“I didn’t expect civilization to collapse quite so quickly.”
– popular Facebook meme
Quite frankly, neither did I. History tells us no one ever does: Empires and civilizations just kind of bumble along as they slowly degrade into depravity, lawlessness, authoritarianism, vice and barbarity.
Eventually, Vandals breach the castle walls and we’re all eating gruel for 1,000 years before we start putting things back together again, if that happens.
Most of us are aware of the European “Dark Ages,” though modern historians no longer use the term.
We forget that mighty Greece, from whom we patterned our language, architecture and government, itself suffered a “Dark Age” between between 1,200 and 800 B.C., 400 years of “system collapse with no identifiable central administration, population decline, and impoverishment of material culture,” according to World History Encyclopedia.
The Greeks became illiterate, poor and hungry. When they crawled out of their misery, they were awed by the structures their ancestors built 400 years before them.
The world is rife with the remains of civilizations that advanced then receded for reasons unknown, taking with them histories, languages, cultures and technologies, some lost forever.
Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th century amateur archaeologist who uncovered the legendary city of Troy in modern-day Turkey, dug through nine “Troys” trying to find the one that matched the Greek legend of the Trojan War, digging right through the one he was looking for.
That is, Troy rose and fell nine times before it was finally buried in the sands sometime after 400 A.D.
The Greeks and the Romans used concrete to create their impressive structures. It’s the reason so many of their buildings survived the ages. But use or knowledge of concrete – a superior technology for construction – was lost or forgotten for more than 1,000 years, until the 1700s.
Could the same thing happen to us? Could war or a new virus turn back the clocks, sending us back into caves for 500 years? Because we have a limited knowledge of history, we falsely assume that our progress is a continuum, that iPhone 15 will lead to iPhone 20, but history says otherwise.
The palaces of ancient Crete featured flush toilets but 1,000 years or more later, pits were the best plumbing offered by medieval castles.
We are led by technology and vanity to believe we are smarter than generations that came before us. We mistake gadgetry for progress.
But gadgetry and civil society are not equivalent values. If you have the iPhone 20 and your nation descends into savagery, all you have is barbarity and a really cool phone. After a few hundred years of regression, no one in your tribe might have any idea how a cell phone was invented at all.