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We've looked at several books and articles discussing the decline and collapse of civilizations, and attempting to predict where we are, and where we are going. In this article, I want to bring some of these ideas together.
It is generally best to start at the beginning, and the same is true in this case. Accordingly, I want to revisit some of the basic scholarship on the decline and collapse of civilizations that I have found worthwhile.
Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West
Oswald Spengler provided one of the earliest and, still, one of the best reviews of the common patterns between the growth, maturity, and eventual death of civilizations in his magnum opus, The Decline of the West. (As a side note, for those interested in reading Spengler, I would warn you that I have yet to see an electronic version of his book that is worthwhile--his books are replete with footnotes, and include many terms in German or Greek, which have not converted well to an e-book format. I had to suffer through an e-book version for Volume 1 of his work, but was fortunate enough to stumble across a copy of his Volume 2 at a used book store). I've referred to Spengler's writings numerous times in this blog, but never provided an in-depth review. Thus, I want to spend some time laying out Spengler's main ideas.
I suppose if I were to attempt to sum up Spengler's ideas in a single sentence, it would be that once a society cuts its ties with its root culture, it becomes increasingly empty, sclerotic and nihilistic. But while that is the essence of his theory, it lacks the necessary meat or body necessary for understanding. Spengler saw societies developing along the lines of an organism's life. Beginning with a vital culture as its root stock, a society matures into a civilization which, even upon reaching civilization, has in fact begun to die. Although the civilization continues to grow and appears stronger, it, in fact, loses its vitality. In Spengler's mind, this is demonstrated through the decline of art. A civilization may become more technically proficient, from a scientific or engineering standpoint, but its art has reached its apogee and declines into recycled and degenerate forms that are increasingly designed to titillate rather than inspire, appealing to only a declining minority of specialists. Along the way, the sanctity of home and hearth is abandoned. Power and government is concentration in a world city (or cities), feminism appears, birthrates decline, and the highest virtue of the civilization comes to be attacking the culture that forms the root of the civilization. The world cities have not only forgone the native culture but, as Spengler theory states, have lost even their national identities, with little or no interest in the rural population.
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Robert W. Merry, at the National Interest, provides a good overview and summary of Spengler's main ideas:
But two elements of Spengler’s thinking merit particular attention. One is his rejection of the “Idea of Progress,” that hoary Western notion that mankind has advanced over the centuries through quickening stages of development, from primitiveness and barbarism to enlightenment and civilization—and that mankind will continue to advance through the human experience on earth. The Idea of Progress has animated the thinking of nearly all significant Western philosophy since its first stirrings in the thirteenth century. As writer and philosopher Robert Nisbet put it, “No single idea has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western civilization.”
In our own time, the Idea of Progress serves as progenitor of the concepts of Eurocentrism and American exceptionalism. It was the underpinning of Francis Fukuyama’s famous “End of History” perception that Western democratic capitalism represents the culmination of human civic development. It fuels today’s foreign-policy belief, so prevalent across the political spectrum, that America’s world role is to remake other societies and cultures in the Western image.
Spengler, by contrast, embraced a view of history as the story of various discrete civilizations, each with its own distinct culture, that emerged, developed, flowered and then declined. This cyclical view subsumes certain underlying perceptions. First, since civilizations and cultures are distinct, there can be no universal culture. No body of thought emanating from one culture can be imposed upon another, either peacefully or through force. And civilizational decline is an immutable rule that applies to all civilizations, including the West.
The second noteworthy element of Spengler’s thought is his view, based on his study of eight great civilizations, that the process of decline carries with it a surge of imperial fervor and a flight toward Caesarism. Hegemonic impulses come to the fore along with forms of dictatorship. As Charles and Mary Beard wrote in The American Spirit, “Spengler’s judgment of history certainly conveyed to American readers the notion that ‘Western civilization’ was doomed and that another Caesar, the conquering man of blood and iron, would bring it to an end.” This phase, which Spengler calls the civilizational phase, can last a couple centuries, and the question Americans face today, looking at the world through the Spenglerian prism, is whether their country, as leader of the West, is in the process of embracing these elements of Spengler’s civilizational phase.
... [H]e pictures the great cultures as essentially organic entities whose phases of emergence, development and decline are remarkably similar from culture to culture. “Cultures are organisms,” he writes. “If we disentangle their shapes we may find the primitive Culture-form that underlies all individual Cultures and is reflected in their various manifestations.” That’s why, says Spengler, the pursuit of historical analogy is so critical to understanding the “Cycles of History”: by studying the patterns of past civilizations we can better understand our own, including its current state of cultural health or decline.
Each of these civilizations, says Spengler, is born when a people in a particular region rather suddenly develops a distinctive way of looking at the world. This world outlook is entirely fresh, unencumbered by influences from other cultures. And as this new culture emerges it develops a sense of its own mortality, which stirs powerful longings for fulfillment, which in turn unleash a passion for creative expression, new methods of inquiry and new modes of knowledge—all conforming to the distinctive “soul” of the new culture.
The passion for creative expression and new strains of culture knowledge runs on for centuries, generally a thousand years or more unless interrupted by external forces. But eventually it peters out. Then begins that civilizational phase, characterized by the deterioration of the folk traditions and innocent enthusiasms of the culture. Its cultural essence, once of the soil and spread throughout the “mother-region” in town, village and city, now becomes the domain of a few rich and powerful “world-cities,” which twist and distort the concepts of old and replace them with cynicism, cosmopolitanism, irony and a money culture.
Thus, Spengler draws a sharp distinction between culture and civilization. The former is the phase of creative energy, the “soul” of the countryside; the latter is a time of material preoccupation, the “intellect” of the city. As Hughes elaborates, “So long as the culture phase lasts, the leading figures in a society manifest a sure sense of artistic ‘style’ and personal ‘form.’ Indeed, the breakdown of style and form most clearly marks the transition from culture to civilization.”
WE PAUSE over this thinking to ponder its implications. Recall that Spengler wrote nearly a century ago, when the Western avant-garde movement was merely a tiny knot of artists bent on assaulting the conventional sensibilities of the prevailing culture. As author and critic Lionel Trilling once explained, in Spengler’s time these people weren’t interested in talking to the masses. Their art was rarefied and special, designed exclusively for the avant-garde itself, those inclined to look down on the masses and on conventional thought and culture. Few at that time predicted that this avant-garde cynicism and cultural nihilism eventually would be absorbed into the popular culture itself and be accepted, even embraced, by large numbers of people within the so-called masses—the same masses under assault by the avant-garde. But Spengler saw it coming, as merely the inevitable consequence of any civilization’s transition from its cultural to its civilizational phase.
He also predicted the West’s coming decline in birthrates brought about largely by the advent of feminism, also a feature of Spengler’s civilizational phase. Whereas the advent and success of feminism in the West is heralded in our time as a sign of civic progress, Spengler’s study of other civilizational cycles convinced him that it was just the opposite—a reflection of cultural decline, largely because it curtailed the production of children. As he puts it:
The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “lives for herself”—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.This phenomenon, says Spengler, is seen in every society in transition from the cultural to the civilizational phase, and in all instances it leads to what he calls “appalling depopulation.” Spengler saw a similar phenomenon in the realm of politics. Looking at Athens of 400 bc and Caesar’s Rome, he sees a progressive degradation:
As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party candidates, an area ready for the intervention of money, and . . . of ever bigger and bigger money. “The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money.”But what most clearly marks the civilizational phase is what he considered the inevitable gravitation toward Caesarism and empire. Spengler’s historical analogies taught him that the transition from culture to civilization unleashes a kind of Will to Power, manifest internally in a drive to consolidate power within the civilization, and externally in a drive to assert dominance over other peoples. “Imperialism,” writes Spengler, “is Civilization unadulterated.”
... IN ASSESSING our own time through the Spenglerian prism, a number of perceptions emerge. First, Spengler predicted with uncanny foresight a number of Western developments of the past century, including the rise of world-cities and the money culture, the emergence of a powerful feminism focused on the yearnings of the Ibsen woman, the force of money in politics, declining birthrates and the popular embrace of avant-garde cultural sensibilities, awash in cynicism and cosmopolitanism and bent on destroying the cultural verities of old.
Second, Spengler makes a powerful point when he says these are not characteristics and developments found in ascendant civilizations. On the contrary, many are signs of cultural and societal decadence and decline. Although the hallowed Idea of Progress has shrouded this truth from Western society, the reality is clear: the Western cultural decline, as understood and predicted by Spengler, is now complete. ...
Third, Spengler’s rejection of the notion of a universal culture provides provocative fodder for Western thinking at a time when that notion is embraced widely as a bedrock of American politics. ...
... Thus, it isn’t difficult to see why Spengler doesn’t resonate in today’s America or the West more generally, with their embrace of the Idea of Progress and the doctrine of Eurocentrism. Nor is it difficult to see why Spengler’s Cycles of History would spur yawns in societies that have come to revere—and see as progress—all the elements of the civilizational ethos foreseen by Spengler and identified by him as hallmarks of cultural decline.Another useful article on the subject is "Probapossible Prelegomena to Ideareal History" written by James Blish (under the pseudonym, William Atheling, Jr.) in 1978, which also attempts to summarize Spengler's main ideas. Blish explained:
NONE OF this was lamented by Spengler as he peered into the West’s civilizational future. Nor did he lament the age of Western imperialism and the decline of democratic structures that he also saw on the horizon. These too were simply inevitable consequences of the natural developmental cycles through which the West was passing. Indeed, as a product of the West he thrilled to the idea of its culminating phase of power and glory.
But modern Westerners—and Americans in particular—might want to ponder the implications of Spengler’s prediction that the first nation of the West would lead that civilization into an era of imperialism in corollary with serious erosions in its democratic structures. ...
Spengler's view of history is organic rather than casual, and so is his imagery; as previously implied, he compares the four major periods of each culture with the four seasons. The onset of civilization is the beginning of autumn. At this point, the culture has lost is growth-drive, and its lifestyle is codified--most particularly in architecture, with the building of great cities or cosmoploi which both express the culture's highest spirit and drain it away from the countryside. Here, too, law is codified and history is written (all history is urban history); and the arts enter upon a period of attempted conformity to older, "standard" models, like the eighteenth century in Europe, when it became increasingly difficult to tell one composer or playwright from another. In the West, civilization began to set in about the time of Napoleon.
Civilization may last for centuries and be extremely eventful; Imperial Rome is a prime example. At first, too, great creative works remain possible; I have mentioned Vergil, and in the West we have had Milton, Goethe, Joyce, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Einstein. (Spengler would unabashedly add himself to such a list, I think justifiably.) But autumn ends, and a civilizations becomes a culture gone frozen in its brains and heart, and its finale is anything but grand. We are now far into what the Chinese called the period of contending states, and the collapse of Caesarism.
In such a period, politics becomes an arena of competing generals and plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low intelligence and complete moral plasticity, who amuses himself and keeps the masses distracted from their troubles with bread, circuses and brushfire-wars. (This is the time of all times when a culture should unite--and the time when such a thing has become impossible.). Technology flourishes (the late Romans were first-class engineers) but science disintegrates into a welter of competing, grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede each other almost weekly and veer more and more markedly toward the occult. Among the masses there arises a "second religiousness" in which nobody actually believes; an attempt is made to buttress this by syncretism, the wrenching out of context of religious forms from other cultures, such as the Indian, without the faintest hope of knowing what they mean. This process, too, leads inevitably toward a revival of the occult, and here science and religion overlap, to the benefit of neither. Economic inequity, instability and wretchedness become endemic on a hitherto unprecedented scale; the highest buildings ever erected by the Classical culture were the tenements of the Imperial Roman slums, crammed to bursting point with freed and runaway slaves, bankrupts, and deposed petty kings and other political refugees. The group name we give all this, being linearists by nature, is Progress.
Given all this, it is easy to deduce the state of the arts; a period of confused individual experimentation, in which traditions and even schools have ceased to exist, having been replaced by ephemeral fads. Hence the sole aim of all this experimentation is originality--a complete chimera, since the climate for the Great Idea is (in the West) fifty years dead; nor will nostalgia, simply an accompanying symptom, bring it back. This is not just winter now; it is the Fimbulwinter, the deep freeze which is the death of a culture.(from The Best of James Blish, Ballentine Books, NY, 1979).
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Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course of world-history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of "the provinces." The "provinces" are now everything whatsoever--land, town, and city--except these two or three points [world cities]. There are no longer noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians, believers and unbelievers, but only cosmopolitans and provincials. All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events, all habits of life, all views of the world.(Vol. II, 98-99). But the World-City is not just an intellectual center, but a financial center--where money becomes a real power, divorced from the goods it once represented. But there are other characteristics that define the World City. First, it draws all people to it--emptying the countryside with its insatiable hunger for laborers. Second, because its work is "intellectual," its respite is the opposite--relaxation, distraction, and sensual straining for pleasure. And, finally, the "sterility of civilized man." (Vol. II, 103). "[I]t is to be understood as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the true terror of death." (Vol.. II, 103-104). "Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. ... When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard "having children" as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning-point has come. ... When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable." (Vol. II, 104. Marriage ceases to be about selecting a mother of children, but a companion for life. And thus enters feminism, in whatever form it takes in history. "The father of many children is for the great city a subject for caricature." (Vol. II, 105).
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.(Vol. II, 105). Consequently, the giant cities eventually fall empty of but a small population of fellaheen who shelter in the ruins. (Vol. II, 107).
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Joseph Tainter and The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Next on our list is The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge Press, 1988), by Joseph A. Tainter. Tainter's work focused on the mechanism of collapse--that is, what actually pushes a society over the edge into collapse. I've discussed Tainter's work in depth in a six part review and commentary (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6). Suffice it to say, Tainter came to the conclusion that the single overriding factor in the collapse of a complex society--i.e., a civilization--is that it becomes too complex, and therefore, too expensive to maintain. That is, the complexity of a society is subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility. Once a society reaches of point of negative marginal utility--the costs of any added level of complexity exceeding the benefit derived from it--the society is at risk of collapsing. Or, as he described it:
... as a society evolves toward greater complexity, the support costs levied on each individual will also rise, so that the population as a whole must allocate increasing portions of its energy budget to maintaining organizational institutions. This is an immutable fact of societal evolution, and is not mitigated by type of energy source.
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It is the thesis of this chapter that return on investment in complexity varies, and that this variation follows a characteristic curve. More specifically, it is proposed that, in many crucial spheres, continued investment in sociopolitical complexity reaches a point where the benefits for such investment begin to decline, at first gradually, then with accelerated force. Thus, not only must a population allocate greater and greater amounts of resources to maintaining an evolving society, but after a certain point, higher amounts of this investment will yield smaller increments of return . Diminishing returns, it will be shown , are a recurrent aspect of sociopolitical evolution, and of investment in complexity.
(p. 92). A significant part of this "complexity" and associated costs come from centralization of power. Tainter writes:
Control and specialization are the very essence of a complex society. The reasons why investment in complexity yields a declining marginal return are: (a) increasing size of bureaucracies; (b) increasing specialization of bureaucracies; (c) the cumulative nature of organizational solutions; (d) increasing taxation; (e) increasing costs of legitimizing activities; and (f) increasing costs of internal control and external defense.
(p. 115). Tainter's work not only builds on Spengler's ideas, but explains why societal growth and decline appears to follow an organic, almost cyclic, pattern of development. A society grows and is vibrant while the marginal utility of complexity is large relative to its cost; and begins to wither and die as the marginal utility declines or becomes negative.
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