In the Middle Ages, prophecies of a coming global collapse proliferated across Europe. Conditions were ripe for a powerful strain of apocalypticism to take hold: Population growth, the rise of industry, increasing inequality, and an onslaught of natural disasters and plagues had made life feel more difficult and precarious than it had ever been. The poor and itinerant classes bore the brunt of these developments, while the wealthy were more insulated from their assault. Self-styled messiahs appeared in towns and cities promising healing and redemption to the oppressed. During this period, the historian Norman Cohn has written, parts of Western Europe witnessed the emergence of what he called “messianic movements of the poor.” In almost every instance, he argued, “a collective sense of impotence and anxiety and envy suddenly discharged itself in a frantic urge to smite the ungodly”—to seize wealth and power, and hold it for “all eternity.”
Today the conditions for apocalypticism—gaping inequality, pandemics, rapid technological development—are amply present. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that, over the past several years, a number of scholars and political figures have warned of a coming collapse, by which they tend to mean the destruction of the basic elements of society. The philosopher Toby Ord has claimed that humanity has a one-in-six chance of being wiped out this century, and the author Jared Diamond has argued that there is a 49 percent chance of doomsday arriving by 2050. Commentators discern strong “end of the world vibes” in many domains of politics and culture. An apocalyptic impulse to destroy the federal bureaucracy and reestablish patriarchal, Christian supremacy has been blamed for fueling the rise of the MAGA movement. Peter Thiel recently spoke of the coming anti-Christ to sold-out audiences in San Francisco; Donald Trump is viewed among some of his supporters as a “religious hero” who will smite the political establishment. “What is notable now is that apocalyptic angst has become a constant,” the British writer Dorian Lynskey argues: “all flow and no ebb.”
[Read: Apocalypse, constantly]
In his new book, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, Luke Kemp, a researcher affiliated with the University of Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, addresses this moment not by debunking the idea that the apocalypse might happen but by showing that something like it already has, many times over. Surveying 5,000 years of human civilization, Kemp identifies commonalities among recurring societal collapses. He argues that these events are not only potential learning experiences, but also inflection points in the history of humanity, many of which have been, in certain ways, productive.
“Crises can be good for you,” Kemp writes, because out of widespread devastation comes a possibility to rebuild. “The destruction of capital—temples, palaces, manors, monuments, bathhouses, and wealthy properties—all disproportionately hurt the rich.” Though calamities such as disease and famine tend to bring greater harm to the poor, those who manage to survive the wipeout event, Kemp suggests, are left with “more bargaining power with bosses and landlords” because there are fewer people with whom to compete. In the Late Bronze Age, when a combination of earthquakes, drought, and trade disruption ended the Egyptian, Mycaenaean, and Hittite empires, those who survived began to get healthier and taller, Kemp writes. And those who made it through the Black Death found that they “now had twice as much of everything, from ships to land to grain.”
The evidence for these simplistic claims is mixed. Skeletal remains do suggest that people gradually became taller after the Bronze Age collapse, in part because diminished agriculture required them to eat more meat. But Kemp’s conclusions about the Black Death are debatable: Though some scholars have argued that the plague caused wages to increase, others have found that it led to the concentration of power within bigger businesses. Kemp offers many more examples of rebirth, a number of them overly general. Together they offer something like a hopeful history of collapse: If we cannot avoid the cycles of structural devastation that have brought down societies since prehistoric times, Kemp suggests, we might as well try to look on the bright side.
But alongside his sweeping tour of declining civilizations from Mesopotamia through 20th-century Somalia, Kemp doesn’t argue that people should simply surrender to catastrophe. He encourages readers not to regard the remains of empires as “splendid ruins” but rather to understand the lethal cocktail of inequality, alienation, competition, and extraction that hastened their demise. Readers learn of the city of Cahokia, which stood in present-day Illinois a thousand years ago until it was abandoned, possibly because of flood and drought (though new archaeological findings suggest it was soon repopulated); the Mesoamerican city of Monte Albán, which disappeared after its inhabitants “voted with their feet” and abandoned it around the seventh century C.E.; and the urban complex of Jenne-Jeno, an ancient city in present-day Mali that disappeared around 1400 C.E., after a long slide toward top-down rule. The Egyptian, Incan, Roman, and Chinese empires, in Kemp’s telling, were undone by similar causes. No two collapses are exactly alike, Kemp cautions, but almost all of them share telltale characteristics of decline: fighting among dynastic rivals, stockpiling of weapons, imperial overextension, diminishing returns in agriculture and industry.
These civilizations were both built and destroyed by what Kemp calls the “Goliath,” his shorthand term for “a collection of hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour.” He describes how in Jenne-Jeno, the Goliath emerged when the city’s inhabitants built a wall around the urban center, separating those on the inside from those on the agrarian perimeter. A chief eventually took control over the walled compound and built a palace, which he then moved to nearby Djenné, just as flooding hit. Some families followed him, submitting to his rule, but most left the area, and within a few centuries it was deserted. Kemp argues that the “Goliath” has felled virtually every society that ever existed and now threatens to destroy the framework of modern life around the world. The titular “curse,” he argues, is that societies built upon domination, wealth, and power contain the “seeds of their own demise.”
One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.
Much the same could be said of Kemp’s work, which is a manifesto for radical change thinly veiled by social history. He moves quickly from the death of the Mediterranean civilizations in 1100 B.C.E. to the 2008 financial crisis, arguing that both events, though devastating, came with health benefits. (Some research has found that the Great Recession did decrease mortality, due in part to reduced air pollution and traffic deaths. Kemp only glancingly acknowledges that economic downturns are also linked to spikes in suicide and mental illness. Job loss has also been found to harm health.) The economic and social reform after the horrors of both world wars led, he argues, to “a world in which many of the most powerful countries” have been, “by historical standards, inclusive and democratic.” Meanwhile, he warns that the current consolidation of cultural, economic, and political clout in the hands of people such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is creating an environment comparable to the excesses of the Gilded Age and the interwar period. “The record is simply replaying today,” he writes.
[Read: Human history gets a rewrite]
The historical record does not “simply” replay, though elements of past political and economic forces may reappear in new forms. Kemp does warn his readers to be skeptical of truisms about the nature of history and the odds of apocalypse. Estimations of global catastrophic risk that offer up “suspiciously round figures and clichés, such as 50/50, a quarter, or Russian roulette,” he writes, “aren’t to be trusted.” Yet in his final chapter, he indulges in a similar kind of rhetoric. “What we have done with violence is to shift the risk distribution much more towards a game of Russian roulette,” he argues. Although the average person might enjoy a relatively peaceful life, he writes that the overall risk of low-probability, very bad events—such as a nuclear war or an engineered pandemic—is at an all-time high.
Despite its shortcomings, Goliath’s Curse is best read as a call to channel apocalyptic angst into a productive political project, an appeal to combat oppression and inequality. At times, Kemp’s language distinctly recalls the social movements of the Middle Ages: “We are passengers on a journey that looks likely to end in chains or evolutionary suicide. Our Global Goliath will die explosively unless we kill it first,” he writes. He argues that “a new Silicon Goliath is emerging,” composed of mass-surveillance technology, data centers, AI, and data themselves—“a crucial new lootable resource.” He worries that unless citizens rise up as an army of Davids, democracy will perish, as could the world itself.
He offers some ideas, such as rejecting for-profit artificial-intelligence models in favor of decentralized and collaborative ones, or at least paying people fairly when their intellectual property is used as training data. Another route would be to refuse to work for entities that Kemp calls “agents of doom,” be they an artificial-general-intelligence lab, “a fossil-fuel company, or an arms manufacturer.” Anyone who says they might be reforming these entities from the inside, he argues, is kidding themselves. Every person who doesn’t go to work for the agents of doom, or who joins a union, or who refuses domination and tries to protect democracy, he writes, “is another stone flung at Goliath, and each crack in its skull is a doorway to freedom.”
Today there is ample evidence that we live in a dark, ever more undemocratic, frighteningly unequal, and possibly doomed world. At a time like this, Kemp’s invitation to imagine what a better society could look like—and to believe that we might still avoid the worst outcomes—sounds a welcome note.
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