A new history of societal collapse by an expert in existential risk argues that our globalized society is edging toward the precipice.
Nicolas Ortega for Noema Magazine
Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London.
LONDON — There are 8 million artifacts in the British Museum. But to commence his tale of existential jeopardy, risk expert Luke Kemp made a beeline for just two items housed in a single room. On a visit in early fall, beyond a series of first-floor galleries displaying sarcophagi from pharaonic Egypt, we stopped beside a scatter of human bones.
The exhibit comprised two of the 64 skeletons unearthed from the sands of Jebel Sahaba, in northern Sudan, in 1964. Believed to be over 13,000 years old, the bodies in this prehistoric cemetery were significant for what they revealed about how their owners died. Of those 64 skeletons, at least 38 showed signs of violent deaths: caved-in skulls, forearm bones with parry fractures from victims staving off blows, or other injuries. Whether a result of organized warfare, intercommunal conflict or even outright massacre, Jebel Sahaba is widely considered to be some of the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record.
According to Kemp, these shattered bones were a foreshadowing of another object in this room. Ten feet away, displayed at knee-height, was the Palette of Narmer. Hewn from a tapering tablet of grey-green siltstone, the item on display was an exact cast of the 5,000-year-old original — discovered by British archaeologists in 1898 — that now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
At the center of the stone stands the giant figure of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. His left hand clasps the head of an enemy, presumed to be a rival ruler of the Western Delta. In his raised right hand he holds a mace. The image is thought to depict Narmer bludgeoning his greatest opponent to death, an act that solidified his sovereignty over all Egypt. Beneath his feet lie the contorted bodies of two other victims, while overhead a falcon presents Narmer with a ribbon, believed to represent the god Horus bestowing a gift of the Western Nile. “Here we have perfect historical evidence of what the social contract is. It’s written in blood,” Kemp told me. “This is the first depiction of how states are made.”
In the British Museum’s repository of ancient treasures and colonial loot, the palette is by no means a star attraction. For the half hour we spent in the room, few visitors gave it more than a passing glance. But to Kemp, its imagery “is the most important artwork in the world” — a blueprint for every city-state, nation and empire that has ever been carved out by force of arms, reified in stone and subsequently turned to dust.
Systematizing Collapse
When Kemp set out seven years ago to write his book about how societies rise and fall — and why he fears that our own is headed for disaster — one biblical event provided him with the perfect allegory: the story of the Battle of the Valley of Elah, recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Fought between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 11th century BCE, it’s a tale more commonly known by the names of its protagonists, David and Goliath.
Goliath, we are told, was a Philistine warrior standing “six cubits and a span,” or around 9 feet, 9 inches, clad in the alloy of copper and tin armor that would give his epoch its name: the Bronze Age. As the rival armies faced off across the valley, the giant stepped onto the battlefield and laid down a challenge that the conflict should be resolved in single combat.
For 40 days, Goliath goaded his enemy to nominate a champion, until a shepherd named David came forward from the Israelite ranks, strung a stone into his slingshot and catapulted it into Goliath’s brow, killing him at a stroke, and taking his head with the giant’s own sword. For centuries thereafter, the story of David and Goliath has served as a parable challenging the superiority of physical might. Even the most impressive entity has hidden frailties. A colossus can be felled by a single blow.
According to Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” it’s a lesson we would do well to heed. Early on, he dispenses with the word “civilization,” because in his telling, there is little that might be considered civil about how states are born and sustained. Instead, he argues that “Goliath” is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.
“‘Goliath’ is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.”
Like the Philistine warrior, the Goliath state is defined by its size; in time, centralized polities would evolve to dwarf the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens. Ostensibly, it is well-armored and intimidating, exerting power through the threat and exercise of violence. And, in kind with the biblical colossus, it is vulnerable: Those characteristics that most project strength, like autocracy and social complexity, conceal hidden weaknesses. (A more modern allegory, Kemp writes, can be found in the early Star Wars movies, in which a moon-sized space station with the capacity to blow up a planet can be destroyed by a well-placed photon torpedo.)
Kemp is, of course, by no means the first scholar to try to chart this violence and vulnerability through the ages. The question of what causes societies to fail is arguably the ultimate mission of big-picture history, and a perennial cultural fixation. In the modern era, the historian Jared Diamond has found fame with his theories that collapse is usually a product of geographical determinism. The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, hosted by the historian Paul Cooper, has over 220 million listens. Perusing a bookshop recently, I spotted a recent release, entitled “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World,” among the bestsellers.
What distinguishes Kemp’s book from much of the canon is the consistencies he identifies in how different political entities evolved, and the circumstances that precipitated their fall. A panoramic synthesis of archaeology, psychology and evolutionary biology, “Goliath’s Curse” is, above all, an attempt to systematize collapse. Reviewers have hailed the book as a skeleton key to understanding societal precarity. Cooper has described it as “a masterpiece of data-driven collapsology.”
Moreover, it is a sobering insight into why our own globalized society feels like it is edging toward the precipice. That’s because, despite all the features that distinguish modern society from empires of the past, some rules hold true throughout the millennia.
Becoming ‘Dr. Doom’
In September, Kemp traveled down from Cambridge to meet me in London for the day. Given his subject, I half-expected a superannuated and eccentric individual, someone like Diamond with his trademark pilgrim-father beard and penchant for European chamber music. But Kemp, 35, would prove to be the antithesis of the anguished catastrophist. The man waiting for me on the concourse at King’s Cross was athletic, swarthily handsome and lantern-jawed. He’d signed off emails regarding our plans to meet with a puckish “Cheerio.”
Kemp’s background is also hardly stereotypical of the bookish scholar. He spent his early years in the dairy-farming town of Bega in New South Wales, Australia, where cattle outnumbered people three-to-one. It was “something of a broken home,” he told me. His father was an active member of the Hell’s Angels, involved in organized crime, a formative presence that would later germinate Kemp’s interest in power dynamics, the way violence is at once a lever for domination and for ruin.
Escaping to Canberra, after high school, Kemp read “interdisciplinary studies” at the Australian National University (ANU), where he found a mentor in the statistical climatologist Jeanette Lindsay. In 2009, it was Lindsay who persuaded him to join a student delegation heading to COP15 in Copenhagen, where Kemp found himself with a front row seat to what he calls “the paralysis of geopolitics.”
At one stage, during a symposium over measures to curb deforestation, he watched his own Australian delegation engage in endless circumlocutions to derail the debate. Representatives from wealthier countries, most notably America, had large teams that they could swap in and out of the floor, enabling them to filibuster vital, potentially existential questions to a deadlock. “If you’re from Tuvalu, you don’t have that privilege,” Kemp explained.
Afterward, Kemp became preoccupied by “a startling red thread” evident in so many spheres of international negotiation: the role of America as arbiter of, and all too often barrier to, multilateral cooperation. Kemp wrote his doctoral thesis on how pivotal issues — such as biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons and climate change — had grown captive to the whims of the world’s great superpower. Later, when he published a couple of academic articles on the same subject, “the ideas weren’t very popular,” he said. “Then Trump got elected, and suddenly the views skyrocketed.”
In 2018, Kemp relocated to the United Kingdom, landing a job as a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk” (CSER, often articulated, in an inadvertent nod to a historical avatar of unalloyed power, to “Caesar”). His brother’s congratulatory present, a 3-D printed, hand-engraved mask of the Marvel character “Dr. Doom,” would prove prophetic. Years later, as Kemp began to publish his theories of societal collapse, colleagues at CSER began referring to him by the very same moniker.
“Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, ‘dark triad’ personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.”
It was around this time that Kemp read “Against the Grain,” a revisionist history of nascent conurbations by James C. Scott. Kemp had always been an avid reader of history, but Scott’s thesis, which argued that the growth of centralized states “hadn’t been particularly emancipatory or even necessarily good for human wellbeing,” turned some of Kemp’s earlier assumptions about human nature on their head.
Such iconoclastic ideas — subsequently popularized in blockbuster works of non-fiction like Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind” (2019), and “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) by Graeber and Wengrove — would prompt years of research and rumination about the preconditions that enable states and empires to rise, and why they never last forever.
‘Hobbes’ Delusion’
“Goliath’s Curse” opens with a refutation of a 17th-century figure whose theories still cast a long shadow across all considerations of societal fragility. In “Leviathan” (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed that the social contract was contingent on the stewardship of a central authority — a “Leviathan” designed to keep a lid on humanity’s basest instincts. Political scientists refer to this doctrine as “veneer theory.”
“Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire,” Kemp surmises. “Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.”
For decades now, the predominant version of history has been beholden to this misanthropic worldview. Many of the most influential recent theories of collapse have echoed Hobbes’ grand theory with specific exemplars. Diamond has famously argued that the society on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, unraveled due to self-inflicted ecocide before devolving into civil war. That interpretation, in which the islanders deforested the land in the service of ancestor worship, has since been held up as a species-wide admonition — evidence, as researchers John Flenley and Paul Bahn have written, that “humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), Steven Pinker estimated that 15% of Paleolithic people died of violent causes.
But Kemp was struck by a persistent “lack of empirics” undermining these hypotheses, an academic tendency to focus on a handful of “cherry-picked” and emotive case studies — often on islands, in isolated communities or atypical environments that failed to provide useful analogs for the modern world. Diamond’s theories about the demise of Rapa Nui — so often presented as a salutary cautionary tale —have since been debunked.
To further rebut such ideas, Kemp highlights a 2013 study by the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum. In what amounted to the most comprehensive survey of violence in prehistory, the authors analyzed almost 3,000 skeletons interred during the Paleolithic Era. Of the more than 400 sites in the survey, they identified just one instance of mass conflict: the bones of Jebel Sahaba. “The presumed universality of warfare in human history and ancestry may be satisfying to popular sentiment; however, such universality lacks empirical support,” Haas and Piscitelli wrote.
If there was any truth to the Hobbesian standpoint, the Paleolithic, with its absence of stratified social structures, should have been marked by mass panic and all-out war. Yet the hunter-gatherer period appears to have been a time of relative, if fragile, peace. Instead, conflict and mass violence seemed to be by-products of the very hierarchical organization that Hobbes and his antecedents essentialized. Cave art of armies wielding bows and swords dates only to around 10,000 years ago. “As soon as you start tugging on the threat of collapse, the entire tapestry of history unravels,” Kemp told me.
But if Hobbes was wrong about the human condition — if most people are averse to violence, if mass panic and mutual animosity are not the principal vectors of societal disintegration — what then explains the successive state failures in the historical record? Where or what, to mix metaphors, is Goliath’s Achilles’ heel?
What Fuels Goliath?
In seeking to disentangle a template of collapse from this historiography, Kemp turned to historical data, searching for traits of state emergence and disintegration shared by different polities. “When I see a pattern which needs to be explained, it becomes a fascination bordering upon obsession,” he told me.
A central pillar of his research was the Seshat Global History Databank, an open-source database incorporating more than 862 polities dating back to the early Neolithic. Named after the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Seshat includes a range of metrics like the degree of centralization and the presence of different types of weaponry; it aggregates these to create nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs), including polity size, hierarchy, governmental framework and infrastructure.
“Wherever Goliath took hold, ‘arms races’ followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious.”
Using this and other sources, Kemp set out to collate his own novel dataset, this time focusing on the common features not of complexity, but of collapse. In keeping with Seshat’s old-god nomenclature, he dubbed it the “Mortality of States” index, shortened to “Moros”, after the Greek god of doom. Covering 300 states spanning the last five millennia, the resulting catalogue is, Kemp claims, “the most exhaustive list of state lifespans available today.”
To some extent, Kemp’s data told a story that has become received wisdom: As Earth thawed out from the last ice age, we entered the Holocene, a period of warmer temperatures and climatic stability. This shift laid the terrain for the first big inflection point: the advent of agriculture, which encouraged our previously itinerant species to settle in place, leading to greater population density and eventually proto-city-states. These early states rose and fell, often condemned by internal conflict, climatic shocks, disease or natural disasters. But gradually the organization of human societies trended toward higher levels of complexity, from the diffuse proto-city-states, through the birth of nations, then empires, to the globalized system of today. The violent paroxysms of the past were merely hiccups on a continuum toward increased sophistication and civility, and perhaps someday immortality. Such is the tale that is commonly framed as the arc of human progress.
But trawling through the data in more detail also revealed unexpected and recurrent patterns, leading Kemp to an early realization: states observably age. “For the first 200 years, they seem to become more vulnerable to terminating. And after 200 years, they stay at a high risk thereafter,” Kemp told me.
The other glaring commonality concerned the structure of these societies. “The common thread across all of them is not necessarily that they had writing or long-distance trade,” Kemp said. “Instead, it’s that they were organized into dominance hierarchies in which one person or one group gains hegemony through its ability to inflict violence on others.”
Kemp argues that dominance hierarchies arise due to the presence of three “Goliath fuels.” The first of these is “lootable resources,” assets that can be easily seen, stolen and stored. In this respect, the advent of agriculture was indisputably foundational. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be taxed and stockpiled, giving rise to centralized authorities and, later, bureaucracies of the state.
The second Goliath fuel is “monopolizable weapons.” As weaponry evolved from flint to bronze, the expertise and relative scarcity of the source material required for early metallurgy meant that later weapons could be hoarded by powerful individuals or groups, giving those who controlled the supply chain a martial advantage over potential rivals.
The third criterion for Goliath evolution is “caged land,” territories with few exit options. Centralized power is predicated on barriers that hinder people from fleeing oppressive hierarchies.
In Kemp’s telling, every single political entity has grown from one of these seeds, or more commonly, a combination of all three. Bronze Age fiefdoms expanded at the tip of their metal weaponry. “Rome,” Kemp writes, “was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords,” its vast armies sustained by crop imports from the Nile Valley, its endless military campaigns funded by the silver mines it controlled in Spain. In China, the Han dynasty circumscribed its territory with its Great Wall to the north, intended both to keep Xiongnu horseback raiders out and the citizenry in. Europe’s colonial empires were built, in Diamond’s famous summation, by “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
For millennia, the nature of forager societies kept these acquisitive impulses to some extent contained, Kemp argues. The evolutionary logic of hunting and gathering demanded cooperation and reciprocity, giving rise to “counter-dominance strategies”: teasing, shaming or exile. With the advent of Goliath polities, however, the “darker angels of our nature” were given free rein, yielding social arrangements “more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.”
“Rather than a stepladder of progress,” Kemp writes, “this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.” Moreover, Goliaths “contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.”
In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Consequently, history has been shaped by pathological figures in the Narmer mold, dominance-seekers predisposed to aggression. Reinforced by exceptionalist and paranoid ideologies, these strongmen have used violence and patronage to secure their dominion, whether driven by a lust for power or to avenge a humiliation. Several of the rebellions that plagued dynastic China, Kemp points out, were spearheaded by aggrieved people who failed their civil service examinations.
“Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same.”
Wherever Goliath took hold, “arms races” followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious. The growth of “one bellicose city-state” would often produce a domino effect, in which the threat of an ascendant Goliath would provoke other regional polities to turn to their own in-house authoritarian as a counterweight to the authoritarian next door.
In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Many of the great men of history, who are often said to have bent society to their will, Kemp told me, are better thought of as “a rollcall of serial killers.”
The 1% View Of History
Back downstairs, on the British Museum’s ground floor, we walked into a long gallery off the central atrium containing dozens of megalithic totems from the great ages of antiquity. The giant granite bust of Rameses II sat beatific on a pediment, and visitors peered into a glass cabinet containing the Rosetta Stone. Kemp, slaloming through the crowds, murmured: “The 1% view of history made manifest.”
Along both walls of an adjacent corridor, we came upon a series of bas-reliefs from the neo-Assyrian city of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. Depicting scenes from the life of the Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud in the 9th century BCE, the gypsum slabs were like an artistic expression of Kemp’s historical themes: Ashurnasirpal sitting on a throne before vassals bearing tribute; Ashurnasirpal surrounded by protective spirits; Ashurnasirpal’s army ramming the walls of an enemy city, rivals dragging themselves along the ground, backs perforated with arrows. The entire carving was overlaid with cuneiform script, transcribed onto signage below, with sporadic sentences translated into English: “great king, strong king, king of the universe. … Whose command disintegrates mountains and seas.”
Across the atrium, in a low-lit room containing a bequest from the Rothschild family’s antique collection, Kemp lingered over an assortment of small wooden altarpieces, with biblical scenes and iconography carved in minuscule, intricate detail. Elite status could be projected in the imposing size of a granite statue, he said. But it could just as well be archived in the countless hours spent chiseling the Last Supper into a fragment of boxwood.
It is, of course, inevitable that our sense of history is skewed by this elite bias, Kemp explained. While quotidian objects and utensils were typically made of perishable materials, the palaces and monuments of the governing class were designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring and durable. In the hours that we spent on the upper floors, we spied just one relic of ordinary life: a 3,000-year-old wooden yoke from Cambridgeshire.
Likewise, early writing often evolved to reinforce the “1% view of history” and formalize modes of control. The predominance of this elite narrative has produced a cultural blind spot, obscuring the brutality and oppression that has forever been the lot of those living at the base of a pyramid, both figurative and actual.
From all this aristocratic residue, Kemp sought to extract a “people’s history of collapse” — some means of inferring what it was like to live through collapse for the average person, rather than the elites immortalized in scripture and stone.
The Curse Of Inequality
If Kemp’s research revealed that historical state formation appears to follow a pattern, so, too, did the forces that inexorably led toward their demise. To illustrate how the process works, Kemp provides the example of Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that arose on the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey around 9,000 years ago, one of thousands of “tells,” mounded remnants of aborted settlements found throughout the Near East.
Excavations of the site’s oldest layers suggest that early Çatalhöyük was notable for its lack of social differentiation. Crammed together in a dense fractal of similarly sized mud-brick dwellings, the settlement in this period exhibits no remnants of fortification and no signs of warfare. Analysis of male and female skeletons has shown that both sexes ate the same diet and performed the same work, indicating a remarkable degree of gender equity.
This social arrangement, which the Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder has described as “aggressively egalitarian,” lasted for around 1,000 years. Then, in the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, the archaeological record starts to shift. House sizes begin to diverge; evidence of communal activity declines. Later skeletal remains show more evidence of osteoarthritis, possibly betraying higher levels of workload and bodily stress. Economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient, which measures disparities in household income, doubled in the space of three centuries — “a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil,” Kemp writes. Within a few centuries, the settlement was abandoned.
“In almost every case, [societal] decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality.”
The fate of Çatalhöyük established a template that almost every subsequent town, city-state and empire would mirror. Its trajectory resounds throughout the historical record and across continents. Similar patterns can be discerned from the remnants of the Jenne-Jeno in Mali, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Tiwanaku in Titicaca, and the Cahokia in pre-Columbian North America.
Occasionally, the archaeological record suggests a fluctuation between equality and disparity and back again. In Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City, the erection of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid by an emergent priestly class in around 200 CE ushered in a period of ritual bloodletting. A more egalitarian chapter followed, during which the temple was razed, and the city’s wealth was rechanneled into urban renewal. Then the old oligarchy reasserted itself, and the entire settlement, beset by elite conflict or popular rebellion, was engulfed in flames.
Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same. As Acemoğlu and Robinson explored in “Why Nations Fail” (2012), the correlation between inequality and state failure often rests on whether its institutions are inclusive, involving democratic decision-making and redistribution, or extractive: “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Time and again, the historical record shows the same pattern repeating — of status competition and resource extraction spiraling until a tipping-point, often in the shape of a rebellion, or an external shock, like a major climate shift or natural disaster, which the elites, their decision-making fatally undermined by the imperative to maintain their grip on power, fail to navigate.
In almost every case, decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality. A rise in the presence of large communal pots indicates an upsurge in feasting. Deviation in the size of dwellings, preserved in the excavated footprints of early conurbations, is a measure of social stratification, as wealth accumulates among the elite. Graves of that same nobility become stuffed with burial goods. Great monuments, honoring political and religious leaders or the gods who were supposed to have anointed them, proliferate. Many of the most lucrative lootable resources throughout history have been materials that connote elevated social standing, an obsession with conspicuous consumption or “wastefully using resources,” that marked a break from the hunter-gatherer principle of taking only what was needed. (Kemp wears a reminder of the human compulsion to covet beauty as much as utility, an obsidian arrowhead, on his wrist.)
All the while, these signs of burgeoning inequality have tended to be twinborn with an increasing concentration of power, and its corollary: violence. War, often instigated for no more reason than the pursuit of glory and prestige, was just “the continuation of status competition by other means,” Kemp writes. On occasion, this violence would be manifested in the ultimate waste of all: human sacrifice, a practice custom-made to demonstrate the leadership’s exceptionality — above ordinary morality.
Better Off Stateless
As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.
Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said.
In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.
Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.”
“Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.”
Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.)
Elsewhere, too, collapse was not necessarily synonymous with popular immiseration. The demise of the extravagant Mycenaean civilization in Greece was pursued by a cultural efflorescence, paving the way for the proto-democracy of Athens. Collapse could be emancipatory, freeing the populace from instruments of state control such as taxes and forced labor. Even the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, became in time an economic leveler, slashing inequality and accelerating the decline of feudalism.
It’s a pattern that can still be discerned in modern contexts. In Somalia, the decade following the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 would see almost every single indicator of quality of life improve. “Maternal mortality drops by 30%, mortality by 24%, extreme poverty by 20%,” Kemp recounted from memory. Of course, there are endless caveats. But often, “people are better off stateless.”
Invariably, however, Goliaths re-emerged, stronger and more bureaucratically sophisticated than before. Colonial empires refined systems of extraction and dominance until their tentacles covered diffuse expanses of the globe. Kemp, never shy of metaphor, calls this the “rimless wheel,” a centripetal arrangement in which the core reaps benefits at the margins’ expense.
At times, such regimes were simply continuations of existing models of extraction. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés unseated the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, it was merely a case of “translatio imperi” — the handing over of empire. The European imperial projects in the Americas were an unforgivable stain, Kemp said. But, more often than not, they assumed the mantle from pre-existing hierarchies.
Endgame
In the afternoon, we walked north from the British Museum over to Coal Drops Yard, formerly a Victorian entrepôt for the import and distribution of coal, now a shiny vignette of urban regeneration. The morning rain had cleared, and Granary Square was full of tourists and office workers enjoying the late summer sun. Kids stripped to their underwear and played among low fountains; people chatted at public tables beneath a matrix of linden trees. Kemp and I found an empty table and sat down to talk about how it could all fall apart.
As “Goliath’s Curse” approaches its conclusion, the book betrays a sense of impending doom about our current moment. The final section, in which Kemp applies his schema to the present day, is entitled “Endgame,” after the stage in chess where only a few moves remain.
Today, we live in what Kemp calls the “Global Goliath,” a single interconnected polity. Its lootable resources are data, fossil fuels and the synthetic fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Centuries of arms races have yielded an arsenal of monopolizable weapons like autonomous drones and thermonuclear warheads that are “50 trillion times more powerful than a bow and arrow.” The land — sectored into national borders, monitored by a “stalker complex” of mass surveillance systems and “digital trawl-nets” — is more caged than ever.
We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe. However, the resulting interdependencies and fetishes for unending growth have created an ever-growing catalog of “latent risks,” or accumulated hazards yet to be realized, and “tail risks,” or outcomes with a low probability but disastrous consequences. Kemp characterizes this predicament, in which the zenith of human achievement is also our moment of peak vulnerability, as a “rungless ladder.” The higher we go, the greater the fall.
“We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe.”
Under a series of apocalyptic subtitles — “Mors ex Machina,” “Evolutionary Suicide,” “A Hellish Earth” — Kemp enumerates the existential threats that have come to shape the widespread intuition, now playing out in our geopolitics, that globalized society is sprinting toward disaster. After the post-Cold War decades of non-proliferation, nuclear weapons stockpiles are now growing. The architects of artificial intelligence muse about its potential to wipe out humanity while simultaneously lobbying governments to obstruct regulation. Our densifying cities have become prospective breeding grounds for doomsday diseases. Anthropogenic climate change now threatens to shatter the stability of the Holocene, warming the planet at “an order of magnitude (tenfold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90% of life on earth 252 million years ago,” Kemp warns.
The culprits in this unfolding tragedy are not to be found among the ranks of common people. The free market has always been predicated on the concept of Homo economicus, a notional figure governed by dispassionate self-interest. But while most people don’t embody this paradigm, we are in thrall to political structures and corporations created in that image, with Dark Triad personalities at the wheel. “The best place to find a psychopath is in prison,” Kemp told me. “The second is in the boardroom.”
Now, deep into the Global Goliath’s senescence, several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red. Donning his risk analyst hat, Kemp arrives at the darkest possible prognosis: The most likely destination for our globalized society is “self-termination,” self-inflicted collapse on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Goliath is more powerful than ever, but it is on a collision course with David’s stone.
Lootable Silicon
All of this seemed hard to reconcile with the atmosphere of contented civility in Granary Square on this sunny September afternoon. I proposed that an advocate for global capitalism would doubtless view our current circumstances as evidence of the Global Goliath’s collective, trickle-down bounty.
“We should be thankful for a whole bunch of things that started, by and large, in the Industrial Revolution,” Kemp said. “Vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, low infant mortality and the fact that over 80% of the population is literate. These are genuine achievements to be celebrated.”
Kemp argued that most redistribution has been a product of “stands against domination”; for example, the formation of unions, public health movements and other campaigns for social justice. Meanwhile, underlying prosperity still depends on the rimless wheel: the hub exploiting the periphery. “If we were here 150 years ago, we’d be seeing child laborers working in these courtyards,” he said, gesturing at the former coal warehouses that are now an upmarket shopping mall and that once served as a nerve center of the fossil fuel industry that built the modern age.
The same dynamics hold sway today, albeit at a further remove. Just south of us, across the Regent’s Canal, sat the London headquarters of Google, a billion-dollar glass edifice. At first glance, Kemp gave the building an enthusiastic middle finger.
Later, he explained: “The people sitting in that building are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization.
Another plausible eventuality, which Kemp dubs the “Silicon Goliath,” is a future in which democracy and freedom are crushed beneath the heel of advanced algorithmic systems. He is already at work on his next book about the evolution of mass surveillance, an inquiry that he told me “is in many ways even more depressing.”
Slaying Goliath
Toward the end of “Goliath’s Curse,” Kemp imagines a scenario in which the decision of whether to detonate the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 was made not by a Department of War but by a “Trinity jury,” an assembly of randomly selected members of the public.
“Now several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red.”
In such a counterfactual, with the Nazis defeated, Japan already inches from surrender and Manhattan Project physicists warning of a non-zero possibility that the test could ignite the whole atmosphere and exterminate all life on Earth, Kemp contends that a more inclusive decision-making process would have changed the course of history. “If you had a random selection by lottery of 100 U.S. citizens and asked them, ‘Should we detonate the bomb?’ What decision do they come to? Almost certainly ‘No,’ he told me.
As Kemp sees it, the widespread adoption of such open democracy is the only viable route to escape the endgame. These citizen juries wouldn’t be free-for-alls, where the loudest or most outrageous voice wins, but deliberative procedures that necessitate juror exposure to expert, nonpartisan context.
Such assemblies wouldn’t be enough to “slay Goliath” on their own, Kemp told me. “Corporations and states … [must] pay for the environmental and social damages they cause … to make the economy honest again.” Per capita wealth, Kemp added, should be limited to a maximum of $10 million.
I challenged Kemp that this wish-list was beginning to sound like a Rousseauvian fever-dream. But seven years immersed in the worst excesses of human folly had left him in no mood for half-measures. “I’m not an anarcho-primitivist,” he said. There was no point trying to revivify our hunter-gatherer past. “We’d need multiple planet Earths!” Kemp conceded. And yet the urgency of our current circumstances demanded a radical departure from the existing status quo, and no less a shift in mindset.
His final demotic prescription, “Don’t be a dick,” was an injunction to everyone that our collective future depends as much on moral ambition as political revolution. Otherwise, Goliath won’t be just a Bible story. It could also be our epitaph.
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Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 