An Age of Decline?

If you were to ask any Roman in the age of Augustus what type of government he lived under, he would have undoubtedly answered a Republic.  In retrospect, we recognize that the Republic was long dead by this point.

If you were to ask an Italian in the year 500 what political organization he was part of, he would have declared proudly that he was a citizen of the Roman Empire.  In retrospect, we recognize that the Empire fell decades earlier. 

People rarely perceive great changes when they live through them, even less so do they recognize decline even when their country or civilization is in the final throes of it.   

Which leads me to ask: are we living in a time of decline?  

In the short term our standard of living has decreased, but looked at broadly over the last century, it has certainly increased.  Is the current decline an aberration or the start of a long term trend?

Rome went from a population of a million in the age of Augustus, to 800,000 by the time of Constantine, to about half of that by the year 500 before reaching a nadir of 30,000 by the time of Charlemagne’s Christmas coronation in 800.  In the last century, many of our cities have shrunken, though suburbs have increased.  Is this a sign of decline or of fundamental change?  

Rome’s population shrank for long periods of time as the wealthy elected to have fewer and fewer kids.  If it were not for immigration, our population would be declining.  What are we to make of this?

The Senate of Rome did not become obsolete overnight—rather they were slowly eclipsed by the power of the executive.  Has the point come, or are we heading towards a point, where our senate is a power in name only?  Are we still truly a republic or has power become too concentrated in the hands of the executive?

Or consider our morals.  In some ways they may have improved, but we have no solid moral framework—we have no agreed upon reasons to do what we do so we no longer seek to persuade, we merely attempt to overpower our opponents.  (For more on this idea, see the addendum below).

Civilization is more than technology.  Our greatest achievements may in fact be our downfall.  For all we know we are declining and declining rapidly in the areas of morals, cultural, and politics, but the little rectangles we keep in our pockets, with their glowing buttons that beep and whistle, keep the reality of our peril far from our minds.   

Addendum: http://www.iep.utm.edu/p-macint/

Alasdair MacIntyre begins After Virtue by asking the reader to engage in a thought experiment: “Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe…. A series of environmental disasters [which] are blamed by the general public on the scientists” leads to rioting, scientists being lynched by angry mobs, the destruction of laboratories and equipment, the burning of books, and ultimately the decision by the government to end science instruction in schools and universities and to imprison and execute the remaining scientists. Eventually, enlightened people decide to restore science, but what do they have to work with? Only fragments: bits and pieces of theories, chapters of books, torn and charred pages of articles, hazy memories and damaged equipment with functions that are unclear, if not entirely forgotten. These people, he argues, would combine these fragments as best they could, inventing theories to connect them as necessary. People would talk and act as though they were doing “science,” but they would actually be doing something very different from what we currently call science. From our point of view, in a world where the sciences are intact, their “science” would be full of errors and inconsistencies, “truths” which no one could actually prove, and competing theories which were incompatible with one another. Further, the supporters of these theories would be unable to agree on any way to resolve their differences.

Why does MacIntyre ask us to imagine such a world? “The hypothesis I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described” (After Virtue 2, After Virtue 256). People in the modern liberal capitalist world talk as though we are engaged in moral reasoning, and act as though our actions are chosen as the result of such reasoning, but in fact neither of these things is true. Just as with the people working with “science” in the imaginary world that MacIntyre describes, philosophers and ordinary people are working today with bits and pieces of philosophies which are detached from their original pre-Enlightenment settings in which they were comprehensible and useful. Current moral and political philosophies are fragmented, incoherent, and conflicting, with no standards that can be appealed to in order to evaluate their truth or adjudicate the conflicts between them – or at least no standards that all those involved in the disputes will be willing to accept, since any standard will presuppose the truth of one of the contending positions. To use an analogy that MacIntyre does not use, one might say that it is as if we tore handfuls of pages from books by Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Danielle Steele, Mark Twain, and J.K. Rowling, threw half of them away, shuffled the rest, stapled them together, and then tried to read the “story” that resulted. It would be incoherent, and any attempt to describe the characters, plot, or meaning would be doomed to failure. On the other hand, because certain characters, settings, and bits of narrative would reappear throughout, it would seem as though the story could cohere, and much effort – ultimately futile – might be expended in trying to make it do so. This, according to MacIntyre, is the moral world in which we currently live.

 MacIntyre claims that protest and indignation are hallmarks of public “debate” in the modern world. Since no one can ever win an argument – because there’s no agreement about how someone could “win” – anyone can resort to protesting; since no one can ever lose an argument – how can they, if no one can win? – anyone can become indignant if they don’t get their way. If no one can persuade anyone else to do what they want, then only coercion, whether open or hidden (for example, in the form of deception) remains. This is why, MacIntyre says, political arguments are not just interminable but extremely loud and angry, and why modern politics is simply a form of civil war.