“No news is good news”, the saying goes, but the reverse is also true. Good news rarely makes the headlines or history books unless it’s to record the conclusion of some calamity. The end of World War II, say, or the whimpering exit of fourteen years of Tory hegemony. Otherwise, chroniclers generally go straight for gore or scandal. If it’s not pestilence, wars and social collapse, then it’s corruption, sexual shenanigans or, on a slow day, miscellaneous peccadilloes. The good-old-days are boring. Just ask Terry Deary: his Horrible Histories have sold 36 million copies in 45 different languages.
Think of Ancient Rome, the way they gutted Vercingetorix’s Gauls and brutalised Boudica’s Iceni. Or how the empire got its comeuppance from Hannibal’s Carthaginians at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, when 50,000 of its legionaries met the sharp end of a gladius or falcata. Think of the Vikings and the first phrase that leaps to the lips is “rape and pillage”. And if that’s not bloodthirsty enough for you, swot up on Genghis Khan and his Mongols, who ran roughshod over China, Europe and the Middle East in the thirteenth century, killing a staggering 40 million people.
It’s about 25 years since I did my Masters on religious heresy in the medieval period and I confess to having forgotten most of it. But I still remember the misnamed Pope Innocent IV’s bull of 1252, Ad Extirpanda, which authorised the use of torture to extract confessions. That’s the blueprint for the gulags and Guantanamo right there. It’s difficult to say why we feast on others’ misdeeds or misfortune – perhaps just relief at not being caught out ourselves. But maybe more than that, it’s a validation of our own invincibility. It seems fundamental to human nature that when faced with disaster or demise, we never quite grasp that it’s happening to us. These things happen to other people! Even when the Grim Reaper inevitably calls, most of us will leave the world with a look of surprise on our faces.
The Hunger Games might soon need to be moved out of the fiction section
Of course, many of the precursors to past collapses – inequality, competition between elites and environmental degradation – are key features of our own age. So it would be mad to miss out on these vital lessons of history. Especially at a time when the richest one per cent own half the wealth, while the poorest half own less than one per cent; and when our internecine wars are matched in their iniquity and ferocity only by the hostilities we inflict on the planet. It’s no wonder the 21st century has already spawned a library’s worth of books cataloguing and prophesying social breakdown. And I’m surely not the only one who’s starting to think The Hunger Games might soon need to be moved out of the fiction section.
Yet, amid all these tales of rack and ruin, there are as many lesser-discussed, more hopeful stories of adaptation and survival. When Rome fell in the fifth century, only the western half of the empire expired. With limited military resources and surrounded by volatile states the Byzantines powered on for another thousand years, downsizing and pursuing a policy of rigorous diplomacy. (There’s a lesson in there somewhere for our new prime minister.) As the American scientist and historian Jared Diamond wrote in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2011), a civilisation’s chance of longevity depends on the ability of its population to adjust to changed circumstances. In childhood, I loved the Norse sagas, especially Erik the Red’s settlement of Greenland, which at one point grew into a community of thousands. But, like many of our species, the Vikings were prone to the “sunk cost fallacy” and ploughed on doing things in their own boneheaded way – depleting the environment, fighting with the neighbouring Inuit, and making the mistake of thinking it couldn’t get any colder – even when it must have been obvious a change of tack was required. By 1450 the Norse were gone, while the Inuit, who lived in greater harmony with their surroundings, remain the most populous group in Greenland today.
All civilisations have a shelf life and today’s major powers will pass theirs soon enough. You could argue that some once-great nations already have. But in the absence of bad luck, the end of an era doesn’t have to mean full-scale disaster. Homo sapiens might be slow learners, but ever since our ancestors made it through the Ice Age we’ve also shown ourselves to be adaptable, creative and resourceful. Change can emerge peacefully and voluntarily, if only we can recalibrate our values as a society and map a more sustainable and equitable way forward. It all depends on how we want our story to go down in history – as a tale of ruin, or of resilience.
Peter Phelps is founder and publisher of Perspective
