WOE, WOE.
‘Woe! Woe to you, great city,
you mighty city of Babylon!
In one hour, your doom has come!’ Revelation 18: 10.
“Woe”, is an old-fashioned word for ‘great stress’. Let me rephrase this Bible text: “Our commerce-dominated world, our AI obsessed society is utterly doomed. We now live on the edge of the ultimate volcano: any minute the most lethal of all outbursts, its monstrous Magma, will totally engulf us, incinerating all that lives to total oblivion.”
What’s happening?
Psalm 50 has an answer:
He summons the heavens above,
and the earth, that he may judge his people.
The Lord built a ‘revenge feature’ into his creation: Harm the heavens, exploit the earth, and creation exacts vengeance. That’s what we experience today.
You don’t believe me, of course.
Here’s another line: ”You must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him”. That is Jesus’ timely reminder in Matthew 24, depicting the earth’s conditions in 2025.Both the apostles Peter and Paul affirm this when they write that the Parousia, the return of the Lord, will come ‘like a thief in the night’.
Just a few examples, something we city-slickers don’t notice: Already an insect apocalypse is under way. Considering the importance of insects to our daily lives, the ongoing insect apocalypse is very important. Insects pollinate our food, control pests, decompose dead plants into soil, and serve as a food source. They contribute to the cycling of nutrients and are vital for maintaining soil health. Beyond land, they also maintain the cleanliness of aquatic ecosystems.
Another warning: “Already chemical pollution is beyond remedy: it too is a threat to the thriving of humans and nature.”
And then, of course, there is Climate Change: it is advancing and accelerating much faster than earlier predicted.
Don’t kid yourself: Collapse is coming.
Two books confirm this.
In addition to the biblical warnings, there are lots of alarm bells ringing. In 2005, an almost 600 pages book: COLLAPSE, was published, written by Dr. Jared Diamond, professor of geography in Los Angeles. Its subtitle: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Being a Collapsetarian by faith – deeply influenced by the last Bible book, Revelation – I bought the book two decades ago. Paid $47.00 (Can.), and here is what I read: “Dr. Diamond traces a fundamental pattern of catastrophe, spelling out what happens when we squander our resources, when we ignore the signals our environment gives us, and cut down too many trees”.
Interesting times.
We live in a time of cosmological chaos. We see hierarchies humbled; we see social norms discarded, we see morality demolished, we see new philosophies emerging, and we see God ignored.
Then there is this new book, discussed in the Guardian: Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp. Here’s the opening line:
“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” writes Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.
He notes that today’s global civilisation is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse ever. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of a dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.
“It is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status”, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”
Three reasons.
Dr. Kemp cites three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than previous events. First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance. “In the past, those battles were waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons.”
Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. “Today, most of us are specialised, and we’re dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,” he says.
“Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,” he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.
“The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”
The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society.
My final comments.
Finally, we have a sober assessment: the forces at work are irreversible. I agree with his synopsis, with one single tiny change:
Self-destruction AND a fundamental transformation of society, to which I add: brought about by Jesus’ crucifixion – John 3: 16.