To understand why, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries — to Florence and the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmanoeuvre his opponents but is “defenceless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and can scare off wolves, but who is “defenceless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilisations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class — its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general — of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They will use physical force if necessary, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilisations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. As states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law and procedure, this quickly favours the Byzantine organising and scheming of foxes. In comparison, lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually, a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalised and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenceless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection and manipulation, and attempt to bury or buy off threats rather than confronting them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the Government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought with it.

It has attempted to manage the perception of it, in classic fox-like fashion, via careful control of media and online information. Those who continue to speak out on the issue are then smeared with reputation-destroying labels such as “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far-Right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the immediate reaction to the latest riots: to blame them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media”. The implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.

This controlling instinct is also reflected in the UK’s “Neighbourhood Policing” model, which, as Aris Roussinos has noted, makes state-managed avoidance of ethnic conflict the top priority of the police forces. In practice, this means deploying police to swiftly shut down anything that might provoke unsightly public disturbances in minority ethnic communities, such as “openly Jewish” men walking too near pro-Palestine demonstrations, people criticising Hamas, or Englishmen holding the English flag. Meanwhile, inciting rhetoric and open violence committed by the same ethnic communities is met with studious non-confrontation or polite de-escalation in order to avoid upsetting “community relations”.

This means British police now operate much less like a conventional crime-solving and deterrent force, as Ed West has pointed out, and far “more like that of a colonial [police] force, charged with preventing community relations from spilling over into violence”, while keeping multi-cultural imperial possessions  stable despite the natives’ displeasure.

The British elite’s habitual reliance on these techniques of information control and relationship micromanagement have combined most spectacularly in the Home Office’s “controlled spontaneity” programme, which aims to pre-empt any backlash to terrorist attacks and violent crimes by “pre-planning social media campaigns which are designed to appear to be a spontaneous public response to attacks”, such as candle-lit inter-faith vigils and people handing out flowers “in apparently unprompted gestures of love and support”. This is of course all a façade that government “contingency planners” and their “civil society” partners rush to impose in order to, as Roussinos writes, “present an image of depoliticised community solidarity” meant to head off any potential escalation of ethnic tensions and violence. Or as one planner described it, the whole effort is intended to serve as “an anaesthetic for the community”.

The result is what Matthew Crawford has noted is essentially government by psyop, or soft managerialism. The ruling elite, Labour and Tory wings alike, would rather try to manage the British public’s whole perception of reality than ever use force to stop illegal immigration, actually police crime, or attempt — in the longer-term — to salvage the cratering popular legitimacy of their regime. Such is the way of the fox.

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But this way now seems to be reaching its inevitable failure point. The explosion of violence in the streets is proof enough of that. Pareto and Machiavelli would not be surprised, as this is exactly how just about every other fox-ruled regime in history eventually collapsed.

So, what is likely to happen next in Britain? We should first expect the foxes to immediately double-down on soft managerialism, including by restricting even further the digital information space, expanding surveillance and financial restrictions, and using the techniques of obfuscation and manipulation to control dissent — all of which Keir Starmer has already committed to doing.

His government has also already demonstrated its willingness to lash out with naked force against the disgruntled “far-Right” that it blames for disturbing the peace (doubtless along with the broader political opposition). And we should certainly expect to see more of this in the future. But the flailing response, and the resulting escalation in Britain’s state of anarcho-tyranny (“law and order for thee, but not for them”), will hardly solve the deeper problems driving the nation further into chaos.

That would take lions. But the foxes of the Western elite are even more scared of lions than they are of wolves — and perhaps for good reason: again and again in history, the oligarchic rule of foxes tends to end when the people finally get fed up enough to turn to a lion to save them from wolves.

These bizarre events are shrouded in mystery. Conspiracy theories abound. Did Trump arrange for the shooter to nick his ear with a bullet so that he could rise from the ground bloodied but unbowed? Did the Democrats blackmail Biden into ending his campaign? Who, if anyone, is in charge?

Unfortunately, Western democracies require high levels of trust to survive. It’s what distinguishes us from, say, Somalia, where warring clans settle disputes by bloodshed. But we seem to be devolving rapidly into our own warring clans. Trump’s opponents have worked for years to paint him as a racist, a bigot, an antisemite, and a Nazi. They’ve slandered and libelled his supporters, too, and the poisonous fruit of these concerted efforts is now ripe for picking. What is more, the opaque machinations of the Democrats to remove Biden from the ticket are strongly reminiscent of Shakespearean hugger-mugger, with Kamala Harris playing a wheedling Regan or Goneril to Biden’s King Lear.

Witnessing the ongoing collapse of the American polity, one tries to find words for what is happening. The catastrophic error of our time goes beyond nasty political partisanship, and is not confined to our shores. It is easily described, but almost impossible to fix. Put simply, we’ve forgotten what civilisation is, and who we are without its distinctions and proscriptions: wild and vicious animals.

Nothing captures our terrible obliviousness better than Werner Herzog’s 2005 film Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell, the film’s subject, spent 13 summers living among the bears of Alaska’s Katmai National Park. Treadwell is a characteristically postmodern man. His is a story of self-promotion and heartfelt, boundless imitation; as one man tells Herzog: “He tried to be a bear” An actor who took to alcohol and drugs after he lost a leading role on the sitcom Cheers, Treadwell starred in his own production while in the wilderness. In almost 100 hours of footage, he presented himself as the heroic protector of his grizzly “friends” against the (mostly imagined) threat of poachers. His sincere and passionate devotion to the bears landed him on the Discovery Channel and the Late Show with David Letterman.

So compelling was Treadwell’s long-running drama that the ending wrote itself. One wind-whipped October night in 2003, battened down at their campsite against the storm, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were killed and eaten by an ursine stranger, a hungry interloper from the park’s interior. That bear was later shot, and his corpse was eaten by other bears. (Cannibalism is a common practice among grizzlies, who will eat their cubs when other sources of food dry up.) Having failed at comedy and achieved modest success in action-adventure, Treadwell is remembered almost entirely for his role as the tragic protagonist of Herzog’s documentary.

Treadwell, Herzog says in the course of his film, died “fighting civilisation itself” — something many people are now doing in many different ways, all of which involve transgressing what used to be cultural red lines. Their error, like his, is one of egoistic projection, in which the laziness of beautiful, self-promoting wishes substitutes for concentrated thought about hard truths. Herzog observes that Treadwell believed he and the grizzlies, apex predators that bring down moose and elk, “would bond as children of the universe”. Mistaking the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness for a paradise of natural goodness and concord, he allowed a quasi-religious fantasy to obscure a harsh reality. “[He] reached out seeking a primordial encounter,” Herzog says, “but in doing so he crossed an invisible borderline.” Others in Grizzly Man echo this assessment. A helicopter pilot who helped to recover Treadwell’s remains thinks he acted “like he was working with people wearing bear costumes”, while a curator of the Alutiiq Museum remarks that he “crossed a boundary [between man and bear] that we [the Alutiiq] have lived with for 7,000 years”.

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Herzog himself displays what it means to be civilised in filming Grizzly Man, discreetly suppressing an audio recording of the fatal attack and refusing to air Treadwell’s obscene rant against named employees of the Park Service — “a line… which we will not cross”. He blames Treadwell’s death on his “sentimentalised view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and in harmony”. In the blank eyes of a grizzly that Treadwell captured on video just days before his death — possibly the very one that killed him and his girlfriend — Herzog sees “only the overwhelming indifference of nature”. What is more, he remarks, “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder”. Herzog seems to be describing not just nature but human nature, whose ferocious depths are easily forgotten in times of prosperity and stability.

You can’t say we weren’t warned. In the foundational mythology of the Greek poet Hesiod, all things, starting with Earth and Heaven, emerged from Chaos. But while you can take human beings out of chaos, you can’t take chaos out of human beings. Greek tragedy was from the beginning obsessed with the problem of how to keep civilisation from collapsing into the primordial disorder from which it emerged. Everything turned on the maintenance of basic distinctions that opened the space of civilisation in which human life was possible. This space was defined by a matrix of oppositions: citizen vs. foreigner, adult vs. child, man vs. woman, Greek vs. barbarian, animal vs. human being vs. god. Greek tragedy and comedy dramatically displayed the breakdown of these distinctions, with results that were either horrific and pitiable or simply ludicrous.

The earliest tragedies, from the late 6th century BC, told the story of how the cult of Dionysus, a god closely associated with nature, came from Asia to conquer the Greek cities. Euripides’s Bacchae, one of the last great tragedies, covered the same ground. In the Bacchae, Dionysus avenges himself on the rulers of his native city of Thebes, who deny his divinity. In doing so, he lives up to his reputation of being the absolute Other, a paradoxical god who scrambles all that should be separated and defies the laws of logic. An immortal who appears in the disguise of a young man, Dionysus is, in effect, a grizzly bear in human costume. He is ambiguously masculine and effeminate, Theban and foreign, Greek and barbarian, tame and wild. Present everywhere yet nowhere, he is sober, cruel, and, like nature itself, “most terrible, yet most gentle, to mankind”. By the end of the play, the complete collapse of the civilisational matrix is visible onstage, where a palace lies in ruins and the mother of young King Pentheus cradles his decapitated head.

The Bacchae exposes the darkest depths of the human psyche, where tenderness is inseparable from viciousness. For it is the Theban women, led by Pentheus’s mother, who tear him limb from limb. They do this not as Bacchants, peaceful celebrants of Dionysus who had earlier “nestled gazelles and young wolves in their arms, / suckling them” on a wild mountainside, but as Maenads (from the Greek mania): furious destroyers of human worlds. And the play’s true horror derives from the women’s instantaneous transition between these two seemingly opposed modes of being, one Edenic and pastoral, the other homicidally insane.

Grizzly Man is in essential respects a postmodern reprise of the Bacchae. In one scene, a seaplane pilot remembers the horror that awaited him when he arrived to fly Treadwell and Huguenard out of the wilderness. As a thick swarm of flies and mosquitoes buzz around him, the pilot recalls finding “what was left of Tim’s body, his head, and a little bit of backbone attached, and we found a hand, arm, wristwatch still attached”. Treadwell’s grisly end makes his very name sound like a warning. One is reminded of Pentheus’s murder, when crazed females shout in triumph while he shrieks in terror. “One tore off an arm, / another a foot still warm in its shoe.” This, Euripides suggests, is what happens when fundamental differences are erased and clear thinking gives way to labile sentiment and emotion.

Dionysus is the god of wine and intoxication. A modern-dress production of the Bacchae might make him a grungy, long-haired, androgynous hippie from the Sixties, wearing bell-bottom jeans and an army jacket with a painted peace symbol, handing out psychedelic drugs that induce pleasant highs followed by nightmares. The era of communes and “make love, not war”, after all, was also a time of murder and mayhem. Who can forget the Manson Family cult or the wide-eyed lunacy of its leader? Freed from long-standing societal constraints, raw feeling reveals itself to be a heaving sea of chaos.

Yet we are busily wiping away all the boundaries and borders of civilised life in the suicidal pursuit of some ill-defined vision of justice and equity. Gangs of criminals loot stores in major cities with impunity. Illegal immigrants are treated like citizens, and private citizens are surveilled like malicious foreigners. We no longer care to observe the difference between males and females. The new libertinism of drugs, pornography, and electronic amusements frees adults to remain in perpetual childhood, while encouraging children prematurely to abandon their innocence. The family is collapsing because there are too few men willing to protect and nurture it as husbands and fathers, and too few women insisting that they do so. Animal liberation extremists, “furry communities”, trans-, post-, and anti-humanist philosophies, and the relentless advance of AI are progressively effacing the differences between human beings, animals, and machines. Even logic and analytical precision are now attacked as instruments of oppression.

Can we really be surprised that many Americans, frightened and confused by a world turned upside down, have gone mad and are ready to tear apart the body politic? Or that many Westerners, cut adrift from civilisational moorings, support Islamist jihadis who gang-raped Israeli women and played with a breast they’d severed from a victim?

There’s an old joke about a Greek tailor who tells a man trying on trousers, if “Euripides, you buy-a-dees”. This is a humorous way of expressing the tragic wisdom of pathei mathos, “learning by suffering”. Our civilisational clothes are torn, but we lack the knowledge and the energy to mend them. Nor do we have new garments to cover our nakedness. Little wonder that so many of us are reverting to the nasty and brutish condition of nature, and are behaving like wild beasts or psychopathic gods.

For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.

They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home. 

As archaeologists and historians have increasingly begun to stress, our globalised world has seen two antecedents in the past: in the interconnected, hyper-specialised trading systems of the Bronze Age, and those of the Roman Empire at its height. When both buckled under a wave of unexpected shocks, the result was not decline or recession but total collapse, a process defined by the great theorist Joseph Tainter as “fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. 

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This is, as Tainter observes, “a suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated” society, where “the flow of information drops, people trade and interact less” and “specialization decreases and there is less centralized control”.  This is not a Spenglerian moral fable of societal decline, but an inexorable process whereby growing complexity and sophistication bring with them a growing fragility: when a combination of shocks arrive, the entire society is suddenly forced to reorganise itself. It is not an extinction event or the end of the world: life goes on, just in a poorer, simpler fashion.

The great trading civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean present just such an example. As the archaeologist Eric H. Cline notes in his recently reissued book 1177 BC, for more than two thousand years the great civilisations of Egypt, Western Asia and the Aegean had formed a single interconnected trading system, dependent on complex trading networks that “were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts”.

When crisis struck, shortly after 1200 BC, it took down all the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean simultaneously. As Cline notes, “perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession”. A “domino effect” followed, in which, thanks to the globalised nature of their world,  “the disintegration of one civilisation led to the fall of the others”.

The collapse of Roman civilisation, a product of an overextended, underfinanced empire weakened by internal feuding among its political elites, presents another apposite example. As the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins emphasised in his 2005 book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the most remarkable aspect of Roman civilisation, archaeologically speaking, was the ability of even the poorest members of society to afford cheap and high-quality consumer goods, enabled by immense specialisation in production and an interconnected trading network that spanned the entire empire.  

Yet after Rome collapsed, such goods were only available for the very richest members of society. In the production of ceramics, the use of coinage and the construction of stone buildings, the Western half of the empire suddenly sank back to a level of societal complexity lower than in Iron Age prehistory, not returning to a Roman level of sophistication until the later Middle Ages. And indeed, as Ward-Perkins warns, the Roman economy’s complexity was the precise reason its collapse was so total: “economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists — sometimes working hundreds of miles away — for many of their material needs.” While this worked well in times of stability, it precipitated collapse when trade routes were disrupted.

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Like Friedman, or Biden, Ward-Perkins observes that today “we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing”. Yet he draws a very different conclusion about the desirability of this situation, noting that now “we would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency”. 

Yet of course, even as they were living through its early stages, the Romans were unaware their society was collapsing. Yes, goods were harder to come by, infrastructure was increasingly degraded, urban life was increasingly unsettled, economic growth was only a memory, and new religions boomed as people tried to make sense of their declining prospects. But even still, the military failures on the empire’s eastern fringes barely impacted life in the imperial centre. For some people, great profits could still be made: for most, things went on much as before, though with a lower standard of living with each passing year. No doubt, things will improve soon, Romans told themselves: this is only a temporary blip.

The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. This is the process of what Greer terms “catabolic collapse” — “the stairstep sequence of decline” where decades of crisis are followed by decades of seeming improvement, though the underlying society is left weaker and less resilient before the next crisis hits: “rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.” 

This gloomy view accords well with the Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis that the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, has led us into a period of civilisational entropy and decay. For him, we experience “life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck”. It is a period where the state can no longer guarantee its citizens order or security, where “deep changes will occur” in an unpredictable fashion, and where every last effort to squeeze profit out of a collapsing system further undermines the social structure.

For Streeck, this interregnum is a time when personal wealth dwindles and financial insecurity becomes the norm. Indeed, as Streeck observes, it is a period where “as growth declines and risks increase, the struggle for survival will become more intense”. It offers “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”. It is not a vision of hell, or of the kind of apocalypse fantasised by Hollywood, but simply of a degraded version of the present: a world closer to the modern Global South than our recent past. It is not necessarily a sudden cataclysm, but a process that will take decades, perhaps even centuries, to fully reveal itself.

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Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. As Ward-Perkins warns, Rome’s system of complex supply chains “worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted”.

The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. As Tainter notes, “the whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator” of decline. A focused effort on domestic resilience is, after all, in itself evidence of reduced civilisational complexity: as trade routes wither and consumption begins to drop, we should strive to ensure that we are heading towards a controlled descent and not a sudden, cataclysmic crash. The imperial centre may not hold, but our lives must go on.

As in personal life, so too in business and civil society. Each year hundreds of thousands of businesses cease trading. In 2019, even before the pandemic, there were 336,000 business “deaths” — 11% of all British businesses. Factories and workshops close, while industries decline and sometimes vanish completely. Once-vibrant clubs and churches gradually dwindle.

Even at the level of states and governments, nothing lasts forever. Countries and languages and whole peoples disappear with tragic regularity. Over lockdown, I read Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms, a series of elegies for various European states, or statelets, that are no more. Some are widely known, like the Soviet Union or the Byzantine Empire. Others are much less celebrated, even among history buffs. Davies includes a chapter dealing with the Visigothic state that existed in eastern France in the century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century before being subsumed into the Kingdom of the Franks. But perhaps his most obscure case study is the Republic of Rusyn, a short-lived attempt by Carpatho-Ukrainians to carve out an independent nation from the ruins of Czechoslovakia, as it was being dismembered by Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland in March 1939.

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As I read about these statelets struggling to survive, Covid-19 was causing human suffering and misery on a massive scale — not simply deaths, but strain on medical staff, family separations and ongoing disruption to normal life and health system operation. The Government and the health service were making serious and repeated mistakes. Vital organs of the state were hesitant and sclerotic, highly susceptible to groupthink. It was easy to think: this is how a nation collapses.

Indeed, there has been a widespread sense that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining event, that the world has changed irrevocably, that we must re-examine our assumptions about numerous aspects of modern life. The giant consulting firm McKinsey produced a report called “The future of work after Covid-19”, while its rival EY issued one focusing on the changes to globalised supply chains. The Economics Observatory asked “What is the future of commuting?” The Centre For Cities think tank investigated whether cities themselves have a future anymore.

But Vanished Kingdoms — I hesitate to use the dread phrase “putting in perspective”, because that sounds glib — made me reflect on what it takes, really, to destroy a way of life. Not to trivialise people’s grim experiences, but when you read about, say, the Russian invasion of East Prussia in the last year of the Second World War — invasion is almost too antiseptic a word; destruction would meet the case — it does inevitably offer a new baseline for the consideration of terrible events.

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Obviously, its’s little or no comfort to someone who has lost a family member to Covid — or a job or a home — that it could be worse: they could be living in a chaotic post-Roman kingdom menaced by enemies on all sides. But when we come to reflect on the specific political-historical-civilisational questions raised by the pandemic — the future of work, of the health service, of global trade — it’s important to have some kind of benchmark. Particularly because, in the modern West, there is a prevailing sense that we have little to learn from history, because we are so advanced. My generation grew up during the 1990s “holiday from history”, when the power of liberal democracy was unchallenged and its future seemingly secure. No wonder Covid-19 feels like the end of the world.

But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century. We are lucky to have strong nation-states, able and willing to look after their people, and well-established norms of diplomacy and international co-operation. However badly her Majesty’s Government has failed in its responsibilities, the nation has not yet been annexed by neighbouring powers, as happened to the venerable Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, weakened by infighting and loss of trust in government.

That said, it is worth noting that Davies, writing in 2011, does argue that the United Kingdom in its current form is not long for this world — mainly because of the loss of confidence in the shared beliefs and institutions that held its four nations together: Crown, Empire, and Protestant Christianity.

Covid, by itself, is not going to bring an end to the largely orderly and peaceable Europe of 2021, in the way that — for example — the World Wars were catastrophic for so many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe featured in Vanished Kingdoms. The disease remains a serious problem, but most continental nations have now reached high levels of double vaccination — and cut their death rates accordingly. Seven European nations were added to the British government green list over the weekend, meaning that travellers from them do not need to quarantine. The suggestion by UnHerd’s Ed West, at the very start of the pandemic, that the long-term consequences might not be very severe, now seems very prescient.

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Possibly, of course, I am too optimistic. One of Davies’ subjects is the Byzantine Empire, which endured for more than a thousand years, but whose long-term fortunes were seriously affected by recurring outbreaks of plague from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Those plagues, of course, were much deadlier than Covid-19, and spread through populations without access to modern medicine; but perhaps the pessimists are right that we can expect more globalised outbreaks of serious disease. It is entirely possible that not all such diseases will be as treatable and relatively non-deadly as our current foe.

And optimism can be dangerous if it tips into arrogance. Vanished Kingdoms carries a dedication to i’r anghofiedig, a Welsh phrase which Davies translates loosely as “those whom historians tend to forget”. He explicitly frames the book as dealing with our collective tendency to absent-mindedness, our complacency in looking back on our ancestors.

It has been argued that some of the misjudgements made by the British public health establishment in the early weeks and months of the pandemic stemmed from a kind of instinctive resistance among highly educated, high-status people to solutions that were redolent of historical responses to disease outbreaks. Why did it take so long to impose any kind of meaningful border restrictions? Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?

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The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true. It’s what people did in the age of the plague — when our allegedly simple-minded forebears still believed in dirty foreigners, miasma theory and bodily humours — so it must be rejected by sophisticated moderns. As the great Theodore Dalrymple has noted, intellectuals are incentivised to avoid obvious conclusions, because their status depends on the elucidation of non-obvious truths. And liberal modernity encourages us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to reject the wisdom of past ages, as well as the unscientific mistakes and prejudices.

Davies would, I fancy, dislike such disdain, even if held unconsciously or instinctively. He is a humane writer, concerned not with ideology, but with truth and historical drama — and with helping us know what the past was really like. At a time when the public square is full of rancour and misinformation, inflamed by people’s understandable fears and concerns about the spread of disease and the undoubted, if unavoidable, downsides of our chosen anti-Covid strategies, his proposal is tempting. We must focus on the lessons of history, and so prioritise truth and fact — and proportion.