The Lesser Dystopia
(This is part 3 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In On the Fragility of Civilization, I argued that due to the slowly compounding effects of an increasing number of relatively localized โnaturalโ disasters caused (directly or indirectly) by climate change, a vicious circle of failing disaster management, economic decline, civil unrest, and hunger will trigger a cascade of collapsing societies, eventually leading to global societal collapse in roughly 25 to 30 years from now (give or take a half decade). The world during and after collapse will be very different from what most of us have ever experienced,...
On the Fragility of Civilization
(This is part 2 in the No Time for Utopia series.) Doom has always been a major attraction for some, perhaps even many people. There are whole subgenres of extreme (heavy) metal built on the aesthetics of death, doom, and decay. But โdoomโ in the form of extreme pessimism about the (near) future is also increasingly common in discussions about climate change and its effects. In Stages of the Anthropocene I tried to look into the more distant future. Whether what I found is an example of โdoomโ in this sense is debatable โ at least I didnโt predict human...
No Time for Utopia
Most political thought is โideal theoryโ: its arguments are based on an idealized world in which important aspects of reality are abstracted away. Abstraction isnโt necessarily a bad thing โ in the contrary, it is often necessary in science โ but it isnโt self-evident that the results of abstractions and idealizations are (always) applicable to the real world, and if theory doesnโt descend from the ideal world to reality it turns into an intellectual game without practical relevance; or worse, as the case of neoclassical economics illustrates. In that case abstraction and idealization resulted in a โtheoryโ that explains nothing,...