Originally Posted by TimWalker

I have considered how a far future West might resemble the Byzantine Empire.

The most significant culture difference between Byzantine and Graeco-Roman culture was religion-Christianity supplanted the old paga pantheon.

The great missionary religions have been three: Christianty, Islam, Buddhism.

Islam clashes so much with the West that the West would be extirpated.

So...

A zen West?

One huge difference separates the United States from all of the prior Universal States: that the US is far more flexible. It keeps re-inventing itself as technologies change. It has its own tests for valid philosophies -- that they work. The ethnic composition of the USA has changed through immigration. Think of New England: a region that began as Puritan and Protestant is now largely Catholic even without mass conversions.

But even at that, the generational cycle operates as efficiently in America as it does anywhere else. Fads do not become institutions. Foreign ideas and customs assimilate Americans just as effectively as America assimilates immigrants. Impressionist painting, pizza, and classical music (I may have my bias, but I think that it will outlast every musical fad) are not American in origin.

Another: our generational cycle tends to break down pathological bureaucracies that fail to adapt. Consider the fascist blitzkrieg: we turned it on them, doing it even more effectively.

Bad businesses -- like Enrob Corporation and Montgomery-Ward -- go under irrespective of size. Does anyone not expect a huge shake-out of the banking industry in the next few years, with some giants going bankrupt? We find an alternation (most of the time) between small-government right-wingers and big-government left-wingers. The right-wingers usually keep the currency solid, promote the tried-and-true in culture and morals, and maintain the incentives for enterprise; the left-wingers promote social justice and investment in people while preventing an ossification of culture and morals. (Dubya looks like an anomaly, to be sure, as a right-winger who has debased the currency for the gain of special interests).

Liberal democracy proves more flexible than the alternatives whether of the recent (communism, fascism) or distant (monarchical absolutism) past as well as military rule that has appeared so often in all ages that it can't be considered atypical of any time. Should democracy die, then the "rise" chapter of American history has no need for further additions.

I look at the other manifestations of Toynbee's "Universal State", the political system that encompasses a whole civilization and then ossifies while decaying -- including the Roman Empire, ancient Sumer and Babylon, Pharaonic Egypt, Byzantium, several Chinese dynasties, the Aztec and Inca empires in the New World as well as the Spanish empire in the New World -- and the one that he did not live to see collapse (the Soviet Union). The systems all become repressive and exploitative, so fifth columns develop -- people who might see a barbarian invasion as liberation instead of the bane that an entrenched bureaucracy and a self-indulgent class of rent-seekers dread. Taxes soar to create security for the elites, and the poor get treated with increasing harshness both economic and legal. Perhaps the society does well what it did earlier... but that becomes increasingly stale.

Above all -- there are no barbarians at the gate. The last 'primitive' barbarians -- the Sioux, the Apache, the Zulu -- have been smashed as threats to any part of the West. Threats can come only from other civilizations.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

Awhile back I mentioned a young Xer woman who had returned from a vision quest. I wondered where the idea of a vision quest came from.

I have an intriguing work of anthropology entitled Man's Rise To Civilization As Shown By The Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State by Peter Farb.

"Indians elsewhere also believed in the reality of visions, but none so relentlessly pursued the vision quest and were so caught up in the emotional excesses of religion as the Plains tribes...."

So the vision quest came from the Indians!

"The change produced in one culture by its encounter with another is called 'acculturation.' Rarely is the exchange of cultural traits an equal one, and never does one emerge entirely untouched; the encounter almost always results in an increased similarity between the two cultures...."

Vision Quest was a totally awesome movie. That scene with Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino in the tent really rocked!

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

One huge difference separates the United States from all of the prior Universal States: that the US is far more flexible. It keeps re-inventing itself as technologies change. It has its own tests for valid philosophies -- that they work. The ethnic composition of the USA has changed through immigration. Think of New England: a region that began as Puritan and Protestant is now largely Catholic even without mass conversions.

But even at that, the generational cycle operates as efficiently in America as it does anywhere else. Fads do not become institutions. Foreign ideas and customs assimilate Americans just as effectively as America assimilates immigrants. Impressionist painting, pizza, and classical music (I may have my bias, but I think that it will outlast every musical fad) are not American in origin.

Another: our generational cycle tends to break down pathological bureaucracies that fail to adapt. Consider the fascist blitzkrieg: we turned it on them, doing it even more effectively.

Bad businesses -- like Enrob Corporation and Montgomery-Ward -- go under irrespective of size. Does anyone not expect a huge shake-out of the banking industry in the next few years, with some giants going bankrupt? We find an alternation (most of the time) between small-government right-wingers and big-government left-wingers. The right-wingers usually keep the currency solid, promote the tried-and-true in culture and morals, and maintain the incentives for enterprise; the left-wingers promote social justice and investment in people while preventing an ossification of culture and morals. (Dubya looks like an anomaly, to be sure, as a right-winger who has debased the currency for the gain of special interests).

Liberal democracy proves more flexible than the alternatives whether of the recent (communism, fascism) or distant (monarchical absolutism) past as well as military rule that has appeared so often in all ages that it can't be considered atypical of any time. Should democracy die, then the "rise" chapter of American history has no need for further additions.

I look at the other manifestations of Toynbee's "Universal State", the political system that encompasses a whole civilization and then ossifies while decaying -- including the Roman Empire, ancient Sumer and Babylon, Pharaonic Egypt, Byzantium, several Chinese dynasties, the Aztec and Inca empires in the New World as well as the Spanish empire in the New World -- and the one that he did not live to see collapse (the Soviet Union). The systems all become repressive and exploitative, so fifth columns develop -- people who might see a barbarian invasion as liberation instead of the bane that an entrenched bureaucracy and a self-indulgent class of rent-seekers dread. Taxes soar to create security for the elites, and the poor get treated with increasing harshness both economic and legal. Perhaps the society does well what it did earlier... but that becomes increasingly stale.

Above all -- there are no barbarians at the gate. The last 'primitive' barbarians -- the Sioux, the Apache, the Zulu -- have been smashed as threats to any part of the West. Threats can come only from other civilizations.

Internal barbarians - the Brits call them "Chavs". Anyway, disaffected youths from the underclass who have no hope left. No frontier to settle, no way into the army, no way into jobs, and street entrepreneurship has become so totally illegal one might as well join the gangs and be doe with it. And people a lot smarter than I am have pointed out a lot earlier that the social structure thereof reverts to the tribal - the likeness between the punk in the gang colors and Achilles is no coincidence.

Not saying its inevitable. But any urbanized society has them.

Renaissance Watch

Generations and the High Arts

Philosophy, religion, science and turnings

I have wondered how the spiral of progress could last half a millenium.

Toynbee visualized the growth of civilizations depending on a dynamic of challenge and response. Eventually a civilization is in trouble for failing to meet a challenge.

Perhaps success in meeting a series of challenges depends in part on a civilization's capacity to reinvent itself. That would seem to imply that a civilization with a mechanistic bent might have more luck with this than a civilization with, say, an aesthetic ethos, or a religious ethos.

I don't know how things will work out in the long run, but a new creative ethos implies that the West is even more versatile than it was.

7 stages

Western reinvention has been tied to the modern saeculum. It reinvented its religion with the Reformation. A democracy revolution was inaugerated with the Enlightenment, with varying results with the French and American Revolutions. Twice the West reinvented itself economically, with Mercantilism during the Early Modern Period, and with the Industrial Revolution, again interacting with the turning rhythm.

and so on

Which brings up the MegaSaeculum. It has been suggested that the next Awakening will be an Intellectual Awakening, as part of a revolutionary saeculum. Will the West not just reform-but reinvent-itself institutionally?

synopsis

libertarian view

clash or fusion?

Samuel Huntington described the West as a mature society on the brink of decay.

"The overriding lesson of the history of civilizations, however, is that many things are probable but nothing is inevitable. Civilizations can and have reformed and renewed themselves. The central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay. Can the West renew ifself or will sustained internal rot simply accelerate its end and/or subordination to other economically and demographically more dynamic civilizations?"

"The West...went through a first European phase of development and expansion that lasted several centuries and then a second American phase in the twentieth century. If North America and Europe renew their moral life, build on their cultural commonality, and develop close forms of economic and political integration to supplement their security collaboration in NATO, they could generate a third Euroamerican phase of Western economic affluence and political influence. Meaningful political integration would in some measure counter the relative decline in the West's share of the world's people, economic product, and military capabilities and revive the power of the West in the eyes of the leaders of other civilizations...."

@

A fourth Expansion?

Desktop Manufacturing

This article seems to describe a Fourth Expansion as carried out by Millenials.

God And Gold

Britain, America, and the Making Of the *Modern World* by Walter Russell Mead

The author considered the theories of Spengler, Toynbee, and Huntington. Are civilizations predestined to go through a linear sequence of birth, growth, decay, and death?

"...they don't rise and fall so much as they wax and wane, and then wax again. They have good times and bad times, but they recover from their setbacks and go on. The idea that there is some sort of inexorable law of aging and decline to which all civilizations are somehow subject looked quite compelling in 1920, when all the world's civilizations except for those with roots in western Europe (and Japan) appeared to be tottering toward their doom."

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

One huge difference separates the United States from all of the prior Universal States: that the US is far more flexible. It keeps re-inventing itself as technologies change. It has its own tests for valid philosophies -- that they work. The ethnic composition of the USA has changed through immigration. Think of New England: a region that began as Puritan and Protestant is now largely Catholic even without mass conversions.

But even at that, the generational cycle operates as efficiently in America as it does anywhere else. Fads do not become institutions. Foreign ideas and customs assimilate Americans just as effectively as America assimilates immigrants. Impressionist painting, pizza, and classical music (I may have my bias, but I think that it will outlast every musical fad) are not American in origin.

Another: our generational cycle tends to break down pathological bureaucracies that fail to adapt. Consider the fascist blitzkrieg: we turned it on them, doing it even more effectively.

Bad businesses -- like Enrob Corporation and Montgomery-Ward -- go under irrespective of size. Does anyone not expect a huge shake-out of the banking industry in the next few years, with some giants going bankrupt? We find an alternation (most of the time) between small-government right-wingers and big-government left-wingers. The right-wingers usually keep the currency solid, promote the tried-and-true in culture and morals, and maintain the incentives for enterprise; the left-wingers promote social justice and investment in people while preventing an ossification of culture and morals. (Dubya looks like an anomaly, to be sure, as a right-winger who has debased the currency for the gain of special interests).

Liberal democracy proves more flexible than the alternatives whether of the recent (communism, fascism) or distant (monarchical absolutism) past as well as military rule that has appeared so often in all ages that it can't be considered atypical of any time. Should democracy die, then the "rise" chapter of American history has no need for further additions.

I look at the other manifestations of Toynbee's "Universal State", the political system that encompasses a whole civilization and then ossifies while decaying -- including the Roman Empire, ancient Sumer and Babylon, Pharaonic Egypt, Byzantium, several Chinese dynasties, the Aztec and Inca empires in the New World as well as the Spanish empire in the New World -- and the one that he did not live to see collapse (the Soviet Union). The systems all become repressive and exploitative, so fifth columns develop -- people who might see a barbarian invasion as liberation instead of the bane that an entrenched bureaucracy and a self-indulgent class of rent-seekers dread. Taxes soar to create security for the elites, and the poor get treated with increasing harshness both economic and legal. Perhaps the society does well what it did earlier... but that becomes increasingly stale.

Above all -- there are no barbarians at the gate. The last 'primitive' barbarians -- the Sioux, the Apache, the Zulu -- have been smashed as threats to any part of the West. Threats can come only from other civilizations.

Item One to be addressed: among the 'other civilizations' are some, like Islam and Latin America, which have the potential to assume the role previously filled by the 'barbarians at the gate' in bringing down or transforming decaying civilizations like the West.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Item Two looks at the differing situations on each side of the Atlantic.

1)The United States, as mentioned above, is by far the more flexible half of the Western World's core region, even in it's decline. Facing it is Latin America, itself in many ways an offshoot of the West and thus quite similar culturally to the US.

2)Europe, the less flexible half and further gone in decline, faces the Islamic World, which is not only far less similar than Latin America, but has been dedicated to the conquest and destruction of both Western and Orthodox Cvilizations for the last 1.4 millennia.

From the above, one can guess that the United States would display sufficient flexibility to transform and absorb the Latino newcomers even as they transform (and hopefully reinvigorate) our society. Meanwhile, Europe, grown even more brittle in decline, will face a far grimmer future as Islam finally succeeds in said imperative. There is even a name for this grimmer future - Eurabia.

Originally Posted by SVE-KRD

Item One to be addressed: among the 'other civilizations' are some, like Islam and Latin America, which have the potential to assume the role previously filled by the 'barbarians at the gate' in bringing down or transforming decaying civilizations like the West.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Item Two looks at the differing situations on each side of the Atlantic.

1)The United States, as mentioned above, is by far the more flexible half of the Western World's core region, even in it's decline. Facing it is Latin America, itself in many ways an offshoot of the West and thus quite similar culturally to the US.

2)Europe, the less flexible half and further gone in decline, faces the Islamic World, which is not only far less similar than Latin America, but has been dedicated to the conquest and destruction of both Western and Orthodox Cvilizations for the last 1.4 millennia.

From the above, one can guess that the United States would display sufficient flexibility to transform and absorb the Latino newcomers even as they transform (and hopefully reinvigorate) our society. Meanwhile, Europe, grown even more brittle in decline, will face a far grimmer future as Islam finally succeeds in said imperative. There is even a name for this grimmer future - Eurabia.

The Eurabia meme is total BS. If the cultural integrity of Europe becomes threatened enough the infection will be flushed out by a wave of xenophobia if Muslim immigrants refuse to westernize. The supposed decline of Europe is nothing but scaremongering by European paleo-conservatives. Indeed, such rhetoric itself is merely the side effects of the "immune response" if one could call it that.

Latin America is part of Western Civilization, the part where our civilization has become the most vigorous, obviously, but Latinos are Westerners. Thinking they are not Westerners is ingnorant and insultiung to them.

The Main Stream Media finally seems to have noticed what Huntington predicted back in the '90s-we are moving into a multipolar world in which the poles are states of different civilizations.

Obama and the multipolar moment by A. Wess Mitchell

Referring to Obama....

"...What he will see is unlike anything any American statesman has ever had to confront. Two simultaneous land wars; a rapidly arming Iran; an atomic, post-Musharraf Pakistan; a resurgent, energy-rich Russia; a China that hold 10 percent of U.S. currency; a $10 trillion public debt; the worst recession since World War II; and a weak dollar.

"...it may occur to Obama that he faces the most densely packed and danger-fraught international agenda of any American president since Harry S. Truman-but the weakest hand of any president since Warren G. Harding...."

"...of the many 'firsts' that Obama will register in the history books, the most important but most frequently overlooked is that he will be the first American president to have to come to grips with fullblown psychological reality of global multipolarity.

"...This is neither the geopolitical straitjacket of bipolarity...nor the permissive strategic environment of unipolarity...Multipolarity has never existed on a global scale. The closest parallel we have to it is late 19th-century Europe, with its narrow power differentials and multiple actors jostling for influence in the finely tuned regional balance of power.

Ahead of schedult

"The 21st century wasn't supposed to look that way. Only 18 years have passed since Charles Krauthammer proclaimed the advent of the 'multipolar moment.' The leitmotif of this new era was supposed to be incontestable American strength...

"Now, however, the multipolar moment has arrived ahead of schedule...

"China continues its peaceful half century march to superpower status, amassing an economy that will be larger than America's in a decade and a globe-girdling array of Third World client states.

"Russia, long thought a geopolitical washout, has used a combination of natural-gas wealth and diplomatic braggadocio to expel U.S. influence from Central Asia and reinsert itself into the ranks of great powers.

"India, now a member of the nuclear club, is quietly dethroning the U.S. high-tech industry and carving out a geopolitical sphere of influence in South Asia.

"Although the U.S. will still be the strongest power in this new system, it will not enjoy the sway it did in the early 1990s."

Originally Posted by TimWalker

The Main Stream Media finally seems to have noticed what Huntington predicted back in the '90s-we are moving into a multipolar world in which the poles are states of different civilizations.

Obama and the multipolar moment by A. Wess Mitchell

Referring to Obama....

"...What he will see is unlike anything any American statesman has ever had to confront. Two simultaneous land wars; a rapidly arming Iran; an atomic, post-Musharraf Pakistan; a resurgent, energy-rich Russia; a China that hold 10 percent of U.S. currency; a $10 trillion public debt; the worst recession since World War II; and a weak dollar.

"...it may occur to Obama that he faces the most densely packed and danger-fraught international agenda of any American president since Harry S. Truman-but the weakest hand of any president since Warren G. Harding...."

"...of the many 'firsts' that Obama will register in the history books, the most important but most frequently overlooked is that he will be the first American president to have to come to grips with fullblown psychological reality of global multipolarity.

"...This is neither the geopolitical straitjacket of bipolarity...nor the permissive strategic environment of unipolarity...Multipolarity has never existed on a global scale. The closest parallel we have to it is late 19th-century Europe, with its narrow power differentials and multiple actors jostling for influence in the finely tuned regional balance of power.

Ahead of schedult

"The 21st century wasn't supposed to look that way. Only 18 years have passed since Charles Krauthammer proclaimed the advent of the 'multipolar moment.' The leitmotif of this new era was supposed to be incontestable American strength...

"Now, however, the multipolar moment has arrived ahead of schedule...

"China continues its peaceful half century march to superpower status, amassing an economy that will be larger than America's in a decade and a globe-girdling array of Third World client states.

"Russia, long thought a geopolitical washout, has used a combination of natural-gas wealth and diplomatic braggadocio to expel U.S. influence from Central Asia and reinsert itself into the ranks of great powers.

"India, now a member of the nuclear club, is quietly dethroning the U.S. high-tech industry and carving out a geopolitical sphere of influence in South Asia.

"Although the U.S. will still be the strongest power in this new system, it will not enjoy the sway it did in the early 1990s."

Russia is now trying to do in Latin America what the above mentions having occurred in Central Asia, and will quite probably succeed, if only briefly. (Before China or India - or both - comes to overshadow them, as well.)

In fact, I'm not convinced that the U.S. will be the strongest power in the new system by the end of this 4T. I don't rule out an implosion of U.S. influence for a second, which in fact may not stop until Alaska and Hawaii have slipped through our fingers (unless we become willing to resort to conduct vis-a-vis Canada which would currently be ubthinkable ). Said implosion would simply be part and parcel of the Western World's ongoing decline.

Obama and the multipolar moment continued

The label of "declinist"

"Talking this way in Washington will earn you the pejorative label of 'declinist.' Thus, arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan used a recent Washington Post column to warn the new administration against constructing a realist foreign policy template premised on an acceptance of attenuating American strength. By equating American primacy with 'optimism' and 'limits on our power' with defeatism, Kagan sent an unmistakable political message to the new Democratic president: Persist with the orthodoxy of unipolarity or risk the epithet 'declinist' in the Republican Party's 2012 comeback narrative.

"'The danger of today's declinism,' Kagan wrote, 'is not that it is true but that the next president will act as if it is.'

"But the real danger is precisely the opposite-that America is in a state of relative decline but that the new administration will act as if it is not. The latest forecast from the National Intelligence Council, the strategic forecasting unit of the U.S. intelligence community, depicts, by 2025, a world in which U.S. preeminence is deeply eroded and in which Washington maintains a decisive edge only in military hardware.

"This is the world that Obama must equip the nation to navigate. It is imperative that he initiate a fundamental break from the post-Cold War U.S. strategic playbook. He must find a way to be flexible without being perfidious, to be a realist without being cynical, to match American policy ends with American power means. He must not persist, like him immediate predecessor, with a unipolar mind-set and a bipolar tool kit in a multipolar world."

Originally Posted by TimWalker

But the real danger is precisely the opposite-that America is in a state of relative decline but that the new administration will act as if it is not. The latest forecast from the National Intelligence Council, the strategic forecasting unit of the U.S. intelligence community, depicts, by 2025, a world in which U.S. preeminence is deeply eroded and in which Washington maintains a decisive edge only in military hardware.

I'm not convinced that we'll even maintain an edge in military hardware, as I see our decline as not only relative, but absolute, even if still (hopefully!) in it's early phases.