Sounds like bad news, right? Perhaps. But it has always been this way. Historian Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History describes declinism from its nineteenth-century origins in concepts of racial and intellectual degeneration to its late twentieth-century manifestations in the eco-pessimism of Al Gore and Ted Kacyznski. Herman’s major point — that theories of decline evolve in a dialectical fashion both with theories of progress and with competing theories of decline — is about as unexciting a perspective as any author can offer, so it should hardly come as a surprise that his work failed to stem the tide of warmed-over apocalyptic literature.

As a historian, I always regard with bemusement the various attempts at laying down universal “laws of history”, much less writing the history of the future. The former, even in the hands of individuals such as Peter Turchin or biophysicist Jared Diamond, seems too close to writing an adversarial legal memorandum: first you state the laws, then you fit the facts, which at any rate are always disputed. The latter is closer to fiction than to history, more interesting for what it tells us about an author than for the validity of its claims.

“The collapse of the world is a young man’s game,” Peter Karsten, my dissertation advisor, used to tell me, citing both the history of English property law — which historians F.W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock framed as a perpetual conflict between parents seeking to protect their estates and children interested in selling them to experience fleeting material pleasures — and his own experience as a young officer on a destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. His point was: no matter how apocalyptic the times, life goes on, much as it always has, for good and (mostly) for ill.

Scattered along the stages of life’s way are, of course, a handful of catastrophic events, born of weather or war or whatever other time and tide-tossed horrors mankind must face. More common are tiny tragedies such as the closing of a family business, the diminution of a hometown, the untimely death of a breadwinner — all collapses of a sort, setting lives on downward trajectories, and sometimes difficult for even the sharpest minds to distinguish from broader trends that might actually imply planetary extinction or the “passing of a great race”, whatever those concepts would entail.

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The discourse of decline and collapse, then, plays out primarily on this personal level. For example, Peter Turchin first theorised “elite overproduction” as the source of societal collapse in his 2016 book Ages of Discord. But the idea that there were too many would-be elites floating around was at the front of my mind five years earlier, when I was applying for tenure-track history positions. And even after I secured one of these coveted jobs, the effort left me scarred; I came to regard the humanities as a dying field enthralled by mumbo-jumbo, an ember near extinction that served as a microcosm for the world itself.

Beyond the realm of the personal, at the level described by Herman, decline and collapse represent a topic with perennial appeal for public intellectuals and their publishers. Books on the subject are always among the best-selling releases in any given year: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Earth in the Balance, The Twilight of Democracy, The Democracy Trap, Democracy on Trial, Giving Up on Democracy, The Frozen Republic, The Selling of America, The Bankrupting of America, The Endangered American Dream, and Who Will Tell the People all appeared within a ten-year span between 1985 and 1995, during which time the United States continued to hold peaceful federal and state elections while my own household priorities were related to bare-minimum subsistence and survival.

It is simple enough to explain the public’s thirst for this material — personal setbacks of any sort can make a person feel as if the whole world is coming to an end. For public intellectuals, the incentives to produce it are irresistible. Predictions and forecasts are some of the easiest pieces to write, particularly if their reckoning is far enough in the future that their author can change directions if the winds begin to shift. And as Pierre Bourdieu noted in his essay “The Metamorphosis of Tastes”, intellectual work constitutes a field where supply — increased as colleges and universities graduate more would-be public intellectuals — creates its own demand. Elite overproduction of this sort might not serve as a bellwether for social unrest, as Turchin argues, but it represents a useful shortcut when determining how much writing will be published relating to the relationship between social unrest and elite overproduction.

After all, the prophets of decline rely heavily on the work that came before them. One of the most obvious genealogies runs from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose pioneering work in its expurgated, pro-German form prompted Oswald Spengler to write his own historical analysis of concepts like “race”, “blood”, and cultural creation in the West. Spengler in turn inspired Arnold Toynbee to produce an even longer series of works, which borrowed Spengler’s concept but welcomed the West’s gradual decline. All the while, everyone else was reading them in order to respond to their work, with a 1928 Time review of the second volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West noting that “it was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathise or revolt”.

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When one views declinism at a far remove from its truth or falsity, its professional function becomes apparent: it is a fun and easy thing for intellectuals to argue about. These ideas become mere pieces on a chessboard, with the moves of the authors improved and refined over the course of their careers. This is not necessarily good or bad, but rather the nature of the marketplace of ideas.

However, this work, when consumed carelessly and in bulk, can exact a significant toll on members of an already-atomised society. Even sophisticated readers of decline and collapse literature find themselves reacting to it on the personal level — more personal than ever before in a society of extremely siloed “selves” and “identities” four decades past the “culture of narcissism” examined by Christopher Lasch. In such a world, even people far removed from poverty struggle to imagine their posterity. Millenarian fantasies of death and hellfire sell well when the people building society cease to imagine a future. The idea of the world ending in one’s lifetime certainly offers a romantic prospect for some melancholy souls.

But the world, even the world of recorded history, will likely outlast these naive notions. The Annales School of historical writing’s concept of the “longue durée”, with its emphasis on the impact of slow-changing factors such as geography and climate, offers a mature counterpoint to “histoire événementielle”, the event-driven historical approach that popular historians struggle to avoid, given the ease with which every minor political scandal or protest march can be laden with significance and transformed into a portent of the end times.

My own perspective on the matter aligns most closely with G.K. Chesterton’s, as articulated in his short essay “A Much-Repeated Repetition”. There, Chesterton noted that “although the life of man is a terrible thing at many times and in many places” and “he has much to put up with in any case”, he “has not to put with the horror of history repeating itself”. The future outcome of human history remained a mystery to him, but he was sure that tyrants laid to rest did not rise from the ground again like blades of grass. “In history a thing recurs,” he wrote, “but it never recurs quite exactly.” The story of mankind remained “literally a story: that is, a thing in which one does not know what is to happen next”, and thus a narrative in which one still has an active role to play throughout their lifetime.

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Is this the end of the world?

By Douglas Coupland

A heavy dose of declinism can ease an anxious mind by providing a compelling justification for passivity and quiescence, but this is also its most invidious side effect. Under its influence, one might sneer at small things you can do right now, focused interventions that can turn the tide of this or that event.

But we are never quite as powerless as we assume. For example, the campaign against critical race theory in education was largely the work of one man, Christopher Rufo. His efforts, love them or hate them, appear to have played a part in the outcomes of several 2021 American elections.

Mind you, victory or defeat in a process as mundane as an off-year election hardly means the end of world. But this, thank heavens, is precisely the point.

One night they were still at it in the early hours. This was a battle we could capture, live, to be beamed onto British television. War reporters, after all, are supposed to be above all brave. So I donned my flak jacket, and a helmet, and out we went to what we thought was a safe space at the back of the house. Good for dramatic background noise but no risk of death. All war reporters live for moments like this. We went on air and I offered some thoughts about the night to a surely admiring audience, who would be rising and going about their dull little lives in the presence, on screen, of my fortitude.

I thought it was going well. There were a couple of cracks of gunfire and a few of those whizzing sounds that audience members familiar with battle would recognise as bullets passing close by. I grimaced slightly but didn’t jump out of my skin in a way that might have been embarrassing. But something was amiss. The cameraman looked up from his machine with an expression of genuine horror, which turned — oddly, I thought — to hilarity. We finished the interview and scarpered inside.

“Do you want to see what happened?”

He showed me the tape. I looked pleasingly rugged at the start of it: steady and grave. An empty field behind me, and in the distance something that might have been a puff of smoke, but might have been a cloud. Then in the foreground, about 20 metres behind me — oblivious to me and the sounds in the air — an elderly woman, wearing an apron and carrying a large basket, enters the shot and begins to hang out washing on a line.  She moves slowly, deliberately, stretching her arms above her head as she pins white shirts in a long row that by the end of my segment stretches from one side of the screen to the other. I am in a flak jacket talking about danger; she is in an apron doing her chores. One of us was indeed brave. The other was a reporter.

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Oxbridge is killing journalism

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War reporting has always, from its earliest days, been a mixture of high-mindedness and lowly self-aggrandisement. Not everyone gets found out as early in their careers as I did.  Some of those who do it more successfully and for longer have stayed very much on the saintly side of the equation, others less so. Some are addicted to it, some repelled by it but find nothing else satisfying, some are too numb in their later years to find anything else that feels real.

The real professionals — those whose names will be remembered long after the wars they covered are forgotten — bring their own humanity, their own vulnerability, to the job. Marie Colvin, who lost her left eye in Sri Lanka, and was killed in Syria. John Simpson, close to tears on The Today Programme only this week as he revealed the extent of the looming famine in Afghanistan. Anthony Loyd of The Times, in the same country. Kate Adie in Tiananmen Square.

Where are their peers, today?

You might think that this is a golden age for war reporting. There is no obvious shortage of conflict and news coverage has never been more comprehensive. With every passing year, we seem keener to tell ourselves that everything is ghastly and the world is going to hell. There is an appetite for horror and misery and the latest technology makes it easier than ever to bring it all into people’s homes.

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And yet. What if we no longer prize the things that create war correspondents and make us take heed of what they say? In a media environment of caution, of self-censorship, of behaviours and attitudes monitored, of media managers promoted not for scoops but for meeting internal targets, what is to become of the dotty people who hear gunfire and run towards it? In a world in which safety is fetishised and risk over-exaggerated, we need people comfortable being occasionally unsafe. And we need audiences who respect that decision and take extra notice of those who do it.

First off, as well as vulnerability, we need to respect bravery. What all the greatest war reporters have in spades is a cussed determination to beat the odds. They occasionally risk their lives but don’t expect to die. They (and the camera teams who go with them) are headstrong but not reckless. I have often wondered why it is that women — including locals caught up in wars and employed as translators — sometimes seem much braver than men. Lacking testosterone, uninterested in bravado, perhaps they are closer to reality when the bullets fly.

Brave people are not always easy people. They sometimes lose their tempers and shout. I still wonder about the mental health of the person who took a call from the legendary Kate Adie, who was standing next to me in the desert in the first Gulf War. “It’s Kate,” she screamed into the rudimentary satellite phone, “get the fucking bird up or we’ll miss our slot and I will personally disembowel you.”

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To translate: a bird was a satellite connection and the slot was the 10-minute opportunity for her news report to be sent to London. If she missed it, the piece would never air. But here’s the thing: it was the middle of the night in London and Kate had dialled the wrong number. Some hapless person had been woken by the unmistakable voice of one of the most famous people on British television, and been threatened with considerable and totally unwarranted violence.

In the field Kate was enormously fun, hugely generous to junior colleagues like me, and, she will excuse me for saying so, bloody difficult to manage. She will have articulated (quite loudly) all manner of problematic things to people in her long and storied career. And workplaces are increasingly rooting out eccentrics, people who raise their voices, seeing them as more trouble than they’re worth. But this is a mistake. We need room for passion. For mistakes. For humanity.

And for facts unencumbered by context. The Fox news catch phrase, “We report, you decide,” is not universally thought to have been respected by the company that invented it. But it’s a good phrase. In the social media age, in which opinion is paramount, it’s increasingly tempting for reporters to try to set their work in a wider picture. Why is a war being fought? Is it oil or water or nationalism or climate change? Sometimes this is useful, but sometimes it muddies waters.

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The death of American patriotism

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My friend Robert Moore’s immensely powerful report for ITV News on the storming of Congress last January was almost entirely context-free. He mentions Donald Trump’s incendiary words in the run-up to the attack, but for the most part he merely lets us see what was happening and hears from those rioters able to string together a coherent reason for being there. Robert reported. We could decide.

When Martin Bell — he of the white suit — became famous in Bosnia, the managers at CNN decided to hire him. I don’t think he seriously considered leaving the BBC, but one of the big stumbling blocks, if he had, was the American practise of “script approval,” where scripts in the field are checked by editors back at base before they can be recorded. Martin told me how the conservation on that subject ended. “There can be no script approval,” he boomed to a bemused suit in Atlanta, “for there is no script!”

It was true. Martin wrote nothing down. He declaimed to pictures. All his pieces, he used to say, were a mere minute and 42 seconds long. I won a Martin Bell soundalike competition once (hey, there was nothing to do in the evenings in Bosnia) with this entry, delivered with his staccato 1950s-newsreel style:

The night was long.
The piece was short.
The facts were in the intro. 

Bravery. Eccentricity. Brevity. War reporting requires all of them. Here’s to the next generation who pick up the baton — and to the organisations committed to nurturing them, protecting them, but sometimes just letting them go.