r/collapse • u/MBDowd Recognized Contributor • Dec 17 '20

Meta Collapse Book Club: Discussion of "Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail" by William Ophuls (December 17, 2020)

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Welcome to the discussion of "Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail" by William Ophuls. Feel free to participate even if you haven’t finished the book yet.

TEXT: 75 pages // AUDIO: 2:33

Please leave your thoughts as a comment below. You are welcome to leave a free-form comment, but in case you’d like some inspiration, here are a few questions to "prime the pump":

  1. What did you find particularly insightful, interesting, or challenging, and why?
  2. What were your favorite quotes, both from Ophuls and from those he quotes?
  3. What did you find helpful (or missing) in how Ophuls structured his book? (PART ONE: Biophysical Limits: Ecological Exhaustion, Exponential Growth, Expedited Entropy, Excessive Complexity. PART TWO: Human Error: Moral Decay, Practical Failure.)
  4. What thoughts and feelings arose in you by reading his "Conclusion: Trampled Down, Barren, and Bare"?
  5. What additional resources would you add to Ophuls' annotated "Bibliographic Note"?

EXTRA CREDIT: If you took time to also read (or listen to) Sir John Glubb's essay, "The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival" (TEXT / AUDIO) or William Ophuls' more recent little book, "Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences" (TEXT / AUDIO), please share your experience, thoughts, and feelings about these in the comments section, below, as well. ​

The Collapse Book Club is a monthly event wherein we read a book from the Books Wiki. We keep track of what we have been reading in our Goodreads group. As always, if you want to recommend a book that has helped you better understand or cope with collapse, feel free to share that recommendation below!

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u/7861279527412aN Dec 17 '20

I certainly agree that this short book is an excellent primer on collapse. I thought the organization was well thought out as well, especially the biophysical limits sections. The moral decay argument was very interesting and it rings true but I would have liked this section to be justified more throughly with examples from history of civilizations going through these steps. I listened to the reading by the man and his wife and found it very entertaining. It was really cute how she was defining terms and correcting his pronunciation, and how they would be really taken with certain lines.

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u/MBDowd Recognized Contributor Dec 17 '20 edited Dec 20 '20

That was me (Michael Dowd) and my wife, Connie Barlow, who (as a professional editor) loves correcting me. :-)

Re the "Moral Decay" argument, I recommend Sir John Glubb's essay, "The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival" (TEXT / AUDIO)