Yesterday I read one of the oddest and least convincing pieces of civilizational doomsaying. The author is Jared Diamond–who also wrote the runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel–and it appears in the current issue of Harper’s (here’s the table of contents, but the article doesn’t appear to be online). It starts out in an appropriately gloomy way: “One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collaspe.” True enough, I suppose. Most of the article is a reasonable review of why scholars believe Mayan civilization fell apart 11 or 12 centuries ago: overpopulation, overfarming, drought, warfare, etc. It seems that just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for those poor folks in the Yucatan, who built such marvelous monuments in the jungle. (They’re definitely worth seeing; my wife and I went to Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and several other sites on our honeymoon.) Diamond, however, believes there are some pretty clear lessons for us in all this. “We do indeed differ from the Maya, but not in ways we might like: we have a much larger population, we have more potent destructive technology, and we face the risk of a worldwide rather than a local decline.” What’s more, we have “Enron” (mentioned twice in this survey of Mayan history) and “advocates of tax cuts for the rich.” I’m not going to be so hubristic as to say our own civilization won’t ever crumble, but I’m willing to bet that lowering marginal rates won’t ever be the cause. This is hysterical leftism at its finest–or worst, I should say.