Should we be worried? From the very first paragraph:
> 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.
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.
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?
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'.
Spengler referred to the Medieval Era as Spring because that was when what he saw as the key cultural forms first emerged -- such as linear perspective in painting, and soaring Gothic cathedrals - all of which he saw as manifesting a new cultural tendency to reach out to infinity which later seeped into maths and music.
For Spengler, this sense and longing for infinitely wide and profound 3D space marked out the Western individual.
I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
Democracy didn't really become a thing until after the Baroque era. Maybe democracy failing will bring us back to the "golden age" of the West, like the medieval/renaissance era.
Democracy was certainly a thing before the Baroque era. A lot of old school "kings" were chosen by groups, with varying degrees of how large that group is, e.g. Ancient Athenian democracy.
What you're talking about is European/Western Liberal Democracy, which may involve voting, but has a different set of assumptions and serves different rights.
The period when Spengler published his work (1918 and 1922) was a period of deep pessimism for obvious reasons.
At that time, the Baroque era was actually pretty close, less than 200 years ago.
The medieval era, while atrocious in the aspects you mention, was also the start of the liberation of cities and the beginning of some sort of "somewhat free" commerce.
So it does not surprise me that he'd name it the spring. After all, the spring is not an all-pleasant season.
What does surprise me is that German romanticism in the 19th century would already fall in the winter period. But I suspect that he blames Marx, the revolutions of 1848 for the decline and ignores the staggering achievements in art, literature, mathematics and physics in that era.
To expand, I disagree with the underlying premise of his/similar works.
That somehow all culture exist in a perpetual state of competition, and the spread/growth of one necessitate the decline of other. While cultures usually can claim a direct ancestry down the ages, the truth is that the cultures and norms existing today in different part of the world is MUCH closer to each other than say their direct ancestral culture 500 years ago - and it happened because cultures are NOT in a competition, rather it adapts to the new technologies and outside cultural influences. As a result the world is closer together than it ever has, and that's a good thing.
I'm pretty sure the premise you cite wasn't his view. For Spengler, cultures were attached to a specific location or landscape -- the idea of them spreading doesn't make sense in that context. I also don't recall any discussion of competition. Here's a direct quote:
"A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality ( dem urseelenhaften Zustande ) of ever childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul."
Spengler, Oswald. Decline of the West: Volumes 1 and 2 (Kindle Locations 2294-2297). Kindle Edition.
Yes, twice, once in the time of Commodore Perry, when they were humiliatingly forced to open to western powers.
Then, after they powered up, and tried to ensure this doesn't happen again, in 1945, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their humiliating surrender and occupation. They turned into western culture as a response, and it took them until the 80s to shake some of this off...
>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.
That's because what's important is the vector, not the absolute state. Towards the end of the medieval era we saw the emergence of all kinds of positive developments, plus increased prosperity, order, etc. And of course it was followed by the Renaissance.
Similarly, now we see all kinds of degeneration, including the most major: the western countries fall down several steps in the top 10 of GDP, giving their place to Asian countries. The West increasingly loses importance economy wise, and this also means declining standard of living, infrastructure, forward momentum, political discontent (Trump is an example of that), and cultural relevance. It's a slow process, which will take decades or even a century to be completed, but it will be completed.
>So here comes the real question: What is the west?
Historically/Geographically, the Europeans and their ilk in the USA/Canada.
Culturally, the mix of Roman law / Christianity etc as it progressed through to the Renaissance, Enlightenment and on to the 20th century.
Economically, sometimes "westernized" places like Japan and South Korea are included (and Australia/NZ).
In any case, it's mostly: what's not culturally Asian, African, Latin American, or Arabic.
> Culturally, the west now is way more different then the west in 1500 as versus the East today.
Yes, but that's neither here nor there. Physiologically, mentally, etc. a 60 year old is more similar to another 60 year old than to his 5 year old self. But despite that the 60 year old and the 5 year old are the same person - and share their development history.
>Why is it that people start feeling that the west will pass - and that it somehow coincide with demographic changes
Because that's how it happened for other similar cultures/countries in the past. Including for a succession within the west: In the 20th century Britain as an "empire" declined and gave way to the USA, for example.
Also because it has already began giving its place to developing economies that have began to surpass it, and have more momentum.
>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
Those are not "much worse". Those are historical developments in a country with a positive momentum vector and huge development (economic, population, global relevance, etc) during and afterwards.
>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'
In history few powers (or superpowers) remain in their place for long.
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.
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.
Is it the destiny of the West to die? 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.
Interesting, and (so far) well-sourced. You picked a good day to post here. For some reason, Sundays is always it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on HN. Every week I see variations around the same theme. It's cool to have the topic covered with reduced scope (societies, not the planet at large), and in-depth.
Which brings me to my questions. One, what is "The West"? Would the French Revolution count as a civilization-wide failure? The Bronze Age collapse? Sea Peoples? The Long March? The Hellenic Era ending? Perhaps this is explained elsewhere, but some clarification would be helpful.
Two, it might be good to cover all of the "false positives" when it comes to predicting civilization collapse. It's been quite the cottage industry over the centuries. Romans were quite concerned with the lack of morals and corruption the Greeks brought them. Many believed that signaled the end of Rome. Why, some of the "new" Romans weren't even sleeping on the ground any more! They were using beds!
Three, and I apologize for so many queries, but "collapse" or "failure", or whatever you're using could also use a bit of definition. The Western Roman Empire collapsed and failed, that much is obvious. But just when that occurred is much less clear. People in Europe thought of themselves as Romans long after modern historians view Rome as being gone. I believe there are a couple of other examples of unclear failures, where the people involved in the failure couldn't see what was happening right in front of them, but none come to mind right away.
Thank you for this positive response and good questions.
1. I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If W. Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
2. I would define failure as a near complete and permanent loss of control by a society over itself and its internal territory. So the Bronze Age Collapse would definitely qualify, as some of those societies never rose again. But under this definition the French Revolution and the Long March would not qualify. The conquest of Greece by Rome could count, but the re-emergence of Greece in the Byzantine Empire complicates things. Some see the latter as a different culture -- I would need to read more myself before coming to a view on this.
It's true that some thought of themselves Roman well into the 600s -- such as Gregory the Great, for instance. But they weren't in control anymore, so that would be a partial collapse under my definition (as the Eastern Roman Empire persisted)
> You picked a good day to post here. For some reason, Sundays is always it's-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it on HN.
I’ve noticed this too but I wasn’t sure if it was in my head/confirmation bias or an actual pattern. I wonder whether the Sunday Scaries could be to blame for the uptick in that sort of reading material.
I've noticed it for a couple of years or more now. I figured most readers of HN have also noticed it, so I thought I would throw it out there to see if my observation was shared or not.
I know that people cycle through moods in their lives. I also know that people require some amount of drama in order to feel as if they have meaning (Even/especially people who say they don't like drama). Doomscrolling and the associated content promotion, curation, and aggregation probably tap into that primal need.
The internet at scale and the associated Markov-chain-like content selection and promotion we're seeing is hacking the species in some very significant and unexplored ways. Between the folks completely in denial and those claiming that the end is near, there needs to be some real philosophy and science going on (I don't think either one by itself is going to help much since this is a completely new area of intellectual exploration)
*(Reference to phrase "Sunday Scaries" for those who haven't seen it before: www.sunday-scaries.com/what-are-sunday-scaries )
As mentioned earlier, this is a well trodden field whose results depend heavily on how you choose to define collapse or decline. I didn't see any indication of that kind of discussion. Secondly, you seem to make use of historical examples as demonstrations, but without discussing the context around them (if they were even collapses!). There's a huge risk in doing that of making superficial comparisons with no actual basis in reality. This is the trap most works on the subject fall into, because it's almost impossible for any single person to have high level expertise across multiple disparate periods and history of any particular collapse is very much unsettled, expert level territory.
Quite interesting work. My main questions are:
What is the West? Which countries? and What do decline and death mean, and what don't they mean?
These, I think, should be established as early as possible, and the ideas of Spengler and Toynbee presented afterwards, with points of similarity and difference with your own definitions highlighted.
Some minor points:
- Section 1.2 begins by discussing a crisis in creativity and the changing relationship between the elites and the masses. But then it switches to a list of "challenges" including aging and growing sovereign debt. This is rather jarring and needs to be reorganized.
- It's very surprising to read that Greek philosophers switched focus from political philosophy to individual virtue once the Macedonians and Romans invaded. All of Plato's dialogues that I've read are about individual virtue. Even the Republic is only fifty percent politics and the rest is about the soul. Aristotle too is very concerned with what the personal virtues are and how they can be cultivated.
IMHO this misses the mark. For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future, and as per all unsustainable things by definition, sooner or later this situation is going to come to an end. Saying things like climate change or political corruption or whatever might cause western civilization to collapse is accurate, but that's not really a good starting point. There's a bigger pattern here that you should be mentioning.
[1] I realize Maslow's Hierarchy is not an accurate model, but close enough for the point I'm making.
Liberal western values were invented hundreds of years before modern levels of wealth.
Wealth and security has the opposite effect. People take it for granted and that security becomes more important than the western values of liberty, etc.
> Liberal western values were invented hundreds of years before modern levels of wealth.
You need to look at when they became mainstream and were codified into the law and into our other institutions, not when they were invented. E.g. women got the vote in the US only 100 years ago.
Different regions have had vastly varying levels of liberalism with vastly different levels of wealth. Look at Saudi Arabia. And remember that rich countries 100 years ago were much poorer than poor countries now. There is some correlation for sure, but there is a certain tendency to say that everything is due to the level of wealth, which is empirically false.
It's possible for liberal western values to exist there. They don't, but the fact that they could still supports what I'm saying.
Whereas in somewhere like Somalia, there is no way they could ever have a liberal western democracy. Basically liberal values are made possible by democracy, but no one adopts democracy in order to have liberal values. People adopt democracy because it's a good way to mediate disputes about how the rules surrounding private property should work, but if people don't have much of value in the first place or any clear path to accrue wealth then it wouldn't make any sense to have a democracy to manage that process.
It's a chicken and egg problem. Is the absence of a path to accrue wealth the reason why Somalia doesn't have a well-functioning political system, or is the bad political situation (part of) the reason why it's so hard for Somalis to accrue wealth? I don't think it's one or the other, it's a complex interplay of both.
Sure, but if there aren't enough natural resources left for a population to meet its basic needs then that population isn't going to be able to accrue wealth under any circumstance.
And yet, those examples do fit. Saudi Arabia has "vastly different levels of wealth" but much less liberalism precisely because of how that wealth was achieved (not through competition, building an internal market, developing a middle class etc, but by digging holes on the ground where basically money comes out in the form of oil - holes which are tied to the owning families).
So the development is still economic it's just not merely about "amount of wealth" but about the process in which the wealth was created too.
A self-made guy with a 1 billion wealth is more likely than not a savvy businessman.
A guy who won 1 billion in the super-lottery is not - even though both have 1 billion.
I agree with that, but that's not what the comment said:
> For me the crux of it is that it's only possible for liberal western values to exist in contexts where most people have enough wealth to not have to seriously worry about their physiological- and safety-related needs.[1] And the reason we're at this level of wealth now is only because we've been unsustainably borrowing wealth from the future
Which is rather the opposite of what you're saying, particularly if "unsustainably borrowing from the future" refers to things like fossil fuels.
While your changed hypothesis matches empirical data better than the original hypothesis, I think you have to be careful in how you interpret it. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands have large amounts of fossil fuels, yet are very culturally liberal, even compared to neighbors like Germany. So it doesn't seem to be the case that the presence of natural resources turns cultures away from liberalism, though that's probably not what you meant anyway.
There's the question of the direction of causality. The comment I responded to only considers one direction, but could the other direction not be an important factor? Is it that wealthier societies develop certain kinds of cultures, or is it also that certain kinds of cultures tend to develop more wealth, even in the absence of vast locally available natural resources? For example, if we had an alternative timeline in which Saudi Arabia had no oil yet was rich, isn't it plausible that they'd also have a culture that focuses on scientific inquiry, education, and economic freedom, not because those things are a result of wealth but because they are a prerequisite for it in the absence of natural resources.
There is obviously a relationship between economy and culture, but the relationship is not one-way, and it's far from simple.
If you've read "The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future" by Oreskes and Conway, what did you make of it? The collapse they portray (and they're not so much saying "this is how it will happen" as just running with an idea) is driven by climate change and a refusal (political and social inability?) of the West to save themselves, if I recall correctly.
You certainly touch on this in your first section, although Spengler and Toynbee discuss other ways for a civilisation to collapse.
I read it, and am still puzzled what precisely you mean by 'the West'. Spengler meant western Europe; is this also your definition? Or do you mean same vague idea, including countries like North America (with or without Mexico?), New Zeeland, Australia? What about South America?
This is a very difficult question. I am sympathetic to the view of Spengler, which is similar to that of Toynbee.
But in practise, I think what constitues the West is constantly changing. The historical base is Western Europe. If Western Europe and the US diverge in ideology over the next few decades (not necessarily a bad thing) then as a category the West will shrink back to the base. Possibly a bit larger if the EU stays intact or integrates further, as I hope it does.
If one was to scientifically determine it they would look at how strong cultural transmission is across the different units -- probably looking at the distribution of movies and other media, as well as how quickly new phrases and political ideas spread across social media.
I suspect that collectively, we actually DO want to; we've just ended up with social and political systems, both domestic and international, that conspire against actually managing to do anything serious about it, like some prisoners' dilemma played out on a grand stage.
For example, we collectively would like to live a nice life on planet Earth. If climate change is real (and I'm in the majority that believes it is the case), then that that nice life is at great risk. But we do not collectively believe that climate change is real because of the aforementioned conspiracies to try to make us collectively disagree.
Everyone collectively wants to, we just can’t decide how.
Half the population wants the post-capitalist, ecologically sound, anti-racist path forward.
The other half wants to lean hard into capitalism and traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”) with an emphasis on innovating our way to the future and out of our current problems.
The post-capitalists look too much like communists to be trusted by the freedom folks, and the freedom folks look too much like history’s economic oppressors and robber barons to be trusted.
Historically these divides take a long time dissolve (unless there is a bloody conflict and clear winner).
I believe you're trying to apply the US model to the rest of the West. For instance, I'm not sure there is a conflict between ecologically sound and innovation in most other western countries, or the same perception of "communism" as the Bogeyman: for most, it's just a failed experiment/ideology, not an imminent threat to their way of life like how some US discourses view it.
> traditional civil liberties (“freedom to” not “freedom from”)
There's no such thing as "freedom from", which is probably one of the main sticking points between these two groups. "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control".
I realize this may seem like a pointless semantic quibble, but I think at it's root it points out a philosophical divide, where-in I personally believe one side is divorced from reality.
There are reasonable discussions to be had about where on the sliding scale from totalitarian to libertarian that society should fall for the best results for everyone, but in no case is there ever a situation in which "freedom from" is a real thing. You are trading off "freedom" for "safety".
> "Freedom from" is just a nice way to say "loss of agency due to oppressive external control".
That is not always the case. Counterexample: "freedom from tyranny", as in "citizens are free from tyranny by the government" – that can hardly be reframed as "the government loses agency due to oppressive external control by the law".
This website appears to be a (not very subtle) collection of dogwhistles masquerading as historiography.
From the "Introduction to Metasophism"[1]:
> 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.
> 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.
I really hate this dog whistle crap that I keep hearing. It's like a more intellectual version of 'so what you're really saying is <something you did not explicitly say>'. I don't know how it ever became a legitimate thing to say but I keep seeing it used to brandish anybody, who's opinion is not completely in line with standard left ideology, as some sort of bigot in hiding.
I don't agree so much with the parts you quoted but it should be obvious to a reasonable person that somebody could have those opinions and not be a white supremecist.
It really is scary to me how quickly people will throw around these accusations
Believe it or not, you do not have to be a white supremecist to be sympathetic with
> I don't know how it ever became a legitimate thing to say but I keep seeing it used to brandish anybody, who's opinion is not completely in line with standard left ideology, as some sort of bigot in hiding.
To be absolutely clear: everything I've said (or asserted) as been liberal at most. Nothing about is is particularly left or left-leaning, regardless of my personal politics. This is an important distinction, especially in the context of reactionaries who like to bemoan the death of the West (which, of course, originated political liberalism).
> I don't agree so much with the parts you quoted but it should be obvious to a reasonable person that somebody could have those opinions and not be a white supremecist.
This is why they're dogwhistles. They exist in a space of plausible deniability, and only become obvious to those who (1) keep up with what reactionaries are doing, or (2) are themselves reactionaries.
Standing completely alone, they're merely concerning. With the other components attested in both the posts and this thread, they're clearly intended to signal fellowship with some reactionary group.
I would argue that the concerning thing is that when accused of dogwhistling, while plausibly deniable, is also completely irrefutable. How can I show you that the text is not secret code words?
I have only come across the great replacement theory twice and both times it was in this exact context. Somebody being accused of dogwhistling to it. Small sample size for sure, but also a strange phenomenon no?
I think what you are engaging in is quite dangerous and I believe it must come from a real ignorance of the other side's way of thinking.
You think, to have those opinions, they must have some underlying racist beliefs, and lo and behold, you find the evidence in the most innocuous of places.
> I would argue that the concerning thing is that when accused of dogwhistling, while plausibly deniable, is also completely irrefutable. How can I show you that the text is not secret code words?
Once again: it’s patterns of phrases and contexts. Dogwhistles only work because of plausible deniability and people like you.
> I have only come across the great replacement theory twice and both times it was in this exact context.
This is a testament to ignorance, not the evidence that you think it is. The existence of this conspiracy theory is well attested online, as are its standard dogwhistles.
> This is McCarthyism 2.0.
If “McCarthyism 2.0” means “having some private schlub call you out on your pseudonymous account for being racist (or playing into racist language),” then the real McCarthyism must have been a real cakewalk. Funnily enough, that’s not how I learned about it.
I apologize if my comments before were a bit on the scathing side. I really am just a bit shocked that this way of reasoning had become commonplace.
I would like to ask you, do you think that somebody could write the article and not have the beliefs you are asserting?
Imagine if I am pushing for some version of universal health care. Most of the rhetoric around such a topic will refer to things like equality, private industry exploiting the people and the poor getting the worst of it. All fairly standard and not necessarily untrue. What would you say to somebody that claims this to be dog whistling to communists. You say, 'no of course that's not he means. He means what he says'. Then they say he's using code words that give these fair normal statements a double meaning that are a signal to those in the know.
I don't see what you can do about this situation. This kind of tactic is really shady. You pass them an unprovable accusation that they can't even defend. But the accusation is usually of something so slanderous that, even if they are absolved of guilt, a certain amount of damage is already done.
> To remedy this defect, a new Metasophist University is needed to provide high quality online modules and reliable accreditation to all. We shall thus provide cheap education of the highest quality to all Europeans, while empowering people to explore all domains of knowledge at all ages. This is but a first step to boost creativity, a first volley in our war to ensure the creation of an effective elite.
Sounds like the neo-reactionaries of the so-called "intellectual dark web".
Yes, this was my interpretation as well. It's always fascinating to see these kinds of abuses of language and phrase by people (ostensibly) invested in some idealized philosophical and literary tradition.
How is it wrong? Too many people in a new environment where they're fish out of water that don't understand the customs will destroy the culture there. It's dilution. Foreign people should be intergrated into society or they'll be outcasts and not understand how it works. My friend got a credit card at 16 since his mom understood the financial system. My family used cash all the time only and I'm far behind because I was raised to hate credit.
In Italy everyone is furbo and lies to get ahead. People rely on honesty in the US, I remember reading a story where an Italian man complained about his room and he got another one, instantly. He was astonished, and said it would never work in Italy since everyone would lie about it.
My experience as a life long resident of the bay area is the children of immigrants very quickly adapt. In the bay area you have first world highly trained engineers whose parents were iron age dirt farmers in Southeast Asia.
"In the bay area you have first world highly trained engineers whose parents were iron age dirt farmers in Southeast Asia."
I didnt know that migration from SE-Asia was big to the Bay Area, I always thought most 'Asians' were from South Asia. Can you name a few SE-Asian countries where highly trained engineers whose parent were iron age dirt farmers actually come from.
It's very easy to adapt (as an immigrant). It's not rocket science. I wonder what the argument is going to be since it's way easier with the internet now to be primed already.
> If what you quoted is the dog whistle, what is the decoded message that the in crowd would be hearing?
Both tie closely into bog-standard reactionary and white nationalist rhetoric. The first is a dogwhistle for "the great replacement," or the conspiracy theory that Europeans (meaning, to them, whites) are being intentionally replaced by migrants as a method of control. The latter ties closely to a crowd that calls themselves "white nationalist" but not "white supremacist" -- they insist that they don't believe in the superiority of whites, and only want isolation for "fundamentally different cultures" (by which they mean races). It should be apparent that this is really just white supremacy with more steps, especially if (as this introduction proposes) the European continent functionally becomes the landlord and benevolent overseer of a migrant nation.
> Do you think the whole world has a right to enter Europe? Isn't this an amazing form of entitlement?
As every European country agrees[1], refugees certainly do have the right to request asylum in Europe. There's nothing "entitled" about fleeing death, violence, and privation.
That's the base case, and the one this blog post seems to be opposed to. More elaborate cases require more discussion, but you'll have to forgive me if I'm not inclined to spend time on that with a throwaway account.
> 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.
I mean, it worked well enough for the people of Hong Kong... but what's going to happen once the century-long lease is over?
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.
We're already living in an irreversibly ruined environment. You don't notice because you didn't live to see it in its prior state. You never saw half a billion ducks take flight over North America. You never saw, and you will never see, a seasonal salmon migration on the San Joaquin river that can support a fishery catching 11 million pounds per year. My kids have never seen a Sierra Nevada conifer forest that wasn't sterile and dead, and they think forests just look that way. Our society does not have the facility to remember the ecosystems of the past. We just forget and adapt to the new one.
That happens when you replace a population that lives sustainably (Native Americans) with a population that does not care about sustainability (Modern Americans).
Converting material wealth with an intrinsic value (a healthy environment, biodiversity) into abstract wealth without an intrinsic value (a number in a bank account) is really the dumbest thing to do.
Once we are done converting every resource into a money, the resulting balance will surely be very useful to satisfy our needs.
"When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money."
Honestly, you need to level up your argumentation. No material is (except in form of waste) converted to anything abstract without an intrinsic value. Capitalism generally reduces waste. What happens though, is that material is turned into products which a lot of people find useful/desirable. This problem is a problem, but it is a much harder problem to 'solve' than the one you are claiming.
Thank you for commenting. I haven't looked into the groundwater issue -- perhaps a consequence of living in rainy countries to date.
On your second point, I think the big problem is that status is increasingly linked with consumption -- having a large house, relatively new car, frequently travelling, and so on. This link has always been there, but perhaps non-material ways of obtaining status have declined (religious vocations, public service, etc.)
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.
Desirable traits for a society inviting growth, prosperity and egalitarianism can exist in nearly any industrialized society today, and many 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.
Let's worry more about creating a sustainable, distributed, and well-understood technology base. Unlike culture, that actually takes time and infrastructure to build.
No, society does not necessarily make large technical progress during overturnings or revolution. Rome is a case in point. Western society slid into nearly 1000 years of stagnation.
At any rate, culture is far more foundational than you suppose and it's very difficult to get right. And when a culture has become corrupt or toxic it is very difficult to get anything of value done at all.
This seems like a very, very sketchy definition of "progress." The later 1/3rd of Rome was not exactly full of memorable technological and intellectual progress, especially compared to its neighbors.
Roman's are sorta famous in history for their lack of interest in anything but making war. There's a reason we don't refer to many roman math treaties; they were often very dogmatic texts referring to greek works and heavily influenced by the lens of military problems; and often fantastically wrong.
Well maybe for intellectual works, you're right, but their civil engineering prowess was unmatched for 1000 years. But again, you're just underscoring my point... this "war making" culture prevented other types of intellectualism from flourishing. Culture matters. And cultural revolutions can just as easily wind up in hell as in heaven.
Isn't that my point? That we shouldn't be afraid of cultural change if it brings about more of the values we want and less of the values we don't?
"Cancel Culture" is much feared by many, as an example, but in practice it actually intensifies public debate among questionable issues while not wasting time allowing folks with classically racist views to muddy the more pressing issues, so while it can feel painful sometimes, it seems like a net good.
The decline of West was invented as a tool to mobilize certain groups of Western population, just like any cultural and/or political narrative.
To name one obvious narrow prejudice: The prosperity in China was brought by market economy and Western corporation mechanisms. The rise of China is the rise of West. And often cited as one indication of the decline of the West.
The rise of China is /not/ the rise of the West. It's something we haven't exactly seen before, it's the rise of a new type of Totalitarian Fascism which is supplanting Totalitarian Communism to intentionally enrich a blessed few through state-run corporations. There is nothing even resembling a "free market" in China, and most of the official economic reporting in China is falsehoods and outright lies. As Benito Mussolini said "“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” and what would be a more accurate description of how China creates and structures SRCs?
What created prosperity in China was not adoption of Western corporate mechanisms and a market economy, it was the realization of party leadership that if they created an appropriate facade it would allow Western Neoliberals to create the necessary messages to shift economic policy and allow foreign money to flood into China, enriching party officials and their cronies by using the massive population of destitute people ripe for exploitation as unskilled labor.
Both before and after, China remains a totalitarian country run by despots, but now they are able to put a veil of acceptability over their actions which has greatly helped their propaganda machine in the West as people eat it up.
The West was not merely it's democracy political system. It is also the market economy. Overwhelming amount of US politicians state the same thing. For example, most US president express one of the core principles of western system is market economy.
Again, I want to emphasize that I am not defending CCP. What typical HNers stated about CCP's "crimes" are nothing but typical political polis. Let me say one thing, CCP organized the suppression of Han Chinese population, totaling probably 100+ millions baby, through the one child policy. While at the same time allow racial injustice by selectively applying the rule (I.e. force it strictly on normal Han people, but allow political figures and some population the free rein). And the systematic exploitation on the rural population during since 1976 opening up probably was the most cruel of all of the modernization process. These were seldom mentioned by Westerners.
Of course, china's rise is complex phenomenon. It has many debatable elements. But decisively, it's rise was enabled by adopting core western value system, forsaking the Soviet Union era Communism doctrine.
It's in that sense that I believe it is a fair statement to say China's rise is the rise of the West.
I see the point you're trying to make, but I don't see any market economy in China. I see China directly manipulating currency markets, stock markets and requiring state ownership or control of all major companies, as well as the creation of SRCs. This is not a market economy, it's a vehicle to enable foreign dollars to prop up state actions.
I mean, the Chinese government even manipulates data at all levels to lie about the status of their economy intentionally and with no attempt to even report accurate data. It's so bad that most Western companies which make serious investments in China use other data as a proxy and perform their own analytics to determine market movement separate from what is reported by the government. I'm not going to go digging for a pile of links, but here's one article in the Financial Times discussing how far off the official numbers are: https://www.ft.com/content/961b4b32-3fce-11e9-b896-fe36ec32a...
There's some depth there, I don't think all of the misreporting in China is machinations occurring at the top. I've seen too many substantiated reports of more minor governmental officials reporting incorrect data to save face or to enhance their own position politically within the CCP and once that data becomes analyzed in aggregate it will lead to incorrect results. It seems there's a "vig" being added at every layer, such that it may not even be possible for China to report accurate data.
Market economies run off of data and information, fundamentally. The stock market itself is just a mechanism to set pricing and valuation based on all available collected data. It's essentially a mechanism for crowd-sourcing, where the people participating have skin in the game and a vested interest in making a meaningful analysis of the data available to them. China manipulates and misreports data as a matter of course and directly intercedes to manipulate what little in the way of markets actually exist, so it cannot be in any way described as a "free market economy" (that word "free" is crucial to the Western capitalistic way).
> it's the rise of a new type of Totalitarian Fascism which is supplanting Totalitarian Communism
If the argument is "putting capitalism in a box and using it to motivate government hegemony" is "the rise of a new type" of "fascism" unique to China, that's not true at all. Avoiding comparisons to certain "western" governments, Germà Bel argues convincingly that Nazi Germany was deeply committed to this strategy [0].
It's the western party line that this is exactly what the post-revolutionary Soviet Union ended up doing sometime after Stalin, ultimately leading to its dissolution into what can only be called an Oligarchy.
And uh, I think it's at least worth debating if the US responded to the Great Depression by doing the same thing; essentially using the notion of "jobs" programs and "public works" projects to move lots of money into corporate government supporters rather than directly providing relief.
> , it was the realization of party leadership that if they created an appropriate facade it would allow Western Neoliberals to create the necessary messages to shift economic policy and allow foreign money to flood into China
Maybe, but if that's the case than that's them simply noticing what various other economic projects the US in particular was already engaged in. I'm still not convinced "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by Perkins is entirely made up.
> Both before and after, China remains a totalitarian country run by despots, but now they are able to put a veil of acceptability over their actions which has greatly helped their propaganda machine in the West as people eat it up.
Perhaps so. But any government is only a few leaps from fascism. See, for example, the Philippines. The US's response to COVID-19 and its current use of loyalist "border control forces" to "defend federal monuments" while violating subject Miranda Rights, States Rights, and arguably the US Constitution should remind us that it is not so long a fall for any organized nation.
Agreed on basically all points here. My criticism of the state of China is not a defense of the state of the West. It's merely intended to provide a clear distinction between the two, and to combat the rising pro-CCP shilling I see happening consistently on HN. It is very much possible for two different bad things to both be bad.
Well then allow me to extend a hand from the other side of the aisle and point out that articles like this off and read like love letters to a much more authoritarian era. Often containing words like "value" and "culture" which appear to be little more then a thinly-veiled rebuke of cultural liberty.
In the top posted article here, it's a depressing truth that it's impossible for us to tell what the author means to say until they write more about it, because words like "the west" and "Culture" I've been deeply co-opted by reactionary discourse.
So I'm keeping an open mind, but I definitely want to point out that there's nothing special about Western governments when it comes to a slow slide into fascism.
Thanks for commenting, and sorry for that side-effect. I don't experience it myself anymore, and that may be due to exposure.
I guess to solve the issues you need to tolerate staring them in the face for quite a while!
To repeat what I said below: I'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also a historical awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.
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.
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.
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'm personally optimistic -- I think the ideas are there to avoid protracted decline and there's also an awareness which most previous civilisations didn't have.
I don't see any need to invoke grand themes. We are perfectly capable of collapsing via our own unique failings.
Global climate disruption followed by mass migration, triggering fascist government, and then global thermonuclear war, could be our generation's unique mode of collapse.
In particular, you don't need to blame the Woke movement or the US's failed pandemic response. Exxon suffices.
Many thanks for this remark. That scenario is unfortunately within the realm of possibility -- indeed in a later chapter I will address the topic of climate.
But there are other ways of failing which I think also need to be insured against -- hence my engagement with the cyclical models of history, to see what insight they have to offer.
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.
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.
Thanks for your comment. I'm agree with your second sentence.
For the first, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. with Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.
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.
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.
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.
To repeat what I said below, I would shy away from discussing rise and decline in purely geopolitical terms. I'm more referring to internal aspects of decline -- social cohesion, creativity, quality of governance, and so on. It's possible to be in relative geopolitical decline but culturally and economically quite vibrant e.g. Austria-Hungary between 1866 and 1914, and I wouldn't say they were in decline then.
Some countries (or at least their governments) are also starting to reject the Western secular cultural template -- Turkey, Pakistan, Hungary, and Poland.
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.
Based on the dataset he and his colleagues compiled, civilizations big enough for internal dynamics tend to exhibit these characteristics during their stagnation phase:
* stagnating or declining real wages
* increasing rents
* decrease in social cohesion
* increasing inequality
* increasing urbanization (mostly due to no rural opportunities)
* 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
* sharpening intra-elite competition, leading to a gradual abandonment of previous norms. Dirty tricks become more and more commonplace
* crisis amplification - non-issues turn into crises, challenges turn into disasters
* 'overproduction of elites' leads to increasing corruption and rent seeking
* stagnating wages and increasing corruption leads to strain on public finances
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).
Thanks very much for this detailed and rigorous comment.
I have already read part of that book (along with the book review), but haven't finished it yet. I find that model highly plausible, and think it offers useful insights into what is happening today (even though there is a major difference between the agricultural societies which provide all of his cases, and the modern situation).
I will address the overproduction of elites theme in the chapter on selecting and training a new elite. My central innovation is to try to create an alternative to top-down elite selection and training. Essentially, requiring an aspiring elite member to work with others in small groups at a young age, after which their performance would be peer assessed -- which determines whether they could enter the elite. I hope that this could dissolve the tendency of hierarchies to select people who look/think/talk just like themselves, and thus create an elite more reflective of the diversity in society. This component of the elite would be numerically limited (1 per 100, or 1 per 200).
I address the issue of inequality in other chapters. One idea follows from the above: if the groups above choose to spend their time together to form companies, then some of the shares should go into a Public Equity Fund, in which each citizen would have an account (a fair exchange in return for facilitating the activities of the group). This would mean that everyone would benefit from the formation of new companies. More details on all this in the coming weeks.
> 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.
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.
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?
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'.