Ch. 1: Whispers from Fallen Civilisations

1.1 Spengler’s Prediction

Is it the destiny of the West to die? For Oswald Spengler, the answer was yes. In The Decline of the West he argued that all civilisations go through a similar life-cycle. According to Spengler, the Medieval Era was the spring of the West, the Renaissance its summer, and the Baroque era its autumn. He predicted that the West would enter its Winter around the year 2000, which would be characterised by a decline of democracy due to excessive influence from moneyed interests, and a resultant rise of authoritarianism. Spengler saw this life-cycle as inevitable, a dogmatic approach which led him to support an ultimately destructive nationalism. Nonetheless, some prescient insights can be rescued from his framework.

Prescient, because even today, his prophecy is slowly being fulfilled. The immense power of the financial sector, mobilised to loosen financial regulation, resulted in the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The ensuing austerity sparked the rise of anti-establishment movements with authoritarian tendencies. In countries such as Italy and Hungary, such parties were or are in power.

The power of money seems set to remain strong in the West. The conditions which necessitated huge bank bailouts have not been eliminated. The revolving door means that many politicians and regulators are incentivised to serve banks while in office in return for very lucrative jobs afterwards. Typical examples of this include former US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, former President of the Bundesbank Axel Weber, former head of the Swiss central bank Philipp Hildebrand, and former German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, all of whom earned millions from the financial sector during or after their positions in the public sector.

Since Spengler made his prophecy, the number of challenges has multiplied beyond even what someone with his ability could have foreseen. In a study of the collapse of the Bronze Age civilisation around 1177 BC, the historian Eric Cline revealed the true horsemen of collapse as being climate change, famines, droughts, earthquakes, rebellions, and mass migration.[1] Any one of these challenges could have been surmountable, but the confluence was fatal. Some are reappearing today, with the pandemic as a new recruit.

Climate change was the first to manifest. The fact that the ice shelves have begun to splinter is, for now, one worry among many. Of much greater concern are ever more extreme weather events, namely floods and droughts, that strike previously temperate regions. The final result of this could very well be the desertification of large parts of the United States and Southern Europe.[2]

Reducing our consumption of carbon fuels will not stop this threat. Europe has reduced CO2 emissions by 22 percent since 1990 [3], but the rest of the world, and especially China, continues to burn fossil fuels. According to Vaclav Smil, fossil fuels still supply 90 percent of global primary energy, a greater share than in 2000 when hydropower and nuclear energy were proportionately more widely used.[4] In fact, the success of Europe to date in containing rising emissions may be due to the fact that much energy-intensive manufacturing has already been sent abroad.

The oceans have also become more hostile to life. They have already begun to acidify due to their absorption of over 20 percent of the increased carbon dioxide in the air. This along with the higher temperature has pushed entire ecosystems such as the coral reefs into collapse, endangering the food supply of the one billion people who rely on the oceans for nourishment.

It should be no surprise then that the sixth mass extinction is now unfolding. Researchers, looking at 177 mammals for which they had detailed data, found that all have lost at least 30 percent of their geographic range and over 40 percent have undergone sharp population declines.[5]

Bee and insect populations are collapsing, along with the bird populations who rely on them for food. In France, countryside bird populations have fallen by a third in 15 years.[6] In remote Swiss mountains, plastic has even permeated the soil.[7] Given the complex nature of the ecosystem, the effects of all this are unpredictable.

Such environmental chaos could force migration, as much of Africa is highly dependent on agriculture for employment and well-being — and this is the sector most exposed to climate change. This is before we even take into account UN projections, according to which the population of Africa is forecast to increase from 1.2bn today to 2.5bn in 2050 and 4.4bn in 2100, at the same time climate change could make much of that continent uninhabitable.

This will occur in a context where youth bulges could very well lead to civil strife. According to German sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, violence is inevitable when those aged fifteen to thirty comprise over 30 percent of the male population.[8] Similarly, others have found that a majority of conflict in previous decades started in countries where 60 percent of the population is under the age of thirty.[9] In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington pointed to demographic trends to predict that many North African and Middle Eastern countries would be unstable today, a prediction borne out by the Arab Spring.[10]

Such instability be a particular challenge at a time of reduced integration and increased social stratification; integration of migrants seems to have failed in some Western European countries, while members of the working class are withdrawing their loyalty from governing elites. Toynbee’s framework indicates that both phenomena may have a common cause.

1.2 Toynbee’s Thoughts

Arnold Toynbee, a British historian who wrote twelve volumes entitled A Study of History, sought to understand the factors underlying civilisational growth and decline. Toynbee’s principal thesis was that a decline in creativity among the elites precipitates the breakdown of a civilisation. Their inability to devise solutions to the problems of the time leads the masses to cease their deferral to them.

And who could blame them for this in today’s world? A cursory glance in a newsagent tells us who the dominant cultural figures are: celebrities, sports stars, and perhaps the occasional politician. Yet what are the meaningful achievements of these groups? What risks do they take?

In a previous age, the leaders of societies literally put their lives on the line for their countries – think of de Gaulle, Churchill and most of the governing classes of the post-War period who had been involved in one if not two wars. This provided a powerful moral authority which today’s leaders lack. Moreover, the leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wrought the national and international institutions that govern us today – a creative triumph that eludes current leaders.

Due to numerous scandals, religious figures who once would have been venerated are now mostly disgraced. As for modern celebrities, while many are simply too vapid to be worth imitating, this does not stop the vapid from doing exactly that — to the delight of all manner of brands for whom the celebrity becomes a purchasable ambassador.

The decline of creativity is also evident in the world of fashion. As Kurt Andersen noted in an essay in Vanity Fair, fashion used to go through radical changes.[11] Every ten years from the 30s to the 90s, style changed radically. It has since stagnated. Taking a longer historical perspective, the dominance of the business suit since the thirties is anomalous, given that for centuries formal wear underwent radical changes relatively frequently.

How did this creative decline come about? Toynbee noted that once the masses cease to mimic the elite, the elite begins to mimic the masses in an attempt to gain popularity. This process, which Toynbee termed proletarianisation, is already quite advanced: consider the carefully calibrated way in which politicians seek to echo the opinions and language of the electorate. The coarse language of Donald Trump is a particularly egregious example of this — however, here it does not seem the imitation was feigned, unlike when former British Prime Minister David Cameron forgot which football team he was meant to support.[12] To this theatre we can add the rise and now ubiquity of profanity, and the decline of formal dress. Perhaps this proletarianisation is the root of the stagnation in fashion: the elites mimic the masses, who are in general less likely to wear something radically different for fear of ridicule.

At the same time that the achievements of the elites are becoming less impressive, their failings are becoming more visible. Martin Gurri, in his book The Revolt of the Public, identified the internet as a key factor behind the diminishing credibility of elites.[13] The explosion of information has undermined traditional hierarchies, which formerly relied on control of information in order to hide their incompetence and thus preserve their legitimacy.

These multiple challenges could be tamed in a world where the nations of the West stood strong. Unfortunately, they continue to weaken. One example is the high level of debt in many Western countries, and their inability to stop borrowing. There was no clear plan to reduce such debt levels before the Coronavirus, and now the load has weightened significantly. As such, the West remains prone to a major financial crisis in the event a large economy, such as Italy, slips into bankruptcy.

As argued by Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University, high levels of government debt will be compounded by extravagant commitments governments have made on pensions and healthcare. These unfunded liabilities are considerable and much greater than the official levels of public debt. In the case of the US, while public debt is around one hundred percent of GDP, the amount of unfunded liabilities is twelve times greater. The equivalent in the UK and the Netherlands is about five times annual GDP, while in France, Germany and Italy it does not exceed a multiple of two.[14]

In many ways the current difficulties faced by the West are a consequence of ageing: the debt crisis, low economic growth, and low interest rates all arise from a greying society. In Europe, the ageing German population needed to save a vast amount of money at a time when there was less need for investment in Germany itself as fewer people needed to be educated or housed.

As a result of this low need for investment within Germany, such savings were invested abroad. This process is still ongoing; in 2019, Germany had the largest current account surplus in the world, sending capital abroad to the tune of US$ 300 billion.[15] Over the last decade, the sum exported totalled € 2.7 trillion. As Prof. Moritz Schularick of Bonn University and others have noted, domestic investments had a higher return of three percentage points each year.[16] This led another German economist, Jens Suedekum, to note quite rightly that it would have been better invested at home, in Germany.[17] But changing this behaviour is very difficult, as German discourse has sacralised the idea of itself as a “Exportweltmeister”, a world champion of exports: to be successful as a nation is to export. But if you export more than you import, then others must borrow from you, resulting in a capital outflow.

The outflow was not counterproductive just for Germany. Property markets in places such as Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain were the ultimate destination in the 2000s of €350 billion of this outflow, with catastrophic results.[18] If Germany had not been ageing to such a great extent, such flows would most likely not have been so great; the crisis would have been a tremor, not an earthquake. Similar dynamics may have contributed to the US subprime crisis.

The seriousness of the demographic crisis can be measured using the fertility rate, which measures the average number of children born per woman. In 2018, all European countries were below the replacement rate of 2.1. The EU-28 average was 1.6; the highest being France at 1.9, and the lowest being Spain at around 1.3.[19] Concretely, this means that each successive European generation will only be 76% the size of the previous one; and with each third generation the population more than halves.

Ageing, left unsolved, will lead to a downward spiral. As the old are less likely to favour the long-term, their inherent conservatism may prevent society from taking the necessary risks to revive itself.[20] They will also exert greater political pressure in elections, making pension increases likely. Consequent rising taxes will make it more attractive for Europeans to migrate to countries with younger populations and lower tax burdens, such as Australia and Canada, worsening an already considerable demographic problem.

A growing economy could relieve some of this pressure, but economic growth has been depressed by a number of factors. Consider the fastest growing companies, the internet giants, whose main objective is to sell more advertising. These companies employ few and invest little. US economist Lawrence Summers cites the fact that WhatsApp is worth more than Sony, despite needing far less capital investment.[21] Similarly, General Electric employs over the ten times the number of people Facebook does, despite the fact that Facebook is worth nearly five times more.

The Internet, and the illicit spread of copyrighted information it enables, has made it more difficult for some industries to capture the value they create, leading to ever broader market failure as Eric Weinstein has pointed out.[22] If those in the music, news, and movie industries cannot make a living from their work, less will be produced. The decline in the quality of the news has already become evident, with many newspapers now pursuing a click-bait strategy: salacious content and bombastic headlines abound.

Finally, if people spend more time watching YouTube videos and playing addictive games, then we can expect fewer scientific breakthroughs. In The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr argues that the Internet is making people less creative. He cites a number of studies demonstrating that the brain is becoming less adept at reading and thinking deeply. This diminishes original thinking, and bolsters conventional thought.[23] It also promotes conventional thought in other, more surprising ways: the improved ability to search for information means that one can more easily find the prevailing opinion, making one more likely to adopt it without having first been exposed to multiple viewpoints. This has been shown in academia: while there are more citations, fewer articles are being cited.[24]

Not all blame for the decline in creativity can be attributed to the Internet however. In an article in The Atlantic, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen argue that progress in the field of physics began to slow just after the 1930s.[25] Running a number of surveys, they find that despite a large increase in funding, the number of scientific breakthroughs has not increased -- implying a large decrease in efficiency. In addition, Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood also list a number of indicators of declining innovation: the plunge in the 1990s of the number of newly-issued breakthrough patents, the slowing down of Moore's law, and the growth of certain crop yields falling to 0.9 to 1.6 percent per year when growth of around 2.5 percent may be needed to feed the world population in 2050.[26]

As the West becomes less creative, as its economy stagnates, and as its problems go unsolved, its ideas will progressively exert less of a gravitational pull. The liberal model will become less attractive across the world. Many countries, particularly in Africa, seem to be turning to China for economic advice and aid — although this may be mostly motivated by the lack of conditionality usually attached to Western support. And as the power of China grows, its ability to thwart the interests of the West strengthens. This will make it more difficult to secure access to resources, to shape the rules that govern trade, and to ensure our own security.

1.3 The Road to Collapse?

A heady list of challenges weighs upon the West. What will happen should they not be transcended? Certainly, life for those in the West will get worse. As people’s expectations in life are not met, they will become ever more frustrated. As Eric Hoffer discusses in his book The True Believer, such individuals can become the fanatical adherents of political and religious mass movements — an early ghost of which can perhaps be glimpsed in the Woke movement. Given the abominable behaviour of mass movements in the previous century, their return is not a comfortable thought. The authoritarian instinct would certainly stifle political creativity. For example, after Greece fell under the foreign and authoritarian rule of the Macedonians and later the Romans, Greek philosophers lost interest in practical political designs. Instead, they began to devote more attention to individual virtue, which meant figuring out how one could be good in a wicked world.[27]

In a similar way, religious movements could be equally pernicious. Such was the case during the later stages of the Roman Empire, as described by Bertrand Russell in A History of Western Philosophy. During the Crisis of the Third Century, the Empire suffered barbarian invasions, civil war, and peasant rebellions. The population fell by about a third, and financial ruin befell even provinces that suffered no invasions.[28] And yet, according to Russell, the thinkers and serious men of that time such as Plotinus never intellectually engaged with the travesties pervading the Empire. Rather, they turned their gaze to the next world: Heaven for the Christians, and the eternal world of ideas for the Platonists. Russell tendentiously commented that when the Christians such as St Jerome did turn their gaze to the earthly realm, they concerned themselves not with saving civilisation but rather the advocation of virginity and the damnation of unbaptised infants.[29] Others, such as Salvian, saw in the roving Barbarian warbands the judgement of god meted out to the Romans who had known and ignored God’s law.[30]

Some may defend the behaviour of the prelates by stating that the negative effects of civilisational collapse are exaggerated. This argument could proceed along two lines.

First, that Rome was an oppressive plutocracy, where membership of the town council was determined by wealth, and one could be sentenced to death for criticising the emperor. It was therefore both unworthy of salvation, and probably incapable of it. Salvian himself noted the increasing oppressive nature of the late Roman Empire; whereas at one time Roman citizens fled from the Barbarians, later they begun to flee towards them, mainly to escape the imperial tax machine whose clutches increasingly tighened around the less wealthy.[31] So we should not mourn Rome too much.

However, one would go too far to say that the Dark Age which followed the fall of the Roman Empire was a period of cultural regeneration and that there was a peaceful merging between Romans and Barbarians. Such a sanguine conclusion would be at odds with the archaeological evidence. Archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins of the University of Oxford looked at objects from the post-Roman period such as pottery and roofing.[32] Though such items may seem trivial, they can serve as key indicators of the standard of living. He found that the quality of pottery declined drastically after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Whereas previously, economies of scale had allowed high quality pottery to be manufactured at low cost and distributed from one plant in South France to areas as far as Britain, the fall of the Empire resulted in the breakdown of transport routes, thereby preventing such economies of scale. The quality and quantity of pottery produced fell drastically.

The rot manifested in other places. While clay slates were widely distributed during the heyday of the empire, later many areas reverted to using thatch for roofing, which needed to be replaced more frequently. The average size of cattle also fell tremendously. All of the above points to a marked decrease in standards of living, which did not reach the same levels again in Europe until the seventeenth century.

For transport to break down so suddenly, a measure of violence sufficed to dissuade people and traders from using the roads; it was this same violence which compelled citizens of Late Antiquity to leave the lowlands for the more easily-defended hilltops. A shade of this long-forgotten dynamic re-emerged recently in the area around Calais, where some truck drivers said they wished to retire due to excessive levels of danger from migrants.[33] However, as we have seen, a pandemic can also disrupt transport and trade. Should we fail to find a vaccine in a timely manner, then we many have already entered the early stages of collapse.

In the modern world, a collapse would be much more dramatic; the higher the climb, the harder the fall. But as long as Western society remains democratic, hope remains that such a fate can be avoided. It is only when the authoritarian induces complete political apathy, to protect his power and conceal his corruption, that the balance of probability tilts towards death. In other words, to embrace authoritarianism as Spengler advised would be to commit a sort of collective suicide.

For this reason, our new philosophy must be inherently democratic. One may say that we already have democracy, and it has not fully delivered. Yet the forms of democracy found throughout the West are remarkably similar, stemming as they do from the Westminster model. There are potentially many, unexplored variations of democracy, one of which we shall explore later.

But in order to be able to implement any new design, the people must have the power discuss ideas and to change the system. Unfortunately, intolerance is on the rise, and authoritarian parties are unacceptably close to power in many countries. We may not have that much time to avoid the worst.

In the midst of all these trends, the listlessness of Western governments is remarkable. Now out of ideas, they shall soon be out of time. But how did such a decline in competence, energy, and élan come about? What are people seeking to resurrect the ugly ghosts of history? Answering this question is the necessary first step to conceptualising a better system, and therefore is the task of the next chapter.

Next Chapter: The Decline of the Elites

Previous Chapter: Introduction

Endnotes

[1] Eric H. Cline. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton University Press, 2014

[2] Parag Khanna. “Climate Change Is Forcing a New Manifest Destiny”. In: (Apr. 2016). URL: https://www.paragkhanna.com/home/2016/4/18/climate-change-is- forcing-a-new-manifest-destiny

[3] Eurostat. Greenhouse gas emission statistics - emission inventories. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Greenhouse_gas_emission_ statistics. Accessed: 2018-09-17. 2018

[4] Paul Voosen. “Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy”. In: Science Magazine (Mar. 2018). URL: http://www.sciencemag. org/news/2018/03/meet-vaclav-smil-man-who-has-quietly-shaped-how-world- thinks-about-energy

[5] Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo. “Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines”. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114.30 (2017), E6089–E6096. ISSN: 0027-8424. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1704949114. URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089

[6] “Le Printemps 2018 s’annonce silencieux dans les campagnes françaises”. In: Muse ́um National d’histoire naturelle (Mar. 2018). URL: http://www.mnhn.fr/fr/recherche-expertise/actualites/printemps-2018-s-annonce-silencieux-campagnes-francaises

[7] Damian Carrington. “The hills are alive with the signs of plastic: even Swiss moun- tains are polluted”. In: The Guardian (Apr. 2018). URL: https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2018/apr/27/the-hills-are-alive-with-the-signs-of- plastic-even-swiss-mountains-are-polluted

[8] Gunnar Heinsohn. “Exploding Population”. In: New York Times (Jan. 2008). URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/opinion/17iht-edheinsohn.1.9292632. html

[9] Elizabeth Leahy et al. “The Shape of Things to Come: Why Age Structure Matters to a Safer, More Equitable World”. In: (2007). URL: https://pai.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/01/SOTC.pdf

[10] Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon and Schuster, 1996

[11] Kurt Andersen. “You Say You Want a Devolution?” In: Vanity Fair (Dec. 2011). URL: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2012/01/prisoners-of-style-201201

[12] Daniel Boffey. “Is it West Ham? Or is it Villa? Cameron mocked on Twitter as he forgets which team he backs”. In: The Guardian (Apr. 2015). URL: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/25/david-cameron-mocked-for-aston-villa-gaffe

[13] Martin Gurri. The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millen- nium. Stripe Press, 2018

[14] Laurence J. Kotlikoff. America’s Fiscal Insolvency and Its Generational Consequences. URL: https://www.kotlikoff.net/sites/default/files/Kotlikoffbudgetcom2-25-2015.pdf. Accessed: 2018-09-05. 2015

[15] Franziska Hünnekes, Moritz Schularick ,and Christoph Trebesch. Exportweltmeister: The Low Returns on Germany’s Capital Exports. CEPR Discussion Papers 13863. C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers, July 2019. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/13863.html

[16] Ibid.

[17] Tweet by Jens Suedekum. https://twitter.com/jsuedekum/status/1224295259515105283. Accessed: 2020-04-18

[18]Hans-Werner Sinn. “Germany’s capital exports under the euro”. In: VoxEU (Aug. 2011). URL: https://voxeu.org/article/germany-s-capital-exports-under-euro

[19] Federica Cocco. “Highest fertility rates in Europe still below ‘replenishment level’”. In: Financial Times (Mar. 2018). URL: https://www.ft.com/content/d54e4fe8-3269-11e8-b5bf-23cb17fd1498

[20] Thomas Dohmen et al. “Risk Attitudes Across The Life Course”. In: The Economic Journal 127.605 (Oct. 2017), F95–F116. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12322

[21] Lawrence H Summers. “U.S. Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound”. In: Business Economics 49.2 (Apr. 2014), pp. 65–73. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/buseco/v49y2014i2p65-73.html

[22] Eric R. Weinstein. “Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy”. In: (2016). URL: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26756

[23] Nicholas Carr. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. W.W. Norton and Company, 2010. URL: https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750, P.140

[24] Ibid., p.217

[25] Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen. “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck”. In: The Atlantic (Nov. 2018). URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/ 2018/11/diminishing-returns-science/575665/

[26] Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood. “Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down?” (Aug. 2019). URL: https://www.brown.edu/academics/political-theory-project/sites/brown.edu.academics.political-theory-project/files/uploads/Innovation%20%26%20scientific%20progress.pdf

[27] Bertrand Russell. A History of Western Philosophy. Routeledge Classics, 1946, p.221

[28] Ibid. p.269

[29] Ibid. p.340

[30] Peter Brown. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton University Press, 2012, p.445 (Kindle Edition)

[31] Ibid.

[32] Bryan Ward-Perkins. The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2006.

[33] “Calais to Dover lorry drivers on migrant security risks”. In: BBC News (Feb. 2016). URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-northamptonshire-51362698/ calais-to-dover-lorry-drivers-on-migrant-security-risks