Over at The Orthoshpere, J.M. Smith, who has just turned sixty-one, has posted a piercing essay on the stages of life: not just the lives of men, but of civilizations. They have a great deal in common.
We read:
It is not only the lives of men that can be seen as passing through a cycle of ages or seasons. Until the modern age, it was generally supposed that nations, states and civilizations also followed an ineluctable path of birth, growth, maturity and decline, and that the quality of each stage in this cycle was different. A decayed nation might pass under the same name and occupy the same territory as it had in its vigorous youth, but it was no longer that youthful and vigorous nation. As Byron wrote of Greece subjugated by the Turk:
Such is the aspect of this shore:
’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.’Modern civilization rejects cyclical time and asserts that it has embarked on a path of perpetual progress.
Drawing on Polybius, Mr. Smith reminds us of the reliable progression: from anarchy, to strong-man rule, to kingdom, to aristocracy, to oligarchy, and from oligarchy, through democracy, back to anarchy — where the cycle begins anew. He describes the last turn of the wheel:
Disgusted with the corrupt oligarchy, the multitude seizes power and establishes a democracy. Like its predecessors, the democratic order is at first virtuous and austere; but power works its evil on the multitude just as it worked its evil on the king and the aristocrats. It is now the turn of the common man to grow insolent and self-indulgent, and to misuse his political power as a means to secure private privileges.
“When the people themselves become haughty and intractable, and reject all law, to democracy succeeds, in the course of time, the government of the multitude.’
Government of the multitude is the decadent phase of the democratic age. It is marked by widespread dependence on state subsidies, personal profligacy, and increasingly rancorous quarreling between factions that are rivals for subsidies or adversaries in profligacy. This leads to an anarchy that is ended by the emergence of a new strong man.
“Once the people are accustomed to be fed . . . and to derive all the means of their subsistence from the wealth of other citizens . . . then commences the government of the multitude: who run together in tumultuous assemblies . . . till being reduced at last to a state of savage anarchy, they once more find a master and a monarch.’
A decadent democracy cannot rejuvenate itself because the cycle does not run in reverse.
Read the whole thing here.