Civilisation collapse

More content from Neil,    / @neil-oliver  . Civilisations, Forgetting and the Fear Machine A conversation between John Campbell, Neil Oliver and Dr Tim Kelly    • Civilisation collapse   In this wide-ranging, three-way discussion, I sat down with two guests who come at the big questions from very different directions. Neil Oliver trained as an archaeologist and is widely known as a broadcaster and author. Many people still stop him in the street as "the Coast guy". Dr Tim Kelly is a medical doctor, computer scientist and systems analyst. My own background is 28 years as a nurse teacher, with a long-standing interest in science, research and writing. The conversation started from a worry I've had for some time. With artificial intelligence, demographic change and growing social strain all arriving at once, could we be heading into a kind of dystopian dark age? From there we covered a lot of ground. We talked about how civilisations collapse and forget, how fragile digital knowledge is, the limits of what we really know about the ancient world, the puzzle of consciousness, how complex systems go wrong (with medicine as the main example), fear as a tool of power, the cost of dissent, and whether this moment is just another turn of history's wheel or something new. This is a summary of the main arguments. The views are the speakers' own. Do civilisations survive their crises? I opened by asking how earlier civilisations faced existential crises. Neil's answer was blunt: none of them responded successfully, because they are all gone. Ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Romans and the British Empire all rose and fell. Whether or not they saw the threat coming, they didn't survive it. He compared this to the boom-and-bust cycle in economics. Growth breeds confidence, which breeds more growth, until inflation and loss of confidence bring recession and collapse. He thinks civilisations follow a similar pattern. Neil cited two classical models of this cycle. The first is Polybius's anacyclosis. A good king is followed by a weaker heir, and monarchy decays into aristocracy, then oligarchy. The people overthrow that and create democracy, which degenerates into mob rule. A demagogue rises and falls, a good king returns, and the cycle begins again. The second is the eighteenth-century philosopher Giambattista Vico's four ages. In the age of gods, fearful people think the thunder speaks to them. In the age of heroes, knights fight the common people. In the age of men, you get republics and democracy. Then comes chaos, and the cycle repeats. The "great forgetting" Neil's own contribution was the idea of a deliberate forgetting, which he called a "great forgetting" or a kind of great reset. Humanity keeps rediscovering things it already knew. He recalled a university field trip to Stonehenge, where he asked a lecturer: who forgot what this was for? For centuries everyone must have known what you did at Stonehenge, just as we know what a cathedral is for even if we no longer go. The same goes for the pyramids. At some point a generation simply stopped knowing. He doesn't think this is accidental. He pointed to the Library of Alexandria, a cosmopolitan centre of learning that held the works of Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy and others, and was burned more than once. He also pointed to the lost knowledge of other great civilisations, and to centuries of book burning, including in the Holy Roman Empire long before the Nazis. His view is that those in power at a given moment decide it would be better if people forgot certain things, and that this drives the cycle. The fragility of digital knowledge Neil argued the danger is sharper today than ever. When a library was burned in the past, other copies usually survived in private hands or other collections, so it was very hard to wipe out a work completely. Now so much is held centrally and streamed: books on Audible, films on Netflix. Whoever owns that platform could delete a title, whether To Kill a Mockingbird or the Bible, and if nobody owns a physical copy, it is gone for good. Tim said his bigger concern was censorship rather than a technical failure. Knowledge doesn't need to be taken offline; a small change to an algorithm can make a position hard to find, so people only see a skewed picture. He also pointed out that AI companies are buying up huge numbers of second-hand books, cutting off the spines and scanning the pages, which destroys the originals. Tim has stopped throwing books out, and Neil regularly urges people on social media to buy old books and keep them. If he were rich, he joked, he would fill climate-controlled aircraft hangars with them.