RECENTLY, I’ve been watching several videos on the Bronze Age Collapse, an ancient apocalyptic epoch so destructive that even written language disappeared.
One of the leading causes of the collapse was the loss of trade due to a combination of war, plague and politics. This caused the economies in the Near East, at the time, to crumble, which lead to riots, rebellions and loss of agricultural production. This, in turn, led to the Bronze Age Collapse.
So when a New York Post article entitled, “Suez Canal ship crisis may unleash worldwide toilet paper shortage” popped up in my radar, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the ancient apocalypse. For those who don’t know, a cargo freighter got stuck in the Suez Canal last week, causing a traffic jam in global trade.
Not exactly a world-changing event, but mix that up with plague (coronavirus comes to mind), war and political upheaval, and you get the Bronze Age Collapse. Looking at the world right now, we’re not quite in the same situation but it feels like we’re getting there.
What caused the Bronze Age Collapse was not one single disaster but a systems collapse, where not only one but several different things stop working at the same time. Consider the pandemic. It reduced economic activity, heightened civil unrest, put stress on institutions and more.
But that’s only one stressor. Imagine if the situation turns ugly in Southeast Asia or war in the Middle East or some kind of environmental disaster. Any one of these can cause a “systems collapse” in a world that is becoming more and more brittle.
Like the ancient Bronze Age, our own world is heavily interconnected, and like the collapse of the Bronze Age, our globalized world order will end when the trade routes close down, perhaps not to the level that we will lose written language, but it will be devastating./PN
