Do you want to read a challenging book about things that are ineluctably going to cause you, your children, your grandchildren unbelievable pain - that may even threaten the survival of all of us - in the coming decade? Think collapse of the Roman Empire and multiply it up to global level - famine, energy shortage, collapse of government, barbarian attacks, and then some.

No? OK, I don’t blame you. But nonetheless I strongly recommend you read Thomas Homer Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization.

Homer Dixon, Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in Canada, argues that the present global order is under unprecedented stress and that it could suddenly collapse catastrophically in the near future.

The thesis presented in the book is not the rant of a global-catastrophist nutcase, but a well researched and carefully argued exposition of certain realities facing the human race, realities that most of us would prefer to deny right now.

“When, next, will be see people walking out of our cities - in the darkness of a mid-afternoon?” asks Homer Dixon (he’s thinking of 9/11 and of the 14 August 2003 power failure across eastern North America from New York to Detroit and Toronto).

Maybe not long from now, because the possibility of abrupt breakdown in our vital social and technological systems is rising, and perhaps rising fast. Breakdown is often like an earthquake: it’s caused by the slow accumulation of deep and largely unseen pressures beneath the surface of our day-to-day affairs. At some point these pressures release their accumulated energy with catastrophic effect, creating shock waves that pulverize our habitual and often rigid ways of doing things.

Tectonic stresses

Homer Dixon believes that there are five tectonic stresses that are accumulating underneath the surface of our societies:

• population stress arising from differences in the population growth rates between rich and poor societies, and from the growth of megacities in poor countries;
• energy stress - above all from the increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
• environmental stress from worsening damage to our land, water, forests, and fisheries;
• climate stress from changes in the makeup of our atmosphere;
• and, finally, economic stress resulting from instabilities in the global economic system and ever-widening income gaps between rich and poor people.

Multipliers

Dixon also draws our attention to two multipliers that will give these stresses extra force:

• the rising speed and global connectivity of our activities, technologies and societies;
• the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people.

Destructive catastrophe? Or creative catagenesis?

If all these stresses and multipliers peak together, we may have what Dixon calls synchronous failure, a destructive collapse of all natural, social, economic and political systems around the globe. Recovery from such a collapse would be slow, perhaps impossible.

Some kinds of complex systems, on the other hand,

adapt to their changing environment by going through a four-stage cycle of growth, breakdown, reorganization, and renewal.

If the predicted collapse of global order is constrained in some way, catagenesis (Homer Dixon’s term for the birth of something new and unexpected and potentially good from a disaster) can occur. That’s not to say that it will be easy. Far from it. But humankind and the planet may not be utterly doomed.

Rolling up the old world order, unrolling the new

Baha’is will recognize immediately the truth of what Thomas Homer Dixon is saying. Baha’u'llah warns that an “unforeseen calamity” is following humankind. Some of us have spent too many years speculating what such a calamity might be. Baha’u'llah also says that “the old world” order is being “rolled up” (like an old carpet) and a new order is being unrolled in its place. Well, I don’t think the possible collapse of all the world’s major systems has been foreseen - in fact, many would still deny that any such thing is happening. But it certainly would ensure that all the accumulated crud and rigidities of our economic, social, political and other systems are cleared away and that space is made for something new.

Why don’t we face the stark reality? We’re addicted to our oil-based, consumerist life style. Like all addicts, we don’t want to change. So we either deny that there’s any crisis, or we deny that the crisis will affect us. And then we wonder what we can do about it. It all seems too much. No individual or family, we think, can actually make any difference.

In fact, we can, each and every one of us, do things that will make catagenesis more likely. Thomas Homer Dixon’s thesis provides us with a compelling reason to study the teachings of Baha’u'llah and the life of the Baha’i community, which is striving to build the foundations of a new global civilization, based on a deep understanding of the oneness that underlies human diversity and on social, economic and environmental justice. Actually, it provides a compelling reason to do more than just study the teachings of Baha’u'llah, but to step onto the path of service with the Baha’is and to join this global community in its work.

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