Collapse and The Road

Fighting over resources is at the crux of all human conflict, food, water, oil, land, women, men, children, time (bit too abstract?).

In Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed Jared Diamond lays out a pan global retrospective of examples where a lack of resources has led to the demise of a society, and always precluding this downturn is unrest and violence between the people for whom there is too little of everything.

On Easter Island the disappearance of every tree left the isolated population without the means of repairing or making boats and without fuel. A population of thousands were reduced to a few hundred miserable survivors through the ensuing war, eating their dead for a bit of extra protein and being mocked by the giant stone heads they'd used their valuable trees to erect in times of prosperity.

If we are only as good as our society lets us be, is Cormac McCarthy onto something with his unrelentingly bleak post-apocalyptic novel The Road? I suppose that's an obvious 'yes'. While this beautifully written book may seem to have little hope (indeed the vacuous absence of hope in this book left me despondent a week after finishing it) there is optimism in the dead and ashen world of The Road.

What?! Those of you who have read it shout. The horror of this ruined world is only exceeded by the acts of sickening desperation portrayed by the people who inhabit it, so where's the hope?
The clue is in the dedication, "for John Francis McCarthy" Cormac's father. Despite the deterioration of seemingly all the world's people to, at best, theft, and worst, cannibalism on the living, the father and son both unnamed "are carrying the fire", and the son clings to this as a mantra throughout the book. This metaphor of a torch in the darkness is used in another of his novels No Country for Old Men and it represents that stubbornness of truly good people not to take the easy choice and give in to the bad things in the world (yes like Batman). It's reasonable to ask again 'where's the hope?' when these two figures of morality slowly die leaving the world in darkness. However, while this tale may chronicle the death of man, the message of hope comes with the refusal of the father to live committing evil.

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that if people can retain some element of 'goodness' until the whole of civilisation is gone, then we are worth preserving.

What the archaeology and analysis of physical remnants in Collapse can't tell us is whether there have ever been such people in the history of societal decline.

When was the last time someone starving to death said, 'what I really worry about is global warming'?
It is a concern lurking in my head that the ability to give a shit about any of this high minded stuff is just the privilege of someone who doesn't have to worry about the basics. In fact I know this to be true. So bringing the point back to The Road is the question. Would I be a good guy when the choice becomes more difficult?

I guess the key is to make sure the post apocalyptic scenario doesn’t happen. Jared Diamond illustrates how much we know about the mistakes of past people, so there's not much excuse to make them again. I vow from this day forth to only drive my car when absolutely necessary... like when the weather is spitting something fierce.