Is the Collapse Coming Soon?
What does it say about a society when its scholars turn increasingly to studies of the downfall of civilizations, the end of empires, the concept of human extinction, and even “existential risk”? That scholarly attention in both Europe and America turned to something that was labeled “collapsology” in 2015, and an academic volume of Futures in January 2023 listed the existing literature on “societal collapse” as 361 peer-reviewed articles and 73 books since 2010? That the Wikipedia entry on “Existential Risk Studies” has 670,000 links? And that JSTOR, the basic digital library of academic journals worldwide, in 2020 listed 66,809 results for articles on “human extinction”–and in 2025 listed 153,885.
I don’t know about you, but to me it suggests that a lot of smart folks are worrying about something the majority of people sense is in the deep background of life but most don’t want even to think about, much less confront: Western civilization, and perhaps the whole of the world, faces an imminent end, with one possibility being a tragedy so vast—nuclear warfare, global overheating, overwhelming disease pandemics—that it ends human life on earth. And only scholars care.
One branch of this new wave of intellectual attention has been the study of the reasons for societal collapse, including a close study of the lifespan of empires and civilizations in the past. One exhaustive search by Luke Kemp, a BBC correspondent and a professor at the Cambridge University—get this—Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, was published in 2019, and he found an average lifespan, of societies from the Akkadian empire of the 24th century BC down to the modern age, of 336 years. It is very difficult to find an exact date for the “rise” of anything so complex as a civilization and often of its “fall,” though in the case of coinciding empires it is sometimes easier to find the date when one king or emperor comes to the throne and when the last such office existed, so such an exact figure must be taken as suggestive only.
That 336 figure suggests that underlying each civilization is an inherent fragility, and many scholars, following Joseph Tainter, whose definitive Collapse of Complex Societies came out in 1990, suggest that it is the inevitable complexity of such societies that leads to their fall. Civilizations begin with an aggregation of traits, each with some complications, and as they develop they tend to create larger societies, more developed governments, greater bureaucracies, multiple armies, and still a wider array of problems, until the whole edifice begins to stretch and crack. Collapse, says Kemp, is “a normal phenomenon for civilizations, regardless of their size and shape,” and greater size is not a defense “against societal dissolution.”
Or, taken another way, there are inevitable limits to the growth of civilizations, and once those limits are passed—a condition modern ecologists call “overshoot”—there is no survival possible. An interesting study on exactly those lines, Limits to Growth by a team of MIT scientists in 1972, showed by computer analysis that “if the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years,” probably around 2020—30. An update by this group in 2004 found no reason to change this prediction—indeed, it argued that the case for overshoot was even stronger than before. Obviously there has been no change since then in humankind’s “growth trends,” so the limits are very near to being reached right now.
And how long do we have? Well, that 336 years figure for the duration of civilizations doesn’t help us much. In our society, what we may call Western civilization, 336 years ago was 1689, not a very significant year for either European or American history, and nothing about it to suggest the beginning of a fixed society. And if we regard our civilization as beginning in, say, the 16thcentury with the rise of nationhood, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the beginnings of capitalism, we overshot 336 years a century ago in the late 19th-century. So that’s a meaningless number for us today.
It does suggest, however, a different number: the reformation began with the Lutherean theses in 1519; the high Renaissance may be dated from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in 1512 and his Laurentian Chapel in 1525; nationalism may be dated to the battle of Pavia in 1525 creating the Spanish state and the simultaneous end of the Peasants’ War; Durer’s Course in the Art of Measurement in 1525, the first book on mathematics written (in German) for the general public; Durer in 1516 celebrated the rise of European scholarship with a copper engraving of Erasmus, “the Prince of Humanism”; and the first publication of Galen’s classical book on treating diseases was published by the Aldine Press in Venice in 1515.
Thus it can be fairly said that the modern European civilization of which we are the inheritors today began in the early 16th century—500 years ago.
That figure 500 has been taken by other scholars as the general duration of civilizations, examples including the Ancient Egypt Old Kingdom, Minorca, Xia and Shang dynasties in China, Phoenicia, Etruscans, Roman Republic, Roman Empire, First Chera Empire in India, Early Chola Dynasty, and Parthian Empire. That fits nicely with our civilization—and thus predicts the beginning of the collapse as probably already having occurred, and 2025 as a fitting year for its terminus.
Nor should that idea come as much of a surprise. Look around: not a stable nation in the lot, some veering toward a right-wing patriotism yearning for the past, others drowning their cultures in immigration, some in total collapse. Not a single nation with any concept at all of how to deal with global overheating, scheduled to rise to life-threatening levels before this decade is out. Not a one with a coherent, agreed-upon vision of the future that might give the rising generations a reason to hope—except maybe Trump’s dream of reliving the Eisenhower years.
January starts with an absolutely devastating Los Angeles fire, a perfect symbol of collapse, and possibly itself a trigger to economic disasters elsewhere, while much of the rest of the country is in record freezing temperatures. (Some say the earth will end in fire, some say in ice.) Many of us will survive, in a withered world, but we might begin to prepare now for new lives in new ways, and perhaps with more humility, community, and faith.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of seventeen books. A 50th anniversary reprint of his classic SDS has been published this fall (Autonomedia).
