The System Flies Apart
Possible Futures, Installment 2
“Humans have an expression: what is past is prologue. Minbari also have an expression: What is past is also, sometimes, future.” -J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5
IN THE 1980s, historian of science James Burke wrote and presented a survey of the ways that the western worldview has changed over the past three thousand years in the BBC miniseries called The Day the Universe Changed.
“How did we get this way?” he asked, referring to our tendency to be forward-looking, future-minded, and always on the make, “When we started out being almost exactly the opposite?”
By this point in our explorations, you’ve got my answer to that question.
But then Burke followed it up, when talking about the medieval world:
“These people weren’t stupid, they were as smart as you and I. They just knew different things...and everything they knew...was old.”
Medieval Europeans were surrounded by the remnants of the towering civilizations of the Iron and Bronze ages. They subsisted on the knowledge, the wisdom, and the religions that were in circulation when Rome fell apart, as well as on folk traditions and local knowledge that far predated Rome.
What we could call “progress”1 happened as experience iterated across the generations, and things changed, but it wasn’t the kind of change that you’d notice much if you were living through it. One or two big changes in a lifetime, usually in the wake of a big war, was about all you could expect. By contrast, at the peak of technological acceleration in the late 19th century, changes were happening weekly that wouldn’t finish having their full effect on the world until the 2010s—which meant that, for all that time, every year or two the world was visibly different than it had been just a couple years before. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and nothing has (so far) happened since.
Looking backwards at a golden age is something we often associate with epic fantasy, but the roots of this trope are sunk firmly in the reality of medieval Europe.
Of course, Medieval Europe is not the only time that the present has been defined by the haunting presence of a lost golden age.
These historical periods most often go by the name “dark age,” generally because, characterized as they are by political chaos and a lack of centralized authority, few written records or coherent narratives emerge from them. They’re not “dark” in the sense of being awful or threatening (though they sometimes are), but instead they are “dark” because they are relatively impenetrable to historical inquiry. In order to get a sense of what life was like, the historian must piece together disparate evidence without the guide of a central or official narrative which they can use as a reference.
These are the winters of civilization, periods of genuine reset. When war, plague, or fatigue and collapse basically knock the leaves off an entire culture, and there’s nothing left that works at scale anymore. Only the most basic things—friendship, kin networks, subsistence, and storytelling—that enable life to continue.
And, of course, there is the trauma. Losing your civilization to a collapse that you can’t stop—or that, worse, you participated in—is like having your whole family die in a fire when you’re seven or eight years old. You can make it on your own, but you have to hustle, you have to scrounge, and you have to do it in the shadow of cataclysm and loss.
These ages are chaotic. They’re often intensely local. They’re marked by unpredictable periodic violence and small-scale warfare.
What Is Past Is Also (Sometimes) Future
Dark ages happen when a large, centralized government and/or imperial system collapses. The collapse of Rome happened when the institutions at the imperial center could no longer command the respect or loyalty of the provinces (or, indeed, the other city-states in Italy). The Bronze Age Collapse saw a series of volcanoes and crop failures leading to displaced people (probably from Carthage and Iberia) moving in militarized waves across Greece, Mycenae, the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. The biblical Book of Judges called these people “Philistines.” Most other civilizations called them the Sea Peoples. Whoever they were, they knocked over the last dominoes in a long and stately decline of a cluster of empires that had persisted in dignified stability for centuries.
When looking over past collapses, it is hard to avoid the observation that all of the elements that presage a collapse—public indebtedness, private indebtedness, disruption of supply chains due to plague or war, corruption, lack of social cohesion, decadence, widespread spiritual and cultural disconnection, the dissolution of consensus, outsized labor supply disruption, and depopulation—are today in play, globally. The historically-minded person is compelled, under such a circumstance, to ask not whether the world they know is ending, but when and how.
What central authorities will collapse, and how badly will they collapse?
In this scenario, we do not enter a stately long-term terminal decline. The collapse is sharp, and harsh, and is accompanied by warfare—both civil and imperial—across the world.
In such a world, we should expect:
Class conflict on a scale that is foreign to living memory.
Sustained street violence in cities historically known for their placidity.
Racial violence as migrants flee zones of unrest for zones of stability, bringing with them some who then work to destabilize the areas of refuge in order to establish power bases for themselves (this quite apart from the kind of ethnic tensions caused by ghettoization, which happens in every refugee crisis).
Large-scale flight from dominant ideologies into radical ideologies, both politically and religiously.
The breakdown in trust between subsidiaries even in the imperial cores of China, the US, and Europe.
Asymmetric warfare at all levels.
Balkanization, localization, the return of genuine xenophobia, and the formation of formal, informal, and underground trade networks.
The failure of technological countermeasures (digital IDs and passports, digital currency, mass surveillance, etc.) that depend on the top-layer of the technological stack.
The return of littoral and blue-water piracy.
The rise of informal currencies and scrips.
The return of company towns.
The failure of power grids and process control systems.
The scramble of governments to secure mind-share legitimacy (through devotion or through terror) in the face of their inability to marshal any consensus or resources to solve tangible problems.
Interment, expropriation, and genocide of disfavored cultural, political, and ethnic factions.
Famine.
In other words, in a scenario where the system flies apart, we should expect exactly what we are seeing (and have been seeing for the past few years). And if this scenario truly is our future, we should expect these trends to continue until the system has crashed to the point of equilibrium. This situation will look different in different places across the world, and even across the North American continent.
In the United States proper, that equilibrium can settle at one of a number of different levels, some of which I’ll tackle in future scenarios. But for this scenario, let’s look at the worst case: the dissolution of the United States in all but name.
Why “in all but name?”
Because, frankly, I think in this instance the US can only fall so far. The demand for its agricultural products in a rapidly-hungering world will keep it just barely afloat for the foreseeable future. As long as that’s going on, I can’t see a plausible path towards total balkanization (i.e. the actual formal division of the States—or blocks of them—into separate countries).
Informal balkanization, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.
Papers, Please
So what might informal balkanization look like?
In this scenario, we should expect the following trends to continue:
“Voting with your feet.” For a couple decades now, the population has been self-segregating along ideological and class lines.
Legal defection. Several cities in California pioneered the so-called “sanctuary cities” movement for illegal immigrants a few years back. City employees were prohibited by law or policy from cooperating with Federal officials on immigration-related issues. The constitutional logic underlying this approach is fairly sound—sound enough for California as a whole to adopt the same strategy, and for localities (and later States) on the other side of the political aisle to pull the same stunt with regards to firearms laws.
The recent overturn of Roe vs. Wade is already shaping up to be another such battlefield, as are issues related to the Trans lobby.
Up to a certain point, this sort of re-devolution of power to the States is to be expected as a pendulum swing of power from the Fed back to the States, Localities, and People, but it may go much, much farther than that.
In this scenario, many such wedge issues will begin to serve as pretexts for restricting interstate travel and trade with the thinnest of constitutional justifications (just as, during the 20th century, the Federal government extended its power using very flimsy arguments related to the Interstate Commerce clause). States with similar interests, who share waterways and highways, may begin to chip away at things like the Jones Act, the Mann Act, and other pieces of cornerstone legislation upon which the Fed depends, even to the point of making the exercise of Federal authority within the State, outside of a very limited scope, a criminal act.Refusals to honor reciprocity requirements under the “full faith and credit” clause. We saw the first rumblings of this during the run-up to the SCOTUS decision legalizing gay marriage. In a balkanization endgame, this tactic will be deployed again to get around proposals such as Concealed Carry reciprocity, peaceable transport in arms, and perhaps even things like driver’s licenses and other forms of State-issued ID.
Selective blockades of commercial shipments from certain States—for example, California might outlaw the importation of oranges from Florida. Texas might prohibit the shipment of borax from California through its territory, etc. The breakdown of international trade would be reflected on the homefront as tensions between States rise.
Water rights disputes managed by armed detachments of State militias and National Guardsmen.
The end result of this scenario will be a general difficulty in travel and trade between the various affinity blocks of States on the continent, extending even to a variable foreign policy situation in different States (with, for example, Texas being extremely open to NAFTA trade while closing its southern border to immigration, while California takes the opposite tack).
All of this would, oddly, be accompanied by a wide-scale renaissance in local manufacturing and craft-level industries enabled by new onshore ship fabrication plants (already under construction as a hedge against a war over Taiwan), onshore steel production (already underway as a result of China’s ongoing economic implosion), onshore agricultural and fertilizer ramp-up (already underway in response to the Ukrainian war), and facilitated by the consequent broad deployment of more cheap machining, bioengineering, and materials fabrication equipment.
On an international level, in this scenario, things aren’t nearly so rosy. The war in Ukraine will be the first domino in a wave of eastern hemisphere international and civil wars that will blaze across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Subcontinent, and the North Pacific region.
The Demographic Winter
All of these trends will continue for a long time. While technological civilization might be able to handle a gradual decline in population, today’s decline has two rather nasty stings in its tale.
First, the longevity of modern humans means that the economic trauma of the demographic inversion will do serious damage to everything all the way up and down every supply chain and cultural institution of every nation on Earth. There simply are not enough young people to pay for the social security of the elderly generation, nor are enough of the elderly dying off fast enough to transfer capital back down into the age cohorts that are economically active. This translates directly to a world where prices rise and demand contracts, for everything, most of the time, for decades.
Second, the wave of wars, famines, and economic collapses that are beginning now and will sweep over the globe will disproportionately kill the young, the economically active consumers, and the labor force that makes production possible—all while the elderly remain largely insulated, and their capital remains locked up in their retirement accounts and entitlements (because they are the largest voting block everywhere, power which will only grow as attrition claims great swaths of the younger generations). This makes the hope for salvation-through-automation dim, at best.
These are the conditions which provoke revolutions leading to dictatorships.
The Bright Side of a Dark Age
The strangest part of all of this is that, despite mass death and famine, major political reorganization across the globe, broad-scale financial collapse (possibly even including the dollar) the near-dissolution of the American identity, and the substantial decline (if not outright death) of representative democracy, this new Dark Age will not be altogether dark.
Historically, everything that defines a culture comes out of its previous dark ages.
Christianity didn’t get a foothold until the Roman decline forced the Emperor to pick from among the popular mystery cults that had eroded the Roman civic identity and promote its pick to the official religion of the empire.
Greek civilization flowered in the wake of the Bronze Age Collapse.
The Enlightenment and Reformation, which together created the modern world, were themselves the re-imagining and re-assembling of the pieces of a post-apocalyptic world in the wake of the Black Death.
And, of course, the Medieval world which the Black Death collapsed—and which was itself something of a long dark age—produced towering achievements of science and art and law (specifically, the Catholic Church anathematizing marriage between cousins in order to break the clannish power structures that kept its own power at bay) that enabled everything that came after.
The world’s Dark Ages gave us the Homeric epics, Beowulf, the Arthurian legends, the biblical Book of Judges, market economies, freeholder farming, banking, and modern metallurgy.
The Return of the Old Ways
One thing is certain, though. The social fabric in a balkanized world will look very, very different. A decentralized political system will, by necessity, strengthen political power at the level of the town and tribe and family. This will correlate with a significant, swift, and shocking shift away from liberal cosmopolitanism as the default moral orientation and worldview.
In this scenario, “money” will not simply be denominated in fiat currency issued by the Fed. Corporate scrip, bank notes, coupons issued by individual States, traveler’s checks, hard currency, etc. will all be (practically speaking) negotiable, and will be accepted preferentially by different retailers, which will, of course, make local currency exchanges (i.e. money changers) a happening business to get into.
I would also expect to see a return of multi-adult households on a broad scale, both in the re-crystalization of extended family networks and compounds, and in the re-emergence of polygyny and (to a much lesser extent) other forms of multi-partner-and-single-domicile sociality. Childbearing will be an economic advantage again, which is good news for children and for economic growth, and for women’s cultural power, but bad news for women’s political and economic power.
In such a world, we would also see a return of the prostitution as a tolerated cultural institution—a necessity in a more sexually conservative world, especially one where some men accrete to themselves more than one wife and where sex-selective abortion and/or infanticide returns. After all, the more young men without prospects you have running around without access to hire-able women, the greater your potential for breeding a warlord culture. Expect some localities to figure this out sooner than others. I’d put money on areas with a strong bias towards Catholicism or Islam to figure this out much sooner than those areas populated primarily by Protestants, Secularists, or Progressives (Nevada and other areas with a boomtown culture being the exceptions to this general trend).
We will also likely see the resurgence of fraternal orders, mutual-aid societies, religious communes, and festivals—I don’t just mean “local vendors fairs,” I mean Mardi Gras/Dio des los Muertos/Oktoberfest/Beltane Fertility Rites kinds of affairs.
But even at its most extreme, a balkanized world won’t be a wholesale retrogression to the “old ways.” Short of full-scale, irretrievable collapse, the technology that will remain available will mean that the ground conditions for this world are very different than the ones which shaped the pre-industrial past. Those decentralizing technologies I talked about will enable a lot of new kinds of innovation—especially in agricultural productivity, power production, and problem solving—at a very small scale, and will vastly increase local resilience to climactic shocks...but at the expense of the ability of governments, even local governments, to “manage” their charges.
The world that emerges is something we haven’t seen in the West since the 13th century:
A steady state world, organized around persistence and genuine sustainability, rather than around growth. And it will stay that way until population dynamics shift again, and there is the rise of a new Golden Age of limitless horizons, unimaginable growth, and, perhaps, off-world colonies.
1I should note that there are two kinds of “progress.” One is iteration upon a path undirected by conscious planning—the progress of a child through development stages, for example, or the progress of a person self-teaching a craft, or the progress of a writer through a novel (or essay series).
The other kind is progress toward a superintended goal: The perfection of a student’s mastery of a course of study, the attainment of a rank or threshold, the approach of the perfection of one’s soul or one’s society according to a particular set of values. Political progress (“Progressivism”) and religious progress (as in John Bunyan’s novel “The Pilgrim’s Progress”) are of this latter sort.
Progress in this essay is used exclusively in the former sense.