Collapse
It seems like people are always sitting around waiting for The End.
This might be what we have inherited from Judaism. Jesus himself speaks many times of the coming end of the world in the Gospels, insisting that an intervention will take place, life as we know it will come to a halt, and there will be a Good Kingdom set up on earth. This was common of apocalyptic Jews of the day, and, despite the fact that it never came to pass, we have throes of people who still believe this is imminent.
I'm one of those people who doesn't really think that any fundamentally ever changes from generation to generation. I went to a lecture last weekend in which an attorney laid out the legislation and history that governs the impeachment of an elected official in the United States. I was the youngest person in the audience, by a very wide margin of perhaps 30 years. When the time came for questions from the audience, the elderly people around me were raising their hands, getting up on their soapboxes, and talking at length about how "Trump has destroyed democracy" and that "we've never seen corruption like this before" and "our government has been corrupted beyond saving".
In my head: really? You people are all a few decades older than me. Are you really going to fall prey to the conceit that what's happening in our time is somehow altogether new and unprecedented? It seems like, once you've been alive for upwards of 65 years, you'd come to recognize that nothing really changes. We've had people who are prone to corruption in the White House before, who have put their own interests before serving the people they were elected to represent. We've even impeached a few of them, and, not so incidentally, no sitting President who has ever been impeached has been removed from office. Our country still stands. Politics has always been divisive. It was worse when the country divided in a bitter and bloody civil war around the issue of slavery, wasn't it?
For people who are really obsessed with apocalypse, I generally encourage them to look into the collapse of the Bronze Age, which took place over a few hundred years and ended around 1200 BC. The story here should sound very familiar. In and around ancient Mesopotamia, there are numerous empires clustered around large urban centers, who enjoy the benefits of advanced technology and agricultural production, and who are all heavily interconnected with each other via the practice of trade. We have a decent sense of what life was like for them in these times, because writing had just been invented, and they left some record of what was happening at the time.
What we know far less about is how this all came to an end. What we do know is that in a very short period of time, things declined quickly. People fled the cities, and these former empires now have ruins that stand abandoned as they were those thousands of years ago. It's clear that things got desperate, there was strife and conflict, many people died, and when the dust settled, the civilizations and empires that had existed were all but destroyed. Egypt, the only civilization to remain standing after the dust had settled, was significantly weakened by this time period, from which it never recovered. The power and dominance of the ancient Egypt that we study today was leveled in this time frame.
Why did this happen? We have very little information to go on. Despite that fact that we have written records from the era, it seems that no one was sitting around documenting why civilization was collapsing in the midst of it taking place, which doesn't come as a surprise. There are theories: the climate shifted around this time, which affected the food supply. There are also accounts of a marauding band of pirates known as the "Sea Peoples" laying seige to the cities, though it's believed that this might have been an effect of the collapse and not a cause. Ultimately, we don't know, and it's likely that we never will, barring any massive discovery from archeology.
There is, of course, no reason to believe that our network of civilizations as it exists today is somehow immune to the possibility of this happening again. If anything, we are more susceptible to this happening considering how massively interdependent all of our countries are on one another. If anything, a similar collapse transpiring now would likely be far worse. At least the Bronze Age collapse was somewhat localized. If you wanted to flee to Far East, you had that option. It's not clear that a similar collapse today wouldn't be on a global scale, and wouldn't leave us anywhere to which to flee.
So, do things ever really fundamentally change? The short answer is that no, they never really do. Things seem to be pretty constant, which is a double edged sword. Humanity is largely kind to itself, but we have ugly patches of behavior that can devastate large portions of the population, and we can descend into senseless conflict without really trying. A slightly more accurate answer is probably that no, things do not ever fundamentally change...until they do. But it's not clear to me that we'll see the end coming when it starts to sink its tendrils into our institutions, our environment, our livelihoods, and so it would seem to do precious little good to sit around prosthelytizing about when or where it will start to occur.
It was from the ashes of this collapse that much of modern civilization arose. A few hundred years later, Homer composes his works, which go on to coalesce Greek culture, from which we derive much of our modern thought. The Israelites as we know them today settle in Canaan and put together the Jewish Bible (and the Jewish tradition) as it exists today. Spawning as it did in the wake of collapse, perhaps the ancient Hebrews are wise to constantly worry about the coming end of days. To them, the scars from the Bronze Ago collapse would have been fresh in their heads. Collapse might be one of those things that seems silly to worry about, but maybe you manage to stave off by constantly worrying about it.
This might be what we have inherited from Judaism. Jesus himself speaks many times of the coming end of the world in the Gospels, insisting that an intervention will take place, life as we know it will come to a halt, and there will be a Good Kingdom set up on earth. This was common of apocalyptic Jews of the day, and, despite the fact that it never came to pass, we have throes of people who still believe this is imminent.
I'm one of those people who doesn't really think that any fundamentally ever changes from generation to generation. I went to a lecture last weekend in which an attorney laid out the legislation and history that governs the impeachment of an elected official in the United States. I was the youngest person in the audience, by a very wide margin of perhaps 30 years. When the time came for questions from the audience, the elderly people around me were raising their hands, getting up on their soapboxes, and talking at length about how "Trump has destroyed democracy" and that "we've never seen corruption like this before" and "our government has been corrupted beyond saving".
In my head: really? You people are all a few decades older than me. Are you really going to fall prey to the conceit that what's happening in our time is somehow altogether new and unprecedented? It seems like, once you've been alive for upwards of 65 years, you'd come to recognize that nothing really changes. We've had people who are prone to corruption in the White House before, who have put their own interests before serving the people they were elected to represent. We've even impeached a few of them, and, not so incidentally, no sitting President who has ever been impeached has been removed from office. Our country still stands. Politics has always been divisive. It was worse when the country divided in a bitter and bloody civil war around the issue of slavery, wasn't it?
For people who are really obsessed with apocalypse, I generally encourage them to look into the collapse of the Bronze Age, which took place over a few hundred years and ended around 1200 BC. The story here should sound very familiar. In and around ancient Mesopotamia, there are numerous empires clustered around large urban centers, who enjoy the benefits of advanced technology and agricultural production, and who are all heavily interconnected with each other via the practice of trade. We have a decent sense of what life was like for them in these times, because writing had just been invented, and they left some record of what was happening at the time.
What we know far less about is how this all came to an end. What we do know is that in a very short period of time, things declined quickly. People fled the cities, and these former empires now have ruins that stand abandoned as they were those thousands of years ago. It's clear that things got desperate, there was strife and conflict, many people died, and when the dust settled, the civilizations and empires that had existed were all but destroyed. Egypt, the only civilization to remain standing after the dust had settled, was significantly weakened by this time period, from which it never recovered. The power and dominance of the ancient Egypt that we study today was leveled in this time frame.
Why did this happen? We have very little information to go on. Despite that fact that we have written records from the era, it seems that no one was sitting around documenting why civilization was collapsing in the midst of it taking place, which doesn't come as a surprise. There are theories: the climate shifted around this time, which affected the food supply. There are also accounts of a marauding band of pirates known as the "Sea Peoples" laying seige to the cities, though it's believed that this might have been an effect of the collapse and not a cause. Ultimately, we don't know, and it's likely that we never will, barring any massive discovery from archeology.
There is, of course, no reason to believe that our network of civilizations as it exists today is somehow immune to the possibility of this happening again. If anything, we are more susceptible to this happening considering how massively interdependent all of our countries are on one another. If anything, a similar collapse transpiring now would likely be far worse. At least the Bronze Age collapse was somewhat localized. If you wanted to flee to Far East, you had that option. It's not clear that a similar collapse today wouldn't be on a global scale, and wouldn't leave us anywhere to which to flee.
So, do things ever really fundamentally change? The short answer is that no, they never really do. Things seem to be pretty constant, which is a double edged sword. Humanity is largely kind to itself, but we have ugly patches of behavior that can devastate large portions of the population, and we can descend into senseless conflict without really trying. A slightly more accurate answer is probably that no, things do not ever fundamentally change...until they do. But it's not clear to me that we'll see the end coming when it starts to sink its tendrils into our institutions, our environment, our livelihoods, and so it would seem to do precious little good to sit around prosthelytizing about when or where it will start to occur.
It was from the ashes of this collapse that much of modern civilization arose. A few hundred years later, Homer composes his works, which go on to coalesce Greek culture, from which we derive much of our modern thought. The Israelites as we know them today settle in Canaan and put together the Jewish Bible (and the Jewish tradition) as it exists today. Spawning as it did in the wake of collapse, perhaps the ancient Hebrews are wise to constantly worry about the coming end of days. To them, the scars from the Bronze Ago collapse would have been fresh in their heads. Collapse might be one of those things that seems silly to worry about, but maybe you manage to stave off by constantly worrying about it.