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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
September, 2004
1. INTRODUCTION
This month's newsletter is a review of the book 'Our Final Century' by the Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. Since
dark age theory holds as an axiom that today is a typical moment in history, not a special moment in history, I
am immediately prejudiced against a book whose title implies that we are living in a special, culminating era of
the human story. However, Martin Rees's book is more balanced than is suggested by its attention grabbing title.
A lot of the content will already be familiar to dark age theorists, and although the author does have a few original
comments and insights, the book's main value is as a summary of the broad range of potential catastrophes facing
humanity.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm I welcome
all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you
think might be interested. Marc Widdowson
2. 'OUR FINAL CENTURY'
Review of 'Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-First Century?' by Martin Rees, published in
Arrow Books 2004 (originally published by William Heinemann 2003).
'Our Final Century' is largely a compendium of current concerns - environmental catastrophe, meteorite impact,
bioterrorism or biotechnological accident leading to release of a nightmare disease - that could supposedly wipe
out humanity or at least knock us back to the stone age. By his own admission, the author has treated each one
in a relatively standalone manner. If there is an overall theme it is that of the 'sorcerer's apprentice' - there
may be avenues of scientific research we should not go down because of the massive potential ramifications of any
mistakes. Martin Rees sums up his theme as being that humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its
history, and he also observes that people's expectations for how long our civilisation is likely to last have shrunk
substantially in recent times.
There is much there that any dark age theorist could agree with, and although a lot of the material is quite familiar,
the author makes it interesting and readable and adds some wise insights of his own. He makes a very good point
that the conquest of space will not act as a release valve for the population problem here on earth, just as the
discovery of America did not halt population growth in England. I also liked what he had to say in refutation of
the 'end of science' thesis, arguing that science offers infinite surprises. He is very balanced - although this
could be seen as a drawback, in that he presents worst-case scenarios then acknowledges that they are extremely
unlikely and asks a lot of rhetorical questions - will humanity move out into the cosmos, or will we destroy ourselves
first? etc. - without ever answering them. To be fair, he does give his overall assessment that we have a fifty-fifty
chance of surviving the coming century, though I think this is just a guesstimate, not based on any particular
reasoning.
My personal prejudice is that the future will be much the same as the past and therefore I have a more sanguine
view of human prospects than Martin Rees does. In fact, he discusses precisely this notion, that the future will
be much the same as the past, which he describes as a scientific principle, i.e. the 'principle of mediocrity'.
According to this, we are ordinary, rather than special. Hence the earth is not at the centre of the universe with
everything else revolving around it. Rather there has been a growing realisation - hard-won, as Galileo can report
- that the earth is a mediocre planet around a mediocre star in a mediocre galaxy in a perfectly typical segment
of the universe. To me, the idea that we live in a special era of culmination falls foul of this principle of mediocrity.
However, Martin Rees describes how Brandon Carter, originator of the cosmological concept of the 'anthropic principle',
has used the principle of mediocrity to predict our imminent demise. That is to say, Carter argues that if we are
'in the middle' that means as many people will come after us as have lived before us - and since the human population
is much larger than it was it will not take very long for that to occur. Martin Rees observes that this is a neat
argument but that it seems like a piece of sophistry and I concur. Apart from anything else, there seems to be
no good reason why we should be in the middle in terms of total number of humans rather than in terms of elapsed
time. At any rate, I think it is more reasonable to interpret the principle of mediocrity in the sense that the
future will be as full of disasters and setbacks as the past was, but that overall and in the long run humanity
will continue its upward progress.
When Martin Rees tries to present our situation as a special one by saying that "science is advancing faster
than ever", he is merely stating a truism. People a thousand years ago could have said the same thing, and
so could people a thousand years in the future. In fact, Martin Rees quotes H G Wells making similar observations
back in 1902 about the opportunities and threats of accelerating technological growth during the 20th century.
Therefore it could be argued that the 21st century is no different from any other century in this respect. While
it is true that we have become a lot more effective at wreaking havoc, there are also a lot more of us, and our
capabilities do have a positive side in that we can also fix things a lot more effectively. In the military sphere
it has been pointed out that battlefield casualty rates have remained fairly constant over the centuries despite
vast increases in weapon lethality, and this is because people have evolved responses to those increases in lethality
- albeit slowly and reluctantly and not without disasters like the Somme. I would say that in his more pessimistic
passages Martin Rees underestimates human resilience. He himself notes that 187 million people died in the 20th
century through war and other man-made disasters, and I don't think he gives sufficient credit to the way that
the human race nevertheless picked itself up and carried on.
Another personal prejudice of mine is that setbacks and disasters are actually necessary for progress to occur
- we can only really learn from our mistakes - the Somme had to happen before military thinkers would wake up to
the threat of the machine gun and the need for new infantry tactics. Martin Rees acknowledges that biological extinction
is a natural and indeed necessary part of the evolutionary process, but he doesn't recognise that something similar
applies in social or technological evolution. Some of the fears that Martin Rees describes are really fear of change
- for example, humans inventing a race of intelligent machines that eventually displace us altogether. If that
is the way evolution is headed, why should we really worry about it? It doesn't affect our lives in the here and
now. To try and prevent it seems to me a call for stagnation. In any case, despite the appearance of books warning
about these nightmare scenarios, human ingenuity will not be repressed and things will unfold of their own accord.
Charles II ordered the destruction of machines that he feared could put artisans out of work, but the industrial
revolution happened anyway. By contrast, the powerful Chinese emperors succeeded in holding back technological
change, and look what happened to them.
Finally, I think it is unfortunate that Martin Rees says at one point "The most conspicuous sub-national threat
today comes from Islamic extremists, motivated by traditional values and beliefs far removed from those prevailing
in the US and Europe." Here is not the place to go over everything that is wrong with this statement. However,
in brief, it completely glosses over the political, economic and social context of what he is calling Islamic extremism.
It also lacks historical perspective - he presumably has in mind the Sep 11 perpetrators, and regards their behaviour
as being somehow typical of traditional Islamic values rather than recognising it as a modern problem arising out
of modern issues. In fact, as one historian has observed, one of the most notable features of traditional Islamic
civilisation was that, unlike western Europe, new ideas were not immediately used for military purposes.
This is a relatively throwaway remark in Martin Rees's book, and I wouldn't make so much of it, if it were not
that it reflects a more general point about the kind of analysis he presents. This is that I regard history as
a saga of human relationships, i.e. as a politico-socio-economic phenomenon. My own research and reading suggests
that the ups and downs of history comprise a politico-socio-economic dynamic and are not simply driven by natural
disaster or technological change. E.g. Rome was attacked by barbarians virtually from the day that it was founded,
and if in 476 the barbarians finally put an end to the western empire it was only because Roman society was by
that time already sick and rotten. Similarly, while some techno-disaster, as described by Martin Rees, could trigger
the collapse of global civilisation some time in the next century or the one after, we need to recognise that this
would not be occurring to a civilisation that was essentially healthy but rather to one that was ripe for destruction.
Techno-disasters will happen (e.g. the American dust bowl) but they only pose a threat when your society has lost
its resilience (e.g. the US bounced back from its problems in the 30s). Obviously Martin Rees did not set out to
write about the political, economic and social problems facing global society, so this is not a criticism of his
book, but to me those issues are more interesting and more fundamental than the precise nature of the straw - nuclear
war, meteor impact, bio-plague - that breaks the camel's back.
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