"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice"
About this Quote
A whole society, Durant implies, is basically a lease signed by earthquakes, droughts, and microbes. The bite of "geological consent" is that it demotes our proudest institutions to something contingent and physical. We like to imagine civilization as a moral achievement or a technological ratchet. Durant drags it back to bedrock: soil depth, river patterns, fault lines, climate stability. The phrasing borrows the language of bureaucracy and contracts - "consent", "subject to change without notice" - to mock our confidence in permanence. History, in this view, is not a steady march but a temporary clearance between disasters.
The intent is cautionary, but not sentimental. Durant is arguing against the comforting story that nations fall only because they become decadent or forget their values. Sometimes the ground literally shifts. Sometimes the harvest fails. Sometimes a plague arrives. The subtext is almost anti-heroic: leaders and laws matter, but they operate inside a fragile ecological envelope they don't control.
Context matters: Durant wrote as a historian who lived through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War - eras when "progress" looked reversible overnight. He also belonged to a generation steeped in the rise-and-fall model of civilizations, newly informed by modern geology and deep time. The line works because it collapses human timescales into nature's indifference, making "without notice" feel less like a joke and more like a verdict.
The intent is cautionary, but not sentimental. Durant is arguing against the comforting story that nations fall only because they become decadent or forget their values. Sometimes the ground literally shifts. Sometimes the harvest fails. Sometimes a plague arrives. The subtext is almost anti-heroic: leaders and laws matter, but they operate inside a fragile ecological envelope they don't control.
Context matters: Durant wrote as a historian who lived through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War - eras when "progress" looked reversible overnight. He also belonged to a generation steeped in the rise-and-fall model of civilizations, newly informed by modern geology and deep time. The line works because it collapses human timescales into nature's indifference, making "without notice" feel less like a joke and more like a verdict.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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