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

by Dan Carlin

Just noting past evidence and extrapolating it out to future events can get weird quickly.

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.

While much of what follows is rather dark, looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective. Hearing about what, for example, people dealt with as their cities were carpet-bombed or while enduring monstrous medieval plagues has a way of making your problems seem small. Premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me things are pretty good now, no matter what.

Hubris is, after all, a pretty classic human trait. As my dad used to say, “Don’t get cocky.”

“History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,” Voltaire reportedly said. The observation refers to the argument that fortunes of nations or civilizations or societies rise and fall based on the character of their people, and this character is heavily influenced by the material and moral condition of their society.

Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury under President Herbert Hoover when the 1929 stock market crashed, which initiated more than a decade of economic collapse, thought the coming hardship would be a good thing. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” Mellon said, as reported in Hoover’s memoirs. “High costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

Clearly, there were times in our history when only the strong survived, so a person had better be tough. But a case might be made that toughness isn’t as important a qualification for survival as it used to be.

Modern militaries have, like Delbrück’s Romans, found ways to work around the toughness deficit.

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.

DeMause believes that most children up until recent times would likely have met modern criteria as child abuse victims,

Yet the practice often still meant sending children away from their homes to live with a wet nurse, sometimes for years. The casual giving away of children in past eras can astound; in various writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children sometimes sound like litters of puppies rather than human beings.

It wasn’t until the late 1930s in the United States that child labor in such dangerous industries as mining and manufacturing was outlawed. There was much more opposition to the reform attempts at the time than might be thought.

The historian John H. Arnold pointed out that history is an ongoing process—it never can, nor will, reach its final conclusion, and revisions will always be happening, as more facts and data become available and older theories are modified or disproved.

One of the modern theories on societal collapse argues that because of the entire planet’s connected nature in the twenty-first century, individual or localized “dark ages” of the sort that formerly occurred are nowadays absorbed by the rest of the global body and civilization as a whole.

Some two hundred years after Assyria’s fall, a Greek general named Xenophon recorded an encounter with what was left of Assyria’s grandeur when he saw cities—places that were larger and more formidable than anything he’d seen back in Greece—dissolved into ruins. Xenophon wrote the Anabasis—now considered a classic of Western literature—about his experience commanding Greek mercenaries in a Persian civil war. As Xenophon and ten thousand Greeks fought a running battle trying to escape from their pursuers after fighting on the losing side of that war, they stumbled upon enormous fortifications and cities decomposing in the sand in what’s now northern Iraq—the ruins of something greater than his own civilization had ever produced.

But the fall of Nineveh is probably one of the most significant geopolitical events in world history.

But the long-term gains for the descendants of the conquered inhabitants were immense. The Romans brought the proverbial “blessings of civilization” to much of the world.* But when they eventually left and returned to where they came from, they often took those blessings back with them. And it’s at that point that the local version of the Statue of Liberty begins the long process of melting into the sand.

Valentinian III gave Roman lands in North Africa to the Vandal tribe. The Visigoths were ensconced in Spain, and the Franks in much of modern-day France. Without realizing it, the Roman decision makers were parceling out the empire to the people who would eventually run these regions when the central authority fell apart—in effect creating their own successor states. As the historian Roger Collins writes: “What is genuinely striking . . . is the haphazard, almost accidental nature of the process. From 410 onwards, successive Western imperial regimes just gave way or lost practical authority over more and more of the territory of the former Empire. The Western Empire delegated itself out of existence.” Central

people in the premodern world lived with what we would consider to be extreme levels of death by disease at all times. If we moderns lived for one year with the sort of death rates our pre–industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock. Their disease- and death-heavy environment perhaps gave them some increased level of emotional or cultural immunity to such things.

The victims of the plague didn’t have the tools to understand that they were dealing with a biomedical contagion. In fact, from time immemorial people have thought plagues to be divine anger or justice; in the case of the Black Death, many people thought the pandemic was God’s will or a manifestation of the devil on earth.

Having witnessed a scourge that had carted off perhaps seventy-five million people—up to half of the world’s entire population at the time—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.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, the people who served as the scapegoats were the Jews. What happened to the Jewish population in the plague era is probably second only in its horror to the Holocaust.* Jews were accused of poisoning wells to make people sick and thereby take over the Christian world.

By the time it receded in 1920, modern epidemiologists estimate that the flu had killed somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people; “roughly half of those who died were young men and women in the prime of their life, in their twenties and thirties,”

“perhaps two-thirds of the deaths occurred in a period of twenty-four weeks, and more than half of those deaths occurred in even less time, from mid-September to early December 1918.” That amount of damage in that short a period of time is disorienting and potentially destabilizing for a society.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, sometimes called the father of the atomic bomb, described the moment that the bomb went off in a 1965 interview on a program called The Decision to Drop the Bomb: 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.

By the time the atomic bombs were dropped in August, Tokyo was already so devastated by previous firebombing raids—fifty to sixty square miles of the city had been burned out—that it had been taken off the priority targeting list. Some sixty-plus other Japanese cities had suffered the same fate.

For the first time in their history, humans had created weapons so powerful they had the theoretical potential to spawn dark ages.

The CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow put it this way: “Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear—with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”

he would have no trouble understanding why the victorious alliance so quickly fell apart. They almost always do after victory, because the winners are the biggest players left on the board, hence they automatically become the greatest threats to each other’s power.”

The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, had, in fact, wanted JFK to win over his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, a man who had been Eisenhower’s vice president and was known to be a virulent anti-Communist.

Samuel Johnson is supposed to have said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” For that two-week period, when all seemed near lost, humankind treated the threat with the level of gravity it had always deserved.

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your (peace) congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

Combat also exerts pressures on the human psyche, tapping into fight-or-flight response and various biochemical releases* that help humans survive dangerous situations. Such conditions and such pressures are not the most conducive to reflective thought. It is for this reason that distinctions are made between actions carried out in “hot blood” versus ones carried out in “cold blood.”

H. G. Wells’s The War in the Air depicts a German zeppelin fleet flying across the Atlantic to bomb New York.

Whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about our civilization’s long-term chances may depend on your view of how much we human beings can change. We laud ourselves for the adaptability of our species, but these are difficult challenges that may have sunk many other intelligent life forms before us. If we do what we have always done, we can depend on outcomes that are disastrous.