Near the end of July I became intensely interested in the Bronze Age Collapse. After some deep rabbit-hole dives, a picture started to come into view. Civilizations I had heard about---the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Sumerians, the Egyptians, Babylonia---started to form in historical context.
This was centuries before the Greeks, even more centuries before the Romans.
And nobody knew what happened.
Well, not definitively, anyway. Great civilizations grew, complex societies we would recognize today as fairly modern with art, leisure, literature, sewage, agriculture, complex trade systems, agriculture and warfare developed. And, within a decade, great metropolises were destroyed and permanently abandoned, left in ruins. Out of these near-east nation-states, only the Egyptians moved past the collapse, and even then it was a shell of its former glory.
If you melt copper and add arsenic, you can make a type of metal that's harder than copper, namely bronze. But working with arsenic is dangerous, and once it was discovered that using tin instead of arsenic made the bronze harder and safer to work with, a world changing metal could be produced in massive amounts.
Bronze was used for jewelry, weapons, and other more banal household items. Having it in abundance (like the Hittites did) meant you could trade it for grains and another precious metal, gold, that other kingdoms had (like the Egyptians). After a few generations a complex web of trade stretched around the eastern Mediterranean.
During this time both writing and mathematics developed out of the ways in which large civilizations needed to supply their populations with food. The cities involved were massive, some nearing a hundred thousand people deep. (Enter the
MHs Calendar from earlier this month.)
The recorded history from the time of the collapse mentions, repeatedly in different sources from different places, marauding "sea-people" arriving and wreaking havoc, among other naturally occurring catastrophes. The identity of the sea-people is hotly debated, but with enough research and a well developed smell-test skill, an advanced view of the realities start to form.
Besides writing and math developing, the use of the wheel had become rather advanced, and with it the chariot as a weapon of war. Chariots are pretty badass, but they are complicated to use effectively. It takes years to train to be proficient. All you need now is a collective system where enslaved people do the agricultural and industrial labor (check), a series of climate-induced droughts, and the system is ready to crumble.
So...droughts lead to starvation and unrest, the hyper-trained soldier class that is no longer being paid---or fed---start to attack, causing more unrest and internal strife, which causes trade to dissolve, and the positive feedback loop can't stop.
Survivors flee coastal metropolises for inland mountains more easily fortified, and literacy is lost. For centuries.
A dark age begins.
The letters from the collapsing times are tragic: kings send off pleas for help; responses are found in broken tablets, never to reach their final destination: "We can't help you, we also have no food and are, too, being savaged by the sea-people."
This concept---civilizations growing larger than they can manage crumbling under their sheer complexities due to a confluence of factors---is known as Systems Collapse. The systems that keep a community of civilizations going---agriculture, trade, and warfare---fail to be able to maintain their integrity, and the whole web fails.
In the aftermath, literacy plummets, as does life expectancy and art. Most recently it occurred after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which plunged Europe and the west into the so-called Dark Ages for nearly a thousand years, up until the Renaissance.
This got me thinking about right now, in the early 20th century (55th century MHs): We fully rely on one invisible thing for our continued existence---electricity---while a separate invisible thing---the novel coronavirus---has ground our world to a halt.
I guess not a halt exactly, since some places are beginning to reopen, but any return to "normalcy" is a fantasy, in the short term or, frankly, the long term. Whatever that "normalcy" was left us so vulnerable to being decimated by pandemic that why would we ever long for it? Nostalgia? I'd hoped that kind of thinking had been done in by the events of September 11th.
Early on during the pandemic I remember seeing a joking comment about our national response saying we were "failing our beginner's apocalypse."
This is funny because it's true. We're not really vulnerable in this moment, I'd posit, to a Systems Collapse event or series of events. I could be wrong, and the events surrounding the upcoming election in November could have some influence on that. But I'd guess that our Systems would mostly stay intact.
But what of those systems and their structures? This "beginner's apocalypse" has shown how threadbare our society is. The vast majority of working families were headed towards destitution after two missed paychecks. For a great many of those families, the federal relief package of $600 a week was more than they made before they were sent home to sit and hide and try and beat our invisible foe.
The healthcare system isn't prepared for a tsunami of cases (luckily many hospitals are able to function with only overworking their staffs, and not bursting at the seams); preventative care evaporated well before the virus hit, making the impact worse, and especially for people of color. States have been sent to fight amongst themselves for testing equipment.
An educational infrastructure that has been repeatedly defunded for generations has produced a populace that regularly questions the authority of medical experts and could be responsible for the continuing inability to contain this threat.
Armed white people storm state capitols demanding an end to safer-at-home protocols---and seem to have the support of the highest executive administration in the country. No harm befalls them.
Peaceful protesters around the nation amass to demonstrate after the murder--on camera--of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd (SAY HIS NAME). They---we---demonstrate for a reckoning with systemic racism. It does NOT seem like we have the support of the highest executive administration in the country. Hundreds are beaten and gassed.
The last two points are just here to illustrate how frayed our national identity gets when told go hide for a few months to beat an invisible foe.
The pandemic has shown how "essential" workers are the ones making the least money.
I'm not making the case that we're a failed state, because it has been made before recently, and been made well.
I think the burden of proof is on the position that we aren't a failed state: that case is hard to make. ESPECIALLY WHEN THE INCUMBENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE OPENLY TALKS ABOUT HIS PLAN TO CRIPPLE THE EASIEST MEANS OF VOTING DURING A PANDEMIC.
Our country may be teetering WAY closer to an edge than we're really willing to admit, but that's not what Systems Collapse is about. We are a cog in a larger machine. Sure, if we were to fall into some kind of even-worse hellscape, the larger machine would be rather damaged, and in a sort of trouble, but even then, I don't think Systems Collapse is in the cards.
But...
Three threads in my head come into focus.
Thread One: I watched a show on an astronomer who aimed his big telescope at the sun and was actively sketching sunspots on paper that collected the light from the sun, for he knew it was too bright to stare at using his eyes. As he sketched, a bright flash popped a few times on his paper. Weird, he thought. Eighteen hours later every telegraph box around exploded, having been overrun by a solar burst.
That it was a mass telegraph box explosion betrays the era in which this astronomer worked. What if this unpredictable event happened tomorrow? How would our global society deal with explosions at power stations around the globe? Is it conceivable that this could act as a nudge towards Systems Collapse?
Thread Two: It's been quite a few years that I've been of the belief that we're witnessing an Extinction Event. Especially after watching a great many dinosaur shows with my Boy, the view that Extinction Events quite often take a few million years to occur is prevalent. Maybe a few thousand years, what with the volcanic formation of the Deccan Plateau in India caused conditions that were mortally exasperated by the great asteroid crashing through at Chicxulub and ending the Permian (and the dinosaurs). The asteroid hit is romantic to an extant, but it happened in concert with other, natural phenomena.
When you hear how many animals are careening towards extinction, coupled with how many have already succumbed in the course of a few human lifetimes, it's hard to ignore that this is probably what an Extinction Event looks like to observers of the event. Which leads to...
Thread Three: While I've been of the opinion that we're witnessing an Extinction Event, I've also held the position that climate change is too far gone to positively (for humans) alter. A complete and radical change to our approach to life is what it will take to make the changes to slow the dumping of carbon into the atmosphere, and while it's my personal cynicism that believes the attempt is ultimately fruitless, it's certainly morally correct to do it.
And this is what people don't understand, or don't want to believe. If we get 4.5 degrees Celsius increase by 2100 (5582 MHs), as some conservative estimates put it, Systems Collapse is not only a possibility, it's a cute euphemism for "not quite headed towards extinction, but mostly fucked," which will be the reality. Is it "shred of humanity fighting for a piece of Patagonia or New Zealand" bad? Maybe.
The drastic estimates of 6 or 7 degree Celsius by that year would prove so catastrophic that discussing them is seen as alarmist. Like the Great Dying at the end of Cambrian Era bad.
If all goes right, my kids could be alive in 2100.
This is why NOW it's important to try and learn from the past, to study it and try and make sense of it. To face it instead of still bickering about hoaxes and bad science.
Are we a solar flare storm away from Mad Max?
Are we another virus away from total breakdown?
Is the Old Normal even something we'd like to entertain?
No. Especially if it makes us complacent to real disasters that we could actually have some power over.
And, what exactly do we have power over?
