From: kharin (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Fri May 03 2002 - 08:11:02 MDT
"Toynbee's analysis was reasonably accurate for the civilizations of the post-Neolithic, preindustrial age and particularly for the transition between Hellenistic Rome and Christian Western Civilization. It is not as successful in explaining examples that are not typical agricultural empires."
I suspect that a study of the memetics of 'decline and fall' would be a fascinating one. This one looks to me like a variant of Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents, wherein civilisation is viewed as being predicated on the suppression of disruptive instincts. As I seem to recall Slavoj Zizek suggested, this model also applied quite well in certain contexts. For example, as Mikhail Gorbachev slightly loosened Societ state restrictions the structure of that state beagn to unravel. Conversely, the liberalising of restrictions in capitalist states tended to have the opposite effect; free markets find it difficult to operate outside a free society. One example might be the "surrender to a sense of promiscuity" that one of the articles mentions. This is typically linked to declining public morals and a dying civil society. An alternative way to look at it was that behaviour of that kind had always been practised by elites (something that Toynbee's model doesn't seem to account for since it requires them to be
role models), and that the presence of greater social mobility (i.e. less stratified income distribution) meant that it was inevitable that aristocratic debauchery would also become more widespread. Which hardly seems to indicate social collapse - quite the contrary.
To apply that to the original discussion, it shouldn't be difficult to observe how the idea of elite imitation of the underclass would appear to mainfest itself as a threat within a predominantly aristocratic value system, but it is difficult to see how any modern free market society could actually function without the kind of social mobility that that suggests. Again, it may not be accidental that the only modern state that was able to maintain creative minority standards in 'arts, manners and language' was the Soviet Union. My guess is that according to Toynbee's theories, the Societ Union should have been a much more robust society than the US. The fact that it was not calls a great deal of this Mary Whitehouse-style obsessive theorising over decline into question.
---- This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25450>
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