What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values belief in the strength of its system of law and order belief in its currency above all, perhaps, belief in its future. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.īertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them.
‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence.
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.
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