For the past 45 years (or so - no reason to take a specific measurement on it all...), we in America (and, because of the US's soft imperialism of the latter-20th Century, to a lesser extent, the world) have been in a state of civilizational decline. It's easy to see now, looking back, that this has happened - and I think it's easy to look around our world today and see modern technologies and say "It's Tik-Tok / FaceBook / CRT" or "It's cancel culture / hyper - wokeness / Trump" and these are all, of course, symptoms of the decline, but to think that the symptom is the root cause and the thing to be treated is - well, is essentially modern American medicine under late capitalism, really.
And - i know i know - virtually anyone reading this is now saying, "wait a minute, you can't lump ______ in there with _______", and that's sort of also the point (see my point about writing things from a few weeks ago), but I would say in response that if you find yourself within a civilization in decline, all aspects of it are symptoms of it, not just 'the good ones' or 'the bad ones'. Decline isn't necessarily a negative thing (I mean, for the civilization or whatever thing it is that is in decline, sure, it's probably not great, but), rather it is always also making space for whatever might simultaneously be arising or entering the emptying space...
But this, here, post is a look back rather than a look forward.
I finished Dan Carlin's book, The End is Always Near, "a couple months ago", and while Carlin's scope is (as always) much grander than my smaller [self]sample here, his take is that our current run as Western Civilization could be coming to a close here any day now...
We've had a pretty good run... whether you start to measure from, say, 1066, and we've been on a roll now for the last 960 or so years, or maybe 1776 and we're about to host our 'quarter of a millennium' party - or maybe the much more closely relevant to me, 1978, and it's halfway to 90! And don't get me wrong, it's not over (hopefully) for all or most of us, but that word "Near" in Carlin's title has always been a bit squishy. Nothing seems close, historically, except for the recent past. A future shift always looks further away than it is.
That "our" moment of historical pre-eminence is at an end or in jeopardy or at least at a crucial moment has been widely accepted (or bemoaned or lauded depending on the perspective) for many and many a now. From 'the end of the American Century' or the coming (stroke current) Chinese Century to Strauss-Howe's assurance that we're due for a Fourth Turning, there seems some agreement that 'we're due' for something.
It's often tempting, I think, to try reading history as 'tea'leaves' - learning from prior collapses just what might happen next. We have a shorthand for this in the clichéd aphorism "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." But I tend to think it's a lot more complicated than that - (more of a "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does often rhyme" or Marx's "first as tragedy, then as farce" situation).
I just finished Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (ikr!?), a book written during our last great Crisis Turning, and while I find Hayek's conclusions quite mystical, I think his read on the structures that are coming to an end and what they might look like coming out of World War II. It's the difference between predicting 'what is going to happen' (which I don't think tends to turn out very well) and guessing 'what it might be like'.
I've lived all of my life within an Unraveling and a Crisis Turning - starting with Watergate and Reaganomics and continuing through to 9/11, the Great Recession, Trump and then who knows what's next in the back half of this decade or so... If nothing else, I suspect the next 6 years won't be boring...
We have this narrative narrative desire to make history into something where decisions are made about 'what comes next', and to be sure I think the end of this next Crisis (if it isn't the end of all of it) will be a kind of tipping point - where history might lead us to one of several sorts of underlying superstructures: a new oligarchic royalty; or a next-gen AI authoritarianism (this one seems more likely if quantum computing gets discovered and then owned by one company) or perhaps a new new deal... (so, basically we're looking at Dune, or Terminator, or Star Trek... You Choose!)
Sometimes it seems like all sorts of pseudo-intellectuals are constantly bemoaning the imminent fall to come if ________________ is allowed to occur, but really it's only been that way for the last 45 years or so :(. A real retrospective perspective will see that it's all just part of a cycle. The end of this cycle might just end up being quite a bit bigger than the ones we've seen somewhat recently.
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