The big question for this segment is, how and why do human societies collapse? [MUSIC] Over the course of human history the collapse of societies has often taken the form of a slow decay, resolved by a sudden catastrophe. Yet Western modernity, as it evolved from the French and Industrial Revolutions, seemed to generate its own magic, defeating the forces that had once led societies to permanently collapse. Even if modern societies suffered breakdown, new forces of economic development and political reform, even revolution, could revive them. Modernity generated a process of creative destruction, offering a limitless future of progress. This segment gives a snapshot of creative destruction. Take it from the story of modern Germany, a nation born in war in 1871 and destroyed in 1945 as a consequence of another war. Germany experienced intense modernization leading to an intense collapse in just under 75 years. And then, gradually, Germany was born again. The philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the economist, Joseph Schumpeter, conjured with the term, creative destruction. Nietzsche felt it represented the world, and the unstable energy of modernity. Schumpeter believed that creative destruction could be harnessed as a force of progress. We face an unresolved question, is the process of creative destruction endlessly adaptable, capable of perennial cycles of obliteration and renewal, or is it a blind, relentless force that ultimately consumes its host modern human society. In the 1920s, modern progress seemed to revive Germany following its defeat in the first World War. The empire had gone. The Weimar Republic, democratic and modern, was born. The writer Joseph Roth, a prolific journalist and novelist was a poetic observer of the modernity reshaping Germany in the Weimar years. In 1924, Roth described the modern railway junction as the fantastic product of a futuristic force. The railway junction was a magnificent temple of technology open to the air. An iron landscape that distributed immense new forms of productive power along the train lines that crossed through it. Joseph Roth believed human beings should remake the world in the image of the railway junction. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat. Joseph Roth became a believer in creative destruction. The historian Aleida Assmann describes how modernity represented the triumph of a scientific objectivity that seemed to conquer time itself, harnessing time to the project of modern progress. In modernity time had acquired the shape of an arrow that runs irreversibly from the past into the future. The train system symbolized the unity of time and objective progress. That shot like an arrow into the future and his logic could not be questioned. Yet the imminent experience of the world is not objective. It is deeply rooted in our cultural heritage. And our hopes and our anxieties. In our fragile sense of identity that may seem strong, but is easily disturbed. By the mid 1920s, the legacy of war and economic crisis had fundamentally destabilized the German society. That Joseph Roth celebrated the railway junction in July 1924. Germany's social and economic life endured a traumatic breakdown induced by hyper inflation. A loaf of bread cost 200,000 million German Marks. Another traumatic breakdown haunted German society in the 1920s. Joseph Roth the first World War battlefields in 1926. Is a fresh pasture, covered the old killing grounds. Roth recalled the muddy wasteland created by modern industrial warfare. Roth warned that the pestilential stink of a shell outlives the devastation it wreaks. The artillery shell was another arrow the modernity sent into the future. It carried the pestilence of war, a thirst for revenge for Germany's humiliating defeat in 1918, and together with a post war economic crisis, bred Adolf Hitler's Nazism. Hitler promised to ease the anxiety of the German people. They would be shielded from the unstable nature of the modern world and are brutally homogenized regime were all forms of modernist culture. And anyone who did not conform to the Nazi racial ideal of Aryan purity was eliminated. Joseph Roth was expelled from Hitler's future. As a Jew, he was forced to flee Germany in 1933. The Germanic War God as he called it, that the Nazi regime seize command of the forces of modernity, resulting, Roth observed, in the technical apotheosis of the barbarians, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes. Technologies Roth noted, delivered to the regime by Germany's giant chemical and industrial corporations. Disillusioned and condemned to exile, Joseph Roth died in Paris in 1939, as Hitler's armies invaded Poland and unleashed the second World War. In Hitler's hands, modernity generated a hurricane of destruction. In the high energy acceleration of the Blitzkrieg and the death camps. Hitler lost control of the mayhem. From 1942 the allies opposed to Hitler concentrated their own forms of modern destruction on Germany. The allies bombed one German city after another with ever greater precision on refined methodologies on mass killing. By the time they bombed Dresden in February 1945, the allied bombers were masters of time, space, and technology. Masters of another arrow bearing relentlessly into the future. 25,000 people perished in the Dresden firestorm. Millions died in Hitler's holocaust. German society had utterly collapsed by 1945. In the decades that followed, Germany's collapse was hidden in restoration. Visit Dresden today and you might never know that the city had once been reduced to burning ruins. You might never know that from 1945 until 1990, Germany had fractured into two halves of a broken nation, divided by competing Cold War visions of modernity. One that privileged the market, the other that privileged the state. But each united in a faith in the promise of industrial and technological modernity. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The reunification of Germany in 1990 has perhaps fed a belief that even the most terrible forms of art annihilation can be overcome. The arrow of modernity still runs into the future, collapsed societies maybe revived. What in humans beings approve to death to transforming destruction into creation. If the arrows flied into the future not only represent progress but a potential for permanent loss. Stephen Hawking reminds us that we are governed by the arrow of time by the second law of thermodynamics. And that intelligent beings can exist only in the expanding phase of the universe. Does climate change represent a permanent force of contraction? A new phase, that intelligent beings on Earth can not endure. Born with the industrial revolution, climate change is one of the oldest products of the modern world. As global economic production accelerated across the 20th century, so too did climate change. Perhaps, like Joseph Roth, we must hope that technology will transform our circumstances and deliver human society from the consequences of our accelerating ambitions. [MUSIC]
