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

by Dan Carlin

Charlemagne seems a wonderful synthesis of the “Dark Age” Germanic barbarian stereotype and the pious Middle Ages Christian ruler stereotype.

The Saxons sacrificed prisoners of war to their gods, as Germans had always done before converting to Christianity, and the Franks did not hesitate to put to death anyone who refused to be baptized.”

The pagan Saxons were known to kill those who tried to preach to them, yet the conversion of the Saxon tribes was part of the conditions of victory.

example of how different the optics are between “defending the church with the sword” and, as Roger Collins has phrased it, “armed evangelizing.”

it’s difficult to keep the faith clean during such a brutal religious conflict.

“If you will not accept belief in God, there is a king in the next country who will enter your land, conquer it, and lay it waste.”

there always seemed to be more ferocious barbarians behind the ones he’d just subdued.

the story reeks of an after-the-fact prediction coming true,

Sometimes in history, what goes around, comes around.

The fact that we live in an age when we don’t expect a large percentage of our children to die in childhood makes us the historical anomaly.

throughout most of human history, no one really understood disease or germs, so sickness was attributed to all sorts of causes.

many of today’s common childhood maladies were fatal before the availability of modern vaccines and medicine.

people in the premodern world lived with what we would consider to be extreme levels of death by disease at all times.

Their disease- and death-heavy environment perhaps gave them some increased level of emotional or cultural immunity to such things.

after about 750 CE, it seems almost to have gone away. The next time the plague came, in the 1340s, it had a new name: the Black Death. Eight hundred years after the Plague of Justinian burst on the scene, the terrible disease once again visited itself on the known Western world.

Persistence is a key factor in how deadly any pestilence will be,

because the plague kept coming back, thanks to the numbers of people on the planet and how much they now traveled, the plague’s effects only widened.

There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.

in the case of the Black Death, many people thought the pandemic was God’s will or a manifestation of the devil on earth.

The last sentence of his note was written in another hand and said that Brother John had died of the disease.

The human ripples of pain are still heartbreaking when made visible to us now.

When was the last time the developed world experienced such a rapid descent into a microbial hell?

people kept their distance from one another, creating one of the silent tragedies of this plague: that they had to suffer virtually alone.

In the end, the clergy suffered fatalities at the same rate as the rest of the population, and their deaths led to unexpected consequences. For example, to replace losses in their ranks, the church lowered the ages at which people could attain positions of authority. This led often to very young, hardly prepared people in positions that had previously been held by much older, more august figures.

Over the course of around two centuries, the clergy’s reputation diminished, tarnished by abuses and excess and a lack of high standards. This dissatisfaction led to the development of the many complaints that the German theologian Martin Luther is said to have nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg Castle in 1517, marking the onset of Protestantism and a break with the Catholic Church.

Having witnessed so many of their neighbors and loved ones die, survivors had no confidence that life was going to last very long. This attitude is reflected in the art of the period, which is a window into the psyche of these traumatized people.

some folks went off the deep end with quackery and mysticism. Many others adopted a live-for-today attitude. There were orgies and rapes and robberies and killings by people who figured they had nothing to lose. A quarter of the people in fifteenth-century England didn’t marry. That’s an amazing statistic in that era.

There were subsequent outbreaks of the Black Death, the Great Pestilence, or the Great Mortality, as it was variously called, every couple of years, as though it were returning to claim the lives it had missed the previous go-through.

Before the plague struck, peasants were afraid to protest poor working conditions, but after, all bets were off. To paraphrase Barbara Tuchman, modern man may have been born because of the Black Death.

ideas of equality and merit-based advancement seeped in where nobility and lineage had previously held sway.

Population disasters always prompt questions about balance, and they are usually the sort of questions that are easier to ask about in the context of animal ecosystems rather than human ones.

The collision of this outbreak with this first period of true globalization was devastating.* At its height, whole cities in the United States were virtually shut down, as areas where human beings congregated were closed to prevent people from transmitting the illness.* People stayed home from school and work rather than risk exposure, and the gears of society in some places seemed imperiled by the justifiable fear of getting sick.

our civilization is not unsinkable.

The traditional Black Death–type pathogen has already been used in attempts at weaponization.

a man-made plague might be worse than anything nature’s previously thrown at us.

It’s hard to imagine a human society acting rationally or humanely if mortality levels began reaching catastrophic levels. In the past, societies have been reshaped and at times have nearly crumbled under the weight of a pandemic. It’s possible that, facing mortality rates of 50, 60, or 70 percent—as people who lived through the Black Death did—we might do as they did: turn to religion, change the social structure, blame unpopular minorities and groups, or abandon previous belief systems.

Unless humankind can break patterns of collective behavior that are older than history itself, we can expect to have a full-scale nuclear war at some point in our future.

Despite intermittent peaceful eras, there have always been wars.

the next Total War will be the first one in which both sides possess weapons powerful enough to destroy civilization—and efficient enough to do it in an afternoon.

the only way this experiment will likely ever conclude is if we find out that we can’t.

We are an ostensibly adaptable species.

human violence is, alas, ongoing and constant—but

It’s hard to imagine us ridding society of problems relating to any number of baseline human instincts: sex, greed, intoxicating substances, violence . . . war?

If you don’t understand the information, what do you do with it?

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the end of scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.

Second World War proved, it was that it doesn’t matter how many arms treaties nations sign or what limits countries impose during peacetime—when societies are in the midst of a Total War, with their survival at stake, there’s nothing ethically sacrosanct in the arsenal.

Today, when we talk about the two atomic bombs* the United States dropped on Japan, we tend to do so in the context of the morality of dropping them. The truth is, the decision makers almost certainly didn’t have the range of options we often assume (or wish) they had. The idea that President Truman could have done something other than use the atomic bomb on Japan is probably a little out of step with the political realities of the time.* As the historian Garry Wills wrote in his book Bomb Power: “If it became known that the United States had a knockout weapon it did not use, the families of any Americans killed after the development of the bomb would be furious. The public, the press, and Congress would turn on the President and his advisors. There would have been a cry to impeach President Truman and court-martial General Groves. The administration would be convicted of spending billions of dollars and draining massive amounts of brain power and manpower from other war projects and all for nothing.”

The author Susan Southard writes in her book Nagasaki that within a second of the bomb being dropped, the resulting fireball was 750 feet in diameter, and the temperature inside it was 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than at the center of the sun. “Horizontal blast winds tore through the region at two and a half times the speed of a category five hurricane, pulverizing buildings, trees, plants, animals, and thousands of men, women, and children. In every direction, people were blown out of their shelters, houses, factories, schools, and hospital beds; catapulted against walls; or flattened beneath collapsed buildings.” And all of it happened in an instant. One Hiroshima survivor, Hiroshi Shibayama, saw the explosion and ran toward the city center where the bomb had gone off. He wrote, “The people were burned so badly that it was hard to distinguish feature from feature, and all were blackened as if covered with soot. Their clothes were in rags. Many were naked. Their hands hung limply in front of them. The skin of their hands and arms dangled from their fingertips. Their faces were not the faces of the living.” The survivors’ accounts leave a modern reader slack jawed.

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that he didn’t know what sort of weapons the Third World War would be fought with, but the one after it would be fought with sticks and stones.

“to bomb someone back to the Stone Age.”* Both quotes, whether said by these men or not, invoke the idea of a future all-out war knocking humanity backward on the civilization scale. For the first time in their history, humans had created weapons so powerful they had the theoretical potential to spawn dark ages.