Ben Ehrenreich: How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart? Meet the scholars who study civilizational collapse
When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building. The president of the United States had appeared to suggest treating the coronavirus with disinfectant injections. Utah, where Tainter lives - he teaches at Utah State - was reopening its gyms, restaurants and hair salons that very day.
The chaos was considerable, but Tainter seemed calm. He
walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex
Societies,” which has for years been the seminal text in the study of
societal collapse, an academic subdiscipline that arguably was born with its
publication in 1988. “Civilizations are fragile, impermanent things,” Tainter
writes. Nearly every one that has ever existed has also ceased to exist, yet
“understanding disintegration has remained a distinctly minor concern in the
social sciences.” It is only a mild overstatement to suggest that before
Tainter, collapse was simply not a thing.
If Joseph Tainter, now 70, is the sober patriarch of the field, it is not a role he seems to relish. His own research has moved on; these days, he focuses on “sustainability.” But even in his most recent work his earlier subject is always there, hovering like a ghost just off the edge of each page. Why, after all, would we worry about sustaining a civilization if we weren’t convinced that it might crumble?...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html
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