“A pin in the hands of a child,” James Connolly once told his fellow Irish republicans, “might pierce the heart of a giant.”
This was Connolly’s version of David and Goliath, the biblical story about a hulking Philistine warrior killed by an Israelite shepherd boy’s slingshot. Even the most arrogant and intimidating colossus, in other words, may be more vulnerable than they look.
According to Luke Kemp’s learned, provocative and deeply unsettling book about how societies come crashing down, today’s equivalent of Goliath is staring us in the mirror. Our current civilisation is more complex, sophisticated and interconnected than any the world has ever seen. That is precisely why a single, well-aimed blow at one of its vital organs could have devastating consequences.
“Once you pull on the thread of collapse, the entire tapestry of history begins to unravel,” Kemp warns in his typically melodramatic introduction. “The darker angels of our nature are flying us towards evolutionary suicide.”
RM Block
These may be bold claims, but Kemp is certainly well qualified to make them. The young Australian is a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), created in 2012 to work out how humanity can avoid various dystopian futures.
Climate change, nuclear weapons, AI-driven robots and a bioengineered pandemic are all obvious threats on CSER’s radar screen. Above all, however, Kemp and his colleagues want to identify the root weaknesses that result in societies being destroyed by their challenges rather than overcoming them.
Goliath’s Curse is a project with its academic roots fully on show. Copious maps, diagrams and statistical data underpin Kemp’s analysis of 324 case studies, stretching roughly 4,000 years from the Bronze Age empires to the disintegration of Somalia. He includes potted histories of once-mighty regimes that eventually bit the dust, most notably ancient Rome, Mesoamerica’s Aztecs and multiple Chinese dynasties.
Many famous thinkers have put forward theories on this subject, but CSER’s research can apparently prove most of them wrong.
To take just one example, Kemp vigorously disputes Thomas Hobbes’s dictum that life in a community without strong rulers will always be “nasty, brutish and short”. By contrast, the most recent archaeological evidence suggests that even our hunter-gatherer ancestors co-operated well and were not innately violent.
Instead, Kemp points his finger at a different culprit. Inequality, he declares, is the “constant variable” or Achilles’ heel that sooner or later causes all Goliaths to buckle. If people stop believing they are “all in it together”, the upshot will be a game of thrones that nobody actually wins.
Whether it’s Mayan cities or west African kingdoms, Kemp argues, the pattern is much the same. Goliaths flourish for a while before becoming victims of their own success, with prosperity leading to status competition, fighting over resources and “state capture by private elites”.
When drought, disease or an invasion comes along, their disillusioned citizens are unable to pull together and see it off.
By now, it is obvious why Kemp thinks our Goliath’s alarm systems should be flashing red. The 21st century’s defining characteristics so far are social fragmentation, economic insecurity, attacks on democracy and declining faith in public institutions. No wonder that our response to looming catastrophes such as global warming can often make a rabbit caught in the headlights look decisive.
As if Kemp’s readers weren’t nervous enough already, he compares civilisation to a badly designed ladder whose rungs break away once they have been climbed. Today’s global Goliath has now reached such dizzying heights that any slip could be fatal.
“If we were hit by a plague like the Black Death,” he speculates, “we would be likely to fall apart in a way that medieval Europe did not.”
Unfortunately, Kemp’s overblown conclusion suggests he is better at diagnosing Goliath’s problems than prescribing solutions. Stretching his analogy to breaking point, he urges us to become Davids instead and slay the giant while there is time to replace him with a superior model.
“Open democracy” is Kemp’s silver bullet, with Ireland’s citizens’ assembly on abortion cited as an example of how more inclusive decision-making can produce better laws. He also calls on voters to elect leaders who will scrap nuclear weapons, tech monopolies and fossil fuel use in an epilogue with the pithy subheading: “Don’t Be a Dick.” It’s impeccably worthy, but far too vague to inspire much confidence.
All this, to be fair, is a simplification of Kemp’s sprawling 450-page narrative which contains lengthy diversions on warfare, technology, colonisation and other related issues. Goliath’s Curse clearly belongs to the “great unifying theory” genre that has produced international best-sellers such as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. It may lack their widespread appeal, however, since Kemp is no great prose stylist and his didactic tone has a wearying effect.
Ironically enough, this feels like a Goliath of a book – exceptionally powerful, undeniably impressive but occasionally just a little too sure of itself.
