The constant theme since the dawn of civilization threaded through all of history is that everything is falling apart. Change is continual. History is more like the seasons. Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt. Sometimes there's peace. There's a continual game of King of the Mountain being played at all levels.
So what can we say? Situation Normal - all effed up!
Enjoy this phenomenon called life. You only get one.
Eh, there have been institutions with almost absurd longevity in history. The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years between Constantine and Vatican II. Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.
It's very easy to forget that the revolutions of Britain, France, America, Russia; it happened just a few generations ago, and upended most of the political landscape (even in countries that didn't see actual revolutions). I think what is happening is most of our modern institutions are all of roughly the same age, and after initial idealism and momentum have roughly at the same time begun to ossify and show cracks as people have started taking them for granted.
This is the first time anyone has attempted democracy on this sort of scale. Looking back we've had republics with longevity, we've had autocratic dynasties with longevity. But democracy? Besides Athens, which had a very different shape of political system, this is really a first. It's a huge political experiment, the long-term viability of which is being determined here and now by our ability to keep our shit together.
> catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years
You have a very flexible definition of "unchanged" then. The Catholic Church pre-Charlemagne is going to be very different from Saeculum Obscurum-era, itself different from Investiture Crisis-era, itself different from the one familiar in the Late Medieval, different from Counter Reformation-era one. It's absurd to me that you think the first time it changes significantly is Vatican II!
> Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.
My knowledge of Ancient Egyptian history is extremely poor, but what little I do know strongly suggests that considering it as a single stable form of government for thousands of years is even worse an error than claiming the Catholic Church was so stable and unchanging. Perhaps akin to saying that the Holy Roman Empire, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and modern Germany are all one single country that has lasted for 1200 years (because they're all called Germany).
It's not 100% undisputed but most historians would agree that until conquered by the Persians in 525 BC, Egyptian history consists of 26 dynastic changes and 8 major distinct periods. Each dynasty of course usually had more than one ruler. Since we're talking about Socrates, then the slightly extended timeline of 33 dynastic changes (including 2 Persian, and 2 Greek), across 9 major and distinct periods, would represent pretty much the mainstream view that is supported by the available evidence, ending in its incorporation into the Roman Republic in 30 BC.
If anything, Egypt is one hell of a counter example of institutional stability. I would also make the pedantic quibble that the HRE never called itself "Germany" until the term was incorporated into part of its much longer official title in the late 1400s. English usage started in the 1500s. It's not to say that the concept of "Germany" or "Deutschland" didn't exist, but pre-Westphalia it's difficult to make truly apt comparisons to conceptualizations of states today, and the term equivalent to Germany was used, intermittently at that, from Charlemagne's death for the next 700 years somewhat like the status of Scotland or Wales within the UK today, as in, it coexisted with the HRE as an part but not considered to have referred to the whole until the HRE lost its non-German territories an that was pretty much all that was left.
>The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years
That's a bit of a myth, thrown around a lot but not quite true. It has existed in some form, but by no means remained changeless. The doctrine is substantially similar but then we can say the same thing about Judaism. Here, we're really talking about the organization, which has many issues:
-The East-West schism in 1054 tore the Catholic Church in half.
-Then there was another schism about 500 years later when Martin Luther & subsequent Reformation really splintered things, sparking many violent conflicts over the centuries. I'm sure many Catholics felt like things were falling apart then.
In lesser events that still made people feel things were falling apart:
-Rome was taken & Pope Pius was imprisoned in the Vatican during the Italian Reunification in 1870 there was probably a similar feeling.
-After Vatican II from 1962-1965 I know from my own relatives that they felt (and still feel) that the catholic church began to fall apart.
-The last few decades with countless child abuse scandals.
I did stipulate until Vatican II, and my point is rather how little the preceding millenium of reformations and Avignon popes and so on actually changed the church. It undeniably had some impact, like the reformation created a need for educating priests to be able to actually argue their case. But the shape of the organization was largely the same through all of this.
Vatican II was a trivial change compared to vast numbers of other changes in the Church - the Church of the 3rd-7th c. and its hierarchy were dramatically different than the Church once they'd broken from Constantinople and Eastern Rome had lost Ravenna and it's control over the Vatican. The Papacy and institutions that formed after the 700s/800s once Italy was independent of the Byzantines are where the pope transitions to a king lording over the Papal States which was a massive change. Those Papal States are gone now, another dramatic change that fundamentally redefined the Church. There were other revolutionary changes throughout the church's history like the Avignon Papacy which changed not only where the Church was centered but reformed the Papacy dramatically to put it under the thumb of the French kings. The schisms after that changed the Church brought the relatively late invention of the College of Cardinals and significant reforms and changes in hierarchy. The developments of various monastic orders and knightly orders also brought major changes and reforms. The Church after the Protestants sacked Rome and Pope Clement VII fled into hiding and was reduced to a figurehead controlled the Holy Roman Emperor was a massive break as well. The reforms of the Counter-Reformation were dramatic as well. The church has always claimed to be a stable perpetuation of tradition, while the reality has been a dynamic institution that's changed significantly not only in hierarchy and structure but doctrine. There always were popes, cardinals, and bishops, but their roles, powers, and relations changed constantly.
> I did stipulate until Vatican II, and my point is rather how little the preceding millenium of reformations and Avignon popes and so on actually changed the church
Clearly, that was your point. It's just completely wrong given things like the Gregorian Reform.
You'd have a better argument that the Catholic Church has been largely unchanged in the nearly 1000 years since the Gregorian reform (or, even better, the 700+ years after the series of reforms starting there and running through the 13th century councils) than the 1600 years between Constantine and Vatican II. It’d still be making the qualifier “largely” do an unreasonable amount of work, though.
The reformation didn't just change the educational needs for priests, it split off a significant portion of it's population out of the church.
I don't think we can cite 1600 years of stability for the organization at all. We may do so, somewhat, for doctrine, which is an achievement, but it's also equalled or exceeded by a few other religions.
The other thing to remember is that even those long-standing institutions had internal change that was a huge deal at the time but is now hardly remembered at all, or considered minor.
You can even see this right now, where countries do not consider themselves to be as old as the current government's age, but much older. For example, most Italians will not consider Italy to be "started" at the Republic in '46, or even the Unification in 1861, but that the country is much, much older.
Italy as a polity, regardless of how real the polity actually existed as a coherent and cohesive governing state, pretty much existed continuously from Rome until entirely left out by the Congress of Vienna in 1805 though. By the time 1848 rolled around most people alive were perfectly aware of the concept of Italy in living memory, and even those who didn't actually live in what was considered Italy - in particular those living in the south from Naples down to Calabria and Sicily, if they were educated and literate, were still aware of the notion of Italy as a distinct political entity. There might not have been much of a centralized government based in Italian territories that represented the polity for long periods of history, but ruling regimes/dynasties come and go but political entities tend to last longer.
Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.
Britain had the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the Magna Carta which amounts to a major revolution was enacted in 1215, and the Norman conquest happened in 1066. All these major events hardly occurred "a few generations ago".
I'm afraid that the idea of things largely unchanging in the past comes from our poor knowledge of history, compared to recent events.
The British revolution, which is the first revolution, is still fairly recent on a historical timescale (and the later revolutions would arguably reshape Britain more than the British one ever did). My point is exactly that 2-300 years is not a particularly long time.
> Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.
There were some dynastic changes and bumps along the road, absolutely, but my point is the overall shape of Egypt was remarkably stable even through the Persian conquest.
Ancient Egypt's "bumps along the road" were several periods of almost total anarchy and state disintegration that each lasted for many decades.
You're right that there's nothing comparable to the modern era: the modern era hasn't existed long enough to have collapses that total. I think you are not applying the same level of scrutiny to ancient societies as you are to modern ones.
Perhaps with regards to "scale" this may be true, but in most ways I disagree. There were hundreds of democracies in the ancient world - particularly in Greece - and they all tended to break down along similar lines. The Greeks even had a term for this - stasis - which there's a body of literature about. In stasis, the norms of democratic government are slowly eroded through an escalating series of power plays (each justified by previous excesses). This in turn erodes the public trust in institutions required for society to function. Which usually ends in violence. So I think it's a mistake to assume our situation is unique.
> The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years between Constantine and Vatican II.
No, it really didn't.
> Looking back we've had republics with longevity, we've had autocratic dynasties with longevity. But democracy? Besides Athens, which had a very different shape of political system, this is really a first.
Modern democracies are almost entirely representative democracies, more like historical republics (and in fact, many of them are explicitly republics, though some are technically limited monarchies) than classical democracies.
For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.
Unless you lived in the parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity… it’s important to remember peace and prosperity are regional phenomena that are not shared around the globe equally.
Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread.
Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes. Most of the "developing world" developed. Marginalized groups gained new civil rights. China and India rose to become great powers even as their former colonial masters, though declining, still enjoyed peace and prosperity.
Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made.
> Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread.
> Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes.
While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters. Many of the world’s most conflict-stricken areas today are ex-colonies still in the process of stabilization.
The dirty secret of peace is that it is often imposed by a dominant power. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana. These were peaceful times because of intense power asymmetry.
> dirty secret of peace is that it is often imposed by a dominant power. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana.
If it’s literally in the name it’s not a secret. Competition for monopolies on violence are bloody. When we can sidestep that contest, we get a lasting peace.
> While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters.
What is this "peace" you speak of? I think you want to take a closer look at the oppression that was endemic to colonization and occupation of foreign lands. One of the worse examples is Belgium's colonization of the Congo:
If an African laborer didn't produce rubber (for example), it was common to chop off a hand (his own or a family member's) to encourage him to work harder.
Congo may be on the worse end of the spectrum of colonization, but it is hardly a singular example.
> Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made
And recognizing that we've made process shouldn't make us believe that we've done enough. Recognize what we've (or they've) achieved, be proud about it but never loose focus on making "it" even better.
(I'm just adding to your comment, not disagreeing)
I've always thought that saying is pretty weak, not only because of the bias that anyone believes it will tend to characterise themselves as one of the "strong men", but also because what one side characterises as good times, another side will characterise as bad. The end of WW2 was a good time for the allies, pretty devastating for Germany, and yet we don't see Germany in current times as on a completely different trajectory than the rest of us, its actually probably the most average of the former allied countries.
Also the political perspective, what the left would characterise as good times the right would probably characterise as bad, and visa versa. At that point its no longer strong and weak men, but men of one camp and men of another.
It's pretty much the definition of fascism - a delusional paternalistic idiot infecting everyone around him with his own neuroses and narcissism, in the name of "patriotism" and "respect."
Good god, enough with this "fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning" nonsense. Let's call it the "No true fascist fallacy". I could bring the corpse of Himmler here and some people would regurgitate the same "Bu-bu-but that's not actually fascist enough!". OP was basically quoting the definition of Ur-fascism by Umberto Eco. Is that historically accurate enough for you? Or should we check beforehand if whoever he was referring to has ever took part in the Salo republic, before we commit the grave sin of not being taxonomically accurate?
The reason people focus on definitions like “oh, it’s really about toxic masculinity!” is because admitting the truth would make them look bad:
Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian system with regulated commerce rather than direct state control, often co-occurring with systemic racism.
The reason people don’t want to be honest about the definition is that it’s the platform of modern Democrats, who are gaslighting by calling everyone else a “fascist”:
Democrats are collectivist authoritarian.
Democrats are pushing for regulated commerce.
Democrats are rebuilding systemic racism, from rationing healthcare [2] and government aid [1] based on race to attempting to repeal civil rights laws in WA [4] and CA [3].
Democrats took to the street in acts of arson, violence, and murder to terrorize the public ahead of an election — the modern Brownshirts. [5]
I couldn't care less what oblique definition of fascism came out from some american think-tank in the 80s, narrow enough to not anger any of their thatcherian or reaganite friends.
I'm italian, my grandfather was drafted in the balilla first at 14 and the fascist army later. And his stories of the time were all about the violence, the machismo, the open contempt for the gay, the jewish, any other minorities. That's fascism, no matter if it doesn't match your clinical idea of what fascism should or shouldn't be.
And yes, they were as silly and ridiculous as the tiki torches guys or the Jan 6 coup guys. Until they were fully in power. Then everybody stopped laughing, or wondering if they were really dangerous or not.
And to be quite honest with you, worry not - I think we'll find very, very soon how close those are compared to US democrats to actual fascists(tm).
I’m paraphrasing what the fascists said their goals were.
If you read about fascism, their proponents viewed it as “Marxism 2.0” — where they could leverage the socialist ideas of collectivist authoritarianism without the problems encountered by the original Marxist revolutionaries with total state control of commerce.
A unified populace where “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
Well yes, the Goodwin point is now crossed very casually, just like people are using superlatives for the mundane things, such as "I ate the most amazing fries yesterday".
This makes for poor debates, where there is little nuance, fuzzy scales and hardly meaningful communication.
As I said in another post, I'm italian, and my grandparents had some direct experience on the matter. Their families were destroyed by nazists and fascists. My grandmother family was jewish, A have a few pictures of her relatives with a number tattoed on their arms. I never dared to ask where or how they got them.
No idea how fucked up my gramps were, but by their direct account, yes that "strong males" attitude we're talking about was quite a fascist trait.
It's the nationalism, totalitarianism and dictatorial control that make fascism. The obsessions are a means to an end or just quirks by example and do not necessarily fascism make.
When the far left calls Trumpists fascist they are generally referring to the far right's current objective of overruling elections and installing a theocratic theocracy under Trump where white males are in charge across the board.
The definition of fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. Patriotism and respect, while they may be against your ideology, have nothing to do with it.
Though that may be, it is in fact not how the word is used, and likely once the concept was pressed to the fore and came into relevance beyond the pale of the esoteric, never more was used with that definition in mind.
No, "a strong man" makes fascism. This happens when the rest of the men are weak, so they seek a strong leader to make up for their own weakness. Strong men don't follow a fascist leader; strong men can't be led like that. It's weak men who are the fertile ground for fascism, not strong men.
If you find yourself in good times, then the key is to make them harder for yourself. Self sabotage by being an outspoken iconoclast, and be hated by everyone! Whee!
This is utter nonsense. Strong men make bad times, as anyone who's lived under a strongman can tell you, and strongman regimes are extremely weak in terms of human development, technological progress, and military power, as evidenced by the utter failures of North Korea and Nazi Germany and the USSR. Whining about how they did some notable things is missing the point: They couldn't sustain, they had no staying power, they achieved some victories and then either got pounded into nothing or stagnated while the rest of the world moved on.
You can see in modern Russia what decades of strongman rule, first in the USSR and then under Putin, looks like: Idiot conscripts hyped up on moronic propaganda getting blasted by an actual military fielded by a so-called "decadent" Western nation, with their ships being sunk by land-based weapons (and if you don't get why that's pathetic, you're not worth talking to) and their economy being destroyed by those "decadent" nations deciding to not buy from them anymore.
Strongmen create good times? Briefly, maybe, but get out before the piper demands to be paid, if anyone will have you.
I mean, even in your own post, you spell strong man different from strongman. Here’s a definition of the word strong for you: “possessing skills and qualities that create a likelihood of success.” Obviously this meaning is divorced from the definition of strongman you provide, so why be obtuse about it?
There are places that have been great to live for multiple generations, and places that have been troubled for just as long, I don't think this model has much predictive power.
Perhaps the language has evolved to the point that the work needs some translation. Because it strikes me as vague enough to be harmful with folks like Putin aspiring to embody "strong men".
The point is I was trying to be neutral. Because depending on who you ask Putin is the definition of true "strong men" or he's a tyrant desecrating the phrase.
I'm saying that right-wing authoritarians often use it as an attack on people they deem as not traditionally masculine, despite the original intention. It's used frequently enough that some people might mistake association.
Search for this saying on twitter, for example. It's been co-opted as fascist propaganda.
Good point. Wait, no I disagree and I think history probably does as well. If you'd like to engage in some unmitigated pedantry regarding this topic, check out https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... which refers to this exact cycle.
The post specifically calls out the saying as “the modern version of this idea has deep roots in Romanticism (c. 1800-1850), a reaction against the reason of the Enlightenment – which makes it more than a touch ironic that this brain-dead meme is so frequently presented as clear logic.”
Strange because I've always seen the saurdukhar/fremen as a literary interpretation of a real aspect of human nature - the ability (of some) to perserverve and excel in stressful/difficult situations.
Some real life examples I've pointed too are the ghurkas in WW2 or Russian hackers.
The "Defining a generation" section is fairly short and describes the theory, and the "Timing of generations and turnings" section maps the theory onto the past ~500 years.
(Edit: got the indentation wrong, I thought the comment I was replying to was on the quote, not the "it's BS" reply. I don't think this is BS, at least not completely.)
The quote is similar to "what does not kills you makes you stronger", easily disproven by polio. [For the nitpickers: I know, the statement depends on the context]
But let's move on: what do you mean with "strong men"?
If you mean some sociopath/callous/ruthless emperor or dictator capable of starting massive wars - it hardly constitute creating good times.
If you mean men that are successful in current society... then very very few billionaires came from a childhood of hardship and poverty.
If you mean men that are capable of taking good decisions while facing difficulties and the stakes are high... then you are describing good education and good mental health, which are does in now way comes from "hard times".
All modern pedagogy and psychology sciences indicate that hardships create a lot of broken people and a few hardened narcissists.
If you mean that affluent and decadent societies become self absorbed and weaken as a whole - then I would tend to agree... but the term "strong men" would be profoundly misleading.
> All modern pedagogy and psychology sciences indicate that hardships create a lot of broken people and a few hardened narcissists.
Really depends on who you ask in the field of psychology. There have been several perspectives contrary to what suggest (e.g., humanistic psychology, positive psychology, post traumatic growth, etc) and I don’t agree that “all modern pedagogy and psychology sciences” suggests that hardships yield nothing but broken people and narcissists.
However, I generally agree with the idea that sayings like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” are a bit silly (they ignore the fact that what doesn’t kill you can severely weaken you for life).
I just don’t think it’s particularly helpful to take things to the other extreme either.
Makes sense. Strength is useless during peace times, so strong men find themselves out of a job with nothing to channel their strength into. "Weakness" which in this case means classically feminine traits are useless during war times but are far preferred during peace times.
We don't need strong men during good times and we don't need weak men during bad times.
Although now we are in neither a good nor bad time. What kind of men do we need?
Virtue is not what survives hard times, it's grit and brutality. Raw strength. Morals and virtues are what arise during good times once we've secured survival.
I'd argue that virtue is a strong survival trait, and vice is a sign of weakness. But we may be considering different things, different aspects of life.
For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.
You mean Ukraine? I would hardly say that the current situation threatens the post-ww2 peace. Compare now to ww2 and the differences are huge. ww2 claimed vastly more lives, in addition to Stalin and Hitler.
> Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt.
I think the concern at hand (at least in the US) is that we’re on the eve of that fall or revolt, and whatever is born out of that, for good or ill, probably means a couple of really hard decades.
I understand taking historical perspective, but I'm not a fan of complete equanimity about change. Lots of bad stuff is "happening all the time", like murder and cancer. It'd be nice to acknowledge when the things that are happening seem to be good or bad.
Do you think there can't be any civilizations in the universe which exist indefinitely? For the past millions or even billions of years? If humans get past the next couple of centuries and start spreading out into the solar system and possibly beyond, what would cause us to have a last generation?
That's so far away that "indefinitely" applies. If I told you could live until there was no more usable energy left in space, would you worry about not being immortal?
This gets straight into realms of like eschatology and the sources of and constraints on life, areas in which I hold deeply unpopular beliefs compared to the norm here.
The most neutral way I can phrase this is that I think life is a planetary expression, more or less fundamentally inseparable from the planet on which it emerges. We may eventually be able to break those bonds but I don't think we're anywhere near as close to that as we think we are, nor do I think we should even try.
I can't see that there's a moral way for people exit the solar system boundary out "into the stars." No one making that choice can arrive there, or even experience an appreciable part of the trip in one life. It's committing generations to be born, live and die for no purpose except to exist and to breed for some future goal of some past people. I believe this to be wicked.
People have always migrated into the unknown in the hope of something better for the people who will call them ancestors. But they've also always been able to make certain promises: that the sun will shine on them as it does on us, that crops will grow even if they aren't the crops we know, that the air is safe to breathe, that god will hear them there. Some of those people have been wrong about some of those things, but they always had good reason to trust in them.
We don't have reason to believe any of that about anywhere other than here. It's possible to imagine a future so grim that the best chance for our offspring is for us to force them to risk these unknowns. It's our responsibility to prevent that choice being necessary.
We can imagine things that could change this calculation. FTL, centuries-long human cryogenics, cross-lightyear microbiology. These are fantasies. If these powers are ever in anyone's grasp, that people will be fundamentally different from what we are, even if they came from us. I don't know what will be right for them and I have no claims on what they do.
Focusing on those far off fantasies of another people is a failure to appreciate our place here, the cosmic gift we've been given with our solar system. It is an understandable weakness but we should fight it. We have enough future in front of us as ourselves, we should leave the unrecognizable far depths of it to the unrecognizable people who will inhabit it.
Highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora, an exploration of precisely these concepts written in the fascinating perspective of a generation ship's AI instructed to narrate its journey.
The idea of going multiplanetary is not to abandon Earth out of necessity, but out of precaution. When you make a backup of your hard disk, it's usually not because you intend to go use your other one for target practice. Waiting to leave Earth when problems become clearly insurmountable is akin to waiting to backup your HDD until you notice it's failing. Indeed the very first thing we should start doing once we begin colonizing our second planet is planning to colonize the third.
There are countless ways human civilization, if not the human species, can come to a rather abrupt end: supervolcano explosion blotting out the sky, directed gamma ray burst destroying the atmosphere ( hypothesized as one of the reasons for the great ordovician extinction ), comet impact acting similar to the supervolcano, random evolution creating a supervirus, and so on. And the countless ways we might manage to kill ourselves go without saying: nuclear war, nukes, deploying weaponized viruses, even far more innocuous things like fertility < 2.5 for too long.
Many of these causes can, have, and will happen abruptly.
Human lives aren't data to be stored against future need. These "backups" aren't redundant; they will have worth, and demands, and dreams, and rights of their own. Are we adequately accounting for that when we imagine this interstellar future? Are we able to meet our responsibility to them with the dignity they deserve? I strongly do not think we are.
It's chilling but correct that so much of the language around this concept talks of colonies, because that is what we're discussing. Other lives, kept far away, for some benefit to ourselves, but not to them.
Until we can present a plausible vision for "the good life" in space, away from the earth that birthed us, we should not be pursuing this goal. If we end then so be it. We have many other means to reduce that possibility, much more accessible, that we're refusing to use right now. Let's pick up that shovel and see how far we can get first.
I don't necessarily agree with giraffe_lady, but I can see the argument where leaving the planet fundamentally changes what we currently consider "human" society to a point where it no longer can be a considered a continuation of the general earthly society. Evolution maybe, but less star trek and more belters from the expanse but taken to an absolutely extreme extent. Maybe closer to something like Seven Eves.
There definitely can be human civilizations that last indefinitely, so long as we stop keeping all our eggs in one basket, planet-wise.
Once we get humans living far enough apart that information about pandemics travels faster than pandemics do, then we should be largely invincible, barring suicide from ennui.
The larger our sub-galactic civilization, the more resilient it becomes to things like total war, total political revolution, etc.
It's really hard to be a galactic emperor at multi light-year distances. By the time you wipe out half the population of the empire, the other half will have doubled.
It's also easily conceivable that in less than 100 decades from now, global unrest or war will make us regress 100 decades. Climate change in particular is going to cause a lot of problems with feeding people.
Maybe so, but that would be straying from the point.
GP said "there can't be any human civilizations that last indefinitely" and in response I gave an easily conceivable version of how human civilizations can last indefinitely.
But what you've posted is science fiction, in contrast there have been a number of historical civilization collapses. Something that's easily conceivable in the mind isn't necessarily practical or going to happen.
It's been over 50 years since humans last set foot on the moon. While there's hope that man will land on the moon again by 2025, success is not assured, and a catastrophic accident could set manned space missions back by decades.
Yes, we might collapse and never recover, but the universe is a really big place, so there might be civilizations which avoid that. And if they did, then maybe we can also.
The fact that no one has figured it out in over 13 billion years kinda suggests not, doesn't it? That's pretty much the Fermi Paradox, and perhaps the answer.
The psychological tension that is inherent to capitalism (indefinite exponential growth is required, unbounded exponential growth is impossible) requires that the system be under plausible existential threat at all times.
So what can we say? Situation Normal - all effed up!
Enjoy this phenomenon called life. You only get one.