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Review date: 17/12/2025
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Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp is a number of books in one: a way of telling thousands of years of human history; and a survey of existential risks facing humanity. On the very first page he defines human history as a power struggle, and power structures can fall apart (how has the Austro-Hungarian Empire been doing lately?!). So can societies, and economies, collapse: “Societal collapse has shaped our history and will determine our future,” he writes bleakly. That the sub-title of his book includes ‘history and future’ shows that the author seeks also to offer some directions; to avoid such fates. Again from early on Kemp offers ‘Goliath’ as another word for the sunnier ‘civilisation’. Whereas we associate civilisation with culture and civility, Goliath stands for slavery and the dropping of atom bombs, ‘top-down obedience enforced through the threat of violence’. Goliath, then, is ‘a collection of dominance hierarchies organised primarily through authority and violence’.
A trouble for Kemp’s argument is that control of people and what they produce can be for good; the Irish potato famine of the 1840s was preventable, thanks to surpluses of food and better transport connections. You cannot really disassociate yourself from Goliath, any more than you can reasonably refuse to pay your TV licence because you don’t like all the repeats on BBC TV.
A trouble for all of us, as Kemp points out early on is that ‘Goliath societies’ as traced by Kemp from the Bronze Age may be sizable and imposing, and rely on violence, but they ‘can often be surprisingly fragile’ (page 5). Collapse can be unforeseen, and quick (page 6): “We may be today living through a collapse that is for now slow and imperceptible.”
Some readers may see irony in the fact that Luke Kemp is a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), at the University of Cambridge, one of the longest-running institutions in Britain, and at the centre of an economically bustling region – indeed, arguably one of only two in the country (the other around London). If it has social problems, they are because the area is richer than the rest of the country (hence the resentment of places that feel ‘left behind’) or because the Cambridge economy is over-heating and doesn’t have enough reasonably-priced, or any, housing. Collapse, Kemp admits, ‘is partly in the eye of the beholder’ (page 7).
To sum up, our ‘fragile future’ as Kemp sets out is well known; the threat of nuclear war, climate change, or disease; and ‘new, more hypothetical technological terrors’. He offers the idea of ‘Silicon Goliath’ where algorithms are in charge and AI treats humans like we treat pet cats and dogs (or terminates us). Or, some combination of those could scupper us. As Kemp admits, ‘apocalyptic angst is not new’ (page 9). Whereas some say that the way to solve problems caused by AI is to use AI, or to stockpile tinned food and guns in a bunker in New Zealand, Kemp states that we need to reverse the root causes of global risk.
Where Kemp’s argument may falter is that – to state the obvious – we don’t know the future yet. Other thinkers, such as Marx and HG Wells, have not fared well with their predictions. Eighty years ago arguably the most famed historian in the English-speaking world was Arnold Toynbee, who like Kemp ranged over thousands of years. Now you don’t even see his best-selling volumes on charity bookshop shelves, because the lessons or analysis he drew from the past have become discredited. As Kemp acknowledges, others have trodden his path, such as Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.
You might, then, choose another general history of the last 5000 years to Kemp’s parts one and two, and (if you’re a security or risk and resilience professional) skip to part three, ‘the prospect of a modern global societal collapse’.
Of particular interest is his definition of resilience as ‘the flipside of collapse’ (page 292). Two comparisons from the natural world are trees that bend but do not break in a hurricane; or grass that keeps growing after it’s trodden on. Societies, Kemp adds, can go beyond resilience and be ‘anti-fragile’: ‘they can gain and improve from disturbances and disorder’, just as if you lift heavy objects your muscles become stronger. But is a complicated society made up of people truly comparable with the biology of the human body? Kemp is no more able to answer this than other thinkers from Thomas Hobbes on. He goes on to write of ‘cultural evolution’, how ‘people develop technologies and cultural practices that allow them to survive and prosper in hostile environments’, and gives the indigenous Australians and Inuit as examples. The catch, which Kemp does not go on to, is that such aboriginal people have not coped at all well with the modern world, as anyone who stays in Alice Springs can tell you. Eye of the beholder indeed.
What can we do? Resist, in a word. Vote, for one thing, Kemp concludes; ‘slaying Goalith’ is the title of his epilogue. Be democratic, whether in your workplace or nation. It’s a surprisingly anti-authority message for an academic who has entrusted his words to global publishing capitalism.
