Provincial life continued much as it had in districts like Cornwall. Frontier villas remained profitable for a time, commerce didn't just disappear when Odoacer took Rome in the 400s. Even after violence done upon them, by man or by nature, civilization doesn't need to just stop either - it can continue - but at some time Western Roman civilization collapsed.
As a rule, we don't just point to a siege or genocide (like Carthage) and say it all stopped then, something exhausts a civilization, culminating in slow death. I think we remember dates and timelines because they can be tools for us to concentrate study, but they're only tools not rules; arbitrary but purpose-made for our sake, looking back.
Going back to the villas of Roman Britain, archaeology of the past four decades has really shown us that civilized life continued, yet it was fragile enough to be blown away in the Dark Age. However, to the frontier aristocracy, Ravenna and Rome's falls might have been a great pity and nothing more.
Is it too late to be asking how to save Western Civilization? Are we in that period where our civilization has already collapsed from exhaustion; when commerce may continue "unimpeded" thanks to where we are technologically, but civilization itself has essentially ended or is idling by?
(P.S. I don't think Western Civilization has ended, but that civilization, expressed in Whiggism and developed into ideologies of the 19th century, has horribly failed mankind.)
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