Are America and the West in Decline?

Big-picture and long-view students of history understand, as a general rule, that civilizations and empires rise and fall—sometimes in the latter case, suddenly and catastrophically. In spite of the many reminders of dead empires scattered across the globe in the form of archeological ruins that we glibly visit in our travels, the rest of us tend not to consider those same cycles of history that might bear upon our own lives. Instead, we assume history to be one long linear and irreversible process of growth and development that continues in the same direction ad infinitum.

In contrast to this short-term view, a small cabal of historical writers have made the rise and fall of empires their academic specialty. An even smaller group among them have strived to elucidate patterns and explain how and why that process of collapse repeats itself, time and again, in much the same way, across the ages.

William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, is the one of the latest, shortest and perhaps most compelling works on the subject. The author builds upon the work of similar thinkers such as Edward Gibbon and Sir John Glubb to distil the fundamental ingredients that both cause—and reflect—civilizational collapse. He argues that our modern civilization not only displays the hallmark symptoms of rapid decline, but that when it does occur, its collapse will, unlike in the past, be global in scale, and thus potentially irrevocable.

Ophuls argues that civilizations break down under their own unsupportable weight and success: their “immoderate greatness.” Collapse is therefore endemic to civilization itself, being part of its very fabric and resulting from "the intrinsic flaws that are the shadow side of its very greatness.” Because of this any given civilization, including our own, is almost assured to one day collapse, and that fall from grace is unavoidable.

“Civilizations are unnatural accumulations of wealth and power that cannot be sustained over the long term,” Ophuls writes. “Insuperable biophysical limits combine with innate fallibility to precipitate eventual collapse… Reducing the process to its essence, a civilization declines when it has exhausted its physical and moral capital.”

The problem, argues Ophuls, is that civilizations are subject to the laws of physical and moral entropy. Decline is unavoidable because decay is a fundamental principle of the universe. The inability of the human brain to manage the compounding complexity of a full-blown civilization further undermines it. Ecological exploitation and degradation, upon which empires are built and sustained, also becomes an additional source of its undoing. Add to these ingredients others such as hubris, practical errors, decadence and corruption, all of which are especially plentiful late in a civilization’s life-cycle, and society goes into an unrecoverable tail spin.

Even when a civilization finally realizes, often too late, that it is in rapid decline, rather than significantly forestalling or reversing the fall, the measures it adopts tends to hasten the crash. Civilizations, he writes, “typically respond in ways that make the problem worse.”

Ophuls adds that short of a society hyper-evolving overnight to develop superhuman faculties that would give it the ability to fix these nearly irreversible problems, which is unlikely, there’s almost nothing to be done to stop the collapse. The most we might do, in our own case at present, is to salvage some of the fruits and knowledge of our civilization in order to prevent a deeper and longer lasting dark age that could follow in its wake.

Immoderate Greatness is an admittedly grim and pessimistic, if not realistic, take on the life and death of civilizations. But there may be another takeaway here, for the longer-term, if we are only willing to see and acknowledge it. Given that civilizations do appear to ebb and flow in the manner he and others describe, perhaps a time might soon come in the future when planning for and managing collapse—including trying to forestall and soften it at a far earlier stage than we usually do—becomes commonplace in the work of politics and government.

The cautionary idea that by not knowing the past, we tend repeat it, may find its greatest utility where the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations is concerned.

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