Theories of civilisational ‘collapse’ grow less convincing when scrutinised
Very unconvincing article. Would have been better if it had stuck to the core assertion that &quot;The fall, like the rise of a civilisation is a highly complex operation which can only be distorted by oversimplification. It may be taken as axiomatic that there was no one cause of cultural collapse.&quot;<p>Yes, the actual causes of civilisational collapse are complex and varied, and do not exist to satisfy any particular narrative. And yes, these stories (most notably Easter Island) have been distorted and by modern polemical desires. And yes, with a few exceptions, &quot;collapse&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean the total obliteration of a culture or their way of life.<p>But to twist this into &quot;Do civilisations collapse?&quot;, with the answer being &quot;no&quot;, is wrong. If you were living in Rome in 477, then your civilisation was collapsing. The fact that Latin would still be the language of the elite for more than a thousand years, or that Corinthian capitals would never cease to be carved, or even that there were people in Constantinople, thousands of miles away, still contentedly calling themselves &quot;Romans&quot;, would provide very little succour, or otherwise argue against the fact that the civilisation you grew up in and depended upon was <i>comprehensively</i> fucked.<p>The same goes for the Maya, the Mycenaeans, the Harappa, and innumerable other civilisations. Any time you see population levels in precipitous decline, accompanied by a dramatic loss of technological and organisational capabilities, you are seeing evidence of some extremely unhappy individuals whose civilisations are, for them, collapsing. Arguments to the contrary -- on the basis that it&#x27;s unevenly distributed, or that there will be elements of cultural continuity -- are academic. Experiential reality is that civilisations DO collapse.