April 2012
Collapse
Collapse happens all the time. Come to think of it, the Bible starts with collapse right in the Garden of Eden, when the good life there suddenly turned sour. Both the Flood and the Tower of Babel triggered collapse, also happening almost overnight. The Bible also ends with it, when our present world order, Babylon, goes bankrupt.
God was directly involved in Noah’s rescue and in thwarting communication when humanity sought to dominate the earth by erecting a skyscraper. Later God started a hands-off policy – see Deuteronomy 32:20 “I will hide my face to see what their end will be,” heralding a drastic divine departure by allowing humanity to go its own way, thereby acknowledging that mankind has come of age. This new approach is especially evident today in the re-built Tower of Babel, now in the form of the World-Wide-Web and Everywhere English.
Jared Diamond, a professor of geography in L.A. wrote a 575 page book simply called Collapse, subtitled: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He devotes one chapter to Easter Island, discovered by Jacob Roggeveen on April 5 1722, Easter Sunday. There that globetrotting Dutchman saw something most astonishing, a landscape with huge stone statutes, but devoid of trees and inhabitants. Apparently the native religion required these immense images, which came at the expense of the native trees, used for transporting logs and scaffolding. Writes Diamond: ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”? He also devotes a chapter to the Maya realm with flourished in Mexico from about 800 A.D. for some 700 years. A few weeks ago it was discovered that a 25-40 percent reduction in the rainfall – resulting in famine – was a deciding factor in Maya’s demise. Will an ultra-dry season in North America, the world’s bread basket, have a similar result?
Late last year Niall Ferguson in Civilization: The West and the Rest, confirms that civilizations do not rise, fall, and then gently decline. No, its shape is more like a steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.Harvard History Professor Ferguson, focusing on the Roman Empire, points out that it collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders, internal divisions and energy shortfalls. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted. The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to interior strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from seeming normalcy to anarchy took little more than a decade.A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the 1989-91 collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East disappeared last year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today. What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they did not. This process also happens quite often in financial markets.
We do well to reflect on our own situation. Don’t think for a moment that our present state of bliss is permanent. History suggests that one day everything smells like roses, the next day we experience a death spiral when the cozy familiar fades away like a figure in the fog.
With everything now having global implications, one catastrophic event – think bombing Iran or the banks owning up to their debts – could quite well result in a global commercial collapse and accelerate the coming of Judgment Day, when we all will appear before Jesus, charged with crimes against creation in whatever form, and especially guilty of greed, the root of all evil, both the result of us worshiping our very own idol: infinite growth in a finite world.
Jesus’ primary mission – and the church’s task as well- has always been the coming of the Kingdom, the New Creation, with the redeemed of the Lord as agents of organic innovation. (John 3:16-17). Since we have totally failed on that score, have actually done the exact opposite, the old has to go before the new appears: collapse has to occur. Welcome it.
Bert Hielema came to Canada in 1951, had an insurance agency from 1952-1975, sold out, moved to Tweed, took off a few years to become an accredited commercial appraiser, sold out again, and retired- sort of -in 1995.