Will Our Civilization Survive?
In 1925, New York Times Magazine asked historians if Western civilization was showing signs akin to those which brought down the Roman, Greek, or Egyptian Empires. Headline: “Will Our Civilization Survive?”
The historians generally answered yes… but with an asterisk.
“I cannot conceive that modern civilization will be destroyed,” said Ernest Barker of King’s College London, “except by a climatic change such as the coming of a new glacial age.” The opposite actually occurred, with 2024 notching the highest global temperature on record.
“I do not see any likelihood of civilization’s perishing,” G.M. Trevelyan of Oxford concurred. “Civilization is now spread so widely over the globe that it is much less likely to perish owing to a local catastrophe, such as the irruption of the Goths into the Roman Empire. If it perished in Europe, it would probably survive in America, unless and until the same causes destroyed it in America also.”
“I do not think that the destruction of our civilization is conceivable in the sense referred to,” J. Holland Rose of Cambridge agreed, “because modern civilization is much more broadly based than was that of Egypt or Greece, and it contains powers of recovery far greater than they ever possessed.”
Yet the historians weren’t absolutely certain. Times journalist Eugene S. Bagger summarized the respondents’ major caveat:
The five historians approached are unanimous in their conviction that the greatest danger menacing our civilization is the abuse of the achievements of science. Mastery over the forces of nature has endowed twentieth-century man with a power which he is not fit to exercise. Unless the development of morality catches up with the development of technique, European humanity is bound to destroy itself.
And the five historians also agree that it is national rivalry which lends to the possibilities of scientific technique their sinister aspect – that, in a word, the most likely grave-digger of the Western World is science in the service of competitive nationalism.
And this was 20 years before the atomic bomb.
Will Our Civilization Survive?: Five Famous Historians Answer Question as to Whether the Present Order Faces Downfall Similar to That Which Overtook Greece and Rome
Published: Sunday, May 24, 1925