Enjoy and feedback welcome!
Which brings me to my questions. One, what is "The West"? Would the French Revolution count as a civilization-wide failure? The Bronze Age collapse? Sea Peoples? The Long March? The Hellenic Era ending? Perhaps this is explained elsewhere, but some clarification would be helpful.
Two, it might be good to cover all of the "false positives" when it comes to predicting civilization collapse. It's been quite the cottage industry over the centuries. Romans were quite concerned with the lack of morals and corruption the Greeks brought them. Many believed that signaled the end of Rome. Why, some of the "new" Romans weren't even sleeping on the ground any more! They were using beds!
Three, and I apologize for so many queries, but "collapse" or "failure", or whatever you're using could also use a bit of definition. The Western Roman Empire collapsed and failed, that much is obvious. But just when that occurred is much less clear. People in Europe thought of themselves as Romans long after modern historians view Rome as being gone. I believe there are a couple of other examples of unclear failures, where the people involved in the failure couldn't see what was happening right in front of them, but none come to mind right away.
Good work. Look forward to seeing more of it!
I’ve noticed this too but I wasn’t sure if it was in my head/confirmation bias or an actual pattern. I wonder whether the Sunday Scaries could be to blame for the uptick in that sort of reading material.
I've noticed it for a couple of years or more now. I figured most readers of HN have also noticed it, so I thought I would throw it out there to see if my observation was shared or not.
I know that people cycle through moods in their lives. I also know that people require some amount of drama in order to feel as if they have meaning (Even/especially people who say they don't like drama). Doomscrolling and the associated content promotion, curation, and aggregation probably tap into that primal need.
The internet at scale and the associated Markov-chain-like content selection and promotion we're seeing is hacking the species in some very significant and unexplored ways. Between the folks completely in denial and those claiming that the end is near, there needs to be some real philosophy and science going on (I don't think either one by itself is going to help much since this is a completely new area of intellectual exploration)
*(Reference to phrase "Sunday Scaries" for those who haven't seen it before: www.sunday-scaries.com/what-are-sunday-scaries )
1. I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
2. I would define failure as a near complete and permanent loss of control by a society over itself and its internal territory. So the Bronze Age Collapse would definitely qualify, as some of those societies never rose again. But under this definition the French Revolution and the Long March would not qualify. The conquest of Greece by Rome could count, but the re-emergence of Greece in the Byzantine Empire complicates things. Some see the latter as a different culture -- I would need to read more myself before coming to a view on this.
It's true that some thought of themselves Roman well into the 600s -- such as Gregory the Great, for instance. But they weren't in control anymore, so that would be a partial collapse under my definition (as the Eastern Roman Empire persisted)
These are very reasonable criticisms and I will take them into account.
These, I think, should be established as early as possible, and the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee presented afterwards, with points of similarity and difference with your own definitions highlighted.
Some minor points:
- Section 1.2 begins by discussing a crisis in creativity and the changing relationship between the elites and the masses. But then it switches to a list of "challenges" including aging and growing sovereign debt. This is rather jarring and needs to be reorganized.
- It's very surprising to read that Greek philosophers switched focus from political philosophy to individual virtue once the Macedonians and Romans invaded. All of Plato's dialogues that I've read are about individual virtue. Even the Republic is only fifty percent politics and the rest is about the soul. Aristotle too is very concerned with what the personal virtues are and how they can be cultivated.
[1] I realize Maslow's Hierarchy is not an accurate model, but close enough for the point I'm making.
So the development is still economic it's just not merely about "amount of wealth" but about the process in which the wealth was created too.
A self-made guy with a 1 billion wealth is more likely than not a savvy businessman.
A guy who won 1 billion in the super-lottery is not - even though both have 1 billion.
> For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future
Which is rather the opposite of what you're saying, particularly if "unsustainably borrowing from the future" refers to things like fossil fuels.
While your changed hypothesis matches empirical data better than the original hypothesis, I think you have to be careful in how you interpret it. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands have large amounts of fossil fuels, yet are very culturally liberal, even compared to neighbors like Germany. So it doesn't seem to be the case that the presence of natural resources turns cultures away from liberalism, though that's probably not what you meant anyway.
There's the question of the direction of causality. The comment I responded to only considers one direction, but could the other direction not be an important factor? Is it that wealthier societies develop certain kinds of cultures, or is it also that certain kinds of cultures tend to develop more wealth, even in the absence of vast locally available natural resources? For example, if we had an alternative timeline in which Saudi Arabia had no oil yet was rich, isn't it plausible that they'd also have a culture that focuses on scientific inquiry, education, and economic freedom, not because those things are a result of wealth but because they are a prerequisite for it in the absence of natural resources.
There is obviously a relationship between economy and culture, but the relationship is not one-way, and it's far from simple.
It's possible for liberal western values to exist there. They don't, but the fact that they could still supports what I'm saying.
Whereas in somewhere like Somalia, there is no way they could ever have a liberal western democracy. Basically liberal values are made possible by democracy, but no one adopts democracy in order to have liberal values. People adopt democracy because it's a good way to mediate disputes about how the rules surrounding private property should work, but if people don't have much of value in the first place or any clear path to accrue wealth then it wouldn't make any sense to have a democracy to manage that process.
Wealth and security has the opposite effect. People take it for granted and that security becomes more important than the western values of liberty, etc.
You need to look at when they became mainstream and were codified into the law and into our other institutions, not when they were invented. E.g. women got the vote in the US only 100 years ago.
You certainly touch on this in your first section, although Spengler and Toynbee discuss other ways for a civilisation to collapse.
This is a very difficult question. I am sympathetic to the view of Spengler, which is similar to that of Toynbee.
But in practise, I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If Western Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
If one was to scientifically determine it they would look at how strong cultural transmission is across the different units -- probably looking at the distribution of movies and other media, as well as how quickly new phrases and political ideas spread across social media.
Jacques Ellul's 1979 "The Betrayal of the West" [0][1] was way ahead of it's time. You might find it useful during your research.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/004057367903600...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-West-Continuum-book/dp/08164...
An issue that bothers me no end is the fact that we very well could get out of this mess if we collectively wanted to.
Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward.
The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems.
The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted.
Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
There's no such thing as "freedom from", which is probably one of the main sticking points between these two groups. "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control".
I realize this may seem like a pointless semantic quibble, but I think at it's root it points out a philosophical divide, where-in I personally believe one side is divorced from reality.
There are reasonable discussions to be had about where on the sliding scale from totalitarian to libertarian that society should fall for the best results for everyone, but in no case is there ever a situation in which "freedom from" is a real thing. You are trading off "freedom" for "safety".
That is not always the case. Counterexample: "freedom from tyranny", as in "citizens are free from tyranny by the government" – that can hardly be reframed as "the government loses agency due to oppressive external control by the law".
I suspect that collectively, we actually DO want to; we've just ended up with social and political systems, both domestic and international, that conspire against actually managing to do anything serious about it, like some prisoners' dilemma played out on a grand stage.
For example, we collectively would like to live a nice life on planet Earth. If climate change is real (and I'm in the majority that believes it is the case), then that that nice life is at great risk. But we do not collectively believe that climate change is real because of the aforementioned conspiracies to try to make us collectively disagree.