited uh Deep Adaptation. The book is called Deep Adaptation. It came out five years ago today. Uh and so we wanted to do something and we thought rather than just um rather than go back to all the issues we covered because it's a it's a multi-disiplinary book that looks at uh deep adaptation and collapse readiness from multiple different scholarly perspectives. What we wanted to do with that book is invite more people to stop feeling awkward about the predicament we're in and actually to embrace it creatively, courageously, and compassionately. And and so with that in mind, what is a a field of scholarship um that we didn't mention that we think is really important? So So we're still learning on this issue just like everyone working on it. And so we thought actually the field of of history ancient history and archaeology we didn't include that and actually that is if if I talk to a so-called lay person a non-scolar on collapse issues about this immediately we start talking about past civilizational collapse. It's a it's a very relatable topic and we thought therefore that it would be great if more scholars in that field could talk about what could be learned from past civilization collapses. um not just as warnings, but actually well did people in those civilizations know what was happening and did they try and do something about it whether at the core or the periphery of those uh civilizations to try and soften the collapse, slow it down or plant seeds of what might be able uh to last and transfer into a future civilization. So um that's why we wrote a paper which we shared as background reading for this salon today which we titled inspirational collapses um what can we learn from past civilizations about how they tried to soften uh their breakdown. So um that's our topic today and this is also um a salon in the meta crisis initiative. So that's something I launched 10 months ago and we meet once a month to have conversations like this one. Um and also there's a peer mentoring. So about 300 people have signed up for the as members of the meta crisis initiative and about 70 for the peer mentoring. So I'll share information on that as well in the chat later. So, the way we're going to um spend our 90 minutes together today is um I'm going to interview my co-author of the book and of that article in Resilience Magazine, uh Professor Rupert Reed. And then we're going to break into uh well, we're going to go into breakout rooms to talk with each other for about what we think about this topic. Then we're going to come back. you're going to share in the chat your ideas uh and your questions not just for RER or me but also for our guest experts who will be forming a panel and [snorts] I'm going to uh introduce them later but um I'm really happy joining us are Michelle Bams Helen Helen and Norberg Hodgej and Will Self so they'll be joining the panel to reflect on this issue and the fact they come from very different um fields of of expertise like h I'm really keen on the on the interdisciplinary the potential creativity from interdicciplinary discussion on on this issue. So Robert not only being a friend is also a philosopher writer and public intellectual whose work explores the implications of climate and ecological breakdown and also using the concepts of metacar crisis and societal collapse. He's become a leading voice in both mainstream environmentalism and also in this more specialist topic of deep adaptation and relatedly transformative adaptation and strategic adaptation which I'm sure he'll mention. Um so basically he's arguing for preparing politically, economically and culturally for a climate disruptive future. So he co-edited the deep adaptation book with me and also co-author co-authored the the resilience article on possible inspirations from past collapses. So, Robert, thank you for joining today. >> Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here with you and with everyone. >> Yeah, it's really um it's really nice to uh to be able to find opportunities to to uh to work together. I know you're pretty busy on on the climate majority project, which I I didn't mention, but that's your you also quit academia like me and that's your main thing now. Is that right? >> That's right. Yeah, that's what I spend the majority of my time on and then the minority on everything else including a lot of time out there in the garden which is very hard work these days. >> Right. Yeah. So you're in Norfolk, aren't you? So that's route I guess at the moment. >> Yep. >> Right. So does that mean you're having more conversations uh with more people including in the mainstream about uh adapting to climate change? >> Yes, it does. the the recent we're in to another heat wave now, but the recent extreme heat wave which we called a heat storm uh in the UK which broke various records uh I think is another of these moments where quite a lot of people are waking up or waking up a bit more and so forth. doesn't there's not going to be one huge wakeup moment and then everything's sort of going to be okay. But these moments where there something of that happens are important I think and I think we've definitely just had one and we're still sort of working through that especially as the summer continues to be extreme and wait before we're about to go into a super nino. >> Yeah. What I like about how you work is that you're ready to actually uh go and talk in the mass media and politically about the climate crisis and also maintain time for going far deeper and uh inviting that deep cultural uh reflection and conversation about what to do. Um >> yeah, so that that's brilliant. So today we're going to try that going deeper. Um and so yeah, to get us started, could you say yeah, what of of the various societal or civilizational collapses that you've read about over recent years in your in your studies? Um what do you find the most inspiring for us in terms of our present situation and also this issue of uh can we see past collapses as more than just warnings and actually look into it to learn something about how we might be able to manage the current situation. >> Yeah. So let me start with a couple of examples from our article which uh we I put into the chat a minute ago uh from resilience. Uh my sort of personal favorite uh that we talk about there is the Eastern uh Roman Empire. Uh and of course one reason why it's quite a good example uh of what we should be looking for here is that there is arguably it kind of didn't collapse at all until it was eventually uh uh defeated um uh after existing for a thousand years u militarily um and it's quite inspiring the way it managed to survive that the part that we talk about in our article uh the part that Joseph Tainter made famous is the moment where it seems like what happened uh around the time of the rise of Islam when um the Eastern Roman Empire was under severe uh stress. It seems that what may have happened is that decisions were made uh within that empire to deliberately move in the direction of what Tainter calls simplification. Um and what that means is that unlike the temptation which is so ubiquitous when one is faced with something like a military threat to build up one's army and then go often into a kind of vicious circle inducing collapse of debasing the currency not putting any resources into anything else etc. It looks like what happened as far as we can tell in the Eastern Roman Empire was that the powers that be uh and this was reflected through the society moved deliberately in the direction of military simplification of localization. We're going to be hearing from Helena Norberg Hodgej uh later. uh and in that sense it is it seems to me quite a strong example of the kind of thing we ought to be doing and it's extraordinary that they managed to do it while having one would presume somewhat less understanding of their situation than we take ourselves to have of ours. The other example I mentioned up top also from our article uh is the way in which something very inspiring happened um as uh the Roman Empire was um uh falling apart in the west um in this country where I'm speaking from Britain uh is that we got the beginnings of serious Christian uh monasticism uh and the way in which that led to all sorts of knowledge and practices etc being not just kept kept alive but in many ways flourishing through what are somewhat kind of in a way misleadingly uh called the the dark ages. There's a fascinating book about this period in history called written recently called the green ages um giving a very different reading uh of of that medieval period uh in terms of the extent to which as the society the civilization that was there um fell apart quite quickly something else started to emerge from it which again points in some of the kind of directions that we should be after here. So yeah, those are two which I like very much which I guess is partly why they're in our uh article, the uh the Bisantine Empire and what happened in the wake of the Roman Empire's decline and fall here in the UK, what is now the UK. >> So those two examples raise the question of how much central centralized effort or effort from the center to manage a collapse matters or not. So >> yeah. Yeah. >> So we we've got with with the Baantine Empire, some research shows that they did know what was happening and they did try and respond beyond just trying to hold things together for longer. Um but but then again, how much of that is is speculation? I'm wondering um >> Oh yeah. Yeah. We don't really know the full story at all of what happened in the Baantine Empire. Partly because of course um it was a time when um and this is part of the simplification uh rates of literacy etc dramatically uh declined. Um but it kind of again it sort of looks like what they did is they kind of focused in on things which were kind of more essential than other things. You know less essential to have a currency, more essential to have food. you know, this may be a a kind of decision that we get to at some point in in our lives if things take a certain kind of uh turn. So, yeah, the Bazantan Empire, it looks like the as far as we can tell, some of the decision-m was kind of top down in a very intelligent way. in post Roman Britain not so a very different kind of uh case and both therefore inspiring in different ways >> because that then raises the question of at times of collapse how much can actually be done um from the center if the center is governed by dominated by elite power. Um because so many analyses of how collapses have occurred in the past is they have they have involved the elites being uh immune to the information about how bad things are and how systematically things need to change. Um and so if that's not going to happen then then I suppose the next question is well well h how how do we just prepare locally without wishing for anything from the state? And I think that's often a conversation I have anyway with people, even if we're not talking about past civilizational collapses, is that do we give up on any kind of central coordination to help soften the collapse and plant seeds of the new? Um, do we turn our back on that? And I encourage people to try and not turn their back on it. And while we still have the central institutions, what how could they help? >> Yeah, absolutely. And here you and I are quite aligned, Jim. For me, we need a kind of full spectrum response in which everybody looks for the way that they along with others can contribute most efficaciously to the the great work of harm reduction and of seeding uh a successor civilization to this one. And for some people that will take the form of semi- top down or political style work or interventions. for many others it will take the form much more of uh bottomup work of work in uh localities seeking to build local resilience etc. Uh and I think one doesn't need to sort of have a sort of win or lose debate on this. It seems to me one can look for what are the most effective levers that are available to one along with others given one's situation, one's one's talents, one's um one's broader context etc. uh we don't need to to to fight about it. Let's just get on with doing the various kinds of things that can be effective. But of course, it's worth it's worth thinking about, okay, what are actually some of the things that can be effective and not waste our our time because we don't have time to to waste anymore. >> So, when you've been looking at this topic that we're discussing today about inspirations from past civilizational collapse, who's been most influential in your in your thinking? >> Yeah. So Tainter was uh was quite an influence. Maybe we'll talk more about him. But the people I'd really like to mention are uh Flannry, his extraordinary book, The Future Eaters, which is controversial book, but I think it it's hugely mindexpanding. Uh I think the title is absolutely brilliant, right? That's what we're doing right now. We're eating the uh the future deliberately and accidentally. Uh and we need to stop doing so. He one of the great things that happens in that book is that Flannery says, "Okay, so look, we seem to have this paradox. On the one hand, you have indigenous cultures that seem to be living in more or less harmony with their surroundings. On the other hand, we know that the forebears of uh uh of those cultures across most of the world outside of Africa exterminated the uh the megapora and wrecked their own ecosystems. So how do we square these two things?" And basically the suggestion he makes is well maybe they learned. Maybe the ones who survived learned from that catastrophic mistake. And then the thought is well yeah but we're kind of too big to fail now in the mega global civilization that we have. So we can't afford to learn from our mistakes in the same way. But the tragedy seems to be that that is at best what is going to happen. In other words, that we're not going to be able to see sufficiently ahead of the coming collapse to be able to prevent it uh or even to radically uh soften it. So that what that implies is we have to learn as much as we can, share as much as we can while accepting that there is going to be epical uh damage and that the fall of this civilization is probably going to be a lot harder than the falls of most previous uh civilizations. And that really as I understand it is what we're trying to do when we when we talk about deep adaptation. And then the other um case I'd like to mention more briefly uh is my my my great late friend David Greyber uh the book that he and David Wendro wrote The Dawn of Everything which if you haven't read it folks uh it's very long and it's worth every word. I've read it twice now. I find it incredibly moving as well as incredibly inspiring and that it really does give one the sense of on the one hand we're up against absolutely terrible odds. On the other hand, there are over and over again cases from the past of civilizations which have done extraordinary and inspiring things in terms of overthrowing authoritarianisms, abolishing slavery over and over again, inventing and reinventing democracy. Uh, and that's very inspiring in terms of the kind of uh heart that we're going to need for what's coming. >> Yeah. In fact, what you said reminded me of um a speech from Llaya June I heard a few years ago where speaking as um uh a Native American or indigenous person from North America, she said um uh we weren't born this cool. um we actually learn through, you know, many many periods where our societies collapsed or were damaged and had to therefore um work out how better to to look after uh nature. And I thought that was fascinating to to hear that that you you know you learn as a society through trial and error as much as you do as an individual. M >> and so that is that was fascinating and similarities are there with with with some of the work of Grey and Wangro. Um, >> yeah. >> So, >> and of Fenry. >> Yeah. So, I'm wondering um when you when you're having these conversations now, um, how useful is the concept of deep adaptation or other framings and how does this >> this conversation we're having about past civilization collapse relate to the conversation of deep adaptation and collapse preparedness in general? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, as you kindly mentioned earlier, on my pel, >> as you kindly mentioned earlier, Jim, uh I've been an advocate for uh quite a number of years now of uh Oh, wow. There is a pair of green woodpeckers in my garden. And oh, one of them is feeding the other. I have never seen that before. It's an adult feeding feeding a young one. Apologies, folks. Um but, uh feels somehow relevant. Um uh as you kindly mentioned earlier, the concept of transformative uh uh adaptation is one that I've been um pushing for quite a number of years now. Uh that I put a link to the book um higher up in the chat. Uh and then there's also the concept of strategic adaptation uh which is very much promulgated by the climate majority project. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to throw a link to strategic adaptation into the uh chat. And really the answer to your question is that more and more what I find is that all of these concepts transformative, strategic and deep adaptation increasingly overlap. Um and the reason for that is uh a sad uh reason. The reason for that is that it is becoming clearer and clearer that this civilization is heading towards collapse uh events. So more and more what it is to be strategic is to uh include horizons of collapse in one's planning and what it is to be transformative is to imagine uh and enact uh how we transform our institutions and etc etc um as um our civilization in various ways uh degrades and uh and unwinds. So I think that um transformative, strategic and deep adaptation are now all very much barking up the same tree. In many ways I think that the frames of transformative and strategic adaptation are really um ways of increasingly are ways of talking about what we talked about under the heading of deep adaptation from your paper onwards. Uh Jim, but ways which are um perhaps for many audiences which are not quite ready to face into collapse yet. um uh including kind of policy um audiences are more um accessible and less scary but it amounts very much to the same thing. Now the fact that we have these concepts and the fact that we have the knowledge that we have of past collapses and non-olapses and so forth should of course be of great benefit to us, right? Because we know a lot more about this stuff than previous societies and civilizations that face these kinds of situations knew. So that's really good. That's on the positive side. On the negative side, of course, um we are facing the potentiality of a collapse which is far more final and uh and epo um than uh any previous collapse when viewed from a global uh perspective. >> Maybe that's the that's something we can come back to. Maybe >> what's that? >> Maybe that's something we can come back to in the I'm just thinking now that Thank you very much for getting us started on this topic, Robert. um uh you've articulated the some of the key themes really really well. Um I'm going to now break us into um groups. So I'm very pleased that on the panel today we have Helena Norbert Hodgej will self and Michelle Bounds joining Rert Reed and myself. So Helena is the founder of local futures and is a renowned pioneer of the localization movement. Her work examines how globalization has amplified ecological and social fragility and where where there are stronger local economies building resilience, maintaining resilience. She's revealed how traditional societies have sustained themselves over generations and how that offers us insights uh as we wish to navigate current disruption uh in even collapse and renewal. So I'm very pleased Helen joins us. We also have Will Self joining us. He is an acclaimed novelist, essaist and broadcaster whose fiction and commentary pro probing the psychological and cultural dimensions of contemporary civilization. And through his explorations of urban life, consumer culture and human frailty and mortality, he's offering us deep reflections on decline uh and recurring patterns that have shaped both past and present societies. Michelle Bowens joining us from Thailand. He is the founder of the P2P Foundation um which has played an important role in my intellectual history. National theorists of the commons and peer-to-peer collaboration. His work explores how new forms of governance, production, and mutual aid can emerge during periods of systemic crisis contraction and collapse. uh he draws on historical transitions between civilizations and examines pathways through the current meta crisis, a real champion of commons economics. So thank you to the three of you for for joining today to begin. I'd like to ask Helena first to offer your thoughts on this issue of what inspiration we might take from our limited understanding, limited knowledge of past civilizational collapse. How will this Yeah. What what are your thoughts on this topic? For this opening, I invite just just a few minutes to share because obviously we'll then get to hear from we'll get to continue talking. So, Helen, if you unmute, over to you. Well, as some of you know, my world view was completely shaped by living in an ancient Tibetan culture and living in that culture before it was affected by the global monoculture. And because it was up at 12,000 feet surrounded by the Himalayas, it had also been spared the impact of colonialism. And because it was um embraced by Tibetan Buddhism a few thousand years earlier or about about a thousand years earlier, Tibetan Buddhism had also protected it from the missionaries who managed around the world to destroy cultural self-esteem. My work really is about rejecting civilization as an expansionist way of doing things that conquers other cultures, robs them of their resources and is expansive. I'm a proponent of peaceful cultures. So I think we should know about the work of Maria Gibbutas and also look at what um Margaret me was saying before she was demonized um by modernist thinking. My experience really is as I say in my book ancient futures that we rapidly want to abandon this fossil fuel-based urban consumer culture to re re you know restore our joy. Not only are we restoring ecosystems, as we come back to who we really are, we evolved in community and when we lived close to the land as indigenous cultures did, we needed one another. So almost without fail, those cultures were intergenerational and they were part of human scale networks where they knew each other. They these were human beings whom they knew whom they traded with whom they depended on. Building up a world where we move in the direction of supporting that type of localization brings with it enormous benefit. So I'm very very happy to say that every day in my inbox I get as much good news as I get bad news. It's particularly as people come to restore local food systems that they're regaining a an awareness and experience an embodied experience of what it is to be human. It is also how we restore diversity because localized food systems demand diverse production. the monoculture that was imposed from the time when closures and slavery imposed monoculture. So I think structurally we have to look very clearly at this and there is a policy path that we should all be talking about and that policy path would start by waking people up to the fact that our governments right now are signing agreements with global corporations in which they say we won't do anything that threatens your profit. If we do you can take us to court. This reality that governments left and right have been signing these agreements with global corporations, providing them with freedom, subsidizing their global infrastructure, fossil fuel-based, but now the renewable uh path is not what we think it is. We have to completely rethink the carbon colonialism. It's coming from corporations running the show at the cops as they have from the time of Al Gore. And these are not evil people, but these are people who are so blind and so far removed from the fabric of life, from the diversity, from human well-being, spiritual, psychological, and physical well-being. So far removed from that as they look at their numbers. It's up to us on the ground. It's up to us who care and who are starting to question what's going on. >> Thank you, Helena. I think that's that's a very important reminder of the way the it's terrible, isn't it? How the the the institutions that have driven us into this mess and made the most out of it uh are certainly not giving up. They're trying to defend and extend their power. So there's a role for resisting and reclaiming our economic power and and yes, we must have that in mind as we have these creative discussions looking at past civilizational collapse. So I'd like to hear more from you in a moment on what you take from the study of past civilizational collapse. but just to hear a few minutes from from each of our special guests at the moment. I'd like to move to to Will Self, the novelist and cultural commentator. If you could unmute if everyone else could stay muted and just your general reflections on on this topic, Will, and thank you very much for for joining us today. The signature image for me of civilizational perurance while undergoing collapse comes at the end of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 465. The survivors from the city gather around a fire. They seek entertainment. Luckily, they are a group that has formed before the collapse. Each of them has memorized a book. They recite them to each other. It's probably because I'm a writer. I don't want bragging rights, but I've written 32 books and as much in journalism and essays or more. My papers are held in the British Library. Two years ago, it had a cyber attack. My other example of civilizational collapse is the MER. One of the greatest books, sorry, not the Mer, the Mexico. There's a brilliant book by Inger Clenum, the historian, called Aztecs, an imagining. The key point is this. When the Mexican elders realized that their civilization was doomed, they gathered the Franciscan friars who had accompanied Cortez and they told them everything. We know everything about Mexico culture because they did that. Now we're facing a literacy crisis. 50% of people in Britain, for example, didn't read a book last year. Quite a lot of the others lied. Lots of people think it's okay to listen to an audio book. You only retain 25%. Barbarism is illiteracy. All societies that devolve into illiteracy acquire scribal elites and the kind of governments that go with them. So what are you going to do about it? Because the problem of literacy is the problem of civilizational survival. And the threat to our literacy is unique. It is the cyborg assemblage of the mindless human consciousness and the mobile phone network to the web. The average Britain spends 4 and a half hours online outside of work. the web and I can prove this with results now. The results are in from from cognitive and experimental psychologists using even reading on the web in a birectional con context destroys attention spans and destroys deep literacy. I also believe that we have nothing to learn from previous civilizations because they are not facing the same crisis as us at all. We are facing a crisis caused by aggregating negative human desire through distributed logistical systems that take on the appearance of intentionality. They are really broken specters, figures formed in the midst of human imagining. They're things like the Epstein conspiracy. The elites. >> Oh, effort that is. >> The elites are aggregated negative human inputs and everybody on this call's been involved in it to some extent. >> This revolution's never had a lower entry level. Turn off your phone. Go offline. Don't consume. And don't fly. If we'd all done that after Coyoto, we wouldn't even be in this situation now. So, I think that our situation is unique and the solution to it is unique. >> Thank you, Will. I've I've yeah I've really appreciated learning from you in our correspondence about the more the the cultural cultural and cognitive breakdown or even collapse that's ongoing now. Michelle Bowens, thank you for joining from Bang uh Thailand and um yeah, if you have three three minutes of an initial contribution uh that that would be fantastic. Um yeah well uh I I take a slightly different view because I do think uh history is important u even though of course we are also in a unique uh moment. Uh and the reason I say that is because I do think there is an institutional uh part of our of our issues and that is the commons the existence of the commons. Um so you know we we could make a little history which I'll do in like a very short of course a bit simplified but basically indigenous societies you know they have gifting and commoning as the main mode of exchange and the their commons are kind of organic to their life. They're you know the the rivers and the mountains are protected by spirits or even owned by by spirits and that's why they they respect them. Uh but even empires, you know, civilizations, warrior societies have commons. And you look at medieval Europe, uh you know, a farmer would have his own land, working for his family. He was working the land of the Lord, which you know, was meant for defense and and um and things like that. And uh they had their common land. And the biggest uh ritual after Christmas and Easter was called the Rogan tide procession when the the people of the village would walk around their village and reconfirm their their common land and uh you know commons really work and common institutions really work. That's Oops, I made a mistake in my alarm. Um and uh so there's also a concept that I use in in in my writing which is called the pulsation of the commons which basically you know if you look at the cyclic nature of civilization you know which upward cycle a peak moment and then it descends and eventually it collapses. Uh what you see is that when when the state and the market function well the commons decline but when the the state and the market decline in their functioning the the people bring the commons back because they need it and then what's remarkable is that in dark ages the commons institutions become hegemonic. So whether you look at the collapse of Rome, the collapse of uh the collapses in medieval Japan or the collapses in China of the the Henna Empire, it's the monasteries that come back and they're extremely efficient and there I mentioned a book in in the chat earlier on from Singchu and one it's a trilogy and one is called Recurring Dark Ages and you can actually prove you know scientifically now that uh yeah the green age. I don't know who mentioned that. Maybe it was you, Jim. Because dark ages are really healing what has been kind of overused by u by civilization. And so what would that mean today? Uh well, you know, I work around the concept of the archipelago of regenerative villages. uh because I do think you know we we can never look at ourselves just alone because we we have states we have market forces as Elena uh mentioned as well and they can be hostile to us u for example in Indonesia you know you cannot uh have seeds it's illegal to for farmers to have their own seeds and there's some African countries have the same so you can say oh yeah have a local village but it's even illegal to share seeds with other farmers because of the corporations have too much power over the parliament and so uh and you know this might be a slight difference that I have maybe with Helena how how we see the world so I think translocalism is as important as localism and what I mean is that all the people who do the local should also think on how they can defend themselves and sometimes mobilize at scale. Uh and so that's what I'm working on. Uh so I I don't know who it was who asked like what is a technology that you know can last and stuff. Well today we are working on something is called ridiculum. Uh it's a bottomup meshwork. Uh it works with the internet. It can survive when the internet is down. It has zero servers, zero cloud, and it's based on very cheap uh electronics. Now, maybe you think we don't need this, but I do actually believe we do need it. Uh communication and transportation is really important, especially if you want to share experience um over some distance. >> So, that's yeah, that's the way I see the world. This this kind of combination between both levels. And thank you Michelle for also referring to the previous uh discussion and contribution. I actually think there's quite a lot of uh resonance and similarity with your ideas and what I've learned of Helena's ideas. Maybe we come to that later um because I want to make sure we we hear from what came up in the small groups and also yeah talk about inspirations from past collapses. So um Robert, I'm going to go back to you now. you've been looking at what's been coming in on the the chat box. Um I was wondering if you could yeah you could >> uh mention maybe mention a couple of the questions and then um invite comments from one of our panelists to kick off and also share your own thoughts on the questions you've selected. >> Yeah. So uh let's start with the a couple of the big questions that have come in that have already been touched on but I think it's worth going into a little bit more. So we've got Tobias Pzin who asks how can we learn something from past collapses if as mentioned in the article Jim Rupert wrote the situation today is so different people are so detached from the basis of their life in particular feeding themselves. It'd be fascinating to hear Helena and others on that. And then the other question I'd like to bring straight in is uh Kathleen Batk. Our global and urban civilization seems hard to compare to past civilizations organizationwise. But how about psychological coping? What can we learn from the past examples concerning emotional adaptation, transformation of our nervous systems? Were there tools, rituals, scholarship around that? So yeah, who would like to have a first go at either of those questions? >> Just to say that second question is is phenomenal just in it. Yeah, >> absolutely. Like like um so for example what we mention in in the article is that the Mayan collapses could be reframed more as urban rural migrations before then receding urban uh urban uh civilizations and actually there's more of a continuum there. It'd be fascinating to see to to know more about how Mayan traditions helped in that expansion contraction um and migration. Um it's something I don't I I have a very superficial level of understanding of something like that. It's a fascinating question. Before we go to a panelist, Robert, do you know anything on on that second question? Well, I guess I was thinking of what you already alluded to a bit, Jim, in terms of we do have um quite a lot that we know about how um and what will mentioned as well, how civilizations that were in the course of uh of or cultures that were in the course of collapsing or being destroyed uh sought to cope with that. for example, in terms of trying to kind of tell their story and also in terms of uh learning from it the kind of stuff that Flenery um talks about. Um and maybe you know there could be enormous strength to take from for example what Native American peoples uh endured uh over centuries and some of the ways in which they found um uh coping mechanisms um to deal with what was happening. Of course there are we should also mention that there are also um ineffectual coping mechanisms. Um, for example, one I I would highlight which is tragically um explained in the in the classic of Native American history, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, is the ghost dance, which was a kind of completely kind of futile attempt by Native Americans to immunize themselves against the bullets of uh of the the the Western invaders. So, it's not all good, right? But I think yeah that there must be lots of richness in what we can learn from what cultures have done which have found themselves in somewhat similar predicaments. >> Yeah. I'm wondering another way of answering that question is to think of not just coping but opportunities for >> new cosmologies and spiritualities. I was thinking Michelle with with you Michelle Bowens with your interest in Whitaker on on how uh environmentally driven collapse of past civilizations may have actually prompted or so or there's evidence that it prompted a spiritual renaissance. >> I wonder if you could say anything on that because it seems to be relevant topic. >> So maybe I I should briefly introduce the the notion from Cojin Karatani which is you know called mod D. So basically what Helena describes in her work it's he calls it mode A which is this con convivial indigenous way of of living and producing. Um but that is lost under civilization and so there's a so basically there's a constant yearning of people to return to that conviviiality but at a higher level of complexity. uh you know to make it simple is we we want to live like that but we also don't want to die when we're 40. So we you know we also like to to maintain some of the the complex modern systems at the same time. Ideally it's what we would like. Um and so that takes different forms historically and of course before western modernity it was only religious. uh so you know the already the great actual religions were all attempts to to humanize civilization. So you have the extractic classes and you know every revolution in extraction is is terrible. Uh you know agricultural civilization destroy the tribes and move them to the mountains and the marshes. uh industry destroys the farmers and AI may destroy everybody else that's still left. Um and so that creates counter movements and certainly historically you know think about the monks the the Christian monks are a good example right aura at labor work and pray spirits and nature and matter are on the same level and they have farmers they have craftsmen they have intellectuals and mystics in one integrated community and they strive for the good the true and the beautiful of course I'm somewhat idealizing uh but you know you can see the buildings You can see their agriculture uh you know they did amazing things in a very barbaric environment. So you know they were kind of the healers of that period and then paradoxically what happens as they are successful they create more s more surplus and that gives room to the you know more extractive classes to to come back and and this has been a cycle and so the question is today how would you do it right and I sorry I talk a lot so I'll be very brief so how would you do it today so we had the religious period we had the ideological period and I think Now we're in the period of constructive networks. So we just do it and we connect to each other. And this is where you know cosmolocism comes in is that you know we do permaculture, we do organic agriculture uh but we also connected uh with people who can help us in all different kinds of ways. And I think there's different levels hyperlocalism, bio regionalism and then there is a cosmic level because we have one planet and we need to work together on the level of the planet as well. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. And Helena or or will any thoughts on this topic or also the first question on that because >> and is it possible to turn up your microphone at all or just maybe >> I'll speak louder. So I I I think um where I'm a bit uh coming from a different point of view from Michelle is that I'm seeing the need for the placebased embedded uh direction as extremely urgent. However, maintaining the connections we now have on the internet using Zoom as we're doing now, even our mobile phones to be connected and to both articulate our resistance to further corporate takeover which AI if we allow AI now to continue in the hands of this corporate empire, we are facing an extreme extreme increase in the speed and the destruction of this man-made system energy intensive. We know how much water is required, minerals, fighting over those minerals, going to the moon, to Mars. This is something that we need to be opposing and very clearly and we need to use these tools to do so. possibly even make use of AI that's available to us to to question not only question but very clearly resisted join the movement that is growing in America probably more strongly than anywhere however I feel that the well I never mind I don't know exactly Michelle what you've been doing that I saw such a big emphasis on the connection and my emphasis has been on the urgent need to reconnect. And I'm glad that you realize that agriculture was not always destructive. That's part of the myth that the colonizers have wanted us to believe. We had many examples of agriculture surviving for tens of thousands of years. Settled population. Our only avenue is not to roam around as we think, you know, all indigenous people did when there was a smaller population. the fact that small diversified farms produce far more per unit of land and water than monocultures can do. That's what we have to recognize. You >> point to something very interesting there Helena. So like for those of you who are fascinated by the ancient history topic then go clayepe in Turkey is really challenging uh mainstream views on when agriculture came and and therefore when cities really started and it seems that it goes back a lot further and that people decided in the past whether to do agriculture and how much agriculture and would take it up and drop it. It seems a lot more complicated than the normal. >> I want to say something also about the healing that is already coming from a deep embedded localization. >> Right? >> We can learn from AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, that people heal together in community when they know that with their imperfections they can still be loved. This is what the consumer culture has done is to, you know, to turn children around from their deep need, their universal need for love with the message if you want to belong, if you want to feel that you're connected, you need to have those Nike shoes, you need to be drinking that Coca-Cola, perverting this universal human need for connection into a need to consume. >> Yeah. And we're turning around in the localization movement. We're turning that around by encouraging that deep coming together, learning from AA, learning from indigenous culture, and learning the importance of trying to do that journey in an intergenerational way. One more thing I want to say is that we need to respect the feminine. We need to recognize that even on this call, the majority are women. In my 50 years promoting a more ecological way forward, in these 50 years, the women have always been the largest number by far. They are not the voices. They're not speaking as much as they should, but they do in smaller groups. That's why I think a very important path forward is the smaller groups whenever we can facilitate that. And it's all about reclaiming the feminine. It's about reclaiming the feminine. It's not about men and women. It's about rejecting a women's movement that tried to prove we're just as strong. We're just as aggressive and competitive. I'll stop there. Yeah. >> All right. Thank you. Yeah, that's an is Thank you for bringing that up as well. I'm just wondering will self you um your critique takes us even further in terms of the issue of how much connection or disconnection and reconnection locally or with aspects of ourselves that need to happen to hear from participants whether they could even hear what I said because I have told you that people are addicted it to something that turns them into a cyborg. I appreciated what Helena said, but AI is the limit. I'm a writer. I'm a professional writer. I've written a lot. I'm a very well-known writer. Look on X. I've used it for a pro provocation. There's a piece on it called read tetra packs not novels about the impact of AI. You may not be readers or not think it's important whether people have read Dickens or Margaret Atwood or the Bible or Doris Leing or anything. But your civilization is a literary civilization. When you discuss collapse, you should bear in mind Paul Verilio's dictim that when you build a car, you build into it an accident. You want to think about the kind of civilization you want to rebuild because what's been taught here is prepping. It isn't actually learning from civilizational collapse. The pe people have been speaking about things like Michelle's been talking about what being a Christian that's what builds monasteries nothing else that's fine if you want to be a Christian I don't think God told us to not have more children or not exploit the earth in the in the Christian revelation I think he told us to go forth and multiply isn't that one of the ideological problems of deforming patriarchy. So, that's not really going to work out. And Helena and Michelle are really not on the same page at all. But of more interest to me is why no one can hear what I say. So, the network is out, guys. The network caused the problem. Men are addicted. Heterosexual men are addicted to pornography. The web spawns pedophilia. You talk about using AI, who developed it. I'm currently in a legal suit with Anthropic, who used all my work to build their large language models. So, that's civilizational survival. Maybe I should just train my AI to be my amenu amenuences since nobody else wants to do the job because I'm already living in an illiterate society. While environmentalists are planning the succession of a society based on another timeline that has nothing to do with this one. You don't need to worry about what civilization will succeed us. It's none of your business. Your business is to preserve this one. So, get off your phones. Thank you. I'm wondering whether people have heard what you said about um the main message I've taken from our correspondence that was new to me is the extent of cognitive decline through how we're interacting and the the the the attention deficit disorder the lack of reading massive increase in ADDH I taught for 14 years in British academia When I began, the students were barely literate. When I ended, my colleagues were barely literate. >> Yes. Hillary Nielson has said, "I've heard well and in the past and I hear him now." Um, >> thank you, Hillary. I don't get little hearties and thumbs ups though, do I? Little pink balloons. If there's something that >> if something of people have agreed with will then [laughter] >> Yeah. And you say you're I hear a passionate call. >> Listen, my message is one of hope. It's one of hope. That's what people don't understand. I'm a happy man. I nearly died last year. I speak with some authority. My life was saved by an allergenic stem cell transplant that is a function of these very logistic systems. >> According to my own ethics, I wouldn't be alive. So, if I come here on this web call, it's not to waste my time or yours. It's 5 minutes to midnight. We're all agreed. Don't be on the phone when the clock strikes. Well, can I say it's five minutes to midnight is our task to save the living earth or to save this civilization and as far as I'm concerned to save the living earth and to save humanity to thrive and to be happy and to be flourishing. >> Well, I'm afraid I'm afraid you're on an alternative timeline. All environmentalists talk about what Jared Diamond writes about in his book the world before whatever it was the world talking about >> you all talk as if you can learn >> the lives of billions of people on this planet who do not know Doris Leing and who don't know will self and knowing that is not what's going to make them happy thriving human beings we have to understand diversity. We have >> Why do you know? Why are you the authority on what human flourishing is? Because why are you the authority? >> Because I'm here the only person among all of us who lived in a culture that had never known depression, that didn't know suicide. I lived with those people. I spoke their ancient language fluently and I experienced why they were so much happier. I went back to my native country. I'm telling you, I'm perfectly happy. >> 1977 in Sweden held up as a wonderful model of this civilization. EP, we had an epidemic of depression, alcoholism, and suicide. So, I had my eyes open very early on in Tibet. I'm going I'm going to intervene there, Will, because um I I actually really welcome the fact that you've got Helena to actually be really clear about what we're talking about here, but I don't want to get it I don't want to turn it into an interrogation. So, the really important thing you've got us to talk about, I think, is yeah, what are we talking about trying to save amidst ecological and social system breakdown? Um, I think I think Ruper what you said earlier is there are many things we can work on in many ways. We don't have to set it up as if they're all kind of exclusive and need to compete. Some people might think that's just a kind of a sort of a peacemaking way of going about things, but could you speak to that issue with what you've just heard, Robert? >> What are we trying to save amidst ecological and social disruption and breakdown? >> Yeah. So I think it would be a very fine thing to uh to seek to um preserve lots of knowledge from um this civilization and some of the things which are good about it like despite what Helen said earlier which I kind of agree about about we need the feminine I think it's also true that there has been some degree of liberation of women over the last couple of centuries. It would be great if we can preserve that. I also think it would be great to preserve the living earth. There are much worse possibilities than the possibility of uh of uh human civilization collapsing completely. Um there is the possibility that we could destroy the earth as a place where any beings are capable of living. So for example, one possibility I think we should try to hold open um is the possibility that there are beings such as um elephants or corvids or octopi or uh chimpanzees and bonobos or above all perhaps the great uh whales and social dolphins. um which if they were able to outlive us could go on to um to produce um successor species and civilizations that might be better than ours. Now, these are a lot of very different things that it would be great to try to preserve, and I think different people will have different parts of that mission. Uh, and most people won't have any real um uh ambition that that goes as high as that, but we will be interested in doing things like um preserving the place that they're in or something that's valuable from their family or their village. And all of these things can be uh valuable um if we don't uh allow them to get into a violent competition uh with each other. So that's part of what I meant by saying you know in the in the darkness of this time let's look to find what we are called to do uh along with others to to do something worthwhile and that can be look very different for very different people I think. >> Thank you. Is there we've got we've got five minutes before closing and um uh Rupert are there any other questions from the chat. The conversation was so lively I didn't get a chance to look at the chat. So >> well there is there is one other question it would be good to come to because it's another big uh question. Okay. There's a question from uh Zoe Cohen. And what Zoe asked was, "Aren't we euphemizing or avoiding naming mass loss of life or do the panelists think that that isn't going to happen?" I wonder if we might invite the panelists to to address that. >> So, I just like to to reframe that slightly. So if we're talking about softening collapse or maintaining something of our current societies which we value >> um where how do either of those two ideas relate to um the possibility or likelihood of mass death I guess therefore not through war but possibly war but but through starvation malnutrition. >> When I was born there were 2 and a half billion people in the world. There are now nine billion. Okay. So, you're going to tell me that all those seven billion people have some weird inviable right to life? I think that's the spectre you're projecting onto the heavens. I'm wondering if the question from Zoe and maybe Zoe can articulate it herself is more about no matter how futile our efforts might be, are we trying to help avoid as much mass death as possible in in the years ahead? Is that a priority or is something else? >> Yeah, but as environmentalists, we should have avoided. Well, I'd like I'd like to hear from Zoe on that. Um, if she's available and also from well, actually Michelle, you've been uh listening for a while. Have you thought this through this idea of of and it's because it's a broader issue of what does how much does a humanitarian ethic matter and and and so on. Oh, Zoe, you're there. >> I Michelle Zoe, can you say something? >> You can hear me, Zoe. Yeah. I mean I think um uh I think I intended the question on a fairly straightforward level as I typed it really um do does each person actually believe that we are going to go through a phase of mass loss of life at a scale you know enormous scale and therefore are we avoiding talking about it or euphemizing it or does each person actually not think that's going to happen >> all right so yeah I do believe there will be loss of life and and more so than in any crisis in the past. I mean, that's that's the historical pattern. Um, and I don't think there's that much we can do about it. And in a way, I know I'm going to say it doesn't matter, but it's not because, you know, I I I don't think it's important, but it's the situation has always been it's not society as a whole that changes. societies and systems collapse and then you have people who exit the system and create seed forms and experiment with new logics and it's not going to be different this this time and so it's very important that the existing communities that Helena is working with you know that they are they have knowledge they have experience they have tradition but I think it's equally important to respect the new communities that are exiting right and just to give you an example just in France there were 150 eco villages 10 years ago and there are now 1 1500 so millions of people are already leaving the cities you know there uh New York San Francisco Paris they lost hundreds of thousands of people where are they where they are they're going to the villages and to the small cities China has stopped urbanization three four years ago Right. They have a new law bankrupted all the real estate speculators and they're investing in the rural. I went uh five weeks in China visiting grassroots communities of the national rural reconstruction movement. They're rebuilding their rural base. They're preparing. They call themselves an ecological civilization. Of course, they're not h they're far from 100% uh you know serious, but but they actually are making these uh preparatory strategies uh for the for the long run. >> That's something I would like to to like to learn more about maybe very important to watch the seed forms. What are people doing >> right? And then you have the the more ancient tradition. >> I just want to make it very clear that I've been working with the eco villages. I'm a founder of the global eco village network and I've also been collaborating with the rural reconstruction movement in China for the past 15 years. So absolutely we are working globally and we're connecting people across the so-called global south and the global north. Very important connection to dispel the myth that America is a paradise on earth that everyone has so much money doesn't have to work which makes rural populations feel inferior. So the psychological dimension in all of this is also very important. And why I totally agree with you Michelle, we need international collaboration and connection to strengthen this movement. This is part of this global localization movement. The rural reconstruction movement in China via Campisina with about 200 million small farmers, the permaculture movement, the transition movement. are all part of people finding ways that are human, human human scale and profoundly ecological and allow people to heal and to thrive, but they're all the time working against a system that keeps slamming it down, bringing regulations that make it very difficult. >> Thank you, Helena. I think the main thing is this kind of conversation still in in my world is is rare. Environmentalists generally are not talking about these darker scenarios and it's it's a it's difficult and if we were all agreeing then I think maybe we're not recognizing the the gravity of the situation. So, um, what I've got from the conversation is, uh, thinking I've got more work to do. So, I'm actually feeling somewhat enthused and excited about my choice to stay engaged in these topics rather than just focusing on music uh, and my little farm. Um, I started this meta crisis initiative back in September with the idea I would get back involved in conversations about collapse and what to do about it in a positive way, a purposeful way. There are so many different views on that and that's great that there are so many different views on that. The fact that there aren't enough conversations about it, that's not great. So, I'm pleased that you all joined today. I'm Thank you, Rupert, for helping get started. Thank you, Rupert, also for despite some of our disagreements back in 2018 for being so open to ongoing dialogue and collaboration because you have your eye on the bigger picture which is that we need to begin to learn how to talk about these uh super tough worrying uh situations. >> So, final word to you and then and then we close. >> Well, thank you Jim. Look, I won't keep people. We're we're over time here. I think it's been vigorous and exciting uh and great stuff uh in the chat which people can of course save if they want to and yeah I too look forward to the recording. I think we need to have these difficult conversations and >> so thank you Rbert, thank you Helena, thank you Michelle and thank you Will and thank you everyone for joining. So for those of you who are part of the initiative, see you next month. [music]