Black Swans and Beijing’s Balderdash

To fill the idle hours of my state-imposed social isolation, I’ve been working through a pile of books, which is how I came across this from Ross Douthat in The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success explains:

Even if an educated futurist in Tenochtitlan in the years before Cortes had somehow imagined the possibility of a technologically proficient invader arriving from distant shores, given the state of knowledge at the time (on both sides of the Atlantic), nobody could have foreseen the world-historical role played by the armies of microbes that came with the conquistadores, devastating indigenous societies and preparing them to crumple before the military blows that followed.

The lesson of 1492 and its consequences isn’t that misgovernment and human sacrifice invite conquest and guarantee destruction. It’s that any civilizational order, decadent or otherwise, is sustainable only until the right black-swan development arrives, at which point it…