{"id":55538,"date":"2020-11-05T09:34:03","date_gmt":"2020-11-05T14:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55538"},"modified":"2020-11-05T09:34:03","modified_gmt":"2020-11-05T14:34:03","slug":"how-do-you-know-when-society-is-about-to-fall-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55538","title":{"rendered":"How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n

Meet the scholars who study civilizational collapse.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n

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W<\/span>hen I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing \u201cmultiple famines of biblical proportions.\u201d George Floyd was still alive, and\u00a0the protests spurred by his killing<\/a>\u00a0had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had\u00a0taken over the Michigan State Legislature building.<\/a>\u00a0The president of the United States had appeared to suggest treating the coronavirus with disinfectant injections. Utah, where Tainter lives \u2014 he teaches at Utah State \u2014 was reopening its gyms, restaurants and hair salons that very day.<\/p>\n

The chaos was considerable, but Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation,\u00a0\u201cThe Collapse of Complex Societies,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0which has for years been the seminal text in the study of societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its publication in 1988. \u201cCivilizations are fragile, impermanent things,\u201d Tainter writes. Nearly every one that has ever existed has also ceased to exist, yet \u201cunderstanding disintegration has remained a distinctly minor concern in the social sciences.\u201d It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n