Historic Recurrence - Lessons

Lessons

G.W. Trompf notes that most western concepts of historic recurrence imply that "the past teaches lessons for... future action" — that "the same... sorts of events which have happened before... will recur..."

One such recurring theme was early offered by Poseidonius (ca. 135–51 BCE), who argued that dissipation of the old Roman virtues had followed the removal of the Carthaginian challenge to Rome's supremacy in the Mediterranean world. The theme that civilizations flourish or fail according to their responses to the human and environmental challenges that they face, would be picked up two thousand years later by Toynbee.

Dionysius, while praising Rome at the expense of her predecessors — Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia — anticipated Rome's eventual decay. He thus implied the idea of recurring decay in the history of world empires — an idea that was to be developed by Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE) and Pompeius Trogus (1st century BCE).

By the late 5th century, Zosimus could see the writing on the Roman wall, and asserted that empires fell due to internal disunity. He gave examples from the histories of Greece and Macedonia. In the case of each empire, growth had resulted from consolidation against an external enemy; Rome herself, in response to Hannibal's threat posed at Cannae, had risen to great-power status within a mere five decades. With Rome's world dominion, however, aristocracy had been supplanted by a monarchy, which in turn tended to decay into tyranny; after Augustus Caesar, good rulers had alternated with tyrannical ones. The Roman Empire, in its western and eastern sectors, had become a contending ground between contestants for power, while outside powers acquired an advantage. In Rome's decay, Zosimus saw history repeating itself in its general movements.

The ancients developed an enduring metaphor for a polity's evolution: they drew an analogy between an individual human's life cycle, and developments undergone by a body politic. This metaphor was offered, in varying iterations, by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Seneca (ca. 1 BCE – 65 CE), Florus (who lived in the times of Emperors Trajan and Hadrian), and Ammianus Marcellinus (between 325 and 330 – after 391 CE). This social-organism metaphor would recur centuries later in the works of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).

Niccolò Machiavelli, about to analyze the vicissitudes of Florentine and Italian politics between 1434 and 1494, described recurrent oscillations between "order" and "disorder" within states:

when states have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend, and thus from good they gradually decline to evil and from evil mount up to good.

Machiavelli accounts for this oscillation by arguing that virtù (valor and political effectiveness) produces peace, peace brings idleness (ozio), idleness disorder, and disorder rovina (ruin). In turn, from rovina springs order, from order virtù, and from this, glory and good fortune.

Machiavelli, as had the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, saw human nature as remarkably stable—steady enough for the formulation of rules of political behavior. Machiavelli wrote in his Discorsi:

Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples... ever have been animated by the same desires and the same passions; so that it is easy, by diligent study of the past, to foresee what is likely to happen in the future in any republic, and to apply those remedies that were used by the ancients, or not finding any that were employed by them, to devise new ones from the similarity of events.

A recurring theme in world history is the rise and fall of great powers and empires; even many, if not all, now medium-size or small countries have experienced expansionist periods in their histories. British historian Paul Kennedy, in his study of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, concludes that

The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequence of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict.

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana observed that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Which raises the question whether those who can remember are not doomed, anyway, to be swept along by the majority who cannot.

Karl Marx, having in mind the respective coups d'état of Napoleon I (1799) and his nephew Napoleon III (1851), wrote acerbically in 1852: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

British historian Niall Ferguson, in Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), warns that the rise and fall of civilizations "isn't one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.... striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause." Ferguson cites examples of such historic tipping points: the collapse of the Roman Empire within a few decades in the early 5th century; the fall of the Inca Empire within less than a decade in the early 16th century; the Ming Dynasty's fall in China over little more than a decade in the mid-17th century; the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991; the implosion of North African and Middle Eastern dictatorships in 2011. Similar catastrophic "tipping" processes occur in financial markets. "In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you're fine until you're not fine — and when you're not fine, you're suddenly in a terrifying death spiral."

Ferguson notes that in 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American, but by the late 1970s the American was over 20 times richer than the Chinese. "By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires — including the United States — controlled 58 percent of the world's land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy."

According to Ferguson, the West first surged ahead of the rest of the world after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations: competition among fragmented Europe's multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities; the Scientific Revolution, whose major 17th-century breakthroughs occurred in Western Europe; the rule of law and representative government; modern medicine; the consumer society; and the work ethic, and higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

Ferguson details the decline in the functioning of these institutions in the United States in recent decades and warns of the possibility of "imminent collapse." "Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a 'civic great awakening' — a return to the original values of the American republic."