Spoiler alert: We all float down here.
Given the fact that we are currently living in civilization, it’s obviously difficult to imagine civilization ending because some sort of calamity befalls us, be it a plague, nuclear war, climate change, or something else entirely. This same notion, certainly, had to apply to past civilizations that couldn’t imagine an end, either, and yet, those civilizations ended. The Assyrian Empire lasted for 19 centuries in pre-Biblical times. The Western Roman Empire existed for half a millenium, depending on how you look at it. In the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed nearly two-thirds of the European continent at the time, and likely scared those people into thinking it was a world-ending scenario. Civilizations have risen and fallen in our past. The only question, which Dan Carlin, the podcaster of Hardcore History, asks in his 2019 book, The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses, is when — if at all — will our civilization be the next to fall? That’s the binary proposition undergirding Carlin’s thesis: if we follow the same pattern of other humans and societies, we, too, will fall (coupled with the fact of adding, say, nuclear weapons and climate change to the equation), or will we be the ones to continue progressing, break through Fermi’s Great Filter, and stay vigilantly good astride “the end is always near” precipice? Thousands of years of human history, human fallibility, and human arrogance are betting against our resiliency, ingenuity, and adaptability.
To the latter point, Carlin starts his book off musing about how we tend to measure ourselves and our civilization by the nebulous notion of “toughness.” Of course, such a notion is stretched to absurdity when ascribing it to individuals and civilizations from thousands of years ago. However, contemporaneously, there were Roman historians who thought Rome had “gone soft,” as it were. Likewise, in our time, there are those who think America has gone soft and it’s leading to a Rome-like decline. Toughness and corresponding softness are in the eye of the ideological beholder, though. But I think Carlin uses this to point out that modern humans have it a lot easier, in a manner of speaking, compared to our ancient counterparts. For one, we don’t have to deal with ubiquitous, unrelenting, and calamitous disease the way they did. To be sure, leading causes of deaths in the world are still disease, but nothing like in ancient times, or even before the advent of germ theory, vaccines, and antibiotics relatively recently. Correspondingly, we don’t live in a world with mass child death all around us like our ancient counterparts did, where it wasn’t uncommon for multiple children from the same family to die before the age of five. Does the very fact of our progress from death make us “soft” to oppose its machinations, or bounce back from something like the Black Death, or for a more modern example, the total war fact of WWII, where 50 to 85 million people died? Are we not as tough as even our grandfathers and great-grandfathers? Psychohistory, the study of history and psychology to understand the human behavior and motivations of past societies, is a shaky science, Carlin admits, but it’s interesting, nonetheless, to try to understand how ancient humans thought. If their world of persistent pestilence, child death and rape, and brutish, grinding poverty was all they knew, maybe it “made” them tougher and more resilient — or to put it another way, as Carlin does, maybe they weren’t “traumatized” in the way we would be, because they didn’t know the counterfactual reality. Obviously, though, like with the Black Death, when calamity befalls a people, a collective trauma is often reflected in the art and literature of the time. That seems a way of processing it. I also can’t help but find it interesting that Carlin’s book came out a year prior to COVID-19, which has killed more than 7 million people in the world so far, the worst pandemic in more than 100 years, but still distant from plagues our ancestors dealt with. That said, if COVID-19 was a test of Carlin’s aforementioned binary, I’m partly thinking we’re tumbling over the precipice, and I’m partly thinking we could pull through, owing to the minority of ingenious humans who save the rest of us from death (the inventors of the vaccine, for example).
Similar to the notion that “hard times make hard people,” it’s difficult, Carlin argues, for those of us now to understand sometimes the decisions made in the past during such hard times. Prime examples Carlin spends considerable time examining are a.) the firebombings of German and Japanese cities during WWII by the Allied forces, and b.) the subsequent use of two atomic bombs by the United States on two Japanese cities. In fact, Carlin dubs that chapter, “The Road to Hell,” because the total war of WWII — the most devastating war in human history — has a way of eroding over time one’s ethical boundaries and qualms about how to conduct a war. In other words, if it’s killed or be killed, you drop the nuke, in the estimation of the contemporary generals, politicians, and public of the time, and many of them now, too. The fact that we have in our possession smallpox (after eradicating smallpox from the world in the normal manner of speaking) and thousands of nuclear weapons — and by possession, it’s worth pointing out that not merely in the possession of the United States, if you think of us as the benevolent ones — makes the precipice of civilizational collapse more salient. If you think about it even for a moment, one human error or miscommunication could kill millions in an afternoon. That’s startling. Us Americans are even somewhat glib about it here in the United States during presidential elections: do you really want this person having the nuclear codes? Because that’s the other thing; we’ve somehow given one person the power to “press the button” to kill millions. As Carlin points out, the Founders could never have envisioned one person having such power that despots from Adolf Hitler to Genghis Khan could never have envisioned. Would they have been as benevelovent, for lack of a better word, as the United States was post-WWII? That is, Carlin goes through the ruminations and discussions about a nuclear preemptive strike on the Soviet Union to stave off what seemed like the obvious (WWIII) when the United States had a monopoly for about five years on nuclear weapons. I find such a notion unconscionable, especially that any American could have seriously agitated for that scenario, but I also do find it … reassuring that obviously, we didn’t do it when the historical record is replete with those who would have. That’s a point in favor of our civilizational progress! But can we maintain that forever? That’s why Carlin argues the “end is always near.” Maybe this is my American-centric brain, and because the United States has been atop the last seven decades of unprecedented peace in the world (thanks also to NATO), but I do disagree with Carlin’s notion that American decline would only marginally impact the world. When the Bronze Age ended, “no other society in the world existed to pick up the pieces or keep the lights on,” he says, but with the U.S., modern globalization would better absorb the shock of the U.S.’s fall. I think it is precisely because of globalization and interconnectivity that the U.S. — by far the biggest source of that connective tissue — collapsing would have all sorts of big and small ripple effects on the rest of the world, including the potential dangers of which country or countries would fill the global stage power vacuum.
Fascinating, alarming, and perhaps unintentionally inspiring, Carlin’s book is a must-read, bite-sized dive into history and recent history of civilizations that thought they could never fall … falling. Surely, in some sense, we’ve taken for granted the unprecedented human progress since the Industrial Revolution, and that such progress is the norm in perpetuity. But as mentioned, a whole lot of history says otherwise — nature’s plagues and climate change, asteroids, and our own fallibility as a species — that anything could knock us back a civilizational peg, as it were. And then what? If there is a chance for a “then what” at all.
Milam's Musings 