"The thing about collapse is that it serves a cathartic, therapeutic purpose." Yes. Doomer fantasies serve this purpose and conveniently also make it seem irrelevant or even unwise to take care of one's own house... On the other end of the political spectrum, the left-wing neologism "late-stage capitalism" gets stuck in my tooth for similar reasons. 'Late-stage' always seemed to me to sound awfully optimistic.
Max, ever look into Ben Davidson? I'd recommend the Dark Horse podcast with him... A wide scale power outage from solar flares might actually cause a collapse.
I think it's a bit too glib for Van Buskirk to say that the Black Death didn't collapse civilization. It may be literally true, but Europe after the Black Death was culturally set on a different trajectory. I say that because when I was researching "The Benedict Option," a historian cautioned me not to be overly intellectual in considering the collapse of medieval Scholasticism in the face of Nominalism, a shift that opened the door to the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Reformation. He said that the Black Death and the disastrous wars of the 14c likely made the highly complex constructs of Scholasticism seem like too much, too hard to grasp or maintain in the face of such mass suffering.
Closer to our time, I'm researching the Weimar Republic now, and boy, is it ever true that Europe was a different place in 1918 than in 1914. I know that's commonly accepted, but when you get into the historical weeds, you see how profound the trauma of the war was to European civilization. Yes, you could have spent the years 1914-18 drinking coffee every morning in Paris at the same cafe, and could have continued on throughout the Twenties. European civilization didn't die. But the Great War poisoned it so severely that it might never recover.
Rod's correct here. The loss of 30-40% of Europe's population reshaped European society deeply over the following century.
For nobles: The decimation of many families enabled a land consolidation the likes of which can only be compared to the aftermath of 1066. It shifted English agricultural production from labor intensive row crops toward pastoral uses (livestock).
For peasants, A huge labor shortage made them mobile. Lords started competing for laborers, even offering them pat them. This eventually leads to the end of serfdom and the creation of a new class: free-commoners (loosely akin to what we call "middle-class" today) who become the seed of the English merchant class.
It's possible to argue the Black Death didn't cause this, , but it did accelerate it enormously.
It also reshaped gender relations in a similar way as WWII. Peasant women engaged in paid labor. Noble women began directly managing the estates of their dead husbands. (The Church walked a lot of this back in later decades.)
I think Van Buskirk's timeline is just too short. He's focused on social structures during the Black Death instead of afterward. It's afterward that the social and economic changes occur.
There's no denying that the Black Death led to tremendous changes in society. That's an indisputable fact. Van Buskirk's point, as well as mine, is that it didn't lead to some sort of wholesale regime change. It absolutely didn't lead to anarchy, either. Anarchy tends to be more likely in a situation where there's too many people (like America today) fighting over limited resources than in a situation where too many people are dying.
I'm a big fan of the video game franchise "Deus Ex." The entire franchise, which consists of four main installments, is about a dystopia which becomes more dystopic. The games depict cataclysmic events, but what I like about it is how they drive home the point that even in chaos, someone always is in charge, and even following collapses, someone will always fill that power vacuum, and it's often the same people who had power before.
For sure these events changed the course of history. Van Buskirk's point is that we don't go from order to Mad Max just because millions die. Even in Weimar Germany, things didn't unravel completely in the wake of World War I, hyperinflation, or the Great Depression. If anything, the state became supremely powerful in the end, and the demand for order never became greater.
In the West, the problem is that the demand for disorder is far higher. It makes you think how bad the crisis would need to be for people to demand order once again.
It seems that there is an argument to be made dystopia is the more likely resting spot for a failing civilization than outright collapse. Rome became a dystopian state that was so bleak that packing up and heading for barbarian lands seemed to be a better alternative. IIRC, the Aztec state was also a failed civilization that had become a bloody and demonic dystopia as well.
"The thing about collapse is that it serves a cathartic, therapeutic purpose." Yes. Doomer fantasies serve this purpose and conveniently also make it seem irrelevant or even unwise to take care of one's own house... On the other end of the political spectrum, the left-wing neologism "late-stage capitalism" gets stuck in my tooth for similar reasons. 'Late-stage' always seemed to me to sound awfully optimistic.
Max, ever look into Ben Davidson? I'd recommend the Dark Horse podcast with him... A wide scale power outage from solar flares might actually cause a collapse.
I think it's a bit too glib for Van Buskirk to say that the Black Death didn't collapse civilization. It may be literally true, but Europe after the Black Death was culturally set on a different trajectory. I say that because when I was researching "The Benedict Option," a historian cautioned me not to be overly intellectual in considering the collapse of medieval Scholasticism in the face of Nominalism, a shift that opened the door to the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Reformation. He said that the Black Death and the disastrous wars of the 14c likely made the highly complex constructs of Scholasticism seem like too much, too hard to grasp or maintain in the face of such mass suffering.
Closer to our time, I'm researching the Weimar Republic now, and boy, is it ever true that Europe was a different place in 1918 than in 1914. I know that's commonly accepted, but when you get into the historical weeds, you see how profound the trauma of the war was to European civilization. Yes, you could have spent the years 1914-18 drinking coffee every morning in Paris at the same cafe, and could have continued on throughout the Twenties. European civilization didn't die. But the Great War poisoned it so severely that it might never recover.
Rod's correct here. The loss of 30-40% of Europe's population reshaped European society deeply over the following century.
For nobles: The decimation of many families enabled a land consolidation the likes of which can only be compared to the aftermath of 1066. It shifted English agricultural production from labor intensive row crops toward pastoral uses (livestock).
For peasants, A huge labor shortage made them mobile. Lords started competing for laborers, even offering them pat them. This eventually leads to the end of serfdom and the creation of a new class: free-commoners (loosely akin to what we call "middle-class" today) who become the seed of the English merchant class.
It's possible to argue the Black Death didn't cause this, , but it did accelerate it enormously.
It also reshaped gender relations in a similar way as WWII. Peasant women engaged in paid labor. Noble women began directly managing the estates of their dead husbands. (The Church walked a lot of this back in later decades.)
I think Van Buskirk's timeline is just too short. He's focused on social structures during the Black Death instead of afterward. It's afterward that the social and economic changes occur.
Fine, take Rod's side! I don't care! LOL
There's no denying that the Black Death led to tremendous changes in society. That's an indisputable fact. Van Buskirk's point, as well as mine, is that it didn't lead to some sort of wholesale regime change. It absolutely didn't lead to anarchy, either. Anarchy tends to be more likely in a situation where there's too many people (like America today) fighting over limited resources than in a situation where too many people are dying.
I'm a big fan of the video game franchise "Deus Ex." The entire franchise, which consists of four main installments, is about a dystopia which becomes more dystopic. The games depict cataclysmic events, but what I like about it is how they drive home the point that even in chaos, someone always is in charge, and even following collapses, someone will always fill that power vacuum, and it's often the same people who had power before.
For sure these events changed the course of history. Van Buskirk's point is that we don't go from order to Mad Max just because millions die. Even in Weimar Germany, things didn't unravel completely in the wake of World War I, hyperinflation, or the Great Depression. If anything, the state became supremely powerful in the end, and the demand for order never became greater.
In the West, the problem is that the demand for disorder is far higher. It makes you think how bad the crisis would need to be for people to demand order once again.
It seems that there is an argument to be made dystopia is the more likely resting spot for a failing civilization than outright collapse. Rome became a dystopian state that was so bleak that packing up and heading for barbarian lands seemed to be a better alternative. IIRC, the Aztec state was also a failed civilization that had become a bloody and demonic dystopia as well.