Duty’s spectacular decline in Western nations | Tom Colsy
Why do civilisations fall? Prosperity can lead to a regression of individuals understanding their duties to one another.
Sir John Baghot Glubb is a man whose words all Britons and modern Westerners could well take heed of. Born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1897, he studied at the Royal Military Academy and became not only Lieutenant-General in the British Armed Forces but served in both World Wars. He was injured three times for his nation, even suffering a shattered jaw as a young soldier while in the bleak mud of the Western front in 1915. This left him with lasting injury.
As an officer, he later went on to command the Arab Legion in the British Mandate of Transjordan, becoming a close friend of King Hussein I. He was decorated with an array of honours ranging from the Order of the British Empire (OBE), the Order of St John (KStJ), the Military Cross (MC), and the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) to surviving honours from the Jordanian state such as the Order of Al Rafidain. When he died, the New York Times even dedicated an entire page to his obituary. In short, he was a learned man with a serious perspective and experience on states, civilisational change, and most importantly duty.
Yet Glubb’s feats didn’t stop there. He was also a renowned scholarly historian, and in 1976 he published a report and academic article entitled ‘The Fate of Empires”. This is the reason we must draw our attention to him at this moment. In it, he breaks down the duration of a civilisation’s existence into sixths- different stages for varying phases of character over the course of its lifespan. And, after academically observing and analysing the timelines of the Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Persians, Romanovs, Arabs, Spanish, and more, he broke the stages of great nations and empires’ lives into a typology of:
Stage one: the “Age of Pioneers”,
Stage two: the “Age of Conquest”,
Stage three: the “Age of Commerce”,
Stage four: the “Age of Affluence”,
Stage five: the “Age of Intellectualism”,
Stage six: the “Age of Decadence”.
On the surface, this is easy to identify as making sense. At the birth of a great kingdom, empire or republic there have been foundational heroes like legendary Romulus, or the concretely real Cyrus the Great and Gaius Julius Caesar. These being the innovators. The pioneers. A sweeping reform, reorganisation, establishing movement, or feat, follows that initiates the foundations of a strong nation. It has also long been something of ancient wisdom that extended periods of prosperity and peace can lead to weakness.
However, Glubb helpfully underlined the features of decadence for the modern reader, something which to him is often marked by pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the welfare state, and a weakening of religion. These all, in various forms, are true of modern day Western Europe. Our society is more sexualised and perverted than ever before in recent history. In specifically capitalistic nations such as the UK, religion is on its way out, and migration levels are historically enormous (at record highs). The rest, while somewhat difficult to mathematically quantify for the most part to the conservative onlooker of the modern world, speaks for itself.
Significantly, the general expanded on his descriptions of decadence by noting:
“Decadence is not physical… The citizens of nations in decline are sometimes described as too physically emasculated to be able to bear hardship or make great efforts. This does not seem to be a true picture. Citizens of great nations in decadence are normally physically larger and stronger than those of their barbarian invaders. Moreover, as was proved in Britain in the first World War, young men brought up in luxury and wealth found little difficulty in accustoming themselves to life in the front-line trenches. The history of exploration proves the same point. Men accustomed to comfortable living in homes in Europe or America were able to show as much endurance as the natives in riding camels across the desert or in hacking their way through tropical forests. Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease… The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving.”
The prior serves as a warning note to so-called ‘rational optimists’ who point to material advancement in recent times as something of an indicator of civilisational security. More interestingly, however, was Glubb’s description of what such and such manifestations of decadence are caused by. He stated that factors influencing the surfacing of the aforementioned symptoms in a failing society were ‘too long’ a period of wealth and power, selfishness, a love of money, and (if nothing else is appreciated let it be this last point, for it affects all the rest) the loss of a sense of duty.
Yet do these explanations align with reality? And does it apply today? During the postwar era it became unmistakably clear that the Age of Conquest for the West was over. With sweeping waves of decolonisation coming over the empires of Britain, France, Belgium, and even (to some extent) America, focus turned to economic matters. Even America’s foreign policy during this postwar period reflected a regular competition for hegemony- but particularly with a rival diametrically opposed in economic structure. With the Wirtschaftswunder of West Germany, and a new period of economic growth and prosperity all the way up until the nineties, the Age of Trade and soon the Age of Affluence can be fittingly used to sufficiently categorise the circumstances of the period in the Western world.
Today, it is mostly visible we are experiencing an overlap of two of Glubb’s proposed ages. The West is seemingly at the apex of the Age of Intellectualism and the advent of the Age of Decadence (if not already underway in the latter). Our intellectual elites come up with elaborate arguments as to why we must pull statues down, but leave us totally devoid of ideas of what to erect in their place. We are given fantastical theories about ‘institutional racism’ that are supposed to be applicable to the UK, nonsensically at a time where prejudice is at its lowest levels on record, and white children comprise the smallest proportional racial grouping in attaining placements in its higher education. Meanwhile, duty has empirically vanished. In most European nations, outright minorities of the male population state they would fight for their nation if attacked.
Sir John ‘Pasha’ Glubb, nicknamed due to his shattered jaw.
I am fully aware of the irony that as director of a think tank, I should complain about intellectualism. Yet, in a time that so many lambast as belonging to civilisational degeneration, somewhat intellectually, someone must.
The philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel explained to us how we exist only within the paradigm of the society and civilization that raised us. We were civilised (often against our will) by the strained efforts of those around us. We were taught how to think, how to act, how to improve, and how to live as a human being, rather than survive as a mere beast. In short, we owe to the collective everything. All that we are, and all our ability to fulfil.
It is no coincidence that at the height of America’s civilisational prowess, President John F. Kennedy instructed citizens not to ask what the country could do for him, but instead ponder what he could do for his country. We could relearn a thing or two from that 1961 inaugural speech. Or, at least, take heed of G.K. Chesterton’s words, that “men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her”.
Kennedy and Chesterton both recognised the truth that a civilisation is ultimately only as strong as the sum of its parts. For it only succeeds by the dedication and devotion of its members. Patriotism ought to be unconditional in order to be wholly effective, and the advent of individualism threatens that now as it did then. This is why duty’s regression causes civilisational decline. Duty, while an obligation to one’s state and neighbours, is in varying ways both a legal and moral obligation- but is doubtlessly far stronger when encouraged yet made by the free, voluntary decisions of enfranchised citizens.
John F. Kennedy famously underlined the necessity for duty from citizens of a successful nation.
Even to a very basic understanding of Edmund Burke’s intergenerational contract by political conservatives, we are imbued with a duty to the dead; to preserve their heritage and trust it does not wither or collapse. And also with an obligation to the unborn; a responsibility to ensure societal continuity so that they may experience the cultural, political and spiritual inheritance that was passed down to us, with some cost, by our ancestors, and which has allowed us to flourish. At all times, a people must realise that the dead and the unborn matter. The dead learned things the hard way so that we didn’t have to, and passed down the fruits of their progress and successes, all of which can be undone in a mere generation. And without a consideration for the unborn, an assurance that things will be as sufficient for them as before, there will be no tomorrow.
Duty is vital to the continuity of any civilisation. And any leader who would wish to ‘fix’ our problems (of incessant social and cultural decline) will unavoidably be required to do something about its regression. But stoking patriotism- duty to one’s nation- is a difficult task. A responsibility that is mostly that of the education sector, families, and institutions. All three have been failing to do so adequately across the West, and at the Orthodox Conservatives we seek to undertake the arduous mission of identifying how our governments can rectify such a potentially late-stage civilisational crisis.
Glubb offers an extremely prescient, useful, and doubtlessly accurate typology. But such is the nature with typologies that the categories are never concretely distinct. Both intellectualism- a population increasingly disloyal in thought and belief to the collective which gave to them everything (obsessive over nihilistically bringing about its destruction)- and decadence are upon us. Yet reflecting on the perhaps senile, sickly and ageing civilisation that is our own, pondering whether a new caesar is lurking around the corner waiting to propel us to either new heights or final ruin, we can take the ever cynical and humoured words of Oscar Wilde, that “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between”.
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