As a kid, I thought of societal collapse in terms of the fall of Rome.
As you know, I’ve been fascinated by history my whole life (and I still fail to understand why everyone else isn’t). Not as a profession, more of an avocation. I’m into it the way some people are into football. I earned a second major in it at Memphis State, completely by accident — I just took that many elective courses in the subject. (I had time for them for a number of reasons, including the fact that I didn’t go to football games.)
And ever since I was a kid, I’ve been somewhat morbidly interested in one of history’s most ominous questions: What would it be like to live in a great, thriving civilization that you deeply loved, and you were seeing it falling apart all around you?
I generally framed it in terms of Rome. It ruled the known world for centuries (despite a form of government that seems unstable at every point at which I’ve studied it), and then it was just gone. Suddenly, Rome is in the hands of barbarians, the last legion has pulled out of Britain, and all of Western Europe has sunk into chaotic darkness, ruled by local warlords of one sort or another.
But lately, I’ve gotten interested more in other collapses of great cultures, such as, say, the British Empire. It exceeded the Roman in geographic breadth and possibly global cultural hegemony (the adoption of English as the current lingua franca, for instance), so its collapse from what it was in Victoria’s day is pretty remarkable. But it still isn’t as complete or as crushing as the Roman fall (I was there last summer, and London still seemed to be thriving), and when I was in school my teachers didn’t cover it. Too recent, I suppose. And no barbarians have yet succeeded the Windsors.
At the moment, though, I’ve been fascinated by an earlier event on that sceptered isle. I’ve been listening to a wonderful (not only informative, but entertaining) podcast called The Rest is History, and I’ve been entralled by several episodes dealing with the events of 1066 (“the most important year in English history”), including what led up to it, and the details of the final erasure of real English (that is to say, Anglo-Saxon) rule. The last episode was the denouement, “The Battle of Hastings.” (But wait! I see there’s a fourth episode after that: “The Norman Conquest.” What joy. Unless, of course, you’re a Saxon.)
And remember last year when I suddenly discovered, to my great embarrassment, the Late Bronze Age Collapse? Well, I’m digging deeper into that now by reading a book about it, titled 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Not that all of it — the attacks of the Sea Peoples, havoc caused by global warming, etc. — happened in that one year. It took awhile. I’m simultaneously studying the same period, or a bit later, from a different angle through James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible. (Turns out those Philistines who keep coming up in the Old Testament were actually Sea People. Who knew?)
You’ll notice I’m looking into collapses a bit more intently recently. You can probably figure out why. I haven’t paid all that much attention lately to stuff that’s happened since about a millennium ago. And considering what’s happening now, I haven’t missed too much that would give me joy.
When I was a kid, past collapses were an idle interest, and not very threatening — compared to, say, nuclear annihilation. In the 1950s and ’60s, I was growing up in a country and a period that was more firmly stable than anything I could see in the past. We were at the peak of an arc that started, as many reckoned it, with the Magna Carta in 1215. Several centuries later the process soared to previously unknown heights with the drafting and adoption of the U.S. Constitution — which was almost immediately a success, but would go through another two centuries of gradual perfection, with particularly big leaps during the presidential tenures of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and yes, Lyndon Johnson. The strains and splits that emerged in the 1960s were to me dramatic demonstrations of how resilient this rational and humane rule of, by and for the people really was. We carried on, and saw our Cold War adversaries do the collapsing.
We didn’t have an empire in the usual historical sense (despite all that nattering you heard in the ’60s), but since 1945 our global influence — and responsibility (that thing that so many on both the left and right now spit upon) — exceeded that of any emperor who ever sat upon a throne. I continue to love those stories of the incomparable Royal Navy in the Napoleonic era, but Lords Nelson and Cochrane, and my fictional hero Jack Aubrey, would have had to cut and run in the face of the Service in which my father served.
I read a lot of Mad magazines in the mid-’60s, and that’s fitting. If anyone had mentioned societal collapse to me in 1965, I’d have said, “What, me worry?”
And now, this. All this stuff going on around us, in this beautiful country and throughout the West — in fact, throughout all the developed countries that a reasonable person might have wrongly, but reasonably, assumed were beyond such societal pratfalls as we read about in history books.
Do I have to detail all the evidence of collapse all around us as our liberal republican-democracy just goes “poof” in practically an instant? That shouldn’t be necessary. I take it most of you are paying more attention than I am to the daily nightmare.
Just last week, Donald the Unready destroyed $10 trillion in weath in this country and others, on an idiotic whim (idiotic whims being the only kind for which he possesses a certain genius). A lot of people had voted for him with one of the favorite slogans of people who understand neither government nor business on their lips: “Run Government Like a Business.” I saw a crack about that on social media in recent days. I can’t remember who said it, but it doesn’t matter, because the observation was so obvious that attribution seems unnecessary. (Actually, quite a few said it on Twitter.) Something like “They didn’t know he was going to run it like one of HIS businesses.” Of course, they had no excuse for not knowing, since they’d been warned a million times since 2016 — they just disregarded anyone who told them, because it didn’t fit within the fantasy in which they so fervently believed.
Of course, a few days back, Trump did his Emily Litella routine — “Never mind!” So everything’s OK, right? Well, no. There’s this thing that a functioning society needs leaders not only to project, but embody: stability. In the business world, “uncertainty” is a scary word. It keeps businesses from planning, growing, creating jobs, and all the rest.
Expect more surprise attacks on global financial growth and stability. Just as a garnish on top of his usual shtick of abandoning allies and hugging bad guys abroad, and pouring gasoline on ANY fire that serves to divide us at home.
Now let me pause to say what it’s always necessary to keep in mind, if we can stand to be that depressed: Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is that a majority of people in this country have so lost sight of what has always made America great (not just that — they’ve simply lost common sense) that they would actually vote for someone like that — repeatedly.
And just to make sure I tick off everybody, no one on the left should be nodding smugly at this point. If we had a Democratic Party capable of projecting an image of a strong, unified movement committed to principles and causes with broad appeal, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I cite that book Sapiens a lot — not because I agree with everything Yuval Noah Harari says, but because when he’s right about something, he explains it well. And one thing he makes plain about what separates humans from other creatures and has enabled us to work together to advance to an extraordinary extent is the ability to coalesce around unifying ideas. We don’t have to all agree, but we need to embrace a consensus about certain basic principles. All successful human endeavors involving groups larger than, say, a troop of chimpanzees (somewhere between a couple of dozen individuals and a hundred) depends on that ability. It is in fact the one major thing that separates us from those other apes.
But quite suddenly, we have lost that special gift. Now we can’t even agree on what facts are, much less work together effectively to change and shape a commonly perceived reality.
(At this point, I should point out to you that I’ve been thinking about writing this post since sometime last summer but have not for a reason that should by now be evident to you: It just takes too much time, and too many words. After about 1,500 of them, I’m really just getting into the meat of the problem. And I’ve been writing it, in short bursts at a time, for two or three days. I’ll redouble my efforts to get to the end as quickly as possible…)
How do we pull out of this nose dive? I have no idea, which is one reason I haven’t written much on our current plight, and have spent more and more time on the distant past.
As elusive as solutions might be, it’s somewhat easier to diagnose the problem. I refer you back to every post I’ve written in the last couple of years that uses the term “Rabbit Hole.” You should probably start with this one.
Of course, now some of you are warming up your intense objections to the Rabbit Hole thesis. Some of your fave arguments are:
- That I’m ignoring all the things that led up to the current situation. No, I’m not. I would never. The thing is, every major development has antecedents. The creators of those works I mention above touting 1177 B.C. and 1066, know full well that a great deal led up to those pivotal dates. For instance, England had been invaded successfully by non-Anglo Saxons exactly a half-century before 1066. (Check out King Cnut‘s big takeover in 1016.) But nothing so decisively changed the present and the entire future as what happened at Hastings in October 1066. And it was all quite sudden, as Harold Godwinson would tell you if he could. A similar book or podcast or whatever addressing what I’m talking about in this post would have “2016” in the title. That doesn’t mean a lot of it hadn’t already happened by that time, or that it isn’t still developing now. But that year was pivotal. It’s when some definitive disaster fell — a disaster that would have been impossible at any previous time in this one nation’s history. (Of course, this one nation isn’t the whole story of that year. Remember Brexit? The collapse of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? The election of Duterte in the Philippines?)
- That Brad has a helluva nerve trying to tell you that the end of newspapers and its replacement by technology that could be (and pretty much always is) programmed to always tell you what you want to hear plays a huge role in the Decline of the West. Does he really think we’re too stupid to see the utter transparency of such self-interested pleading of a has-been career newspaper editor? No, he doesn’t. But he’s still confident in making that assertion, whether you accept it or not, precisely because of his extensive experience communicating all day every day in both eras.
So, those objections having been dealt with, I’ll get back to my premise…
The thing is, evolution grinds slowly — very slowly. It took many tens of thousand of years after humans got clever before they settled down to farm life, which led to the development of cities, kingdoms, empires, money, and writing, along with a gazillion other things. That started about 12,000 years ago, and we haven’t fully adjusted well to the changes. This very recent development is a big reason obesity is such a problem. Any hunter-gatherer with initiative stuffed himself with as many calories as he could, whenever he could. He had to. Now that most folks in developed countries can gorge themselves on sweets and other carbs without limit, our brains still haven’t completely evoved to the point that we understand that we shouldn’t. (Other creatures have to mutate for big things to happen. It is both the great advantage and flaw of humans that we just go ahead and change, and don’t wait around for new hardware and software to be installed.)
So consider what happens if you live in a modern liberal democracy with a deliberative system built to allow people to engage in lively disagreements, but do so in a manner that still allows for, even encourages, effective, amicable solutions. And then, all of a sudden, practically no one seems to believe in the abstractions necessary to such a system — the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, pluralism, Voltaire’s “I disagree with what you say…” principle, liberal democracy itself, all of it. They’ve all suddenly gone “poof,” in what amounts to a microsecond in evolutionary terms. (Of course, despite the words that follow, it wasn’t just our beloved technology that did this to us. There’s the classic American attitude that history is, as Henry Ford said, bunk. We are not a grounded people, in terms of internalizing the most important principles we have inherited.)
The internet, and a decade later social media, made it possible for the first time in human history for a sad, maladjusted person (and there are millions who fit this description on the planet; it’s not just that one guy) to communicate instantaneously with thousands (out of billions, a statistical fact in which we once could take comfort) of other people just as deluded as he is, and he and they become instantly convinced that they must not be crazy, because so many people agree! He, and every one of those thousands, now possess greater power to publish their musings than anyone previously in the history of written communication — and to do so instantly, and to the entire planet at once.
Consider the case of RFK Jr. In previous decades, he would simply have been (and I suppose was, up until recently) the embarrassing secret of a great American family. But today, he can in short order find himself leading an army of anti-vaxxers, and eventually become United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. In what previous time, since the U.S. Constitution was drafted, was such a thing possible? (Sure, the sadly lacking, even demented, son of a prince might once have raised an army and taken the throne, but isn’t one of the main points of this country the fact that we’ve put that sort of thing behind us? We had, and now suddenly it’s back.)
As a people, we have by and large simply turned our backs on the great American experiment. We were not overrun by Sea Peoples or other enemies. No Vesuvius went off and buried our cities in ash. We did it as whimsically, and unnecessarily, as Trump erased that $10 trillion in market value. We didn’t even do it consciously, near as I can tell. We just did it. And to the extent we’re conscious of the damage wrought, we’ve blamed it on those other guys (who used to be our fellow Americans).
How long will it take for our species to find its way through this unforeseen shock? How long will it take us to adapt, if we do?
I do not know. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, it was the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Europe would not see another republic for 1,000 years. And that didn’t involve a new technological development that outstripped the human capacity to think clearly.
Am I saying things are hopeless? Nope. I’m not giving up. It’s not in my nature. Remember, I’m the guy who set aside everything he was doing to try to unseat an incumbent white Republican in South Carolina in 2018 — two years after that ominous date mentioned above.
But at the moment, I’m sort of out of ideas as to how we pull out of this. I suppose I’ll come up with something — that is, we’ll come up with something. I’m just describing the situation: that technology and our weaker tendencies have already done something to our cognitive abilities that we were not ready for. And mind you, AI hasn’t even gotten warmed up. Anyway, that’s my diagnosis over the last few months. Beyond that, I’m hearing a paucity of ideas regarding effective remedies.
But I’ll keep listening. There are plenty of smart people out there, even though it’s often hard to tell at the moment. And if I think of something myself, I’ll give you a heads-up. You know me.
In the meantime, maybe some of y’all have an idea, one that has so far escaped notice, for how we can return to building a rational civilization together. But don’t waste your breaths, as some tend to do, telling me I’m wrong. I’m not. Boy, do I wish I were…
In late 1941, Harry Niles owns a bar for American and European expatriates, journalists, and diplomats, in Tokyo’s entertainment district, called the “Happy Paris”. With only 24 hours until Japanese fighters and bombers attack 
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