FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA
Following the onset
of the Renaissance, there was modest security in national boundaries.
Growing inventions eventually aided ordinary life. Acquiring goods
became important, especially because men lived lives more secure
than ever before. Still they argued for and demanded more goods
and possessions to satisfy a need for power which was translated
into ownership. Western expansion (two new continents discovered)
fired selfishness and, by distance more than anything else, insulated
greedy humans from their greedy neighbors, providing safety for
more education and more invention.
Technology improved and brought once distant nations close together. Old human habits took hold and enlisted technology to protect their assets and maybe to confiscate those of their neighbors. With that blossoming technology we have had to live through two world wars, a host of "police actions," and the refinement of power culminating in the ability of obliterating ourselves which we have so far kept from doing.
Not so, Miller's Earth
The third part of
the novel is like our time. Nations of the earth have risen again,
maintaining the political relationships we know them to have now.
Three major powers control the world and are as technological
as we are. The balance between them is tenuous; each stretches
the patience of the others. Instead of the awkward truce of our
Cold War, countries two millennia in the future are openly violating
peace treaties; war is immanent; and then it 
explodes
full scale. The Abbey of Saint Leibowitz becomes a shelter until
it gets bombed: the last refuge of civilization wiped out
once again and centuries later. Brother Armbruster is proved correct.
Miller never uses the words 'nuclear' or 'atomic'; he does use
radiation and its fatal effects. Still, Miller offers a small
chance of survival to humanity with hope that the civilization-technology-destruction
cycle might be broken.
Reading segments: