I’m convinced that the answer to “Is it too late?” may well be, “Yes.” Given that, might our efforts best be spent not on “saving” our American / Western civilization, but on “salvaging” what we can while we can so that we can begin anew.
Most first versions of things have design flaws that often don’t become apparent until an extensive body of real-world data is available. (Unless the flaws are features and not bugs) Constitutional Democracy 1.0 was amazing, a true disruptor and game-changer in the governance space. It wasn’t perfect and needed 10 patches right away (the Bill of Rights) followed by 17 updates (amendments) over the following years. The core technology is sound and proven, but its inherent design flaws (a debt-based economy built upon fiat currency to name one) have rendered it impotent and harmful over time. The creators of Version 1.0 are long gone. The folks running it now are generations removed from the founders and lack their knowledge, wisdom, and character. They’ve long since given up on updates and have no interest in addressing the ineffectiveness and outright harm caused by the thing. Thus, maybe it’s time to contemplate Constitutional Democracy 2.0, and what changes we might make given what we know now.
Civilizations rise and fall, come and go. They have their time, then they pass. They have traits of living things: they are born, they grow, and eventually die. This has been the noted by many thinkers over the centuries a few of whom are noted below. Note that within each observation, from over 2000 years of history, there are parallels to our current time.
ANCIENT AND LATE ANTIQUITY SOURCES
Polybius, The Histories, Book 36 (written c. 150–140 BC). Polybius was a Greek historian who watched Rome conquer the Greek world. In one well-known passage he describes Greece suffering from “a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population.” Cities emptied and land went untilled, even though there had been no long wars or plagues. He blamed it on “pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence.” People didn’t want to marry, or they raised only one or two children so they could leave those children rich. When war or sickness then took those few heirs, households died out, and “by small degrees cities became resourceless and feeble”. He insisted the cause was human behavior, not the gods, and that praying wouldn’t fix it. That makes him one of the earliest writers to treat population decline as a self-inflicted cause of a civilization’s decline.
Salvian of Marseilles, De Gubernatione Dei (On the Government of God) (written in the 440s AD). Salvian was a Christian priest in Gaul. He wrote in the years after the Vandals took Carthage in 439, trying to square God’s providence with the collapse happening around him. His most famous claim is that ordinary Romans, including educated people from good families, were running away to the Goths, the Bagaudae and other barbarians to escape crushing, unfairly shared taxes and corrupt officials. In his words, “They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans,” and they “would rather live as free men, though in seeming captivity, than as captives in seeming liberty”. He also argued that “it is our vicious lives alone that have conquered us,” meaning moral decay, not barbarian strength, defeated Rome. Historians value him as an eyewitness to how heavy taxes and patronage pushed the poor into serfdom, flight or armed revolt.
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN THINKERS
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377). This North African historian is often called the founder of the philosophy of history. He argued that dynasties rise on asabiyyah, the solidarity of tough frontier or desert peoples. Over about three to four generations, comfort, luxury and heavier taxes wear that bond away until a new, more united group takes over. It is probably the first cyclical model of rise and fall.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science (Scienza Nuova) (1725, revised 1744). Vico said nations pass through three ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes and the age of men. Each age ends in what he called a “barbarism of reflection,” where too much rationalism and self-interest dissolve shared customs. Then the cycle starts again.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789). Gibbon’s six-volume classic traces Rome’s long decline. He blamed lost civic virtue, dependence on mercenary soldiers, the empire’s sheer size, and the rise of Christianity, which he believed turned people’s loyalty away from the state. He famously called Rome’s fall “the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.”
NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY
Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895). Adams was an American historian and the grandson of John Quincy Adams. He argued that civilizations move from a “martial” phase driven by fear and imagination to an “economic” phase dominated by money-lenders and the drive for profit. He believed that centralized finance eventually wears down a society’s vitality.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (Vol. 1, 1918; Vol. 2, 1922). Spengler rejected the idea of history as one line of progress. He described separate “high cultures,” such as the Classical, Arabian and Western (“Faustian”) cultures, each growing and dying like a living thing over about a thousand years. A creative “Culture” eventually hardens into a “Civilization” of huge cities, money, mass politics and finally “Caesarism.” He placed the West in that late stage.
Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics (1931). This short follow-up describes humans as predators and technology as a weapon in their struggle with nature. Spengler predicted that the West would hand its technical knowledge to other peoples, who would then turn it against the West. He also expected the “machine culture” to wear itself out. He ended with a call for stoic courage in the face of decline.
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (12 volumes, 1934–1961). Toynbee compared about two dozen civilizations. In his “challenge and response” theory, civilizations grow when a “creative minority” answers environmental or human challenges. They break down when that minority turns into a “dominant minority” that rules by force instead of inspiring people. Society then splits into an alienated “internal proletariat” and an “external proletariat” of frontier peoples. Toynbee concluded that “civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937–1941). Sorokin was a Harvard sociologist. He described civilizations swinging between “ideational” cultures, where spiritual and religious truth comes first, and “sensate” cultures, which are materialist and focused on the senses, with a balanced “idealistic” phase in between. He saw the modern West as a sensate culture in crisis.
Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations (1961). This Georgetown historian set out seven stages: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decay and invasion. Decline sets in when an “instrument of expansion” becomes an “institution,” meaning it starts protecting the interests of those who run it instead of creating new wealth.
John Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (1978). Glubb was a British general. He argued that empires last about 250 years, or roughly ten generations. They pass through ages of pioneers, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect and decadence. In the decadent age he saw defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, obsession with celebrities, and more and more welfare and immigration that the society couldn’t absorb. He noted that people in a declining empire rarely realize what is happening.
Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Tainter, an anthropologist, set aside moral explanations and offered an economic one. Societies solve problems by adding complexity, such as bureaucracy, armies and infrastructure. Over time each new layer pays off less and less (“declining marginal returns”). Eventually complexity costs more than it gives back, and collapsing to a simpler state becomes the sensible, even beneficial, choice. Rome and the Classic Maya are his main examples.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). Diamond studied Easter Island, the Norse in Greenland, the Maya and others. He identified five factors behind collapse: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, loss of trading partners, and how a society responds to its problems. He stressed that the last one, the society’s response, is always decisive. Elites who shield themselves from the effects of their own decisions are especially dangerous.
Peter Turchin, “Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade,” Nature (February 2010). In this short letter, Turchin warned that the next decade would probably bring growing instability in the United States and Western Europe. He pointed to stagnating real wages, a widening gap between rich and poor, an oversupply of young people with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. He argued these trends are connected, that they all hit turning points in the 1970s, and that in the past they have signaled coming unrest. His model put the peak of instability and political violence in the 2020s.
Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord (2016). This book applies Turchin’s “cliodynamics,” a mathematical approach to history, to the United States. It lays out the “structural-demographic” model behind his 2010 letter. Of the three main drivers of instability, he calls elite overproduction “by far the most important.” The other two are popular imiseration, meaning falling living standards, and the declining fiscal health of the state. The book builds on the 200-to-300-year “secular cycles” that Turchin developed with Sergey Nefedov in their 2009 book.
