World News Trust World News Trust
World News Trust World News Trust
  • News Portal
  • All Content
    • Edited
      • News
      • Commentary
      • Analysis
      • Advisories
      • Source
    • Flatwire
  • Topics
    • Agriculture
    • Culture
      • Arts
      • Children
      • Education
      • Entertainment
      • Food and Hunger
      • Sports
    • Disasters
    • Economy
    • Energy
    • Environment
    • Government
    • Health
    • Media
    • Science
    • Spiritual
    • Technology
    • Transportation
    • War
  • Regions
    • Africa
    • Americas
      • North America
      • South America
    • Antarctica
    • Arctic
    • Asia
    • Australia/Oceania
    • Europe
    • Middle East
    • Oceans
      • Arctic Ocean
      • Atlantic Ocean
      • Indian Ocean
      • Pacific Ocean
      • Southern Ocean
    • Space
  • World Desk
    • Submit Content
  • About Us
  • Sign In/Out
  • Register
  • Site Map
  • Contact Us
  • Russia's War and the Global Economy | Nouriel Roubini
  • U.S. Considers Radical Rethinking Of Dollar For Today's Digital World | David Gura
  • Why is Israel Amending Its Open-Fire Policy?: Three Possible Answers | Ramzy Baroud
  • WATCH: Republican National Committee Abandons America
  • ‘Previously Unknown Massacres’: Why is Israel Allowed to Own Palestinian History? | Ramzy Baroud
  • The Revolt of the Imagination, Part One: Notes on Belbury Syndrome | John Michael Greer
  • Human gut bacteria have sex to share vitamin B12 | University of California - Riverside

Why Decline Matters (John Michael Greer)

More items by author
Categories
Edited | Commentary -- WNT Selected
Tool Bar
View Comments

  May 28 (Archdruid Report) -- One of the most curious blind spots in the contemporary imagination, as I have suggested more than once in these essays, can be traced in the way that the concept of decline has vanished from our collective discourse about the future. What makes this blindness even more curious is that it is a very recent thing.

  A century ago the possibility that the modern western world might reach a peak, and then retrace history’s familiar path down to the common fate of civilizations, was on many minds. The art of Aubrey Beardsley and the novels of Joséphin Péladan, to name only two leading figures of the Decadent movement, announced, and at times wallowed in, the approaching decline that Oswald Spengler detailed a few years later in his magisterial prose. The belief in decline was never universally held, or even a majority view – those who prophesied the imminence of Utopia through progress or violent revolution had at least as large an audience, and apocalyptic fantasies were never hard to find – but the idea was there, and commanded attention from serious thinkers.

  Somewhere between the 1920s and the end of the Second World War, however, the entire concept of decline dropped out of the modern world’s collective imagination. Except for a brief reprise in the wake of the converging crises of the 1970s, and a few manifestations on the far edges of today’s fringe culture, it has yet to return. This odd shift in the shapes of our imagined futures demands attention from those of us who try to sense the shape of the future in advance, because if the future we get is one of decline, the results could be far more challenging than anything the more simplistic notion of sudden collapse can offer

  Decline, after all, is not a linear process. Trace the decline of the dead civilizations of the past along the dimension of time, and much more often than not it follows a complex, stairstep curve that alternates periods of crisis with respites and partial recoveries. Compare the process to the sort of sudden apocalyptic collapse that occupies so much space in the collective imagination today, and a striking result emerges: the amount of population decline and cultural loss in any given generation may be much less than would result from a single sudden catastrophe, but the overall impact of decline is much greater, and the capacity for swift recovery much less.

more

READ MORE: The Archdruid Report

back to top
  • Created
    Friday, June 13 2008
  • Last modified
    Wednesday, November 06 2013
  1. You are here:  
  2. Home
  3. All Content
  4. Edited
  5. Why Decline Matters (John Michael Greer)
Copyright © 2022 World News Trust. All Rights Reserved.
Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU General Public License.