Cycles of Apocalypse and Interregnum

The analysis of historical cycles of civilization was the life’s work of the late historian Arnold Toynbee. He was a juggler of ideas reading what comprises a civilization, how they arise, how long they exist, and in what manner they end. We may especially consider the United States as a sub-species of civilization and consider if it has entered it culminating universal phase of expansion and has not entered it’s period of decline. What would be the signs of that time that we may recognize?

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Toynbee’s ‘A Study of History’ is a monumental work in which he finds that twenty-one civilizations, and another five with arrested development-twenty six overall, have existed in world history.

http://www.malaspina.org/toynbeea.htm

Arnold Toynbee was a universal historian. He had an uncle who was an economic historian. Toynbee was influenced by Oswald Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’; also an analysis of historical cycles. Spengler was an historical determinist while Toynbee was not. Toynbee developed a challenge-response thesis for the advance of societies. A societies might develop into civilizations if they continued successfully to meet empirical challenges with successful responses. A civilization might continue to avoid decline if it all successfully met challenge s with successful responses. Nations as a subset of a civilization might catalyze the continuing progression of a civilization. Nations may also take the core values of a civilizations and develop them in a social transformation perhaps into another civilization as elements of the parent civilization wither away. I have added some of these ideas regarding national developments myself, yet Toynbee in ‘A Study of History’ did not the parent-progeny phenomena in the identity of historically transitional civilizations occasionally.

With contemporary set theory criteria we might increase the range of Toynbee’s social analysis of organizational structures that comprise a civilization ontologically. National groups as organizational elements should not be under-valued for the survival and progress of a civilization; the civilization is a product of the sum of the parts rather than the reverse. The organizational whole of a civilization that has eclipsed and over-subordinated the national parts may create a pervasive inclemency repressing creativity and independent progress rendering the civilization unable to respond to challenges adequately for survival.

Toynbee found civilizations that have reached a zenith of success transform from a creative majority into a repressive minority as they expand the geographical and demographic range of the society to a Universal phase. The United States seems to have entered that area of expense of effort with little return in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the problems and population of the Indian subcontinent and Pakistan the entry of the United States into a state of perennial conflict with terrorism at an asymmetric cost has created a long-range decline of U.S. public accounts as foreign military ventures with a lack of overall political rationale for field operations continue.