Frederic Jameson is often quoted as saying that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism; the popularity of predominantly dystopian narratives of futurity—whether delivered as multiplex blockbusters or economic forecasts—would seem to bear him out. But the sf-nal utopian tradition has long had a cautionary and critical backbone to it, with the implication being that a grim future more fully explored might thereby be more easily avoided; Huxley, Wells and Orwell all depicted dystopias for rhetorical purposes, and “if this carries on…” has been an implicit part of the standard sf-nal plot engine ever since. The endurance of the classic dystopias as literary and political touchstones suggests there is considerable power in presenting a worst-case scenario as a fait accompli; the techniques of narrative can bring disaster to life, make consequences feel more concrete than the mere recounting of facts.
I feel safe in presuming that a similar conclusion prompted Oreskes and Conway, two history-of-science scholars, to write The Collapse of Western Civilisation. Purportedly originating in “the Second People’s Republic of China” and published “on the 300th anniversary of the Great Collapse”, the text takes the form of a fairly dry academic precis of the socioeconomic and ideological drivers that led to the titular Great Collapse of 2093. A thrilling page-turner, it ain’t: the narrator effaces themselves from the text in the grand academic tradition (a habit one might have hoped a few more centuries would cure), and settles for simply and clearly recounting the choices—even, if not especially, those choices left unmade—which led to our inexorable run-in with global ecological market-failure. You know the culprits already, if you’ve been reading along at home: neoliberalism’s contradictory obsession with free markets and deregulation; logical positivism and the epistemological hubris of technoscience; the economic dogma of competition, growth and progress; a money- and blood-soaked century of path-dependency politics and infrastructural lock-in. There’s no Maguffin needed for this denouement, no jonbar point on which our fates might pivot—merely business as usual.
Dystopias of ecological collapse aren’t rare, though few are so rigorously couched in cutting edge research as this one. But therein lies the rub: with its dry style, devoid of both sexy CGI spectacle and shambling hordes of concretised metaphors for poverty, The Collapse of Western Civilisation is unlikely to reach a popular audience, who prefer their dystopias to thrill at least as much as they scare. And that’s a shame, because it sneakily does something sorely lacking in the environmental discourse: it depicts drastic climate change impacts as something which, given the appropriate social and political will, might be recoverable from in the long run.
That a post-capitalist China should play poster-child for that recovery is no mere ironic device, either. It may be harder to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world, but happy endings have always been the hardest to write convincingly.