In November of 1920, two years after the silencing of the guns of the First World War, Irish poet W. B. Yeats published an ode to that vast bloodletting entitled “The Second Coming.” Like most post-war literature, it was dark and bleak, suggesting a world torn apart by strife and chaos that was slipping even deeper into an oblivion from which it would not return.
Written in vivid Christian imagery, the poem warned in no uncertain terms that the worst, so to speak, was yet to come for a society that had done its best to murder an entire generation in the dank trenches of a fruitless, pitiless war.
Yeats’ poetic license, in hindsight, turned out to be more prophetic than he knew, for two decades later another war — one more vast, terrible and destructive than the first — convulsed the world and sent European pretensions to being the center of organized human culture crashing to Earth. Global power and the impetus of that force called “civilization” then shifted from Europe’s ruined cities and ashen death camps to a place across the sea, to a new Rome on a new continent that in the aftermath of that second war bestrode the world like a colossus.
Today, nearly 70 years after the end of that second war and in the midst of the long period of peace established and guarded by that new center of world power, cracks and strains are beginning to show in the global civilization it bequeathed to us. That young colossus across the sea is now much older, and it has grown weary of the burdens placed on its shoulders.
Worryingly, another colossus is rising in the East, while the tiring giant is finding it difficult to manage its own affairs, let alone that of the rest of the world. Everywhere, it seems, the bitter fruits of nationalism, sectarianism, economic inequality, environmental degradation and political disenfranchisement are coming home to roost and we get a sense that great change, likely for the worse, is upon us.
The idea that civilizations can fall to some decayed state or even come to an end altogether is not a new one. Indeed, Yeats’ contemporary, Rudyard Kipling, wrote some 17 years before the outbreak of World War I his famous poem “Recessional” on the occasion of Queen Victoria of England’s diamond jubilee. The poem warned starkly about the ruin that would one day encompass the entirety of the empire upon which the sun never set. Britain, he admonished, would ultimately become “one with Nineveh and Tyre.” Even earlier, another English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote in “Ozymandias” about a traveler to an ancient land viewing the inscription on a broken statue of a long-dead king that read, “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
The end of civilization and the rise and fall of empires is thus a common theme in Western culture, an unsurprising fact given that the modern West, itself, is the offspring of an earlier, fallen civilization. How earlier civilizations fell, including the one that gave rise to the West, is, therefore, something that scholars have long struggled to understand. It is, after all, hard not to ask “Why?” when one is standing amongst the ruins of what came before. Edward Gibbon, perhaps the first to systematically explore this question in earnest, wrote that “all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance” — a pithy, if grim, assessment of the fate of all great empires.
A familiar tale retold
Today, however, discussion of the rise and fall of empires and the collapse of civilizations has advanced a bit further than, as historian Edward Gibbon once stated about history, a rote recitation of the “crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” One such modern effort to understand how and why things fall apart has made news recently by claiming that industrial civilization may be traveling down the same path as Rome, Ninevah and Tyre.
Funded by NASA and soon to be published in the journal Environmental Economics, this latest attempt to understand why past societies have crumbled into dust uses a mathematical model that incorporates both environmental pressures and socio-political dynamics to explore how societies such as ours may be disrupted in the future.
In general, the study found, important factors that lead to the collapse of a society occur when ecological factors such as population, climate, water, agriculture and energy, interact with a social system that is increasingly stratified and unequal. Put simply, competition between competing elites and those who would hope to join them produces a “keeping up with the Joneses” effect that leads directly to overconsumption of vital resources or otherwise deeply stresses the environment. This is important, the study’s authors say, because “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history,” and is actually, disturbingly, “quite common.”
According to the authors, their analyses demonstrate that as the population grows and becomes more unequal, the competition for position and privilege heats up accordingly, as entry into elite status becomes more difficult. This competition, in turn, uses the resource base more intensely, and elite consumption that is really social competition eventually puts enormous pressure on the resource base. To keep elite consumption going in this race to the top that has no end, elites put the squeeze on non-elites in ways that greatly limit non-elite consumption and quality of life. Ultimately, this leads to social conflict and political instability that results in what the authors call a “precipitous collapse.” This collapse is what future poets will describe in their accounts of ruined civilizations.
Precedent — mathematical models included
Arguments like this have been made before, of course. In the 1970s, for instance, the famous Club of Rome published a similar study, “Limits to Growth,” that also used mathematical models to demonstrate the consequences of unrestricted economic growth and consumption on social stability. As in the recent NASA-funded study, consumption of resources beyond that which could be sustained by the natural regeneration of the resource base led inevitably to collapse. More recently, naturalist Jared Diamond made a similar argument, but also added in social dynamics of the type mathematically modelled by the new study’s authors.
These all-important social dynamics, in turn, have been pointed out as far back as Karl Marx, with economist Mancur Olsen making a similar argument about the enervating power of entrenched elites in the 1980s. Mathematical modeling of these social dynamics have recently come into vogue with the christening in the last decade of the field of cliodynamics, the mathematical modeling of long-term historical processes that sounds more like science fiction than science. The innovation of the recent study, then, comes in its combination of both ecological and social factors in one larger model.
As in all such mathematical modeling, the question is whether all of this is an accurate, objective understanding of history or mere projection of one’s own biases and theoretical predilections. Should we take the grim predictions that are inevitably churned out by studies of this type as prophetic truth, or as groundless, if number-based, doom-mongering? Or, perhaps, it could be interpreted as something in between — a warning of what could occur if business in our global civilization continued as usual. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these questions. The best we can do is to look out on the world to see whether the data matches up with what these models predict.
If we do that, what do we see? Currently at a little over 7 billion, human numbers are expected to increase to 9 billion or more by 2050. These 9 billion people will be facing a global environment that is much more stressed than it is today. Climate, it seems, is now thought to be much more vulnerable to small variations in global temperature than previously thought, suggesting that the resulting changes produced by manmade global warming could be profound and could occur relatively quickly, creating a truly unprecedented and dangerous shift in the climate by as early as 2036. This could dramatically impact crop output, an area already struggling to keep up with human demand. Even the bounty that is the world’s oceans is in deep decline, with the large fish scooped up by trawlers and sent to our dinner tables becoming rarer and rarer as time goes by.
If the ecological news is none too good, what about the sociological factors important in these end-times models? Well, socio-economic inequality is vastly higher in the United States today than it was even a generation ago, something most scholars examining the phenomenon have ascribed to a political system that has become paralyzed by extreme partisan gridlock that is itself created by rising inequality — effectively drowning the guarantor of present world order in a near-permanent cold civil war in lieu of a hot one. Globally, while interstate wars, civil wars and violence in general have been in decline for some time, the Arab revolutions and the resulting armed conflict that has stemmed from them are a reminder that mass political violence has not yet been banished altogether and lurks, like a monster under the bed, just waiting for the right opportunity to pounce.
So, is the end nigh?
To that we should give a qualified “maybe.” Doomsayers are notoriously prolific in their often wrong predictions. And yet, like the refrain from Kipling’s “Recessional,” we would do well to remember that civilization, for all its seeming permanence, is a profoundly fragile thing. It can and has come to an end in the past for reasons that should be familiar and understandable by now — resource stress, inequality, social strife and armed conflict. The trick is to recognize in the weft and weave of our own times the same patterns that brought down, in other times and places, less fortunate societies. Look upon these studies, then, ye mighty, and learn from them the follies and tragedies that came before so as to not repeat them.