History Is A Continuation of Itself

History Does Not Repeat Past Mistakes, It Simply Continues the Same Mistakes

There is a somewhat recent book by Eric Cline entitled 1177 b.c. the year civilization collapsed.  Okay let’s not quibble about the date because since writing the book, Cline himself has revised his own date. There are lots of books on this subject, but this is recent, well-researched, and strives at understanding what happened in roughly 1200 B.C.E.  So let’s bookmark it.

In 1988 Joseph Tainter published The collapse of complex societies.  He was certainly not the first to suggest any of the ideas he presented, but it was well-researched and developed a continuous pattern of the collapse of complex empires, and of course has resulted in dozens or more copycats, including much of what I myself write.  So let’s place another bookmark on Tainter’s work.

Cline writes about a complex global marketplace and exchange established by the kings of the day that exchanged goods commercially from Afghanistan to the eastern Mediterranean.  I believe Cline neglects the rest of the Mediterranean in favor of the larger Egyptian-Cush empires on the south shores and the islands of Mycenae and the Pelopesian peninsula, as well as both to the south and north of the Kush areas in the east.  I think there were more peoples involved in this global interchange.  But overall Cline describes this thriving mercantile globalistic control of resources by a few quite well.  Now around 1177 B.C.E. it all collapsed.  Quite probably from drought, that new research has uncovered was probably caused by an environmental ravishment that transformed much of the fertility of the soil into a dusty surface much less useful for sustaining the survival needs.  This caused marauders from some of the “lesser developed” nations migrating into the region because their resources had been used to sustain the mercantile globalistic union of the few, and this in turn caused uprisings in the region both against the immigrants by the people who lived there and the kingdoms who lost control of their mercantile dominance both to the immigrants and to their own coerced labor forces that descended back into smaller tribal units nd the great globalistic civilization evaporated into what some call a “dark age”  similar to what would occur after the collapse of Rome or the end of the European empires.

So if we place Tainter’s work into the mix, we see this event as not only a singular event, but the constant refrain of an unrestrained strive for more control over resources and labor.  The system becomes unsustainable as its inefficient abuse of people and the consolidation of resources into fewer and fewer hands inefficiently destroys its own power.  Attila, and the other Germanic invaders might have been especially brutal, but they were brutal from denial.  The children had been stolen to work in the mines, their own resources had been diverted and quite frankly they were on the literal verge of starvation.  

So read the books if you have not, read the others who have also explored the subject and understand that we do not learn from history, we continue history.  The history of man, the civilization of man, is an evolutionary footnote no longer than the lifespan of a fruitfly.  The history of what man proclaims his civilized greatness is, and has been, unsustainable and will not be, if we survive it, be considered by the future as anything  but one ten millennial mistake of nature, the fluke that might evolve, but does not successfully evolve into a long-lasting species.  

But that in no way means the evolution of hominids was a mistake.  Hominids are one of the most successful species, one of the most viable species for survival in multiple eras of environment, and could possibly be as long-lasting upon the earth as the shark has been.  It is not the species, itself, but the gaining control of the species by the most undesirable portions of that species, the part of humanity, given say, survival of the fittest, that were incapable of surviving within the species, the mutant that shouldn’t have survived were it true.  They gained control and have been attempting to create the species in their image.

That is not sustainable.