Where Are We Going? Decay vs Circumvention
No civilization lasts forever. But while every civilization falls apart eventually, there is no law of the universe to tell us when. Each stage of a civilization’s lifecycle can be longer or shorter, sometimes by centuries. More importantly for us today, the aging of a civilization is not quite like the one-way aging of a biological creature. When a system is noticeably corrupt and decayed, but is not yet totally unsalvageable, there is a window of opportunity where the system can be circumvented, and the civilization can return to a “younger” stage of its lifecycle. This has happened twice in the development of Western civilization. We are in a third such window today.
The beating heart of any civilization’s lifecycle is its economic engine. When the economic engine is working well, this leads to expansion of the civilization’s territory; expansion of its population; expansion of scientific knowledge; and cultural flourishing. In Carroll Quigley’s taxonomy, this “age of expansion” is the third of the seven stages a civilization passes through. Usually it lasts for a few centuries.
As time goes on, every economic system becomes encumbered with parasites. Social classes which had established themselves by increasing economic production come to put less effort into increasing economic production and more effort into extracting revenue from the economic production of others. The owners of the means of production cease to manage the production directly, and put the management into the hands of non-owning professionals; this leads to a focus on steadiness rather than growth, since the managers can be blamed and fired for failures but do not capture much of the gains of growth like owner-managers would. (Legend has it that during Classical civilization’s age of expansion, when the Romans came to appoint Cincinnatus dictator, they found him at his plow, personally overseeing the production at his estate. By Caesar’s time this was unheard of, and landowners would put the stewardship of their estates in the hands of professional overseers, usually freed slaves.) Social and class competition intensifies. Economic production is still expanding, but at a slower rate than before. This is Quigley’s fourth stage, the “age of conflict”. All this probably sounds familiar. Western civilization has been in this stage since the mid-20th century.
From this point, one of two things can happen. Most often, the decay advances steadily. As economic expansion becomes more and more encumbered with parasites, jockeying for position internally becomes more and more important, so people direct more of their efforts towards jockeying and less towards production, so economic expansion becomes harder and jockeying becomes more important, and so on until the mess becomes totally locked in. At this point, the course of the civilization’s lifecycle is set. It will continue decaying, growing slowly weaker and more decrepit for many centuries. Eventually it becomes so hollowed out that outside invaders can push over its fragile remains.
Sometimes, before things get this far, the decayed economic engine is circumvented by a new form of economic organization, which leads to expanding production outside of the domains overrun with parasites. In late medieval Europe, the decaying feudal manorialism was circumvented by commercial capitalism, based on urban crafts and long-distance trade. The feudal nobility was left in place, but they became less and less relevant—some places still have their dukes and barons today, for all it matters. Commercial capitalism also eventually decayed into a tangle of guild privileges and mercantilist parasitism based on restricting, rather than expanding, production and trade. As this happened, it was circumvented by industrial capitalism, based on the operation of machines and mass production.
After a few centuries, industrial capitalism, too, is now heavily encumbered with parasites, rent-seekers, state-backed monopolies, and all the rest. We see the hallmarks like separation of ownership and management, and huge sectors of the economy that make money by restricting rather than expanding production. The comparison is stark with the much younger version of industrial capitalism which has taken shape in modern Chinese civilization, where the mass manufacture of cheap goods expands at a breakneck pace, growing the production of real wealth (steel, cars, ships, solar panels, drones, …) with vastly lower financial profits than its Western counterparts.
Most civilizations only have one economic engine before they reach terminal decay. A few have two. As far as I know, Western civilization is the only recorded civilization which had three successive economic engines. Is there something in Western culture that makes us better at this? Did we just get lucky twice in a row? I have my guesses and just-so stories but I really don’t know. Is this our last age of expansion before we slide into our civilization’s long slow old age, or will we circumvent it with a fourth? The window is open for another couple of generations or so. Things haven’t ossified yet.