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Why nations
die
By Spengler
Why
people read a certain book often contains more
information than the book itself, and there is
rich information content in the brisk sales of
Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed. Diamond picks out of the
rubbish bin of history a few cases of nugatory
interest in which environmental disaster
overwhelmed a society otherwise desirous of
continued existence. According to the publisher's
notice (I do not read such piffle), Diamond avers
that the problem was in breeding too fast and
cutting down too many trees.
The silly
Vikings of Greenland refused to eat fish,
disdained the hunting techniques of the Inuit, and
consumed too much wood and topsoil. As a result
their colony collapsed during the 15th century and
they all died. One feels sorry for the
Greenlanders, though not for their cousins on the
Scandinavian mainland, who just then stood at the
cusp of their European power.
Something
similar happened to the Easter Islanders, who
chopped down all their palm trees and the Mayans
of Central America, who burned their forests to
build temples. Diamond thinks this should serve as
a warning to the inveterate consumerists of the
United States, who presumably also face extinction
should they fail to erect legal barriers to
suburban sprawl.
Ideological reflex is too
mild a word for this sort of thinking; perhaps the
term "cramp" would do better. Given that America
returns land to the wilderness each year, the
danger to American survival from deforestation
must be on par with the risks of being hit by a
large asteroid. The world is not breeding too fast
- birthrates are everywhere falling - and the
industrial countries (except for the Anglo-Saxons)
fail to reproduce at all.
Why should the
peculiar circumstances that killed obscure
populations in remote places make a geography
professor's book into a bestseller? 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]
In fact, the main reason
societies fail is that they choose not to live.
That is a horrifying thought to absorb, and the
average reader would much rather delve into the
details of obscure ecosystems of the past than
reflect upon why half of Eastern Europe will die
out by mid-century.
Suicide is a rare
occurrence at the individual level, but a typical
one at the level of nations. Even among the most
stressed populations in the world, eg the
Neolithic Amazon people of the Guarani, the
suicide rate is small compared to the total
population. According to Survival International
(survival-international.org), 330 of the 30,000
Guaranis killed themselves during the past 17
years, a sad response to the shock of engagement
with modern culture.
We know little of
small peoples who died out in antiquity or even
Medieval times, but the case histories that have
come down to us are compelling, precisely because
they include the most successful civilizations of
the West, namely classical Greece, Rome and
Byzantium. Countless small tribes disappeared into
the hands of the Roman slavers, doubtless quite
against their inclinations. As Robert Marcellus
wrote in The Human Life Review:
The Greek geographer and historian
Strabo (63 BCE-21 CE) described Greece as "a
land entirely deserted; the depopulation begun
since long continues. Roman soldiers camp in
abandoned houses; Athens is populated by
statues". Plutarch observed that "one would no
longer find in Greece 3,000 hoplites
[infantrymen]." The historian Polybius (204-122
BCE) wrote: "One remarks nowadays all over
Greece such a diminution in natality and in
general manner such a depopulation that the
towns are deserted and the fields lie fallow.
Although this country has not been ravaged by
wars or epidemics, the cause of the harm is
evident: by avarice or cowardice the people, if
they marry, will not bring up the children they
ought to have. At most they bring up one or two.
It is in this way that the scourge before it is
noticed is rapidly developed. The remedy is in
ourselves; we have but to change our morals."
[2] 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.
No doubt Diamond's
Greenlanders wished to keep on living. They ate
their dogs when other food ran out (although
apparently they continued to refuse fish for
reasons that are hard to explain). Perhaps the
will to live among 17th century Easter Islanders
burned brightly as they chopped down their last
palm tree. It is hard for us to fathom, for we
have very little in common with the Easter
Islanders. But we have a great deal in common with
the residents of classical Greek polis and with
the Romans as well as their Byzantine offshoot.
Notes
[i]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB03Aa01.html
[2]
http://www.humanlifereview.com/2001_winter/demarcellus.php
[3] Crossroads to Islam, by Yehuda D
Nevo and Judith Koren. Prometheus: New York 2003.
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