Dear Immigrants

[eggspurt]

@Hypatia

I’m not interested in the debate about whether Rome was “rotten”. I’m talking about the phenomenon of people on the move.

A very worthwhile reminder. Here are a few pieces I posted over the past few years on what it would feel like:

Rome's final days, and the now

The Cambridge medievalist Eileen Power writing in 1938 on the decline and fall of Rome: But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilization itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life withou diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about bus…

A Week in The Land of the Fray…

This talk comes to mind: Samo Burja: How Civilizations Collapse | Samo Burja We need to seriously consider the possibility that we are a post-industrial society⁠—not in a positive sense, but in the sense that the Industrial Revolution has stopped. Civilizational collapse in conditions of very advanced technology might very much look like something we have right now, where what was once the product of advanced rational systems, or at least self-catalyzing systems of production, has reverted to …