APOCALYPSE.COM
What would it take for modern civilisation – and all the comforts we enjoy – to collapse into a new dark age in just days? Terrifyingly, as ROBERT HARRIS reveals in his brilliant new thriller, we’re only a click away... SATURDAY ESSAY
You wake first thing in the morning and reach for your mobile phone. ‘Phone’, of course, has long since become a misnomer. It is your vital umbilical link to the world: the channel through which you receive your correspondence and news and entertainment, the means by which you pay your bills, the assistant that tells you where you ought to be and the guide that shows you how to get there, the custodian that holds the record of your life in photographs and videos.
But this morning it won’t connect to the internet. Nor will your laptop, or your home computer. You turn on the television and discover the news is reporting a global failure of the internet.
Later, you will be appalled to remember that your first reaction was a feeling of relief to be free, for an hour or two, of the constant demands of answering emails.
on your way to work you realise you have hardly any cash so you stop to join the queue at an ATM. People ahead of you tell you that it has stopped working.
Someone announces that all credit card machines have also ceased to function.
This is a bore. You would go to a bank and take out money in the old-fashioned way, with a cheque book, but you are not sure you even have a cheque book any more, and, besides, High Street banks have been closing at the rate of 1,000 a week and your local branch is now a sushi bar.
Food, you think: that’s a point. If you have learnt nothing else from the Brexit debate, you have become aware that supermarkets — which had previously seemed such reliable temples of abundance — in fact carry very little stock and rely on lorries for just-in-time resupply. London, you are constantly reading, is only six meals away from starvation.
But by the time you reach the nearest Waitrose you discover everyone else has remembered the quotation, too. The aisles are crowded. Shelves are emptying. The checkouts aren’t operating. Some people, laden with whatever they can carry, are trying to leave without paying. others are struggling over the last few trays of adzuki and edamame bean salad.
You decide to skip work. Back home, the children are more than usually fractious.
Their phones and games aren’t working. You tell them to be quiet as you try to watch the news.
The u.S. president is due to make a broadcast shortly — he can no longer tweet — and the experts in the studio are discussing the relevance of an article published in June in The New York Times, which revealed that the united States has deployed computer malware inside Russia’s national grid and ‘other targets’ in response to longstanding evidence that the Kremlin ‘has inserted malware that could sabotage American power plants, oil and gas pipelines, or water supplies’.
THe presenter interrupts to say that intelligence sources are now confirming that an undeclared and highly-classified cyber-war has, in fact, been raging for some months — hence those recent computer meltdowns in the NHS and at Heathrow.
At that point, the electricity cuts out.
For the first time you experience a twinge of real panic.
If Russia’s national grid is a legitimate target, does that mean the uK’s is as well?
Throughout the remainder of the day and into the night, power occasionally flickers back on, only to cut out again. Cooking is impossible. The phones won’t work.
Come the dawn, after a sleepless night, you face a dilemma: do you sit it out in London, or do you try to reach your friends in the country? You load up the car and switch on the satellite navigation system. of
course, it doesn’t work, and you haven’t possessed a map for years. Besides, the roads are jammed with traffic.
The full horror of your predicament now hits you.
In the words of Lewis Dartnell, an academic whose book The Knowledge envisages how difficult it would be to reboot an advanced technological society after a prolonged breakdown: ‘People living in developed nations have become disconnected from the processes of the civilisation that supports them.
‘Individually, we are astoundingly ignorant of even the basics of the production of food, shelter, clothes, medicine, materials or vital substances. our survival skills have atrophied to the point that much of humanity would be incapable of sustaining itself if the life-support system of modern civilisation failed, if food no longer magically appeared on shop shelves, or clothes on hangers.’
The great economic engine of our age is information.
Its motor is, by its nature, intangible.
Yuval Noah Harari makes the point well in his best-seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
In the past, ‘most wealth consisted of material things like fields, cattle, slaves and gold, so it was easy to loot it or occupy it. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organisational know-how. Consequently, it is difficult to carry it off or conquer it by military force.
‘Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid...There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth resides in the minds of Google engineers and Hollywood script doctors.’
Without most of us ever stopping to consider the dangers, a huge amount of our economy, our wealth and basic knowledge has migrated from the terrestrial world to the cloud, rendering us uniquely vulnerable to attack. Without a shot being fired or a bomb dropped, our society could be plunged into anarchy and shortages far more destructive than anything seen in wartime.
If this sounds alarming — well, no wonder.
Foreign powers are already actively interfering not just in our elections but in the very basis of our democratic polity: commonly agreed truth.
We look around at the streets and the countryside and all seems just as it ever did. But beneath the surface, to quote Marx and engels, ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’.
Social media in particular seems to be responsible for
‘At that point electricity cuts out and you begin to feel the twinges of panic’
what feels like an Age of Anxiety, evidenced by the rise in prescriptions for antidepressants, especially among young people.
A friend of mine recently cracked a tooth and went to the dentist, who told her that he and his colleagues had never seen so many similar cases. He joked that the whole country seemed
to be its teeth. History suggests we are right to be worried. Every civilisation believes it represents the last word in human development, and that it will endure for ever. It is an illusion.
Advanced societies have collapsed throughout history, some with bewildering speed. The Mayan grinding empire, which at its height — between the 3rd and 9th centuries — boasted about 40 cities in Central America, appears to have been overwhelmed within a few decades; no one knows by what.
The Roman empire lasted for about 500 years until Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in AD410.
The Romans tried to protect the heart of their empire by withdrawing their legions from the peripheries, including Britain. Their astonishingly sophisticated infrastructure — the hundreds of miles of straight roads, the great villas, the baths and aqueducts — fell into decay.
The remains were still visible 300 years later. A Saxon poet described them in one of the earliest fragments of English literature: Fortresses broken, the work of giants crumbled. Ruined are the roofs, tumbled the towers, Broken the barred gate: frost in the plaster, Ceilings gaping, torn away, fallen, Eaten by age . . .
It is a paradox of our advanced technological civilisation, with its proud towers of glass and steel, that little would survive as long as a two-storey brick-built Roman villa.
High-rise buildings are unsustainable without electrical power and constant maintenance.
Their method of construction — embedded steel in concrete, encased in glass — is peculiarly vulnerable to decay. Within 150 years, every building that dominates the London skyline is likely to have collapsed.
Similarly, our network of roads will not last nearly as long as those of the Romans. Within a decade or two, they will vanish beneath the forest floor.
WHAT we will leave behind may strike distant generations as evidence not of an advanced culture but of barbarism: concrete cooling towers and motorway embankments, rising isolated out of the landscape like the blocks of Stonehenge, and plastic, great drifts of plastic — shopping bags, straws, nappies, polystyrene cups — the detritus of a disposable civilisation that trashed the planet and has now been eradicated from it.
It is not surprising that our Age of Anxiety is working into the literary subconscious and producing so much dystopian fiction, from John Lanchester’s The Wall, published this year, to Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which was published this week.
A slew of books predicting Armageddon was produced in the decade before World War II. H.G. Wells’s The Shape Of Things To Come (1933) imagined saturation bombing and the descent of the world into anarchy. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) foresaw biological warfare: ‘The noise of 14,000 aeroplanes advancing in
open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm [of Berlin] and the Eighth Arrondissement [of Paris], the explosion of anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag.’
The most enduring of all dystopian novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, appeared in 1949, and its vision of a surveillance society — telescreens, Big Brother, the Thought Police — in which objective truth has been eradicated (‘2+2=5’) made it a best-seller all over again in America in 2016, following the election of Donald Trump.
ORWELL got so much right, it seems churlish to point out one big thing he got wrong. But his friend Evelyn Waugh put his finger on it in a letter to Orwell after receiving an advance copy: ‘What makes your version [of the future] spurious to me is the disappearance of the Church. Disregard all the supernatural implications if you like, but you must admit its unique character as a social & historical institution. I believe it is inextinguishable.’
Waugh’s prophecy came true in Poland in the 1980s, where it was the Catholic Church that did much to undermine the communist monolith in eastern Europe.
There are about 40,000 churches in England and Wales. It is likely that these structures — or their ruins — built mostly of stone and dating from an earlier epoch will continue to stand, long after modern buildings have collapsed.
In my novel, it is the churches that provide the local centres where survivors congregate — at first for shelter and security, and gradually for spiritual support and a theological explanation of the catastrophe. Because, in my view, while the societies that surround us rise and fall over the millennia, humanity does not change. We are the same creatures, with the same fundamental impulses, as the Romans or the Saxons.
We form ourselves into communities the better to survive, we work, we trade, we rear children, we create art, we seek theories and ideologies and religions that will give meaning to our existence.
None of that will alter, whatever befalls our civilisation.
To which you may respond: this is nonsense. It isn’t going to happen. In fact, it’s irresponsible to scare people in this way.
No wonder we live in an Age of Anxiety when this sort of stuff is being written.
And I am sure you are right. Or almost sure.
You will reach for your phone tomorrow to check your emails and they will be there. The cash machines will disgorge cash. The supermarkets will continue to offer us all the fruits of the earth. Our governments may plant bugs in their rivals’ computer networks, but they will never actually trigger a cyberwar.
We are at the apogee of human progress and the future will be even better than the present.
But writers will continue to offer less comforting visions. That is our function.
‘Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘and I’ll tell you a story.’