Growing disparities in wealth, a housing and gas crisis, transhumanism galloping over the horizon, heroized incivility, and the constant threat of viruses, the "cures" for which may be worse than the diseases. Global politics feels eerily apocalyptic these days and, in our own little worlds, many of us are so lost, so unmoored from the comforts of our pre-pandemic lives, that we don't know which end is up or what the future will hold. Investigative journalist Trish Wood recently wrote that we are living the fall of Rome (though it's being pushed on us as a virtue).

I wonder, are we falling as Rome did? Is it possible that our civilization is on the verge of collapse? Not imminent collapse, perhaps, but are we taking the initial steps that civilizations before ours took before their eventual downfalls? Will we suffer the fates of the Indus, the Vikings, the Mayans, and the failed dynasties of China?

As a philosopher, I need first to understand what we mean by "civilization" and what it would mean for that thing to collapse.

This is a significant conceptual hurdle. "Civilization" (from the Latin civitas, meaning a body of people) was first used by anthropologists to refer to a "society made up of cities" (Mycenae's Pylos, Thebes, and Sparta, for example). Ancient civilizations were typically non-nomadic settlements with concentrated complexes of persons who divided labor. They had monumental architecture, hierarchical class structures, and significant technological and cultural developments.