About twenty years ago, I started reading one of those dryly intellectual magazines, called The Futurist and published by the World Future Society. I still remember an article in 1993 that “Western culture was in crisis, marked by increasing pessimism about the future . . . intractable economic difficulties, widening social gulf, and worsening environmental degradation . . .”
Fortunately, the author of that article has just updated himself with “Whatever Happened to Western Civilization?” He points out that such warnings usually say “the sky will fall” within the next decade, and he then lists the reasons that his predictions of cultural collapse did not occur over last nineteen years. He concludes by saying it will just take another two decades for America to collapse.
Having never lived without a prediction of America’s collapse, I’m wondering if such predictions always exist in all cultures? Or, is free speech the only needed ingredient to predict collapse? Did such predictions exist in the old Soviet Union where there was no First Amendment to protect free speech? Do human beings have a need to believe collapse is imminent? Are they just the “glass-half-full” crowd?
I don’t know! But, the need to believe in decline needs to be studied . . .
I do know economic collapse awaits this country if we don’t resolve the rapidly growing national debt, primarily by curbing entitlements. I do know that the free enterprise system, which is combining the economic system of capitalism with the political system of democracy, is the greatest intellectual invention of all time.
I don’t know about cultural collapse. If we can watch twenty children get massacred and then do nothing, maybe we deserve to collapse?
It could be the study of history has just made us too aware that America’s time on center-stage is probably limited, but it is not a law. After all, there has never been a free enterprise system on center-stage before!
Enough about decline already . . . please!