Concerning "Guns, Germs, and Steel ": Murray Gell-Mann is involved in some interesting research on general patterns of civilization. But his and Diamond's schemes are just about some general and indirect indicators, not about what the essence of "civilization" is. To get an idea of that, I am curious about instances where "civilization" went down quickly. This puts e.g. "Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941", and "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" on my desk. A very remarkable case is told about in Simone Weil's "L'agonie d'une civilisation". I scanned two essay by Zbigniew Herbert on decivilization from this - someone curious to get them? "The Dream of Scipio" by Ian Pears sketches (in typical french history-through-novels manner) a thrilling pattern of several critical moments of the last 1500 years of European history.