Immoderate Greatness Why Civilizations Fail by William Ophuls

Author:William Ophuls [Ophuls, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2012-12-28T07:00:00+00:00

6

Practical Failure

For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end.

Will Durant1

The most important reason why civilizations go from high morale and strong consensus to pessimism and division is moral entropy. But this is not the final answer. Of almost equal importance is the fact that those who direct the affairs of a mature civilization are engaged in a war against reality that they cannot win, because a series of insidious transformations has rendered the society dysfunctional and ungovernable. It lacks the ecological, social, financial, and intellectual capital required to solve its problems. Hence morale is gradually eroded, and discord increasingly fomented, by a succession of practical defeats.

As has been shown, a developing civilization grows steadily more complex and increasingly less manageable over time, preparing the way for its eventual demise. Only a race of supremely intelligent, rational, and wise beings could so order their affairs and so limit their behavior as to avoid this outcome. Human beings are not such a race. At best, they manage their affairs by muddling through—a mode of operation that has many virtues and advantages but that also postpones dealing with fundamental issues until they become intractable. At worst, they actively prepare their own downfall through greed, arrogance, obstinacy, shortsightedness, laziness, and stupidity.

Because humans are more focused on the present than the future, and complex systems are unpredictable, decisions at all levels of society are bound to be increasingly “suboptimal” as a civilization grows in complexity. In early times, when affairs are comparatively simple and morale is high, a united populace will tend to think and act with prudence, foresight, and due respect for the interests of posterity. (Witness the epigraph by John Adams in the previous chapter: the founding generation of Americans sacrificed so that their children and grandchildren could have a nobler life.) In later times, when affairs are far from simple and morale is low, the opposite is true. Selfishness crowds out sacrifice, the interests of mass and elite diverge, and the elite itself is divided into warring factions. Solvable problems turn into insolvable plights. Planning for the long term becomes an unaffordable luxury. The society drifts, following the line of least resistance by taking merely expedient actions that postpone rather than resolve problems. Posterity is left to fend for itself.

Complexity is only one part of the challenge. As it develops, a civilization accumulates an investment in physical and social infrastructure that increasingly limits its freedom of action, and it adheres to a certain way of thinking that increasingly limits its freedom of choice. These entrenched habits, patterns, structures, institutions, ideologies, and interests prevent adaptation to changed conditions.2 In effect, civilizations suffer from a structural incapacity to respond to altered circumstances.

It could not be otherwise. Institutions are by their very nature resistant to change, for if not, society would be in a constant state of flux. As time goes on, institutions therefore grow steadily more hidebound, inflexible, and unresponsive.

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