Here's a note I pulled from my book notes:
"The fear of an epidemic is the way it would challenge the very structures of civilization. A family might not bury a dead relative out of fear for catching the pestilence. It would also discourage people from connecting with each other."
It leaves me wishing that I'd written my review in the fifty or so days before Massachusetts went into lockdown, just to see what I'd made of the insights into the existential threat of a contagious pathogen. It's an intriguing "what if?" but I'm fairly certain my thoughts would have mirrored the reality that made this an interesting book - like most of us, I would have acknowledged the possibility just long enough to dismiss it.
The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin (January 2020)
Longtime TOA readers will recognize Carlin, who I've mentioned multiple times for his work on podcasts Common Sense and Hardcore History. The book in some ways is a tribute act to the latter's early days, which often examined history from the broad perspective of an overarching question rather than the confines of a specific period, person, or event. In this work, Carlin muses on the long history of existential threats to civilization and connects the chapters to a wide range of concerns from the past, present, and future. The topics that captured my interest were the above mentioned epidemic, his assessment of the nuclear age, and his analysis of civilizational declines.
The most interesting note from The End is Always Near concerned the effect of parenting norms on the wider society. Carlin points out that common parenting practices would be consider abuse by today's standards, then connects the observation to the relatively cruel foreign policies that were ubiquitous throughout all of history. But what could be expected from a world where half the adults were abuse victims? I was also intrigued by the mathematics of a declining population - it would require that couples, on average, have less than two kids, which seems like will be the case for those in my closest social circle.
The main lesson I will take from this reading grew out of Carlin's comment regarding famine - it's not the direct effect of starvation that threatens civilization, but rather the unpredictable set of new possibilities that emerge in response to the crisis; the world war over bread would be of grave concern. I cannot help but wonder how close the COVID-19 response brought us to this kind of domino, and I worry about how we might respond to the hypothetical challenge of a deadlier pathogen. What I learned in the past year is that although the direct threat is always a critical matter, the task of preventing its escalation to existential concern requires coordinating a global response. This is not just true of pandemics, but of the other challenges that face human survival - communication is almost always the solution. We've come a long way in just a few decades - as Carlin points out, the USA and USSR first established a direct hotline link in 1963 - but such incremental progress can come undone in the panic of just a few decisive moments.
TOA Rating: Three historians out of four.
