Here's an interesting take on Jared Diamond's Collapse by Spengler. I've posted on Collapse before, but Spengler posits two interesting thoughts that appear to be perfectly obvious, but that I have not seen anyone else touch upon.
First: Who is Collapse aimed at, and why would it appeal to them?
Evidently the topic of mass extinction commands the attention of the reading public, although the reading public wants to look for the causes of mass extinction in all but the most obvious place, which is the mirror. Diamond's books appeal to an educated, secular readership, that is, precisely the sort of people who have one child or none at all. If you have fewer than two children, and most of the people you know have fewer than two children, Holmesian deductive powers are not required to foresee your eventual demise.
After rejecting revealed religion, modern people seek an sense of exaltation in nature, which is to say that they revered the old natural religion. If you do not believe in God, quipped G K Chesterton, you will believe in anything. It is too fearful to contemplate one's own mortality, so the Green projects his own presentiment of death onto the natural world. Fear for the destruction of the natural world - trees, whales, polar ice-caps, tigers, whatever - substitutes for the death-anxiety of the individual. I discussed this under the title, "It's not the end of the world – it's just the end of you," and am told that Rush Limbaugh read the whole essay aloud on his radio program. [1]
Just as the number of cleaning product commercials told us something about who was watching daytime TV in the 50s and 60s, so the topics of bestsellers holds a mirror to the people who read them. To me, the contemporary idealization of nature itself as a value seems indisputably true. Why, just this evening, as I walked home from the train station and noted the town-sponsored propaganda billboard which translates to be, "bountiful nature--bountiful heart" （豊かな自然...豊かな心）the same thought crossed my mind. In a Japan which is less Buddhist and Shinto (itself, basically an animistic nature religion) than contemporary Europe is Christian, what else can serve as a transcendant ideal but nature. Not that there's anything wrong with green hillsides and fresh air, but as a corollary to good human conduct? Mercy, no.
Spengler's second point is one that he's been harping on a lot recently, particularly in his last article. But his application of it here is brilliantly fitting. No, we're not in danger of environmental collapse--civilizations now are dying from cultural implosion. Bountiful natured Japan and Europe, in particular, are witnessing a decline in population that normally is accompanied by catastrophes, natural or otherwise. Japan will suffer a loss of power and affluence as its population dwindles, but Europe is being colonized and couldn't care less. It's happened before.
Sparta, the model of slave-based military oligarchy, had 5,000 land-owning families at the time of the Peloponnesian War, but only 700 by the third century AD after Epiminondas broke the Spartan hold over its helot population. Rome's population fell to perhaps 100,000 during the seventh century from 1 million in the second century. Between 150 AD and 450 AD, the population of Rome's Western empire fell by about four-fifths. Constantinople held 250,000 people in the ninth century and between 600,000 and one million during the 12th century, yet it had fallen to only 100,000 when the Turks took it, at least in 1453. After Constantinople, the world's largest city west of the Indus, well may have been the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Estimates of the annual number of humans sacrificed by the Aztecs range from 20,000 to a quarter million per year. Although Aztec civilization was overthrown by the conquering Spaniards, it could not have lasted indefinitely given such practices.
There is endless debate about such data. Roman population data are somewhat conjectural, and Strabo's estimates have been disputed by some scholars. Explanations have been forwarded that range from the collapse of the slave-based agricultural system to mass infanticide and venereal disease.
Nonetheless, it seems clear that the Romans did not so much conquer Greece as to occupy its shell; that the Germanic tribes did not so much conquer Rome so much as to move into what remained of it; and that the Arabs did not so much conquer the Byzantine hinterland as migrate into it. On this last point, a new book by Yehuda Nevo and Judith Koren argues convincingly that the Byzantines ceded frontier territories to Arab foederati in the mid-seventh century and that the famous battles of the Islamic conquest in fact never took place. [3] In one form or another the antecedents of Western civilization died of existential causes, rather than external ones.
I await the in-depth studies and Collapse-style books which will document the downfall of modern societies for just such reasons. But perhaps no one will be interested in reading them...if there's anybody left to, that is.
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