The End Is Always Near Read online

  Dedication

  To Brittany, Liv, and Avery

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1: Do Tough Times Make for Tougher People?

  Chapter 2: Suffer the Children

  Chapter 3: The End of the World as They Knew It

  Chapter 4: Judgment at Nineveh

  Chapter 5: The Barbarian Life Cycle

  Chapter 6: A Pandemic Prologue?

  Chapter 7: The Quick and the Dead

  Chapter 8: The Road to Hell

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  Do you think that modern civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins?

  It sounds like an overused science fiction theme, with the archaeologists of the future carefully poking around the rusting skeletons of New York, London, or Tokyo’s skyscrapers, subways, or sewers; removing our dead from their graves and studying them like we do ancient Egyptian mummies; trying to decipher our language, unlock the code that is our writing, and figure out who we were. To imagine our tombs, buildings, and human remains being treated the way we today treat ancient archaeological finds might seem unimaginable, but there’s a pretty good chance that’s what the mummy being excavated thought about his time and place, too.

  There’s no right answer to a question like that, of course. Many of the questions raised in this book fall into that same unanswerable class. Maybe that’s part of what makes them intriguing.

  Just noting past evidence and extrapolating it out to future events can get weird quickly. To imagine things that have happened many times in history repeating in the modern era is to dabble in science fiction. It is a very thin membrane that separates factual history from unprovable and speculative fantasy. The instant in which we all live is the point at which those two things—the hard chronology of recorded names and dates and the what-ifs and alternate realities of possible futures—intersect. To imagine the twenty-first-century world being hit with a great plague like the great disease pandemics of the past is fantasy, yet it’s also extremely possible and has happened many times before. What’s the connection between the factual past and the speculative future?

  I am told that any conventional book should answer questions or should at least provide an argument. If that’s true, this will not be a conventional book. It’s more of a collection of loosely connected vignettes. I have no argument, which is consistent with the approach we take in the podcast as well. My approach is that of a nonexpert, for that is what I am. Historians, political scientists, geographers, physicists, sociologists, philosophers, authors, and intellectuals in general have all weighed in over the eras on all the sorts of issues we ponder in this book, each doing so using their own methods and viewing them through their own eras, specialties, and cultural lenses.

  While a modern geographer might cite global historical analogies to make an argument about a civilization “falling,” or a physicist provide the math to determine the likely probability of a dark age–creating asteroid striking Earth, the approach of a storyteller or journalist is to look at the human angle.* What sort of human stories are going on as a civilization collapses? A bombing raid destroys a person’s city, or a pandemic begins to unravel the bonds holding a society together? Seeing things through that lens engages different parts of the brain, including emotions, and can often have an impact that the data, graphs, and research studies don’t. Think of it as another tile in a vast mosaic as many disciplines try to restore an image of the past.

  Do tough times make tougher people? Does how we raise our children have an impact on society at large? Can we handle the power of our weapons without destroying ourselves? Can human capabilities, knowledge, and technology regress? There’s a very Twilight Zone sort of element to such ideas, with subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) overtones that seem to speak to our present times. They are ideas that cross the boundaries of modern academic disciplines and tread into territory usually occupied by drama, literature, and the arts.

  But even without agreed-upon answers, such questions are both fascinating and potentially valuable. Many of them are the types of proverbial “deep questions” that have always been at the heart of philosophical works. Simply thinking about them more often may have value. Others may offer some practical usefulness. Reminding us all, for example, of how many times similar occurrences have taken place in the past may help add a layer of believability to many future possible occurrences that seem more like far-fetched movie plots right now. A history professor once told me that there are two ways we learn: you can put your hand on the hot stove, or you can hear tales of people who already did that and how it turned out for them.

  Hardcore History fans have long been asking about a book. I had so much existent material, research, and ideas in the archives that it just seemed natural to use them as the nucleus for such a work. Going back and sorting through it became something of a personal Rorschach test. When one considers all the reading and research that goes into these shows, it’s imperative that the subject be of great interest to me.

  If a person’s bookshelf is a window into their interests, apparently mine lean toward the apocalyptic—although it was a bit surprising just how often the shows eventually factored down to a related version of the same idea: the End of Civilization in one form or another and not just how we humans might react or respond to that based on past experience, but what kind of people these experiences might make us.

  Can you blame me? The rise and falls of empires, the wars, the catastrophes, the high-stakes situations—the “Big Stories”—are intense and dramatic by their very nature.* The combination of material that is entertaining as well as (potentially) philosophical, educational, and practical is an age-old winning formula. Historians and storytellers from Homer and Herodotus to Edward Gibbon and Will Durant recognized that long before Ajax and Achilles were spearing their way dramatically and bloodily through The Iliad while making “History.” There’s a reason a guy like Shakespeare mined the past so often for his material.

  But it isn’t just about diversion or amusement. One is often moved to a form of historical empathy and personal reflection. These events happen to real flesh-and-blood human beings who were often relentlessly trapped in the gears of history. It’s hard not to wonder how we would cope if we found ourselves in similar situations.

  One of the things that I kept noticing when burrowing into the archives was a recurring, unanswerable either/or historical question. Will things keep happening as they always have, or won’t they? It is an unbelievably intense and scary question in some circumstances. Some of those types of case studies, if you will, are discussed in this book.

  Will we ever again have the type of pandemics that rapidly kill large percentages of the population? This was a feature of normal human existence until relatively recently, but seems almost like science fiction to imagine today.

  There have always been large wars between the great powers. Any next such war would involve nuclear-armed states. World War III sounds like a bad movie concept, but is it any more unlikely than eternal peace between the great states?

  Finally, as we asked earlier, can you imagine the city you currently live in as a desolate ruin? Will it one day be like most cities that have ever existed, or not? Either outcome seems fascinating.

  While much of what follows is rather dark, looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective. Hearing about what, for example, people dealt with as their cities were carpet-bombed
or while enduring monstrous medieval plagues has a way of making your problems seem small. Premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me things are pretty good now, no matter what.

  And yet, despite all the differences between people over the ages, some events and eras seem, as Barbara Tuchman wrote, like looking into a distant mirror. It’s hard not to wonder how we would cope in similar circumstances. My grandfather loved the phrase “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Thanks to a bit of cosmic luck, we were born at the time we were, and in the place we were. It could’ve easily been any other time and some other place. I find that recalling that makes having historical empathy somewhat easier.

  However, despite the seeming stability of our time, there’s also no guarantee that our current situation won’t change drastically. The examples in this book dramatize some times in which this happened. At the risk of sounding like a low-rent Nostradamus wearing a sandwich board sign reading “The End Is Near,” a modern version of the Bronze Age collapse could happen to us. Or the global superpower could implode unexpectedly, as ancient Assyria did, creating a huge geopolitical vacuum. Our version of Rome could fragment as the Roman Empire did. A pandemic could easily arise and if bad enough could remind us what life was like for human beings before modern medicine. A nuclear war could occur, or environmental disaster could await us. We may yet find ourselves in a reality that future ages read about in books on examples of extreme human experiences or warnings about things to avoid doing.

  Hubris is, after all, a pretty classic human trait. As my dad used to say, “Don’t get cocky.”

  Chapter 1

  Do Tough Times Make for Tougher People?

  For as long as humans have been writing history, some historians have suggested that hard times somehow create better, tougher people, that overcoming obstacles—through war or privation or some other hardship—creates stronger, more resilient, perhaps even more virtuous, human beings.

  “History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,” Voltaire reportedly said. The observation refers to the argument that fortunes of nations or civilizations or societies rise and fall based on the character of their people, and this character is heavily influenced by the material and moral condition of their society. The idea was a staple of history writing from ancient Greece until it began to decline in popularity after the middle of the twentieth century.*

  Nowadays, the wooden shoes–silk slippers concept has been largely dismissed by modern historians. There are all sorts of very good reasons for this, starting with the lack of data. It is hard to prove or quantify an amorphous human quality such as toughness or resilience* and then justify its inclusion in a fact-driven, and peer-reviewed, academic history book. But that doesn’t mean it has no impact at all.

  Let’s try a little mental exercise: Imagine that two boxers step into the ring together. They are the same height, weight, and skill level. They have had the same conditioning; they even shared a trainer. All possible variables have been eliminated. What is most likely to be the deciding factor in determining which boxer wins? Is it this hard-to-quantify concept we call “toughness”? It’s difficult to say one boxer won because he was “tougher.” For a start, why do we tend to assume that tougher is better? Toughness is this vague concept that we all believe exists, and we all use “tough” as an adjective, but it is a relative term, and one person’s or culture’s idea of what’s tough may be different from another’s.*

  Now instead of individual boxers lining up against each other, imagine the contest on a larger scale, with entire societies facing off. For example, how about if the United States of America of today went to war against another country just like it—the same geographic size, the same population size, the same economic output, the same military capability, the same weapons and equipment and technology. And this war is going to be brutal, fought to an unconditional surrender, with cities left in ruins on both sides. The only difference between the two countries is that the people we are fighting against, in that mythical mirror country, are our grandparents.

  Most of the people born between 1900 and 1930 are gone now, but they were part of an age-group popularly dubbed “the Greatest Generation”*—but there have been so many tough eras and generations in history that singling out “the greatest” of anything seems a bit silly. Nonetheless, by our standards the members of the Greatest Generation seem very rough and tough indeed. And there’s a reason for that. Even before they fought the Second World War, these men and women had lived through more than a decade of extreme economic hardship—the worst in modern world history.

  Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury under President Herbert Hoover when the 1929 stock market crashed, which initiated more than a decade of economic collapse, thought the coming hardship would be a good thing. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” Mellon said, as reported in Hoover’s memoirs. “High costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

  From Mellon’s point of view, maybe he got his wish. The Depression put an end to the Roaring Twenties, a time remembered for high living, speakeasies, jazz, flappers, the Charleston, and the advent of motion pictures. What Mellon might have thought wasteful frivolity was simply fun to others. Things got a lot less fun when money became more scarce.

  When the collapse came, it didn’t ruin everyone, but about half the population found itself suddenly below the poverty line. It was a decade of hard times. And the accounts from that era are heartbreaking, so much so that it’s hard to imagine any good coming from it. Certainly, few in our modern world would choose to experience an economic disaster like the Great Depression for the potential positive side effects.

  By the time the Second World War arrived, an entire generation had been through deprivations. And then they got the worst war in human history right on top of it. The war itself was very bad, entirely different from twenty-first-century conflicts. Today, a first-class power might suffer casualties from a single incident that number in the dozens—perhaps from the mechanical failure of a helicopter, or maybe a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED). Compare this with the hundreds of thousands of casualties the United States experienced in the Second World War—at Iwo Jima, for example, the thirty-six-day conflict left nearly seven thousand Americans dead, of at least twenty-six thousand total casualties. And that’s just American numbers; imagine the millions of casualties suffered by the Germans, or the tens of millions suffered by the Chinese and Soviets. It’s interesting to speculate how we today would react to such mortality.

  And it’s not just about weathering the damage; it’s also about inflicting it. Maybe we could take it, but as US general George Patton pointed out, that isn’t how you defeat your adversary.* Think about the kind of bombing runs the American military had to make—a thousand planes loaded with tons of bombs heading toward cities where ten or fifteen thousand people might be killed in a single night. Or imagine living through the Blitz in London, when German bombers unleashed their payloads on the city nearly every night for more than eight months. The Greatest Generation knew there was a solid wall of planes above them, and they also ordered the bomb bay doors to be opened.

  And then there was the ultimate weapon, nuclear bombs. History shows that our grandparents certainly could, and did, use them.* Is there currently a scenario in which the citizens of our societies (as opposed to their governments) would find that an acceptable course of action?

  We seem almost too civilized now to do something that seems so barbaric. But then, we haven’t lived through what the World War II generation did. Assuming that one could measure a generation’s relative toughness on a scale of one to ten, perhaps the Greatest Generation gets a seven; if we were to imagine ten of these people born between 1900 and 1930 together in a room, maybe seven of them meet our qualifications for “tough.” Generation X
has tough people, too—some became Navy Seals, a few have crossed Antarctica on foot—but maybe only two out of every ten members of that generation could be said to be tough enough to do such things. So rather than each individual being tougher, perhaps there is simply a higher percentage of tough people in what is considered a resilient generation. That is one way to try to conceptualize how toughness might apply to societies, and yet at the same time it helps highlight how strange it would be to try to quantify such a thing.

  In the moralistic histories of the ancients, the “tough times make tougher people” formula worked both ways. Soft times made softer people. To Plutarch and Livy, for example, sloth, cowardice, and lack of virtue were the fruit of too much ease and luxury and money. And a lot of softer people in a society meant a softer overall society. In times and places where the citizenry might have to don armor and use a sword to defend their state in hand-to-hand combat, this could potentially be a national security concern. Perhaps we’re living in a time when toughness in the old sense doesn’t matter as much as it used to. If that is the case, then what advantages might a “softer” society have over a tougher one?

  The great twentieth-century historian Will Durant wrote about the Medes, an ancient people who lived in what is now Iran. At the time Durant wrote,* the Medes were thought to have been a relatively poor, pastoral people who had banded together to help throw off the domination of the Assyrian Empire and who had then become a major power in their own right.* But soon after, wrote Durant, “the nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways. Wealth came too suddenly to be used wisely. The upper classes became slaves to fashion and luxury, the men sporting embroidered trousers and the women cosmetics and jewelry.”

  The pants and earrings were not themselves the cause of the Medes’ fall from power, but to Durant and many of his contemporary historians, they were outward signs of how this society had changed and become corrupted, along the way losing the qualities born of harder times that had made them tough enough to win the empire in the first place.*