Nonfiction
In “Goliath’s Curse,” Luke Kemp crunches the numbers to see exactly how far we are from the fate of once-great empires.
By Ed Simon
Ed Simon is a member of the English faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and the editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books.
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GOLIATH’S CURSE: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp
During the height of the ancient silver mining industry, when metal was pulled from the earth in southwestern Spain for the Greek drachmas and Phoenician coins that connected the wealthy ports of the Mediterranean, some three million tons of excess rock waste was produced before the Common Era.
The clay furnaces throughout the Iberian Pyrite Belt that separated the precious metal from other elements expelled a fine mist of lead dust that permeated Europe. In the glaciers of Greenland there exists a record of this production, ice-cores revealing strata discolored by the fine lead particulate that settled in this northern climate.
But as the Bronze Age transitioned into the Iron, the lead stratification in those glaciers dropped to literally nothing for a period of nearly three centuries. Evidence of the Bronze Age collapse is inscribed into the very rocks: We’ve been here before.
Luke Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” considers the calamity that occurred nearly two millenniums before the fall of Rome, as well as similar occurrences in the Yucatán and Han China, on the Pacific island of Rapa Nui and among the Cahokia people of the Mississippian plain.
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A scholar at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk who has worked as an adviser for the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Kemp has been referred to in the media as “Dr. Doom.” By methodically observing the factors responsible for societal collapse, he attempts to mine the commonalities and complexities in disparate cultures.
Unlike Jared Diamond’s formative 1997 best seller “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” which focuses on a handful of examples (and is increasingly contested by scholars), “Goliath’s Curse” analyzes a massive data set through digital analysis. And the conclusions it draws can be surprising.
In the modern tradition of Big Books of human history like Diamond’s “Sapiens” and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything,” “Goliath’s Curse” provides a novel theory of civilizational development.
“Societal collapse has shaped our history and will determine our future,” writes Kemp, yet that history can depart wildly from popular assumptions. The development of civilizations, he notes, isn’t always a net positive for those who live in them. At the end of the Paleolithic Era, for example, the inhabitants of early agricultural settlements often led shorter and less healthy lives than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them.
Other events that have been interpreted as catastrophic were actually revolutionary actions against brutal dominance-hierarchies — or as Kemp terms them, “Goliaths.” Civilization, he reminds us, is also a wellspring of warfare, inequity and exploitation. The Bronze Age collapse was a result of “a perfect storm of drought, famine, earthquakes, disease, invasions and rebellions,” resulting in the end of the Mycenaeans, Minoans, Babylonians and Hittites.
As with other instances of large-scale social breakdown, Kemp doesn’t attempt to downplay the real-world negative effects. At the same time, he subverts the typical expectations about their meaning: What qualifies as an apocalypse for the 1 percent who no longer reign doesn’t necessarily qualify as such for everyone else.
That the subsequent so-called Greek Dark Ages saw both the introduction of modern alphabetic writing and the literary triumph of the Homeric epics severely complicates the narrative of rise-and-fall that still dominates how so many of us think about history.
At the same time, no one wants to be the diminutive David standing next to a Goliath when the giant topples. Most readers won’t be interested merely in narratives about abandoned Mayan cities and early Holocene Levantine ruins, but also in the question of what all of this might mean today.
“We live in a uniquely dangerous time,” Kemp writes — an age of pandemics, global heating, inequality, the rise of authoritarianism, the development of potentially dangerous artificial intelligence technologies and the ever-present nuclear sword of Damocles. As the author puts it, “The future of collapse looks far grimmer than the past.”
From his number-crunching, Kemp is able to identify certain commonalities that attend societal collapse — including an ever-widening inequity between classes and a resistance to cultural diversity. In averaging out the predictions of various scholars, he arrives at a one-in-three chance of global collapse by the conclusion of the 21st century.
“Goliath’s Curse" feels something like reading the French economist Thomas Piketty filtered through “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But at a time when the wealthiest among us court fantasies of surviving in apocalypse bunkers, Kemp emphasizes the importance of community in avoiding such civilizational breakdown — or at least mitigating the worst of it.
Kemp’s prose can be dry, and his prescriptions feel too general to be comforting. But “Goliath’s Curse” is still a strangely hopeful book. Contrary to the dark view of human nature portrayed in fictional dystopias, he writes, communities tend to demonstrate a high degree of cooperation during societal unravelings.
Humanity, he maintains, can exist and even flourish even after Goliath has fallen. Ages pass, civilizations collapse, but the work continues.
GOLIATH’S CURSE: The History and Future of Societal Collapse | By Luke Kemp | Knopf | 582 pp. | $35