They talk about the Western Roman Empire "going out with a whimper," or "delegating itself to death," or whatever other useful phrase is at hand to describe its anticlimactic end. Which is true in a very provincial and strict sense, where you see the gradual delegating out of the central authority's functions to Germanic chieftains, who gradually assumed control of their respective domains, and then you have the symbolic final act of the strikingly-named Romulus Augustulus being deposed by Odoacer. But then if you look at the processes that led to that point, and then the processes that carried on after that point, you see something altogether different: at the very least, you can make out a little more than a whimper.
The entire arc from the beginnings of Rome to the rise of the modern world is an incredible thing to behold as a continuous object, but what I had in mind at the moment is the thousand years or so after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The entirety of that period itself is impossible to get into here, so I wanted to briefly sketch out the Viking Age within that period to give a general impression of what I'm getting at here.
To hook this analysis up with the previous illustration of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, we'll start with the Germanic efforts to reanimate the Western empire after its fall. It was the Franks that really started to pull away from the other tribes, allying with the church and centralizing power in Western Europe. Through the Merovingian and then the Carolingian dynasties, culminating with the peerless reign of Charlemagne, the Franks were able to temporarily re-establish a continuous empire in the early Middle Ages, which subsequently flamed out with the death of Charlemagne, plunging the region once again into chaos.
But it was also Charlemagne that helped to cultivate the conditions for that chaos, relentlessly and aggressively Christianizing the remaining Pagan tribes, such as with his genocidal campaigns against the Saxons, in a bid to weld the "warring states" into a new empire. Also in conflict with the Saxons were the Vikings - thought to be originally from Scandinavia, though their exact origins remain murky - who would nevertheless witness the violence meted out to their rivals, the Saxons, by the Franks in a war of annihilation, which would have a profound effect on the Vikings' own geopolitical outlook.
Frequently enough, Christian depictions of the Vikings - depictions which are still revived today, but which have also undergone extensive revision and reimagination - unsurprisingly painted them as a fearsome scourge, descending upon the settled societies to raze their settlements and sow chaos. Perhaps there was some truth to this, as the Viking Age saw the Viking economy as chiefly a raider society, in which armed bands moving about on longships in between planting seasons would raid societies throughout Northern and Western Europe. But then there were historical accounts in which the Vikings themselves would present as under siege and in danger of extinction.
The reasons for the Vikings' increasingly explosive and expansive conquests are complex and speculative. Climate change and the collapse in old trade routes after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire are good reasons advanced, as well as the demand for women in the competitive Viking culture. Finally, the aforementioned Christian war of annihilation against the pagan peoples - and the progressive Christian incursion into Scandinavia - was said to have intensified the Viking instincts of self-preservation, and eventually they would descend, exploiting the increasingly fragmenting Western European region after the disintegration of Charlemagne's kingdom. The subsequent raids, growing larger as resources accumulated in the form of booty, would be met with ever fiercer resistance, and eventually the Vikings would turn to colonization and then consolidation into larger, more hierarchical kingdoms of their own.
Allow me a quick digression. There has been a lot of talk going around about William Gibson's Jackpot concept, which is kind of a funny concept all in all. Because in colloquial speak, the idea of a "jackpot" still exists today as a really lucky break, a much less likely event in which you basically "win it all." And then Gibson inverts that idea into a singular event that takes place in which you basically lose it all. To Gibson's credit though, his Jackpot concept is also realistic, it being a long, continuous, multifaceted, and drawn out process.
And if you take a look at the gambling concept of the jackpot and then at Gibson's apocalyptic inversion, there is actually an ingenious unifying thread between the two that is quite illuminating. In the gambling concept, you have a set of poker players advancing their money to a common pool, the "pot," and to simplify the rules a bit, the winner had to have three of a kind, jacks or better, who would then take away the pot. If no player could match this standard, everyone would go onto the next turn and the pot would be raised. Statistically someone would eventually win, and the win would get bigger and bigger the longer the game went on. That big win took on the name "jackpot," which is a form that shows itself in contemporary gambling constructs like online gaming and lottery systems.
So for Gibson's Jackpot, we turn this concept inside out, while retaining that same statistical thread. You have multiple cascading crises growing in the world system, on multiple environmental, political, economic, and cultural levels. As long as the system continues on its cyclical turnover, it retains its particular form and function, staving off disaster, while the existing crises spread further and deepen, until disaster finally arrives by statistical inevitability, and cascades through the system, tearing it apart.
In relating to the Viking era however, I'd like to give the Jackpot concept a slight twist. Thinking of the turbulence ensuing during that era, the concept popped into my head in light of a pinball variation: that unlikely event in which the pinball hits the first bumper at just the right angle at just the right speed, and then goes bouncing all throughout the course, lighting up every bumper in a cascade, resulting in a "jackpot" of light and sound and accumulated points.
All of that mass of desperate humanity, flowing to where it could and then crashing into itself where it couldn't, doing violence to itself as it moved throughout Western and Northern Europe, splintering off and seeking out security and safety and wealth and freedom, or else putting down roots and firming up stances to sprout new kingdoms in seeking out stability.
After a while, conditions were right for the violence to continuously circulate and get more and more spectacular. The chaos and destruction ensuing from these masses of peoples colliding into each other would set more and more people and resources free, and accelerate those tendencies of warmaking and conquest, setting into motion greater waves of warring humanity, causing more destruction and chaos to set more people and resources free, and so on.
You could see why the great Christian nations would become so vicious and totalitarian, as much in constant war against themselves as with themselves and with rival powers, baldly contradicting their theologies of peace and love, as embodied in the symbolism of the blunt weapon of the mace, wielded by the warrior priest so as not to spill blood. A symbolism which although is historically dubious, is quite direct and poetic in its messaging.
And eventually those Christian nations would centralize and concentrate power and tamp down on the warring warlords, exporting their explosive and expansive violence outward to subdue the rest of the earth.
The lesson here? No matter how hateful the dam, beware when it breaks. But then to instantiate a meta-lesson from that, perhaps it is the particular building of the particular dam that is the problem in the first place? And then there are often manifold reasons, many of them arising out of desperation, for building the various dams in the way they are built. Ah, there is no lesson here.
