XII. Growth and Decay
We have defined civilization as “social order promoting cultural
creation.”
It is political order secured through custom, morals, and law,
and economic order secured through a continuity of production and
exchange; it is cultural creation through freedom and facilities for the
origination, expression, testing, and fruition of ideas, letters, manners, and
arts. It is an intricate and precarious web of human relationships,
laboriously built and readily destroyed.
Why is it that history is littered with the ruins of civilizations, and seems
to tell us, like Shelley’s [Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)]
“Ozymandias,” that death is the destiny of all? Are there any regularities, in
this process of growth and decay, which may enable us to predict, from the
course of past civilizations, the future of our own?
Certain imaginative spirits have thought so, even to predicting the future
in detail. In his Fourth Eclogue Virgil announced that some day, the
ingenuity of change having been exhausted, the whole universe, by design
or accident, will fall into a condition precisely the same as in some
forgotten antiquity, and will then repeat, by deterministic fatality and in
every particular, all those events that had followed that condition before.
Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo
delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella,
atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles–
“there will then be another [prophet] Tiphys, and another Argo will carry
[Jason and other] beloved heroes; there will also be other wars, and great
Achilles will again be sent to Troy.”
Friedrich Nietzsche went insane
with this vision of “eternal recurrence.” There is nothing so foolish but it
can be found in the philosophers.
History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may
reasonably expect that in the future, as in the past, some new states will
rise, some old states will subside; that new civilizations will begin with
