Enjoy and feedback welcome!
Which brings me to my questions. One, what is "The West"? Would the French Revolution count as a civilization-wide failure? The Bronze Age collapse? Sea Peoples? The Long March? The Hellenic Era ending? Perhaps this is explained elsewhere, but some clarification would be helpful.
Two, it might be good to cover all of the "false positives" when it comes to predicting civilization collapse. It's been quite the cottage industry over the centuries. Romans were quite concerned with the lack of morals and corruption the Greeks brought them. Many believed that signaled the end of Rome. Why, some of the "new" Romans weren't even sleeping on the ground any more! They were using beds!
Three, and I apologize for so many queries, but "collapse" or "failure", or whatever you're using could also use a bit of definition. The Western Roman Empire collapsed and failed, that much is obvious. But just when that occurred is much less clear. People in Europe thought of themselves as Romans long after modern historians view Rome as being gone. I believe there are a couple of other examples of unclear failures, where the people involved in the failure couldn't see what was happening right in front of them, but none come to mind right away.
Good work. Look forward to seeing more of it!
1. I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
2. I would define failure as a near complete and permanent loss of control by a society over itself and its internal territory. So the Bronze Age Collapse would definitely qualify, as some of those societies never rose again. But under this definition the French Revolution and the Long March would not qualify. The conquest of Greece by Rome could count, but the re-emergence of Greece in the Byzantine Empire complicates things. Some see the latter as a different culture -- I would need to read more myself before coming to a view on this.
It's true that some thought of themselves Roman well into the 600s -- such as Gregory the Great, for instance. But they weren't in control anymore, so that would be a partial collapse under my definition (as the Eastern Roman Empire persisted)
I’ve noticed this too but I wasn’t sure if it was in my head/confirmation bias or an actual pattern. I wonder whether the Sunday Scaries could be to blame for the uptick in that sort of reading material.
These are very reasonable criticisms and I will take them into account.
These, I think, should be established as early as possible, and the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee presented afterwards, with points of similarity and difference with your own definitions highlighted.
Some minor points:
- Section 1.2 begins by discussing a crisis in creativity and the changing relationship between the elites and the masses. But then it switches to a list of "challenges" including aging and growing sovereign debt. This is rather jarring and needs to be reorganized.
- It's very surprising to read that Greek philosophers switched focus from political philosophy to individual virtue once the Macedonians and Romans invaded. All of Plato's dialogues that I've read are about individual virtue. Even the Republic is only fifty percent politics and the rest is about the soul. Aristotle too is very concerned with what the personal virtues are and how they can be cultivated.
[1] I realize Maslow's Hierarchy is not an accurate model, but close enough for the point I'm making.
Wealth and security has the opposite effect. People take it for granted and that security becomes more important than the western values of liberty, etc.
You certainly touch on this in your first section, although Spengler and Toynbee discuss other ways for a civilisation to collapse.
This is a very difficult question. I am sympathetic to the view of Spengler, which is similar to that of Toynbee.
But in practise, I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If Western Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
If one was to scientifically determine it they would look at how strong cultural transmission is across the different units -- probably looking at the distribution of movies and other media, as well as how quickly new phrases and political ideas spread across social media.
Jacques Ellul's 1979 "The Betrayal of the West" [0][1] was way ahead of it's time. You might find it useful during your research.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004057367903600...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-West-Continuum-book/dp/08164...
An issue that bothers me no end is the fact that we very well could get out of this mess if we collectively wanted to.
I suspect that collectively, we actually DO want to; we've just ended up with social and political systems, both domestic and international, that conspire against actually managing to do anything serious about it, like some prisoners' dilemma played out on a grand stage.
Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward.
The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems.
The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted.
Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
From the "Introduction to Metasophism"[1]:
> The above proposals may seem sweeping, but we are only getting started. Particularly concerning is European demographics arising from low fertility and deepening social divisions. A society is beginning to divide along ethnic lines is one where any debate will be tribal; higher ideals such as discovering the meaning of life will be ignored. Ethnic issues must therefore be de-dramatised. The Fellowship programme described earlier would help unify society by engaging diverse groups in common tasks.
> But we must go further: to dispel ethnic tensions within Europe, asylum-related migration needs to be limited. Chapter Nine therefore discusses a way of doing this that would prevent further asylum immigration while ensuring that migrants would have prosperity and security. The central idea is to rent a small amount of land on the coast of Africa for one century, give it a basic constitution and access to EU markets, and ensure legal and physical security. Such an area would become an attractive place for investment, thus providing jobs for migrants.
I don't agree so much with the parts you quoted but it should be obvious to a reasonable person that somebody could have those opinions and not be a white supremecist.
It really is scary to me how quickly people will throw around these accusations
Believe it or not, you do not have to be a white supremecist to be sympathetic with
To be absolutely clear: everything I've said (or asserted) as been liberal at most. Nothing about is is particularly left or left-leaning, regardless of my personal politics. This is an important distinction, especially in the context of reactionaries who like to bemoan the death of the West (which, of course, originated political liberalism).
> I don't agree so much with the parts you quoted but it should be obvious to a reasonable person that somebody could have those opinions and not be a white supremecist.
This is why they're dogwhistles. They exist in a space of plausible deniability, and only become obvious to those who (1) keep up with what reactionaries are doing, or (2) are themselves reactionaries.
Standing completely alone, they're merely concerning. With the other components attested in both the posts and this thread, they're clearly intended to signal fellowship with some reactionary group.
Sounds like the neo-reactionaries of the so-called "intellectual dark web".
In Italy everyone is furbo and lies to get ahead. People rely on honesty in the US, I remember reading a story where an Italian man complained about his room and he got another one, instantly. He was astonished, and said it would never work in Italy since everyone would lie about it.
If what you quoted is the dog whistle, what is the decoded message that the in crowd would be hearing?
I'll take that at face value.
> If what you quoted is the dog whistle, what is the decoded message that the in crowd would be hearing?
Both tie closely into bog-standard reactionary and white nationalist rhetoric. The first is a dogwhistle for "the great replacement," or the conspiracy theory that Europeans (meaning, to them, whites) are being intentionally replaced by migrants as a method of control. The latter ties closely to a crowd that calls themselves "white nationalist" but not "white supremacist" -- they insist that they don't believe in the superiority of whites, and only want isolation for "fundamentally different cultures" (by which they mean races). It should be apparent that this is really just white supremacy with more steps, especially if (as this introduction proposes) the European continent functionally becomes the landlord and benevolent overseer of a migrant nation.
I mean, it worked well enough for the people of Hong Kong... but what's going to happen once the century-long lease is over?
> the Medieval Era was the spring of the West, the Renaissance its summer, and the Baroque era its autumn. He predicted that the West would enter its Winter around the year 2000, which would be characterised by a decline of democracy due to excessive influence from moneyed interests, and a resultant rise of authoritarianism.
I can't help notice how decline of democracy is painted as the 'end of the West', meanwhile Medieval Era was the 'spring of the West'. There is no democracy in Medieval West, there were kings, theocracies, crusades, burning of heretics and women. I immediately starts smelling hypocrisy, the only thing about Medieval West is that it is almost entirely white.
So here comes the real question: What is the west? Culturally, the west now is way more different then the west in 1500 as versus the East today. Why is it that people start feeling that the west will pass - and that it somehow coincide with demographic changes. Is it a coincidence or subconscious bias?
US have been through much worse, from the America First nazi sympathizer of the 30s to McCarthyism of the 50s, that's not even mentioning the civil war of the century before that. We as humans tend to characterize what we're currently moving through as more significant than they are - put it into historical perspective and it could just be a 'nah'.
Spengler referred to the Medieval Era as Spring because that was when what he saw as the key cultural forms first emerged -- such as linear perspective in painting, and soaring Gothic cathedrals - all of which he saw as manifesting a new cultural tendency to reach out to infinity which later seeped into maths and music.
For Spengler, this sense and longing for infinitely wide and profound 3D space marked out the Western individual.
I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
What you're talking about is European/Western Liberal Democracy, which may involve voting, but has a different set of assumptions and serves different rights.
At that time, the Baroque era was actually pretty close, less than 200 years ago.
The medieval era, while atrocious in the aspects you mention, was also the start of the liberation of cities and the beginning of some sort of "somewhat free" commerce.
So it does not surprise me that he'd name it the spring. After all, the spring is not an all-pleasant season.
What does surprise me is that German romanticism in the 19th century would already fall in the winter period. But I suspect that he blames Marx, the revolutions of 1848 for the decline and ignores the staggering achievements in art, literature, mathematics and physics in that era.
That somehow all culture exist in a perpetual state of competition, and the spread/growth of one necessitate the decline of other. While cultures usually can claim a direct ancestry down the ages, the truth is that the cultures and norms existing today in different part of the world is MUCH closer to each other than say their direct ancestral culture 500 years ago - and it happened because cultures are NOT in a competition, rather it adapts to the new technologies and outside cultural influences. As a result the world is closer together than it ever has, and that's a good thing.
That's because what's important is the vector, not the absolute state. Towards the end of the medieval era we saw the emergence of all kinds of positive developments, plus increased prosperity, order, etc. And of course it was followed by the Renaissance.
Similarly, now we see all kinds of degeneration, including the most major: the western countries fall down several steps in the top 10 of GDP, giving their place to Asian countries. The West increasingly loses importance economy wise, and this also means declining standard of living, infrastructure, forward momentum, political discontent (Trump is an example of that), and cultural relevance. It's a slow process, which will take decades or even a century to be completed, but it will be completed.
>So here comes the real question: What is the west?
Historically/Geographically, the Europeans and their ilk in the USA/Canada.
Culturally, the mix of Roman law / Christianity etc as it progressed through to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and on to the 20th century.
Economically, sometimes "westernized" places like Japan and South Korea are included (and Australia/NZ).
In any case, it's mostly: what's not culturally Asian, African, Latin American, or Arabic.
> Culturally, the west now is way more different then the west in 1500 as versus the East today.
Yes, but that's neither here nor there. Physiologically, mentally, etc. a 60 year old is more similar to another 60 year old than to his 5 year old self. But despite that the 60 year old and the 5 year old are the same person - and share their development history.
>Why is it that people start feeling that the west will pass - and that it somehow coincide with demographic changes
Because that's how it happened for other similar cultures/countries in the past. Including for a succession within the west: In the 20th century Britain as an "empire" declined and gave way to the USA, for example.
Also because it has already began giving its place to developing economies that have began to surpass it, and have more momentum.
>US have been through much worse, from the America First nazi sympathizer of the 30s to McCarthyism of the 50s, that's not even mentioning the civil war of the century before that
Those are not "much worse". Those are historical developments in a country with a positive momentum vector and huge development (economic, population, global relevance, etc) during and afterwards.
>We as humans tend to characterize what we're currently moving through as more significant than they are - put it into historical perspective and it could just be a 'nah'
In history few powers (or superpowers) remain in their place for long.
Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and many of them currently fall short of their stated ideals when difficulty is encountered. Further, society as a whole seems to make lots of progress when small and large overturnings (or revolutions?) happen. Poorly formulated ideas are refined or discarded, and values are reaffirmed. Counter-revolutionary elements seek to roll them back, but even in success they're irrevocably changed for the experience and cannot help but define their mission in terms of their challengers.
Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.
At any rate, culture is far more foundational than you suppose and it's very difficult to get right. And when a culture has become corrupt or toxic it is very difficult to get anything of value done at all.
Roman's are sorta famous in history for their lack of interest in anything but making war. There's a reason we don't refer to many roman math treaties; they were often very dogmatic texts referring to greek works and heavily influenced by the lens of military problems; and often fantastically wrong.
The decline of West was invented as a tool to mobilize certain groups of Western population, just like any cultural and/or political narrative.
To name one obvious narrow prejudice: The prosperity in China was brought by market economy and Western corporation mechanisms. The rise of China is the rise of West. And often cited as one indication of the decline of the West.
What created prosperity in China was not adoption of Western corporate mechanisms and a market economy, it was the realization of party leadership that if they created an appropriate facade it would allow Western Neoliberals to create the necessary messages to shift economic policy and allow foreign money to flood into China, enriching party officials and their cronies by using the massive population of destitute people ripe for exploitation as unskilled labor.
Both before and after, China remains a totalitarian country run by despots, but now they are able to put a veil of acceptability over their actions which has greatly helped their propaganda machine in the West as people eat it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q
I think the West will eventually we faced with a decision: either learn to live sustainably or get used to living in an irreversibly ruined environment.
Reduce and reuse come before recycling.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_sk...
Converting material wealth with an intrinsic value (a healthy environment, biodiversity) into abstract wealth without an intrinsic value (a number in a bank account) is really the dumbest thing to do.
Once we are done converting every resource into a money, the resulting balance will surely be very useful to satisfy our needs.
"When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money."
On your second point, I think the big problem is that status is increasingly linked with consumption -- having a large house, relatively new car, frequently travelling, and so on. This link has always been there, but perhaps non-material ways of obtaining status have declined (religious vocations, public service, etc.)
I guess to solve the issues you need to tolerate staring them in the face for quite a while!
To repeat what I said below: I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also a historical awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.
I think about the world my parents and grandparents grew up in, and then I think about what life is going to be like in the next 50 years (I'm in my mid 20s) and it makes me anxious.
The only bright spot about Covid is that it rapidly accelerated social changes (work form home) and gave people time to think about the kind of society they want to have.
I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also an awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.
Global climate disruption followed by mass migration, triggering fascist government, and then global thermonuclear war, could be our generation's unique mode of collapse.
In particular, you don't need to blame the Woke movement or the US's failed pandemic response. Exxon suffices.
But there are other ways of failing which I think also need to be insured against -- hence my engagement with the cyclical models of history, to see what insight they have to offer.
Now it's the time for west to advance to the next stage and herald the new chapter of human civilization, instead of wrongly reminiscent of its past glory that was not really meaningful nowadays.
For the first, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. with Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.
Spengler would have hated this because he was afraid the non-white races would adopt our technology and use it’s against us. However since I’m not a racist, with a zero sum fear of the foreign, I think that’s fine. They’re part of our civilisation, or at least are rapidly becoming part of it just like Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc.
The one outlier is China, which against the odds has managed to ditch Communism, adopted radically laissez faire Capitalism, yet retain one party authoritarianism. They seriously worry me, but not for anything to do with Spengler and the inherent instability of civilisations.
To repeat what I said below, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.
Some countries (or at least their governments) are also starting to reject the Western secular cultural template -- Turkey, Pakistan, Hungary, and Poland.
Based on the dataset he and his colleagues compiled, civilizations big enough for internal dynamics tend to exhibit these characteristics during their stagnation phase:
* stagnating or declining real wages
* increasing rents
* decrease in social cohesion
* increasing inequality
* increasing urbanization (mostly due to no rural opportunities)
* more people pursuing education, arts and crafts in hopes of joining the elite. This sounds as a plus, until you realize it's caused by inability to keep a decent standard of living in traditional occupations
* sharpening intra-elite competition, leading to a gradual abandonment of previous norms. Dirty tricks become more and more commonplace
* crisis amplification - non-issues turn into crises, challenges turn into disasters
* 'overproduction of elites' leads to increasing corruption and rent seeking
* stagnating wages and increasing corruption leads to strain on public finances
Turchin's contribution lies mainly in providing historical statistics to back these claims, the novel mechanics of 'elite overproduction' and 'elite aspirants', and overlaying a secondary generational cycle, when a clique of elites keep power for too long (30-50 year cycle, think of Boomers in US or WW2 veterans in USSR).
(1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles
I have already read part of that book (along with the book review), but haven't finished it yet. I find that model highly plausible, and think it offers useful insights into what is happening today (even though there is a major difference between the agricultural societies which provide all of his cases, and the modern situation).
I will address the overproduction of elites theme in the chapter on selecting and training a new elite. My central innovation is to try to create an alternative to top-down elite selection and training. Essentially, requiring an aspiring elite member to work with others in small groups at a young age, after which their performance would be peer assessed -- which determines whether they could enter the elite. I hope that this could dissolve the tendency of hierarchies to select people who look/think/talk just like themselves, and thus create an elite more reflective of the diversity in society. This component of the elite would be numerically limited (1 per 100, or 1 per 200).
I address the issue of inequality in other chapters. One idea follows from the above: if the groups above choose to spend their time together to form companies, then some of the shares should go into a Public Equity Fund, in which each citizen would have an account (a fair exchange in return for facilitating the activities of the group). This would mean that everyone would benefit from the formation of new companies. More details on all this in the coming weeks.
These studies often involve panning the rubble of previous civilisations for clues about decline, but without much in the way of generally applicable theories those clues aren’t really much use to us. Yeah, civilisations that are collapsing have agricultural, economic, military, ecological, and demographic problems. So do the thriving ones.
Is it the destiny of the West to die? Well, sure – it requires a huge wobbly stack of things to keep it alive (from physics to poetry), so one day it will almost certainly end. It’s not prophecy unless you can tell me when these things will happen. It could conceivably be ten years or ten thousand years away.
