A SUMMARY OF THE PAST CENTURY OF HISTORIANS OF CIVILIZATIONAL RISE AND FALL –“Q

A SUMMARY OF THE PAST CENTURY OF HISTORIANS OF CIVILIZATIONAL RISE AND FALL
–“Q: Hey Curt, what are your thoughts about Oswald Spengler?”–

My thoughts on Spengler differ based upon what question you’re asking.

In General I think of Spengler compared to Arnold Toynbee and Carroll Quigley. Though I tend to think of all historians of rise-and-fall in relation to all others:

Spengler (Very German,1880) thought civilizational cycles were deterministic.

Toynbee(British, 1889) thought that they rise and fall based on their success or failure to handle challenges.

Quigley(American, 1910 ) thought they had tendencies to go through cycles but good government could change the course.

Huntington(American, 1927) Thought that civilizational differences were nearly impossible to overcome so the future would be decided by the conflicts that arose between the civilizations.

Tainter (American, 1949) Tainter thinks (like me) in economic terms, and that all organizations, including states and civilizations, ‘calcify’ by exploiting opportunities, investing in all manner of systems and institutions to do so, and maximize rents and free riding – until a shock can’t be adapted to without collapse and reorganization – learning and developing the appropriate systems. In other words, humans behave at all scales, including the economic and political, as neural economies behave.

Diamond (American Jewish, 1937) Diamond thinks that geography and geographical resources were more deterministic than demographics, culture, and institutions. This is partly correct and partly wrong, and his later work on fall of civilizations just repeats the same as everyone else. Diamond always has an agenda and I find him as exasperating as he is helpful – just like say, Howard Zinn(Marxist) and NY Harari(Mythicist) who are full of pop culture Jewish nonsense in the jewish pseudoscientific tradition of Freud, Boaz, Marx, and Gould, as well as the ever dominant Frankfurt school.

Fukuyama (Japanese American, 1952) Fukuyama thinks three things are necessary for a strong and capable MODERN state, the state’s subordination to a rule of law, and the state’s accountability to all its citizens. But while these are difficult to produce, maintaining it is even harder. Because all political systems (as in all human organizations) calcify, exhaust resources and opportunities, maximize internal rent seeking, overproduce rent-seeking elites, and decay. So Fukuyama attributes (correctly) rise and fall to political decay from political overpopulation, self interest, rent seeking, and corruption.

Turchin (Russian American, 1957) Turchin believes, even more analytically, than Fukuyama, and mathematically that the overproduction of elites produce political decay. But he also holds to the cyclical view of history the way that previous russian thinkers (and I include myself in this group) recognize the patterns of economic cycles and the reasons for them in the cycles of history.

My perception is that these men are increasingly refining the theory of history at civilizational scales in parallel with the increasing refining of the theory of economic history at national and global scales.

I think the best thing we can learn from all of them is the need for small government, with the maximum use of financial investment by the state and the maximum use of the private sector, combined with the minimum public sector employment. Because it’s our governments and the people who seek rents and privileges and distributions from them that cause us to fail.

One thing I can’t stress enough is that people like Turchin and myself are not ‘literary essayists’ reading texts, but using economic and legal data, by effectively trying to discover the algorithms for human behavior at scale. Whereas there is a great deal of theology, philosophy, and idealism in earlier generations of thinkers – particularly those pre-war.

I hope this short set of paragraphs helps.

Cheers

Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
The Science of Cooperation

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