Evolving Backwards

[Abhorsen]

Hello again all!

Just a quick query but have any of you ever thought to write a story where humans realise that their endless tinkering is bad juju and just straight up go backwards? Reverting from perhaps the Industrial Revolution to the Middle Ages? I believe it could prove a very interesting detail in your worlds!

Who knows what could come of this? Let me know your thoughts!

Thanks again,

- Abhorsen

 

[Queshire]

Personally I would only include that to portray it as a bad thing.

 

[CupofJoe]

As an idea you could frame it in a number of ways... A new religion promoting a simpler purer life. The sudden failure of a staple of life that forces a change. An environment catastrophe that throws civilisation back a century or two. Or a mixture of all of these and more.
It has been used on TV.
There is at least one episode of Stargate Atlantis where a world/society has realised that if they stay below this level of Technology and that number of People, then they are overlooked by the Wraith, the big bad of the early series. They make a positive choice not to [apparently] advance or grow.
To me it seems to be an idea more suited to a reversion from a post-industrial landscape [like ours with its incumbent technologies and abilities] to a more agrarian [and supposedly sustainable] life style. You need to be able to see "the big picture" and that sort of needs some technology to help with the heavy lifting.
And to me it sees you would have to deal with the over population.
If this world moved back to a more agrarian pre-industrial model, several billion people will get very hungry very quickly.

 

[Insolent Lad]

I've been making notes toward an SF novel (to be under a pen name) of a planet that pretty much decided to settle on a Medieval-tinged society, informed both by the manorial economy and by more modern distributism. I have to finish a couple other books in the series first, however! But the serfs are all robots so pretty much everyone gets to live the aristocratic/knightly life. Yes, there are ideas there borrowed from both Asimov and Anthony.

 

[Chasejxyz]

Lol that's not how evolving works. "Evolution" is the changing of genetics across a broad population due to external environmental pressures. Humans getting more body hair and fat because the world grows colder is evolution. Humans destroying all computers because they're Evil is a major cultural revolution, but it's not evolution. Culture is not genetic.

There have been plenty of stories that have done concepts like what you're proposing. Usually it's because of some great global catastrophe. In The Handmaid's Tale, they go back to a deeply misogynistic and bio-essentialist culture because the birth rate craters (the true cause of it is never fully explained, but it's implied that sperm are probably just as screwed up as eggs/uteri, so this "solution" doesn't fix anything). In Man After Man, Dixon takes a really pessimistic (and eugenticist) view of medical intervention and has many humans utilizing machines to keep themselves alive (think WH40K's emperor, but more gross) but there's plenty of "normal" humans running around killing each other, though some DO return to a more serf-y existence because they reject All Of That (but they get screwed once the magnetic poles reverse). And in Last and First Men, there's multiple iterations of "men" (i.e. whatever species of H. sapein sapien that's running around at the time) that "regress" to something more basic. Most of the time they really don't have much of a choice due to global catastrophe (like running out of petroleum) or mass migration (like to Neptune).

Then there's also Dr. Stone, but that's because only 6 people escaped the global catastrophe and, like, 3 of them die pretty damn quick from pneumonia. So even though 5 of the 6 were very smart astronauts, 5 people are not enough to do all the science for the whole gosh-dang modern world.

Also there's Dune, where people "chose" to fly ships "manually" because computers bad. There's lords and serfs and lots of very low-tech fantasy stuff going on and there IS a diegetic reason for it but tbh the world building is very silly and everything is more done for a specific vibe/aesthetic than it is for cohesive/logical world building. Same deal with Warhammer 40K, there's a very Catholic-y religious organization that keeps information and performs critical roles for society, there's tons of people doing paperwork by hand, there's humans running around battlefields and dying in the wilderness, even though there's all this high-tech stuff. But it's intentionally anachronistic with the Warcraft-esque pauldrons and the fake Latin. Also the theme of the IP is "running things like this is bad, actually" which a lot of people miss, somehow, because wow cool guns.

So yeah! You CAN do something like how you propose, but are you doing it because you like that type of setting's vibes OR are you trying to make a statement about something?

 

[Ned Marcus]

humans realise that their endless tinkering is bad juju and just straight up go backwards? Reverting from perhaps the Industrial Revolution to the Middle Ages?

There are many stories where humanity takes a step backwards, regressing to an earlier way of life. Post-apocalyptic stories do this all the time. It all depends on how you tell the story.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I think there's a difference between a kind of post-appocalypse setting where stuff has reverted backwards because of Reasons and society simply decided "We don't like this modern stuff, lets forget about it".

The first, a big event causing civilization to revert to an earlier technology level could happen. It's at least probable enough for readers to suspend disbelief. The second however I don't buy. Simple reason is that society is not a homogenous thing where you can simply decide something and everyone follows. There's too many people and countries around for it to work. Just imagine that tomorrow America decides that they will forget about all this technology stuff and return to pre-industrial life. Even if everyone in America does this, then there is no reason for either China or Russia to follow. If anything, they'd stay where they are and just invade America / boss them around on the world stage. After all, you can't fight a fighter plane with bow and arrow. So on a global scale it doesn't work.

On a personal scale there is always the issue of what is good for me now vs what is good for society as a whole in the long run. People generally tend to go for good for me now over good for society in the long run. Especially when it comes to giving up stuff we consider basic life necessities. We might give up using a petrol car because it's good for the environment. But I doubt you'll find anyone who gives up their fridge, or indoor plumbing or electricity. They are just too damn useful for us to do so.

Just think on it. The average person, and even almost all low income people in western countries, today live a better life than the richest people on the planet did 200 years ago. It's not even being able to fly across the globe in a day. It's simple things like antibiotics, paracetamol, plumbing, a fridge and washing machine, an indoor toilet and soft toilet paper. I just can't imagine a world where everybody willingly gives that up for the simple reason "it's probably good for the planet."

 

[Steerpike]

Read Kurt Vonnegut’s book Galapagos. It’s not just humans reverting to an earlier technological period, it’s humans reverting backward to a more or less harmless animal species—something that doesn’t look or act anything like modern humans.

 

[Ned Marcus]

I think there would have to be a reason to revert. Some advantage, even if it was wrong-headed. Reading some of these posts made me think of the sea squirt, an animal, that once it's found a place to live, eats (or detaches, I'm not sure which) its own brain. As it never plans to move again, it no longer needs a brain.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

The thing about the Middle Ages is, it was a time of great technological advancement. We don't think of it that way now because we've seen even greater, and faster, technological advancements since then, which make theirs look puny, but there were vast improvements during that time in technologies used in farming, cloth making, furniture making, carpentry, smithing, building... really, pretty much all trades.

So to say technology is at a Middle Ages level is to imply that technology is developing and improving. Which it would if we had lost our modern technologies. It wouldn't advance in the same way if there were no longer electronics or motorized machines, but the changing landscape and infrastructure would require new uses of technology and new forms of it. Maybe new/old forms: we might be using oil lamps instead of electric ones, but there might be some improvements in those oil lamps. Perhaps adaptations to make them work on the most accessible kind of oil. (Currently, if you have an antique oil burning lamp, you can get lamp oil to burn in it, but it's a specific kind of oil, not necessarily made from what would be most readily at hand. If we all used oil lamps, and we didn't have the infrastructure to ship specialized lamp oil anywhere and everywhere, maybe they'd be adapted to burn kitchen grease.)

The idea of an apocalyptic event that torpedoes modern infrastructure, or gradual loss of modern technology, is something I've worked into several short stories. I think it will happen sooner or later. Fossil fuels won't last forever. Electronic devices can only be made from certain metals, which are in limited supply. There's no way technology as we know it can last forever. Also no way it can grow indefinitely. If nothing else, we'll run out of the raw materials to make it.

But if and when we lose modern technology, we'll have to adapt to a world that was built for it but no longer has it. That will be a challenge unlike anything medieval people faced. And the ruins of the industrial world will be everywhere. Including toxic waste sites. We'll have to navigate that as well.

It's possible that some of the technologies used in the Middle Ages would be revived, but the setting they're used in would be different, and the way they grow from there would be different.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I actually saw a Youtube video on this recently. Apparently MIT did a study back in the 70's which predicts that society will collapse by 2040: MIT Has Predicted that Society Will Collapse in 2040 - YouTube.

I'm generally an optimist, and I think we'll be fine in many ways. But nothing can grow forever, so we'll have to adapt our mindset in a sense that we might need to get used to a more stagnant society. I once read an argument on the question if the rate of technological change is really increasing and the world is changing ever faster. They argued that it didn't. Just compare the last 50 years to the 50 years before that. In the period 100 to 50 years ago, the world changed immensely. Flight became common, we put people on the moon, computers and television were invented, energy became cheap and abundant. Then look at the past 50 years. How much really changed? The internet became a thing. Other than that? Not that much. And many of the recent innovations simply are "computer does thing".

Still, society won't collapse. It will just increase the difference between those who have the technologies and those who don't. We're already some way towards green energy. The main thing will be that without new input into the system (either in terms of more people or extra materials) the growth will slow down; there would be nothing to grow with...

I can think of one historical example where society as a whole collapsed, and that was the bronze age collapse, where the cultures in the easterns mediteranian simply vanished in the span of a generation. That could be something to research if you want.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

I can think of one historical example where society as a whole collapsed, and that was the bronze age collapse, where the cultures in the easterns mediteranian simply vanished in the span of a generation. That could be something to research if you want.

And even that doesn't mean the people disappeared, just that their artifacts did. They were no longer using things archaeologists could find and label "bronze age culture." Perhaps there was a lot more use of biodegradable tools and structures, and a lot less use of non-biodegradable ones, so the archaeological record doesn't pick it up.

 

[skip.knox]

The whole notion of backwards and forwards is an interesting one. IMO its provenance is more properly SF, but I reckon it could work in fantasy as well. SF tends to focus on technology as the measuring stick, whereas fantasy could use other measures.

There are peoples in Altearth who have undergone major shifts. The elves most especially. I don't think they would think in terms of progress and regress, but more in terms of change and choice. That could be an interesting theme to explore, he said to himself.

Anyway, as others have noted, the presumption of "evolving backwards" is fundamentally progressivist. That view has been criticized by historians for a century or so, but that doesn't mean in a fantasy (or SF) story an author cannot put the story in stark forward-backward terms. A great many have.

 

[Rosemary Tea]

Evolving "backwards" can be a progressive thing in itself. Organic farming, for example: it's considered the progressive way to farm nowadays, but to farm organically is to eschew GMO crops and chemical pesticides and fertilizers, all of which are scientific advancements.

And urban farming. Kitchen gardens were almost universal for much of history, went away in the twentieth century, and now growing your own vegetables is an increasingly common thing to do. So is keeping backyard chickens and beehives, even in cities. Nowhere near universal, but there are people doing it, and those people usually consider themselves progressive.

And breastfeeding babies. For a few decades in the mid twentieth century, formula was touted as the progressive, modern way, then "breast fed is best fed" became the rallying cry.

People can and do decide to do things the old fashioned way because they consider it healthier, or better for the environment, or some such thing. And then doing it the old fashioned way becomes the progressive way.

 

[LAG]

Read Kurt Vonnegut’s book Galapagos. It’s not just humans reverting to an earlier technological period, it’s humans reverting backward to a more or less harmless animal species—something that doesn’t look or act anything like modern humans.

For anyone looking for more speculative biology weirdness regarding humans, read 'All Tomorrows'(free online) and 'Man after Man'.