The strange death of Liberal Democracy
It occurs to me that there are a couple of possible criticisms of the Lights in the sky series, if we consider it purely as futurology. The most pertinent currently, is the lack of any evidence of (or reference to) infectious disease during the breakdown of civilisation to which (in the novels) I give the name ‘The Collapse’. I talk about fire and flood, I reference civil war, species extinction and resource depletion, and I describe mass migration, the breakdown of law and order and war between States. I also depict whole countries being lost to the waves, and I do say (or rather Marta Camacho does in the sixth novel, Maya) that the human population of the Earth drops to a third of pre-Collapse levels. But nowhere do I mention the role pandemics play in this process. Nor do I specifically mention famine.
I’m not alone in this, at least as far as disease is concerned. Neil Gaiman, in his television adaptation of the Good Omens (the novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett) has bumped Pestilence from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and replaced him with Pollution, a more ‘up-to-date’ Horsewoman. Recent events should now be persuading him of the error of his ways.
My abiding impression viewing this series was that even though it was set in 2018, it now appears to be part of the more distant past. In fact, a lot of contemporary culture is beginning to look distinctly like it’s on borrowed time. It all has a fin de siecle feel about it twenty years too late), with everyone desperately trying to have their fun, make their point, push their interest group, consume to the nth degree, before it all gets too late. Before our globalised world economy and related global culture start to come apart at the seams as nation states retreat behind their borders, trading blocs break up, political alliances fracture.
The pressures bringing this change about are many and various. Some are progressive, some are reactionary, but all speak to a truth that our current way of doing things is unsustainable. We cannot (physically at any rate) be citizens of the world for much longer, the environmental costs of the mass transport of people around the world are becoming too high. The idea that your food should be grown on the far side of the globe and your clothes made there also, is now palpably absurd. There is (I think) a curious sort of unanimity across political divides, with people who loathe, despise and refuse to debate with each other reaching startling similar conclusions by completely different routes.
The populist right appears to dismiss the notion that an environmental crisis is upon us. However, if you examine much of the content of right-leaning social media and the reactionary populist press, so much of the talk is about looming catastrophe, expressed in terms of out of control weather, imminent asteroid strikes, super volcanoes erupting etc etc. To me this all has the appearance of metaphor, a bizarre process of transference whereby the truth they all know in their hearts but dare not admit (i.e. that our civilisation is headed for a fall) cannot be completely suppressed and comes out in an attachment to fringe catastrophe theories.
Opposing shades of political opinion appear to be moving inexorably towards the notion of smaller political units and a less integrated global economy, with the liberal democracy that promoted globalisation in danger of being sidelined somewhere in the middle.
I mentioned that there were two possible criticisms; the second relates to timescale, as I have my Collapse happening near the end of the century, far enough away in time to not be immediately threatening. As I concluded earlier in this blog, I am (in the great tradition of English science fiction) basically writing a ‘cosy’ catastrophe.
However, it looks like Armageddon isn’t prepared to wait, and, unlike the world of Lights in the sky, there doesn’t appear to be a benign deus ex-machina waiting in the wings to save us…