Beyond debt

 

Take steps to limit the growth of debt, or be prepared for the Age of Capitalism to give way to the next stage in the cycle of civilization.
It won't be an improvement.

-- mine of 21 Feb 2021

 

 
Curse my memory. I read Robert Heilbroner years and years back. I remember him saying business civilization won't last another 500 years. Funny thing: When I find the reference, it's only 100 years. From the Leonard Silk review of Business Civilization in Decline (March 21, 1976):

Is capitalism dying? Robert L. Heilbroner is sure it is. He expects it to be gone within a century.

That would be by 2076. Just 55 years from now.

A decade or more after reading Heilbroner, I found the abridgement of Toynbee's A Study of History: a book about the rise and fall of civilizations, and the traits different civilizations have in common. I found it fascinating beyond fascinating.

From the Argument: 

The intelligible units of historical study are not nations or periods but 'societies'. An examination of English history, chapter by chapter, shows that it is not intelligible as a thing-in-itself but only as part of a larger whole...

The 'whole', or 'society', to which England belongs is identified as Western Christendom...

Exploration of its beginnings reveals the existence of another society which is now dead, namely the Graeco-Roman or Hellenic society, to which ours is 'affiliated'.

From Chapter I, page 11:

The continuity of history, to use an accepted phrase, is not a continuity such as is exemplified in the life of a single individual. It is rather a continuity made up of the lives of successive generations, our Western Society being related to the Hellenic Society in a manner comparable (to use a convenient though imperfect simile) with the relationship of a child to its parent.

As summarized in the Argument, Toynbee finds that

The Orthodox Christian society is, like our own Western society, affiliated to the Hellenic society...

Behind the Hellenic society we find the Minoan...

As offspring of the Sumeric society we find two more societies, a Hittite and a Babylonic...

... we have, in all, twenty-one specimens of 'civilizations' ...

I'm trying to show what makes A Study of History so fascinating to me. I was never interested in history, by the way; Toynbee makes it interesting by showing common features shared by many civilizations over the course of their lives. And by tying-in the few things that I do happen to know.

For example, seeking evidence of the parent/offspring relation that he calls "apparentation and affiliation", Toynbee evaluates the latter stages of one civilization and the origin stage of another, looking for particular signs:

The marks of this relationship are (a) a universal state (e.g. the Roman Empire), itself the outcome of a time of troubles, followed by (b) an interregnum, in which appear (c) a Church and (d) a Völkerwanderung of barbarians in an heroic age.

But these are just the "marks" of the relationship. They suggest scenes and scenarios that we might find among the facts of history. And Toynbee provides plenty of them. I'm omitting them and presenting just an overview, mostly from the Argument, which is "an abridgement of the Abridgement" of Toynbee's 5500+ pages. But hey, if you've got time to do some reading, Toynbee will keep you busy.

For me, the interesting thing is the civilization I'm part of, its ancestry, and, in particular, the possibilities for the future. 

 

Let me offer you one more dribble of enticement: the dates Toynbee applies to Western civilization. There is first an "interregnum", described as

the deep sleep of the interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos... 

And then, dates for the civilization itself:

So we have:

Western I ('Dark Ages'), 675-1075.
Western II ('Middle Ages'), 1075-1475.
Western III ('Modern'), 1475-1875.
Western IV ('Post-Modern'?), 1875-?

But we have strayed from the point...

It may be later than you think. But don't read too much into the dates. I mean, they're extraordinarily precise for dates that cover almost two thousand years. Surely the purpose of these dates is to convey the "big picture", not to reference specific, sharply-defined moments of transition. They are not like appointments with destiny.