In the End

As I’ve discussed before, I’m a bit of a science fiction aficionado. Or addict. Whichever sounds nicer in polite conversation. In one of those awesome post-apocalyptic fiction books (Fitzpatrick’s War, if you’re so inclined), there was a line at the end that really snapped out at me. A puppet master character was explaining to our protagonist the secret of the world. To paraphrase (because with L here, I’d rather not devote time to quote hunting), every civilization exists in three phases: a heroic age, a golden age of empire and finally a period of decline and decay. To forestall decline, there exists in that civilization a secret group whose goal is to keep them forever stuck in the heroic age. But that’s not what I came here to write-book reports are so 3rd grade.

This was so interesting to me because, as a sociologist, I’ve always loved thinking about the nature of civilizations. I know I’m not original; hundreds, thousands, hell millions of people have historically considered the nature of civilizations’ rise and fall. I could use my few remaining words to discuss what kinds of civilizations gain the upper ground in the game, but I think that can be explained in almost the same way as why certain species evolutionarily succeed-a mix of adaptation, luck and flexibility. What has been of more interest to me in the past was how civilizations fade; losing influence or territory or cultural supremacy. As a child of the 80s and 90s, I don’t really remember a time when the United States wasn’t an ascendant power. For me (since I was in middle school and such), I’ve lived in world defined, in many ways, but American hegemony. As a consequence, I’ve always been on alert for things that could lead to the end of this particular, golden moment in time.

There are so many possible things that could lead to our fall. We could lose our economic edge. Technological competition could lead to our military being leapfrogged by a foreign power. Increasing cultural divide could lead to gridlock or (what the hell, we’re being speculative) a second civil war. Someone else could build a cultural wonder. There are so many possible paths to failure, as any seasoned Civilization player could know.

But that’s not what will happen.

Before you pull out the stones to kill your false prophet, hear me out. There’s a reason that not a single one of those reasons will be our downfall; our fall (when it comes) will be the result of a number of events (unless it’s some sort of species wide extermination, in which case, all bets are off). It’ll be something like foreign excursions sapping our will and draining the treasury such that we are unable to invest in our infrastructure, making us unable to economically compete and in the face of increasing foreign resistance, we then withdraw our focus to our own shores. Just saying.

As a student of the Cliff Notes version of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and to pull from Judson again, “rigorists always win”. Civilizations fall because they lose their unity of purpose and are supplanted by groups that have not. When groups within the society fragment to the point that there is no commonality of purpose, then that society has given up on keeping its cultural/military/technological/linguistic/whatever superiority. The Roman Empire, devolving into conflicts for the imperial purple, was destroyed by barbarian clans united in their desire for gold, food, land and hot Roman women. The machinations of the imperial court of Sung China fall to the barbarian forces of the Mongol horde. The economic power of the British Empire is splintered relative to singularity of local independence movements. Unity of purpose and sense of self is all that keeps a society together and prevents it from surrendering into that good night.

And that’s what makes me so scared about following politics these days. The more that I see and watch, the state of American politics seems to be breaking this unity of purpose. That we have one party that seems to doubt even the legitimacy of their opponents seems that we are, as a unified society, giving up our continued place in the sun. Oh well, it was a good ride while it lasted.

This post was part of the continuing series of mental gymnastics known as the Synchronized Blogging Experiment. Look at them, they’re better.