Wax and Wane and Wax

Mead responds to the notion that civilizations and empires inevitably decline with this: Arguments about inevitable decline, articulated by Spengler and Toynbee, “looked more probable in the early and middle years of the twentieth century than they do today. Consider the idea that all civilizations decline. Fifty or one hundred years ago, perhaps, China looked like an example of a formerly great civilization (and empire) that had fallen into contemptible weakness and backwardness. Does it still look that way today? What about India? These are among the world’s most ancient civilizations and they don’t rise and fall so much as a they wax and wane, and then wax again.” (The Economist , by the way, reports this week that India, for decades the world’s chief recipient of foreign aid, is not beginning to dispense foreign aid.)

Civilizations have collapsed, but Mead argues that “this is the exception rather than the rule.” In fact, “all the world’s great civilizations now are very ancient, and all of them has survived many shocks and many winters. Great civilizations don’t fall; they are pushed, and it takes an unusual combination of circumstances for a whole civilization to be pushed past its breaking point.”