Why Nations Fall—and What We Can Do to Save Ours: Pt 1

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, Philosopher

Every civilisation in recorded history has eventually fallen. In recent historical memory alone, China’s traditional Confucian monarchy; the Turkish Ottoman Empire; the Royal House of Iran; and the mighty Soviet Empire. All collapsed with sudden totality after allowing major problems to accumulate.

While all these Empires suffered from well-recognised structural, social, and economic flaws, few commentators and historians at the time saw these challenges as threats to the very existence of these societies.

Most people, if they think about it at all, would view the possible decline and fall of modern Western civilisation as a highly unlikely proposition. The modern state, with its supposed evolutionary adaptability, its representative democracy, ever-increasing technological development, and fluid market economies, would simply mould and adapt to any internal or external challenges it may face.

This was the alluring proposition of political philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s hugely-influential 1992 work, The End of History and the Last Man. He argued that the ascendancy of Western democracy — which followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War — meant that human society had reached “not just… the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western democracy as the final form of human government.”

Events since that time — the rise of radical Islam; the increasing fragmentation of society, family, and community; the increasing levels of depression, self-harm, and drug abuse in advanced Western countries — indicate that this optimism was naïve at best.

Historians looking at the fall of civilisations often use as an example, the once-seemingly unassailable Roman Empire. With its ruthlessly efficient armies; its technological, economic, cultural, and social sophistication relative to its contemporary challengers; and its ability to adapt and absorb influences from other civilisations and cultures; it provides a rich example of the folly of seeming historical inevitability. With the invaluable benefit of 1500 years of hindsight, reasons for the decline of the Western Roman Empire based at Rome are often listed as including:

• Economic upheavals and the over-reliance on slave labour
• Geographical and territorial over-expansion and military over-spending
• Government corruption and political instability
• The increasing threat from migrating Germanic tribes from the North including the Visigoths, the Franks, Vandals, Burgundians, and Huns
• Weakening of the Roman legions.

Francis Schaeffer in his book How Should We Then Live (in commenting on Edward Gibbon’s seminal work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), marked five fatal attributes of Roman society in its slow but inevitable decay from about the third century AD:

1. A mounting acceptance and approval of ostentatious displays of “show” and luxury (affluence)
2. Economic disparity creating a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor
3. An excessive obsession with sexual gratification
4. Decline of traditional and formalistic artistic conventions and their increasing substitution with outlandish and absurdist styles betraying little originality and creativity
5. An increasing toleration and desire to “live off the state” without any commensurate social obligations.

To many contemporary observers viewing — with increasing alarm — current social and cultural trends of Western society in the third decade of the third millennia AD, this catalogue might sound depressingly familiar.

States don’t fail overnight. The seeds of their destruction are sown deep within their political institutions.

Commentator Bill Muehlenberg, on his website CultureWatch, observed:

A lot of thought has gone into human mortality, and how we can prolong life. Less thought has gone into the question of why nations die. But nations, like people, do have a beginning, and do have an end. Thus, it is worth looking at the questions of: how and why nations collapse? …

One common theme that emerges from those who have thought carefully about the decline of nations is that often it is the case that they collapse from within, instead of perishing from without. Thus, Arnold Toynbee could rightly say, “Civilisations die from suicide, not murder.”

He goes on:

British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) is most famous for his magisterial A Study of History, 1934-1961. In this 12-volume work, he examined the rise and fall of nations, remarking,

“Of the twenty-two civilisations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”

Given that this observation is more than half a century old, how much truer could it be today?

English writer and historian Lord Macaulay (1800–1859) made a similar observation about the fate of democracies in a letter to an American friend in the mid-1850s. In this, he theorised that the average “age” of the world’s great democratic nations rarely passed 200 years, with each following a similar pattern from prosperity and freedom to dependency and decline:

From bondage to spiritual faith.

From faith to great courage.

From courage to liberty.

From liberty to abundance.

From abundance to complacency.

From complacency to selfishness.

From selfishness to apathy.

From apathy to dependency.

And from dependency back again
into bondage.

Questions arising from this supposedly inevitable progression from liberty and abundance to dependency and bondage include: Where are we now in this supposed cycle? In other words, how far along are we at this moment on the road to this seemingly inexorable decay?

For those not just studying history as an academic field, but who also believe that the modern democratic state is the best model for maximising human freedom, prosperity, and happiness, the more important question is: Can we possibly escape this typical collapse? Are we next?

In the next part of this series, we explore a deeper question: how did our societies arrive at this point, and what cultural and philosophical shifts may have set the stage for the challenges we see today?