What Collapse Looks Like From the Inside

Why civilisations rarely know they are falling until it is too late

Here is a question worth thinking about: if you were living through the collapse of a civilisation, would you know?

Not in retrospect. Not with the benefit of hindsight and a shelf of history books. In the middle of it — in the ordinary Tuesday of it, with the children still at school and the familiar hum of the world doing what the world does. Would you know?

The honest answer, drawn from every collapse we have studied in sufficient detail, is almost certainly not. There are always those who shout loudly that civilisation is about to end: there has been a longing for the apocalypse in every society in history. Just look at the scriptures of every major world religion. Today we see the doomsayers parodied with sandwich boards in our films and TV shows. These people are always there, even when the going is good. And they’re usually in a minority.

But ordinary people living through the end of Rome, the end of the Bronze Age world, the end of Mycenaean Greece, did not experience themselves as people living through the end of anything. They experienced themselves as people living through a difficult period. A prolonged difficult period, yes. An unsettling one. But difficulty is not the same as terminus, and the human capacity for assuming that things will eventually return to normal is, it turns out, one of our most durable and most dangerous traits.

This is what collapse looks like from the inside. It looks like now, only worse. And then worse again.

The Bronze Age did not end on a Tuesday

Around 1200 BCE, the eastern Mediterranean world fell apart. Not quickly. Not in one dramatic convulsion. The Late Bronze Age — a network of interconnected palace economies stretching from Greece to Egypt, from Anatolia to the Levant, linked by trade routes and diplomatic correspondence and the movement of raw materials across considerable distances — came undone over the course of several decades. Scholars still argue about the causes: climate disruption, drought, internal rebellion, the disruptions associated with the mysterious “Sea Peoples,” a cascade failure of the sort that happens when every system in an interconnected network is stressed simultaneously.

What we know is this: the great cities were abandoned or destroyed. Writing disappeared. Long-distance trade collapsed. Population declined sharply. And then, for several centuries, the archaeological record goes quiet. Greece entered what is now called a Dark Age. When writing reappeared, it was in a completely different script. The people who came after had no memory of what had been.

But here is the part that stays with me. The last Linear B tablets (the administrative records of the Mycenaean palaces) show no sign of awareness that anything was ending. They are concerned with exactly the kinds of things bureaucracies are always concerned with: the distribution of grain, the allocation of bronze, the movement of workers. Someone, in one of the last seasons before everything went dark, was dutifully recording how many jars of olive oil had been dispatched to which destinations. The administration continued until it didn’t.

The long dying of Rome

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is perhaps the most discussed collapse in history, and the one most frequently invoked whenever anyone wants to draw a pointed analogy about the present. Edward Gibbon spent six volumes on it. Historians have spent the two and a half centuries since Gibbon arguing about what he got wrong and what he missed.

What rarely gets said, though, is how gradual it felt to the people who lived through it. Rome did not fall on a single day, despite what textbooks imply by pointing to 476 CE — the year the last Western emperor was deposed — as the decisive moment. By 476, the Western Empire had been a fiction maintained by convention for a long time. Real power had long since migrated to military commanders of various backgrounds. The city of Rome itself had been sacked twice already. The grain shipments from North Africa had become unreliable. The administrative machinery creaked.

And yet people continued to describe themselves as Romans. They continued to use Roman law, Roman titles, Roman administrative forms. An aristocrat writing in the late fifth century, a man named Sidonius Apollinaris, produced elegant Latin letters to his friends discussing the deterioration of his world with a mixture of melancholy and bewilderment. He knew things were wrong. He did not seem to know, at the level of felt experience, that a world was ending. He was still hoping, in some underlying way, that it would sort itself out. That the familiar scaffolding would hold.

It didn’t.

What the survivors do

There is a particular pattern in what comes after. When the collapse has finished and the survivors find themselves living among ruins they cannot explain and cannot replicate, something interesting happens to the way they think about the people who built those ruins.

They become sacred.

This is not a universal law, but it is something close to a tendency. The Mycenaeans left behind enormous stone structures, the citadels of Mycenae and Tiryns, with their massive walls of fitted stone, that later Greeks found inexplicable by any ordinary human means. They called them Cyclopean walls, because only the Cyclops, the giants of mythology, could have moved stones that large. The gap between what the Late Bronze Age world had been able to achieve and what the Dark Age world could achieve was so vast that the explanation had to be supernatural.

Much the same thing happened, in different forms, across the post-Roman world. The ruins of Roman infrastructure — the roads, the aqueducts, the great public buildings — persisted long after anyone could have built them. And they persisted in the imagination too, as evidence of a vanished greatness that the present could not hope to match. The medieval world was haunted by Rome in ways both practical and psychological. Half the political theory of the Middle Ages was essentially an argument about who was Rome’s legitimate heir.

This is, when you look at it squarely, one of the stranger consequences of collapse: the people who lived before it are remembered not as ordinary people making ordinary mistakes under pressure, but as something grander. As ancestors, at best. As something approaching gods, at worst. The collapse erases the knowledge of how things were actually built and replaces it with an assumption of superhuman capability. Because if ordinary people could have done it, why can’t we?

The things that persist

Not everything is lost, even when almost everything is lost. This is, in its way, a hopeful observation; though one worth holding carefully, because what persists is rarely what anyone would have chosen to save.

Languages persist, in changed forms. Place names survive, even when their meanings are forgotten. The names we use for places in Britain are frequently older than English, older than Latin, layers of successive settlement compressed into a word that has been in continuous use for thousands of years without most people who use it knowing why. Customs persist, detached from the contexts that gave them meaning. Folk practices, calendar observances, ways of marking time and season, that survive in the habits of communities long after the theology or the economy or the social structure that originally produced them has gone.

And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — objects persist. Sealed in the right conditions. Buried deliberately. Left in places that remained dry and stable when everything around them changed. Things that were placed with care by people who understood that they were living through something significant, who chose particular objects and asked their descendants to keep them, without being able to explain precisely why.

Keep it, they said. Don’t lose it. One day someone will know what it says.

Why this matters now

Every generation that has ever lived has believed, at some level, that it was living in unusual times. Most of them were right, in the narrow sense that all times are unusual when you are in the middle of them. The experience of difficulty is not evidence of ending.

But the historical record is clear on one thing: the collapses that happened did not announce themselves. They arrived in the form of cascading pressures that individually seemed manageable, the disruption to one system here, a failure of another there, until the connections between them failed and the whole weight came down. The people living through it continued to describe themselves in the terms the old world had given them, continued to reach for the normal, continued to hope. They were not foolish for doing this. It is what human beings do. It is, probably, what we would all do.

The question collapse asks (and never quite answers) is whether it is possible to see it clearly while you are inside it. Whether the cognitive equipment we have, shaped as it is by a built-in preference for continuity, can register an ending as an ending rather than as a setback.

I don’t think we know the answer to that. I’m not sure we have ever managed it. But I find I want to keep asking.