Sobering thought of the day

Large empires and small kingdoms, which had taken centuries to evolve, collapsed rapidly. With their end came a period of transition, once regarded by scholars as the first Dark Age. It was not until centuries later that a new cultural renaissance emerged in Greece and the other affected areas.

Eric H. Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed

We don't know why this happened which means we cannot be sure that it could not happen again.

It seems that the politics, trade, and diplomacy of thirty-five hundred years ago, especially during the fourteenth century BC, were not all that dissimilar to those practiced as part and parcel of the globalized economy of our world today.

We have come close to destroying ourselves before.

They seemed oblivious to the huge casualties of the still relatively recent American Civil War, and expected a short, decisive conflict. It never occurred to them that the failure to make their alliances correspond to rational political objectives would lead to the destruction of civilization as they knew it.

Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy

Looking at the last 30 years it is hard to argue that the citizens of the developed world have become more thoughtful and more willing to face complex realities.

The survival of civilization in the twentieth century was a near thing. And the perils were greatly exacerbated by unreal thinking within the democratic culture itself. Kierkegaard once said that the most dangerous mental faults are laziness and impatience. Laziness of mind meant unwillingness to face unfamiliar, complex and refractory realities. Impatience led to infatuation with supposedly all-explanatory theories in lieu of thought and judgement.

Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century

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