I happened upon an article recently about crazy ants. I don’t think I would have believed it, if it had been printed by just about any place other than the New York Times. It just sounds so impossible, some terrifying fantasy stripped out of a bad horror film: that there could be so many ants, mounds of pounds of the tiny six-legged marchers, enough to take out just about anything. In their crazed abundance and zealousness, these ants decimate wherever they frenzy to—literally they’re smothering the ecosystems. And we have no idea what to do. As a species-entity, these ants so contend with the current global balance, what can and should we do?
I remember a passing thought I had a while ago, about how fortunate it is that most of the most poisonous species are also the most remote/rare/reclusive. And then I stopped that thought and added another one—is that really such a coincidence? Or was just simply evolution, that the most common/interactive venomous species have been encountered with enough frequency that we have some level of tolerability, where the ones we consider deadly now were too rare for that to happen… and so then, is a black widow’s toxins really more toxic than [a less venomous, more common spider]? For us, yes it is more toxic, simply because it harms us more, and that’s the measure we use… would there be any other? They hide in the dark and usually retreat. A balance was found.
My point is that what we’re doing isn’t, in the larger sense, destructive or productive. It’s just what we do, and how everything reacts, and how the balance is shifted. But how it affects the individuals (who gets swarmed, who gets bit,) matters a great deal. When there were just bacteria, billions of years ago, a species overpopulated the earth and created so much oxygen waste that they killed themselves off. And this was the end of their rule of the earth, as humans see life, in reigns.
But specifically Western Civilization, and will it die… Are the Romans not a part of Western Civilization’s reach? After all, even though the Roman Empire died, Roman culture did not—its influence propagates the “Western Civilization” of today, as does that of the ancient Greeks before, as do the tribes before them. Our arts, our sciences, our beliefs of the world… go back far enough, and they have bodies buried with flowers at the time of the Neanderthals. “Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization, Western lifestyle or European civilization, is a term used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, belief systems, political systems, and specific artifacts and technologies that have some origin or association with Europe” (wikipedia); this is very broad. Perhaps certain reigns of power, specific people or specific families, will be extinguished. Revolutions the centuries over have demonstrated this—but that is no more than the vanquishing of a few generations within the culture. Didn’t ancient Egypt have several different pharaoh dynasties? And within the western scope, England was invaded by the Germanic tribes, and then by the French, and then it revolted and gained independence again, but not before its language shows the influence of both other cultures; yet all three different cultures fall within the scope of Western Civilization.
In another sense, Western Civilization is just a name. In this way it’s somewhat arbitrary, and up to us to decide when it no longer applies, and what historical marker we’ll use. Think of all the changes of names and political stances by the US’s Democrats and the Republicans each throughout history, as well as the establishment of ‘new’ parties that mostly function as subsets of the larger. Yet they claim their parties continuous.
I don’t think that the relatively recent creation of enormously booming corporations can be considered all of Western Civilization; there’s so much more to any civilization, as described in the wiki quote—and anyway, large corporations are no longer distinctive of the western civilizations.
Yes, the modern drive towards an endless growing economy is inherently unsustainable in its concept. In that sense, yes, it will have to change. But this doesn’t have to be catastrophe.
The spiders are poisonous by evolution; this is how they catch their pray—but their venom has been a design of time, and time works indiscriminately; so in that same time, creatures have evolved defenses. The ants are massive and swarming suddenly, invading ecosystems that are without any evolutionary counter. We like to think of our economy as our own creation of evolution. And we like to think of evolution in mechanistic terms. Poisons and the frenzying swarms of other creatures are pretty much out of the hands of us—either as individuals or by communal human will. But even here, our reactions to these problems are within our control, and that’s part of the point of evolution. If we want to consider our system its own evolutionary structure, then we have to remember that evolution is run entirely by the individuals, the summation of the individuals. There are no rules or ruling order other than, ‘how are you going to respond, given what you have?’
I watched a Nat Geo on Netflix on Stress a while ago. One part of it talked about a particular family of baboons. They were affected by a disease that wound up killing all of the super aggressive males in the group (their raised cortisol levels, constantly aggressors to remain in charge, left them more susceptible) and leaving the more passive females. Given this freak opportunity the females stepped up and kept everyone in this more peaceful state, and for a few generations now this baboon tribe is a calmer and noticeably kinder one. Researchers had, before this group, thought it impossible for the baboons to change their behavior so drastically. They thought it was inevitable that baboons would be nasty. The physiology of these calm baboons is identical to any other groups, except they have lower stress hormones. Their baboon knowledge and communication and technology is identical. The inner-group strife is gone. A change happened, something was overthrown. What? What part of their lives do would we call their civilization?
And then, if we humans have a problem of endless growth, if we have a problem of destructive/stressful behaviors, what do we want to call those—the civilization itself, modern characteristics, unfortunate missteps? To know if “Western Civilization” is at its end, we need to know that first.
And what do we want to do about it? Let’s just not chalk everything up to inevitability and doom.
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