Civilization Is Shutting Down
Yesterday, Spain and Portugal had what was possibly the largest blackout in the history of the Western world. Millions of people were stranded, trapped in underground trains or traffic jams, and while the body count has not yet come in, large numbers almost certainly died. This comes despite many decades of efforts to make power grids more robust. One day later, there’s no still no explanation as to what happened, and official accounts have cited atmospheric phenomena that apparently do not exist. It’s a conspiracy theorist’s dream.
But the power outage is a demonstration of a more fundamental failure: civilization is no longer meeting the most basic needs of human beings. Affordable homes are disappearing. Hospitals are so overwhelmed that patients are collapsing in the waiting room. Many commentators fear that democracy itself is on the brink of collapse.
But the problem is not just bad policy but bad philosophy. Today’s nation-states were built in an era of mythology and faith. They could appeal to ancient values — God or King — that would bind people together even in the face of great adversity. But those values no longer have relevance. The people don’t believe in God, and they hate the King. It’s no surprise that institutions built on these values cannot function. They are empty at the core.
To reverse the collapse of civilization, nations must rebuild for a different era, one of transparency and science. And to survive in this era they must appeal to a new set of values that can earn the people’s trust.
This is where animal rights come in. The best test of whether our institutions are trustworthy is how they treat those who are most powerless to defend themselves from abuse. I’ve called it the moral stress test. And only if our system can pass this test can it survie the forces that are causing civilization to collapse.
I certainly hope something good will come from all the bad things now happening in the world.
Thank you! At first glance re: this post, I'd say your gratitude for the work you've done, and your general optimism, are part of the way forward. We --- and many other species whose lives are affected by us --- are at an unprecedentedly difficult point in our existence in this biosphere. My understanding of this tells me that for many millions of years in our drive to solve daily problems like hunger and danger from other species, we have over-instrumentalized life around is and within us. --- So much so that generally we have missed the fact of wholeness, commonality, the single whole system that we share with others, other species, around us and inside of us. It is almost unthinkable to think of telling "our leaders" of the present that we share this world with the animals and plants they are trying to erase from memory and vocabulary with destruction of wilderness and destruction of gains made by "democracy", enabling expanded factory farm "liberties" and so on, merely in the name of a few corraled, corraling human nationalities. So it emerges that although animals suffer under the attacks of the most advanced predators, probably their simple attitude of truth to life is good enough to show us more of the way forward also. Just as it is one of the things that inspired animal liberationists to start with. And remember, lying embezzlers can ogle Mars, or somebody else's pile of bombs somewhere, but they won't package the universe, which is "the Life" happening . . . including their portions of "the Life" . . . roughly speaking, this is my current reaction to "anthropogenic" stress.