The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation: Chapter 2: The Metacrisis
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The biggest and deepest crisis our species will ever face has begun. Biggest because after the global population peaks and crashes there will never again be anywhere close to eight billion humans living on Earth. Deepest because the changes to the structure of human social organisation required if civilisation of any sort is to survive what is coming aren’t just unprecedented in terms of human history – they represent an evolutionary revolution of a kind that has only occurred a few times in the entire history of life on Earth, and just twice on the line of descent from abiogenesis to anatomically modern humans.
The paths to ecocivilisation
There are many possible paths through this crisis, the vast majority of which ultimately lead to some form of ecologically sustainable civilisation. None of these paths are easy, but some are much longer and harder, and involve far more suffering, than others. The paths that are easiest in the shorter term are the ones which become harder in the more distant future. Taking difficult decisions now is, by definition, hard, but not taking them will ultimately be even harder. But we are human, so of course we prefer to take the easier option now because we will probably be dead when the consequences of our decisions are felt by future generations. It is still possible that these changes tothe structure of human social organisation will be purely the result of cultural evolution, but the probability that biological evolution will also be involved increases proportionally to the inadequacy of our cultural response. Are we the finished article, biologically?
This book is about the real paths and where they might take us, and how we should, as societies and individuals, be thinking about the future. It is about preparing for a future in which we will be confronted by the increasingly difficult realities of the Metacrisis. I believe the best possible futures are those where we collectively learn to think not just more rationally and realistically but also more coherently and holistically. As things stand, there is almost no public debate at all about the real paths. Instead there is a fragmented smorgasbord of every kind of nonsense that people want to believe, or want other people to believe. Different groups and individuals continually scream past each other. Large numbers of people live their lives in echo chambers guarded by self-appointed ideological gatekeepers whose calling is to “keep their communities safe” from ideas deemed to be too dangerous, frightening or immoral. Meanwhile, the situation in the real world keeps getting worse, steadily reducing the physically possible options remaining for the future of our planet and our species.
Facing the truth about the severity of our predicament is not easy. In extreme situations we can expect serious conflict between ethical idealism and practical realism, but in normal times, by definition, extreme situations happen very rarely and to few people. These are not normal times. The whole world is heading towards an extreme situation that will take at least centuries and probably millennia to play out, and instead of hitting the brakes we’re accelerating straight into it. There is no way to avoid it now. Even if we could miraculously overcome the political obstacles that stand in the way of meaningful reform of an economic system that is fatally detached from reality, it is already too late. The question now is not whether we can still avoid the biggest and deepest crisis we’ll ever face, but just how bad things are going to get before the situation begins to stabilise, how long it takes until light becomes visible at the other end of the tunnel, and what kind of civilisation – and what kind of human – eventually emerges. Given the extent of the changes required, maybe a better metaphor would be a pupa.
Perhaps there never was any way to avoid it. The whole thing may already have been inevitable long before our ancestors invented farming. My guess is that the point of no return was no later than 2 million years ago, as Homo erectus established itself as the first apex predator specialised in brainpower. Once evolution had started down that path, and got to work perfecting auxiliary adaptations such as our toolmaker’s hands and complex speech, further increases in brainpower were inevitable. Then, when our intelligence had passed some sort of threshold and climatic conditions were optimal, a rapidaccelerationof cultural evolution catapulted us to where we are now (see Appendix One). We’re the cleverest animal there has ever been, by an enormous margin. So why are we in so much trouble? Why can’t we think our way out of it?
The biological growth imperative
A fundamental property of all known life forms is a drive to grow and expand – to increase in size, reproduce, occupy more space and/or consume more resources. This process is competitive, and it is the main driving force of both ecological and evolutionary processes. Its flipside is death and extinction – the only way it is possible for new organisms to flourish and new species to evolve is for others – the old, the weak and the losers in the grand competition of life – to die and go extinct. I will call this property “the biological growth imperative”.
Much more rarely in the story of life, something else happens: a new sort of co-operation is established between individual organisms to create a super-organism (relative to the individuals it is composed of). An early example of this “mutualism” was when the individual micro-organisms that were the ancestors of what we call cell organelles got together to produce the first eukaryotic cell (a cell with a nucleus and a variety of other internal structures, rather than just a biological bag of genetic material). In order to do this, each of the organelles had to find a way to override the growth imperative: they had to “learn” how to stop growing and reproducing, unless instructed to do so by the nucleus when the whole cell is ready to divide.
It happened again when the first multicellular organisms appeared. Multicellular organisms are a colony of genetically identical cells, even though there are many different types of cell with a huge variety of purposes and physical forms. That this happened at all is an example of the mind-boggling power of evolution by natural selection – an extraordinary feat of biological engineering. Again, the biggest obstacle to assembling a viable super-organism from its component parts was the biological growth imperative. Every cell in a multi-cellular organism is the last in an unbroken series of cells stretching right back to the first single-celled ancestor, every one of which divided, and yet somehow it “knows” that it must specialise and (in most cases) stop dividing. The complexity of this process of overriding the biological growth imperative is revealed by the plethora of ways it can malfunction, whenever the cell “forgets” to stop dividing. We call this cancer.
The next major layer of complexity occurred in termites about 150 million years ago, and in the hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) at least eight times since then. Footnote: 'Ancestral Monogamy Shows Kin Selection is Key to the Evolution of Eusociality', William Hughes et al,.Science,2008, Volume 320, Issue5880, pp 1213-1216. Each cell in an insect is a collaboration of organelles. Each insect is a collaboration of genetically identical but morphologically diverse cells. A colony of eusocial insects is a collaboration of individuals which functions as a single super-organism. In order to achieve this, their genetics had to change such that each individual that labours for the colony does so on behalf of its own genes, even though the workers don’t get to reproduce. So again we have an example of an additional layer of co-operation, which was only made possible by most of the individual units that comprise the super-organism finding a way to over-ride the biological growth imperative.
Something similar has happened in social mammals, such as wolves. Wolf packs are led by a dominant pair, and usually they are the only ones who reproduce. Other members of the pack help to raise the young, who share at least some of their genes. The system would not work if all the adults followed the imperative, so most of them don’t have any right to reproduce. If they want to do that then they must establish a new pack in a new territory.
Now compare to humans. Civilisation is another example of individual organisms co-operating to form a super-organism, but in terms of evolutionary history it is both new and revolutionary. It appeared only very recently and is unlike anything that has previously happened (to any species, not just humans). Our previous state of social organisation was tribalism – which was more like the wolf pack, though with more complex reproductive arrangements, than it is to what has happened since. There were also loose collaborations between larger groups – a sort of proto-civilisation that had not yet run into the problems that emerge when you stop being nomadic hunter-gatherers. footnote: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow, Allen Lane, 2021. In human tribal systems these internal relationships are regulated by social rules, the whole system having evolved relatively slowly as an integral part of human evolution more generally. Civilisation is on a completely different scale to this, and has developed much more rapidly. The Neolithic revolution took several thousand years, but almost immediately after humans invented the form of social and physical organisation we call “cities”, they became home to tens of thousands of people. Bigger was better, right from the start.Footnote: See Appendix One.
These new super-organisms started out as temple/city states, then expanded into great empires, and now they are sovereign nations. Unfortunately, this revolutionary evolutionary advance is still in the experimental stage and suffers from a major problem which has brought countless civilisations down in the past and now directly threatens our own: we are yet to find a satisfactory way to over-ride the biological growth imperative. We haven’t done so at the level of global civilisation and sovereign states – the history of human civilisation is the history of war between groups of humans, usually over territory and access to resources, though occasionally over important ideas, especially ideas about human social organisation. And we haven’t done so within sovereign states either – or at least we haven’t done so in the West; China’s one-child policy undeniably succeeded in overriding the imperative in its most direct form. However, that is still only one aspect of a much bigger problem and China is only one country. Elsewhere in the world, including the West, population control is unthinkable, or at least unspeakable.
In the temple/city state model, individual humans were encouraged to reproduce in order to provide military manpower, and the imperative was either satisfied by expansion at the expense of other humans, or counterbalanced by a death rate kept high by famine, disease and endless warfare. This system was perfected by the Romans, who invented the republic and pushed territorial expansion to its absolute limits. Something similar applied in feudalism too – feudal estates had to supply soldiers to their rulers, and if that didn’t keep the population under control then localised famine did (there was very little international trade, and feudal estates aimed at self-sufficiency). In the modern Western world of science, capitalism and democracy, we do not even attempt to overcome the biological growth imperative. Instead we celebrate it and encourage it. We have constructed social, political and economic systems that depend on it. To question the desirability of growth, whether in terms of population or GDP, is to reject the constraints of present political reality. It’s sufficiently outside the Overton Window
[Footnote: Named after Joseph Overton, this term describes the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. to ensure that you are talking about the philosophical context of contemporary politics rather than actually taking part in it.]
Our economic and political system requires that each individual human is actively encouraged to consume more, even though many don’t have enough. Control of human numbers is strictly taboo – “progressive” people frequently denounce it as ecofascism. The way to control the population, we are told, is to raise living standards – something that would require very large numbers of people who are currently very poor consuming significantly more than they currently do. Or perhaps the problem will simply solve itself, even though this would be catastrophic for our economic system. We are willing to call for a reduction in the wealth and consumption of the very rich, but it is widely assumed that all humans – at current population levels or higher – should have the right to enough resources not just to survive but to reproduce to our hearts’ content. Not many of us would consent to compulsory restrictions on our own rights to behave in all sorts of unsustainable ways.
We suffer from a profound psychological, political and cultural unwillingness to admit the reality of this situation. The only way to make civilisation work – to make it ecologically sustainable and therefore a viable example of co-operative evolution rather than an inherently unstable structure which is doomed to collapse – is to find ways to comprehensively and reliably control the biological growth imperative in humans. This has to apply both individually and collectively. Unfortunately there is no way to achieve this that does not conflict with what Westerners consider to be inalienable individual human rights, such as our unrestricted and unqualified right to reproduce, consume whatever resources we can legally acquire, and expand our personal territory (i.e. buy/own property and land). There is no pleasant way to square this circle.
Humanity’s future
What is the long-term fate of Homo sapiens? Are we going to so thoroughly wreck this planet that the entire land surface becomes uninhabitable? Are we heading towards extinction? This is certainly a popular view among some of the more extreme of the collapse-aware. I’ve seen plenty of people declare their certainty that civilisation will disappear by the middle of this century and all complex life will be extinct by the end. This is an understandable reaction to the shock of realising that civilisation as we know it is doomed and that its collapse has already begun. It is also undemanding in the sense that no more thinking is required: if everything is going extinct in the foreseeable future then nothing really matters any more. There is no need to focus on survival – either your own or anybody else’s – or the range of possible futures for humanity and the long-term consequences of our decisions today. Extinction is the ultimate example of levelling down: it’s as bad as things can get, but at least it is equally bad for everyone. In reality, near-term human extinction is extremely improbable, precisely because we are by far the most intelligent species in the history of life on Earth, a talent that has also made us the most adaptable. There is also a limit to how much damage we can do to the global ecosystem before our numbers are reduced to the point where we have effectively removed ourselves from the equation, at least at that level. We couldn’t turn Earth into Venus if we tried – eventually the atmosphere would lose heat into space faster than the greenhouse effect can warm it up. [Footnote: Scoping of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report Cross Cutting Issues, Thirty-first Session of the IPCC Bali,26–29 October 2009.] Even if we collectively choose the worst possible scenario for climate change, there will still be places on this planet that humans can eke out a living. Clearly the global population will be far smaller, but even if it is reduced to six figures then we will still not be threatened with extinction.
Another popular prediction is that we will return to the Stone Age, or abandon farming entirely and go back to hunter-gathering. This won’t happen because we aren’t going to forget what books are for, or how to make them, and the more valuable or useful a book is, the more reason there will be to look after it, and make copies of it. The paraphernalia of 20th and 21st century techno-industrial civilisation is going to be very much in evidence for a long time to come. Certainly we are going to go backwards in some respects (for most people, most of the time, collapse will be experienced as declining living standards) but that doesn’t mean we can return to the Stone Age, or to any other stage of human development. What is coming is very bad, but it is the future, not the past.
So what is going to happen? Nobody has a crystal ball, but a very broad answer is available, because there are limits to the way evolution and ecology operate. Ecosystems evolve dynamically in response to what is happening to their parts and that isn’t going to change because a new sort of apex predator has destabilised the whole system. No species can remain out of ecological balance with its ecosystem forever. Not even a very clever one.
It seems probable that humans have got a very long future stretching out ahead of us. Certainly long enough for all sorts of evolutionary changes to take place, to both humans and the Earth’s ecosystems. The broad answer is that at some point a new ecological balance will emerge between the descendants of the survivors of the die-off and an Anthropocene ecosystem very different to the Holocene ecosystem that nurtured civilisations for the last 6,000 years. There can be no return to nomadic tribalism, and no sustained anarchism. Civilisation is too powerful. Civilised humans will always eventually overpower or displace uncivilised and disorganised ones. We cannot uninvent civilisation, so we are doomed to keep trying to make it work until we finally figure out how to control the biological growth imperative.
If this view is correct, then an ecologically sustainable form of civilisation isn’t just something we should aspire to, but an inevitability. And it will not be merely an inevitable stage, like the scientific and industrial revolutions and the coming collapse, but the completion of the evolutionary revolution which began in Mesopotamia in prehistory. In that sense at least, ecocivilisation is our destiny.
Ecocivilisation, China and the West
Ecocivilisation (Ecological Civilisation) is any form of human civilisation which has established a stable long-term balance with the ecosystem in which it is embedded and upon which it depends, and is therefore sustainable indefinitely. The final state or stage of the evolution of human social organisation.
The concept of ecocivilisation is currently in only fringe use in Western politics and philosophy. It was first used by academics in the Soviet Union in 1984, then in China from 1987. In 2012 the Chinese government made ecocivilisation one of its five national development goals.
In China the concept is already closely bound to policy and governance, and rooted in the ancient philosophical-religious tradition of Taoism. The Chinese do, obviously, acknowledge the existence of different forms of society, and they define ecocivilisation as the final state “for a given society”. Of particular relevance here is that China’s political system is authoritarian: it is possible for the leadership to commit the nation to ecocivilisation without having to worry about winning the next election. This difference is crucial, because democracy is one of the hallmarks of Western civilisation, and is very likely to pose multiple show-stopping problems for a Western version of ecocivilisation.
China has already demonstrated the power of its authoritarian system to make essential ecological choices that would be impossible in any existing Western democracy. From 1979 to 2015 the Chinese government implemented a one-child policy intended to reverse China’s unsustainable population growth. There is no better example of a policy that was both ecologically necessary and unthinkable in the West. If you ask Westerners their opinion about it now, you can expect the answers to focus on the negative consequences for individual human rights (such as forced abortions) or the unintended side-effect of the imbalanced sex ratio that currently exists in China because of a preference for boys over girls. However, if the policy is judged in terms of its raison d’etre, it was a great success: China’s population peaked at just over 1.4 billion in 2021. Had it not been implemented then both China and the whole world would be in a significantly worse ecological position now than they, and we, actually are. As for the undesirable consequences for human rights, there is no point in creating laws if you are not prepared to enforce them, and the more unpopular the law the more important enforcement is. If the law itself is morally defensible, then so is enforcement. And with hindsight the sex-ratio imbalance might have been avoided if the authorities had made clearer just how disadvantageous such an outcome would be to men when it comes to finding a partner – the singles market in China is now very much stacked in favour of women. Neither of these negative consequences are bad enough to have justified not implementing the policy. They were a price worth paying to avoid a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe worse than Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and an irrelevant trifle compared to the price that will have to be paideverywhere for ecocivilisation.
Ecocivilisation requires that humans are systematically deprived of the right to behave in an ecologically unsustainable manner. How else could it work? What exactly this means must be subject to a great deal of public debate, but as a general claim it must be true. The only conceivable alternative is a world where everybody is free to behave unsustainably, but nobody actually does. While physically possible, this is a game theoretical fantasy of the highest order. In the real world, civilised humans don’t behave like that. None of us are Jesus.
I find myself heading for familiar trouble. All I want to do is write the truth as I understand it: our problem, both globally and in most if not all individual sovereign states, is ecological overshoot caused by severe overpopulation. We’re not just consuming too much per head. It’s not just that our economic and political systems are broken. The real problems are even more fundamental than that, and until we can talk openly, rationally and realistically about them then we cannot even begin working towards real solutions. That’s what I want to say, but if I continue down this path then my words will be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented. I will be condemned as an ecofascist, regardless of the fact that I’m talking about modern China as an example, not Nazi Germany. People will try to cancel me on social media. There is no viable path to ecocivilisation here. To find one, we are going to need to start thinking differently, reacting differently, talking differently and voting differently. Only after some carefully considered ground rules have been established will I be able to write more freely. These rules are epistemological – they are concerned with the categorisation and justification of knowledge claims.
This book is addressed to a Western audience, and it is specifically about the West’s paths to ecocivilisation – both the real ones, and the illusory and fraudulent ones that obscure the most inconvenient realities and the most appalling moral dilemmas. Ultimately, in order to fully satisfy the definition of ecocivilisation, it will have to be global, because all nations are embedded in a singular global ecosystem. However, it is also the case that the creation of a global ecocivilisation directly, without doing much of the work at the national level first, would be considerably more difficult than the creation of ecocivilisation (or as close as possible) at the level of sovereign states. Sovereign states have exactly one national government (or they have a civil war), and even if those governments have to face the electorate every few years, at least sovereign powers can take decisions on behalf of the nation without having to negotiate with anybody else. If the politics of ecocivilisation is impossible in a democratic state, the global politics is impossible squared. Only in a future world where multiple sovereign states are not only committed to ecocivilisation as a national goal, but also well on the way to achieving it, will effective global co-operation start to become plausible.
How can we Westernise the concept of Ecocivilisation? None of the easy answers are any good. The most closely related concepts are already compromised, and I will take a look at two of them now.
“Sustainability”
The term “sustainability” has become a ubiquitous buzzword, splashed liberally around corporate boardrooms, political campaigns, and marketing materials. Once a term rooted in ecological preservation and long-term planetary health, “sustainability” has come to mean something like “sustaining our way of life while trying to minimise ecological harm”. It has nothing to do with facilitating the transformative changes required to foster a true ecocivilisation. The result is a shallow, surface-level commitment to maintaining the status quo, often under the guise of self-contradictory terms like “sustainable growth”. True sustainability is inherently linked to the notion of balance between human needs and the capacity of the environment to support those needs without degradation. However, as the term has evolved, the goal is no longer the creation of a fundamentally different relationship with the natural world, but about tweaking current systems just enough to give the illusion of ecological responsibility while avoiding any substantial sacrifices or shifts in priorities. This debasement of the concept of “sustainability” serves the interests of those who benefit from the current system. Claiming to be sustainable can enhance brand reputation, attract eco-conscious consumers, and stave off regulatory pressure. Greenwashing, in other words.
“Degrowth”
A new concept was needed to replace “sustainability”, which would not be open to similar dilution and abuse. Enter “Degrowth” to the lexicon – a word designed to be unsettling, to reinforce the message that it refers to something very different to what has gone before. “Degrowth” is a movement calling for a transition to a new sort of economic system that can not only cope with long-term economic contraction, but can do so in a way that improves everybody’s real standards of living. In this case “real” means measuring their wellbeing not in purely economic terms, but also in terms of mental health and all manner of other life-enhancing things that money can’t buy. Buying stuff doesn’t actually make us happy (although financial insecurity certainly makes us unhappy). Degrowth is distinguished from collapse in that it is voluntary, controlled and intended to be as fair as possible, whereas collapse is necessarily involuntary, guaranteed to be chaotic and intrinsically unfair.
We have known for 50 years that growth-based economics must end, one way or another, but have not made much in the way of progress in response to this knowledge. “Degrowth” is not taken seriously by most economists, and most people have never even heard of it. Why? What makes “degrowth economics” so difficult to achieve in reality? It isn’t the laws of physics, so the problems must be cultural in some way. But if so, why don’t we have a clear idea of exactly what those problems are? I suggest the answer is that the academics involved in this area are themselves either in denial about the nature of the coming transition, or knowingly misleading people about it. This is certainly not hard science. It is very much influenced by politics.
Post-growth economics is not going to be optional. It is coming whether we like it or not. It is not a case of “growth-based economics must end for the sake of the planet and the people” but “a society premised on growth-based economics cannot be sustained and will eventually collapse”. There is a reluctance to admit this, for political reasons. This paper demonstrates the problem. Footnote: 'Challenges for the degrowth transition: The debate about wellbeing', Milena Büchs and Max Koch, Futures, Volume 105, January 2019, pp 155-165.
“[D]egrowth societies would be societies that are organised according to fundamentally different cultural, social, economic, political and technological principles as the ones that are dominant at the moment, organised around the growth ideology.
[W]e propose that the establishment of regular deliberative forums that discuss universal needs satisfaction could be one (small and first) step to address this. This could be organised according to a “dual strategy” as proposed by needs theorists (Doyal & Gough, 1991), combining input to consensual decision-making by experts and citizens. We argue that it would be important to add other ‘dual’ elements here to make these deliberative forums fit for debating universal needs satisfaction under degrowth (and for considering the underlying cultural principles on which this will be based): these forums would need to establish a dialogue between people from rich and poor countries, as well as between ‘representatives’ of current and future generations. The dialogue between rich and poor people globally is necessary because of their different relations to degrowth – the incomes and material living standards of groups across the world whose basic needs are not currently being met would need to be allowed to rise in the future until their basic needs are satisfied whilst those of the rich will need to decline rapidly. At a country level, degrowth trajectories will need to vary in rich versus poorer countries....”
These authors are saying that representatives of all 8 billion of us, with our different cultures, religions, systems of government, locations on the planet, physical resources, etc... need to get together and agree how to make contraction fair. Within individual countries the rich and poor will need to agree how to do this, and then all the rich countries would need to agree with the poor countries on the fairest way to allow the poor countries to catch up while the rich countries accept a long-term reduction in their relative wealth.
I am reminded of the New Seekers 1972 hit I’d like to teach the world to sing. Footnote: The original version of this song is worth a look if you’ve never seen it. The effect today of the original “hilltop” TV advert now is one of idyllic dreaminess which almost immediately morphs into a sinister nightmare. What the world needs today is the real thing. So buy it a coke. Real human societies have never worked like this, and probably never will. We can safely say that the transition from growth-based economics to post-growth economics will not happen this way. So there is an answer (though not necessarily the only one): the people working in this field are insufficiently engaged with reality. To make this sort of solution work, we would at the very least need the World Economic Forum to start behaving like a Global Communist Party. And why would they do that?
To be clear, “degrowth” is an improvement on “sustainability” – at least it unambiguously rejects the rank insanity of believing infinite economic growth is possible in a finite physical system. But Degrowth is a movement premised on the idea that somehow the process of contraction of both our economic systems and the human operation on Planet Earth can not only be politically managed in democracies, but managed in a way that is deemed to be fair at every level, including the whole world. This condition has about as much to do with realism about human nature and geopolitics as mainstream economics has to do with realism about ecology and the limits to growth. We’re nowhere near grasping the enormity of this problem, let alone being able to talk rationally about the solutions. In this respect, China is way ahead of us.
The coming transition is not going to be very voluntary. It is going to be chaotic, competitive, and on a global scale there are going to be a lot of losers. No government is going to prioritise the wellbeing of people in other countries over that of people in their own, especially given that this rebalancing between rich and poor is going to have to take place internally in the rich countries too.
We therefore have a stalemate between a majority who are in denial about the fact that growth has to end at all, and a small minority who accept that fact but are in denial about the nature of the process which will take us from here to there. Two competing visions of the future, both of which are guaranteed to be wrong, and for people who reject both of them, the most widely professed opinion of the future is a simple “we’re doomed” (or something more expletive). Understandable, but it’s not much of a vision of the future. We need to accept that both are wrong – thatpost-growtheconomics is unavoidable, and that the process will mostly be chaotic, uncontrollable and manifestly unfair, at least at the beginning and maybe for a very long time. The real transition will not begin with a global debate about wellbeing. It will begin with debates aboutsurvival, and they will take place at the sovereign level and below, because at the global level the game is already over. The post-WW2 global order is already falling apart. Civilisation as we know it is approaching its death throes, but that is not going to be the end of the story.
The rich are not guaranteed to win in this situation. History tells us that even though the rich go through long periods of getting their own way, at times of crisis they can become the biggest losers (the French Revolution being the prime example). What is guaranteed is that in those places where there is a rebalancing of wealth and power away from the rich and towards a fairer society, the winners in that process (which may well require civil war/revolution of some sort) are not then going to voluntarily give up their domestic gains in order to make the international system fairer. People who risk everything to fight for their own survival, and for that of people they care about, do not then selflessly give up what they fought for to help people in other countries whose situation is even worse than their own. They are unlikely to agree to this even if those other countries are themselves heading in the right direction, and they certainly won’t do so if those other countries are still heading in the wrong direction. What history cannot shed much light on is the fate of an “elite” ultra-rich class who see themselves as “above” the system of sovereign states, their immense wealth hidden away in unaccountable tax havens. I seriously doubt whether the existence of those categories of persons and places can be made consistent with an ecocivilisation. The ideology that sustains them is based on the myth of an ever-expanding pie. Without that, there can be no justification for a system that delivers them an ever-expanding slice. If nothing fundamental changes even when that myth has been exploded, then we are revolutionary territory – and this sort of revolution would have to be truly international.
The hallmarks of the West
I am not advocating that the West tries to emulate the Chinese approach to ecocivilisation. China’s authoritarian system does indeed bypass the intractable problems of democracy, but I am personally very attached to the democracy, liberalism and free speech we actually have. I cannot imagine a situation where I would not defend them as general principles. Right now I am in the process of trying to challenge prevailing orthodoxy in many different ways – not the sort of activity that is tolerated in China if those in power deem it undesirable.
I am not advocating a Westernised eco-authoritarianism either, although I fear for the survival of democracy and I would obviously prefer eco-authoritarianism to any other sort. The problem is that once you have freed politicians from the fear of non-riggable elections, then there’s no way to guarantee that power remains in the hands of your sort of authoritarian instead of some other sort. I would like to think we can save democracy, in some form. I wish to see it improved, not abolished.
Two other hallmarks of Western civilisation will not survive in their current form. One of these is capitalism, which must either somehow be adapted for a post-growth world or be replaced by another system entirely. The other is science, or more accurately certain philosophical ideas that are widely but wrongly believed to be part of science or inseparable from it. The West cannot just adopt Taoism; it is too Chinese. We need something of our own, which can play a similar role, and is fit for the 21st century and beyond.
There is a pattern here, and that is a need for a transformative reset of Western civilisation. As unrealistic as this might sound, some sort of major transformation is guaranteed, because the existing situation is unsustainable and therefore must eventually come to an end. Growth-based economics doesn’t magically become sustainable because billions of people believe it is so. The question we should be asking is how we can prepare for its demise and what should replace it.The question nearly all of our politicians and economists are actually asking is how to keep it going.
One other concept ranks among democracy, science and capitalism as a hallmark of Western civilisation. The deepest foundations of the modern West were laid down in Athens in the 5th century BC, during the most extraordinary flowering of human cultural progress there has ever been. The Greeks invented politics, science and philosophy (although all three were mixed together and remained so for a long time afterwards) but if you had to sum up in one word the nature of how that golden age shaped the future of Western civilisation, that word would be individualism – individual thought, individual ethics and individual choices. These ideals became the bedrock of Western civilisation, influencing everything from governance and law to art and education, and they continue to resonate through the fabric of modern Western society. Maybe that too is going to have to change, but if so it is likely to prove the toughest challenge of them all.
Individualism and the limits of language
The centrality of individualism to Western thought has been both its greatest strength and its potential undoing. It has fuelled extraordinary creativity, scientific innovation, and personal freedom. Yet, in an era of global crises, individualism risks becoming a barrier to the kind of collective action that is urgently needed. The ecological and societal challenges we face demand not only collaboration but also a reimagining of the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Can we retain the spirit of individual agency while embracing a more integrated, communal mindset? This is no trivial question, as it strikes at the heart of Western identity. Our inherited frameworks of thought, shaped by centuries of individualistic philosophy and practice, may no longer be adequate. Even our language – the medium through which we think, communicate, and shape our reality – reflects and reinforces the assumptions of this worldview.
This brings us to the limits of language itself. How do we articulate the need for transformation when the tools we use to describe the world are products of the very system we aim to change? Here, philosophy offers a surprising point of entry. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, grappled with the constraints and possibilities of language. His work illuminates not only the traps laid by our linguistic habits but also the potential for transcending them.
In particular, Wittgenstein’s reflections on the mystical and his later concept of “language games” provide a framework for understanding how we might begin to think and speak differently about the necessary shifts. These shifts are not just practical but also deeply philosophical – they concern the nature of reality, meaning, and human interconnectedness.
Wittgenstein and the mystical
Wittgenstein wrote two major works during his life, though the second, the Philosophical Investigations, was published posthumously. Both are famously difficult to interpret. His first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, was written while Wittgenstein served on the front lines during the First World War. The Tractatus stands as a remarkable artefact of modernist philosophy, a bold attempt to resolve what Wittgenstein believed were the central problems of philosophy. Wittgenstein’s work arrived at a pivotal moment in intellectual history. The Great War was not only dismantling empires but also shaking the foundations of Western thought. The scientific worldview, which had reigned supreme since the Enlightenment, was undergoing a crisis of its own. The mechanistic, deterministic paradigm that had triumphed with Newton and Darwin was losing ground to the strange new realities of quantum mechanics. Wittgenstein would have been aware of Einstein’s theories of relativity (published in 1905 and 1915), but these still operate largely within the framework of classical physics. Meanwhile, quantum theory was poised to disrupt that framework entirely.
In 1913, Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford introduced the quantum model of the atom, a revolutionary step toward understanding subatomic particles. This model hinted at the inadequacy of classical physics to describe nature at its most fundamental levels. By the mid-1920s, quantum mechanics had emerged as a fully developed field, challenging long-held assumptions about the determinism and continuity of the physical universe. Against this backdrop, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus can be seen as the philosophical counterpart to the scientific culmination of classical thought – a final, rigorous attempt to delineate the boundaries of what can meaningfully be said. Central to theTractatus is Wittgenstein’s “picture theory” of language. According to this view, language serves as a means of representing reality. Propositions (statements) function like pictures, their structure mirroring the structure of the facts they describe. For a proposition to have meaning, it must correspond to a possible state of affairs in the world. This idea, while elegant, imposes strict limitations on what can be expressed. Anything that cannot be “pictured” in this way – such as abstract concepts, ethical values, and metaphysical claims – is excluded from the domain of meaningful language.
As the Tractatus progresses, Wittgenstein confronts the implications of his own theory. If language can only describe facts about the world, then certain truths – those concerning ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical – lie beyond its reach. These truths are not meaningless; rather, they are unspeakable. They “make themselves manifest,” as Wittgenstein puts it, but defy articulation.
The book’s concluding propositions encapsulate this tension:
- 6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
- 6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science – something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
- 6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
- 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Wittgenstein’s concluding statement is both a summary of his position and a challenge to the reader. The Tractatus itself is revealed as paradoxical. If it is true that the mystical and metaphysical lie outside the limits of language, then Wittgenstein’s own propositions, which aim to delineate these limits, must also be nonsensical. Yet this nonsense serves a purpose. Wittgenstein likens the book to a ladder: once the reader has climbed it and gained clarity about the nature of language and thought, the ladder must be discarded.
By declaring his own propositions senseless, Wittgenstein does not diminish their importance. Instead, he underscores their role in guiding us to an understanding of what can – and cannot – be said. In this way, the Tractatus transcends its apparent finality. It does not merely close the door on metaphysics; it invites us to confront the ineffable directly, to experience the mystical as something that “makes itself manifest” in silence.
The Tractatus marks a conclusion of modernist philosophy and the dawning recognition of its limitations. Just as quantum mechanics demanded a new conceptual framework for understanding the physical world, Wittgenstein’s work called for a radical rethinking of the role of philosophy. His later writings would take a very different approach.
The Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein’s other book was the Philosophical Investigations (1953), on which he worked over his many years teaching at Cambridge. It consists of a collection of short passages about philosophy, this time with a focus on a different theory of language – that of “language games”. This time his claim was that our usage of language is much like different sorts of games we play – each language game has its own set of assumptions and rules, which under normal circumstances are never questioned from within the game itself. Much of our confusion, especially philosophical confusion, is the result of people using incommensurate (i.e. incompatible) language games without acknowledging that this is what is happening.
I’ll give two examples that are directly relevant to the subject matter of this book.
Example 1: An ecologist talks to an economist about economic growth
In the language game of economics, growth is considered to be both sustainable and desirable, and one of the main goals of policy. Anybody who questions this is not taken seriously by other participants in that language game. In the language game of ecology, economic growth is viewed as intrinsically dependent on the growth of the physical human operation on Planet Earth, and since humans are already well into ecological overshoot this can only be unsustainable and therefore undesirable. The conflict arises because ecology is grounded in hard scientific reality, whereas economics is a quasi-scientific discipline based primarily on politics and psychology. That is not to say that human politics and psychology aren’t part of reality – they surely are – but as academic subjects or language games they are not constrained by physical reality in the way hard sciences like physics and ecology are. Economics starts with conclusions derived from politics and psychology, and then attempts to find a scientific-sounding theory to support those conclusions. There is no other way we could end up with “theories” like Trickle-down Economics and Modern Monetary Theory. We therefore have two incommensurate language games, and that means that if an ecologist is debating an economist about anything concerning growth, they will just end up talking past each other. It’s like trying to have a game where one side is playing football and the other is playing rugby: there’s no point.
Example 2: A physicist talks to a new-age mystic about energy
In the language game of physics, the concept of energy has a clearly defined meaning. It refers to a specific physical concept, and the meaning is understood with zero risk of confusion by anybody who knows how to play that language game. In the language game of new-age mysticism this word means something rather different. A new ager believes they are talking about something real, and they’ve chosen the word “energy” because they have no better one, but what do they actually mean when they say it? Sometimes it seems to have some sort of relationship with the scientific meaning – it’s about “something that makes things happen” – but the meaning is much broader, encompassing things that, in a scientific context, are indistinguishable from magic. Again, we have two incommensurate language games, and when physicists and new-agers try to have a discussion about “energy”, nothing is likely to be achieved unless this situation is recognised for what it is. The way forwards, I believe, is to pay closer attention to the vocabulary and precise usage, and the context in which the discussion is taking place. What exactly does it mean to say that new-age metaphysics is indistinguishable from magic? Could there be magic that doesn’t contradict physics? Could there be magical laws?
The transition from civilisation to ecocivilisation will require ecologists, economists, scientists, mystics and all sorts of other people to be able to understand each other considerably better than they do now. This can only be made possible by some sort of over-arching epistemic system or agreement that provides shared understanding of the appropriate relationships between ecology, physics, economics, politics, ethics, the mystical and anything else that can’t be left out. To misquote Chief Brody – we’re going to need a bigger language game.
Private language and the meaning of the word “consciousness”
In another part of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein presents what has come to be known as the “private language argument”. He contends that a truly private language – one intelligible only to the person who creates it – is impossible. More specifically, he argues against the possibility of a private ostensive definition. An ostensive definition is when a word is defined by pointing to its referent – for example, teaching the word “pink” by showing various pink objects that share no commonality other than their colour. A private ostensive definition would involve assigning a word to a personal sensation or experience in one’s own mind. The problem, Wittgenstein points out, is that such a word would be meaningless in any shared context because no one else could verify or understand its usage.
I will now propose a definition of the word consciousness. This definition will be crucial in the arguments that follow, but defining consciousness without falling into circularity is a challenge. Words like subjectivity, mental, mind, or the technical term qualia – which refers to the subjective aspects of consciousness – all face the same issue: they rely on one another to define themselves. How can we break this loop and pin down what they actually mean?
The only satisfactory approach is a private ostensive definition, not of any specific experience but of the entire domain of experience. I will use the word consciousness to refer to everything we experience, have experienced, will experience, and all experiences of all conscious beings. To establish this definition, we mentally “point” to our own experiences and associate the word consciousness with what we are pointing to. Crucially, other beings – humans and many animals – behave in ways that suggest they, too, experience things. Because others can make the same private ostensive definition, the term consciousness can acquire a shared, public meaning. This is not a conventional definition, but it aligns with how the word consciousness is actually used. Attempts to define it otherwise, such as equating it with “brain activity”, lead to confusion and meaninglessness. For instance, if consciousness is defined as “a type of brain activity”, the question “How does consciousness arise from brain activity?” would collapse into “How does [a type of] brain activity arise from [presumably some other type of] brain activity?” This is not the question we started with, and similar problems arise with definitions involving specific brain structures or processes.
Some people extend the meaning of consciousness to encompass external realities unconnected to human minds – phenomena unrelated to brains yet purportedly similar enough to qualify as consciousness. However, without grounding the term in our own experiences, such extended definitions risk diluting the meaning of consciousness into something too vague to be useful.
While no orthodox definition of consciousness has been provided, I assume readers now understand what that word refers to within the context of this book.
Introduction to the central argument of this book
There is an argument running through this book, which will come together in Chapter Nine, where it forms the formal part of a proposed meta-ideology of Ecocivilisation. The first two stages of the New Epistemic Deal could come in either order, since neither is dependent on the other.
1: Ecocivilisation is our shared destiny and guiding goal.
Ecocivilisation represents a vision of a society that harmonises human activity with ecological principles. This is not a utopian ideal but a necessity dictated by the realities of ecosystems and evolution. The claim that ecocivilisation is our destiny is pre-political, transcending specific ideologies or systems. The social, political, and economic structures of ecocivilisation are not part of this definition, but the core premise is clear: civilisation must work ecologically to endure. This realisation, however, is insufficient on its own to inspire a mass movement. The challenge lies in how we navigate the path forward. Choosing a “least bad” route demands careful thought and collaboration, as well as a willingness to embrace complexity. Yet, despite the uncertainties and debates about how to proceed, we can and must agree on this: ecocivilisation is our ultimate goal – a commitment to creating a world where humanity thrives within the limits and laws of nature.
2: Consciousness is real.
Consciousness – our individual interface with reality – is the one thing each of us can be absolutely certain exists. It is through consciousness that we perceive existence and recognise that anything exists at all. As such, consciousness must serve as the starting point for exploring what exists beyond our subjective experience and for discerning the boundaries of what we know and what we don’t.
Resources relevant to this chapter<h1>Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change: William R. Catton, 1982, University of Illinois Press. Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos, Garrett Hardin, 1995, Oxford University Press USA. The Consilience Project: https://consilienceproject.org/
Daniel Schmachtenberger is a prominent thinker and strategist known for his work on complex systems, civilisation design, and the integration of multiple disciplines to address global challenges. Schmachtenberger is a key figure behind The Consilience Project, an initiative focused on addressing the deep systemic issues facing modern society by promoting a more integrative and comprehensive understanding of global problems. The word “consilience” refers to the unity of knowledge across disciplines, and the project embodies this by seeking to integrate insights from various fields—such as science, philosophy, economics and technology—to create a more coherent and actionable understanding of complex societal challenges.
A central concern of the project is the current crisis in sense-making—wherein misinformation, polarised media, and cognitive biases contribute to a fragmented and often misleading understanding of reality. The Consilience Project aims to address this by developing more reliable and integrative ways of making sense of the world, particularly in the context of rapidly evolving technologies and global risks. Schmachtenberger and his colleagues are deeply concerned with the challenges of modern civilisation, particularly in terms of governance, sustainability, and the potential for catastrophic risks (such as climate change, nuclear war, or uncontrolled AI). The project explores alternative models of governance and social organisation that could better manage these risks and lead to a more resilient and adaptive civilisation.
One of the key concepts explored by Schmachtenberger and The Consilience Project is the “Metacrisis”, which refers to the interconnected and mutually reinforcing crises facing modern society. The project seeks to understand these crises in a holistic way and to develop strategies for addressing them collectively rather than in isolation.