Apex

One common sentiment I often hear expressed (and admit to sometimes sharing) is the idea that human civilization somehow peaked a few decades ago and is now beginning an inexorable, horrific decline interrupted only by (a) the return of Christ or (b) the destruction of humanity.

This is nonsense for two reasons.

One: Egocentrism

The United States is in moral, political, and (largely for political reasons) economic decline. Unfortunate? Sure. The demise of all mankind? Hardly. India is on the rise. China (if democracy wins out) may be another great nation. Europe is falling apart but has been doing so for the last fifty years. The cold fact is this: change is not always decline. The Western world is diminishing; the Eastern is ascendant. We may as well get used to it and learn to live with the new order. We may even, through miraculous recovery, manage to slow the shift, but it's pretty hard to argue with population and nationalistic youth and vigor. Even if the United States falls clean off the world stage or embraces socialism (more) and is ruined economically, humanity will go on. Look at the decline of the British Empire. To the English it looked like the end of the world. Who even thinks about this today? It's amazing what a bit of perspective can do. The United States was waiting to fill the power vacuum and has, all in all, done fairly well. The world kept turning. The counter argument here is that the new rising nations are hardly supporters of human rights, freedom, and justice. Which brings us to reason two:

Two: Transience

Even if democracy and capitalism fall and the world is plunged into a new dark age, a new renaissance will follow it. Civilizations fall. How about them Romans, eh? The Roman Empire (and earlier the Roman Republic and earlier still Greece) was a truly amazing society, with knowledge and a passion for truth unmatched until the Enlightenment. What is left of the Romans today? The Coliseum (which actually is a symbol of decline and barbarism) and Little Caesar's Pizza. Life is tough. Countries are no more exempt to entropy than the people who comprise them. Everything dies, and sometimes death is painful. The fall of the Roman Empire triggered the Dark Ages. And guess what? We recovered. It took fifteen hundred years to reclaim some of the losses, but we recovered. Upheaval is not even truly death but rather slumber. Nigh all mistakes are reversible, any error healed by the passage of time. Is there pain, loss, turmoil? Yes. But there is no final end that we can bring about ourselves.

What is my point? Let's not get so enraptured by our own accomplishments and our own status and even our precious modern comforts that we lose track of the truth that matters. Life finds a way. The fall of the West is not the fall of humanity. Should we stave it off as long as possible? Sure. We can even mourn its passage on the day we fail. But we must do so because the fall is undesirable, not because it is the end of the world. The idea that we have reached the pinnacle of human history is unsupportable and distorts how we view the world. We all too easily forget that the only things that matter are eternal and universal. Our current civilization is neither.