Decline and Fall?
How bad is it?
I hesitate to descend into commentary on the present state of the world, because there’s always so much of it going around. But the larder was bare this week, so here we are.
It’s 411 AD, and you’re living in Rome. The Visigoths plundered your hometown a few months ago, leaving it an awful mess. The place was already going to ruin after a few centuries of civil strife, one incompetent self-serving emperor toppling another. Rome is not even the capital of the empire, or what’s left of it. That’s moved to Ravenna. Oh, the price of bread since barbarians took North Africa, and the circuses, well, they aren’t what they used to be. The Visigoths made off with your possessions, but at least your family, minus a few slaves, has come through. You could hardly be blamed for feeling gloomy.
How does that compare today with someone living in Washington, D.C.? The barbarians are within the gates. They and their tech bros allies are running the country, plundering away with grift and slush funds. The price of groceries and gas is heading in only one direction – up – since the nincompoop in the White House decided he had to distract from his troubles at home by starting a war on the empire’s Middle Eastern frontier. As for circuses, how about a cage-fighting arena on the White House lawn, and a bombastic ballroom next door.
Here in Canada, trying to disentangle from client state status, we watch nervously as a rank south wind gusts northward, shaking the foundations of our confederation. Alberexit, anyone?
At least we don’t have missiles and bombs raining down on us as in some parts of the world. No famine, no ghastly epidemics like Ebola (okay, the aftereffects of Covid live on). A drug epidemic and thousands of people living on the streets will do.
So, decline and fall? Early 20th-century philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler said so. In The Decline of the West, his masterwork, he concluded that civilizations, like biological entities, have lifespans, and ours was due to age out starting around 2000. A couple of centuries of reversion to rule by despots would follow before the final collapse of western civ. Hmm.
When I first encountered Spengler a lifetime ago, at university back in the 1970s, I recall that he was dismissed as something of a crank, a dystopian counterbalance to the utopia promised by the high-riding New Left Marxists who then held sway in the academy. But that Spenglerian timeline.
Elders among us will remember 1968 with its riots, burning cities, uprisings in Europe, assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, etc. We got over it and sailed on. It seemed still a hopeful time. The Boomers held sway; they were young, and they knew they would change the world. It was naïve hope, but hope, nonetheless.
Today, in the face of climate change and AI, it feels like the young must climb a much steeper mountain. Maybe they will at least inherit some Boomer wealth when that bulge moves on.
So, while there’s reason for despondency, it’s too soon to give up hope. The Romans eventually became Italians. And in bad times there are everywhere good people. This I know because I live among them, and so do you. So, take your spouse out dancing. Teach your kid something new.
You’re brave Sharon. It can’t be easy.
Great observations and excellent expression of it, as always, Bryan.
I think if the citizens of the US could stop their cultural habit of worshipping their heroes and treating them as false Gods who want to rescue the common man, they may calm down and join the rest of the world again. Too much belief in the "Hollywood characters" that they create. It would be amusing if the outcome didn't negatively affect the rest of us too. (An observation from Down Under )