Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. It's mind-blowing. In the case of the Black Death in the 14th century, it's pretty clear. It kills 50, 60% of the population in entire regions. We don't necessarily think that it killed 50, 60% of the whole continent, although that's actually not impossible. But even the fact that it's killing 50% of the people in cities, in provinces, in countries, is just beyond the damage that other plagues do. Right. And do you think that were it not for this 60% mortality event plus the fact that we haven't even discussed yet, this super severe cold snap, do you think that the Roman Empire might have otherwise just kept going? You discuss there were these two previous other big pandemics. The empire still survives. I think Will Durant had this quote that the Roman Empire fell for longer than most empires have lasted. Do you think it'd be similar to China maybe? Maybe a dynasty collapses, but fundamentally, the same sort of cohesive nation reemerges? Yeah. That's a great comparison. Not just decline and fall of dynasties, but also geographic changes in the configuration, that parts get added and parts get cleaved off, but you still kind of think of it as fundamental continuity in the core. That to me is a very plausible counterfactual. Justinian, the emperor in the 540s—he reigns from the 520s to the 560s—he’s on a path of success. He's retaken Africa. He's mostly retaken Italy when the plague hits. To me, a very plausible counterfactual is that a more or less Mediterranean core of the Roman Empire could have survived east and west. It does sort of survive in the east, but even including really all of Italy, Africa, and probably Spain. That would have been a very reasonable outcome of the sixth century if you hadn't had this kind of random shock. The Roman Empire would keep going. Remember, it does, and it calls itself the Roman Empire until the 15th century. But we would think of it as maybe more the Roman Empire if it still included the western Mediterranean and was this major, powerful, urbanized polity that resists invasion from the southeast, as happens in the seventh century. So the answer is yes, I think that the Roman Empire absolutely could have had another turn as the thing we kind of mean when we say the Roman Empire: this pan-Mediterranean, powerful, urbanized empire.…

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