The spectre of decline is a seductive narrative. How easily nostalgic laments find their own straplines: late capitalism; the eclipse of the West; the collapse of public discourse; the atomisation of society; the impoverishment of the public square; and, as a niche addition, I can’t resist including the downward trajectory of Test cricket. Perhaps the narrative arc of societal decline is weirdly in step with the individual ageing process, and we find a perverse personal consolation in believing that the world, or our framing of the world, has also peaked.
Even allowing for that tendency, we seem particularly convinced about decline today. Every discipline has its theory about why – economists, for example, tell us that a generation will be miserable if it feels poorer than its parents’ demographic. But I wonder if there is something here more fundamental than money. The privileges that are supposed to make us fulfilled and happy (such as leisure and choice) can be seen as reversing back into themselves. If modern capitalism gives you the time and freedom to become addicted to vapid and ephemeral digital technology, for example, then humanity becomes further detached from the most important anchor of all: the conviction that something of lasting value will be left behind. Decline takes many forms, and perhaps we are well tuned to understanding the impoverishment of grand ambition.
It’s an opportune moment for the writer and historian Johan Norberg to choose seven golden ages and interweave their rise and fall into a history of human progress: Athens, Rome, the Abbasid caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic, and the Anglosphere. The authorial challenge is bringing it all together. And yet this highlights reel of world history won me over.
As with any well-edited montage, we certainly know what side we’re on. “History casts long shadows,” Norberg concludes, “but also light.” And it is light, in his history, that more often has the last word. The heroic threads are established at the outset and constantly remain in focus: innovation, openness, liberty, commerce, learning, assimilation, enquiry. You always get the point, sometimes a little too bluntly. After introducing classical Greek drama, Norberg adds: “Netflix would not have been the same without it.” Is he exemplifying or parodying the popular historian’s trait of linking everything to the here and now? But if Peak Human is the kind of muscular broad-brush storytelling that academic historians look down on, it is engaging and persuasive.
Peak civilisations, of course, are portrayed as constantly in conflict with dark-age duds. First up on the wrong side of history are the Spartans, who Norberg gives such a mauling that you begin to feel sorry for them. Not only did the Spartans leave us “no literature, no poetry, no art, no architecture and no innovative body of thought”, but Norberg then adds the sucker punch that they weren’t even any good at fighting. The Spartans, he concludes, “are the most overrated warriors in ancient history; they just had very good PR”.
Step forward the Athenians, who run the first leg in the civilised relay race. “Only a regime as open, innovative, energetic, pragmatic and meritocratic as democracy,” we are told, “could have followed the policy that won at Salamis.” The book’s pattern is set, with each great golden age explained in the style of a business journalist charting the development of a superstar company. Military victories gave the Athenians “proof of concept”, so they “doubled down on democracy and trade”.
The sleight of hand required by any episodic world history is navigating the leap from one chapter to the next. Getting from ancient Greece to classical Rome, however, probably didn’t cost Norberg much sleep, especially as Horace gave him the line “Greece, the captive, took her savage victor captive”. In Norberg’s summary of Rome’s “melting pot of marble”, the definitive engine of greatness was the empire’s strategic tolerance. “The Romans did not embrace tolerance because they were enlightened,” Norberg concludes, “they did it in order to beat everybody else and take their stuff. They wanted to integrate people to benefit from them.”
After pointedly lingering on the creative and economic hiatus after the fall of Rome – “pitch dark” despite “the heroic efforts of revisionist historians” – Norberg picks up the story in the 9th-century Abbasid caliphate. In AD 892, there were more than a hundred bookshops in Baghdad, which had become the new cradle of learning and free markets. Baghdad emerges as a nexus of social mobility and commerce, with successful businessmen achieving not only wealth but also corresponding status. So this Islamic “bourgeois revolution” extended beyond the marketplaces of Athens and Rome, where commerce had still been seen as a necessary evil. (You won’t be surprised that Norberg follows his Cato Institute colleague Deirdre McCloskey in recasting “bourgeois” as an explicitly positive concept.)
Norberg’s next leaping off point for laissez-faire liberalism is Song dynasty China, where a 12th-century poet observed that “great ships sail only for profit”. Marauding Mongol hordes rudely interrupt the flow of progress by shrinking the Song state. But with a little help from Marco Polo – who described the old Song capital of Hangzhou as “the greatest city which may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies oneself in paradise” – the flame is kept alive in a new cultural and trading crossroads: Venice. When the pope complained to the Venetians about their economic relationship with Syria and Egypt, they replied: “We are Venetians first, only then Christians.” Open, secular, undogmatic: the book’s firmly established heroic template.
The Netherlands, despite its remarkable military exploits in the Eighty Years’ War, is revealed as “a bourgeois society that wanted to make money not war”. And the same openness is found at the heart of Britain’s 18th-century ascent. Norberg cites Voltaire’s description: “Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.” Finally, Norberg reaches America, completing his distilled histories of elevated cultures, lovingly interleaved into a unified history of enlightened humanity.
Although Norberg never hides his strong ideological convictions, he often finds room for the counter-view, while also being unfailingly courteous in crediting other historians. Though it’s unclear whether the book is meant as an introduction or a refresher, I ended up thinking it didn’t matter either way: one would have to be an incredibly erudite reader not to find anything new and surprising at every turn, no matter how familiar the terrain. Books such as this are feats of engineering, rather than style or originality. Can the narrative structure survive the conceptual weight it is being asked to support? That’s where the intelligence of Norberg’s book is found.
Norberg frequently revisits a familiar objection to his thesis: slavery. To what extent did that inhuman and unpaid debt enable these so-called golden ages? Very significantly. But Norberg argues that slavery was seldom the definitive causal factor in the growth stories he admires. Other societies indulged slavery, Norberg stresses, not only the celebrated and economically successful ones.
A similar question has obvious resonance in our own context today. Hyper-globalisation delivers cheap fast-fashion clothing, for example, churned out by child-labour sweatshops in Asia. When growth is driven by wilful blindness, are “rise” and “decline” appropriate concepts? The approved stamp “artisan” might be an overused cliché today, but you can see what the concept is being defined against.
I finished Peak Human unsure about something even more fundamental: the influence of mass digital information on our subliminal attitude towards knowledge. In Norberg’s sunny enlightenment world-view, the exchange of information is the engine of progress. Assimilators thrive and the curious win.
But the digital age – in which information is exchanged without any friction – now overwhelms us. We often feel defeated by information rather than excited by it. TS Eliot’s aphorism feels truer than ever: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
If a part of us wants to switch off – literally and metaphorically – we are not necessarily turning away from the kind of creative human interaction that Norberg celebrates, but instead trying to salvage a more textured human experience. Today’s ceaseless exchange of mostly meaningless pixelated “content” seems to be undermining our higher instincts rather than supporting them.
AI and the manipulation of digital information adds an extra layer of underlying disquiet. Our brilliance at manufacturing information is becoming inversely correlated with our confidence that the information is trustworthy. For all our material advances, there’s a feeling of being tossed around on digital seas that we don’t quite understand. For that reason, Peak Human feels incomplete. Norberg’s spectrum charts “peak-human” relative to “declining-human”. But aren’t we facing an even bigger question today: “actually human” vs “non-human”?
When the sizeable chunk of human experience is reduced to watching rotating adverts on an iPhone, what Norberg wrote about Sparta leaving “no literature, no poetry, no art, no architecture” becomes just as applicable to our vacant technological age as it was to Sparta’s closed and military one. Norberg might counter: new technology is always unsettling but rarely turns out frightening. I’d say: this time could be different. We’ll see.
It’s only a hunch, but I think this underlying anxiety about our place in the world is seeping into political restiveness. The paradox, of course, is that intellectual loss of confidence and bewilderment manifests itself as a yearning for childlike simplicity. “Hard times create strongmen,” Norberg warns us near the end of the book, “and strongmen create even harder times.” He’s writing about the decline of the Dutch Republic, and the prince of Orange. But of course the shadow of America’s own prince of orange, Donald Trump, falls across the page. The next peak for humanity feels distant.
Ed Smith is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities
Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages
Johan Norberg
Atlantic, 512pp, £22
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[See also: Dickens’s Britain is still with us]
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This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap