The Climate Crisis and the Dying-Empire Perspective

How worldviews and historical perspectives can shape our destiny

“Terrified, shrieking women, helpless old and young, people intent on their safety, people unselfishly supporting invalids or waiting for them, fugitives and lingerers alike – all heightened the confusion. When people looked back, menacing flames sprang up before them or outflanked them. When they escaped to a neighboring quarter, the fire followed – even districts believed remote proved to be involved. Finally, with no idea where or what to flee, they crowded onto the country roads or lay in the fields. Some who had lost everything – even their food for the day – could have escaped, but preferred to die.“ Tacitus 64 AD, Rome (photo: PublicDomainPictures.net)

Trapped at home behind two-feet thick stone walls, hiding from the searing Greek summer heat and feeling sick from an overdose of on-line content, I resort to rediscovering bits of my old-fashioned printed library. Shreds of wisdom from distant and more recent ages suddenly fall in place, shedding light on our current predicament.

Reading an essay by Golo Mann on the Roman politician and historian Tacitus, I am struck by two observations, one by Mann and one by Tacitus himself. Mann was a historian with literary talent, who lived under the shadow of his father Thomas, seen by many as one of the towering but conservative figures of German and European 20th century literature, and his uncle Heinrich, his father’s fraternal rival novelist and the one with a social conscience. Being part of the family, Golo had an acute sense of the strengths and limitations of both. But, being one of the last people who could read and translate extensive text passages of classical Latin, he must have sensed that he himself was one of the last members of a dying culture. One that had received its death blow through twelve years of Nazi tyranny and the unfathomable horrors of the holocaust, even though it continued for a few decades after. And so he could feel the sense of decline and lack of perspective that pervaded both his own time and the first century AD. Now that we have proceeded well into the 21st century, we can see the same happening essentially to all of Western culture, if we dare to look.

About Tacitus, Mann observes that he was first of all a chronicler of stories often times so bizarre and incredible that only reality could tell them, of wars, palace intrigues, dehumanising slavery and the terror and sense of insecurity brought on by unhinged tyranny. But at the same time, that he lacked any desire to generalise, philosophise or draw conclusions that could serve the reader as a guiding star towards a better future. He was an adherent of his aristocratic class, despised the emergent Christian movement and the less educated, but this strong cultural identity did not bestow any sense of strength or optimism. There was only that hope that the next tyrant might turn out to be a little less cruel than the previous one. Which Tacitus expresses as “The best day after the death of a bad emperor is always the first one.”¹

I can’t think of a better way of characterising this very moment we live in the history of our own, now almost completely globalised Western culture. When the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was finally brought down, the overwhelming sense felt by the commentariat was one of caution and insecurity – no-one dared to predict what the new islamist rulers would bring to this tortured country. Contrast that to the optimism prevailing during the Arab Spring just 15 years ago, when there was still this long-forgotten idea that the masses were finally freed from tyranny by the free use of the internet. And now, with a tyrant in the White House, what is there to expect from the next US election, other than something a little less bizarre and a little less cruel?

When I look at the world today, what I see is that the vast majority of places suffer from a thorough lack of perspective. There is a universal societal, economic and cultural decline brought on by unhinged capitalism and, feeding on its debris, Nazism, fascism and other forms of authoritarianism and absolutist dictatorship. This decline has started in Europe, which it has now thoroughly engulfed. Not only has the holocaust thoroughly delegitimised the idea of a humanist European project – the way leading parts of Europe, with Germany at its forefront, have used its very memory to support and justify another genocide in the occupied Palestinian lands has killed off and buried any shred of remaining moral integrity the continent might still have possessed. At the same time, trust in the political class is falling, not only in Europe, but also globally – with the notable exception of China².

This is the geo-cultural-political background that will always shape our perception of the climate crisis, and the activism and attempts at policy solutions that surround it. If we want to see it or not, we, as Tacitus before us but unlike the Chinese of today, live within or under a dying empire. It is no coincidence that China is now so far ahead in practically all green technologies that the EU has long been forced to throw overboard all green pretences and put a break on green development through increasing tariffs for the exact technologies – solar cells, EVs, batteries and so on – we need to save the planet from climate related breakdown. The US, governed by a climate denying clique, does the same without the pretence. As for all dying empires, preserving the illusion of superiority is given priority over the sheer need for survival.

A central feature of the recent climate movement, which I define roughly as existing from the founding of Extinction Rebellion in 2018 onwards, has been a debate about wisdom and necessity of doom versus hope. It has been and continues to be a valid debate, because a continued insistence on the need for hopeful stories while warming has been accelerating can only be characterised as devastating – while at the same time there is no doubt that some people need some form of hope to not fall into despair. But there is one thing that tends to be entirely neglected in this debate – because people living in the empire often completely lack the ability to see their situation from the outside: the general sense of decline may run so deeply within our culture that much of the debate about the need for or against hope in the climate crisis may be nothing but an expression of our inability of letting go of the old ways. And as Tacitus some two millennia before us, we continue to identify with the culture of the ruling elites, even those of us who see ourselves as rebels and members of a counter culture.

Normally it is said that the Roman Empire eventually collapsed, but it did not take decades for that to happen – a timeline some people see for the collapse of Western consumer societies as the result of the climate crisis – but several centuries. But that is also a culturally prejudiced Western perspective. Another view is that the Empire embraced Christianity, reversed much of its societal structure, language and society, and turned eastwards, geographically and spiritually³. Yet a third perspective says that what was and is now declining is no more than a societal construct of suppression and tyranny named ‘civilisation’ in a centuries-old act of brainwashing, a system that has always tended towards eventual self-destruction. And that historically, when empires collapsed, people reverted to older and happier lifestyles. Only that this time the collapse, being global, might have a much unhappier ending⁴.

What this tells me in the end is that the climate crisis is a vast field of cultural and psychological projection. The fact that we so much lack progress, that we are held hostage by an elite that has lost contact to reality, that much of our green aspiration eventually goes up in smoke, that ideas of inevitable collapse are gaining strength, all those observations are both valid, and expressions of our own peculiar cultural-historical-economic position in the world. We may oppose and reject “western consumerism”, but our very views on them betray how deeply we are dependent on them. That is the deeper reason why there is so little hope in the debate, and where it exists, it feels stilted, enforced, artificial. We are like teenagers trying to break free from mom and dad’s worldviews, but whose very rebellion is an expression of the lingering dependence.

So in the end, there is hope. And the hope lies in the collapse. Not necessarily in the collapse of the world we have come to know as ‘reality’, but in the collapse of our dependence on its ideas, values, norms and stories. Letting go can be difficult and feel devastating. But nature, the biosphere, life on Earth in the vast and overwhelming likelihood will carry on. In what way, we don’t know. Depending on what cataclysmic event will put an end to the crazy and bizarre global society we live through – there will be some form of survival and resurrection. Nothing is certain, and any belief that we can predict the outcome is no more than a clinging on to a culture of control. We do not know, and we need to accept that. Then the letting go can start. And only once we let go, true action will start. If it will be too late to make a difference, we don’t know. But there is a chance it will, if we let go of the need to know the outcome before we start.

1. Golo Mann. Versuch über Tacitus. In: Wir alle sind, was wir gelesen. S. Fischer Verlag. ISBN 3-10-047910-6, 1989.

2. See the Democracy Perception Index 2025 report: https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index

3. See Runciman, Steven. Byzantine Civilization, 1993. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.509885.

4. See also Luke Kemp’s latest book ‘Goliath’s Curse’. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219301731-goliath-s-curse