Work in Progress: Analysts and Chroniclers of Our Own Decline
Friday 10 March 2023
Back in newsletter 165 from December 2021 I discussed some failure conditions of mature civilizations. After that newsletter appeared a couple of correspondents suggested multiple ways in which civilizations fail, all more-or-less intended to analyze some of our present problems, and, in particular, these four failure conditions were noted:
1. My explanation of defection from the central project of one’s civilization
2. The sclerosis of distributional coalitions formulated by Mancur Olsen
3. The transformation of political leaders into managers of the managerial state, which can be found in James Burnham, Adam Curtis, and generally in critiques of the managerial state (also known as anarcho-tyranny)
4. Elite overproduction, often leading to the emergence of a counter-elite, found in the work of Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin.
This list is not intended to be definitive or exhaustive. Some years ago I wrote a blog post in which I argued that complex systems can fail in complex ways, and so it is with civilization: a mature civilization is a complex system, and while it can fail in simple ways (say, an intense gamma ray burst that killed all life on the planet) it can also fail in complex ways as enabled by its own internal complexity.
Moreover, a close analysis of the four failure conditions named above would probably reveal that these failure conditions largely overlap but do not perfectly coincide: one of the aspects of complex systems failing in complex ways is the particular sequence of failures and how they follow one upon the other. It is easy to imagine how any one of these failure conditions could contribute to the cause of any of the other failure conditions. For example, defection from the central project could cause (or contribute to) sclerosis in distributional coalitions through what Carroll Quigley called the “institutionalization of instruments,” which follows from a social instrument falling out of alignment with the central project. Defection from the central project could also cause, or contribute to, the formation of a managerial state, or elite overproduction, both of which would come about from elite defection from the central project and consequently putting their own interests first.
Such a pattern of explanation could follow from any of the above failure conditions if any one appears before the others. Given the many avenues to failure, there is no single way in which civilizations fail, although many permutations of failure will resemble each other because it will be the same set of problems appearing, albeit the sequence of their appearance may vary. In a slow failure, the problems will be loosely-coupled and their appearance will be discrete and recognizable each in turn. In a rapid failure, the problems will be tightly-coupled and no obvious causal chain will connect them, except that the civilization will seem to fail all at once, with problems appearing in widely scattered areas of social life in apparent suddenness. This kind of rapid failure is of particular interest as it would exhibit a kind of purposive movement of failure, by which I mean that the failures would exhibit an apparent coordination and so would resemble the antithesis of a central project: coordinated failure is purposive movement toward collapse, while the coordination afforded by alignment with the central project is purposive movement toward social coherence and convergence.
What is rapid failure, and what is slow failure, when it comes to civilizations? I am assuming that rapid failure is distinct from sudden failures that are simple failures: whereas simple failures happen extremely rapidly due to some overwhelming single cause that is capable of destroying institutions in one fell swoop, a rapid failure would be a failure of some degree of complexity in which multiple causal mechanisms are involved in cascading failure. The only question is how several causal mechanisms work together, and how quickly they work. A rapid collapse might be effective within less than a century, say, whereas a slow collapse would require more than a century, and perhaps several centuries. This is just a guess, as several conventions would need to be established in order to make the difference quantifiable. For example, a civilization might be a hollowed out husk that is only waiting for a trigger to collapse, in which case we could say that this civilization had been experiencing a slow failure internally, possibly for several hundred years. Alternatively, the timeline of collapse could be taken as the convention, and the rest of the analysis built around this.
When we dig a little in this way we begin to see how inadequate our concepts of civilization are at present. We have almost nothing in terms of quantitative concepts that can be fixed to metrics that might allow us to say something significant (and helpful) about rates of civilizational change and collapse, about civilizational-scale institutions that are functional or dysfunctional, about causal mechanisms that drive the formation and development of civilizations in contradistinction to causal mechanisms that drive the deterioration and dissolution of a civilization. Without an adequate conceptual framework we are helplessly stuck in a loop of making the same obvious observations but without any way to make the observations count (literally, by quantifying them) and so beginning to build a base of knowledge. That is why I have become a something of a broken record (if we can still use that metaphor) on the topic of a science of civilization and our want of even a beginning of such a science.
To elaborate on my account of civilizational failure, defection from the central project of civilization can take many forms, and a prognosis of contemporary social ills could be developed in many ways that would take this causal mechanism as the root cause and driver of failed and failing social institutions. In particular, it is interesting to consider defection from the central project as it manifests in different social classes. Here, again, we might see the process play itself out in one social class before it spreads like a contagion among other social classes, so precipitating a more general failure across institutions that serve society up and down a social hierarchy, or horizontally, cutting across all social classes at once. I won’t get too finicky about the decomposition of American society into social classes — Americans are notorious for denying the reality of social class (the American poor are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, while the rich are all “upper middle class”) — so I will only consider a rough distinction among the poor (including the lower classes, i.e., the working poor, and the dregs of society), the working class, the middle class (in the US, mostly salaried professionals), and elites (including the ownership class).
When the poor detach themselves from the central project, they often become homeless, turning to drugs and alcohol to blunt the pain of failure, and then turning to crime to support their drug or alcohol problem. While many working poor are solid citizens, the fact that they are so close to penury means that they have no social cushion for any mistakes or failures. They are what has been called the precariat, because their mode of life is so precarious they are always only a disabling injury away from losing everything. And, once they have lost everything, the possibility of returning their lives to a stable condition is low, though not impossible. We can see, in major American cities, the growing population of homeless as an increasingly visible, and therefore undeniable, problem. But to wind up at this dead end means that some very basic resources are missing, and supplying them would require a root-and-branch reform of economic policies and institutions, which is not going to happen. These poor souls have checked out of any participation in the central project long ago, and any talk of an ideal must strike them as laughable, so far are they from any ideal.
When the working class detach themselves from the central project, though their resources are limited, they aren’t yet at rock bottom, and they still have options. Consequently, the working class in defecting from the central project may go in any number of directions — any direction except the kind of vibrant participation in the labor force that builds great infrastructure projects and keeps water flowing into cities and sewage flowing out of them. To be sure, the working class usually continue in their working class jobs, but they cease to bring to their employment the same “can do” spirit that makes the difference between a job well done and a job poorly done. Some become drunks and only marginally maintain their employment, bringing their drinking problem to work and thus lowering the morale of others in the same employment. Jobs are done not with an attention to detail and with a love for doing a good job for its own sake, but rather jobs are worked until completion in a spirit of malicious compliance with expected performance. In defecting from the central project, working class individuals will transfer their loyalties to professional spectator sports or to recreational activities that fill the void left by a meaningful society. Ideals are not impossible abstractions, as they are for the poor, but they are distant, and the ideals that disseminate from the core of society seem meaningless in comparison to more proximate ideals like witnessing a perfect sportsball match or having the ultimate hunting vacation.
When the middle class and professionals detach themselves from the central project they typically invest their energies into their careers, and this slowly but surely transforms professional institutions into careerist institutions. As with the working class, the focus shifts away from doing a good job for its own sake, but the middle class population then divides between those who check out at work but continue to show up on the one hand, and on the other hand those who continue to do a good job for the wrong reasons, like promotions, or feathering one’s nest in order to shift to a better position elsewhere. Loyalty to an industry or to an employer vanish, and everyone is on their own and necessarily out for themselves, to get the best deal while they can, however they can. Thus mathematicians who might have worked with engineers to build things, instead use their talents in the financialization of the economy, building castles in the air while everyone who can gets rich and gets out with a golden parachute. Professional ethics have to be painstakingly laid out precisely because they no longer flow from the heart, from the intrinsic love of the profession, but rather it is only seen as a “cover your ass” strategy to avoid any avoidable unpleasantness. The ideals of the central project, with which they would have been made familiar in their university educations, is something to which they pay lip service while focusing on their own comfort and a comfortable retirement, which latter is a lifelong focus as they build their investment portfolio, which is never large enough, as the vision of a secure retirement in a decaying society retreats, like the horizon, as one approaches.
When elites detach themselves from the central project they are never without the ideals that are so notably absent among the poor, for whom ideals are a distant abstraction. For the elites, on the contrary, there is a superfluity of ideals — their elite educations filled them with every imaginable glittering generality, but when these glittering generalities cease to be anchored by a coherent and stable central project, they proliferate like mice in a barn, and they scatter off into all directions. As with the professional class, they pay endless lip service to ideals even as they attack the ideals that were once the backbone of society, sneering at tradition in favor of something new and better, as they imagine it. While their wealth allows them to avoid much of the dysfunction over which they preside, when they are forced to step over homeless people living on downtown streets, they salve their conscience by voting for bleeding heart programs that promise to fix the problem, as they certainly have no interest in fixing it themselves, nor have they any idea how to do so. They know that some kind of terrible and unspeakable gulf has opened up between actual life that they see every day and the ideals they publicly espouse, but none of it really matters enough to try to close the gap. The most successful seem to be attracted by the most distant and impossible ideals, guaranteeing that their ideals will not be shared with the other social classes, for whom even conventional ideals are distant and a bit unreal.
Needless to say, I prefer this analysis of unresolved and unresolvable problems, since it is my own idea and my own conventions employed as concepts, but it is clear that the aggravated and worsening problems of our time have many contributing causes, so that all of the above-named failure conditions, and many more besides, play a role. But defection from the central project has a special place in the study of civilization insofar as civilization is defined in terms of its central project. To defect from raison d’être of civilization deprives civilization of its meaning at its fons et origo. When this defection is sufficiently widespread in a civilization, eventually it passes a threshold from which there is no return.
But there is no end of people like me who are offering analyses of present social ills, either prescribing a cure, demanding triage, or pronouncing the situation hopeless. We are the analysts and the chroniclers of our own decline. Being the beneficiaries of several thousand years of history and civilization, and of several hundred years of rapid scientific development, we have collective experience and accumulated knowledge not available to the men of past civilizations, so we have a better chance of understanding what is happening to us and to our world. But our understanding is the kind of understanding that Hegel recognized when he said that the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the setting of the sun. We can look back on our civilization — or, rather, an epoch in the history of our civilization — with an understanding of how it came to be, how it flourished, and how it declined. We will not likely be around to witness the final extinction, as the developmental arc of civilizations is tediously slow from the standpoint of a single human life, but that it is coming we will not doubt when we truly understand the trajectory of our civilization.
Not only are we the beneficiaries of a great stock of scientific knowledge, but we have enough experience in the sciences that we are in a position to found new sciences to investigate matters like civilization itself. This capacity to found new sciences is not yet mature; as I have recounted many times over, science itself is not yet scientific; there is no science of science. And so we flail about. I read books about the collapse of societies, watch videos, listen to lectures, and throughout it all I reflect on these many voices, each trying to make sense of the elusive present, which seems to slip from our grasp the more tightly we try to contain it. (It is usually professionals and elites who reflect on such matters, but I can’t be counted among the professionals because I am not credentialed and not paid, and my poverty and lack of connections exclude me from the elite.) We all seem to agree that there are serious problems, but we disagree on what the problems are, how they should be addressed, and what we ought to do next. In none of this is there any triumphalism; that is not a note sounded in our time. Perhaps this is a sign that we recognize that the problems are the distinctive problems of a failing civilization, and that, if we get it wrong, there will be no rallying and no return to social vitality. That recognition narrows the scope of the problem ever so slightly, but not enough to converge upon a common understanding of what the problem is.
