The climate slowly worsened, growing less stable and colder, with more frequent droughts and a less dependable growing season for key staple crops. The late Roman Empire faced enormous challenges, both natural and human-made. Yet every state and society faces serious challenges. The difference lies in whether the underlying structures are healthy enough to effectively respond to those challenges. Successful states and societies are resilient when faced with serious challenges.
Falling empires are not. The popular story version of this particular falling empire might focus on a twice-divorced serial philanderer and bullshit artist and make him the villain, rendering his downfall or ultimate triumph the climax of the narrative.
Historians will look back at some enormous disaster, either ongoing now or in the decades or centuries to come, and say it was just icing on the cake. The foundation had already been laid long before, in the text of legislation nobody bothered reading, in local elections nobody was following, in speeches nobody thought were important enough to comment on, in a thousand tiny disasters that amounted to a thousand little cuts on the body politic.
It took a long time, decades, for the true reality of the change to hit the Romans whose writings have survived. Aristocratic Roman officials in Italy maintained the same kind of bureaucratic structure their fathers and grandfathers had, writing the same kinds of administrative letters for Ostrogothic kings of Italy that they had for emperors beforehand. The pull of the past is strong. The mental frameworks through which we understand the world are durable, far more than its actual fabric.
The new falls into the old, square pegs into round holes no matter how poor the fit, simply because the round holes are what we have available.
The nature of the problem and its scale are clear now, right now, on the cusp of the disaster. Maybe those future historians will look back at this as a crisis weathered, an opportunity to fix what ails us before the tipping point has truly been reached.
We can see those thousand cuts now, in all their varied depth and location. He has a PhD in history. Dan Spinelli. Monika Bauerlein. Noah Lanard. Noah Y. Matt Simon. Fairtrade America. Fred Pearce. Dan Friedman. David Corn. Alexander C. Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use , and to receive messages from Mother Jones and our partners. Can you pitch in a few bucks to help fund Mother Jones' investigative journalism?
We're a nonprofit so it's tax-deductible , and reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget. We noticed you have an ad blocker on. Yet the world is worsening in areas that have contributed to the collapse of previous societies. The climate is changing, the gap between the rich and poor is widening, the world is becoming increasingly complex, and our demands on the environment are outstripping planetary carrying capacity. That's not all. Worryingly, the world is now deeply interconnected and interdependent.
In the past, collapse was confined to regions — it was a temporary setback, and people often could easily return to agrarian or hunter-gatherer lifestyles. For many, it was even a welcome reprieve from the oppression of early states.
Moreover, the weapons available during social disorder were rudimentary: swords, arrows and occasionally guns. Today, societal collapse is a more treacherous prospect. The weapons available to a state, and sometimes even groups, during a breakdown now range from biological agents to nuclear weapons. New instruments of violence, such as lethal autonomous weapons , may be available in the near future. People are increasingly specialised and disconnected from the production of food and basic goods.
And a changing climate may irreparably damage our ability to return to simple farming practices. Think of civilisation as a poorly-built ladder. As you climb, each step that you used falls away. A fall from a height of just a few rungs is fine. Yet the higher you climb, the larger the fall. Eventually, once you reach a sufficient height, any drop from the ladder is fatal. Any collapse — any fall from the ladder — risks being permanent.
Nuclear war in itself could result in an existential risk: either the extinction of our species, or a permanent catapult back to the Stone Age.
A woman walks in the ruins of a town in Syria following conflict between fighters Credit: Getty Images. While we are becoming more economically powerful and resilient, our technological capabilities also present unprecedented threats that no civilisation has had to contend with.
For example, the climatic changes we face are of a different nature to what undid the Maya or Anazasi. They are global, human-driven, quicker, and more severe. Assistance in our self-imposed ruin will not come from hostile neighbors, but from our own technological powers. Collapse, in our case, would be a progress trap. The collapse of our civilisation is not inevitable.
History suggests it is likely, but we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past. We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified.
The policy proposals are there. Only the political will is lacking. We can also invest in recovery. There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe. Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widely-accessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible.
The Gupta fell because of invading tribes in the Himalayas. There are several reasons for the decline and fall of Empires and Dinasties but some of the most common are the concentration of wealth and power in the handd of just a few members of the population, the impossibility to afford an army, wrong decisions as regards policies of the government and mass poverty. According to the U. Sun, Amarjeet was just seven years old when he began feeding his bloodlust.
His first kill was a baby. By the time he had turned eight, he had taken three lives. The young girl had been stabbed 17 times by her brother, Paris Bennett, who was just 13 at the time. The Persians, having conquered a great empire, want to move from their harsh mountains to a richer land — but Cyrus, their king, forbids it. Implicit in his narrative, written at a time when Athens was at her peak of glory, is a warning: where other great powers have gone, the Athenians will surely follow.
The Romans signalled their arrival on the international stage by fighting three terrible wars with a rival west Mediterranean people: the Carthaginians. At the end of the third war, in BC, they succeeded in capturing Carthage, and levelling it to the ground. Nevertheless, it is said of the Roman general who torched Carthage that he wept as he watched her burn and quoted lines from Homer on the fall of Troy. Then he turned to a Greek companion. There were many, as the Romans continued to expand their rule across the Mediterranean, who found themselves hoping that the presentiment was an accurate one.
Rome was a brutal and domineering mistress, and the increasing number of much older civilisations under her sway unsurprisingly felt much resentment of her autocratic ways. Rome and her empire were engulfed by civil war. In one particular bloody campaign, it has been estimated, a quarter of all citizens of military age were fighting on one side or the other. No wonder that, amid such slaughter, even the Romans dared to contemplate the end of their empire.
But the Roman state did not die. In the event, the decades of civil war were brought to an end, and a new and universal era of peace was proclaimed. Virgil, perhaps because he had gazed into the abyss of civil war and understood what anarchy meant, proved a worthy laureate of the new age.
All the world has been adorned by you as a pleasure garden. In the event, the garden would turn to brambles and weeds. Intruders would smash down the fences. New tenants would carve up much of it between themselves. Yet the dream of Rome did not fade. Its potency was too strong for that. He was not the first barbarian to find in the memory of Rome — the splendour of its monuments, the vastness of its sway, the sheer conceit of its pretensions — the only conceivable model for an upwardly mobile king to ape.
Indeed, one could say that the whole history of the early-medieval west is understood best as a series of attempts by various warlords to square the grandeur of their Roman ambitions with the paucity of their resources. There was Charlemagne, who not only had himself crowned as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day AD, but plundered the city of pillars for his own capital back in Aachen. Then there was Otto I, the great warrior king of the Saxons, a hairy-chested lion of a man, who in was also crowned in Rome.
The line of emperors that he founded did not expire until , when the Holy Roman empire, as it had first become known in the 13th century, was terminated by Napoleon. Yet the joke was not quite fair. There had been a time when it was all three.
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