In the first episode of Civilisation (1969), “The Skin of our Teeth,” Kenneth Clark takes on why the Roman Empire fell:

“However complex and solid it seems, civilisation is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague… fears that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then boredom. The feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity…”

In the book, Clark switches the word “boredom” to “exhaustion,” which is interesting to me. He continues:

“[Civilisation] requires confidence — confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers… People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.

Jeez, alright K.C., so where does that leave the individual?

Here’s what Jungian James Hollis has to say in his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while . . . sometimes for a long while, sometimes a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion.

Hollis says that this daily confrontation “obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression.”

Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.

To quote Kenneth Clark in the last episode of Civilisation, “One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.”

(I’m not quite sure yet if/how Hunter S. Thompson’s “fear and loathing” fits in, or Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” which comes from Philippians 2:12: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”)