Should we be worried? From the very first paragraph:<p>> 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.<p>I can't help notice how decline of democracy is painted as the 'end of the West', meanwhile Medieval Era was the 'spring of the West'. There is no democracy in Medieval West, there were kings, theocracies, crusades, burning of heretics and women. I immediately starts smelling hypocrisy, the only thing about Medieval West is that it is almost entirely white.<p>So here comes the real question: What is the west? Culturally, the west now is way more different then the west in 1500 as versus the East today. Why is it that people start feeling that the west will pass - and that it somehow coincide with demographic changes. Is it a coincidence or subconscious bias?<p>US have been through much worse, from the America First nazi sympathizer of the 30s to McCarthyism of the 50s, that's not even mentioning the civil war of the century before that. We as humans tend to characterize what we're currently moving through as more significant than they are - put it into historical perspective and it could just be a 'nah'.
It’s fun to think about the decline of civilisation and ponder where we might be in the history of the West, but the truth is we have no idea. Being a student of decline does lend you an air of gravitas that optimism or even indifference just doesn’t I suppose.<p>These studies often involve panning the rubble of previous civilisations for clues about decline, but without much in the way of generally applicable theories those clues aren’t really much use to us. Yeah, civilisations that are collapsing have agricultural, economic, military, ecological, and demographic problems. So do the thriving ones.<p><i>Is it the destiny of the West to die?</i> Well, sure – it requires a huge wobbly stack of things to keep it alive (from physics to poetry), so one day it will almost certainly end. It’s not prophecy unless you can tell me when these things will happen. It could conceivably be ten years or ten thousand years away.
This is the first chapter from a book I am writing about the decline of the West, and how to reverse it. This chapter summarises a number of indicators of decline and implications for the future, while also touching on the potential causes by applying the thoughts of Spengler and Toynbee.<p>Enjoy and feedback welcome!
This website appears to be a (not very subtle) collection of dogwhistles masquerading as historiography.<p>From the "Introduction to Metasophism"[1]:<p>> The above proposals may seem sweeping, but we are only getting started. Particularly concerning is European demographics arising from low fertility and deepening social divisions. A society is beginning to divide along ethnic lines is one where any debate will be tribal; higher ideals such as discovering the meaning of life will be ignored. Ethnic issues must therefore be de-dramatised. The Fellowship programme described earlier would help unify society by engaging diverse groups in common tasks.<p>> But we must go further: to dispel ethnic tensions within Europe, asylum-related migration needs to be limited. Chapter Nine therefore discusses a way of doing this that would prevent further asylum immigration while ensuring that migrants would have prosperity and security. The central idea is to rent a small amount of land on the coast of Africa for one century, give it a basic constitution and access to EU markets, and ensure legal and physical security. Such an area would become an attractive place for investment, thus providing jobs for migrants.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/introduction" rel="nofollow">https://www.themetasophist.com/chapter/introduction</a>
After watching "Pumped Dry: The global crisis of vanishing groundwater", I think future conflicts will be over water.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q</a><p>I think the West will eventually we faced with a decision: either learn to live sustainably or get used to living in an irreversibly ruined environment.<p>Reduce and reuse come before recycling.
It's not at all clear to me why we should be concerned with the decline of a proposed "west." Many of the traits folks laud the "West" for were in fact the products of a series of influences from many other cultures at the time.<p>Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and <i>many</i> of them currently fall short of their stated ideals when difficulty is encountered. Further, society as a whole seems to make lots of progress when small and large overturnings (or revolutions?) happen. Poorly formulated ideas are refined or discarded, and values are reaffirmed. Counter-revolutionary elements seek to roll them back, but even in success they're irrevocably changed for the experience and cannot help but define their mission in terms of their challengers.<p>Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.
I'd really like to think that the "West" will survive. Yet, part of me has a hard time shaking the feeling that we're all living in a period of decline.<p>I think about the world my parents and grandparents grew up in, and then I think about what life is going to be like in the next 50 years (I'm in my mid 20s) and it makes me anxious.<p>The only bright spot about Covid is that it rapidly accelerated social changes (work form home) and gave people time to think about the kind of society they want to have.
I don't see any need to invoke grand themes. We are perfectly capable of collapsing via our own unique failings.<p>Global climate disruption followed by mass migration, triggering fascist government, and then global thermonuclear war, could be our generation's unique mode of collapse.<p>In particular, you don't need to blame the Woke movement or the US's failed pandemic response. Exxon suffices.
My great-grandparents lived in an era before the car. They lived through seeing cars, planes, and finally moon landings. The internet is the crowning achievement of this age, but that also means that in a way physical achievements have lost their focus and luster - that doesn’t mean they haven’t existed.
There is no west decline, it's just individual across the globe reclaimed their rightly productivity. That by itself is a victory of western value: the democracy and freedom of economic power.<p>Now it's the time for west to advance to the next stage and herald the new chapter of human civilization, instead of wrongly reminiscent of its past glory that was not really meaningful nowadays.
The reason the rest of the world is rapidly catching up with the developed world (are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore part of ‘The West’?) is because they are copying as much of it as possible as fast as they can. The cultural and economic template of the developed world is taking over everywhere, it’s spectacularly successful.<p>Spengler would have hated this because he was afraid the non-white races would adopt our technology and use it’s against us. However since I’m not a racist, with a zero sum fear of the foreign, I think that’s fine. They’re part of our civilisation, or at least are rapidly becoming part of it just like Japan, Korea, Taiwan etc.<p>The one outlier is China, which against the odds has managed to ditch Communism, adopted radically laissez faire Capitalism, yet retain one party authoritarianism. They seriously worry me, but not for anything to do with Spengler and the inherent instability of civilisations.
Given the content of the linked article, I heartily recommend taking a peek at Peter Turchin's work on Secular Cycles (1). He also keeps a blog, where he expands on some of the ideas. Not a light reading, though. The best introduction to his work was a book review at now deleted slatestarcodex - maybe it can be retrieved by internet archive.<p>Based on the dataset he and his colleagues compiled, civilizations big enough for internal dynamics tend to exhibit these characteristics during their stagnation phase:<p>* stagnating or declining real wages<p>* increasing rents<p>* decrease in social cohesion<p>* increasing inequality<p>* increasing urbanization (mostly due to no rural opportunities)<p>* more people pursuing education, arts and crafts in hopes of joining the elite. This sounds as a plus, until you realize it's caused by inability to keep a decent standard of living in traditional occupations<p>* sharpening intra-elite competition, leading to a gradual abandonment of previous norms. Dirty tricks become more and more commonplace<p>* crisis amplification - non-issues turn into crises, challenges turn into disasters<p>* 'overproduction of elites' leads to increasing corruption and rent seeking<p>* stagnating wages and increasing corruption leads to strain on public finances<p>Turchin's contribution lies mainly in providing historical statistics to back these claims, the novel mechanics of 'elite overproduction' and 'elite aspirants', and overlaying a secondary generational cycle, when a clique of elites keep power for too long (30-50 year cycle, think of Boomers in US or WW2 veterans in USSR).<p>(1) <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles</a>