— by Odysseus
It is a well noted paradox that a panoramic view of global societies reveals an inverse relationship between the age of the society and its present level of both political and economic development. While it would stand to reason that the oldest civilizations should be the most developed and that the newest civilizations should be the least developed, the reverse seems to be true and even in their relative order of development.
It is generally accepted that Africa is the origin of the human species, yet Africa is the continent that seems the least developed today. Likewise, the earliest recorded civilizations are from the Middle East, the trade crossroads nexus between the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. However, the current geographic space formerly occupied by the early civilizations of Egypt, Ur, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Assyria are economically depressed as well as riven with political strife and violence.
The next civilizations to develop were the Macedonians, Greeks, and, later, the Romans. Their current geographic inheritors are also less developed than their more recently “civilized” neighbors. The inverse order is striking, with the modern Greece trailing behind modern Italy, which, in turn, trails behind the modern versions of Germany and England, who were savages at the time of the Greek and the Roman empires. The same model holds true in Asia, where the Indian subcontinent, China, and Japan all have development levels oddly inverse to the age of their respective societies’ maturation date.
In terms of economic power, per capita income, standard of living, and, to a lesser extent, military prowess, this applies to Europe and the “new world” as well. The last great empire, Great Britain, has been trailing behind its own newer colonies in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Certainly the old colonial powers of Spain, France, and Belgium are shadows of their former selves.
This model seems to apply only to “new” territories in which whole new civilizations were built, not places where a colonial power merely overlaid a new governing structure on top of an existing population/civilization. The countries of Central and South America, Portuguese and Spanish colonies mostly, are still really pre-existing civilizations of indigenous peoples more akin to the colonization of African territory, where the indigenous population adapted to new rulers rather than fundamentally creating or developing into a new civilization. Thus, the model of a sliding scale in which the newest civilizations are the most developed and the older are the least still holds.
In noting this paradox, this author and other, mostly science fiction authors postulated that, upon achieving civilization, societies become complacent, allowing more vigorous, younger societies to develop with the new ideas and knowledge that make growth possible. In this way, they hoped to explain the paradox. Some authors, notably Issac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, projected that, in the development of new frontiers within the solar system, the new societies would also supersede the old societies that spawned them. While such developments may eventually prove the theory, this author believes that the causative factors themselves of an empire’s decline deserve some greater analysis.
All large urban empires appear to indulge in behaviors that may be harbingers of, but not causative, of imminent collapse. Societal decline, seemingly, corresponds to the disintegration in the urban environment of traditional values like father-led families, religious activity, household-based businesses, single-family homes, agrarian traditions, autonomous individualism for needed personal work, such as plumbing and repair, or even permissible levels of violent self defense. Conversely, there is an increase in substance abuse, and sexual adventurism.
In a declining civilization, notions that government benefits and largess should be universally extended to the entire population, under the guise of so-called universal rights and entitlements, become not merely tolerated, but also accepted. Even the delegation of individual meal preparation to specialists outside the home always seems to take place in prosperous, powerful civilizations as they approach their end. It is as though humans always choose to drift in the same downward direction, given sufficient affluence and safety to do so.
In studying the decline of civilizations, it may not be mere complacency that breeds social collapse, but, perhaps, there is a predetermined life cycle to societies just as there is an life cycle to individual biological organisms. There may be a natural tendency for humans to clump together, in an effort to forge a stronger, more successful society, but the clumping up has underlying negative aspects that grow over time and eventually exceed the positive aspects, and they cause the societal collapse. In other essays, we have discussed the salutary effects of decentralization. If it is true that increasing centralization and urbanization are the root of a society’s maturation and decline, then it follows that the benefits may be derived from deliberate decentralization because unwinding the strangling effects of an increasingly centralizing civilization mitigate the damage from the aging process, either by breathing new life into a civilization or, at least, slowing the corrupting influences by letting some air back into the increasingly hermetically sealed system of central control.
When analyzing the discordant, chaotic nature of the presently less developed world, it is possible that the relative political and economic plight of these older societies is a direct result of some earlier time when there were increasing demands for centralization. The chaos may be a reaction against earlier organization. Centralization of economic and political power leads to a diminishing return for the majority of any population as the central structures become increasingly wealthy and distant from the hinterlands that make it all possible. By increasing their power as well as their wealth, the central authorities may always become simultaneously more sybaritic and indulgent for themselves, all while becoming more oppressive and rapacious in their attitude towards the extended population. The ruling class then becomes ever more arrogant and dismissive towards the bulk of the members of their civilization. In this event, it would be natural for the individual members, who benefit less from participation in society with each passing generation, to be less willing to participate in the whole and, instead, to seek to distance themselves as much as possible from the distrusted and eventually hated central government. Whether in Africa, the Middle East, Italy, Greece, or even England, one still sees varying degrees of distrust or even anger against authority and usually with good reason.
Perhaps this overreach by centralized power and the backlash against it are causative of civilization decline, which was true in Rome as it was in Mesopotamia. If so, then one may consider that the more rapid the centralization and the tighter the grip, the more quickly the society will collapse. This would certainly be borne out with the relatively rapid decline of the communist societies of the “iron curtain” era. This could make the inverse true that the relatively least tightly controlled, most decentralized societies would have the longest life span. Again, this could be seen in the Roman and English empire models where, for an extended period of time, the peripheries of the empires were largely left to their own devices. This analysis would certainly fit in with modern organizational models which show top-down control systems to be less adaptive to changing conditions than systems with more (but still intelligent) autonomy.
If this analytical model of the rise and fall of civilizations is accurate, things do not bode well for America in the coming century. The previously decentralized federal model, with its great autonomy for the states, dispersion of economic/material wealth and influence, and with little top down direction, is becoming increasingly superseded by a centralization of both wealth and power. During the post 2008 economic downturn, the only parts of the United States that have seen economic growth are those counties in and adjacent to the District of Columbia. The country’s wealth, power, and influence are becoming increasingly concentrated in Washington DC, New York City, and Los Angeles to the detriment of the the remainder of the country. Even within the subset of the rest of the nation, what remains of the wealth and power is being concentrated into fewer and fewer urban areas.
As the population continues to have its values, voice, and economic interests dis-served by the central authorities, it will grow increasingly dismissive and contemptuous of those authorities. The ruling elite’s lavish and unconventional lifestyles, which is deemed immoral by the more traditional societies of the periphery, will fuel a growing anger. If the authorities then attempt to use force and violence to impose acceptance and, indeed, participation in their distant, alien society, the resulting fury will accelerate their loss of legitimacy. With the loss of legitimacy will come the devolution of the society, in perhaps what is the natural end cycle of a civilization. If this is indeed the timeline, then perhaps the older parts of the world are not, in fact, “less advanced” than the newer world, but, rather they are actually “more advanced”, in being simply further along the civilization life cycle. Perhaps a disillusioned, dispirited, innervated, self-serving population is the natural end state of a civilization. It could be what happens when a people finally discover that the benefits of “community” cannot be effectively extended much beyond the tribal level. Beyond that, the disconnect between the rulers and ruled breeds only arrogance and corruption. If so, then we seem destined to join our elders in what is now called “the third world”.
