Collapse

What does it mean to say that a "society" or a "civilisation" has collapsed? In common use, this tends to be implied as a disaster, a tragedy, a 'nakba' if you will. Increasingly I've come to see things differently.

"Collapse" is a neutral term. A bridge collapsing is a tragedy. A Mafia gang collapsing, not so much. If you're unfortunate enough to be in a war and the enemy are driving their tanks towards you, maybe even the bridge collapsing is Good, Actually. Everything is contextual.

As with so many things, it was David Graeber who helped me to see this. His article — co-written with David Wengrow — "How to change the course of human history" is pretty extraordinary, swirling around a central argument that pre-historic societies were full of experimentation, with literal "kings for a day" and seasonal cities. Elsewhere Graeber (I think...? Or maybe it was someone else) has written about "interegnums" that historians usually imply were times of darkness and poverty between the main action, whereas in many cases they lasted longer than the periods of rule by kings. The mysterious period of the "Sea Peoples" in the Mediterranean springs to mind — from what I've read, much of the destruction is ambiguous and could just as easily represent a home-grown riot and overthrow of local palace-dwellers as a foreign invasion.

James C Scott, the other anthropologist who utterly changed the way I see the world, tells a similar story in his book "Against the Grain". It's the Barbarians who represent the good life for most people through most of human history. The poor "civilised" people spent most of their short lives relying on a single crop, catching diseases from the animals they shared their hovels with, and trying to avoid being murdered by the King's goons.

I've been thinking a lot about seasonal cities lately. There's lots of archaelogical and historical evidence that this was a common lifestyle in Australia for hundreds or maybe thousands of years as well. It certainly was a thing in what's now Canada and the northern USA.

Living basically the same lifestyle according to the same time patterns in basically the same places every week of the year seems increasingly bizarre to me.

I remembered all this after reading "Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story":

A report recently published in the journal Nature argues that an obsession with catastrophe has driven much of the research into how societies responded to a shifting climate throughout history. That has resulted in a skewed view of the past that feeds a pessimistic view about our ability to respond to the crisis we face today.

People love to quote George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", but my intellectual journey over the last few years is leading me to think the opposite is a much bigger problem. If we're unable to remember the real past, it's easy to be constrained by the present. Being "doomed" to repeat the past is only a problem if you think the present situation is an improvement on what came before. This is George Orwell's "memory hole" and "Newspeak". If nobody knows the past ever happened, and they don't have the words to talk about it, we're stuck with the anaemic language of the present to talk about our future. Perhaps it's time to reclaim the idea of "conservatism" while we're at it.

=> How to change the course of human history | Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest states | Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story