Getting out
Rory Carroll is wearing the robes this week, exhorting us to look to the Mayans for an awful reminder that nothing lasts for ever and that we ignore the signs of imminent doom at our peril: much of the article is a recapitulation of Jared Diamond’s argument in Collapse:
According to Diamond’s thesis…the ancients built a very clever and advanced society but were undone by their own success. Populations grew and stretched natural resources to breaking point. Political elites failed to resolve the escalating economic problems and the system collapsed. There was no need for an external cataclysm or a plague. What did for the Maya was a slow-boiling environmental-driven crisis that its leaders failed to recognise and resolve until too late.
So the civilisation was doomed, as is ours, implies Carroll. But the world was the same size then as it is now, that is, large enough that more than one empire might be in decline or in the ascendant at any one moment. What else was going on? Where might a Mayan with the means to travel and the will to succeed have looked to settle in AD 900?
Immediately, a short trip into the centre of Mexico would bring them to the Toltecs, then a couple of hundred years into their empire and good for a couple more. A trip across the Atlantic to West Africa would reach the nascent Wagadou Empire, growing rich from the new trade routes opened up by the introduction of the camel. Travel towards the Mediterranean and the Abbasids would tempt you with the flowering of the golden age of Islamic culture. Head straight on for Europe and a quiet place to wait for Otto the Great and the Holy Roman Empire: turn right for Byzantium and the revival of fortune experienced under the Macedonian dynasty. Straight on for the Chola temples and culture of south-east India and the South China sea: carry on to the mainland for another chance to watch an empire collapse surrounded by the glories of the Tang Dynasty.
This would, of course, be a difficult trip to make starting from the jungles of the Maya, and it’s safe to say it would be hard to integrate in most of these cultures starting from there. The point is that the collapse of the Mayan civilisation didn’t take place in isolation, and that at that time the end of one way of ordering society took place at the same time as another way comes into being. The end of a civilisation wasn’t the end of Civilisation.
The question for us is to what extent globalisation has linked societies sufficiently that the diversity of ways of living that existed in AD 900 no longer exists. Is the end of civilisation really the end of everything now, connected as we are by trade and markets and advertising and mass culture? Or are there alternatives out there, ways of living that will be as untroubled by the demise of “western culture” as the Vikings were when the Mayans faded from the Mexican political scene? And if there are, how do we join them?
