Empires come, and empires go. Empires, like the poor, are always with us. The trick is to be a part of better empire, with a hope to better the empire. The USA et al may be declining but at least it is not entering its terminal stages like Russia is. Russia has an economy a little bigger than Australia's. It population is both dying younger and not having children, currently the best and brightest have left the country while the most poor and most remote and most unlikely to live in Moscow end up as meat waves cannon fodder in vain attempts to deplete Ukraine of ammunition. USA ain't got nothing on that.
True, and even modern Russia isn't as bad as some past empires (e.g. the Aztecs). As empires go, I agree that the US is rather benign - but that doesn't mean I'm happy to be a part of it.
Indeed, I suspect that the problem of civilizational decay is mostly or even entirely a consequence of their sudden rise, and empires commonly are forged during a period of explosive expansion. Confidence fuels success, and success fuels further confidence, but at some point the confidence departs from what is likely or even possible, and becomes Panglossian. The generations turn, people's high hopes become expectations about what is the minimum they can even tolerate, and when reality catches up it spurs disappointment and anger. Disappointment and anger do not fuel success.
Regarding civilization, I think the secret to endurance is limited growth, and an understanding that periods of decay and decline are inevitable. Egypt suffered two Intermediate Periods during which the civilization along the Nile was fragmented. If America stepped back like this, licked its wounds for a century or two, and then tried to pick up the pieces... well maybe that wouldn't even work for the US, but the Egyptians managed to pull it off, anyway!
yes, except this is too UScentric, the empire is bigger than the USA, even as it includes it as the largest bit. There are different types of empire, trading empires and territorial empires, trading empires are more flexible (in which not knowing where your borders are is a feature and not an existential threat like it is for territorial empires). Currently the best example is the EU, which is why fascist-freedom-to-enslave-others mongers do not like it at their border (where-ever they think that is today). [[[[[[ Is Nepal a part of China? It's too far away to know really. I think Tibet is though, wait, didn't the Mongols conquer the Tibetan Empire and then later conquered China, and that's why now it's a part of China.... Wasn't it Catherine the Great who fined people for using the term Moscovy when she wanted to be the Empress of all the Russias, and not just married -well CEO of a respected brand of suppliers of slaves to the the rump of the Mongols in the Golden Horde?
The Sweden-USA comparison on the individual/state relationship in the comments has been interesting.
In Germany the state support and responsibility shifting is more for/on the family ( not directly to the individual necessarily) and other intermediate institutions & levels of government.
Here in Australia we try to do both individuals & family, while the state and federal governments cost shift what they can onto the 'other' level of government, despite most tax being collected at the federal level (a function of WW2 rationalisations). (Municipalities generally only do roads, rates & rubbish here).
Having been just been in New Zealand which has no state/länder level of government local communities have a strong sense of community, an example for this is how they try to boost tourism to their small town via 'community volunteer run' vistor-centre / museum hybrids (I love them, I'm doing some family history there). This is because the municipal level has more state-level functions than in Australia (there being no state level in NZ). We have these small local history rooms but are usually attached to local libraries which are often municipal inAustralia, but funding is usually also from the other levels of government. They are community driven but not necessarily run by the local towns peeps.
Speaking of individualisms, I remember reading (Rom Hare??) somewhere decades ago that in terms of cultures individualism/collectivism:
Inuit/Eskimo are the most non-individualistic
traditional Maori are the most individualistic
And that compared to them both Western/European and East Asian are quite close to each other but on either side of the middle. Can anyone give me the reference?
That's an interesting upside to having no state governments that I never considered; I tend to prefer smaller over larger organizations.
I've never heard a claim about the Inuit and Maori being further apart than Westerners and East Asians in the 20th century, and I'm skeptical about it. Nowadays Asia is getting closer to Western norms, but China is still pretty collectivistic - and then there's North Korea.
except on the road we are more collected, if not collectivist, right of way in China consists of you being in front, and devil take the hindmost, even if you are doing OO and traffic stream is doing 100s.
All the Maori I have met have individually been more individualistically individuals than anyone else I have met. Here I stand they say, even when grouped in a haka.
France gave us the Statue of Liberty. Monuments aren’t put in place by the feds, even in Washington DC. Needless to say I won’t be reading more of your output. Who needs more juvenile doom porn? There’s already an oversupply.
Actually I been dealing with this exact complaint, but how does one deal with it without it appearing to be doom porn, i.e. if it is meta doom porn (or meta anything). Whose meta is it anyway? My attempt is here https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/panarchy-and-me
Hopefully it is at least more youthful than juvenile.
Well... I think Grape's dealing with something painful. I have conservative relatives who complain about this country's meteoric decline, but when I connect the dots and say "Yeah, I think it's over for the US," they get really upset.
I have the impression that the reason why the US, the UK and other traditionally comparatively socially unequal countries are going Woke now, is that their populations wish to be more like Sweden. Civil society fell into disrespect very early in Sweden. Maybe the very rapid industrialization just shattered organic ties between people, making them rely on official society instead for meaning and social security. The slower industrialization of the US and the European continent might have made this process much more gradual there. Communities had some time to adapt to the economic changes.
Now I think you are becoming like us. Eventually, also Americans have lost faith in their locally organized, organic communities. That's why people are promoting an obviously crazy idea like transgenderism: Because it demonstrates the value of the individual at the expense of the community. In Sweden we never had to become transgender crazy, because we already know that the only true love is that between the individual and the state. But in the US that idea was, and is, more controversial. So its proponents need to be much more militant.
I'm not sure about the dimensions that describe culture in nearly the same way that I'm confident about dimensions of individual personality. But from my incomplete understanding, the United States is a somewhat different *kind* of thing from Sweden. It is definitely possible to slide around in cultural space, so that one culture can become like another, but much of this sliding seems to occur in terms of individualism, not other cultural dimensions.
For instance: Geert Hofstede was very interested in cultural masculinity, a dimension pitting competitive countries where boastfulness and high salaries are valued, vs. self-effacing countries where humility and good relationships with managers are valued. Japan and Slovakia are extremely Masculine; the US is rather masculine; the Nordic nations are extremely feminine. Hofstede comes from feminine, pseudo-Nordic Holland, and blames all the ills of the world on cultural Masculinity, but, though *I* have replicated his work, others have struggled to find evidence that Masculinity really exists. If Hofstede is right, the US shouldn't ever really have the same trajectory as a country like Sweden because their cultures are fundamentally different.
If this is wrong, and cultures can easily shift and blend into one another, then what you're saying may be more plausible. But I do suspect that different foreign entanglements, demographics, history, and even geography of the countries make comparisons like this doubtful.
Even though my essay is only the tip of an enormous iceberg, I think it shows meaningful differences between the US and just about every other country in the world. Talking to Americans about guns, liberals must always contend with the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution; conservatives must always contend with Emma Lazarus' poem on the statue of liberty.
Note well: conservatives don't like doing this, as evidenced by Grape Soda. Liberals don't like it either, but I don't have an obvious example of them wishing the 2nd Ammendment never existed.
These quirks of history are part of the reason why Wokeness is such a poison pill for the US: Turn the same lens on our Founding Fathers that you do on contemporary America, and they can't withstand it. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others owned slaves, and this completely undermines their legitimacy according to the moral system applied by the Woke. For anyone who's Woke, that's it; there doesn't need to be any more discussion at all. America's very essence is an abomination that cannot be tolerated. Can any similar argument be made by mainstream Swedes about Sweden?
America will never become Sweden. Won't happen. But I think that America is becoming more like Sweden, while Sweden is only reluctantly becoming more like America: In fact, we have imported both an ethnical, segregated underclass and many guns. But we didn't mean to! Inevitably, we will need to become more like America in order to handle the situation we have brought about. But only out of necessity.
Meanwhile, American liberals are upholding the Scandinavian welfare state as an ideal. Will they ever get the right-wing part of the population on the train? Probably not that much. Nonetheless, cultural imperialism has changed direction. When I was young, American influence was feared. The European Left talked about "US imperialism" as the big threat to the world. "Americanization" was talked about as a bad thing on the cultural level. Only old people who became too used to that rhetoric talk about that by now. Compared to 20 years ago, America is not perceived as a threat anymore, militarily or culturally. I think that supports your perception that America is in decline.
>>For anyone who's Woke, that's it; there doesn't need to be any more discussion at all. America's very essence is an abomination that cannot be tolerated. Can any similar argument be made by mainstream Swedes about Sweden?
Ha ha, no, America has always been an edgier, more colorful place than Sweden. At Peak Woke, around 2013, Swedish Woke people didn't accuse Sweden of being fundamentally immoral as a nation. They accused the whole nation of being so boring and bland that it actually didn't exist! Sweden and Swedisness just didn't exist for real, they said, because something that bleak must sure just be a mixture of bad copies of everything else.
> But I think that America is becoming more like Sweden, while Sweden is only reluctantly becoming more like America: In fact, we have imported both an ethnical, segregated underclass and many guns. But we didn't mean to! Inevitably, we will need to become more like America in order to handle the situation we have brought about. But only out of necessity.
I guess I see this as superficial. The basic essence of the two countries *is* changing, and I'll grant that American liberals used to love Scandinavia. But everything I've heard about the Nordic mindset paints a picture that's rather distant from that of swaggering, sloppily-dressed Americans.
> America is not perceived as a threat anymore, militarily or culturally. I think that supports your perception that America is in decline.
Yes. But what gets me is how long America has been in decline... and still going up. I thought this place was deeply overrated in my teens, thirty years ago. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was shaking his head about America having peaked a hundred years ago! There's something in the air, something in the water in America that says "Look, look! This won't last!"
After watching the decay of American institutions (media, schools, etc), the balkanization of opinion, the breakdown of trust, and the rise in mental health problems, I've come to realize - or to think I realize, anyway - that money is keeping this place afloat. People complain about the economy, but our economy is excellent. No matter how bad the culture becomes, how terribly trust erodes, until it hits the economy, America will continue to limp forward on one leg.
And I think that's tragic. America feels to me like a kind of purgatory in which millions are trapped, waiting for a release that never comes. I'd rather see the religious conservatives all just go to some happy community where divorce was frowned upon and abortion was scandalous; I'd rather see the Woke coalition find some corner to be multicultural and change their pronouns every six months; I'd rather Atlas shrug as libertarians proudly gather in some utopian state where government minimalism could be the rule. But instead, all of these people are crammed together, struggling to make money so that they can spend it on lonely misery.
>>But everything I've heard about the Nordic mindset paints a picture that's rather distant from that of swaggering, sloppily-dressed Americans.
I only think there is one specific (but important) point where Europe and left-wing America is converging: The relationship between citizens, state and civil society. For a long time, Americans relied more than Northern Europeans on civil society: Family and church where Europeans had state-sponsored meeting places and social security. In this precise area, I have the impression that America is becoming more like Europe while Europe is not at all becoming like America.
(And we are entirely capable of dressing sloppily on our own here. If fully grown Swedes dress smartly that is in most cases because they live in some kind of urban area.)
>>There's something in the air, something in the water in America that says "Look, look! This won't last!"
America was once exceptional. Especially after WW2. Where is there to go from there except downwards?
> I only think there is one specific (but important) point where Europe and left-wing America is converging: The relationship between citizens, state and civil society. For a long time, Americans relied more than Northern Europeans on civil society: Family and church where Europeans had state-sponsored meeting places and social security. In this precise area, I have the impression that America is becoming more like Europe while Europe is not at all becoming like America.
That is almost certainly true. Scandinavians are not likely to become more religious in the foreseeable future, but Americans are clearly secularizing. If it weren't for the developing nations, conventional religion would soon become little more than an unusual quirk.
For a long time the sociologists I read were arguing about whether industrialized nations were secularizing, with Rodney Stark an outspoken holdout against the secularism hypothesis. But look around now and you don't have to be a sociologist to see how that turned out.
What's wrong with individualism?
The same thing that's wrong with alcohol; the dose makes the poison.
Empires come, and empires go. Empires, like the poor, are always with us. The trick is to be a part of better empire, with a hope to better the empire. The USA et al may be declining but at least it is not entering its terminal stages like Russia is. Russia has an economy a little bigger than Australia's. It population is both dying younger and not having children, currently the best and brightest have left the country while the most poor and most remote and most unlikely to live in Moscow end up as meat waves cannon fodder in vain attempts to deplete Ukraine of ammunition. USA ain't got nothing on that.
True, and even modern Russia isn't as bad as some past empires (e.g. the Aztecs). As empires go, I agree that the US is rather benign - but that doesn't mean I'm happy to be a part of it.
Indeed, I suspect that the problem of civilizational decay is mostly or even entirely a consequence of their sudden rise, and empires commonly are forged during a period of explosive expansion. Confidence fuels success, and success fuels further confidence, but at some point the confidence departs from what is likely or even possible, and becomes Panglossian. The generations turn, people's high hopes become expectations about what is the minimum they can even tolerate, and when reality catches up it spurs disappointment and anger. Disappointment and anger do not fuel success.
Regarding civilization, I think the secret to endurance is limited growth, and an understanding that periods of decay and decline are inevitable. Egypt suffered two Intermediate Periods during which the civilization along the Nile was fragmented. If America stepped back like this, licked its wounds for a century or two, and then tried to pick up the pieces... well maybe that wouldn't even work for the US, but the Egyptians managed to pull it off, anyway!
yes, except this is too UScentric, the empire is bigger than the USA, even as it includes it as the largest bit. There are different types of empire, trading empires and territorial empires, trading empires are more flexible (in which not knowing where your borders are is a feature and not an existential threat like it is for territorial empires). Currently the best example is the EU, which is why fascist-freedom-to-enslave-others mongers do not like it at their border (where-ever they think that is today). [[[[[[ Is Nepal a part of China? It's too far away to know really. I think Tibet is though, wait, didn't the Mongols conquer the Tibetan Empire and then later conquered China, and that's why now it's a part of China.... Wasn't it Catherine the Great who fined people for using the term Moscovy when she wanted to be the Empress of all the Russias, and not just married -well CEO of a respected brand of suppliers of slaves to the the rump of the Mongols in the Golden Horde?
The Sweden-USA comparison on the individual/state relationship in the comments has been interesting.
In Germany the state support and responsibility shifting is more for/on the family ( not directly to the individual necessarily) and other intermediate institutions & levels of government.
Here in Australia we try to do both individuals & family, while the state and federal governments cost shift what they can onto the 'other' level of government, despite most tax being collected at the federal level (a function of WW2 rationalisations). (Municipalities generally only do roads, rates & rubbish here).
Having been just been in New Zealand which has no state/länder level of government local communities have a strong sense of community, an example for this is how they try to boost tourism to their small town via 'community volunteer run' vistor-centre / museum hybrids (I love them, I'm doing some family history there). This is because the municipal level has more state-level functions than in Australia (there being no state level in NZ). We have these small local history rooms but are usually attached to local libraries which are often municipal inAustralia, but funding is usually also from the other levels of government. They are community driven but not necessarily run by the local towns peeps.
Speaking of individualisms, I remember reading (Rom Hare??) somewhere decades ago that in terms of cultures individualism/collectivism:
Inuit/Eskimo are the most non-individualistic
traditional Maori are the most individualistic
And that compared to them both Western/European and East Asian are quite close to each other but on either side of the middle. Can anyone give me the reference?
If you're interested in Sweden vs USA, you should check out Tove's post at https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/after-woke
That's an interesting upside to having no state governments that I never considered; I tend to prefer smaller over larger organizations.
I've never heard a claim about the Inuit and Maori being further apart than Westerners and East Asians in the 20th century, and I'm skeptical about it. Nowadays Asia is getting closer to Western norms, but China is still pretty collectivistic - and then there's North Korea.
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/after-woke/comment/43091044
except on the road we are more collected, if not collectivist, right of way in China consists of you being in front, and devil take the hindmost, even if you are doing OO and traffic stream is doing 100s.
All the Maori I have met have individually been more individualistically individuals than anyone else I have met. Here I stand they say, even when grouped in a haka.
France gave us the Statue of Liberty. Monuments aren’t put in place by the feds, even in Washington DC. Needless to say I won’t be reading more of your output. Who needs more juvenile doom porn? There’s already an oversupply.
Actually I been dealing with this exact complaint, but how does one deal with it without it appearing to be doom porn, i.e. if it is meta doom porn (or meta anything). Whose meta is it anyway? My attempt is here https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/panarchy-and-me
Hopefully it is at least more youthful than juvenile.
that is too harsh
Well... I think Grape's dealing with something painful. I have conservative relatives who complain about this country's meteoric decline, but when I connect the dots and say "Yeah, I think it's over for the US," they get really upset.
Where did the poem come from? Did France decide to hang it up?
I have the impression that the reason why the US, the UK and other traditionally comparatively socially unequal countries are going Woke now, is that their populations wish to be more like Sweden. Civil society fell into disrespect very early in Sweden. Maybe the very rapid industrialization just shattered organic ties between people, making them rely on official society instead for meaning and social security. The slower industrialization of the US and the European continent might have made this process much more gradual there. Communities had some time to adapt to the economic changes.
Now I think you are becoming like us. Eventually, also Americans have lost faith in their locally organized, organic communities. That's why people are promoting an obviously crazy idea like transgenderism: Because it demonstrates the value of the individual at the expense of the community. In Sweden we never had to become transgender crazy, because we already know that the only true love is that between the individual and the state. But in the US that idea was, and is, more controversial. So its proponents need to be much more militant.
I'm not sure about the dimensions that describe culture in nearly the same way that I'm confident about dimensions of individual personality. But from my incomplete understanding, the United States is a somewhat different *kind* of thing from Sweden. It is definitely possible to slide around in cultural space, so that one culture can become like another, but much of this sliding seems to occur in terms of individualism, not other cultural dimensions.
For instance: Geert Hofstede was very interested in cultural masculinity, a dimension pitting competitive countries where boastfulness and high salaries are valued, vs. self-effacing countries where humility and good relationships with managers are valued. Japan and Slovakia are extremely Masculine; the US is rather masculine; the Nordic nations are extremely feminine. Hofstede comes from feminine, pseudo-Nordic Holland, and blames all the ills of the world on cultural Masculinity, but, though *I* have replicated his work, others have struggled to find evidence that Masculinity really exists. If Hofstede is right, the US shouldn't ever really have the same trajectory as a country like Sweden because their cultures are fundamentally different.
If this is wrong, and cultures can easily shift and blend into one another, then what you're saying may be more plausible. But I do suspect that different foreign entanglements, demographics, history, and even geography of the countries make comparisons like this doubtful.
Even though my essay is only the tip of an enormous iceberg, I think it shows meaningful differences between the US and just about every other country in the world. Talking to Americans about guns, liberals must always contend with the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution; conservatives must always contend with Emma Lazarus' poem on the statue of liberty.
Note well: conservatives don't like doing this, as evidenced by Grape Soda. Liberals don't like it either, but I don't have an obvious example of them wishing the 2nd Ammendment never existed.
These quirks of history are part of the reason why Wokeness is such a poison pill for the US: Turn the same lens on our Founding Fathers that you do on contemporary America, and they can't withstand it. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others owned slaves, and this completely undermines their legitimacy according to the moral system applied by the Woke. For anyone who's Woke, that's it; there doesn't need to be any more discussion at all. America's very essence is an abomination that cannot be tolerated. Can any similar argument be made by mainstream Swedes about Sweden?
America will never become Sweden. Won't happen. But I think that America is becoming more like Sweden, while Sweden is only reluctantly becoming more like America: In fact, we have imported both an ethnical, segregated underclass and many guns. But we didn't mean to! Inevitably, we will need to become more like America in order to handle the situation we have brought about. But only out of necessity.
Meanwhile, American liberals are upholding the Scandinavian welfare state as an ideal. Will they ever get the right-wing part of the population on the train? Probably not that much. Nonetheless, cultural imperialism has changed direction. When I was young, American influence was feared. The European Left talked about "US imperialism" as the big threat to the world. "Americanization" was talked about as a bad thing on the cultural level. Only old people who became too used to that rhetoric talk about that by now. Compared to 20 years ago, America is not perceived as a threat anymore, militarily or culturally. I think that supports your perception that America is in decline.
>>For anyone who's Woke, that's it; there doesn't need to be any more discussion at all. America's very essence is an abomination that cannot be tolerated. Can any similar argument be made by mainstream Swedes about Sweden?
Ha ha, no, America has always been an edgier, more colorful place than Sweden. At Peak Woke, around 2013, Swedish Woke people didn't accuse Sweden of being fundamentally immoral as a nation. They accused the whole nation of being so boring and bland that it actually didn't exist! Sweden and Swedisness just didn't exist for real, they said, because something that bleak must sure just be a mixture of bad copies of everything else.
> But I think that America is becoming more like Sweden, while Sweden is only reluctantly becoming more like America: In fact, we have imported both an ethnical, segregated underclass and many guns. But we didn't mean to! Inevitably, we will need to become more like America in order to handle the situation we have brought about. But only out of necessity.
I guess I see this as superficial. The basic essence of the two countries *is* changing, and I'll grant that American liberals used to love Scandinavia. But everything I've heard about the Nordic mindset paints a picture that's rather distant from that of swaggering, sloppily-dressed Americans.
> America is not perceived as a threat anymore, militarily or culturally. I think that supports your perception that America is in decline.
Yes. But what gets me is how long America has been in decline... and still going up. I thought this place was deeply overrated in my teens, thirty years ago. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was shaking his head about America having peaked a hundred years ago! There's something in the air, something in the water in America that says "Look, look! This won't last!"
After watching the decay of American institutions (media, schools, etc), the balkanization of opinion, the breakdown of trust, and the rise in mental health problems, I've come to realize - or to think I realize, anyway - that money is keeping this place afloat. People complain about the economy, but our economy is excellent. No matter how bad the culture becomes, how terribly trust erodes, until it hits the economy, America will continue to limp forward on one leg.
And I think that's tragic. America feels to me like a kind of purgatory in which millions are trapped, waiting for a release that never comes. I'd rather see the religious conservatives all just go to some happy community where divorce was frowned upon and abortion was scandalous; I'd rather see the Woke coalition find some corner to be multicultural and change their pronouns every six months; I'd rather Atlas shrug as libertarians proudly gather in some utopian state where government minimalism could be the rule. But instead, all of these people are crammed together, struggling to make money so that they can spend it on lonely misery.
>>But everything I've heard about the Nordic mindset paints a picture that's rather distant from that of swaggering, sloppily-dressed Americans.
I only think there is one specific (but important) point where Europe and left-wing America is converging: The relationship between citizens, state and civil society. For a long time, Americans relied more than Northern Europeans on civil society: Family and church where Europeans had state-sponsored meeting places and social security. In this precise area, I have the impression that America is becoming more like Europe while Europe is not at all becoming like America.
(And we are entirely capable of dressing sloppily on our own here. If fully grown Swedes dress smartly that is in most cases because they live in some kind of urban area.)
>>There's something in the air, something in the water in America that says "Look, look! This won't last!"
America was once exceptional. Especially after WW2. Where is there to go from there except downwards?
> I only think there is one specific (but important) point where Europe and left-wing America is converging: The relationship between citizens, state and civil society. For a long time, Americans relied more than Northern Europeans on civil society: Family and church where Europeans had state-sponsored meeting places and social security. In this precise area, I have the impression that America is becoming more like Europe while Europe is not at all becoming like America.
That is almost certainly true. Scandinavians are not likely to become more religious in the foreseeable future, but Americans are clearly secularizing. If it weren't for the developing nations, conventional religion would soon become little more than an unusual quirk.
For a long time the sociologists I read were arguing about whether industrialized nations were secularizing, with Rodney Stark an outspoken holdout against the secularism hypothesis. But look around now and you don't have to be a sociologist to see how that turned out.