Parsing our Apocalyptic Mood
Why are we sure things are falling apart?
One motif that captures much of our social mood in the 21st century, and especially the 2020s, is forebodings of apocalypse. Popular culture, from the Walking Dead to Squid Game, is full of apocalyptic visions with the news and media not much cheerier. Each of us may have a different apocalypse in mind - impending climactic catastrophe, the return of world war, social disintegration, the collapse of Western civilisation or the AI Singularity - but the belief in, or fear of, an apocalypse is pervasive across our societies. While this is far from unique in human history, it is in sharp contrast to the mood in the decades at the end of the 20th century.
As repeatedly emphasised by many thinkers from a range of perspectives, this sense of decay and impending collapse stands in stark contrast to many of the measurable facts. Global wealth, life expectancy, access to technology, education and deaths from conflict have all demonstrably improved through the 21st century. Yet the apocalyptic mood is growing stronger. The COVID-19 pandemic is, in many ways, illustrative of this dynamic. A respiratory disease emerged in 2019 and spread across the globe, as has likely happened every few decades throughout the entire history of modern man. For this pandemic, humans mobilised more resources, more quickly to tackle the disease than ever before, including the development, manufacture and distribution of vaccines at historically unprecedented speeds. Yet the prevailing mood was a sense of failure and despair.
Practically and technologically, humans have built something unprecedented in the 21st century. We have near instantaneous global information flows, travel and business interactions. For the first time ever, it is possible for just about the entire human race to actively participate in the same public square - whether that be the marketplace, performing stage or in global debates. Public fora have moved online and are now open to billions. We are living in a technological, logistical and practical marvel. Yet we feel like it is all falling apart. Why is there such a mood of pessimism and despair?
Many have provided far better sociological and cultural analyses of this mood than I can hope to give. According to these, the culprits variously are neo-liberal capitalism, excesses of economic growth, the abandonment of the underpinnings of Western culture, globalisation and destruction of local societies, the rise of digital and social media and so on. As with all complex situations, a good analysis will include some mixture of all of these. There is no simple cause. Yet, even taken together, these cannot be a complete explanation. There is an important conceptual and philosophical layer.
As always these days, we can develop insights by paying attention to the dynamics of social media. These are a smaller, but normally more extreme, version of broader social dynamics. To understand our sense of impending apocalypse, it is worth noting how the sharpest and most bitter controversies play out online. It is routine for contentious debates to (before they descend into ad hominem attacks) turn on accusations of misinformation, conspiracies, ignoring the facts or dismissing science.
From a philosophical perspective, these accusations show that opposing sides have different understandings about what is true and what knowledge can be trusted. They are attacks on the evidence or justification for various facts, not on the facts themselves. Importantly, the differences between different sides in these debates are usually not just over what evidence or which authorities we can trust. Major divisions open up that turn on fundamentally different views on the processes by which we acquire trustworthy knowledge.
To take one relevant example within the pandemic: what epistemic status do we assign to decisions by authoritative organisations like the World Health Organisation or the US CDC? And what is the process, if any, by which we are entitled to disagree with these decisions? Many bitter online debates are between sides that, at heart, have very different answers to these questions.
If you start looking, and I will explore a number of these over time here a Humble Knowledge, these fundamental debates about epistemology - what do we know and how do we know it - sit not far below the surface of most contentious public debates. Although people don't recognise it, these are not just debates about what is true, but about the process by which we decide something is true. As societies - both within many countries and globally - this puts us in a historically fragile situation. We have no consensus on how to decide what is true and few, if any, commonly shared epistemic principles.
Socially, this is a volatile place to be. Stable societies can tolerate significant disagreements about what is true and what the facts are in many different areas. However, if there is no common understanding of the process by which the disagreements can or should be settled - then many day-to-day interactions that hold societies together can begin to fray. Legal systems, to take one clear example, in many of their practices instantiate a societal view of good processes to decide what is true. In the end, trustworthy legal decisions turn on our ability to discover the truth - or at least have people trust that we have followed a good process to discover the truth. Similarly, broader scale systems like politics, governance and public policy instantiate cultural views about how to determine what is - and therefore what to do.
When a part of a society develops a fundamentally different epistemology - a different understanding of the right way to determine what is the case - then either the processes and structures of society have to shift to match them, or that part quickly loses trust in societal structures. If a society splinters over epistemology, it is in danger of splitting into distinct epistemic communities that do not, or cannot, genuinely interact with any trust. The religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th century are one example of what can happen.
Across many nations and globally, our societies are increasingly divided on epistemology. This means that the mood of impending apocalypse has a genuine social and philosophical grounding. We have built a globally connected society - with highly advanced technology available to many across the world for many, many purposes - and yet we do not have the epistemological foundations necessary to keep that society, let alone much more historically or culturally cohesive societies, together.
How we got here is a complex story, which is partly a natural result of our methods of globalisation and our technologies but is also arguably a failure of Western - and global - philosophy. Our technical abilities have outpaced our concepts. Exploring this story, both in the history of ideas but also people, will be a theme of my writing here, with a particular emphasis on where our confidence in our abilities, both technical and philosophical, may have been misplaced.
We should not, however, let a fear of apocalypse become a self-fulfilling prophesy. There are many more things that tie societies together than shared philosophical assumptions and, like all complex systems, societies can be incredibly resilient. Our tremendous technical and scientific achievements should give us hope. Our common humanity should give us hope. But without a societal shift to more widely accepted norms of epistemology, the stresses driving towards disintegration or collapse will get stronger.
One place to start is accepting that we all know far less than we think we do with less certainty that we would like.