Five Best: Books on the Ends of Civilizations
Selected by Johan Norberg, the author of ‘Peak Human: What We Can Learn From History’s Greatest Civilizations.’
ET
Lost Enlightenment
By S. Frederick Starr (2013)
1. In the 10th century, the world’s most advanced civilization was the Baghdad-based Abbasid Caliphate, uniting the Islamic world from North Africa to Central Asia. We don’t have to go further than the letter A to see how much the West borrowed from this Arab culture: Arabic numerals, algebra, algorithm and arithmetic. It was an empire of open commerce and striking intellectual tolerance. Scientists and philosophers were free to learn from anyone and test new ideas. In “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age From the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane,” S. Frederick Starr guides us through the scientific brilliance of the Central Asian region. “By any measure, this was one of humanity’s great ages of thought and creativity, a true Age of Enlightenment,” he writes. But when rulers felt threatened by religious and political fragmentation, they imposed narrow orthodoxy through state coercion and a new system of schools, devoted to indoctrination instead of inquiry. They triumphed—and in doing so crippled a civilization: “Never again would open-ended scientific enquiry and unconstrained philosophizing take place in the Muslim world without the suspicion of heresy and apostasy lurking in the air.”
The World of Yesterday
By Stefan Zweig (1942)
2. During the golden summer of 1914, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig visited a resort near Ostend in Belgium. The hotels were full, people basked on the beaches, children flew kites. A newsboy announced the latest threats between the great powers. But, Zweig writes, “we had been familiar with these diplomatic conflicts for years; they were always happily settled at the last minute.” Not this time. “The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European” is Zweig’s beautiful eyewitness account of the end of a civilization. He describes how Europe tore itself apart in the 20th century through two world wars ignited by nationalism, fascism and communism—“the most inconceivable decline of humanity into a barbarism which we had believed long since forgotten.” Zweig recalls the economic and social progress before World War I and the optimistic sense of European unity. But the golden summer ended and demagogues soon discovered that their path to power was to set nation against nation.
The March of Folly
By Barbara Tuchman (1984)
3. Historians often explain turning points through technological shifts, class identities or geopolitical forces. Barbara Tuchman’s different insight makes “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam” such a notable achievement. She restores folly to its rightful place in history, defining it as “the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.” This helps explain why, in the late 15th century and for decades after, popes squandered the spirit of the Renaissance and cleared the path for the Reformation by neglecting calls for reform and entangling the papacy in intrigue and war. In a rare moment of self-awareness, Alexander VI, the pontiff from 1492 to 1503, allowed: “The most grievous danger for any Pope lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth.” Tuchman saw how vanity, confirmation bias, lust for power and short-termism could ignite wars, debase currencies and expel minorities.
The Road to Serfdom
By Friedrich Hayek (1944)
4. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek spent World War II in Britain, where he pondered how totalitarians could have consumed Europe—and whether similar ominous forces were stirring in England and the U.S. He dedicated “The Road to Serfdom” to “the socialists of all parties,” because he argued that the drive to control the economy from the top down inevitably eroded liberty, concentrating political and economic power in the hands of planners. Hayek explained that the demand for quick and decisive government action breeds frustration with the slow machinery of democratic procedure. Principles that once bound rulers and made progress possible begin to look like obstacles to be brushed aside impatiently. “It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough ‘to get things done’ who exercises the greatest appeal,” he wrote. Hayek’s book is a lament for a lost world and a manual for rebuilding civilization after the war. Real progress, he insisted, comes from spontaneous, voluntary forces, not from dictates. It requires both the rule of law to restrain power-hungry leaders at home and a rules-based international order to check rapacious nations abroad.
The Fall of Rome
By Bryan Ward-Perkins (2005)
5. Many contemporary historians insist that the Roman Empire never truly fell. Reacting against older textbooks’ sharp boundaries between eras, some historians today emphasize continuity on either side of A.D. 476, when Romulus Augustus, the last Western emperor, was deposed. But they go too far in arguing that Rome dwindled, and slowly, imperceptibly transformed into fragmented Medieval Europe: Rome undeniably fell. In the fifth and sixth centuries, infrastructure began deteriorating and imperial troops could no longer protect property and trade routes against bandits and barbarian warlords. The historian and archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins draws on a vast range of evidence, from changes in architecture to the diversity of pottery. “The Fall of Rome” shows how the literate, urban world of antiquity disintegrated. Coins, used among all levels of Romans, became scarce as commerce collapsed. Craftsmanship and technology were forgotten. “It was no mere transformation,” Mr. Ward-Perkins writes, “it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’”
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