Barbaric triumph?

I got home Tuesday night and found my wife and daughter transfixed by the show Earth 2100.

The theme of the speculative documentary is that a “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion, climate change and the attendant conflicts spell big trouble for civilization — up to and including collapse.

The animated doomsday scenario was riveting, intercut with interviews with a range of scientists, arachaeologists and historians.

Of course, as a history nut, I was gratified to see that the notion of civilizational collapse was treated in historical context. It’s happened before. The Maya. Rome. The Byzantine Empire; Easter Island. The key here is that, with a “global” civilization, where do we go when the walls come tumbling down?

Through it all, I could hear an echo of the dark vision of my favorite fantasy author, Robert E. Howard, best expressed in his finest story of Conan the Cimmerian, “Beyond the Black River.”

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”

That hasn’t seemed true for the past millenium. Nations and empires have risen and fallen, sure, but civilization itself has thrived. The past thousand years have been a record of the inexorable rise of civilization, particularly Western Civilization, and the apparent “conquest” of nature.

But you have to wonder, was that a thousand-year whim of circumstance? Are we on the cusp of the ultimate barbaric triumph?

Jim Cornelius, Editor