Dirty Hands and the Collapse of Societies (Well, Part of It)

[Okay, this is a bit long and erudite, but I believe you'll find plenty of interest here. More posts in the future, no doubt, about the Partridge Family, gross TV commercials, and other topics that fit more properly within the confines of the typical blog.]

Right now I'm re-reading a fascinating book by Paul Johnson, Enemies of Society, which unfortunately is out of print. I've never much liked the title, which is a little sensationalistic and also deceptive, because the book is really not about a conspiracy against civilization (as its title suggests), but rather about the reasons why societies fail. This is also the subject of the much more recent Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, who ranks among our greatest living thinkers on issues of knowledge, technology, society and progress or regress.

In discussing how societies fail, inevitably scholars look to Rome, whose downfall has been the subject of thousands of works. Among these was Augustine's City of God, written in the aftermath of the Visigoths' sack of Rome in 410. (This event, a three-day rampage that left the city devastated, is what many historians cite as the true "fall of Rome"; by contrast, the actual collapse of the western empire sixty-six years later was a relative non-event.) At the time, many Romans blamed the tragic events of August 410 on the fact that they had foresaken the pagan gods of their forebears, whereas Augustine maintained that the opposite was true: they were being punished because they had been slow to fully embrace the Christian god.

More than a thousand years after Augustine, Edward Gibbon took exactly the opposite approach in his epochal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, blaming Christianity for Rome's collapse. Despite Gibbons' achievements as a historian, his thesis regarding Christianity does not hold up to scrutiny; if anything, Christianity helped reinvigorate what had long since become a dying society.

Since Gibbon, scholars have put forward a number of explanations for Rome's collapse, almost all of them plausible as contributing factors. For example, the Romans' choice of material... [for why this post runs out, please see above.]