Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation

"My next book is by far the least well known of my authors, and it’s by far the least well known book. It’s by my friend and colleague, Samuel Alexander, with whom I’ve co-written a couple of books now, including my little book, This Civilisation is Finished . This is a book that deserves to be much better known than it is. And, of the things that Samuel has written, I think it’s the most important. It’s a philosophical novel . What Sam wants to do, is to depict a future in which industrial growth and society have collapsed, and people are trying to live on the wreckage in a way that is sustainable. And they’re trying to live in that sense within entropic limits, trying to be scavengers of the old civilisation and to remake a new viable, essentially agrarian civilisation, with small scale workshops, doing stuff by hand. There’s lots of poetry, with people doing spontaneous performances for each other in their leisure time. But struggling to get by some of the time. The book contains an account of what happens after the Great Disruption, when most societies of the world collapsed, which is conceived as having been within the lifetimes of many of these people in the book. It’s a splendid read. For philosophers, it’s charming, because Sam is continually bringing in implicitly, and mostly explicitly, the great philosophers. He’s quoting or talking about Hobbes, Rousseau , Marx , and the rest. His characters sometimes offer lines of one of them to each other. And, in that sense, it’s very much a novel of ideas in the tradition of utopias and dystopias. “They wanted to see whether people could potentially live off the wreckage of industrial civilisation, whether people could live much more lightly on the earth” Now, for the first two thirds one could think it’s fun and interesting, but a little bit plodding. Quite a lot of it is expository, and it’s not exactly driven by a brilliant narrative or by literary flair. I don’t think Sam would mind me saying that. But then, two thirds of the way through, there’s this enormous twist. And what I’m afraid I have to do in order to give you a sense of why the book is really, really worth reading, is to tell you what the twist is. So, this is going to be a horrible spoiler for you. But it’s for the greater good. The novel is set on an island where they’re building this community of Entropia on the wreckage of industrial civilisation. What happens two thirds of the way through the novel is that, for the first time in a very long time, they get a visitor to the island who rows in a boat to them and tells them an astonishing fact. Here is where Plato comes in… This visitor says that the history of their community is based on a noble lie. And the lie is this: no collapse of civilisation has taken place. And in fact, the time isn’t the late 21st century, the time is the present day. And, actually, the experiment of Entropia started in the 1930s and 1940s, when some far-sighted people started to see that we were on the path to potential societal collapse. What they wanted to see was whether people could potentially live off the wreckage of industrial civilisation and whether people could live much more lightly on the earth. What this visitor then says to the inhabitants of Entropia is, ‘Look what we want you to do now in the early 21st century, is to come back to the world and teach people about how you’ve been managing to live, and explain to them that it’s not going to be as terrible as they all think, and also to explain to them what it was like living in what they thought was the aftermath of the crash of industrial civilisation.’ It’s an absolutely magnificent twist. It really took my breath away; and also, of course, it raises intriguing ethical issues in terms of whether a noble lie like that can ever really be noble, whether it can be justified. That’s Entropia in a nutshell. I hope you’ll still think it worth reading—or studying you’re your students, maybe, if you’re a teacher—even after hearing that. I hope I’ve at least explained how it came to have a powerful effect on me. It is a novel of ideas supremely relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves."