Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Just how did we get this wasteland?
I love a good post-apocalyptic story, living by your wits, outracing death, and searching for survival. Many stories set in these fallen worlds are focused on restoring what came before. The idea is that before the 'fall' everybody was much better off. Well is that true? Or is it a mistaken assumption by the survivors or author? What if the reality is that the world that came before is the one the precipitated the fall?
There is a fascinating article over at COSMOS Magazine entitled Civilisations: why they fail». What is interesting about the article is the examination of the role of self-deception in the failure of civilizations. The ability for a group of people to ignore an obvious problem, even one that will threaten their survival.
More Below/Beyond the Link...
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific is a small island with big heads. It's arguably one of the most famous islands in the world but the people responsible for that fame are gone. Their civilization long since failed.
As the COSMOS Article asks:
What did Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, "Think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees?" Were they saying, "Respect my private property rights?" Surely Easter Islanders must have realised the consequences of destroying their forest. One wonders whether people of the next century – if there are still people alive – will be equally astonished about our blindness today.
I ask, do we look back on the Easter Islanders as a great civilization, one that we would aspire to recreate? How about the Mayans? The Vikings on Iceland? *Maybe* the survivors looked back on those civilizations as something to recreate? If that was the case than they were themselves practising the same self-deception that led to their respective falls to begin with.
Are your post apocalyptic characters deceiving themselves? Do they perceive the world that came before as the paradise they must regain? Civilizations fail for reasons, those reasons don't just disappear after the fall. If your computer crashes and you reboot it, is the problem *really* fixed? Are your characters wise enough to recognize this? What does that recognition do to your story?
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3 comments:
I wrote about the relationship of this article to fiction. Another approach I could have taken was to discuss some of the correlations between what is discussed in that article and our current civilization.
The article spends quite a bit of time discussing why these civilizations fail to act, or fail to succeed when they act, even though they have foreknowledge of the impending disaster.
Each of these behaviours can be seen in today's civilization when confronting problems such as pollution and climate change.
On CNN is an article, Let's get real about alternative energy, written by David MacKay, Prof. of Physics at the University of Cambridge.
The beginning of the article reads:
We need to introduce simple arithmetic into our discussions of energy.
We need to understand how much energy our chosen lifestyles consume, we need to decide where we want that energy to come from, and we need to get on with building energy systems of sufficient size to match our desired consumption.
Our failure to talk straight about the numbers is allowing people to persist in wishful thinking, inspired by inane sayings such as "every little bit helps."
Pretty much sums it all up. You can find Prof. MacKay's book, "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air," available in electronic form for free from www.withouthotair.com.
In a slightly related related vein, I just read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It's a great post-apocalyptic book, in the least cliche way. McCarthy focuses on the 'now' for his characters and hardly references what led up to the fall of humanity.
I've been meaning to check out
The Road, now even more so.
Thanks
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