I go down societal collapse rabbit hole

Legendary Mycenaean civilization ends mysteriously.

I found a National Geographic documentary on ancient Greece on PBS Passport last night, and watched the first episode, going from the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age and the fall of the Mycenaeans.  Homer wrote about a great Bronze Age civilization in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean that had come before, and that lay behind hundreds of years of the “Greek Dark Ages.” The Trojan War (and Odysseus’s subsequent journey home) were something between myth and history, i.e, much of Greek myth and its heroes refers to the preceding Mycenaean civilization. Golden Age Greeks rose out of darkness to hear stories of a great people that had come before, who fought with bronze. That’s something like The Lord of the Rings, where there were ruins of once great cities across the landscape, and human kings ruling them, with a crude and corrupt culture—and memories or stories or what these cities once were. A return to culture: that’s what’s recounted in The Lord of the Rings, and what Golden Age Greeks were reclaiming for themselves with Homer’s stories.

Other fascinating details were that the first Greek civilizations came to prominence precisely because the land was so poor and rocky and far from arable. But they had a huge coastline in proportion to their amount of land mass, so they became one of the earliest seafaring peoples, also boosted by the number of small islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, which allowed them to dot from one to the next in their journeys. The Minoans grew to prosperity because they cultivated olives and olive oil, often perfumed. The documentary made the point of how much patience was necessary to cultivate olives. Your grandfather might start a crop, but it wasn’t till the crop passed to you, two generations later, that it really started to yield. When I visited Puglia with A______, and there were these low, thick, curled trees dotted everywhere in the dry landscape, it was as if the original tree trunks were already gone a hundred or more years ago, and now there were these additional layers of tree wound all round the empty space. The Minoans fell to the Mycenaeans. Both were Bronze Age civilizations; bronze was copper with a percentage of tin to make it hard. The Mycenaeans, based on evidence of a written language that used an alphabet based on that of the Minoans, whose own language remains undecipherable, that is a precursor of Greek, or classical Greek, governed a network of cities. Rather than just one city, and its surrounding land, people, and villages, here was one great city, ruling over a network of smaller cities, each of which had their lands, people, and villages.

And then this civilization, and all the other collapsed suddenly and violently. In response to drought? In response to invasions by the purported “Sea Peoples”? I could read about this all morning. I can’t help wonder, just a little bit, if we aren’t on the verge of a “systems collapse”. Minoan civilization lasted like 1600 years! If we date contemporary Western civilization back to the Renaissance starting in 14th century Italy, that gives us like 600 years of modernity? And we dare think we’ve created something solid.

How plagues trigger social transformation.

I can see myself spending a lot of time on Wikipedia this morning, and can imagine Martha Beck, who in her weekly Gathering Room sessions always says how she’s a sociologist and has been spent her life studying (“and preparing for”) how people deal with change. Speaking of which, I went on The Gathering Room yesterday afternoon, watching the entire session for the first time live. I got on right at 4 PM, and there were only a couple of dozen people at the point. In the chat column on the right people were introducing themselves (“Katie: Hi from Cleveland!” “Joanne: Hi from Oregon!”) Martha was reading back, “Oh, we have Katie, and Joanne from Oregon again.” I wrote: “Hi from Brooklyn!”

“And there’s Brian,” Martha says.

It was so great! It really is live. I was also, as far as I could tell, the only male name that Martha named. And again in the question and answer part later in video, all the questions in my experience so far have come from women. M_____ S_____ had said to do one thing I’m scared of every day, and I had been thinking “Well there’s not much I can do these days.” But going live on the Martha Beck video and saying Hi! was definitely a small thing I was reluctant to do and a little scared of. Another time, when I have a question to ask, I’ll ask it.

Topic of Martha’s video yesterday was “unknowingness,” especially in the context of great social transformations, like those that often follow plagues. I was just peeking on Wikipedia at the beginnings of the Renaissance following the Black Plague. Land values dropped, hurting the landowner class. Meanwhile the working population was so decimated that workers suddenly had more power. And food was cheaper as well, also advantaging workers, many of whom also inherited land.

I can’t imagine what will happen to us now.