02-14-2018, 01:04 AM
Because the generational cycle seems to have a basis in human experience and psychological realities that manifest themselves in politics, economic behavior, and cultural expression and can link the Howe and Strauss theory to a predictable life cycle of collecting memories in childhood, establishing roles in life that fit openings, expressing oneself in ways that meet psychic needs not met by parents or the overall society, and resisting what one feared from childhood throughout one's life, and of course losing all influence in senility in death, I find any cycle that takes much more than a long human lifetime suspect -- except perhaps the pattern that Arnold Toynbee finds in civilizations as the defining unit.
Toynbee offers no rigid schedule for the birth and death of a civilization, but he recognizes a particularly destructive time that indicates the impending doom of the civilization -- the Universal State that encompasses the entire civilization, crushes intellectual creativity and political pluralism, homogenizes national identity while imposing severe and rigid hierarchies, and loses its flexibility. Doom for Classical civilization came with the establishment of the Roman Empire as ann oppressive domain consolidating the whole of classical civilization. Toynbee has suggested that all extinct civilizations have gone through this pattern, and that ours will be no exception.
Western Christian Civilization has had plenty of candidates to be the Universal State -- the Habsburg dominnions of Austria and Spain, the Ottoman Empire (the oppressors can be from outside, and the Ottoman Empire did reach Vienna in 1683), Napoleonic France, Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union... and if America goes bad, it could be next in line to be the core of an Evil Empire. The Universal State is able to stop change, but all that it really achieves is to preserve rot that ultimately undermines the system and causes its disintegration.
There is no rigid schedule for the rise and fall of a civilization. Ours, which got its start with responses to the Saracen and Viking raids to establish a political order and a culture to go with it, is now about 1300 years old. It is not a continuation of Classical civilization even if it has learned much from it, as its centers have included places either on the fringe of the old Roman Empire (modern-day France was a backwater, England is very different from the Roman-Celtic world of Britain; most of Germany lies outside of the borders of the old Roman Empire, and Ireland, Scandinavia and Poland were never parts of the Roman Empire). That is before I discuss the Americas.
Wes
Toynbee offers no rigid schedule for the birth and death of a civilization, but he recognizes a particularly destructive time that indicates the impending doom of the civilization -- the Universal State that encompasses the entire civilization, crushes intellectual creativity and political pluralism, homogenizes national identity while imposing severe and rigid hierarchies, and loses its flexibility. Doom for Classical civilization came with the establishment of the Roman Empire as ann oppressive domain consolidating the whole of classical civilization. Toynbee has suggested that all extinct civilizations have gone through this pattern, and that ours will be no exception.
Western Christian Civilization has had plenty of candidates to be the Universal State -- the Habsburg dominnions of Austria and Spain, the Ottoman Empire (the oppressors can be from outside, and the Ottoman Empire did reach Vienna in 1683), Napoleonic France, Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union... and if America goes bad, it could be next in line to be the core of an Evil Empire. The Universal State is able to stop change, but all that it really achieves is to preserve rot that ultimately undermines the system and causes its disintegration.
There is no rigid schedule for the rise and fall of a civilization. Ours, which got its start with responses to the Saracen and Viking raids to establish a political order and a culture to go with it, is now about 1300 years old. It is not a continuation of Classical civilization even if it has learned much from it, as its centers have included places either on the fringe of the old Roman Empire (modern-day France was a backwater, England is very different from the Roman-Celtic world of Britain; most of Germany lies outside of the borders of the old Roman Empire, and Ireland, Scandinavia and Poland were never parts of the Roman Empire). That is before I discuss the Americas.
Wes
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.