The real Indiana Jones: The end is near

The future is so bright that we have to wear shades. Speculations about the future.
Post Reply
User avatar
Doc
Posts: 12561
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2012 6:10 pm

The real Indiana Jones: The end is near

Post by Doc »

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sens ... on-bubble/
The Indiana Jones of collapsed cultures: Our Western civilization itself is a bubble
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, there has been much debate among economists and policy makers on how best to prevent systemic collapses. Yet there is little data to go on: these are unprecedented times of sustained unemployment, fiscal stimulus, and price-earnings ratios. Perhaps, as Alan Greenspan recently suggested, we need to look to anthropology to see the really long-term trends.

With this in mind, I interviewed one of the world’s leading archaeologists, Arthur Demarest, who studies the collapse of ancient civilizations, from Greece and Rome to the Maya and Aztecs. Demarest, the Ingram Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, has been called the “real Indiana Jones” (see, for example, “The Real Indiana Jones and His Pyramids of Doom and “A 1,200-Year Old Murder Mystery in Guatemala”) for his daring explorations and spectacular finds in the Maya jungles. But from his tent in the Guatemalan rainforest, Demarest grapples with the big question of what causes collapses.
Arthur Demarest: On the future of the U.S., or of Western civilization in general, I tend to be quite pessimistic. Perhaps that is simply because “collapse” is what I do. As an archaeologist, I have excavated single trenches, just a few meters deep, in which you can see stratigraphic levels of several civilizations. We find layers of artifacts and evidence indicating periods of great prosperity, but always separated by levels of burned earth, ash and artifacts that reflect the epochs of social disintegration, chaos and tragedy that seem to conclude the achievements and aspirations of every society.

With that caveat about my gloomy perspective, I would say that today I see most of the symptoms of societies on the brink of collapse, not just in the U.S., but in the tightly interconnected societies of Western civilization – now essentially world civilization.

Ted Fischer: You have observed that in a crisis, leaders “do what they always do, just more of it.” Could you explain?

Arthur Demarest: When there is pressure for leaders to respond to problems or crises, they often simply intensify their efforts in their particular defined sphere of activity – even if that’s not relevant to the real problem. To do otherwise requires taking on entrenched practices and asserting power in areas where it often will not be well received. And leaders tend to see major crises more as threats to their own position rather than as systemic challenges for the societies that they govern or the institutions that they manage.

Frenzied grand constructions, wars and great rituals are among the common responses of ancient leaders to crises. These demonstrate powerful responses by the leaders (enhancing their threatened hold on power), but almost never really address the problems themselves. A cynic might characterize the giant U.S. stimulus bill of 2009 as such an effort.

“The possible signs of a coming collapse are the same as the greatest strengths of Western civilization.”

Leaders may recognize that they are not addressing the real problems, but they rationalize their actions with the argument that they must first politically survive in order to later address the hard problems and sacrifices. Of course, they usually don’t ever actually get around to addressing the fundamental problems later, either because they don’t make it through the initial crisis or because, even later, they are not willing to risk sacrificing their own position (or “career”) with needed measures that usually require tough sacrifices by the population.
"I fancied myself as some kind of god....It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” -- George Soros
noddy
Posts: 11318
Joined: Tue Dec 13, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: The real indiana Jones:The end is near

Post by noddy »

hah, cheery chap.

the problem of course being that from our perspective it can be difficult to see the difference between the final collapse and just another downturn and those can be many hundreds or even thousands of years apart.
ultracrepidarian
Post Reply