Sustainability and Complexity: Are We Doomed to Repeat History?
This excellent, moderate, scientifically-grounded essay illustrates how the Boomer-Blaming Doofus in that other thread is out to lunch.
Sustainability and Complexity: Are We Doomed to Repeat History?
by William Ophuls
Civilizations are trapped in a vicious circle. They must keep solving the problems of complexity, for that is the sine qua non of civilized existence; but every solution creates new, ever more difficult problems, which then require new, ever more demanding solutions.
Thus complexity breeds more of the same, and each increase in complexity makes it harder to cope, while at the same time escalating the penalty for failure. Breakdown becomes unavoidable in the long run. In effect, civilizations enact a tragedy in which their raison d’être – the use of energy to foster the complexity that raises them above the hunter-gatherer level of subsistence – becomes the agent of their ultimate downfall.
Dire implications follow directly from seeing civilizations as chaotic in the scientific sense. Complex adaptive systems are stable until they are overstressed. Then one perturbation too many, or one that arrives at the wrong moment, can tip the system into instability virtually overnight, with unpredictable and frequently distressing consequences.
The second implication is even more distressing to contemplate: there may be no way to reform an advanced civilization. Complex adaptive systems operate according to their own inner dynamic, which can only be imperfectly understood by the human mind or influenced by human conduct.
Writers like
William Catton and
Joe Tainter are also on point with this assessment of the human situation at the opening of the 21st century.
Most of my own essays also address this topic:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/