GOLIATH'S CURSE

Giants are usually hard to fell—but when they fall, they fall hard.

“The average lifespan of a state is 326 years,” writes international relations scholar Kemp. “The largest states…are more fragile, lasting on average just 155 years.” What Kemp calls “Goliath states,” including Russia, China, and the U.S., “can be surprisingly fragile,” even though underlying all of them is the threat of violence via police, army, and other government agencies. In some instances, Kemp observes, the collapse of a state is a good thing: Somalia was better off without its dictatorship, even as warlords contended for power. Often, collapse is incremental, so that a peasant in the Italian countryside might not have been aware that the Roman Empire was falling apart. But just as often, collapse is cataclysmic, as Kemp fears it might be given multiple converging threats, including climate change, inequality, the rise of AI, and nuclear war. Societal collapse may then ensue, but, as Kemp notes, that is largely “about the fall of great power structures,” with elites standing the most to lose. Much of Kemp’s book is about the evolution of the state, revisiting anthropological views of Paleolithic societies as happier and more egalitarian than modern ones; archaeological evidence, he notes, suggests that moderns are about twice as likely to die violently than people 10,000 years ago. As humans acquired “lootable resources” unknown to their forebears, motivations for impersonal violence increased. Kemp’s book is wide ranging and full of useful and provocative theses, such as this one: “The more strongly states subjugate women, the more likely they are to be both autocratic and prone to failure.” Just so is his set of prescriptions for nations and people to survive the possibility of a catastrophic downfall: for states, for instance, the mandate to “make the world equal again”; for individuals, “Don’t be a dick.”

An invigorating look at big picture history across continents and millennia, and a survival manual to boot.