Taking a look at the pictures coming out of Los Angeles the last couple of weeks as wildfires ravage whole neighborhoods brings to mind apocalyptic imagery you might find in the Bible or in some sort of post-apocalyptic novel or film. Add that to the fact that it seems like a ton of scholars across different disciplines have been increasing their studies and reports about the collapse of Western society and civilization and it makes you wonder if they know something the rest of us don’t. Is it possible there are signs out there these folks see that indicate the West is truly in its twilight years?
Could this come about because of a nuclear war? Another more deadly pandemic? Are we talking about the possibility of humanity ceasing to exist? It’s a scary thought, but one we need to stop avoiding and force ourselves to be prepared for.
via Lew Rockwell:
One branch of this new wave of intellectual attention has been the study of the reasons for societal collapse, including a close study of the lifespan of empires and civilizations in the past. One exhaustive search by Luke Kemp, a BBC correspondent and a professor at the Cambridge University—get this—Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, was published in 2019, and he found an average lifespan, of societies from the Akkadian empire of the 24th century BC down to the modern age, of 336 years. It is very difficult to find an exact date for the “rise” of anything so complex as a civilization and often of its “fall,” though in the case of coinciding empires it is sometimes easier to find the date when one king or emperor comes to the throne and when the last such office existed, so such an exact figure must be taken as suggestive only.
That 336 figure suggests that underlying each civilization is an inherent fragility, and many scholars, following Joseph Tainter, whose definitive Collapse of Complex Societies came out in 1990, suggest that it is the inevitable complexity of such societies that leads to their fall. Civilizations begin with an aggregation of traits, each with some complications, and as they develop they tend to create larger societies, more developed governments, greater bureaucracies, multiple armies, and still a wider array of problems, until the whole edifice begins to stretch and crack. Collapse, says Kemp, is “a normal phenomenon for civilizations, regardless of their size and shape,” and greater size is not a defense “against societal dissolution.”
Or, taken another way, there are inevitable limits to the growth of civilizations, and once those limits are passed—a condition modern ecologists call “overshoot”—there is no survival possible. An interesting study on exactly those lines, Limits to Growth by a team of MIT scientists in 1972, showed by computer analysis that “if the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years,” probably around 2020—30. An update by this group in 2004 found no reason to change this prediction—indeed, it argued that the case for overshoot was even stronger than before. Obviously there has been no change since then in humankind’s “growth trends,” so the limits are very near to being reached right now.
So the question you’re probably asking right now is how long do we as a human civilization? The whole idea of a society lasting around 336 years doesn’t really apply to the West, as we’ve been around since 1689, a year with basically zero historical significance for us or Europe. If we change the birth of the West to the 16th century which is when we experienced the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the start of what we now call capitalism, we passed that mark over a hundred years ago.
In other words, it’s likely that we have already begun the slow and steady decline and are headed for the cliff as we speak. Could 2025 be the year it all slides into oblivion? I can tell you this. The year starting off with a massive, destructive wildfire in one of our most important cities is not exactly a sign of great things to come.
“Many of us will survive, in a withered world, but we might begin to prepare now for new lives in new ways, and perhaps with more humility, community, and faith,” the author said in conclusion.
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