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

by Dan Carlin

The essence of that account is of an epidemic destroying the very bonds of human society. When was the last time the developed world experienced such a rapid descent into a microbial hell?

This hasn't aged well.

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.

At the time the plague struck in the fourteenth century, the population of England was six million souls, what many experts consider to be a maximum carrying capacity for that era. This number was reduced to two million in just a few years. The population would not rebound until the 1700s—more than three hundred years later.

If our ability to massively lower the traditional death rate from disease is part of explaining our highest-of-all-time global population level, perhaps we have somehow thrown a monkey wrench into a self-correcting system that was keeping things in balance?

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. In a perfect world, we would be able to do this continuously, but history has shown that the lesser aspects and banalities of life have a way of intruding.

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked for the RAF’s Bomber Command, said years after the war, “I felt sickened by what I knew. Many times, I decided I had a moral obligation to run out into the streets and tell the British people what stupidities were being done in their name. But I never had the courage to do it. I sat in my office until the end, carefully calculating how to murder most economically another hundred thousand people.”

In June 1941, the British officially said they were going to start targeting the morale and living arrangements of the enemy’s workers, and they were going to drop their bombs at night. (“Terror bombing” when the Germans did it, remember; “morale bombing” when the British did it.)

Grossman writes about one of the raids that killed seventy thousand people from the air in an evening: “If bomber crew members had to turn a flamethrower on each one of these seventy thousand women and children, or worse yet slit each of their throats, the awfulness and trauma inherent in the act would have been of such a magnitude that it simply would not have happened. But when it is done from thousands of feet in the air, where the screams cannot be heard and the burning bodies cannot be seen, it is easy.”

After the war, at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the defendants—most of whom would be hanged for crimes against humanity—complained about the Allied bombings of German cities. One of the Allies’ chief counsels said the aerial bombardments had “become a recognized part of modern warfare as carried on by all nations.” So the horse was out of the barn on that ethical question.

To focus on the Allied bombing attacks in a vacuum, however, is to forget the stakes, and the nature of the opponents. The air force historian Bruce Hopper, after visiting the Buchenwald death camp in April 1945, wrote: “Stench everywhere: piles of human bone remnants at the furnace. Here is the antidote to qualms about strategic bombing.”

High-class people in Republican Rome thought commerce and money were beneath them. Money was what merchants and dirty people did. The Japanese samurai were that way as well; merchants were the lowest class in their society. Peasants were above merchants—at least they farmed the food you needed.