NOTE: I came across a version of this cycle a few years ago. Now this is the only version I can find even though it is not in the same context as the neutral version I found several years ago but it will have to do. This will illustrate the life cycle and the different stages. That is the main point.
The Life Cycle of Empires and America's Destiny
http://www.biblestudy.org/prophecy/d...f-america.html
The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) once cynically commented,
"What experience and history teach us is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."
Ever since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, America seemingly stands over the world as a great colossus economically, culturally, and militarily. Despite the present tests of increasing Iraqi restiveness against the Coalition’s occupying forces and the launching of the war against Islamic terrorism since the events of 9-11 and the looming challenges stemming from the European Union’s growing political and economic unity and China’s rapid modernization and industrialization, America’s lone superpower status still presently remains fundamentally uncontested. But could this change? Despite its preeminence, could America still decline and fall like the great empires of the past, such as those of Britain, Spain, Islam, Rome, Persia, and Babylon? Surveying the history of past fallen empires, the British military officer and historian Sir John Glubb Pasha (1897-1987) discerned in his book, "The Fate of Empires," a general life cycle of stages through which empires developed as they started, expanded, matured, declined, and collapsed. If America today has entered the ending stages of this life cycle, Americans should critically self-examine the current state of their culture to see what could be done to prevent the same grim fate.
Of course, some may object to calling America an "empire" because this nation usually didn’t make a point of systematically conquering and directly ruling large numbers of alien peoples with different cultures and varied languages for extended time periods. The case of the Philippines (1898-1946), acquired from Spain after the Spanish-American War, stands forth as the clearest exception, since a major native independence movement initially had to be militarily crushed at significant cost in order to hold onto these islands. But through the mechanisms of sporadic military interventions, economic aid, business investment, and the latent mechanisms of "informal empire," American influence in the Caribbean, Latin America, and elsewhere in the world extends far beyond just those areas abroad America directly administers politically today or controlled in decades gone by. In this light, historical comparisons of the United States with past empires are still sound.
Stages of Life Cycle
Glubb Pasha discovered that empires experienced similar cultural developments while experiencing a life cycle in a series of stages which may overlap. As he generalized, the stages are:
The age of outburst (or pioneers)
The age of conquests
The age of commerce
The age of affluence
The age of intellect
The age of decadence
The age of decline and collapse
Each stage helps to lead to the next as the values of the people change over time as influenced by military, political, economic, and religious developments.
To generalize, the adventuresome manly values of the warrior propel an empire to power as it expands its territory by conquest in the first two ages. Later, the (inevitably) materialistic and increasingly prudent, risk-averse values of businessmen take over at the highest levels of society during the ages of commerce and affluence. Their societies downplay the values of the solider normally not "from motives of conscience, but rather because of the weakening of a sense of duty in citizens, and the increase in selfishness, manifested in the desire for wealth and ease," as Glubb Pasha maintains. Instead of taking more land (i.e., staying on the offensive), empires at this stage build walls (i.e., defensive barriers) instead, such as the Roman Emperor Hadrian’s wall near the Scottish border, the Great Wall of China, even the Maginot line of twentieth-century France. Then the wealth acquired by conquest and (later) business investment promoted by the political unity provided by the empire (such as how the brutal Mongol Empire later promoted the caravan trade across Eurasia) is later spent to establish educational institutions such as universities and secondary schools. During the age of intellect, these may produce intellectuals (such as the medieval Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averoes, who drank deeply from the waters of Greek philosophy) who are skeptical of at least some of the values and religious beliefs of the founders and developers of their empire.
Alternatively, these intellectuals may administer educational institutions that educate the elite or part of the masses in subjects either impractical (i.e., rhetoric in the Rome of the Caesars, when persuading assemblies emotionally was no longer of political value) or mostly oriented towards financial success (e.g., today, the M.B.A), not character development and virtue, as in the early Roman Republic. As both the elites and masses discard the self-confident, self-disciplined values that created the empire because of affluence’s corrosive effects, moral decay and decadence set in.
Eventually, the empire collapses from (say) an outside power (e.g., the barbarians in Rome’s case) or an energetic internal force (e.g., the communists in Czarist Russia’s case). Likewise, God warned Israel against departing from worshipping him when they became materially satisfied after entering the Promised Land (Deut. 8:11-15, 17-18; 31:20). In short, as the growth of wealth and comfort undermine the values of character that led to the given empire’s creation through self-sacrifice and discipline in its initial stages, an empire increasingly grows weak and subject to destruction to forces arising inside or outside of it.
The Latter Phase of America's Power?
Has the United States entered the latter phases of the empire life cycle despite only having been independent from Britain a little over 225 years, despite still being a "young nation"? Does America today have the same values or cultural developments that past empires such as Rome had before they fell? For example, who are the nation’s heroes, and what does their selection indicate about the values of its people? Today, in America people admire and pursue avidly news (i.e., gossip) on celebrities such as sports stars, singers, actors, and musicians. Now Glubb Pasha notes that the heroes of an empire’s leaders and people change over time as their values do. Soldiers, builders, pioneers, and explorers are admired in the initial stages of the empire life cycle. Successful businessmen and entrepreneurs are held up for admiration during the ages of commerce and affluence (cf. the values of prudence, saving, and foresight found in the Horatio Alger stories promoted by late nineteenth-century middle class Americans). The intellectuals and academics are also increasingly admired during the age of intellect.
During the last stages of decadence and decline, an empire’s people often admire and emulate the athletes, musicians, and actors generally regardless of how corrupt their private lives are. Remarkably, Glubb Pasha found in tenth-century Baghdad, during the Arab Abbasid Empire’s decline, writers complained about the corrupting influence of singers of erotic songs on the young people! How different is the America of recent decades, whether the target of conservatives was Elvis, the Beatles, Ozzy Osbourne, or Marilyn Manson? The immense attachment people have to the (rock) music they love, regardless of its often spiritually rotten lyrical content (including sometimes even positive Satanic allusions), encourages them to esteem people whose lifestyle is truly degenerate because of frequent drug use and casual sex.
Features of a Declining Empire
More generally, what are some common features of an empire’s culture in its declining period? Glubb Pasha and Bernard Goetz in "When the Empire Strikes Out" (which usefully summarizes the former’s work) describe developments such as the following:
The decline of sexual morality, an aversion to marriage in favor of cohabitation, and an increased divorce rate, such as in the upper class of the late Roman Republic and early Empire. The first-century A.D. Roman writer Seneca cynically commented about Roman upper class women, "They divorce in order to re-marry. They marry in order to divorce." The birth rate declines and abortion and infanticide both increase as family size is deliberately limited. The historian W.H. McNeill has referred to the "biological suicide of the Roman upper classes" as one reason for Rome’s decline. Gay sex becomes publicly acceptable and spreads, such as it was among the ancient Greeks before their conquest by Rome.
The increased economic and political power of women, such as by their entry into the professions and the general workforce. Arab historians complained about the increased influence of women in public life during their empire’s decline. The Roman satirist Juvenal (c. 55 to c. 127 A.D.) was horrified by female gladiators, poets, athletes, and actresses.
An influx of foreign immigrants into the empire’s capital and major cities. (This could also be elsewhere within its borders, such as the late Roman Empire trying to co-opt barbarians by settling them within the frontier regions of its territory and hiring them to fight other barbarians). The diversity stemming from this cosmopolitan element introduces an (inevitably) culturally divisive element into the empire greatly in excess of its percentage of the population.
Both frivolity and pessimism increase among the people and their leaders. The spirit described in I Cor. 15:32 spreads in society, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." As people cynically give up on finding solutions to the problems of life and society, they drop out of the system and turn to mindless entertainment, luxuries and sexual activity, and drugs or alcohol. The astonishingly corrupt and lavish parties of the Roman Empire’s elite, such as the practice of the Emperor Nero spending the modern equivalent of $500,000 for just the flowers at some banquets, are a case in point.
The government provides welfare for the poor extensively. For example, the masses of the city of Rome (population, perhaps 1.2 million in the second century A.D.) were kept content by government-provided bread and spectacles. Around one-half of its non-slave population was on the dole at least part of the year. Although this provision may seem to manifest Christian compassion (Mark 14:7), it also can encourage laziness and dependency as well (II Thess. 3:10-12), especially when the poor perceive relief as a right of permanent duration, not a privilege to tide them over temporary bad times.
Now a sharp-eyed skeptical critic may ask about why it’s legitimate to cite evidence of family disintegration or of other societal decline in Rome centuries before it fell. Did the Christianization of the Empire after Constantine proclaimed the Edict of Milan granting Christianity toleration (313 A.D.) help improve Rome’s family life or reform the values of its governing officials?
True, the small minority that was Catholic Christian (perhaps 10% of the Roman population when the Peace of the Church came) had to be a largely dedicated lot because of the waves of persecution that periodically struck the Church. But in the mass conversions that came in the fourth and fifth centuries, many of these people were far less committed; they changed their personal behavior little if any at all. One Christian priest in the mid-fifth century, Salvian, complained about people who were Christian in name only, such as the carousing members of the elite whose behavior hardly differed from that found at the court of Nero some four centuries earlier: "Something still remained to them of their property, but nothing of their character. They reclined at feasts, forgetful of their honor, forgetting justice, forgetting their faith and the name they bore. There were the leaders of the state, gorged with food, dissolute from winebibbing, wild with shouting, giddy with revelry, completely out of their senses, or rather, since this was their usual condition, precisely in their senses."
In short, the superficial Christianization (which, incidentally, included the Church compromising by adopting various pagan beliefs and practices) of the Roman Empire before its collapse didn’t seriously improve the moral condition of Rome’s leaders and masses, thus leaving the pre-existing ominous cultural trends in place.
Decadence and Decline?
When we examine this list of indicators of an empire’s cultural and moral decline, does anybody really think the United States hasn’t entered the stages of decadence and decline? True, in the past decade or so, the tidal wave of social and cultural decline unleashed by the 1960’s in America has ebbed some, as the rates of abortion, divorce, illegitimate births, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and violent crime either have declined or have gone up much more slowly. Furthermore, some of indicators of decline aren’t all bad. Some immigration is good, for often it amounts to a "brain drain" from Third World countries that benefits the United States economically. And, indeed, the United States historically is a melting pot nation of immigrants.
Nevertheless, the present influx of immigrants, legal or illegal, equal in impact to the wave that arrived at America’s shores at the turn of the previous century, are far more apt to be a divisive force because the intelligentsia has adopted multiculturalism as an ideal, not assimilation as it was a hundred years ago. Today, multiculturalism is the ideology underlying a potentially ultimate political Balkanization (cf., the liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s "The Disuniting of America"), such as if and when a Spanish-speaking majority inhabits the American southwest. Then, of course, many women with young children, or older ones without any children at home, have to work full-time because ex-husbands (or ex-boyfriends) dump them in order to escape the burdens of fatherhood or to trade in their old wife for a younger model. And it’s clearly better for young single women or even older widows who haven’t reached retirement age to work outside the home rather than be dependent on handouts from their families or the government. But although the traditional sexual division of labor, of men working outside the home and women working inside it, may appear to be rather arbitrary, discarding it or reversing it simply won’t work for most of society in the long run because of the innately different personalities of men and women.
In a process that he has dubbed "sexual suicide," the sociologist George Gilder in "Men and Marriage" describes how the feminist values presently enshrined in our culture lead to demographic decline. For as women increasingly feel the need to both bring home the bacon and to fry it up in a pan, the men correspondingly feel useless and feel free to neglect more their family and work responsibilities.
Given the historical knowledge of Sir John Glubb Pasha’s "The Fate of Empires" and how its insights can be applied to America (and other English-speaking nations, including Britain), how should true Christians react?
We have to redouble our efforts to warn the world’s nations (Matt. 24:14), especially those largely inhabited by the descendants of the tribe of Joseph (cf. Ezekiel 33:1-9), about their fate if they don’t repent. We ourselves have to avoid letting our own sense of loyalty to our nations blind us to how much displeasure God has in our nations’ sins and how they will be punished in years to come. By knowing history better, we can project our likely national futures better, which fits the observation of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill:
"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."
Written By: Eric Snow
Web Site: www.lionofjudah1.org
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Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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