Change We Would Rather Not Have

Ideas of societal collapse have always attracted crazy speculation by armchair philosophers about the end of the world as we know it. The Internet is full of prophecies about end times, 2012 and countless other scenarios thought up by denizens of false verisimilitude. Author David Weinberger in his fascinating book Too Big to Know highlights how the Internet acts as an amplifier for such ideas.

Technology has brought us innumerable benefits, but also many potential pitfalls. Our lives today are suspended in a web of increasinging complexity. It is the weakness inherent in this intertwining skein of complexity that mathematician and complexity researcher John L. Casti writes about in the new book X-Events: The Collapse of Everything Casti, is no armchair nut. He holds a PhD., is the author of several books and holds a position at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. I haven’t checked out this last one. I'm always suspicious of fancy titles that could end up to be mere fluff.

Parts of the book allow us to think about the perils of complexity in our lives in new ways, while others focus on events that are remote at best, lunatic at worst. All in all, this is a worthwhile read, written by someone who takes seriously the precipice that civilization rests upon.

Casti begins his book with a thoughtful discussion of the ever increasing complexity that creates the potential for breakdown. Despite the fact that many of the events Casti describes as X-Events are massive life changing events on a global scale, we just need to look to events like Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami in 2011, long term power outages in the US and an endless list of other events to see examples of events that though similar are smaller in scope.

Casti is not a "run for the hills" survivalist who thinks bunker building and stocking up on canned beans is the placating panacea of the future. Though, he does stir the synapses with evocations of Cormac Mcarthy's doleful novel The Road. I recommend this great, but disturbing little book to anyone who wonders what a worst case scenario of an X-Event might be like.

In spite of this, he calls for thoughtful discussion and careful planning that will lead to more resilient systems in the event of disaster. This book won't have you packing a "bug out bag" to prepare for X-events, but is will have you thinking more about them.

Books like Build the Perfect Bug Out Bag: Your 72 Hour Disaster Survival Kit call for packing up and getting out. The question that presents itself when in possession of a "bug out bag" is: "where does one effectively bug out to?" If the population of a large urban center is "bugging out", it seems that potentially more chaos could be created than by any extreme event itself. As Benjamin Franklin once said with his characteristic wit: "...We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately..." A disaster more than ever is when we need to try and hang together to help others and ultimately ourselves in the process.

Ideas of a world with less complexity have definite romantic appeal despite the fact that my iPhone is indispensable and without the Internet I wouldn't be writing this. The pantheon of books in electronic form that have emerged in the past several years have sated my bibliophillic predilections with infinite variety that I would be wont to give up. Beginning my library career on the cusp of the transition between "analog" and "digital" library systems, I am keenly aware of the amazing world of information that exists now precisely because of technology. With this perspective, I much prefer what we have to today. Though I learned how to make cards for a card catalog, I'm thankful that these skills have never proved necessary.

Since I was young, a fascination with ideas of self-sufficiency have compelled me to learn more about traditional skills useful in an off the grid world. One of the first books I bought myself in middle schoool was Back to Basics, a guide to skills of self sufficiency. This book is still published and in its second edition more than thirty years later. Although, less inclined today to want to move out to the metaphorical woods and live by my own grit and guile, I still harbor a deep concern with where our world is headed. We can all use a degree of self-sufficiency in our lives. Too few of us know how to do much of anything that would help us in the event of an X-Event like Casti describes. This is not just an American phenomenon. Traditional skills, knowledge and technologies that have sustained peoples for millenia, are disappearing worldwide just when they may again prove useful. Like a member of a herd of bison running toward a cliff, pushed from behind and all sides, I feel helpless to stop as we head for potential unpreparedness.