Sometime in the early 1990s, A UK police researcher finally took seriously something that was so commonplace that it had previously been ignored. This was the widespread “excuse” that drivers were making when stopped for speeding… “I didn’t realise I was going so fast.” In law, not so much an excuse as an admission of driving without due care and attention. For most people involved in policing, from the Home Secretary down to the lowliest constable, the excuse was met with Mandy Rice-Davies’ infamous courtroom retort, “they would say that, wouldn’t they.”
To that one researcher though, the growth in the use of that excuse pointed to something real. Why were more and more motorists not realising that they were breaking the speed limit? The answer(s) pointed to a small revolution in UK driving. Improved road surfacing techniques (in an era when the UK could still afford them) made major roads much smoother and much quieter. At the same time, new car suspension systems, such as those in the Ford Mondeo which came out in 1992, along with better streamlining had made cars themselves quieter and smoother. The result, for a generation of drivers who had grown up with Morris Minors, Triumph Heralds, Ford Anglias, and Hilman Imps, was a sudden loss of the sensory clues which used to indicate an increase in speed… speeding drivers were telling police officers that they didn’t know they were speeding because they really didn’t know they were speeding.
I relate this story to illustrate that just because something sounds implausible, there may still be something real behind it. Which is why I want to examine a crop of improbable junk sci-fi stories being repeated on the YouTube platform just now. These revolve around the claim that the world came to an end sometime in the early 2000s, but we somehow failed to notice. The reasons given for this are borderline insane – the world was destroyed by a comet in 1999, and we are just living through the “world flashing before our eyes” moment that is believed to occur at the moment of death; or, perhaps, the Mayans were right, the world came to an end in 2012 as a result of the particle collision which revealed the Higgs-Boson “God particle;” or, maybe the AI which has been running the Matrix all of this time began glitching.
Whatever. I want to suggest that, just like that 1990s police researcher, it is the evidence offered for these whacky tales which tells us that there is something real behind them. That evidence falls within a broad complaint commonly expressed by right-leaning political commentators, that “nothing ever happens.” Politically, the same uniparty which took over in the early-1980s, is still governing us. Economically, the same grindingly slow process of decline which began back then is still lowering our standard of living. Despite the vast energy devoted to protest movements around everything from reversing climate change to saving the local library, the system continues unphased. But it is within the mainstream culture that we find the greatest evidence for a world that came to an end in the early-2000s. Consider the many hundreds of remakes of movies from earlier eras, which suggest that we lost the ability to create new stories. Consider the fashions of previous decades, which allow us to easily distinguish the ‘50s from the ‘60s and the ‘70s from the ‘80s. But the Britpop 1990s are the final moment when we can do this. Since then, each decade has merged seamlessly with the next, with no discernible difference. Then consider (the collapse of) music, with each hit record of the current century using the same four chords and sounding more or less the same.
But it isn’t just the culture. The amount of scientific research continues to mushroom, but the amount of truly disruptive research has collapsed. The result being that almost nobody is seeking solutions to the multitudes of crises beginning to wash over us even as the grant-making bodies spend billions repeating research that has already been done.
Big Tech seems to have spent the past quarter century engaging in a process of enshitification – turning perfectly good and useful applications into ever more useless and annoying ones in the sole purpose of “growth.” Facebook, for example, used to be a place where you could catch up with what your friends and relatives were up to, while joining up with people who shared your interests. Today, in pursuit of growing “attention,” it has turned into a cesspool of slop and clickbait advertising interspersed with just enough content from your friends to keep you coming back for more.
The crisis of economics, politics and governance would seem to underlie this ossification. Economists, trained in the primitive observations of the enlightenment era, offer models so detached from reality that they make casting runes look scientific. Politics, drawing on these erroneous models, has become formulaic, as the neoliberal professional gobshites who populate parliaments these days spout words that barely anyone expects to ever be put into action. Meanwhile governance, as practiced by entrenched managerialists follows a kind of reverse Midas approach in which everything they touch turns to shit.
Okay, the world almost certainly didn’t end in 1999 or 2012 – although a growing number might wish it had done – but this observation of the way everything seems to have stagnated since then does seem to have some grounding in reality. In the UK, the inability to change anything (save for the worse) has led to growing support for some form of military coup to usher in the kind of “strongman” leadership that might just break the impasse, while in the USA, many seem to fear (or hope) that Donald Trump is precisely that type of strongman.
This development requires that we dig deeper still and examine the widely-held view that civilisations – like people – go through a cycle of birth, development, maturity, decline, and death… with very few enjoying a rebirth. This, of course, is a very different view to the religion of progress that has dominated throughout the modern era, in which, and despite periodic setbacks, our civilisational progress is ever onward and upward. Nevertheless, we can count on one hand the number of civilisations which have enjoyed a rebirth after their decline. Byzantian Rome provides one example. The various Chinese empires another. Less dramatically, the recovery of the British Empire following the loss of America, and the Soviet bloc that arose from the ashes of the Russian Empire might also count. But for the most part, even the greatest civilisations seem destined to collapse into ruin eventually.
The Greek historian Polybius was one of the first to document the cycle of civilisational birth and death via a process he termed “anacyclosis.” Nor was this a purely academic exercise. Born in 198BC, Polybius had witnessed first hand the triumph of a powerful Roman Republic over the city states of ancient Greece… Polybius himself taken to Rome as a hostage (although enjoying considerable freedom to observe the mechanics of the Roman system and even to accompany armies on their campaigns). This allowed Polybius to claim that the Romans had discovered the secret sauce which prevented their decline and fall (although if he had lived a few decades longer he would have witnessed the corruption and conflict which caused the Romans to morph from a republic to an empire).
Polybius’s cycle comes in seven stages. First, is a kind of distressed primitive anarchy in which nobody is in charge. But sooner or later, in stage two, a warlord emerges to impose order, ushering in a monarchy. Monarchy – particularly where it is heredity – gradually descends into stage three, tyranny, until such times as even the elites become fed up, and usher in stage four – aristocracy. Aristocrats though, tend to become self-interested over time, leading to stage five – oligarchy. Eventually, oligarchy is overthrown by a popular uprising which ushers in stage six – democracy. But democracy is susceptible to corruption and grift, with representatives making false promises while imposing increased taxes at every opportunity. Until ultimately – stage seven – the civilisation descends into chaos and a dark age ensues.
The Roman Republic appeared to have overcome this cycle by balancing the three positives – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy in a way which prevented any one of the three negatives – tyranny, oligarchy, and anarchy – from breaking out. And it is worth noting that both the British and the American empires in the modern era adopted similar checks and balances – Britain having an actual king (monarchy) a house of Lords (aristocracy) and a house of commons (democracy). America a pseudo, presidential king (monarchy) a judiciary (aristocracy) and a congress (democracy). But note also that over time both systems have been pushed remorselessly in the direction of democracy even as democracy has become ever more venal.
Missing from Polybius’s thinking is an explanation of why the Roman Republic should have risen to greatness in the first place. My regular readers will likely guess my own explanation… energy. Broadly, civilisations and empires rise and fall according to the surplus energy available to them and to their technical ability to exploit it. In pre-industrial – renewable energy – civilisations, this was intimately tied up with climate change. And corresponding to the apex of Rome was the early-Roman warm period which resulted in a benign climate across the northern Mediterranean. This spurred improved agricultural yields and tree growth – the two main energy sources of the pre-industrial world. It may well be that the Roman Republic’s system of government aided its optimisation of these energy sources, building a strong economy at home and allowing conquest abroad.