To Arthur Demarest, a real-life Indiana Jones who has spent decades sifting through the rubble of lost cultures, the West today looks a lot like the Mayan world of AD 750: a golden age that presaged the fall. “Civilizations don’t fade away,” the Vanderbilt archaeologist says. “They peak and then rapidly disintegrate”—growing too fast, consuming too much, drunk on their own grandeur. And in our hyperconnected world the end could come fast, as a collapse in one country or industry cascades into global disaster. To avoid that fate, Demarest says, we need to slow down, put survival above progress. It’s like the process of belaying in rock climbing: “You can skip it and climb faster, but at some point you’ll die.” The Mayans themselves stepped back from the brink around AD 300, he says, trading slash-and-burn agriculture for smaller, diversified farms. It meant lower yields and less wealth to support armies or build temples—but hey, they lasted another 600 years.
