More on the Decline of Civilizations

I was thinking about the post I wrote last night about the decline of civilizations through he expansion of leisure. I was feeling pretty good about it and then I had an interesting thought that kind of threw a different light on the issue.

As I was pondering everything, I noticed that the three main civilizations I talked about all shared a key common factor – they were long-lived. The life cycle of each civilization was measured in centuries, not decades. And that lended more strength to my belief that American civilization still has its best years to come. And as I was feeling all nice and proud and thinking how the American rise coincided so nicely with the British fall, I suddenly realized – the British haven’t really fell. They’re not as dominant as they once were, but they haven’t completely collapsed. So what happened to make the British so resilient and defiant of the trends of history?

It took me a while to identify what I see as the true root cause of the downfall of civilizations. Leisure is still a root cause, but what is the true underlying reason that causes the expansion of leisure?

Now I’m not a sociologist and don’t even play one on TV, but I think that experience has shown the way to at least some of the answers. Expanded leisure is a function of getting older. In our early years, we work to learn and to earn so that as we age we can do more that we want and less of what we have to. In other words, younger people work harder and older folks take more time to appreciate life. There are of course exceptions on both ends of the spectrum, but I think that it’s a pretty fair and accurate generalization.

In all three civilizations, an aging population left the productive workforce and as the younger generations had to devote more and more resources to supporting the elderly there became a disincentive to work. As fewer people worked to their potential, it increased the efforts required of the others, which was another disincentive to work. And so began a vicious cycle that could be broken only by altering the demographics of the nation. The population had to begin getting progressively younger in order to present an incentive to work. In Greece and Rome, this was achieved by a collapse of the civilization and a corresponding reduction in lifespan, which helped to lower the average age of the population. France is looking more and more like it will require a revolution to change the welfare state, but it will not achieve any greatness again until it experiences another baby boom that will help to lower the average age of the population.

This makes me worry some about the state that America is really in. We have an aging population also. They main difference, and what I see as being our saving grace, is that our elderly population is much more willing to put in a full day’s work. That desire to continue to contribute should be enough to put us over the hump. Unfortunately for me, I think that the “Generations X & Y” are going to have a little trouble achieving a higher standard of living as the demographics won’t be favorable until late in our working lives. But I also think that this period will end up being a one-generation aberration in the growth of American power.

So how did the British avoid these aging population issues? People get old and want to relax in the later years even in England. The British have an element of their population that does it’s best to avoid work – just like every nation. So how were the Brits able to pull it off?

The British, I believe, pulled it off through emigration. Just as immigration has helped us in the States to avoid the issue up until now, the British were able to send away enough of the right elements of their population to pull this off. Some people, like the convicts were forced to leave, while others left of their own free will. They went to America, Canada, Australia, Ireland and many other nations. But the ones who left tended to be older (they had to acquire the resources to leave) or the derelicts that didn’t add much to the state of civilization anyway. The removal of these elements of society allowed England to maintain a fairly low average age.

The maintenance of a low average age and its corresponding high productivity led to the survival and strength of British civilization.

It’s interesting to look at the fates of the Americans, Germans, French, and British since WWI in respect to this theory. Germany, France and England all had entire generations wiped out in the trenches of WWI. The resulting age gap allowed the average age of the population to drop in those three nations as they headed into WWII (the US was still expansionist within its own borders and was able to decrease its average age just through natural population expansion). During WWII, the Americans, Germans and British all lost sizable chunks of their populations, while the French basically sat the war out and didn’t see too much of an effect of their population. After WWII, the three affected nations underwent population booms which led to a strengthening of influence in the 1960s and 1970s as those baby boomers started to come of age. French influence and power declined at the same time, as their population just simply got older and more leisurely.

Is this a well-researched study? No, everything here is based on personal (and possibly flawed) observations and readings. Am I saying that this is the end all answer for why civilizations fail? No, it’s just my theory. If you have a different idea or a reason why I’m wrong, post a comment and let me know.