Introduction

Civilizations begin, flourish, decline, and disappear—or linger on as stagnant pools left by once life-giving streams.

—Will Durant

These essays began as part of a continuing contribution to an E-Book titled The Wizards of Ozymandias: Reflections on the Decline and Fall. Written over a period of several years, they are intended as a collection of personal observations accompanying what I consider the dissipation of the systems and characteristics of Western culture. In my first book, Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival,1 I used The Wizard of Oz2 to illustrate how the characters’ dependencies upon external authority provided a metaphor for what I regard as the greatest threat to human well-being: the institutional structuring of society. This book extends the inquiry to consider the impact institutionalism may have on the decline of civilization. My explanations for the major societal transformations now occurring—as well as the prospects for reviving the life-serving qualities of our culture—are offered as speculative impressions rather than as an empirical study of the causes of such changes.

The poet Shelley introduced us to Ozymandias in his poem of the same name, providing the picture of a tyrant whose arrogance of power led him to historical oblivion. Ozymandias is a reminder of the fragile nature of every system—be it biological, institutional, or galactic in character. As we are learning from the advanced course in history in which we seem now to be enrolled, this uncertain existence also applies to so-called civilizations. There is disagreement among historians as to the number and identity of civilizations around which so much of mankind has organized itself. While the values and practices of many past cultures continue to have a diluted influence—both good and bad—on modern societies, Western Civilization has lost much of its once-vibrant character. It is difficult for intelligent minds to dispute that this current system is in the process of joining Ozymandias in the dust-bin of history.

Western culture has added much to the quality of human existence. From the various arts, literature, and philosophy, to systems for producing and exchanging the means for enhancing the material well-being of mankind, to more sophisticated scientific understanding and its technological offspring and revelations in mathematics that have allowed us to take abstract reasoning into dimensions our ancestors could not have fathomed, the well-being of mankind has been greatly advanced during this epoch. We have even imagined ourselves capable of restraining the appetites of the Ozymandiases with written constitutions and structures designed to limit power.

Because of our nature as social beings, and having experienced the productive benefits of a specialization of labor, we have long known the advantages of organizing ourselves into groups to accomplish common purposes. Once in a while, a multitude of factors converge to create what is later recognized as a “civilization.” Western Civilization is the most recent example, having been preceded by, among others, such cultures as the Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Hittite, Minoan, Persian, Phoenician, Roman, Mayan, and Incan. Students of human history have tried to unravel the elements that both produced and brought about the demise of past civilizations. Because civilizations are characterized by multitudinous networks of complexities, historians invariably encounter the uncertainties that inhere in complication.

The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are subject to far too many interconnected and inconstant variables to make it possible to control events in order to achieve predictable outcomes. The ability to predict outcomes in a complex system rests on a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” meaning an awareness of the presence and strength of every factor that could affect the result.3 In other words, our efforts to describe or to prescribe those patterns of regularity we define as “order” are limited by complexity itself. Events in our world are generally produced by countless networks of influences that make it difficult to identify causation. What may appear—if seen at all—as an inconsequential factor can produce damaging results (thus the nursery rhyme about “the want of a nail” leading to the loss of the war). We also discover that our faith in linear processes to produce anticipated results is often upset by the intervention of nonlinear influences (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”). The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.

For the same reasons, explanations for historic behavior prove just as difficult. That so many factors have been identified by so many observers concerning both the origin and demise of civilizations, is a confirmation of the uncertainties that lie hidden within the dynamics of chaos and complexity. While there is no consensus of opinion as to the causes of the birth or death of civilizations, there are a number of common components upon which various historians focus.

As we better understand how chaos underlies so much of what we experience as both order and disorder in the world, we begin to discover the presence of what are referred to as attractors within systems. An attractor represents the organizing principle that brings regularity to a system (i.e., “attracts” orderliness). An earthquake fault line can be regarded as an attractor for geologic forces operating in an area subject to plate tectonics while, on a social level, an estate sale can be regarded as an attractor for antique dealers.

There are many who believe the marketplace is a form of undisciplined, disordered confusion, and that political intervention is required to protect the public from such unpredictable conduct. To those who understand the dynamics of the marketplace, however, the seeming chaos is underlain with processes through which the interplay of competing interests provides incentives for orderly behavior. In the language of “chaos,” the pricing system is an “attractor” that brings buyers and sellers together to engage in transactions that benefit both. The study of chaos and complexity make us aware that simplistic, linear explanations no longer suffice for our understanding of a complicated world. Scientific inquiry has helped us move beyond superficial explanations of behavior, and to examine less-apparent influences.

That said, is it possible to identify causal factors that bring about the creation and the demise of a civilization? Are there elements and processes that serve as attractors for the development of a culture? Such inquiries into the “how” and “why” of civilizations are difficult to assess, given the multifaceted variables involved. Like efforts to identify the mechanisms that trigger biological evolution, they are too dependent on abstract speculation. How, for instance, does individual behavior influence collective outcomes? Like the proverbial tale of the blind men reporting on their examination of an elephant, are we too locked in to our particular experiences to be able to communicate to others anything of verifiable substance? Because of my personal history, the focus of this book will be upon that period known as Western Civilization. What can be said of the dynamics of this epoch that distinguishes it from other societies in other periods of time?

Creative and vibrant civilizations do not come into being in some haphazard manner, nor are they the products of careful planning on the part of self-appointed “leaders.” They seem, rather, to have emerged from the convergence of various conditions, whose syntheses provided the opportunity for great numbers of people to pursue their respective interests in mutually-supportive ways. A culture thrives when it is capable of producing the values that define it. While some civilizations were grounded in agriculture, the success of Western Civilization can be traced, to a great extent, to the processes of industrialization, which essentially resolved the problem of how to sustain the lives of millions of people. It is important to note that a civilized society does not necessarily mean an industrialized society. The decline of our present civilization may be abetted by the emergence of an information based culture which might provide the basis for an even more prolific civilization.

The origins of any productive system seem to be traceable to conditions in which the self-interest driven purposes of individuals are allowed expression. These include the respect for autonomy and inviolability of personal boundaries that define liberty and peace and allow for cooperation for mutual ends. Support for such an environment has led to the flourishing of human activity not only in the production of material well-being, but in the arts, literature, philosophy, entrepreneurship, mathematics, spiritual inquiries, the sciences, medicine, engineering, invention, exploration, and other dimensions that fire the varied imaginations and energies of mankind. Our subjectively defined self-interests become energized within a social matrix that both encourages and reinforces novelty through informal, undirected processes.

Civilizations are not mandated by authorities, nor are they the products of systemic planning. People did not get together and say to one another “hey, let’s start a civilization!” Such cultures have been, rather, the unintended consequences arising from the interplay of creative forces that sustain and enhance life. The variability and cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques that can arise in pluralistic settings conducive to diversity and spontaneity, have been indispensable to the life of modern civilization. In much the same way that “brainstorming” sessions provide synergistic opportunities for individuals to come together to produce solutions to problems that none could have brought about on their own, a culture supportive of individuality can generate values and systems at exponential levels of creativity.

It is difficult to think of the dynamics of Western Civilization without identifying its individual creative producers. When mention is made of this culture, do not the names and accomplishments of Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Gutenberg, Beethoven, Galileo, Sophocles, Leonardo, Roger and Francis Bacon, Homer, Austen, Dante, Edison, Kepler, Carnegie, Michelangelo, Alcott, Locke, Curie, Rembrandt, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Emerson, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Milton, Bach, James Watt, van Gogh, Montessori, Pasteur, Darwin, Van Eyck, Einstein—to identify but a scant few individuals4—immediately come to mind? Do we not think of such persons as the creators of our civilization?

While the works of such people make up so much of the substance of our culture, their efforts, standing alone, would have been insufficient to produce a civilization. What other conditions were necessary to such ends? A factor I have long considered a major contributor to the emergence of highly productive societies can be found in what I call the “power of place.” Why, for instance, did technological inventiveness, standing alone, not produce industrialized societies in such places as ancient Greece, Baghdad, and Rome? In the 1st century AD, the Greek scientist, Hero, invented what we now know to be a steam-engine. He drew upon the works of earlier Greeks Vitruvius (80 BC-15 AD), and Ctesibius (285-222 BC) to create an instrument which, as far as is known, was used only to open and close temple doors. Another Greek invention, the Antikythera mechanism, was created in the second century BC, as a system of gears and cogs used, apparently, to calculate astronomical phenomena. While this device is often referred to as the earliest known computer, its appearance did not transform the pre-Christian world into a “Silicon Valley.” Was the two-thousand year-old copper cylinder found near Baghdad—believed by some to be an ancient electrical device—just another technological cul-de-sac that would await development centuries later? Did the glass industry of ancient Rome suffer from governmental restraints on technological innovation, thus impeding its development?5

My curiosity about the role that “place” might play in the creative process led me to inquire into the underlying conditions that attracted inventive and productive energies to Manchester, rather than Marseilles, as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution; or Florence, instead of Naples, as the center for the Italian Renaissance. Why did the Roman empire decline in its western region, but continue to prosper in its eastern domain? What forces converged to bring such creative minds as Emerson, Thoreau, Louisa May and Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to live within walking distance of one another in Concord, Massachusetts? Why did an interest in individual liberty develop so strongly in America, and not in Russia? The “places” that provide settings for those outbursts of life-sustaining creativity we call “civilizations,” obviously involve more than just geography.

In order to more deeply explore the dynamics involved in the development of this culture, I would like to focus on one of the major contributors to Western Civilization, one that had a profound impact on my own life. At some point in my youth, I became aware of the long-standing practice in such countries as Austria of many students graduating from college and then going on to law school. Following their legal studies, they would undertake careers that may or may not have involved the practice of law. During my college years, I became very interested in going on to law school, although at no time—whether before, during, or after law school—did I have any intention of practicing law. I wasn’t certain as to what kind of work I wanted to do, but law practice was not one to which I gave serious attention: law school, for me, was to provide the opportunity to synthesize disparate subject areas of learning—what used to be termed a “liberal arts” education—and to develop critical, analytical thinking. This approach was well-expressed by one nineteenth-century writer who observed that the study of law was “a sort of search for truth, carried on by teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly undertook, opening up an endless field for philosophic speculation.”6

While I was aware of this fairly common practice in Austria, I was only later able to put names and faces to those who had actually done so. Various musical composers, painters, poets, philosophers, inventors, writers, journalists, found the study of law an integral part of their intellectual development. These major contributors to the life of Western Civilization included such Austrian students of the law as two of the fathers of sociology, Max Weber and Ludwig Gumplowicz; major figures of the “Austrian School” of economics, Carl Menger, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, as well as the economists Friedrich von Wieser and Leopold Kohr (who authored the phrase “small is beautiful”); philosophers Anton Menger, Otto Bauer, Max Adler, Fritz Mauthner, Adolf Stohr, Gottfried Leibniz, and Gustav Bergmann; lawyers and philosophers Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Hans Kelsen; the inventor Wolfgang von Klempelen; journalist Karl Kraus; artist and psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig; art historian Alois Riegl; the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal; music composer Emil von Reznicek; and students of music, Guido Adler and Eduard Hanslick. The world-renowned symphonic conductor, Fritz Reiner, provided another example. Throughout my years of law school teaching, I have often wondered why men and women with backgrounds in music tended to do so well. Perhaps in the interconnectedness of Austrian culture can be found insights lost in modern student concerns over grade-point averages and bar exams! Nor can I overlook the major contributions made to civilization by such erstwhile students of the law as the literary giants Kakfa and Goethe.

The study of law is but one example of the creative nature of the metamorphic powers of an integrative culture. Those who pursued other inter-disciplinary studies illustrate a similar influence. Such dynamics—rather than the modern reductionist emphasis on specialization—helps us understand why Austria became a focal point for the creativity that found expression in such music composers as Haydn, Schubert, Mozart, the two Johann Strausses, Schonberg, Beethoven, and Mahler; such scientific minds as Gregor Mendel, Freud, Alfred Adler, Konrad Lorenz, Ernst Brucke, Theodor Meynert, Erwin Schrodinger, Ludwig Boltzmann, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Mach, Fritjof Capra, and Paul Feyerabend; the novelist and first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Bertha von Suttner; the writer and inventor Josef Popper-Lynkeus; as well as such prolific thinkers as Edmund Husserl, Viktor Frankl, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, Arthur Koestler, Franz Brentano, Bernard Bolzano, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr. While not all of these persons were students of multiple subject areas, the more holistic, integrated Austrian culture in which they and other individuals worked doubtless produced an environment that added to their creativity.

The processes that allow the genius and creative energies of individuals to merge into a prolific civilization, include such powerful domains as frontiers. The course of American history has led many of us to think of a frontier in geographic terms, as an unknown and uncertain territory existing beyond the known and established. Frederick Jackson Turner has written of the pivotal role played by a politically unstructured environment in which people were free to explore and innovate and, as a consequence, generate a free and productive society.7 States whose political systems were too restrictive and structured found themselves in competition with an ever-expanding “west,” to which creative persons were attracted. The presence of reasonably accessible and less-regulated environments also served to temper state efforts for control.

Of greater significance than geographically defined frontiers are the psychological and intellectual dimensions—the “state of mind”—of people who either accept or disregard the restraints placed upon their behavior by external authorities. As Alfred North Whitehead expressed it, “the vivid people keep moving on, geographically and otherwise, for men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.”8 There is a vibrancy in the life process that manifests itself along the boundary lines that separate the known from the unknown; the stable from the changeable; the familiar from the novel. In the interplay between the conscious and unconscious minds—often experienced when the brain is in an alpha state—we can experience this dynamic of creativity.

One can see this same creativity where the boundaries of various intellectual disciplines meet. The study of “history,” “economics,” “law,” “physics,” etc., takes place within realms whose inviolabilities are often fiercely guarded by certified professors within each field. Not unlike the nature of political “peace” talks, so-called “inter-disciplinary” conferences frequently encounter resistance from participants dedicated to the defense of their respective “turfs.” The historian who invades the territory of the physicists, or the economist who incorporates legal doctrine into his presentation—and, I must add, vice-versa—risks attack from the home-guard.

But it is precisely where such boundary lines meet that much creativity occurs. Looking across the boundary line into the neighbor s space can reveal a frontier to be explored. One might discover qualities on the other side that can be synthesized with their own discipline to create an expanded understanding of the world. Cross-disciplinary similarities might also be found, helping to confirm one’s prior thinking. As one noted historian has observed, nineteenth century medical practice in Austria was premised on allowing natural processes of healing to take precedence over interventionist procedures. This attitude also prevailed among many Austrians regarding politics, as well as in the Austrian economics—pioneered by Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises—that eschewed government interference with the marketplace.9 Did earlier principles from the realm of medicine influence economic thought, or might this common principle have a deeper basis of understanding that surfaced within each of these fields?

All creative actions confront the energies that seek to stabilize existing systems, practices, and thought. Elsewhere, I use the metaphor of the “cutting-and-filling” functions of rivers to illustrate the constant interplay between forces of stability and change that pervade nature.10 On the cutting side—where its energy is greater—the river eats into the surrounding bank, bringing earth, plants, and other debris into the stream. On the weaker filling side, dirt and silt collect, and it is here where new plant life forms. In this interaction is found the synthesis between the forces of destruction and consolidation that is the essence of creativity.

We are beginning to develop a better understanding of how the turbulence of chaotic systems produces order in the world. From this enhanced awareness comes a growing appreciation for the individualized and spontaneous nature of the creative process. Privately owned property; personal liberty; respect for contracts—which, in turn, is dependent upon longer-term time preferences; and the decentralization of decision-making, provide the necessary social environment for such inventiveness. The creative energies that gave birth to Western Civilization arose from within individuals who were able to transcend the lines that constrain our understanding and practices to within established boundaries. As has always been the case, within free and independent minds are to be found the frontiers for the creation of new ideas and forms to help us live humanely.

We have seen how civilizations are created by individuals. In the following pages, we shall discover how they are destroyed by collectives11 which are good for little more than the destruction of what others have created. We see this in the sharp contrasts between market economies and state socialism; between the Industrial Revolution and the Soviet Union. In many ways does history remind us of the continuing struggles between the creative energies unleashed by liberty, and the repressive forces of politics. The members of collectives are too dominated by “dark side” forces of mob psychology to ever undertake the prolonged and highly-focused inquiries necessary to the creation of anything fundamentally original. Collectives provide mirror images of minds in the default mode, capable of only reflecting the shared ignorance and prejudices upon which the institutionalized control of humans depends. Because we are unable to identify the names of distant ancestors who produced so much of what we modernly embrace as our common understanding, we are inclined to imagine a collective genesis for the insights of ancient individuals. We gaze, in awe, upon 32,000-year-old handprints found in ancient caves in Spain and France, forgetting that these represented the efforts of individuals to communicate something of themselves to others. Even folk-music and ballads were the creation of unknown individuals rather than collective groups. In the words of H.L. Mencken, there is the “sheer impossibility to imagine them being composed by a gang of oafs whooping and galloping around a May pole.”12

Returning to the Austrian microcosm that reflects the fate of Western Civilization generally, when collectivism—in the form of German National Socialism—infected that country, many of its more creative individuals fled to such less-repressive frontiers as America, Switzerland, and England. Gresham’s law finds expression beyond the more familiar confines of government monetary practices. Arnold Schonberg, Franz Werfel, Sigmund Freud, Erwin Schrodinger, Leopold Kohr, the brothers Ludwig and Richard von Mises, Kurt Godel, Karl Popper, Otto Loewi, Olga Hahn-Neurath and her husband Otto Neurath, Anton Ehrenzweig, Lise Meitner, Rudolf Carnap, novelist Stefan Zweig, Rose Rand, Walter Mischel, Edgar Zilsel, Philip Frank, Nobel laureates (in physics) Viktor Francis Hess, Wolfgang Pauli, and (in chemistry) Walter Kohn; painters Herbert Bayer and Georg Mayer-Marton; noted lawyer Hans Kelsen, Fritz Lang, Josef Frank, Gustav Bergmann, Robert Stolz, and Billy Wilder, were among the better known to depart Austria. They joined with such refugees from other European countries as the writers Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce, and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann; painters Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Piet Mondrian; conductor Georg Solti, composer Darius Milhaud, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, film-stars Marlene Dietrich and Conrad Veidt; along with Nobel laureates Max Born and Albert Einstein (physics), Fritz Haber (chemistry), and Bernard Katz and Hans Krebs (medicine). In such highly personal ways have civilizations continued the dance between the life-enhancing creativity of individuals, and the collective forces of death and destruction.

Mindful of the historic interplay of forces at work in the creation and death of civilizations, I am of the opinion that Western Civilization—with particular attention directed to its American franchise—has about run its course. While this book focuses on such a prognosis, I also address the question: what is likely to follow from this imminent “decline and fall?” Might the remnants of our terminal culture—like an estate bequeathed us by a rich benefactor—provide the foundations for a fundamentally transformed culture; one that does not cannibalize itself?

Previous civilizations continue to exert their influences, long after their death-certificates have been signed by historians. Philosophy students still begin their studies by reading the ancient Greeks; Roman law and engineering retain their influences into the twenty-first century; Western Civilization, itself, also finds its foundations greatly influenced by the Saracens, whose contributions to mathematics, science, and the replacement of Roman with Arabic numerals, helped lay the foundations for the Renaissance. The evolution of human language, biology, and culture, has arisen through millennia of interconnected, cross-fertilizing relationships. The influences of our ancient, primitive ancestors—who learned how to organize with fellow tribesmen either to hunt for food, or to destroy their neighbors—continue to direct our thought and behavior. Our lineage is traceable both to Attila the Hun and Homer; to Machiavelli as well as Shakespeare; while the contrasting images of Ozymandias and Botticelli’s “Venus” speak to passionate emotions.

Western culture has produced material and spiritual values that have done so much to humanize and civilize mankind. It has also produced highly-structured institutions and practices that not only impede, but reverse these life-enhancing qualities. Is it possible for us to energize our intelligence in order to rediscover, in the debris of our dying civilization, the requisite components for a fundamentally transformed culture grounded in free, peaceful, and productive systems that sustain rather than diminish life?

13Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival San Francisco: Alchemy Books, 1985; republished Coral Springs, Fla.: Llumina Press, 2004).

14L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago: George M. Hill, 1900).

15See, e.g., James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984); Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

16I use the word “individual” not to denote activity isolated from other persons, but to refer to persons acting as autonomous, self-owning beings who, more often than not, voluntarily associate and cooperate with others, but who are free not to do so.

17Henry Hodges, Technology in the Ancient World (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1970), pp. 209–10.

18Paul Bonnefon, Oeuvres Completes d’Etienne de la Boetie (Bourdeaux: C. Gounouilhou, and Paris: J. Rouam et Cie., 1892), p. xlvi.

19Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier In American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920).

20Lucien Price, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954), p. 50.

21William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 228–29.

22Butler Shaffer, Boundaries of Order: Private Property as a Social System (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), pp. 307–09.

23I am using this word as it relates to the socio-political concept of “collectivism,” namely “a doctrine or system that makes the group or the state responsible for the social and economic welfare of its members.” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: G&C Merriam Company, 1971), p. 445.

24H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 472.

1T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men, 1925.
2Bretigne Shaffer, “Mere Anarchy Loosed Upon the World,” in Why Peace, Marc Guttman, ed. (Marc Guttman: East Lyme, Conn., 2012), pp. 118–26, at 124.
3See, e.g., James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1984); Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); and John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
4I use the word “individual” not to denote activity isolated from other persons, but to refer to persons acting as autonomous, self-owning beings who, more often than not, voluntarily associate and cooperate with others, but who are free not to do so.
5Henry Hodges, Technology in the Ancient World (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1970), pp. 209–10.
6Paul Bonnefon, Oeuvres Completes d’Etienne de la Boetie (Bourdeaux: C. Gounouilhou, and Paris: J. Rouam et Cie., 1892), p. xlvi.
7Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier In American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920).
8Lucien Price, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1954), p. 50.
9William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 228–29.
10Butler Shaffer, Boundaries of Order: Private Property as a Social System (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), pp. 307–09.
11I am using this word as it relates to the socio-political concept of “collectivism,” namely “a doctrine or system that makes the group or the state responsible for the social and economic welfare of its members.” (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: G&C Merriam Company, 1971), p. 445.
12H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 472.
13When I first decided to chronicle the collapse of Western Civilization, I assumed I would have a sufficient amount of time to observe and comment upon the transformations taking place. I shared T.S. Eliot’s sentiment that: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Surely a vibrant culture that took centuries to develop would have to experience a prolonged demise. I could not imagine that its downfall would be as precipitous as it has proven to be. Because of the complexities involved, it is difficult to identify a specific date or period when the descent began. Suffice it to say that the process was well underway by the time Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!
14If there is one period in Western history that I think reflects what we have become, it would be the French Revolution. What could be a more fitting symbol for that period of collective madness, destruction, and inhumanity than the guillotine, ever busy searching for new victims? Whatever visions of mankind in society have been offered by the numerous creators of Western Civilization are being lost as the culture, itself, disappears into history’s “black hole.” My oldest daughter, Bretigne, may have most succinctly encapsulated the changes occurring during her lifetime when she wrote: “I don’t know who the people around me are anymore.”
15The study of chaos informs us that complex systems are subject to far too many interconnected and inconstant variables to make it possible to control events in order to achieve predictable outcomes. The ability to predict outcomes in a complex system rests on a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” meaning an awareness of the presence and strength of every factor that could affect the result. In other words, our efforts to describe or to prescribe those patterns of regularity we define as “order” are limited by complexity itself. Events in our world are generally produced by countless networks of influences that make it difficult to identify causation. What may appear—if seen at all—as an inconsequential factor can produce damaging results (thus the nursery rhyme about “the want of a nail” leading to the loss of the war). We also discover that our faith in linear processes to produce anticipated results is often upset by the intervention of nonlinear influences (“the straw that broke the camel’s back”). The hubris that attends all political programs of central planning is fueled by an ignorance of the forces of chaos.
16It is difficult to think of the dynamics of Western Civilization without identifying its individual creative producers. When mention is made of this culture, do not the names and accomplishments of Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Gutenberg, Beethoven, Galileo, Sophocles, Leonardo, Roger and Francis Bacon, Homer, Austen, Dante, Edison, Kepler, Carnegie, Michelangelo, Alcott, Locke, Curie, Rembrandt, Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, Emerson, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Milton, Bach, James Watt, van Gogh, Montessori, Pasteur, Darwin, Van Eyck, Einstein—to identify but a scant few individuals—immediately come to mind? Do we not think of such persons as the creators of our civilization?
17While the works of such people make up so much of the substance of our culture, their efforts, standing alone, would have been insufficient to produce a civilization. What other conditions were necessary to such ends? A factor I have long considered a major contributor to the emergence of highly productive societies can be found in what I call the “power of place.” Why, for instance, did technological inventiveness, standing alone, not produce industrialized societies in such places as ancient Greece, Baghdad, and Rome? In the 1st century AD, the Greek scientist, Hero, invented what we now know to be a steam-engine. He drew upon the works of earlier Greeks Vitruvius (80 BC-15 AD), and Ctesibius (285-222 BC) to create an instrument which, as far as is known, was used only to open and close temple doors. Another Greek invention, the Antikythera mechanism, was created in the second century BC, as a system of gears and cogs used, apparently, to calculate astronomical phenomena. While this device is often referred to as the earliest known computer, its appearance did not transform the pre-Christian world into a “Silicon Valley.” Was the two-thousand year-old copper cylinder found near Baghdad—believed by some to be an ancient electrical device—just another technological cul-de-sac that would await development centuries later? Did the glass industry of ancient Rome suffer from governmental restraints on technological innovation, thus impeding its development?
18In order to more deeply explore the dynamics involved in the development of this culture, I would like to focus on one of the major contributors to Western Civilization, one that had a profound impact on my own life. At some point in my youth, I became aware of the long-standing practice in such countries as Austria of many students graduating from college and then going on to law school. Following their legal studies, they would undertake careers that may or may not have involved the practice of law. During my college years, I became very interested in going on to law school, although at no time—whether before, during, or after law school—did I have any intention of practicing law. I wasn’t certain as to what kind of work I wanted to do, but law practice was not one to which I gave serious attention: law school, for me, was to provide the opportunity to synthesize disparate subject areas of learning—what used to be termed a “liberal arts” education—and to develop critical, analytical thinking. This approach was well-expressed by one nineteenth-century writer who observed that the study of law was “a sort of search for truth, carried on by teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly undertook, opening up an endless field for philosophic speculation.”
19The processes that allow the genius and creative energies of individuals to merge into a prolific civilization, include such powerful domains as frontiers. The course of American history has led many of us to think of a frontier in geographic terms, as an unknown and uncertain territory existing beyond the known and established. Frederick Jackson Turner has written of the pivotal role played by a politically unstructured environment in which people were free to explore and innovate and, as a consequence, generate a free and productive society. States whose political systems were too restrictive and structured found themselves in competition with an ever-expanding “west,” to which creative persons were attracted. The presence of reasonably accessible and less-regulated environments also served to temper state efforts for control.
20Of greater significance than geographically defined frontiers are the psychological and intellectual dimensions—the “state of mind”—of people who either accept or disregard the restraints placed upon their behavior by external authorities. As Alfred North Whitehead expressed it, “the vivid people keep moving on, geographically and otherwise, for men can be provincial in time, as well as in place.” There is a vibrancy in the life process that manifests itself along the boundary lines that separate the known from the unknown; the stable from the changeable; the familiar from the novel. In the interplay between the conscious and unconscious minds—often experienced when the brain is in an alpha state—we can experience this dynamic of creativity.
21But it is precisely where such boundary lines meet that much creativity occurs. Looking across the boundary line into the neighbor s space can reveal a frontier to be explored. One might discover qualities on the other side that can be synthesized with their own discipline to create an expanded understanding of the world. Cross-disciplinary similarities might also be found, helping to confirm one’s prior thinking. As one noted historian has observed, nineteenth century medical practice in Austria was premised on allowing natural processes of healing to take precedence over interventionist procedures. This attitude also prevailed among many Austrians regarding politics, as well as in the Austrian economics—pioneered by Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises—that eschewed government interference with the marketplace. Did earlier principles from the realm of medicine influence economic thought, or might this common principle have a deeper basis of understanding that surfaced within each of these fields?
22All creative actions confront the energies that seek to stabilize existing systems, practices, and thought. Elsewhere, I use the metaphor of the “cutting-and-filling” functions of rivers to illustrate the constant interplay between forces of stability and change that pervade nature. On the cutting side—where its energy is greater—the river eats into the surrounding bank, bringing earth, plants, and other debris into the stream. On the weaker filling side, dirt and silt collect, and it is here where new plant life forms. In this interaction is found the synthesis between the forces of destruction and consolidation that is the essence of creativity.
23We have seen how civilizations are created by individuals. In the following pages, we shall discover how they are destroyed by collectives which are good for little more than the destruction of what others have created. We see this in the sharp contrasts between market economies and state socialism; between the Industrial Revolution and the Soviet Union. In many ways does history remind us of the continuing struggles between the creative energies unleashed by liberty, and the repressive forces of politics. The members of collectives are too dominated by “dark side” forces of mob psychology to ever undertake the prolonged and highly-focused inquiries necessary to the creation of anything fundamentally original. Collectives provide mirror images of minds in the default mode, capable of only reflecting the shared ignorance and prejudices upon which the institutionalized control of humans depends. Because we are unable to identify the names of distant ancestors who produced so much of what we modernly embrace as our common understanding, we are inclined to imagine a collective genesis for the insights of ancient individuals. We gaze, in awe, upon 32,000-year-old handprints found in ancient caves in Spain and France, forgetting that these represented the efforts of individuals to communicate something of themselves to others. Even folk-music and ballads were the creation of unknown individuals rather than collective groups. In the words of H.L. Mencken, there is the “sheer impossibility to imagine them being composed by a gang of oafs whooping and galloping around a May pole.”
24We have seen how civilizations are created by individuals. In the following pages, we shall discover how they are destroyed by collectives which are good for little more than the destruction of what others have created. We see this in the sharp contrasts between market economies and state socialism; between the Industrial Revolution and the Soviet Union. In many ways does history remind us of the continuing struggles between the creative energies unleashed by liberty, and the repressive forces of politics. The members of collectives are too dominated by “dark side” forces of mob psychology to ever undertake the prolonged and highly-focused inquiries necessary to the creation of anything fundamentally original. Collectives provide mirror images of minds in the default mode, capable of only reflecting the shared ignorance and prejudices upon which the institutionalized control of humans depends. Because we are unable to identify the names of distant ancestors who produced so much of what we modernly embrace as our common understanding, we are inclined to imagine a collective genesis for the insights of ancient individuals. We gaze, in awe, upon 32,000-year-old handprints found in ancient caves in Spain and France, forgetting that these represented the efforts of individuals to communicate something of themselves to others. Even folk-music and ballads were the creation of unknown individuals rather than collective groups. In the words of H.L. Mencken, there is the “sheer impossibility to imagine them being composed by a gang of oafs whooping and galloping around a May pole.”