"At the bitter end of the Chacoan era, many elites remained in their great houses, probably trying to hold on to the past, rather like Scarlett O'Hara trying to hold on to Tara in Gone with the Wind," Stuart writes. "But the farmers who had brought in the corn harvests were long departed, like the slaves who had supported Tara before the Civil War. Chacoan society collapsed, the framing pillar of its once great productivity shattered. The beleaguered Chacoan farmers had buried their babies one last time. Then they abandoned Chaco Canyon and most of its outlying great houses."
"Prosperity, social integration, altruism, and generosity go hand-in-hand," Stuart adds. "Poverty, social conflict, judgmental cynicism, and savagery do, too."
Collapse, as Joseph A. Tainter points out, is "a recurrent feature of human societies." Complex societies create centralized bureaucratic structures that exploit resources until exhaustion and then prove unable to adapt to scarcity. They create more sophisticated mechanisms to extract depleted resources, evidenced in our own time by the decision of the Trump administration to open up the lands around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park to fracking. In the end, the technologies and organization that make the rise of complex societies possible become the mechanisms that destroy them.
The fate of the Anasazi replicates the fate of all complex societies. The collapse came within one or two decades after the peak. As Jared Diamond writes in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," the trajectories of complex societies "are unlike the usual course of individual human lives, which decline in a prolonged senescence. The reason is simple: maximum population, wealth, resource consumption, and waste production mean maximum environmental impact, approaching the limit where impact outstrips resources."
"Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps," Ronald Wright writes in "A Short History of Progress." "A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee -- or watch for -- long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by millions of years when we lived hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general population begin to suffer."
We in 2018 are beset with signs of impending collapse. The droughts, wildfires, flooding, soaring temperatures, crop failures, poisoning of the soil, air and water, and social breakdown from global warming are leaving huge segments of the world's poor without adequate food, water and security. Desperate migrants are fleeing the global south. Crisis cults carry out nihilistic acts of terrorism, often in the name of religious beliefs. Our predatory elites, who have retreated to their own versions of Anasazi Great Houses, with access to private security, private education, private medicine, private transportation, private sources of water and food and luxury items that are unavailable to the wider population, have walled out reality. Their hubris and myopia, as well as blind obedience to an ideology -- global capitalism -- that benefits them but accelerates social and environmental destruction, mean they have only bought a little more time before they succumb like the rest of us.
The poet V. B. Price, surveying the Chaco ruins in his poem "Time's Common Sense," understands the urgent message these stones impart. He writes, in part:
At Chaco I know I am not alone
I know I have heard even Homer
Weaving the tides of his stories,
And Sappho singing lullabies alone in the night,
Heard the footdrums in Rinconada
Like ancient surf through the stone.This is the place
Where the past remains.
Utterly changed,
the landscape
is the same.The future happens so fast,
It's too fast to dread.
And now
the future is as good
as already over again.
There is one crucial difference between the Anasazi and our complex society. The collapse of past civilizations like the Anasazi's was localized. There were always new lands to conquer, new natural resources to plunder and new peoples to subjugate. Our age is different. There is no new world left.
We can no longer live on the capital of the natural world and instead must learn to make do with the interest. This means the end to reliance on fossil fuels and the animal agriculture industry. It means adopting a simplicity that rejects the ethos of capitalism and the hedonism and gluttony that define the consumer society. It means a communal society in which inequality and income disparity are not extreme. If we continue to live as if the future does not matter, our society, like that of the Anasazi, will fracture and die. We will vanish from the earth in an act of global suicide.
The human species faces its greatest existential crisis. Yet, our elites replicate the imbecility, arrogance and greed of past elites. They hoard wealth. They shut us out from circles of power. They use brutal forms of repression to maintain control. They exhaust and poison the ecosystem. The longer the corporate elites rule, the longer we fail to revolt, the less chance we have to endure as a species. Settled or civilized life is less than 10,000 years old. Our peculiar human social construction is but a nanosecond to the universe. It may prove to be a brief and fatal experiment. Perhaps, as Franz Kafka wrote, "There is hope; though not for us."
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