The Dawn of a New Dark Age

>>1640836

There have been plenty of crises worse than this one in the past 100 years, but none of them ended the world. The Great Recession that erupted in 2008, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the 1997-98 Asian and Russian financial meltdowns, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, the oil spikes of 1973 and 1979 — the list goes on, but civilization always survived. Even the material destruction of the world wars, which claimed close to 100 million lives, was largely put right.

The obvious implication seems to be that we should, as the British like to put it, keep calm and carry on. Terrible things happen, but even the worst can be contained. The larger global system rights itself relatively quickly. But this seems less true if we look back deeper into history, where we find examples of collapses from which no one would say that civilization "relatively quickly" righted itself. These periods raise some troubling questions for the 21st century.

cont.

>>1640839

Civilizations Collapse

The greatest of these end-of-everything moments was the fall of the Roman Empire. In the last three centuries B.C., Rome conquered the whole Mediterranean Basin; within another 100 years it ruled everywhere between the borders of Scotland and Iran. The empire linked together some 60 million people, one million of them in the city of Rome itself, and extended trade routes all across Eurasia. By the second century A.D., aristocrats in Korea could marvel at Roman glass vases while soldiers on Hadrian's Wall spiced their food with Indian black pepper. Living standards within the empire probably rose by 50-100 percent between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200; and while this growth rate sounds glacially slow today, the world had never before seen anything like it.

In the third century, however, the empire broke up. A generation of war then pulled it back together, but by the fifth century its western half was shattered beyond repair. Trade routes collapsed, populations fell and cities returned to forest. In some of my books I have developed a quantitative index of social development for measuring societies' capacity to master their environments, and on that metric, European development fell by one-third between 100 and 700, not regaining its first-century level until the 18th century. Edward Gibbon was quite right to say in 1776 that the fall of Rome was an "awful revolution … which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth."

cont.

>>1640843

But while the fall of Rome was the most awful revolution on record, it was not the only one. Another long-lived, if obscure, catastrophe began around 1900 B.C. in what is now Pakistan. For seven centuries, extraordinary cities with populations in the tens of thousands — Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and others — flourished in the Indus Valley. They were literate, built great monuments and traded with the Sumerian civilizations in what is now Iraq. Then, quite quickly, the Indus cities were abandoned, their script was forgotten (we still cannot read what it says) and their populations collapsed. More than 1,000 years then passed before complex civilizations in South Asia returned to the level of sophistication seen prior to 1900 B.C., and even then the main centers had shifted from the Indus to the Ganges Valley.

There is another well-known example from the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 B.C. Across the previous half-millennium a roughly triangular area with points in what are now Egypt, Greece and southwestern Iran had become increasingly interconnected. Egyptian pharaohs and kings of Babylon exchanged gold, scented wood and marriage partners, writing a voluminous correspondence and, when diplomacy failed, fielding armies of thousands of chariots. Then this world, too, abruptly fell apart. Its great cities burned, some of them forgotten until archaeologists returned to their ruins in the 20th century. Recovery was quicker than in the Indus Valley but still painfully slow; new cities arose in Assyria and perhaps Israel in the 10th century B.C., but Greece, out on the periphery, revived only around 700 B.C.

cont.

>>1640848

The New World had similar collapses and long eras of depression. When the Spanish conquistadors showed up after 1500, the Aztec and Inca empires were only just returning to the level of development attained by the great city of Teotihuacan before its fall around 750, or by the Classic Mayan city-states before their ninth-century decline. China, meanwhile, did not experience such prolonged breakdowns as India, the Mediterranean and Mesoamerica, but it certainly had plenty of shorter ones, with the longest extending from about 200 through 450. The ancient Middle East seems to have had the worst of both patterns, combining a long period of collapse after 1200 B.C. with multiple shorter breakdowns around 3100, 2200, 2000 and 1600 B.C.

In the past 30 or 40 years, many historians have refused to call these post-collapse periods "Dark Ages" because they feel that the label is judgmental and ignores the cultural accomplishments of societies such as Anglo-Saxon England or the Postclassic Maya. They often have a point; and yet it remains true that in every one of these cases, collapse brought sharply declining populations, life expectancies, long-distance connections, security, literacy and standards of living. "Dark Ages" strikes me as a pretty good name for these generations of poverty, ignorance and violence, even if none of them ended civilization permanently. This prompts an unavoidable question: Are the events of 2016 harbingers of a new dark age?

cont.

>>1640853

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The obvious way to answer this question is by looking at how the various Dark Ages began and asking whether similar conditions apply today. Strikingly, in every case where we have enough evidence, we see the same five causal factors, which I like to call the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The first, which is always prominent, is mass migration, on a scale that the societies of the time cannot control. Just how many immigrants it took to destabilize borderlands and spread violence across entire empires must have varied, although DNA seems to suggest that in the wrong circumstances even a group less than one-tenth the size of the host population could bring the roof crashing in.

The second factor, often coming on the back of the first, is disease. Long-distance mass movements sometimes merged what had previously been separate disease pools, producing new infections to which hardly anyone was immune. Steppe nomads migrating across thousands of kilometers were probably the main vector for the Black Death, which killed perhaps a quarter of the world's population between 1350 and 1400.

The third force, regularly linked to the first two, is state failure. Collapsing borders and shrinking populations often bring down governments too, and as chaos spreads, even states that have not been directly hit by invasion and plague can be sucked into the whirlpool.

cont.

>>1640860

Fourth, and strongly linked to the first three forces, is the collapse of trade. When failing states can no longer protect merchants, long-distance exchange networks break down, bringing starvation and yet more rounds of migration, disease and violence. Many historians think that the tipping point in the fall of the Roman Empire came when the Vandals invaded North Africa and cut off grain shipments to Italy from what is now Tunisia in 439. The city of Rome lost three-quarters of its population across the next two decades, and in 476 the Western Empire was officially declared defunct.

The fifth factor, always present but never in a straightforward way, is climate change. Some great collapses, such as that in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 B.C., coincide with rising temperatures; others, such as the Roman and Han Chinese breakdowns in the early first millennium, coincide with global cooling. The direction of climate change seems to matter less than the fact that any big change puts stress on farming, which — when everything else is already going wrong — might be enough to push people over the edge.

cont.

>>1640863

Stratfor readers will not need me to tell them that strategists in our own age are deeply worried about most of these five factors. Immigration was a central concern in the Brexit debates and in the American presidential primaries. In 2009, the "New H1N1" influenza spread from southern China to four continents before it was recognized, and fears are mounting about the Zika virus; climate change is also bursting on the world with a fury not seen since the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. State failure and trade breakdown, however, currently seem less pressing, the former restricted to an "arc of instability" in Africa and Asia and the forces of anti-globalization still a specter rather than a reality. This is not fifth-century Europe.

Comparing the Brexit with genuine civilization-killing events provides some sensible perspective. Leaving the European Union was a really bad idea, but despite the signs that some of the Five Horsemen are saddling up, it is not the end of the world. In fact, we might take the comparative argument further still. So far I have been looking for factors that were present in all cases of collapse and then asking whether these conditions are also present today. But there is another way to think about the question, by asking whether the presence of these conditions guarantees the coming of a dark age. If we can identify episodes where most or all of the Five Horsemen rode but civilization did not collapse, we can perhaps pinpoint how we can keep the darkness at bay.

cont.

>>1640868

Disrupting the Downward Spiral

Fortunately, such cases are not hard to find. One, in China after 600, is particularly informative. The empire had recently been reunited by the Sui dynasty after a dark age, but Turkic invasions from the steppes, new epidemics, civil war, trade breakdowns and global cooling threatened its recovery. In 614 the Sui government collapsed and the worst seemed about to happen; but through a clever combination of diplomacy and war, the first two emperors of a new Tang dynasty, Gaozu and Taizong, stopped the population movements completely by 650. Freed from external threats and with plagues abating, they restored law and order and revived trade. They could do nothing about climate change, but the absence of the other Horsemen reduced it to a mere nuisance. By 700 China had entered a golden age, its economy booming so much that a million people were living at Chang'an.

This Chinese case, along with others such as Eurasia after the 14th-century Black Death and again after 1945, suggests a big lesson: If governments can kill off one or two of the Five Horsemen, even the most alarming situations can be turned around. The big question is whether we will be able to do this in the 21st century.

cont.

>>1640870

When we ask this, however, certainties evaporate. Looking back at earlier breakdowns, one of the recurrent features is the way that long-term processes of slow decline can abruptly spiral into disaster. In one of the earliest cases of collapse, the Middle East around 2200 B.C., even though the usual suspects — migration, crumbling trade networks, climate change — had been posing problems for more than a century, the surviving texts make it clear that no one expected imminent disaster. But then in the 2190s B.C., everything simply fell apart. People stopped paying taxes, armies melted away and bandits seized entire cities. "Who then was king? Who then was not king?" asks our main literary source. By 2150 B.C., the Akkadian Empire and Old Kingdom Egypt, the two biggest states in history up to that point, had ceased to exist.

In the best-case scenario, historians in the 22nd century might ask how ABC News and others among us could possibly have been so silly as to suggest that the Brexit meant the end of a world. In the worst-case scenario, they might ask instead how this apparently minor event triggered a descent into darkness across the following decade — the collapse of the European Union, tens of millions of migrants fleeing the Middle East, war in Eastern Europe, an influenza pandemic killing 200 million, the worst famines in history in Africa and Asia, and finally the ultimate horror: all-out nuclear annihilation.

cont.

>>1640875

It will take a lot of bad luck and poor judgment for the Brexit to lead to this outcome, but there has been no shortage of either in ages before our own. Stodolak's suggestion that we compare recent events with others that really did bring civilizations down is a good one. History is dotted with genuine Dark Ages, some of them centuries long and bringing untold misery to millions of people. All seem to have been driven by the same five forces of migration, disease, state failure, trade breakdowns and climate change, at least three of which are present in the 2010s; and all seem to have taken almost everyone by surprise, as some unforeseen emergency turned long-term problems into a sudden collapse. For centuries now, humanity has managed to contain crises and head off the kind of breakdowns that ended the worlds of the Indus civilization, Roman Empire and Mayan city-states. But if the crowded, interconnected, urbanized and nuclear-armed world we have created does stagger into a new dark age, it will surely be the most terrible of all.

FIN

It sounds like the usual hysterics from "End of History" idiots that thought the end of the Cold War meant a glorious new future of managed capitalism and globalism under the benevolent auspices of the United States

>>1640836
>>1640839
>>1640843
>>1640848
>>1640853
>>1640860
>>1640863
>>1640868
>>1640870
>>1640875
>>1640881
Humanities was a mistake.

ok

I wish I could dispel the nagging anxiety I have over the looming end of the world.