This is the first of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other large-brained creatures, and speculates on how, after civilization’s fall is complete — probably centuries from now — the remnants of the human species might be unrecognizably different from how we behave and think now. But they may be also ‘recognizably’ similar to how we know, deep down inside, we really are, and always have been. The series is not intended to provide hope, or solace, or a prediction, or least of all a pathway to change. Just a speculation about how the world, with a smaller number of us, or without us, might look long after those of us living through the fall have gone.

my own diagram of what Jim Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency” — a gradual multi-stage collapse over an extended period, leading either to our species’ extinction, or possibly to the utterly different world I speculate on in this article, perhaps around 3000 CE, although we probably won’t be measuring time that way then

I have written a whole series of articles about the signs of collapse — the indicators that it’s accelerating and that all the systems on which we depend for everything are rapidly falling apart.

Today’s post is the first in an entirely new series, speculating on what the world will look like after collapse is completed. I have argued that, like the Roman Empire, whose collapse took 200 years to work through, the current collapse will be an extended one. No Mad Max apocalypse. Instead, a possibly millennia-long crumbling with periods of rapid collapse and chaos punctuating periods of relative stability and failed attempts to ‘reboot’ a familiar civilization.

But who knows? I’ve spent enough years studying previous civilizations and how they’ve collapsed, and what followed them, and studying large-scale ecological and other systems and how they ‘work’, and studying human nature, particularly how we behave in times of stress. Studied them just enough to be dangerous. I don’t call my speculations about the distant future predictions, because with such enormous uncertainty and an infinite number of variables, every prediction will necessarily be wrong, even ludicrously wrong like those of the mentally challenged technotopians like Musk, and the Longtermism cultists.

I speculate for one reason only: Because it’s interesting. Especially when one might reasonably speculate that future Earth, and its inhabitants, might be almost unimaginably different from how they are today.

For a start, I would speculate that this future Earth will be ecologically very different from, and much less ecologically stable than, the planet our civilization was founded on. Things will change radically, quickly, and unpredictably. There will be no basis on which to build and maintain what we call ‘infrastructure’, a core requirement for a civilization of any scale. And there will certainly be no safe places and cheap resources that might enable the creation of a synthetic, prosthetic environment like ours. And hence another plague of unsustainable, planet-destroying human numbers will be impossible.

So my basic speculation would be: (1) that the population of post-civilization humans, if we survive at all, will be much, much smaller than today’s (we will likely be a ‘niche’ species, not particularly prevalent, or even notable by the proverbial ‘visitor from space’); (2) that, unable to sustain new civilizations, we will return to a tribal, nomadic way of life; and (3) that, as Anna Tsing explained in her remarkable treatise The Mushroom at the End of the World, future humans will once again become, like the corvids have always, and always successfully, been, and as we were for our first million years on Earth — scavengers rather than builders or settlers. There will certainly be lots of relics of civilization’s excesses to scavenge! Our ‘economies’ will be local, salvage economies.

Books like The World Without Us and A Scientific Romance have speculated about similar scenarios. But I find most speculative fiction tends to be overly rooted in assumptions that what has characterized our civilization will characterize post-civilization human life. And I see no reason why that would be so. Characteristics of a species and culture evolve and they are situational — there is nothing essential and invariable about them. The difference between our evolution and that of our near-identical cousins the bonobos and chimps should be enough to make that obvious.

So what are some of those differences between us and our cousins that might not prevail in post-civilizational cultures? Three come immediately to mind:

1. Language – specifically abstract ones 2. Our intolerance of difference 3. Specialization and dependency

Might as well start with #1.

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF LANGUAGE

Linguists and neuroscientists insist that human brains are ‘hard-wired’ and ‘made’ for language. But as the book The Accidental Mind by David Linden explains, our brains’ evolution was a convoluted and erratic journey that left them suboptimal for just about anything — they really are *terribly designed *(sorry fellow humans). Our brains have a vast capacity for doing many things with so-so competence, so they could be said to have been ‘made’ for lots of things. Saying we’re ‘made’ to speak abstract languages is a bit like saying trees were ‘made’ to be mashed up to make paper.

Many studies have shown how hard it is to learn abstract languages. Feral children who were not intensively exposed to abstract languages by the time of adolescence, simply become incapable of ever learning them. Their entire neural brain structure has developed differently from that of language-trained children, and they can no longer be ‘rewired’ to understand what we falsely imagine to be innate human communications.

Traits and capacities of all living creatures evolve because they are useful. If they prove to be so, their continuation will be selected for. If not, those capacities will eventually be lost to ‘make room’ for others that are useful.

So what exactly is this thing called ‘language’? It originally meant oral expression (it comes from the root for ‘tongue’), though of course its use has been expanded to include written expression as well as “body language” and other non-oral means of expression, even the ‘unconscious’ communication of our chemistry through pheromones etc.

All creatures, of course, have languages, in this broader sense. Trees communicate with other trees in symbiotic relationship with fungi. Plants communicate through colour with pollinators. These are all purposeful, evolutionarily useful ‘languages’ .

Babies use instinctive ‘language’ long before they learn abstract ones, and apparently even before they are even ‘conscious’ of themselves as being ‘separate’ from others they are supposedly communicating with. Mothers (and occasionally fathers) instinctively ‘understand’ these languages. They are more than useful — they are essential to survival.

Most of us are taught that we ‘had’ to develop abstract languages, as hard as they are to learn and as ambiguous and sometimes dangerous as they are, or we would have perished as a species. Since no other creature seems to have had such a need, I find that argument dubious. But it is possible that, when we moved from our primeval homes in the trees of the tropical rainforests to new, hostile territories (maybe due to drastic climate change) that our bodies were not naturally suited for living in (and still aren’t), we required such languages or we would have eventually gone extinct. It seems likely that Neanderthals did not possess such languages, but it is now largely agreed that their extinction was a result of extermination by our species, and that prior to ‘contact’ with us they thrived even in remote arctic environments without the need for abstract languages.

As I have explained in previous posts, the more logical explanation of our development of abstract languages was for social bonding purposes, especially as our ‘settlements’ became more permanent and larger and more unwieldy in number.

As I tried to convey in my song If It Wasn’t For Words, the discovery of ‘taming of fire’ for cooking and warmth created a natural setting for conversations that were not urgent or essential, but merely pleasurable. While music and dance probably emerged first, and abstract languages might first have emerged as a kind of ‘secret messaging’ among tribe members, or as a form of joke, it likely was soon used to fill the silences around the fires.

My song talks about some of the mostly-dreadful consequences of this social invention. But in this essay I’m interested in exploring whether in post-civilization human cultures (whatever form they might take), the use of such abstract languages is likely or unlikely, or maybe even impossible.

Our brains are restricted by their biology in what they can do. It’s been demonstrated that what we call our imagination is essentially a process of applying metaphors. We can only imagine something in the context of something else that we know.

And the essence of imagination (and hence, I would argue, a lot of human misunderstandings and their horrible consequences, and most of the uniquely human ‘negative’ emotions like shame), is story-telling. To construct a story we have to imagine things as separate, and moving through time and space according to some kind of causal rules.

*Stories, I would assert, are building blocks of language, rather than the other way around. *Stories are the means by which (as they’ve currently evolved) our brains ‘make sense’ of everything. We smell something, then we ‘tell a story’ about what it represents. To hate someone, we must first ‘buy’ a story about what they did, and why. Everything we ‘make sense’ of is done through the veil of self, using the ‘language’ of story.

No other creature, I’m convinced, has this capacity (or perhaps it’s better described as an incapacity or illness). When other creatures smell something, their response is instinctive, not ‘thought out’ to ‘make sense’ of it. When they react with rage, or fear, or sadness, or joy, that’s an instinctive reaction that’s been biologically conditioned in them to further their capacity to survive. It’s not an intellectual ‘judgement’. It doesn’t need to ‘make sense’. And such creatures have been around and thriving much, much longer than our ‘sense-making’, story-telling species, raising the question of whether we need these capacities either.

But that’s where we are now. The question is, after civilization’s accelerating collapse is ‘complete’ (the waves in the above chart have finally evened out, at least for a while), will the remaining humans be inclined to tell stories and use them to ‘make sense’ of things, or even capable of doing so?

My radical, and probably unpopular, answer would be no. Not because we couldn’t retain or re-evolve these capacities, but because we don’t need them. Just like our bonobo and chimp cousins, we can do everything we need to do as a society without them. And we’re going to be pretty busy dealing with the vagaries of a destabilized and radically different climate. No time for idle chat, or developing the means to conduct it.

So what might it be like, living in such an astonishingly different, ‘illiterate’ post-civilization society? Here are some of my speculations:

• Without having to learn abstract languages, our brains will develop differently. Like feral children who have been studied, we are likely to develop much keener instincts and senses that will teach us things about our world, free of the veil of abstract language ‘sense-making’ and ‘meaning-making’. Instead of having to learn so much, we will just ‘naturally know’ a lot more. Our attention will be focused outward, not inward.
• Without the mental tools that compel judgement and dis-ease about everything and its ’cause’ and ‘meaning’, and the chronic stresses that provoke ‘helpless’ and judgemental emotions, we will be freed of (what I think are) these uniquely human negative emotions: chronic anxiety, dread, hatred, indignation, harsh judgement, blame, shame, guilt, loneliness, nostalgia, regret, envy, and inconsolable grief. Imagine never feeling these *useless *emotions!
• This will not be an idyllic life by any means: The major cause of death will once again become what it was for our first million years on Earth: Being eaten by a carnivorous animal. We won’t like that, but we’ll see it as natural, not something to be overcome. We’ll just accept it as the way things are. Yeah, I know, hard for us humans as we’ve evolved to date to conceive of us being that way. But it’s how almost every other creature, I think, ‘is’ in the world.
• We will be reconnected with the rest of the natural world, no longer severed from it like a cancer preoccupied with our ‘individual’ survival and indifferent to other creatures’ suffering. I don’t think we can even conceive of how different that will make us.
• Our vocalizations and ‘body language’ will be vastly more precise than the abstract languages we use today, but will be used much more sparingly. We will still sing, perhaps far more than we do today, but the ‘words’, if we use any, won’t matter. This will be a different kind of language, one of collective outpouring and connection, like the howling of wolves, not one of telling invented stories.

Robert Sapolsky tells the famous story about the baboon troop he’d been studying for a decade whose typically-vicious hierarchical alpha males were decimated by eating tuberculosis-laden tainted meat, but whose survivors quickly transformed into a pacifist, female-led troop that thrived despite low levels of stress and aggression. They remain just as peaceful and stress-free today, even ‘indoctrinating’ males from other troops into their matriarchal culture. The lesson is that we overestimate what we consider the ‘inherent’ nature of species, including primates like us.

I believe that the mental illness and the scourge of negative emotions that our current incredibly-stressful civilization has wrought, is a situational stress-related disease, and not evidence of the inevitability of human cultures being violent, destructive, and plagued with the ‘negative emotions’ wrought by our brains’ desperate and stress-driven proclivity for judging and attaching ‘meaning’ and ’cause’ to all of our woes, which is only possible with the ‘tool’ of abstract language.

That’s my speculation, anyway. I’m not totally convinced that homo rapiens is potentially as benign a member of the community of life on Earth as this picture might suggest. But I think it’s possible. I offer it not, as I say, out of hope or as prediction, but just as a very real, and I think interesting, possibility.

A couple of years ago, Rhyd Wildermuth pondered what it might be like without our seemingly unique human proclivity for hatred:

I think the forest asks a different question that humans don’t know how to ask any longer: at what point do you just live? At what point do all the ideas humans have about what is just and righteous stop and life itself takes over? And when do we finally choose to nurture, shelter, and grow the life around us rather than destroy everything at hand for someone else’s imagining?

Perhaps the answer to his question is: after the fall.