‘Collapse’ is the idea that human civilization(s) must eventually (if not soon) suffer the negative unintended consequences of civilization itself. Ironically, on this view, evolutionary adaptations which result in human civilizations are also responsible for the collapse of those civilizations. As I understand it, agriculture and industry are the two biggest adaptations that have produced the most severe threats of collapse.

Agriculture allowed humans to extract excess food energy from land resources. This excess food, especially grains, could be amassed in large quantities and stored for long periods of time. Not only did that increase survival, but supported greater reproductive success and larger populations. Over-farming damages land resources, but technological and social adaptations addressed many of these: irrigation, crop rotation, fertilizer, and the simplest of all – territorial expansion through military conquest, imperialism, and colonial extraction.

Agriculture makes large cities possible, increasing population size further, and developing transportation for greater centralization. But the threat of collapse reappears in new forms. In addition to degraded land resources, human cities faced new internal threats from sanitation, disease, and political unrest, while expanded borders further from centralized power meant greater external conflict with competing civilizations. External threats increase as cities become rich targets for pillage and plunder.

Cultural developments like religion, economy, education, and government may work to address some of these, but create their own risks of conflict and collapse. On this view, science and technology work to solve the symptomatic problems that result from civilizational growth, but do not address the underlying causes that drive the process into collapse in the first place.

The industrial revolution is similar to the development of agriculture in that it allowed for a drastic increase in energy extraction and consumption, fueled literally by land resources in the form of fossil fuels. The same patterns of environmental degradation and population growth and centralization that characterized the rise of agriculture are magnified and accelerated by industrialization. And as the symptoms of collapse accelerate, the demand for technology to mitigate the harms and preserve the gains increases.

Now we are considering the possibilities of collapse on not just a civilizational scale, but a planetary scale. Nuclear weapons may have been the first global threat, but now fears of climate change, technological harm from AI, global pandemics, economic crises, and more all seem baked into our human system.

If this story is accurate, the very evolutionary adaptations and environmental changes that enabled human survival and reproductive success are also the greatest threat to ongoing human survival and reproductive success. Humans adapt to survive in their environment, but in doing so transform the environment to such an extent that to continue the evolutionary survival of the species those adaptations must be unlearned. Our present moment is like a species-wide evolutionary call to repentance. We have to change our entire way of looking at the world, our place in it, and the adaptations required to maximize our fitness for survival in a world we have paradoxically made unfit by our pursuit of evolutionary fitness.

I’ve been reading Jesus through this lens lately. People sometimes refer to world-historical developments in religion as an evolution of human consciousness, but that usually seems distinct from biological evolution. Practical-minded humans have a tendency to say something like “spiritual evolution is great but we still have to eat, and compete, and reproduce to keep the species alive.”

But what if that’s exactly backwards? What if the teachings of Jesus that contradict our fundamental presuppositions of evolutionary survival are themselves an adaptation for greater fitness? When I look at the ways in which Jesus’ teachings are rejected on pragmatic, quasi-evolutionary (and game-theoretical) reasons, it seems plausible to me that, for many of the problems of collapse caused by human adaptation toward fitness for survival, an adaptation away from those in the direction Jesus indicates would also mitigate the acceleration, and maybe even the fundamental orientation, toward collapse.

So I’m struggling with two concepts of ‘evolutionary’. In one sense, it is helpful to think of the teachings of Jesus as anti-evolutionary. He explicitly rejects the standard evolutionary priorities of survival, competition, fitness and reproductive success. But in another sense, given that those evolutionary priorities contribute to inevitable human collapse, his rejection of them may be justified as an evolutionary adaptation beyond them. That may not be the only thing the teachings of Jesus have to commend them, but it is something significant and meaningful and relatable to those who think about collapse in these ways.

But in another sense, I don’t think it is fair or accurate to reduce the teachings of Jesus – dare I say, the Gospel – to evolutionary adaptation alone. And I’m still unclear whether, if taken this way, Jesus advocates a new end for human evolution, or simply new means to the same ends.

Dim reflections, indeed. But thanks for joining me in the journey (assuming anyone is still reading at this point)!