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The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Three: The End of the Dream
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Three: The End of the Dream
Let’s take a moment to recap the argument of the last two posts here on The Archdruid Report before we follow it through to its conclusion. There are any number of ways to sort out the diversity of human social forms, but one significant division lies between those societies that don’t concentrate population, wealth, and power in urban centers, and those that do. One important difference between the societies that fall into these two categories is that urbanized societies—we may as well call these by the time-honored term “civilizations”—reliably crash and burn after a lifespan of roughly a thousand years, while societies that lack cities have no such fixed lifespans and can last for much longer without going through the cycle of rise and fall, punctuated by dark ages, that defines the history of civilizations.
It’s probably necessary to pause here and clear up what seems to be a common misunderstanding. To say that societies in the first category can last for much more than a thousand years doesn’t mean that all of them do this. I mention this because I fielded a flurry of comments from people who pointed to a few examples of societies without cities that collapsed in less than a millennium, and insisted that this somehow disproved my hypothesis. Not so; if everyone who takes a certain diet pill, let’s say, suffers from heart damage, the fact that some people who don’t take the diet pill suffer heart damage from other causes doesn’t absolve the diet pill of responsibility. In the same way, the fact that civilizations such as Egypt and China have managed to pull themselves together after a dark age and rebuild a new version of their former civilization doesn’t erase the fact of the collapse and the dark age that followed it.
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The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations
The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part Two: A Landscape of Hallucinations
Last week’s post covered a great deal of ground—not surprising, really, for an essay that started from a quotation from a Weird Talesstory about Conan the Barbarian—and it may be useful to recap the core argument here. Civilizations—meaning here human societies that concentrate power, wealth, and population in urban centers—have a distinctive historical trajectory of rise and fall that isn’t shared by societies that lack urban centers. There are plenty of good reasons why this should be so, from the ecological costs of urbanization to the buildup of maintenance costs that drives catabolic collapse, but there’s also a cognitive dimension.
Look over the histories of fallen civilizations, and far more often than not, societies don’t have to be dragged down the slope of decline and fall. Rather, they go that way at a run, convinced that the road to ruin must inevitably lead them to heaven on earth. Arnold Toynbee, whose voluminous study of the rise and fall of civilizations has been one of the main sources for this blog since its inception, wrote at length about the way that the elite classes of falling civilizations lose the capacity to come up with new responses for new situations, or even to learn from their mistakes; thus they keep on trying to use the same failed policies over and over again until the whole system crashes to ruin. That’s an important factor, no question, but it’s not just the elites who seem to lose track of the real world as civilizations go sliding down toward history’s compost heap, it’s the masses as well.
Those of my readers who want to see a fine example of this sort of blindness to the obvious need only check the latest headlines. Within the next decade or so, for example, the entire southern half of Florida will become unfit for human habitation due to rising sea levels, driven by our dumping of greenhouse gases into an already overloaded atmosphere.
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