The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

by Dan Carlin

the approach of a storyteller or journalist is to look at the human angle.* What sort of human stories are going on as a civilization collapses?

Seeing things through that lens engages different parts of the brain, including emotions, and can often have an impact that the data, graphs, and research studies don’t.

even without agreed-upon answers, such questions are both fascinating and potentially valuable.

A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.

If a person’s bookshelf is a window into their interests, apparently mine lean toward the apocalyptic—although it was a bit surprising just how often the shows eventually factored down to a related version of the same idea: the End of Civilization in one form or another and not just how we humans might react or respond to that based on past experience, but what kind of people these experiences might make us.

Will things keep happening as they always have, or won’t they?

World War III sounds like a bad movie concept, but is it any more unlikely than eternal peace between the great states?

can you imagine the city you currently live in as a desolate ruin?

looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective.

Premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me things are pretty good now, no matter what.

Thanks to a bit of cosmic luck, we were born at the time we were, and in the place we were. It could’ve easily been any other time and some other place. I find that recalling that makes having historical empathy somewhat easier.

Hubris is, after all, a pretty classic human trait.

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,” Voltaire reportedly said.

fortunes of nations or civilizations or societies rise and fall based on the character of their people,

why do we tend to assume that tougher is better? Toughness is this vague concept that we all believe exists, and we all use “tough” as an adjective, but it is a relative term, and one person’s or culture’s idea of what’s tough may be different from another’s.

it’s not just about weathering the damage; it’s also about inflicting it.

To Plutarch and Livy, for example, sloth, cowardice, and lack of virtue were the fruit of too much ease and luxury and money.

Wealth came too suddenly to be used wisely.

The “Great Kings” of Persia, who could not defeat the Spartans on the battlefield, found that gold was a more effective way to neutralize them.

It’s as if these “soft” Persians, as the ancient Greeks often portrayed them, spreading their softness like a virus, equalized the toughness between the two sides.

War and poverty are not constants.

everything that characterizes the modern military—the organization, tactics, drill, logistics, and leadership—is designed to help offset the natural advantage of the toughness that people at a lower level of civilization possess.

The main service of the standing army consists of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized.”*

History is akin to traveling to a distant planet, but one inhabited by human beings. Biologically the same, but culturally alien—and a major reason is that they were raised differently.

It’s obvious that it has to make a large difference, and yet it’s almost impossible to say exactly how or to what degree it actually has.

The Emotional Life of Nations,

Book

human cultures are so varied that such blanket statements seem too sweeping.

In modern times, we worry about our kids’ exposure to simulated violence on television or in video games and whether it desensitizes them to real-life atrocities. But in many past eras it may have been actual violence, not the made-for-TV variety, that desensitized children to more of the same. Think of the children who grew up in cultures where they would have seen real-life killings and torture up close by the time they were five, six, or seven years old. In some cases, they might have even participated in it.

in various writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children sometimes sound like litters of puppies rather than human beings.

perhaps our concept of what constitutes “damage” is different from theirs. They were raising kids to live in their world, a world alien to us. Besides, who knows what child-rearing experts of the future will think about our current practices?

The idea of “progress” is not without bias.

In the period after the Roman Empire disappeared in the West (the time formerly called “the Dark Ages”), many of the capabilities of the people who lived in its wake deteriorated. Eventually, those who lived in what formerly were Roman lands couldn’t repair or build anew the infrastructure that had previously existed. The aqueducts, monetary system, and trade routes were not what they had been. Literacy plummeted in most areas, and other groups and outlets began to perform some of the functions that formerly had been provided by an organized central authority.* What

The 1968 film Planet of the Apes provides an instructive illustration of the inherent fallacy of the position that our version of humanity represents its final incarnation.

We moderns almost unconsciously consider ourselves exempt from outcomes such as this,

It is unimaginable to us that we could have descendants who might live in a world more primitive than our own.

history is an ongoing process—it never can, nor will, reach its final conclusion,

a surprising amount of written material (again, a sure sign of an advanced era),

The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account.

History, especially the further back one travels, has a way of compressing the events of the past, so that trends that occurred over generations seem to us to happen almost in an instant.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are commonly given the names Conquest (or Pestilence), War, Famine, and Death.

it’s never wise to bet against any of the Four Horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.

When enough people are driven by desperation, not even the greatest state can stop them;

symbols of wealth and prestige mean nothing if enough people reject their meaning.

Smallpox is one of the most infamous diseases in history. To give an idea of its virulence, it killed an estimated 300 to 500 million people in the twentieth century alone,* but the disease was eradicated from the planet in 1980*—meaning half a billion people were killed by smallpox in just eight decades.

nothing separates us more from human beings in earlier eras than how much less disease affects us.

War (and the resulting conquests) has often benefited the state doing the conquering.

When people don’t have food, under certain circumstances all law and order and societal controls can break down.

Anarchy, revolution, and civil war can sometimes do to a society what outside invaders can’t manage. All it can take is too little food or too much disease.

If such destabilization were sparked by a system’s inability to deliver food to a starving population, what’s ultimately to blame: The famine, or the brittle, inequitable social system?

Both the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s and the post-Soviet breakup of the 1990s lasted roughly a decade or so.