The Collapse of the American Empire. What Future for Humankind?

These notes are not supposed to disparage nor to exalt an entity that has a history that goes back to at least a couple of millennia ago. Like all Empires, past and present, the Modern World Empire went through its parable of growth and glory and it is now starting its decline. There is not much that we can do about it, we have to accept that this is the way the universe works. On this subject, see also a previous post of mine "Why Europe Conquered the World "

For everything that exists, there is a reason and that's true also for that gigantic thing that we call sometimes "The West" or perhaps "The American Empire," or maybe "Globalization." To find that reason, we may go back to the very origins of the modern empire. We can find them in an older, but already very advanced, empire: the Roman one.

As someone might have said (and maybe someone did, but it might be an original concept of mine), "geography is the mother of Empires." Empires are built on the availability of natural resources and on the ability to transport them. So, the Romans exploited the geography of the Mediterranean basin to build an empire based on maritime transportation. Rome was the center of a hub of commerce that outcompeted every other state in the Western region of Eurasia and North Africa. This transportation system was so important that it was even deified under the name of the Goddess Annona. It was kept together by a financial system based on coinage, Latin as lingua franca, a large military system, and a legal system very advanced for the time.

Like all empires, though, the Roman one carried inside the seeds of its own destruction. The empire peaked at some moment during the 1st century of our era, then it started declining. It was the result of a combination of related factors: the depletion of the precious metal mines that deprived the Empire of its currency, the growth of the Silk Road that siphoned the Roman wealth to China, the overexploitation of the North-African agriculture that fed the Roman cities. No money, no resources, no food: the Empire could only collapse and it did.

The old Roman Empire left a ghostly shadow over Europe, so persistent that for almost two millennia people tried to recreate it one way or another. But it was not possible, again it was a question of geography. The Roman intensive agriculture had so badly damaged the North-African soil that it could never recover -- still, it hasn't. The loss of the fertile soil on the southern shore divided the Mediterranean sea into two halves: the green and still fertile Northern part, and the dry and barren Southern part. Nevertheless, there were several attempts to rebuild the ancient economic and political unity of the basin. The Arabic caliphate built a Southern Mediterranean Empire based on Arabic as the Lingua Franca and on Islam as the common cultural ground. But the expansion of Islam never reached Western Europe. Its economic base was weak: the North African agriculture just couldn't support the population level that would have been needed to control the whole Mediterranean basin. The same destiny befell, later on, on the Turkish Empire.

On the Northern side of the Mediterranean sea, Europe was a region that the ancient Romans had always considered mostly a periphery. With the Roman Empire gone, Northern Europe was freed to develop by itself. It was the period that we call the "dark ages," a misnomer if ever there was one. The dark ages were a new civilization that exploited some of the cultural and technological structures inherited from Rome but that also developed original ones. The lack of gold and silver made it impossible for Europeans to keep Europe together by military means. They had to rely on subtler and more sophisticated methods that, nevertheless, were patterned over the old Roman structures. Cultural unity was insured by Christianity, with the church even creating a new form of currency not based on precious metals but on the relics of holy men and women. The church also was the keeper of Latin, the old Roman language that became the European the Lingua Franca, the only tool that allowed Europeans to understand each other.

In this way, the Europeans created a gentle and sophisticated civilization. They could maintain the rule of law and they gave back to women some of the rights that they had lost during the Roman Empire. Witch-burning, endemic in the Roman Empire, couldn't be completely abolished, but its frequency was reduced to nearly zero. Slavery was formally abolished, although it never actually disappeared. Material wealth was de-emphasized, in favor of spiritual wealth, art and literature flourished as much as they could in a poor region as Europe was at that time. Wars didn't disappear, but the early Middle Ages were a relatively quiet period with the Church maintaining a certain degree of control over the worst excesses of the local warlords. The Arthurian cycle emphasized how errant knights were fighting to perform good deeds and to defend the weak. It was put in writing only in the late Middle Ages, but it had been part of the European dreamscape from much earlier times.

But things never stand still. During the Middle Ages, the European population and the European economy were growing together exploiting a relatively intact territory. Soon, the gentle civilization of the early Middle Ages gave way to something that was not gentle at all. With the turn of the millennium, Europe was overpopulated and Europeans started looking for areas where to expand. The crusades started with the 11th century and were a new attempt to re-unify the Mediterranean basin. Europe was even equipping itself with international structures that could have governed the new Mediterranean Empire: the chivalric orders. Of these, the Templars were an especially interesting structure: in part a military society, but also a bank and a cultural center, all based on Latin as lingua franca. The idea was that the new Mediterranean Empire would be governed by a supranational organization, not unlike the old Roman Empire.

But the crusades were an expensive failure. The military effort had to be supported by the main economic resources of the time: forests and agricultural land. Both were badly overstrained and the result was an age of famines and pestilences that nearly halved the European population. It was a new collapse that took place during the 14th century. It was bad enough that we may imagine that the descendants of the Sultan Salah ad-Din could have stricken back and conquered Europe, had they not been stabbed in the back by the expanding Mongol empire.

The European Population: graph from William E Langer, "The Black Death" Scientific American, February 1964, p. 117 -- note how growth is faster after the collapse than it was before.

But Europeans were stubborn. Despite the 14th century collapse, they kept using the same trick they had been using before to rebuild after a disaster: patterning new structures on the old ones. The Europeans were good warriors, skilled shipbuilders, excellent merchants, and always willing to take risks in order to make money. They keep doing what they were good at doing and, if they couldn't expand into the East, why not expand West, across the Atlantic Ocean? It was a wildly successful idea. Europeans imported gunpowder technology from China and used it to build fearsome weapons. With their newly mastered gunnery skills, they created a new kind of ship, the cannon-armed galleon. It was a dominance weapon: a galleon could sail everywhere ad blast away all opposition. A century after the great pestilence, the European population was growing again, faster than before. And, this time, the Europeans were embarking on the task of conquering the world.

Over a few centuries, Europeans behaved as worldwide marauders: explorers, merchants, pirates, colonists, empire builders, and more. They sailed everywhere and wherever they sailed, they dominated the sea and, from the sea, they dominated the land. But who were they? Europe never gained a political unity nor it embarked on an effort to create a politically unified empire. While fighting non-European populations, Europeans were also fighting each other for the spoils. The only supranational governing entity they had was the Catholic Church, but it was an obsolete tool for the new times. By the 16th century, the Catholic Church was not anymore a keeper of relics, it was a relic itself. The final blow to it came from the invention of the printing press that enormously lowered the cost of books. That led to a market for books written in vernacular language and that was the end of Latin as a European lingua franca. The result was the reformation by Martin Luther, in 1517: the power of the Catholic Church was broken forever. Now, European states had what they wanted: a free hand to expand where they wanted.

As you may have imagined, the result of this "battle royal" historical phase was a new disaster. The European states jumped at each other's throat engaging in the "30-years war" (1618 – 1648). Half Europe was laid waste, plagues and famines reappeared, food production plummeted down, and with it population. Europeans were not just fighting against each other in the form of warring states. European men were fighting against European women: it was the time of witch-burning, tens of thousands of innocent European women were jailed, tortured, and burned at the stake. With its forests cut and the agricultural land eroded by overexploitation, there was a distinct possibility that the age of the European world empire was over forever. It was not.

Just like a stroke of luck had saved Europe after the first collapse of the 14th century, another nearly miraculous event saved Europe from the 18th century collapse. This miracle had a name: coal. It was a European economist of the 19th century, William Jevons, who had noted that "with coal, everything is easy." And with coal Europeans could solve most of their problems: coal could be used in place of wood to smelt metals and make weapons. This saved the European forests (but not for Spain, which had no cheap coal and whose empire floundered slowly). Then, coal could be turned into food using an indirect but effective technology. Coal was used to smelt iron and produce weapons. With weapons, new lands were conquered and the inhabitants enslaved. The slaves would then cultivate plantations and produce food to be shipped to Europe. It was the time when the British developed their habit of tea in the afternoon: the tea, the sugar, and the flour for the cakes were all produced in the British plantations overseas.

And the cycle continued. The European population restarted growing during the 18th century and, by the end of the 19th century, the feat of conquering the world was nearly complete. The 20th century saw a consolidation of what we can now call the "Western Empire" with the term "West" denoting a cultural entity that by now was not just European: it encompassed the United States, Australia, South Africa, and a few more states -- including even Asiatic countries such as Japan which, in 1905, gained a space among the world powers by force of arms, soundly defeating a traditional European power, Russia, at the naval battle of Tsushima. From a military viewpoint, the Western Empire was a reality. There remained the need of turning it into a political entity. All empires need an emperor, but the West didn't have one, not yet.

The final phase of the building of the Western World Empire took place with the two world wars of the 20th century. Those were true civil wars fought for imperial dominance, similar to the civil wars of ancient Rome at the time of Caesar and Augustus. Out of these wars, a clear winner emerged: the United States. After 1945, the Empire had a common currency (the dollar), a common language (English), a capital (Washington DC) and an emperor, the president of the United States. More than all that, it had acquired a powerful propaganda machine, the one we call today "consensus building." It built a narrative that described WW2 as a triumph of good against evil -- the latter represented by Nazi Germany. This narrative remains today the funding myth of the Western Empire. The only rival empire left, the Soviet Empire, collapsed in 1991, leaving the American Empire as the sole dominant power of the world. Also that was seen as proof of the inherent goodness of the American Empire. It was then that Francis Fukuyama wrote his "The End of History," (1992) correctly describing the events he was witnessing. Just like when Emperor Octavianus ushered the age of the "Pax Romana," it was the beginning of a new golden age: the "Pax Americana"

Alas, history never ends and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, all empires carry inside themselves the seeds of their own destructions. Just a few decades have passed from the time when Fukuyama had claimed the end of history and the Pax Americana seems to be already over. The Western world dominance had been based first on coal, then on oil, now trying to switch to gas, but all these are finite resources becoming more and more expensive to produce. Just like Rome had followed the decline of its gold mines, the West is following follow the decline of the wells it controls. The dollar is losing its role of world currency and the Empire is under threat by a new commercial system. Just as the ancient silk road was a factor in the collapse of the Roman Empire, the nascent "road and belt initiative" that will connect Eurasia as a single commercial region may give the final blow to the Globalized dominance of the West.

To be sure, the Western Empire, although in its death throes, is not dead yet. It still has its wondrous propaganda machine working. The great machine has even been able to convince most people that the empire doesn't actually exist, that everything they see being done to them is done for their good and that foreigners are starved and bombed with the best of good intentions. It is a remarkable feat that reminds something that a European poet, Baudelaire, said long ago: "the Devil's best trick consists in letting you believe he doesn't exist." It is typical of all structures to turn nasty during their decline, it happens even to human beings. So, we may be living in an "Empire of Lies" that's destroying itself by trying to build its own reality. Except that the real reality always wins.

And there we are, today. Just like the old Roman Empire, the Western Empire is going through its cycle and the decline has already started. So, at this point, we could hazard some kind of moral judgment: was the Western Empire good or bad? In a sense, all empires are bad: they tend to be ruthless military organizations that engage in all kinds of massacres, genocides, and destruction. Of the Roman empire, we remember the extermination of the Chartaginese as an example, but it was not the only one. Of the Western Empire, we have many examples: possibly the most evil one being the genocide of the North-American Indians, but such things as the extermination of civilian by aerial bombing of cities during WW2 was also impressively evil. And the (evil) Empire doesn't seem to have lost its taste for genocide, at least as it can be judged from some recent declarations by members of the American government about starving Iranians.

On the other hand, it would be difficult to maintain that Westerners are more evil than people belonging to other cultures. If history tells us something, it is that people tend to become evil when they have a chance to do so. The West created many good things, from polyphonic music to modern science and, during this last phase of its history, it is leading the struggle to keep the Earth alive -- a girl such as Greta Thunberg is a typical example of the "good West" as opposed to the "evil West."

Overall, all empires in history are more or less the same. They are like waves crashing on a beach: some are large, some small, some do damage, some just leave traces on the sand. The Western Empire did more damage than others because it was larger, but it was not different. We have to accept that the universe works in a certain way: never smoothly, always going up and down and, often, going through abrupt collapses, as the ancient Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca had noted long ago. Being the current empire so large, the transition to whatever will come after us needs to be more abrupt and more dramatic than anything seen in history before. But, just like it was the case for ancient Rome, the future may well be a gentler and saner age than the current one. And the universe will go on as it has always done.

Bimillenary of the death of Germanicus: The Defeat of the Roman Deep State

2,000 years ago, on Oct 10, 19 CE, Germanicus Julius Caesar died in Antioch, Asia Minor, perhaps poisoned by his uncle, Tiberius, then the ruling emperor. If we see Hillary Clinton in the role of Germanicus and Donald Trump in the role of Tiberius, you have an equivalent ongoing conflict. Most likely, the concept of "Deep State" existed in Roman times, just as in ours.

Germanicus had not gained his "agnomen" (victory name) because he was a friend of the Germans, but because he had managed to kill many of them in a series of military campaigns from 14 to 16 CE. Tacitus tells us many details of how the Romans engaged in what we would call today a Strafexpedition ("Punitive expedition") to avenge the defeat they had suffered against the Germans in Teutoburg ten years before. The Romans attacked Germany with eight legions and plenty of auxiliary troops in what was probably the largest military expedition in history, up to that time. In military terms, it was a success: the Germans were defeated and forced to retreat, but the cost of the campaign was simply staggering. Reading Tacitus we can get a feeling of the enormous effort in which the Romans had to engage in order to keep their legions supplied with food, equipment (and money). Eight legions were about a third of the whole military strength of the Empire: imagine fielding them in a region having no roads and no supporting infrastructure!

By 16 CE, it must have been clear to everyone that the effort was bankrupting the Roman state. That led to an undeclared conflict between the ruling emperor of the time, Tiberius, and his nephew, Germanicus. It was good that Germanicus could defeat the Germans (or, at least, claim victory over them). But that made Germanicus too popular and hence a dangerous competitor for the ruling emperor. Then, Germanicus wanted to continue attacking the Germans and this was a bad idea on all counts. First, it was too expensive, then the Empire couldn't afford another defeat like the one suffered in Teutoburg. Continuing the campaign was simply too risky.

We don't have documents from those ancient times telling us much about the Roman "war party" that surely existed. War was then, as now, good business for those waging it, but it was very bad business for those who had to foot the bill. So, it made a lot of sense for Tiberius, a ruthless leader by all accounts, to quietly get rid of Germanicus and, with him, of all the risks involved with more wars on the Germans. Germanicus' death was a considerable defeat for the Roman war party (or deep state). It didn't stop the attempts of the Roman Empire to expand, but it made the Romans much more cautious and, specifically, it made it clear that expanding into Germany was a no-no in military terms. 

Today, the situation is similar: the current empire, the American one, is facing gigantic costs just to maintain its huge and largely obsolete military structure. It cannot afford military adventures, not even victorious ones if they end with no economic gains -- the campaign against Iraq is a case in point. And it goes without saying that the ailing American Empire cannot risk a major military defeat. 

Yet, there exists a strong war party, often called the "deep state," in the US pushing for new campaigns. So far, President Trump has played the role of Tiberius, avoiding to engage the US in new wars. Hillary Clinton, instead, has been playing the role of Germanicus as secretary of state, including taking credit for some recent US victories (we all remember her ghastly bout of laughter when she described the death of Lybian leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, in 2011). 

So far, the conflict between the president and the secretary of state hasn't led to anyone being eliminated by poisoning. But the similarities between the current empire and the old Roman one are deep and we may well see more events in the near future that we may interpret as being mirrors of much older events. As we all know, history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but it does rhyme.




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Below, a post that appeared on "Cassandra's Legacy" in 2015

A distant mirror: bimillenary of Germanicus' campaigns in Germania

(Image: a battle scene showing Roman troops fighting Barbarians. This relief is much later than the times discussed in this post, but it gives some idea of how these battles were seen in Roman times: "Grande Ludovisi Altemps Inv8574" by Unknown - Jastrow (2006). Licensed under Public Domain via Commons)

Julius Caesar Germanicus, the grandson of Emperor Augustus, was called "Germanicus" not because he liked the Germanic peoples; rather, he was engaged in a ruthless, scorched earth campaign against them. Nevertheless, he managed to accomplish very little; mainly to show that the Roman Empire, despite all its might, could not possibly conquer Germania. 

Success, sometimes, shows one's limits more than defeat. That's a lesson that the Romans had to learn the hard way when they tried to subdue the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine, between the first century BC and the first century AD. The attempt involved a long series of campaigns and, perhaps, the climax came exactly two thousand years ago, from 14 to 16 AD, when the Romans invaded Germania with no less than eight legions under the command of Tiberius Claudius Nero, known as Germanicus (at right), grandson of Augustus and the adopted son of Emperor Tiberius. The total number of the troops employed could have been at least 80 thousand men, perhaps close to a hundred thousand; about a third of the whole Roman army. Using a modern term, we could say that the Romans were trying to steamroll their enemies.

In this case, the concept of "steamrolling" can perhaps be intended in an almost literal sense. Tacitus makes it clear for us in his "Annals" that the Romans were going into Germania having in mind something much different than "bringing civilization" to those primitive peoples. No, no such silly idea; the Romans were there to teach those Barbarians a lesson. For this, they were burning villages, slaughtering everyone, or taking as slaves, as Tacitus says, even "the helpless from age or sex." Germanicus' name, evidently, didn't imply that he loved Germanic people. Again, using a modern term, we could say that the Romans were practicing a scorched earth campaign, if not an outright war of extermination.

And yet, all these efforts achieved little. Over three years of campaigns, Germanicus' troops won all the battles they fought; but they couldn't break the Germanic tribes. And the cost of keeping so many men in the field was becoming unbearable even for the mighty Roman Empire. In 16 AD, Emperor Tiberius recalled Germanicus to Rome. He also ordered the legions to abandon the territories they had conquered and to retire behind the fortifications along the Rhine, from where they had started their campaigns. Germanicus was given a big triumph in Rome, but, a few years later, in 19 AD, he died, possibly poisoned by Tiberius himself who feared the competition of a popular general. So, Germanicus' campaigns had shown the might of the Empire, but also its limits: there were some things that the legions just couldn't do. That was a lesson that Emperors understood well and, indeed, the Romans never tried again to attack the Germanic territory.

Two thousand years afterward, we see in these remote events a distant mirror of our age. The parallels with our current situation are many, and I am sure that the word "Iraq" is already coming to your mind. Yes, the Iraq campaign was a series of victories, just like Germanicus' campaigns. But, from a strategic viewpoint, modern Iraq, just like Germania two thousand years ago, turned out to be a conquest too expensive to keep.

But there is more to be seen in this distant mirror and so let's go a little more in-depth into history. First of all, Germanicus' campaigns were the consequence of an earlier, failed campaign: the defeat of Teutoburg in 9 AD, when three Roman legions were annihilated by a coalition of Germanic tribes. Not even their commander, Consul Publius Quinctilius Varus, escaped alive. Teutoburg was not only a disaster but a mystery as well. How could it be that the Roman legions, not exactly amateurs in practicing the art of war, blithely marched into a dense forest where a large number of German warriors were waiting to hack them to pieces?

I wouldn't be too surprised if Varus himself were to appear to me one of these nights as a bluish ghost in my bedroom. Then, he could tell me the story of why exactly he was sent to Germania as the governor of a province that existed only on paper and supplied with insufficient troops to control a region that had never been really pacified. Lacking this apparition, we can only speculate on this story but it takes little imagination to conclude that someone in Rome wanted Varus' head to roll. Whoever they were, anyway, they probably couldn't imagine that so many more Roman heads would roll together with Varus' one. We will never know for sure, but we know that the man who led Varus into the trap in the forest, Arminius, was a Roman citizen, albeit born in Germania. Varus was betrayed.

I know what you are thinking at this point. And, yes, we can find some kind of a parallel with modern history in the 9/11 attack to the twin towers in New York. Let me state that I am not discussing conspiracy theories, here; what I want to highlight is the similarity of the reaction of the ancient and the modern empires to events that both perceived as an existential threat. Just as the US citizens were deeply scared by the 9/11 attacks, the Romans were deeply scared by the disaster of Teutoburg.

The main consequence of the defeat of Teutoburg was that it strongly reinforced the position of the Emperor as the military leader of the whole Empire. Don't forget that, in the early 1st century AD, the idea that there was to be an emperor was still something new and plenty of people would probably have liked the Republic to be re-established. That was what Brutus and Cassius had tried to do by killing Julius Caesar. But, after Teutoburg, reinstating the Republic became totally out of question. You probably have heard of Suetonius reporting that Emperor Augustus, on hearing of Varus' defeat, would walk aimlessly at night in his palace, murmuring, "Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!" That was a master propaganda stroke on the part of Augustus, a consummate politician. By showing himself so concerned, Augustus was positioning himself as the defender of the Empire against the barbarian menace.

Not only Teutoburg reinforced the role of Emperors; the campaigns by Germanicus reinforced it even more. If Teutoburg had shown that the Germanic tribes were an existential threat for the Empire, then, Germanicus' failure showed that they couldn't be destroyed. The result was that the Empire positioned itself for a long term war. That generated the equivalent of our present military-industrial complex: a standing army and a set of fortifications along the borders. That was good business for the military contractors of Roman times, but the long term consequence was that the Empire bled itself to death in order to maintain the colossal defense works it had built. Before Teutoburg, the Roman army had been producing wealth as a result of the conquest of foreign lands. After Teutoburg, the army became a destroyer of wealth, costing much more than it produced; as Germanicus' campaigns clearly demonstrated. As time went by, the Roman Empire became weaker and weaker, but it stubbornly refused to admit it and to accept the barbarians in roles that were not those of mercenaries or slaves.

Four centuries after the battle of Teutoburg and Germanicus' campaigns, an enlightened empress, Galla Placidia, broke the rules in a bold attempt to revitalize a dying empire. She married a Barbarian king and tried to start a new dynasty that would merge the Germanic and the Latin elements of the Empire. She didn't succeed; it was too late; it was too much for a single person. The Roman Empire had to go through its cycle, and the end of the cycle was its disappearance; a relic of history that had no reason to exist any longer.

This is the destiny of empires and civilizations that, as Toynbee says, die most often because they kill themselves. So it was for the Romans, our distant mirror. A dark mirror, but, most likely, our destiny will not be much different.


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See also

http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.it/2015/09/fortress-europe-wall-to-keep-foreigners.html

Did climate change cause the fall of the Roman Empire? No, but what may have actually happened is amazing.

"Vanity Fair" may not be the best source for reliable scientific information, but this cover is typical of an idea that's becoming popular in the memesphere: that the Roman Empire fell because of climate change. Alas, this means stretching the data more than a bit and surprisingly, the opposite may be true: the climate changed because the Empire fell. Read on! (image source)

We have a problem with history: we often try to frame the past as if it were the same as the present. And that means projecting on the ancient our own troubles and fears. Add to this the difficulties we have in dealing with complex systems, the kind of systems that normally behave the way they damn please, and the results are often a complete mess.

The fall of the Roman Empire is a case in point. Maybe you know that in 1984 the German historian Demandt listed 210 (!!) causes proposed for the fall. It is fun to read how people just transferred to the Roman society whatever they were afraid of, from Communism to Culinary Excess.

In more recent times, we started being worried about things that weren't well known in the 1980s. One is the decline of the energy return on energy invested (EROI), which is a true problem for our fossil-based society. It is much less obvious that it was a problem the ancient Romans and I wasn't impressed by the attempts of Thomas Homer-Dixon to paint the Roman collapse as the result of an EROI decline. No data, no proof, just vague analogies.

Nowadays, our worries have shifted to Climate Change and, as you might have expected, the idea that Climate Change can destroy civilization has been projected to the fall of the Roman Empire. You can read a popularized version of the idea on "Vanity Fair" (see above), but also serious researchers seem to have bought into it. For instance, Kyle Harper, professor at the University of Oklahoma, titles his 2017 article "Climate Change Helped Destroy the Roman Empire."

The kind of climate change that's supposed to have destroyed the Roman Empire is different than the current version: we are affected by global warming, in ancient times the problem seems to have been global cooling. Lower temperatures negatively affected agriculture, that caused famines and pestilences, and that reduced the population. Then, bang! The Empire collapsed. The problem with this idea is that the dates, simply, don't match.

I already discussed this matter in a brief post in 2016, but let me go back to the story with more details. The Western Roman Empire officially disappeared during the 5th century, but the real collapse was much earlier. Here are data on lead and silver pollution in Roman times from a 2017 paper by McConnell et al. Likely, these data are a good proxy for the whole Roman economy.

You see how the decline of the Empire started around 100 CE and the collapse was complete around 250 CE, a true Seneca Collapse, faster than the growth that preceded it. That corresponds to what we know from the historians of the time.

Now, how about climate? Do we see something happening during the economic collapse? Here, the data are much less certain, but a "proxy" of temperature can be obtained from measurements on tree rings. Here is a data set published in 2011. More recent data substantially confirm these results.

First of all, note the uncertainty in the data: variations under ca. 0.5 °C are probably not significant. Also note how two different sets of data, marked with the black line and the red line, do not match exactly. But some "dips" seem to indicate significant temperature drops -- here, too, we may have a kind of "Seneca Collapse" of the temperature. The most intense drop occurred in mid 6th century CE with, it seems, a full 2 °C temperature decline.

Now, compare with the data of the previous figure on the Roman economy. Clearly, there was no significant cooling during the economic crash of the 3rd century AD. Temperatures started falling, badly, after the crash. And when temperatures reached their minimum - around the year 600 CE, the Western Roman Empire was only a memory. Of course, if you want to say that "A" caused "B," at least it should be that A precedes B!

Besides, you can see that other correlations just don't work the way they should if you want to blame climate change for something bad that happened to the Roman Empire. Consider the decrease of temperature in mid 1st century BCE. It is marked in the figure as "Roman Conquest," correctly so because Caesar's military campaign in Gallia was in full swing at that time: the Roman Empire was probably at its peak power. If cold is supposed to be able to cause the fall of an empire, it surely didn't do that at that time!

So, we can conclude that, no, the Roman Empire didn't fall because of climate change. It is one more of those "explanations" that don't explain anything and that will become part of Demandt's list, together with "Tiredness of life" and "Escapism."

But let's consider the data a little more in depth. It looks like they are telling something to us. Could it be that the opposite conclusion holds? That is, it could it be that the climate changed because the Empire fell?

Let's follow this line of thought. We know that the Roman collapse was accompanied by a considerable decline in population. It is extremely difficult to have reliable data on this point, but it may be that the maximum European population in Roman times was of some 35 million people at the peak, then it shrunk to only 18 million inhabitants in 650 CE.

Depopulation is both cause and effect of the decline of agriculture and, with less agricultural land, forests can regrow. And, of course, forests tend to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, that affects climate by lowering temperatures. According to a hypothesis put forward by Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva, the effects of forests on climate may be even larger because of the biotic pump mechanism. It is a complicated story: it mainly affects rainfall, but it also cools the land.

If we look at the figure above with forest extents in mind, we see that some things start clicking together. Consider the temperature drop when Caesar conquered Gallia. We have no data on how many people his troops killed, but you can read a chronicle of the war written by Caesar himself, the De Bello Gallico, and you can see that it was no gentleman's war. Caesar's troop not only devastated Gallia but surely also brought back to Rome large numbers of Gauls as slaves. A depopulated Gallia may well have seen its forests regrow. Something similar may have taken place earlier on, during the 3rd century BCE, when the Celts expanded all over Europe.

So, things seem to make sense: depopulation and reforestation may really cool the Earth. But, also, a lot of caution is necessary: the matter is complicated and the data are scant and uncertain. Things become even more complicated with the "Little Ice Age" which also appears in the graph above, starting approximately with the 15th century CE. In this case, in contrast with the previous cases, the cooling occurs in correspondence with strong growth of the European population, although punctuated by various disasters in the form of plagues and famines. Maybe it was the depopulation of the North American continent that caused extensive reforestation and hence cooling. But the data are uncertain at best, with some interpretations explicitly denying this effect and proposing that the cooling may have been related largely to volcanic activity.

As you see, this story both uncertain and fascinating. It will take a lot more work before we'll be able to disentangle the various factors that affected climate in historical times. I don't claim here to have said anything new on these matters, but I was impressed to find so much work pointing at the strong interaction between human beings and climate -- even before fossil hydrocarbons started to be called "fuels".

The Earth's ecosystem is a typical complex system. It reacts to perturbations, even minor ones, sometimes very strongly. Don't expect it to remain stable just because it has been stable up to a certain moment. Remember that a pebble can cause an avalanche and don't forget the straw that broke the camel's back. Then, think of how large is the forcing generated in our times by the combustion of fossil fuels, maybe orders of magnitude larger than anything our ancestors could do. We are moving toward interesting times (as in the ancient Chinese malediction).

(h/t Steve Kurtz, Franco Miglietta, Stefano Caserini, Paolo Gabrielli)

The Empire of Lies: How we are collapsing in the same way as the Roman Empire did.

(Image source: Wikipedia) The Devil is sometimes said to be "The Father of Lies." It is an apt definition for a creature that doesn't even exist except as a figment of human imagination. Satan is an evil egregore that we ourselves created, a creature that seems to loom larger and larger behind the current chronicles. The recent arrest of Julian Assange is just the latest deed of an Empire that seems bent on truly creating its own reality, something that, in itself, wouldn't necessarily be evil but that becomes so when it implies destroying all other realities, including the only true one. 

Initially, I thought to comment the recent news about Assange by reproducing a post "The Empire of Lies" that I published here about one year ago, where I described how the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages had taken place, in large part, because people just couldn't trust their Imperial rulers anymore. The Roman Empire had become an empire of lies and it was left to Christianity to rebuild the trust that the old empire had squandered - the Middle Ages were far from being "Dark Ages."  But, eventually, I thought to publish something I had in mind about how the Roman Empire and the modern Western Empire are following parallel trajectories in their habit of telling lies as they move toward their respective Seneca Cliffs.

So, here it is my assessment of the Roman Collapse, based on the excellent book by Dmitry Orlov, "The Five Stages of Collapse." Just one note: in the book, Orlov doesn't describe the post-collapse phase of the Soviet Union that ended with Russia becoming again as a prosperous and united country, as it is nowadays. It was a good example of the "Seneca Rebound" -- there is life after collapse and there will be new life after that the Evil Empire of lies will be gone.

The Five Stages of Collapse of The Roman Empire.

By Ugo Bardi


Dmitry Orlov wrote "The Five Stages of Collapse" as an article in 2008 and as a book in 2013. It was an original idea for that time that of comparing the fall of the Soviet Union with that of the United States. Being an American citizen born in Russia, Orlov could compare the two Empires in detail and note the many similarities that led both to follow the same trajectory, even though the cycle of the American Empire is not over, yet.

To strengthen Orlov's analysis I thought I could apply the same five stages to an older Empire, the Roman one. And, yes, the five stages apply well also to that ancient case. So, here is my take on this subject.

To start, a list of the five Stages of Collapse according to Orlov.

• Stage 1: Financial collapse.
• Stage 2: Commercial collapse.
• Stage 3: Political collapse.
• Stage 4: Social collapse.
• Stage 5: Cultural collapse.

Now, let's see how these five stages played out during the fall of the Roman Empire.

Stage 1 – Financial Collapse (3rd century AD). The Roman Empire’s financial system was not as sophisticated as ours, but, just like our civilization, the Empire was based on money. Money was the tool that kept together the state: it was used to pay the legions and the bureaucrats and to make the commercial system supply the cities with food. The Roman money was a physical commodity: it was based on silver and gold, and these metals needed to be mined. It was the Roman control over the rich gold mines of Northern Spain that had created the Empire, but these mines couldn’t last forever. Starting with the 1st century, the cost of mining from depleted veins became an increasingly heavy burden. By the 3rd century, the burden was too heavy for the Empire to carry. It was the financial collapse from which the Empire never could fully recover.

Stage 2 – Commercial Collapse (5th century AD). The Roman Empire had never really been a commercial empire nor a manufacturing society. It was specialized in military conquest and it preferred to import luxury items from abroad, some, such as silk, all the way from the other side of Eurasia, from China. In addition to legions, the Empire produced only two commodities in large amounts: grain and gold. Of these, only gold could be exported to long distances and it soon disappeared to China to pay for the expensive imports the Romans were used to buy. The other product, grain, couldn’t be exported and continued to be traded within the Empire’s border for some time – the supply of grain from the African and Near Eastern granaries was what kept the Roman cities alive, Rome in particular. After the financial collapse, the supply lines remained open because the grain producers had no other market than the Roman cities. But, by mid-5th-century, things got so bad that Rome was sacked first by the Visigoths in 410, and then by the Vandals in 450, It recovered from the 1st sack, but the second was terminal. The Romans had no more money left to pay for the grain they needed, the commercial sea lanes broke down completely, and the Romans starved. It was the end of the Roman commercial system.

Stage 3 – Political Collapse (late 5th century AD). The political collapse went in parallel with the commercial collapse. Already in the late 4th century, the Emperors had become unable to defend Rome from the Barbarian armies marching across the empire and they had retired to the safety of the fortified city of Ravenna. When Rome was sacked, the Emperors didn’t even try to do something to help. The last emperors disappeared by the late 5th century but, already decades before, most people in Europe had stopped caring about whether or not there was some pompous person in Ravenna who wore purple clothes and claimed to be a divine Emperor.

Stage 4 – Social Collapse (5th century AD). The social collapse of the Western Empire went in parallel with the disgregation of the political and commercial structures. Already during the early 5th century, we have evidence that the Roman Elites had gone in “escape mode" – it was not just the emperor who had fled Rome to take refuge in Ravenna, patricians and warlords were on the move with troops, money, and followers to establish feudal domains for themselves where they could. And they were leaving the commoners to fend off by themselves. By the 6th century, the Roman State was gone and most of Europe was in the hands of Germanic warlords.

Stage 5 - Cultural collapse (starting in the 6th century AD). It was very slow. The advent of Christianity, during the 3rd century, had not weakened the Empire's cultural structure, it had been an evolution rather than a break with the past. The collapse of the Empire as a political and military entity didn't change things so much and for centuries people in Europe still considered themselves as Romans, not unlike the Japanese soldiers stranded in remote islands after the end of the second world war .(in Greece, people would still define themselves as "Romans" well into the 19th century). Latin, the imperial language, disappeared as a vernacular language but it was kept alive by the Catholic clergy and it became an indispensable tool that kept Europe culturally united. Latin kept a certain cultural continuity with the ancient empire that was only very gradually lost. It was only with the 18th - 19th centuries that Latin disappeared as the language of the cultural elite, to be replaced by English nowadays.

As you see, Orlov’s list has a certain logic although it needs to be adapted a little to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The 5 stages didn’t come one after the other, There was more than a century lapse between the 3rd-century financial collapse (stage 1) and the three subsequent stages arriving together: commercial, political, and social collapse. The 5th stage, the cultural collapse, was a drawn-out story that came later and that lasted for centuries.

How about our civilization? The 1st stage, financial collapse is clearly ongoing, although it is masked by various accounting tricks. The 2nd stage, commercial collapse, instead, hasn't started yet, nor the political collapse: the Empire still maintains a giant and threatening military force, even though its actual efficiency may be doubted. Maybe we are already seeing signs of the 3rd stage, social collapse but, if the Roman case is a guide, these three stages will arrive together.

Then, how about the last stage, cultural collapse? That's a question for a relatively far future. For a while, English will surely remain the universal language, just as Latin used to be after the fall of Rome, while people may keep thinking they still live in a globalized world (maybe it is already an illusion). With English fading, anything may happen and when (and if) a new Empire will rise on the ashes of the American Empire it will be something completely different. We can only say that the universe goes in cycles and that's, evidently, the way things have to be.

The Cryptocurrency of the Middle Ages: Relics

I am re-proposing here a post that I published on "Insurge" about one year ago. It is part of the idea of rediscovering the European Middle Ages not as an age of Barbarism and decline, but as a period of intelligent adaptation to a dearth of resources. Our ancestors of those times faced the problem of maintaining some fundamental elements of the collapsed Roman Empire. One was currency, that in Roman times, had been based on mineral commodities: gold and silver. With the mines producing them gone, the people of the Middle Ages had to reinvent money: they did so by using relics. It was a successful idea that maintained commerce alive in Europe through a difficult period. 

Cryptocurrencies are surprisingly similar to Medieval relics

Published on "Insurge" on Jan 9, 2018

By Ugo Bardi

Ancient relics that the author inherited from his grandparents. A chest full of fragments of bones of unidentified saints enclosed in small boxes, these objects probably date back to the 18th century or perhaps they are even older. Relics were supposed to be venerated, but note also the shape and size of the containers: they look like coins and, in a certain way, they were coins. This hoard of saintly relics was a small treasure that the family kept in the same way as today some people keep gold coins and jewels. Today, these objects have no commercial value just like money out of circulation.

Maybe you think that bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies are a completely new form of currency. After all, nothing like that could ever exist before the age of the Internet, right?

Well, not exactly. It is true that the modern cryptocurrencies are based on the Internet, but the basic concept of “virtual currency” predates the Internet, by at least a millennium. During the Middle Ages, people made extensive use of virtual currency in the form of holy relics.

It is a story that needs to be told from the beginning. First of all, all human societies are kept together by means of money. Without money, there cannot be commercial transactions, and without that, no complex society can exist.

For a long time, thousands of years of human history, money was based on precious metals, mainly gold and silver. Coinage was the technology that propelled the Romans to become an empire: they used precious metal money to pay their legions, to bribe their enemies, and to keep the empire together.

But the same technology that created the empire also doomed it. When the imperial mines ran out of precious metals, the Empire ran out of money. That generated a complex chain of events and the agony of the Empire lasted for a few centuries. But the origin of all the troubles was simple: it was a financial collapse. No money, no legions. No legions, no Empire.

Then, the Middle Ages came. An age of scarcity of precious metals, it was not by chance that it saw the birth of legends involving dragons hoarding gold in their lairs. People desperately needed some kind of money. But what to use if gold and silver were mostly gone?

The Romans of imperial times had already tried virtual currency — for instance paying their soldiers with pottery. Eventually, the last breed of Roman troops were simply paid with food. But these ideas didn’t work very well, as you may imagine.

The disappearance of the Western Roman Empire didn’t eliminate the need for some kind of currency. Something that could play the role of money was desperately needed and it was found: relics! Yes, exactly that. The bones of dead holy men (and women) had all the characteristics of money. They were rare, hard to find, limited in quantity, had no value of their own, and they could be traded, exchanged, and hoarded. They were also supposed to have thaumaturgic virtues but, really, they were the true currency of the Middle Ages.

As you start thinking of relics in terms of currency, then a lot of things click together in the history of the Middle Ages. For instance, the rise of the power of the papacy in Rome. How could it be that the Germans Emperors couldn’t use their mighty armies to defeat the popes who had little or no military resources? It was because the Catholic church controlled the relic-based financial system. And it is well known that money is often more powerful than armies.

The church had the power of determining whether an object claimed to be a holy relic was real or not, so it acted in some respects as a bank. It validated relics, even though it couldn’t create them (not explicitly, at least). But that was enough to play a pivotal rule in the medieval financial system. The papacy gradually lost its power grip in Europe only when new mines in Eastern Europe provided enough precious metals for coinage and that allowed kings and empires to gain the upper hands with new armies.

If relics were currency, then you can also understand the incredible craze that had overtaken people during the Middle Ages. People were digging everywhere for holy relics, an activity that was mostly virtual because nobody could prove that the bones that were found had been there before.

Sometimes the craving for bones was so strong that people who had a saintly reputation were literally cut to pieces immediately after their death by crowds craving for their bones. Having such a reputation could even be dangerous, the life of a saint could be cut short by someone who wanted to make a profit out of his bones.

The holy remains of st. Fausto kept in a church in Castellina in Chianti, in Tuscany (photo by the author)

Relics were a virtual currency, just like bitcoin. They had no more substance than the stuff dreams are made of. Nobody could really tell whether a fragment of bone claimed to be holy came from a cow or holy man. Nobody could tell whether a wood splinter was really a chunk of Christ’s cross. To be sure, the Church could declare (or deny) the authenticity of a specific relic; but it was still a declaration wholly based on faith. It was all virtual: a game of make-believe, just as today is the case for all kinds of money, including bitcoin.

But if money is a dream, don’t discount its power. Dreams (and money) are what keeps human societies together. Bitcoin — or some other form of cryptocurrency — is the new money. Maybe it will turn out to be a nightmare, but maybe it will help us keep our dreams alive.

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Notes

As far as I know, so far historians have not noted that Medieval relics can be seen as a form of currency. However, I may cite Gibbons in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (1776) when he says (Book XXVIII) that “the relics of saints were more valuable than gold and precious stone”, hinting at the commercial worth of these objects.

To give you some idea of the craze for relics that had overtaken our ancestors, let me translate for you an excerpt from the book by Edgarda Ferri “The Great Countess” (“La Grancontessa”) (2002) which tells the story of Countess Matilda of Canossa. All this takes place around the year 1000 in Europe. Note how the relics are mined out with some effort (just like bitcoins) and how the pope acts as the “bank”, validating the find. But note also how, just as in the case of bitcoins, it is not the bank (the church) that creates the new money. This particular trove of relics was created by a group of citizens (“miners”) of Mantua who had the resources and the clout needed to carry the enterprise to completion, eventually involving in the game even the Pope and the Emperor. And nobody dared to cast doubts on the improbable story.

Longinus the Roman soldier pierced with his lance the side of Christ on the cross on the Golgotha. Out of the wound, there poured blood mixed with water which, falling on his sick eyes, suddenly healed him, converting him to the Christian faith. Searching for safety, Longinus arrived in Mantua carrying with him a little box which contained a sponge and a fistful of sand soaked with lumps of the blood that came from Christ’s body. He was martyred by the Romans outside the walls of the city, in the place that today takes the name of Cappadocia. All traces of his body were lost for a long time. 800 years later, on a summer night, the apostle Andrew appeared to a Christian of Mantua and showed to him the place in the garden where Longinus had buried the precious box. The Mantuans dug there, found the relic, and they also found the bones of the martyr. The very Christian king Charlemagne charged the pope to go there to have more precise news. The Pope examined the find, released a document, he declared the relics of the holy blood to be authentic, dedicated to them an oratory near the hospice of St. Madeleine, ordered that the day of the ascension the relics were to be exposed to the veneration of the believers. In the end, he brought with him a little of the holy soil to give it to the Emperor as a gift, who devoutly deposed it in the royal chapel of Paris.

What can we Learn From the Middle Ages About Collapse? The Great Challenge of the Seneca Bottleneck

The idea that a collapse is awaiting our civilization seems to be gaining ground, although it has not reached the mainstream debate. But no civilization before ours escaped collapse, so it makes sense to think that the entity we call "The West" is going to crash down, badly, in the future. Then, just as it happened to the Romans long ago, we are going to enter a new world. What will it be? Will it look like the Middle Ages? Maybe, but what were exactly the Middle Ages? It may well be that it was far from being the age of barbarism that the name of "dark ages" seems to imply. The Middle Ages were more a period of intelligent adaptation to scarce resources. So, can we learn from our Medieval ancestors how to manage the coming decline?

Aa some moment during the 2nd century AD, the Roman mines of Northern  Spain ceased to produce gold and silver, depleted after some three centuries of exploitation. The Roman Empire lost its main asset: its currency, the money used to pay for the troops, the bureaucracy, the court, the nobles, and everything else. Without money, there was nothing that could keep the Empire together and, following the great financial crash of the 3rd century AD, the Western Roman Empire faded away into a galaxy of statelets and kingdoms. By the 5th century, Europe was officially in the period we call the Middle Ages and that would last for about a millennium.

Today, we tend to regard the Middle Ages as a period of Barbarism and superstition, truly a dark age of witch hunts and religious wars. But are we sure that it was so? Actually, the Middle Ages were a period of intelligent adaptation to the scarcity of resources, a society that may anticipate our future.

First of all, the people of the Middle Ages faced the problem of the lack of currency. Without currency, there can't be commerce, there can't be a government, and the economy is reduced to local exchanges. But, without a good supply of gold or silver, there was no way to maintain a metal-based currency system. Here, we see a clever invention: a virtual currency based on relics. Relics were mostly human bones that the Church, acting as a bank, would guarantee having belonged to some holy man of the past. That ensured the scarcity and the value of the relic-based currency. Relics also solved a basic problem: convertibility. Any currency, to be of any use, must be exchangeable into goods of some kind. With the economy having crashed, there was little in terms of goods to be purchased during the early Middle Ages. But relics could be redeemed in terms of personal physical and spiritual health. People were eager to have or to be in contact with relics as much as in earlier times they would seek for gold and silver.

If relics solved the currency problem, an economy needs also roads: goods must be transported. We know that the Roman system of military roads had mostly collapsed during the 5th century, as Namatianus tells us in his "De Reditu Suo," and, with the Roman state gone, there was no government that would take care of maintaining the roads. Here, we have another clever invention of the Middle Ages: pilgrimages. People would travel all over Europe and even farther away in order to worship the most precious relics stored in churches and monasteries. Pilgrimages were said to be good for one's spiritual health and well-being, but also created a form of non-monetarized economy. Pilgrims needed food and shelter, and that generated a whole system of support for the travelers, monasteries, hotels, shelters, and the like, in large part based on charity. The local lords were encouraged to maintain the roads going through their domains, again in the form of the prestige they gained by favoring pilgrimages and the associated movement of goods.

Then, of course, if people can travel and exchange things they also need to speak to each other. Here, we have another success of the Middle Ages: keeping Latin alive as a European lingua franca. It was not everybody's language, it was reserved to the clergy, but it was truly universal. An Irish monk could converse in Latin with a Sicilian abbot and both would be able to understand a German priest. That prevented Europe from becoming an unmanageable Babel of languages (any reference to the current state of the European Union is intentional).

Keeping Latin, of course, meant to keep the Roman law codes and, as a consequence, maintain the rule of law, one of the greatest conquests of the Roman civilization. Ah... but you are thinking of witch hunts, aren't you? Weren't Medieval people dedicated to burning poor women all the time? No, that's part of the bad press surrounding the Middle Ages. Witches were NOT, emphatically not burned during the Middle Ages. Look at the data from a recent paper by Leeson and Russ. You see that trials and executions of witches were basically non-existent during the Middle Ages. The age of Witch hunting was the so-called and, - oh, so civilized - "Reinassance".

The use of Latin as not just a lingua franca but also a sacred language meant to create a body of European intellectuals, part of a network of monasteries, all managed by the Roman Church. That network kept alive the body of knowledge that had been gathered during the Classical Antiquity. But weren't people burning books during the Middle Ages? Well, no. Book-burning was not an especially Medieval thing -- you can see in the article by Wikipedia on the subject that book burning is mostly a modern thing. Besides, books written by hand were so expensive during the Middle Ages that nobody sane in his or her minds would engage in burning them.

The Middle Ages also saw an effort to control the violence of the military. During Roman times, soldiers would fight because they were paid and that allowed the government a tight control of the army. But, with the disappearance of currency, armies started fighting in order to loot, creating all sorts of disasters. One attempt to control them was the creation of military orders of warrior monks. During the early times of Christianity, the idea took the form of the militia of the Parabalanoi. They turned out to be unruly and violent, among other things they are said to have killed the Pagan intellectual Hypathia in 415 CE. They were disbanded and disappeared from history after the 6th century or so. Later on, after the year 1000, military orders were created during the late Middle Ages and employed mainly for the Crusades. The Teutonic Knights, the Templars, the Knights Hospitallers, and several others, don't seem to have been very effective as a fighting force since they failed to avoid the Holy Lands to be retaken by the Moslem states. It was a good attempt, but this one failed.

Finally, the Medieval society tried to reduce the oppression of the poor and people such as Benedict and Francis of Assisi made it clear that material wealth was not the only goal worth pursuing. The Middle Ages never were a proletarian paradise, but inequality was probably lower than it is in our society, today. It was also an age of much better gender-equality than anything seen in Roman times.

Then, of course, we know how it ended: with the great economic expansion that followed the Black Death in Europe, currency returned from new silver mines in Eastern Europe: the Medieval cult of relics became just a funny superstition. A metal currency meant new empires and new armies sent to conquer the world that the new European galleons were discovering. The invention of the printing press created National languages and ended forever the role of Latin as lingua franca. National languages also generated nation-states, aggressive and powerful entities that still dominate Europe today. And that created the world of today: aggressive, violent, destructive, unsustainable, and rushing at the fastest possible speed toward its own destruction -- the Seneca Collapse of our civilization.

How about our future? Can we imagine a return to something similar to the Middle Ages, the "New Middle Ages"? It is a widely debated concept, often seen in strongly negative terms because people still see the historical Middle Ages as a "dark age." More than that, most people today seem to find inconceivable that any kind of complex society could exist in the future without fossil fuels. In this view, whatever would emerge out of the coming collapse would be something like "peasants ruled by brigands" or, worse, a new Olduvai world of hungry hunters and gatherers, if not the total extinction of humankind.

Maybe. But it may also be that thisnegative attitude is just as wrong as it was the inability of the ancient Romans to conceive any kind of society without Rome as the capital of an empire. Rutilius Namatianus wrote something like that in his De Reditu, during the early 5th century AD. But he was wrong, the example of the Middle Ages tells us that it is possible to keep a sophisticated civilization despite the dearth of material resources available.

It is likely that the old world can't be saved anymore, and probably it doesn't deserve to be. But, even without the abundant mineral resources that we used to create our current situation, we could be able to emerge out of the Seneca Bottleneck and build a sustainable society based that maintains at least some of the current scientific and literary knowledge by using renewable energy and by means of a careful management of the remaining mineral resources of the Earth -- mining our ruins could help, too, just as Medieval people did with Roman ruins.

We cannot say if our descendants will be able to create such a world, but they will have a better chance if we help them. That means sowing the seeds of a renewable energy infrastructure based on sustainable resources, and to start doing that before climate change destroys everything. We can do that, but we need to start now.




After having written this post, I just discovered a 2013 post on the "American Conservative" about Christian Monasticism that was commented just today by Alastair Crooke. It seems that the idea that we can learn something from the Middle Ages is spreading.

What's Emperor Trump Doing? He is Busy at Splitting the Empire in Two

Donald Trump seems to be doing what Roman Emperors like Diocletian, Constantine, and Theodosius did long ago: splitting the empire into two halves. Trump may not have consciously decided to do that, but an Empire can only be as large as it can afford to be and the American Empire can't afford anymore to dominate the whole world.

Flavius Theodosius Augustus "The Great" (347- 395 CE) was the last emperor to rule over the whole Roman Empire. His success was probably due in large part to his habit of plundering Pagan temples for the gold he needed to pay his troops. But Pagan temples were a limited resource and Theodosius himself seemed to understand that when, shortly before his death, he partitioned the Empire between his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius. Afterward, the empire would never be united under a single emperor again.

The Roman Empire had been a strong centralized power during its heydays, but it never was very interested in creating an ethnical and linguistic unity among its subjects. The Roman authorities understood that it was less expensive to tolerate diversity than to force uniformity -- a typical policy of most empires. So, the Empire remained split into two main linguistic halves: the Latin-speaking Pars Occidentis and the Greek-speaking Pars Orientis. Theoretically, Latin was the official language but, in practice, the Empire remained a bilingual entity and, during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the Roman elite would tend to speak Greek -- considered more refined and classy than Latin.

The split of the two sides of the Empire was not just linguistic, it was economic as well. The Pars Occidentis remained based on mineral wealth which, in turn, fueled the Empire's military power. The Pars Orientis was more based on commerce and manufacturing and it exploited its favorable geographical position as the terminal of the silk road that connected China to Europe. During the expansion period, the military strength of the West made it dominant but, with the exhaustion of the gold mines in Spain, it lost the resources needed to pay for its oversized military apparatus. In time, the Western Empire became unable to control even its own territory and it squandered its remaining resources in huge border walls. It collapsed and vanished during the late 5th century CE. The Eastern Empire lasted nearly one millennium longer but was never able to rebuild the power of the old Roman Empire.

Fast forward to our times, and it is clear that the American Empire is facing the same situation that the Romans were facing around the 2nd century AD. Like the old Western Empire, the American Empire's economy is mainly based on mineral resources: crude oil in particular. But, with the gradual exhaustion of these resources, the empire cannot afford to dominate the whole world anymore.

Emperor Trump seems to have an uncanny ability to understand the situation, even though he may not be an expert in Roman history. His actions are perfectly understandable in light of the plan of splitting the empire into two halves. One half (Pars Occidentis) will still be dominated from Washington, the other half (Pars Orientis) will have Beijing as its capital. The Western Part will retain the original Imperial language, English. The Eastern Part may switch to Chinese.

Consistently, Trump is planning to abandon Afghanistan and also Syria, both too far and too expensive to defend and he also was not interested in an all-out confrontation with North Korea. But he seems to consider South America as part of the Western dominion, so he is moving to take control of Venezuela. Trump is also acting to destroy the hegemony of the dollar as world currency. Apparently, the idea is that the Western Empire is safer from financial disasters if the dollar becomes the Western currency only. So, the economic sanctions enacted against Iran, Russia, and other countries are forcing the Eastern Empire to develop new currencies and financial systems independent of the dollar.

Clearly, Emperor Trump is facing strong resistance. Just as many Roman Emperors, he not completely in control of the Imperial military apparatus and a sizeable opposition is trying to maintain the American Empire alive in is most extended and expensive form: dominating the whole planet. But the direction is clear and the situation is simple: an Empire can only be as large as it can afford to be. The gradual depletion of the mineral resources and the increasing costs of pollution are making a global empire impossible.

The Globalized World Empire was a beautiful creature as long as it prospered, but it was burning the dynamite stick at both ends. The time of global dominance is gone and the Empire is now in a convulsive phase: retreat is the most dangerous military maneuver and it is best executed maintaining an aggressive posture. Which is exactly what Emperor Trump is doing with his threats of war. But it is also true that the game of chicken is the second most dangerous game known (the first is the Russian Roulette). So, the retreat of the Western Empire may not involve just a rapid Seneca Collapse, as it was the case for the old Roman Empire, but a final blast of fireworks in the form of a nuclear war which would end civilization as we know it. Not pretty, but that's the way things are.

There remains one point of contention: is Western Europe in the Orientis or in the Occidentis part of the Empire? Surely, Britain tends to remain part of the Western Empire because of its linguistic ties with the United States. But the non-English speaking parts of the former EU don't have this link and they have strong - practically unbreakable - ties with Russia as an energy supplier. So, they might become part of the Eastern Eurasian Empire.

It seems that Trump understands this point very well, too, and it is in these terms that you can interpret his lashing out at the NATO allies at last year's G7 meeting. Trump's message to the states once forming the European Union was simply, "Sorry, fellows, we can't afford to defend you anymore unless you pay us more money than you can afford to pay." In this sense, Western Europe could play the role of Britain and Dacia during the 3rd and 4th century CE, abandoned by the central Roman Government and left to fend off by themselves against the barbarian invaders. Who knows? History rhymes again and we might even have a new King Arthur.

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Was the fall of the Western Roman Empire a Seneca Collapse? Yes, by all means it was. Look at this:

From Taagepera, Size and Duration of Empires, 1978 -- the vertical scale is in million square miles

See also "Can Donald Trump be the last world emperor?"

And you may also be interested at how Theodosius's daughter, Galla Placidia, managed to keep the Western Empire together even without plundering temples. The story is here.  

Note also that I used the term "understanding" but that doesn't mean that Trump consciously understands the deep reasons of why he is doing what he is doing in the sense of moving intentionally to the splitting of the empire. He is simply reacting to the stimuli he perceives and he moves accordingly. (which is, BTW, what we all do!!)

How the World Elites are Going to Betray us: Lessons from Roman History

The more I study the story of the Roman Empire, the more I see the similarities with our world. Of course, history doesn't always repeat itself, but it is impressive to note how with the start of the collapse of the Western Empire, the Roman elites abandoned the people to build themselves strongholds in safe places. Something similar may be starting to occur in our times and our elites may decide to seek for safe havens while leaving us to drown, starve, or burn.

Rutilius Namatianus is known today for his "De Reditu Suo" (of his return). It is a long poem where he tells us of his travel along the Italian coast around 416 AD, during the last decades of the Western Roman Empire. We read in it a chilling report of the ongoing collapse: abandoned cities, wastelands, ruined roads, and more.

But who was Rutilius Namatianus, and what was he doing? A patrician, a powerful man, a rich man, and also a liar and a traitor. He was running away from Rome, probably taking with him gold, slaves, and troops with the idea of building himself a feud in Southern France, where he had some possessions. In doing so, he was abandoning the people of Rome to fend off for themselves. The people whom it was his duty to defend as praefectus urbi, the prefect of Rome, the delegate of the Emperor himself.

Namatianus was doing nothing worse than other rich and powerful Romans were. Emperor Honorius himself had run away from Rome, settling in Ravenna, protected by the marshes surrounding the city and with ships ready to take him to safety in Byzantium if things were to get really bad. When Rome was besieged and taken by the Visigoths, in 410 AD, Honorius did nothing, preferring to worry about his chicken (a legend, but with elements of truth).

If you read the chronicles of the early 5th century AD, you get the impression of total mayhem, with barbarian armies crisscrossing Europe and few, if any, Roman nobles and commanders trying to defend the Empire. Most of them seemed to be maneuvering to find places where they could find safety for themselves. We don't know what was the final destiny of Rutilius Namatianus but, since he had the time to finish his poem, we may imagine that he could build himself a stronghold in Southern France and his descendants may have become feudal lords. But not everyone made it. For instance, Paulinus of Pella, another rich Roman, contemporary of Namatianus, desperately tried to hold on his possessions in Europe, eventually considering himself happy just for having been able of surviving to old age.

We see a pattern here: when the rich Romans saw that things were going really out of control, they scrambled to save themselves while, at the same time, denying that things were so bad as they looked. We can see that clearly in Namatianus' poem: he never ever hints that Rome was doomed. At most, he says, it was a temporary setback and soon Rome will be great again.

Of course, history doesn't have to repeat itself, even though we know that it often rhymes. But the similarities of the last decades of the Western Roman Empire with our times are starting to be worrisome. Most of our elites aren't yet running away, but some of them seem to be thinking about that (see this article by Kurt Cobb). And some are starting to build sophisticated luxury bunkers where to take refuge.

What's most impressive is the change in attitude: as long as problems such as climate change were seen as needing just cosmetic changes, they were openly discussed and governments pledged to do something to solve them. Now that the problems start to be seen as impossible to deal with, they are ignored. The change is especially impressive for those regions where the climate threat is closer in time. The elites of the Maldives and the Kiribati islands (*) have reacted by denying the danger, while at the same time selling off what they have and getting ready to leave for higher grounds.

We have to be careful here: there is no conspiracy today (just as there wasn't in Roman times) of people getting together in a secret room to decide the fate of humankind. There is, rather, a convergence of interests. People who are sufficiently wealthy to buy themselves a survival bunker may decide to do so and, at that point, it is in their best interest to downplay the threats and to keep their escape strategy as secret as possible.

It is a very different attitude from that of middle-class people. We (I assume that most readers of this blog are middle-class people) don't have the kind of financial clout needed to plan for a future as feudal lords among the ruins of a collapsed civilization. That's why some of us keep catastrophistic blogs, "Cassandra's Legacy", for instance. Blogs can hardly save us from collapse but, at least, they are efficient means of communication and maybe that's what we need in order to plan for the future.

So, returning to Roman history, what happened to the Romans who couldn't run away and reach their castles? We know that not all of them survived, but some did. While the institutions and the state crumbled down, resilient communities started to appear, often in the form of monasteries or secular communities created around "overseers" (bishops).

Can we think of something like that for our future? Yes, it is an idea that's developing in several forms, transition towns, for instance. So far, it is just an embryonic idea, but it may grow into something important together with new ideas on how humans can relate to the ecosystem. The Romans, after all, developed a new religion to help them deal with the collapse of their society. And, as I said, history never exactly repeats itself, but it rhymes.



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Some more details about the experience of ancient Rome with collapse. First of all, what was the origin of the 5th-century collapse? We have to go back to "peak empire" when the Romans reached the limits to their expansion. It was in 9 AD when three Roman legions were massacred by the Germans in the woods of Teutoburg. Their commander, Publius Quinctilius Varus, committed suicide.

How could it be that the Romans, no fools in military matters, sent three of their legions blithely marching into a thick forest were a large number of German warriors were waiting to cut them to pieces? The only possible explanation is that Varus was betrayed: someone wanted to see his head rolling, and they did. It is remarkable how fast and effectively Octavianus, emperor at that time, exploited the defeat for his personal political gain. He spread the rumor that he was so saddened by the news that he would walk in his palace at night, muttering, perhaps hoping to be heard by the Gods, "Varus, Varus, give me back my legions!" If there ever was a viral meme, this was one, still with us more than 2,000 years afterward!

Maybe Octavianus had Varus stabbed in the back, or maybe he just exploited Varus' incompetency as military commander. In any case, the Teutoburg disaster had the same effect as our 9/11 attacks on Roman society. It scared the Romans deeply. That sealed the role of Emperors as protectors of the people. Eventually, politics is mostly a racket: people pay to be "protected." Against whom? Typically, if there is no ready-to-use enemy, one needs to be fabricated on purpose. For the ancient Romans, the Barbarian menace (we would call them today, 'immigrants') was a suitable excuse, although it was also much exaggerated. The problems of the Empire were mostly internal and would have required deep reforms. Instead, the Emperors - and the Romans themselves - refused to admit that and they concentrated on military measures only. It was good business to keep troops and build defensive walls. Again, the similarities with our times are evident.

Things moved slowly in Roman times, so the strategy of concentrating all efforts on the military system seemed to pay, at least for a couple of centuries. If you read the memories of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, you get the impression of a person who genuinely believed that his duty was to defend the Empire. He couldn't understand that the excessive military expenses were ruining the Empire; most empires in history have destroyed themselves exactly in this way. Similarities with our times? Oh. . .

Things started going bad after Marcus Aurelius and the Empire all but collapsed during the 3rd century AD. It managed to get together again in a form that reminded more of a zombie than of the glorious empire of the early times. But the puls (**) really hit the fan with the end of the 4th century, when the Roman Elites started running for their lives. Many of them succeeded, while the poor were left in the puls - or not even that. Between 400 and 800 AD, the population of Rome fell by over 90%, mainly because of famine and the associated plagues.

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(*) The fact that coral islands are "alive" gives them a certain capability of coping with the sea level rise caused by global warming. But there are limits to how fast the coral can grow and to the level the islands can cope with.


(**) If you are curious about what may be hitting the fan, you can see here a bowl of puls, a typical Roman food. It was a soup made with farro grains.