This is part two on ruminations of what happens if civilization falls. thoughts stemming from just having read the créme de la Crème of Zombie apocalypse literature:
There’s another aspect to be borne in mind beyond mere survival-and that is building up a culture afterwards. I live in Magna Grecia. If I had strong enough binoculars I could see the temple where Pythagorus taught math from my terrace (it’s about 15 miles away).
The very landscape, the very shape of the architecture around here bears witness to the Dark Ages. The local museums are full
of artefacts of life here two thousand years ago under the Pax Romana. And then the empire fell and that level of technology and any aspect of social life beyond mere survival were not to appear here for two thousand years.
The Greeks/Hellenes/Romans who lived here in antiquity had a high degree of technology, a safe and efficient highway system and prosperity due to commerce throughout the Mediterranean.
Excavations show how the cities were laid out along the coast
and along the river plains, open spaces, large streets, open temples. But what I see now is only hilltop villages with stone walls, only recently a good road system. I see the remains of a culture closed in on itself.
It survived, but at a huge cost. Though much of what I NOW see around me is attractive in the sense that there is general prosperity again only of a non-corporate kind (luckily) and a very sustainable culture.
I eat food produced by the farmer and livestock grower and vintner and olive oil producer who consumes those products him/herself and feeds it to their children. Not grown by agribusiness conglomerates whose board members are probably from 6 or 7 countries and whose only idea is to make huge profits, even if they have to poison us.
They don’t care. They eat better than what they produce.
This is a tightly-knit society and it is not unusual to have a trade handed down from father to son or daughter. Which
sounds awful but really isn’t. My butchers are 3rd generation and I swear they know each animal by name and there are no antibiotics in the feed.
Every evening, unless it’s freezing or raining, the main street is crowded until around 10 or eleven with three sometimes four generations, just out for a stroll. On the weekends, it’s amazing, it’s like the streets become salons. My town is, by official Italian statistics, the safest city in Italy, probably because of some of these traits.
I think we’re all agreed that we’re living in an unsustainable way and that the tipping point can come at any minute. A pandemic, a huge natural disaster that wipes out that 10,000 mile supply line for food and parts (and which is insane any way you look at it).
If enough people start thinking about this, there is a slight slight chance that we might rethink things ourselves, start devolving, start becoming more self sufficient, particularly in energy. Energy and food should be local. Networks are resilient. But our system might collapse all at once and send the smart few who have planned into the hills because all hell will break loose.
There’s a great apocalyptic novel called One Second After, one second after an EMP destroys everything run on electricity, civilization stops. And that is when you-know-what will hit the fan and there will be massive deaths and destruction. It will take a lot to survive that.
But over and above hunkering down and surviving, we need to plan for the After. We must save some medical and technical knowledge. We must be prepared to hand the core of our learning down to the next generation and the one after that. We must insure that some space be given to the arts because that is who we are. We are makers and producers but we are also artists and writers and musicians.
Some of our culture must survive. Only the best, because a lot of that is now crap, but some provision for a rudimentary library, for training in the arts, must be made. It takes a long time to learn to be a farmer, a mechanical engineer, a doctor. And it takes a long time to learn to play music, to paint and to write. Because we are
more than beasts of burden.
Honestly? I think keeping civilization alive will be the greatest challenge.
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You’re so right: “keeping civilization alive will be the greatest challenge”!
Indeed, it will be hard – I wonder whether the apocalyptic lit you’ve read highlights this challenge. I remember reading years ago one such apocalyptic novel: The Day of the Triffids. Maybe you’ve read it, it was unforgettable! And it was based on a concatenation of events that made the re-start of civilization well-nigh impossible.
In that book there were two unrelated events but when taken together, they caused civilization as we know it to crash. One event was what happened after everybody had marveled at strange fireworks from outer space and spent the night looking at them. The next morning everybody had turned blind. The second event (which had happened a little earlier) were the coming of the “triffids” – strange plants brought from outer space by some meteorite – that could move around, and when finally full grown, could kill humans. Realizing this, the humans had kept them under control in gated parks. But once everyone had gone blind, nobody tcould control the gated parks and the triffids invaded the earth…
A nice way of saying that “you never know”: you could get a double whammy of an apocalypse, just like the Japanese did now, with their earthquake cum tsunami. And we all see now what’s happening to their nuclear plants sitting on fault lines and opened to potential Tsunami devastation…At this point, they’ve got only 17 reactors working on a total of 55 – closed down for safety reasons, but since the economy is winding down and need energy to restart, they are seriously thinking of re-starting all their nuclear reactors.
A very dangerous decision…But do they have a choice? Is that how civilization disappears?
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I think our civilization is more fragile than we think. I read that sunspot activity might peak next year, the same high levels of 150 years ago, except we didn’t have electricity grids then as we do now. Imagine all electricity cut off, as if a switch had been thrown. Civilization can fall because of one catastrophic event, but then we will do our best to complete that fall. We will not immediately go into communal mode–everyone working together to put things back together again. The US has 250 million firearms. there will be plenty of shooting. Law enforcement will be overwhelmed. If a temporary blackout has looters out in force on the streets, imagine a permanent loss of electricity.
Alas, in our rush to modernity (which does have its wondrous charms) we have lost the ability to pull together.
The Day of the Triffids was fabulous, but we don’t need space plants to fall. It would take a lot less than that.
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after being in Matera, particularly living in the Sassi like the Locanda San Martino I’ve realized that apartment houses, even in towns, on the second floor are not good for health and get people nervous.
television has contributed to isolation, the net has made relations virtual, but at least we communicate, like on space stations.
Greetings
Kate
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Claude, mention of the day of the triffids brought another John Wyndham to mind: The Kraken Wakes.
There different creatures from outer space (If memory serves me right from one of the moons of Jupiter) invade the ocean deeps. First attacking and killing, then melting the polar ice caps so coastal cities and ports are flooded. His were great reads…as a child they gave me nightmares but it didn’t stop me reading them.