7: The Collapse of Civilisation and the Second Renaissance
14/04/25
This is a tale about two places on the internet, and the apparently contradictory things they have to say about the future of civilisation and humanity. The first is a very large community on Reddit: r/collapse, where the 530,000+ members seek to deepen their understanding of the collapse of civilisation that all of them have fully accepted is coming. The questions people seek to answer there are about how collapse is already becoming evident in different places, how it is likely to play out in the future, just how bad things are likely to get, and how soon. Anything resembling a positive vision of the future is downvoted to oblivion on r/collapse. The only optimism on offer is of the “hopefully it will be over quickly” variety.
The other is a very small independent forum called Second Rennaissance (2R). Nobody I have encountered on 2R thinks collapse is unavoidable. They certainly agree that it is a distinct possibility, and looking more likely all the time, but for them that's just another reason to focus on their primary interest, which is a shared belief that a major cultural paradigm shift is brewing – something as revolutionary as the (first) Rennaissance. Exactly how this paradigm shift should be defined – what is actually going to shift – is currently unclear, but not so unclear that nothing can be made out at all. At the very minimum it is something to do with Western civilisation's current crisis of meaning and our broken relationship with the truth. Something has gone badly wrong in terms of ideology and knowledge, and what the people at 2R have in common is a strong conviction that it is at least theoretically possible to identify what has gone wrong and work towards a solution. The consensus there is that there is still a reasonable chance that we can fix this before civilisation reaches the point of no return and collapse becomes inevitable.
My own view, which I will explain below, is that both these groups of people are grappling with ideas which are going to be critical to the future of humanity. In at least some very important ways, each group is not only absolutely right, but they're on to something that the overwhelming majority of the human race is yet to realise. But there also something very important that each group does not fully understand: they don't understand each other. And yet understanding each other is exactly what both groups need to do, precisely because because they're both right. 2R has a nascent vision of a better future for humanity, but that vision is incomplete and they have no credible theory of change – they don't have a clear idea how we are going to get from the old paradigm to the new paradigm (which is itself still only vaguely defined). The denizens of /r/collapse have a profound theory of change, because they think the world as we know it is guaranteed to come to an end, but most have no vision of the future beyond “everything's ****ed and we'll be lucky to avoid extinction.”
Is it possible to complete the incomplete theory of change to be found at r/collapse by completing the incomplete vision of a new cultural paradigm to be found at 2R? Is it possible that what begins as the collapse of civilisation could lead to a second renaissance? Or, could it be possible for a second renaissance to occur during the process of collapse?
For the rest of this article, I'm going to focus on the perspective of r/collapse (530,000 is a lot of people). Therefore there is no need to make a case for why collapse is inevitable – the problem at r/collapse is more like a “collapse inflation” which always heading towards certain extinction. But not everybody who posts on that subreddit holds such extreme views – as a rough guess I'd say the balance of opinion would be that one billion survivors of the coming die-off is an optimistic estimate. For the purposes of this article, I will assume that the majority view is that civilisation as we know it cannot possibly survive, that the coming changes are going to be chaotic, largely involuntary and unmanageable, and whatever (relatively) stable state emerges at the other end of this process is going to be very different to the world that everybody reading this knows.
A marginally less gloomy outlook can be found at Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation. Here you can find people who are just as resigned to collapse as the people at /r/collapse but who have chosen a different response. Instead of focusing on coming to terms with giving up, DA is all about preparing to face the storm that is coming. It's partly about the psychology of dealing with it, and partly about the practical steps we need to take in response to it. I consider people sympathetic to DA to be my ideal readers – they understand collapse and they are committed to mentally and physically preparing for the future. But I think it is fair to say that the majority of deep adapters aren't expecting a second renaissance either.
Some readers will find the whole discussion about 2R rather pointless. Civilisation will be collapsing. Aren't we going to be rather busy just trying to survive? Will we have time to craft a major leap in cultural evolution? On this view it's a non-starter even before you even engage with the idea itself. I think it is therefore helpful to “bracket” collapse – just temporarily forget about that so we can focus on this idea of a second renaissance and try to get a sense of what it is actually supposed to be. I will assume readers have no knowledge of philosophy at all.
It does help to think about how we got into this mess. At least part of the reason is cultural-psychological, and something to do with nobody knowing what to believe anymore. Either that or people believing all sorts of strange things, often very strongly. Our society is fragmented and in conflict with itself, and so, to a large extent, are our own thoughts. There is an epidemic of mental illness. Does it have to be this way? Is there a reason for it? I think the answers are no and yes.
Modern western philosophy isn't just one thing. It's two very different things, and it has been that way for a long time. These two great traditions of modern Western philosophy are known as “Analytic” and “Continental”. Broadly speaking each of them corresponds to one half of the dualism of French philosopher René Descartes. Continental philosophy is heavily focused on the subjective realm of mind, while analytic philosophy is more closely aligned to objectivism and scientific materialism. These two schools of thought operate as if they were in different worlds – they scarcely acknowledge each other's existence, and neither makes much in the way of attempts to build bridges to the other. And yet both of them purport to be explanations of exactly the same reality: there is only one world. How did this state of affairs come about? When did these two traditions part company from each other, and why? Because if we can find the answer to this question – the right answer – then it might become possible to find a way to bring them back together again. That is the sort of thing that might provide a basis for something as world-changing as a second renaissance. It is the sort of thing that the people at 2R are in search of, though as things stand there is no sign of a consensus about what it might actually look like. Even the description I've already provided is very much my own.
The point of the schism is reasonably straightforward to identify, because it is the central idea in what is arguably the most influential philosophical book since antiquity: Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). For the previous century European philosophers had had an epic argument about how to put philosophy on as secure a foundation as the new, all-conquering “natural philosophy” that we now call science. This process reached a peak in the work of Scottish philosopher David Hume, who ran up against a whole series of apparently impossible problems trying to figure out how reality is constructed – in very simple terms: how mind is related to matter, and how causality works. Hume never found satisfactory answers to his questions, but his work provoked Kant into writing the CPR, in which he offered a revolutionary solution. Instead of splitting reality into mind and matter, Kant split it into phenomena (things as they appear to us) and noumena (things as they are in themselves). In this regime, matter is part of phenomena – part of what people previously called “mind” – and noumena is not just unknown but fundamentally unknowable. Kant claimed that space and time are conditions for human experience of anything at all, not properties of a reality that exists “beyond the veil of perception”. This is what set up the schism. From the perspective of analytic philosophy and materialism, science was telling us about the only reality that matters – physical reality. From the perspective of continental philosophy, physical reality is part of mental reality and the reality the materialists think they know about is as unknowable now as it was for Kant. Not only does this division still exist, but it has fostered even deeper divisions. The prevailing epistemological situation is therefore a giant, confusing mess, and most people don't hold out much hope for that situation changing any time soon. So where is this second renaissance going to come from?
There is a relatively straightforward way to explain my own answer to this question. Something very important has changed since since the time of Hume and Kant, and very few people have paid sufficient attention to the implications. When H&K were writing, it seemed a dead certainty that classical Newtonian mechanics was “the final word” as a general theory of physics. It didn't explain everything, but what it did explain it explained with such breathtaking accuracy that no serious thinkers had any reason at all to suspect that one day it would be superseded by a radically different sort theory. And yet that is exactly what happened. In 1925, three different physicists invented three different versions of what we now know as quantum mechanics. In the century that has passed since then, multiple metaphysical interpretations of quantum theory have been invented, but none has been accepted as correct. In other words, we radically don't understand what quantum theory is telling us about the nature of reality. We don't what it means. Understanding this is key to understanding why a second renaissance really is possible, because it must mean something. By that, I mean there must be a correct metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics – there must be a way that reality is actually constructed. And I see no reason to believe it is impossible for us to figure out what that correct answer is.
The question I believe we need to be asking is this: What if Hume and Kant had been working on the same sort of philosophical problems, but starting with quantum mechanics instead of classical physics? The answer is very interesting. The different interpretations of quantum theory revolve around what is called the Measurement Problem. This is the problem of explaining how we get from a mathematical description of a multiverse – a world where all physically possible outcomes occur in parallel (the deterministically evolving “wavefunction”) – to the single timeline we actually experience. How does many worlds become one world? This is called “the collapse of the wavefunction” and there is no consensus on what it is supposed to mean, or even whether it happens at all. What I find interesting is that the dualism between the uncollapsed and collapsed wavefunction can be mapped perfectly on to Kant's noumena and phenomena (respectively). The only difference is that now instead of noumena being completely unknowable, they are only unknowable in the way the contents of Erwin Schrodinger's box is unknowable. We can't be sure whether the cat is dead, alive, or in a superposition of dead and alive at the same time, but it is not the case that we can know nothing at all about the contents of the box. We know, for example, that it contains a cat, and not a dog.
Why does this matter? It matters because we now we don't need to say that noumena are completely unknowable and uncognisable – rather, noumena (or at least those parts of noumena which correspond to the phenomenal material reality we experience) are unknowable only in the specific ways that quantum theory dictates they are unknowable. Noumenal reality is a very strange sort of place, in many ways quite unlike the phenomenal reality we actually experience – we certainly never experience dead and alive cats. But we have re-established some sort of contact with a reality beyond the veil of perception, and we know quite a lot about it. I believe this offers us a route to bringing the two traditions of Western philosophy back together again. It opens up the possibility of a new sort of “theory of everything” – or at least a revolutionary step in that direction.
[Takes deep breath.]
OK...so now let's assume that 2R are onto something. It's still not clear exactly what it is, but there's certainly scope for something to happen in terms of ideas about how reality works or what it might be possible to know about it. Let's imagine some sort of second renaissance really is possible. Unfortunately, civilisation as we know it is going to collapse. But there is another way to look at this. As described above, 2R is lacking a theory of change – its proponents have very little idea about how this cultural revolution can actually come about, even if somebody manages to figure out the elusive details. This is why I believe the people at r/collapse and the people at 2R need to get to know each other better. If there's one thing collapse awareness does for people, it is to open their minds to the possibility of radical change. Collapse aware people are already expecting very big changes, and in most cases they aren't very sure about the details either. Trying to predict the course of collapse is a mug's game anyway – it is going to be chaotic, so all sorts of things might happen. But the future is at least ripe with possibility for something new.
Could collapse awareness and the awareness of the possibility of radical cultural change be brought closer together? My answer is a resounding yes. I think we need to accept that a significant degree of collapse is now absolutely inevitable: that the world as we know it is going to come to a chaotic and involuntary end. I am saying this partly because I think it is true and I care about the truth as an end in itself, but also because I think that civilisation as we know it is unreformable. We aren't going to voluntarily reform an unsustainable system, so collapse is inevitable. But I also believe that the sort of actions required to maximise our chances of surviving the collapse are largely the same actions required to build a completely new sort of civilisation – one which actually works. What we are missing is the ideological glue to hold a movement together which is capable of transforming a process of collapse into a process of transformation. Which is exactly what 2R is supposed to be feeling its way towards. How this process plays out, given what looks to me like a resistance of an acceptance of the reality of collapse, remains to be seen.
I have my own suggestion as to what the new paradigm could look like, and for me "2R" has a second meaning. I think the Second Renaissance needs to be a Realist Revolution. But an explanation as to what that actually means must wait for a later post.