I am a theoretical physicist working in the US. I was trained to take a messy piece of the subatomic world, strip it down to something calculable, with the motivation of learning something new about Nature from it. It is a beautiful discipline and a long way from everyday life.

For some time now, other problems that keep me reading late have been on the other side of that distance and concern biodiversity, soils, energy, food, and how long an Occidental society like ours can keep running the way it does.

The next few decades will certainly ask for a lot of careful thinking about how to live. I come to these questions out of curiosity rather than through my work or specific scientific expertise. My view and knowledge of them are still evolving, and writing here is one way I expect to sharpen them.

What is hardest to imagine

There is a pattern in the historical record I find difficult (because of the irony, mostly) to look away from. The people best placed to see an order ending are usually the last to consider it possible. For example, the late Roman imperial elites tended to write about the permanence of their arrangements right up until those arrangements ended, and they did so even as inequality within those arrangements climbed steeply. After several generations of relative stability, the end of the thing that has always been there is not a something anyone has the vision to see.

We are not better equipped than the Romans it seems. After two centuries of what we have agreed to call progress, the proposition that a thermo-industrial civilization running on high growth rates could come apart is not one most people can entertain for more than a few seconds at a time. I include myself. I can follow the scientific arguments and I can check the arithmetic myself, on sea surface temperature, on biodiversity loss, etc. What I realize I (we?) have a harder time doing is holding what this adds up to: that this way of living may have a term, and that the term may fall within our own life.

If you have read this far, you probably already have some version of that uncomfortable feeling.

The moral weather arrives first

Here is the part I did not expect when I started reading into this.

If a collapse dynamic has already begun, its early signs might not just be related to the thermodynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans. They might, more predominantly, be moral and political. Across a good many democracies, including the one I live in, the US, a recognizable profile of leadership keeps arriving in power: fluent in fear, fluent in hostility, whose instinct at every fracture is to widen it rather than close it, and talented at it. One after another, the barriers standing between ordinary people and the world’s violence, physical and moral, are taken down and described as obstacles. These leaders are not imposed from outside. They are elected, and they are (very much unfortunately, still) admired by many.

Moral violence comes before physical violence, and it eventually feeds on it. That is not new, but it also does something quieter and more worrying. It consumes the attention that a slow emergency (like the ones we face with climate change and biodiversity loss) needs to be noticed, and it dilutes the attention it needs to actually be addressed.

I cannot tell you how a society recovers the capacity to act together, but I have begun to suspect that this, rather than a simple energy accounting, is part of the profound constraint binding us in our current inertial state.

The love of “One”

If I had to name the underlying failure in one phrase, I would say an immoderate love of the “One.” A stubborn preference for the single number, the single axis, the single word that is supposed to explain everything.

I say this as a professional simplifier (it is my job, after all, to reduce the complexity in the calculations of interaction probabilities between subatomic particles). In physics (at least if you practice it correctly), you know precisely what you discarded in your approximations and simplifications, you can estimate the error you introduced by discarding it, and when the answer disagrees with the experiment, you go back and put something else in until it works. What our modern Occidental society did was perform the same move on populations and on the biosphere without the bookkeeping and without the check. Growth. GDP. Efficiency. Competitiveness. Capital. Mastery of matter, over some unstated timescale. Progress, unspecified. Freedom, unspecified, for someone unspecified. Science, paper production, meaning inquiry on Monday, a protocol run by a firm with a product to sell on Tuesday and another math conjecture proved by AI on Friday. Each of these is a real thing collapsed to a “One,” and then it is maximized as though nothing had been left out.

The instructions that followed were correspondingly simple. Grow. Detach from nature. Individualize. Automate in every direction. Go faster, go further. “Vers l’infinie et plus loin encore!”

Part of the destination is now clearly visible to some, despite the global cognitive dissonance, and it is strange in ways nobody has loudly advertised. Summer has become a season that a growing fraction of people around the world fear because of heat waves. Cities hold more living things (at least those who manage to survive from the destruction of their environment) than the farmland around them (which has been cleared of everything that is not the crop). Big techs and the engineering disciplines are growing fat and sucking life out of the whole system as if every single thing were their object to exploit. I think it is hard, even for honest, good people in those fields, to see this because they are forced to focus on their own (or, worst, someone else’s) “One.”

For people wired up in this system (myself included, of course), it is easy to criticize climate science, ecology and social science for the often negative news that they bring. But these disciplines were never allowed to break the world into parts and focus on a “One.” They report on the whole, and when the whole is in trouble, there is, really, nowhere else for them to look at…

What would have to be set against it

I do not think the useful question now is whether to be convinced of a possible collapse of civilization. That argument is available in detail elsewhere, and it has been made already by people who know more about this than I do. The question is what a person does with the conviction, which turns out to be two questions: how to hold it without either despair or fantasy, and what to begin building for whatever comes afterward catastrophes.

Neither issue is technical in nature, nor does it have a solution we can engineer and sustain. What we would have to set against a century of maximizing “One” is roughly everything the “One” excluded. The invaluable value of life and living things in an arid and dead Cosmos. Emotions and passions, treated as information rather than noise. Children, friends, the actual networks people are held by. Intelligence and invention aimed at something other than maximized production. Relearning to follow the wanderings of reality, like it was promised to me when I entered physics. Plural, instead of insisting it resolve into single channel. And, most importantly, accepting that the world exceeds what we, humans, can dominate.

Some kind of philosophical revolution will probably be necessary first. It is hard to imagine we can fix anything in the world that we have not first fixed within us. How is this going to happen? I am not sure. But certainly, a valuable skill on this journey will be learning how to stay upright in a storm and to keep working on a house meant to be shared with the living, not just ourselves.