Thinking About: Not Flying, But Falling with Style. 

I’ve been reading a few books recently on the theme of apocalypse and one thought in particular struck me. When the Western Roman Empire fell in 476CE would the average Roman citizen, living away from the capital, have known or suspected that such a thing had happened? Although Historians like to put definitive dates on things to separate them off, it’s actually quite difficult to pinpoint the start and end of things. To use a more modern example when did WW2 start and finish? The dates we use are from the declaration of war between the British Empire (making it global) and Germany on Sept 3rd 1939 and the end as the capitulation of Japan in 1945. But it could be argued that the war started much earlier in China or Spain. It could also be argued that the war continued LONG after the armistice in 1945 because of the continued fighting in China and elsewhere.  

But beyond the academic interest and debate about beginnings and ends here’s a more interesting question to ponder. If we are experiencing the fall of ‘western civilisation’ (whatever THAT means!) would we even know it? Much like the Roman citizen, could we point to something or a string of somethings and say: THAT’s when it fell. The problem, naturally, is that the fall of an Empire or Civilisation isn’t an event, it’s a process. Unless we get hit by a GIANT rock falling from the sky – which, incidentally, made us what we are today – or destroy ourselves in an act of nuclear mass stupidity, any collapse is going to take time, somewhere between decades and generations and we’re not really ‘designed’ to notice something that happens that slowly. Even our children or grandchildren might not be able to tell. They’ll see things as being different, with some improvements and some things worse or non-existent but will they think that their civilisation is in decline or that it had fallen sometime in their own lifetimes or during an earlier generation? Will they have the historical perspective to make any firm conclusion or pronouncement?  

The so-called ‘Decline of the West’ (however you define ‘West’ in this context) has been talked about and, all too often, shouted from the rooftops for at least the last 100 years and, most probably, long before that. But does that mean it's true? Have we at some point ‘fallen’ from a previous Golden Age? Some people point to Rome or Greece as exemplars but the more you know about those civilisations the more questionable that high pedestal becomes. But what else have we got to point to? Every age, every Empire, every civilisation has questionable ‘achievements’, questionable ideas, questionable morality. How can any age be compared with another and said to be ‘better’ or ‘worse’? That begs the question: from what perspective? Ours? Living in glass houses as we do, can we dare start throwing stones? We can’t stand ‘outside’ human culture and human history to judge things ‘objectively’ as some would maintain – there is simply no place to stand to make those judgements. A fall or decline must surely be measured against something higher, something greater for the idea to make sense. So, when someone talks of fall or decline, we must ask ourselves what they are measuring it against and is that measurement a valid one.