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Discussion #13: The End is Always Near, by Dan Carlin
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Discussion #13: The End is Always Near, by Dan Carlin

Recurring Patterns in History
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Introduction

Every six to nine months, history nerds around the world receive a phone notification that makes their hearts beat a bit faster. Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast has dominated history podcast rankings since launching 15 years ago. The episodes have been released on this infrequent cadence for the last several years and typically last around four hours. They’re always worth the wait.

Carlin’s process involves reading countless books on a historical period and then spending years releasing episodes on the period in focus – examples have included the collapse of the Roman Republic, the Greco-Persian Wars, the medieval Mongol empire, and World War I. Most recently, Hardcore History episodes have been solely focused on the Pacific theater in World War II and the related Japanese history that presaged it.

Around the time the Pacific War series of podcasts began, Carlin also set out to write a book. The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses was the ultimate result. Carlin revisited his deep archive of research and surprised himself by identifying connecting threads across much of the content. Evidently, he tended to tell stories of clashing or collapsing civilizations and to raise questions about accompanying human challenges that seem to reoccur throughout history.

Questions Raised, Conclusions Left to the Reader

Carlin is clear about being a podcaster and not a professional scholar – he maintains that he simply draws on scholarly work to tell a story and to raise questions. The book recounts existential challenges that civilizations tend to face and the ways that people have responded or adapted. Uniquely, Carlin promised the reader that the book would not tell a linear narrative or argue a point, matching his famous podcast structure.

Instead, The End is Always Near presents a series of loosely connected vignettes across thousands of years of recorded history. In each vignette, Carlin questions the reader about the connection between the factual past he presents and a speculative future that our current civilization could face. The book was published in 2019, and one of the reoccurring challenges he dedicated a chapter to – pandemics – quickly morphed from speculative future into current reality. We won’t dwell on this aspect, as we’ve all learned about pandemics the hard way, and Citizen Scholar has discussed historical pandemics at length in an earlier post. However, we’re impressed by Carlin’s prescience in the book with the COVID-19 pandemic emerging just a few months after publication. Throughout the book, Carlin also addresses [hard] questions like:

  • Do tough times make tougher people?

  • Does how we raise our children have an impact on society at large?

  • Can we handle the power of our weapons without destroying ourselves?

  • Can human capabilities, knowledge and technology regress?

  • How did well-established civilizations like the east Mediterranean Bronze Age civilizations or the Assyrian Empire decline and fall so completely?

Carlin is a master storyteller and narrator, such that this book is a rare case where it’s almost certainly better to listen to the audiobook that he narrated himself instead of physically reading the text. He will keep the reader’s attention while describing the threats to civilization from pandemics, nuclear war or systems collapse. Carlin gives the reader / listener pause as he describes how aircraft bombing quickly evolved from a tactic its supporters claimed would humanely make war impractical – which is how we often talk about nuclear weapons – before it quickly became a tool of mass murder and destruction by World War II. The bombing of London during the Blitz taught the world that, rather than diminishing enemy morale and encouraging citizens to petition their government for peace, citizens would instead adapt and steel their resolve to defeat the increasingly hated foe.

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Intangible Forces in History

We also want to highlight the less conventional topics Carlin covers in exploring ideas like the average “toughness” in society or examining how child rearing reflects on the character of society. These are areas with less tangible data and thus more easily dismissed as unscientific. However, they’re intoxicatingly interesting to explore. Carlin discusses how old-school historians who wrote before World War II often wrote moralizing histories that traced civilizational rise and decline to the character of inhabitants.

“To Plutarch and Livy for example, sloth, cowardice and lack of virtue were the fruit of too much ease and luxury and money, and a lot of softer people in the society meant a softer overall society.”

In the Greco-Persian Wars, elite Spartan soldiers and tough Athenians defending their own farms as citizen-soldiers soundly defeated the Persians. Greek writers of the time derided the Persians of that time as inheritors of a great empire forged by men who were tougher and wiser than their descendants. This theme was a central pillar in their explanation of the Greeks’ unlikely victory. Yet, when the Persians were defeated militarily, they found another way to influence Greek city states: wealth. They wielded the power of gold to compromise factions of elites in Sparta, Athens and other city states. Their diplomatic maneuvering fueled war between the Greek city-states, helping to bleed them white in the run-up to Philip II and Alexander the Great of Macedonia’s conquests.

A similar pattern could be seen in ancient Rome. While explanations of Rome’s decline are many and hotly debated, we subscribe to the theory that traces the seeds of decline to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. With its last major regional foe defeated, Rome extracted the wealth of its newly conquered territories. Roman elites were wealthier than ever and began a long process of enjoying more cosmopolitan, luxurious lifestyles. Rome’s conquests had been built on armies of citizen-soldiers led by officers from a pious, disciplined and martial elite.

With these ordinary soldiers being away at war for decades, their small farms often fell into disrepair and ceased to be economically viable. Increasingly wealthy elites bought up their land and worked it with slaves from the conquered provinces. Rome’s ordinary citizens were forced off their land and ended up in cities, where they would be fertile minds for the ambitions of populist demagogues like the Gracchi and Julius Caesar. The resulting political turmoil would ultimately destroy the Roman Republic. Over the following decades and centuries, ordinary Romans were reduced to poverty and elites to decadence, and they increasingly left their soldiering to a newly professionalized military increasingly staffed by non-Romans. We’re led to reflect with unease that today, only 1% of Americans will ever serve in the military and that the US increasingly depends on private military contractors for combat operations.

Closing Thoughts

We’ve added our own twist to these ideas here, but it takes guts for Carlin to address them in the first place. The End is Always Near also discusses another issue that frequently arises in Carlin’s podcasts: the way children were raised throughout history. The character of 5th century BC Sparta is inextricably linked to the ruthless cultivation of its children to be professional warriors. Mongol children in the thirteenth century were taught to ride horses at an age when today’s American children are often still learning how to read. The lived realities of the past were different worlds, and parents were raising their kids for those worlds rather than ours. Carlin notes that we’d characterize many of their practices as child abuse, and wonders if future historians may also criticize our commonly accepted child-rearing practices.

Our most notable takeaway is that this kind of thinking can help us understand why present institutions behave the way they do. We’re often encouraged to view recent history in terms of decades, as if there was something in the air in the 1970’s that wasn’t there in the 1980’s. This can be useful, but it’s often better to reflect on institutional leadership. The people who run impactful institutions tend to be between the ages of forty and eighty (as an example, look at the current POTUS, congressional leadership, and leadership of the NIAID). It helps to remember that people who are seventy years old today probably graduated high school around 1969 – roughly 50+ years ago. Their formative beliefs were likely instilled in the Fifties and Sixties by parents, teachers and coaches who had in turn formed their beliefs in a prior time period. We think of these foundational and evolving beliefs as the interlocking chains between generations that maintain continuity alongside societal change.

Carlin’s loosely structured book is a great introduction for those not familiar with his podcast and raises many thought-provoking questions. We’ve hinted at some of our proposed answers and reactions. Let us know what you think!

All the best,

The Citizen Scholar Team

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