boom and bust

One thing tourists like to do is visit the great monuments of the past. Many see these as accomplishments of human ingenuity and intelligence. The view is especially popular in the West, where history is written in terms of individual achievement. The protagonists of history are exceptional heroes who built large empires and created great wealth. We tend to believe that these empires were the result of a personal vision, a sign of greatness in one or at most a few particularly gifted individuals.

And when it comes to the obvious question as to why these civilizations disappeared we have an easy answer. They were overrun by other even greater men (nearly all are men) who built new and bigger empires. We call this progress. Like the US overtaking "old" Europe, the previous empire. And why did this happen? Because Europe somehow lost its nerve. They no longer have "the Right Stuff." Europeans are set in traditional ways that are no match for Yankee ingenuity and creativity. The Europeans are weak we think, they have succumbed to socialism and other degenerate doctrines. They no longer matter all that much. Progress has passed them by.

(Ironically enough this idea of poisoning is also a popular theory of demise. Countless people have tried to prove that lead poisoning did the Romans in. On a more abstract level, some see decadence, or poisoning of the mind, as the real culprit undermining the empire.)

What is surprisingly absent in this view is the dominant player, i.e. nature. But why is it that we should ignore the most obvious actor? It is not that we do not know about nature, climate, and natural resources. But we see nature as the thing that needs to be conquered. It is the clay that needs to be molded. Greatness is achieved by imposing our rule on nature and subjugating it. That is what our monuments are all about. They are witness to our conquests, our victories over the wild. The supremacy of the mind over matter.

We marvel at the pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis, the temples of Angkor Wat, the Mayan cities of Tikal, the statues of Easter Island. These are so impressive to us that we often resort to supernatural explanations for their creation. We discuss the mysteries of pyramids, the lost knowledge of Alexandria, the enigma of Easter Island, the secrets of Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu. But the mystery is in the eye of the beholder. We believe it mysterious because we assume that people were more primitive back then. Because in our linear view of history, not only do we get more successful at each step, we also get smarter and more technologically advanced. We evolve. And in our view evolution is linear and ever upward. It may be interrupted, but we never go back.

It never really occurs to us that we may have taken many steps backwards. That we may have lost knowledge. That we may be endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past. That we run around in circles. It never occurs to us that these monuments are more a testimony to failure than to success. That they are like the ghost towns of the West. They show how people were living it up and in the process polluted their environment and outgrew their resources.

The monuments are evidence of massive ecological disasters, in many cases precipitated or encouraged by the very people we think of as heroes. But unlike the dusty ghost towns in the West, these enduring monuments point to civilizations that often survived and thrived for centuries. They were well thought out and well planned. They survived many setbacks and disasters. They had ample time to prepare for the worst and find technological solutions to their problems. And there was no lack of trying. There is plenty of evidence of technological breakthroughs. Some so ingenious we still have not figured out how they worked. But despite all that, these civilizations failed.

This is resource failure on a very grand scale. But it will be nothing compared to our present experiment. Resource depletion and failure on a planetary scale.