“It is, I believe, more than anything else, the undeniable reality of technological progress that lulls us into accepting the more general—and plainly false—proposition that things will just keep on improving in every respect.”
There is no surer way to feel on the most visceral level that we are entering a new Dark Age than to watch an LGBTQIA+ pride parade in action. I was on my way to the Home Depot on 23rd Street in Manhattan on Sunday, June 30th, having forgotten that the pride parade was on the agenda for that afternoon. When I got out of the subway at 23rd and Broadway, I found myself in the thick of it, with no obvious way out. Nearly every escape route was cordoned off, and the crowds of onlookers and participants, there being no obvious distinction between those two categories, were obstructing every path forward. I was not in a hurry, but I also was not especially keen on spending precious free time crowded in among people who had actually made a deliberate choice to attend this sorry spectacle. I put on a podcast and did my best to tune out my surroundings, as I edged inch by inch through the throng toward my destination.
What I saw, despite myself—and what I unfortunately cannot unsee—was a depressing display of total and utter vulgarity and superficiality. As long as no one gets hurt in the process, I have nothing against consenting adults who have sexual preferences that differ from my own. Yet I would scoff at anyone—heterosexuals, homosexuals, transsexuals, asexuals…anyone—who decides to define himself or herself by a sexual identity and turn it, literally or figuratively, into a parade float. Many who fall into the LGBTQIA+ basket seem to believe, in my experience, that simply by expressing their sexual preferences and/or conforming their identities to the familiar grid lines sketched out by their somewhat more original predecessors in the gay rights movement, they are accomplishing something important, pathbreaking, and transgressive, even as they embody living, breathing stereotypes just as clownish and ludicrous in their own way as preening, beer-swilling, high-fiving heterosexual frat boys, with their crude sexual innuendos and bathroom humor. I am sure, of course, that there remain many, but increasingly not that many, sheltered “normals” out in the demonized American backwoods who genuinely find some LGBTQIA+ people and behaviors disturbing—though I should pause to remark here that the feeling is probably mutual. And, yes, forced to stand and gawk at how these oft-unaesthetic people (un)dress and generally present themselves, one is hard-pressed to avoid acknowledging the effortfully cultivated ugliness on display. But the problem runs far deeper than that.
The problem is that our society has seen fit to devote an entire month to celebrating particular forms of sexuality and identity and that so many lost souls would come out to partake in the debauchery. Our obsession with sexuality has been noted by many commentators. The late left populist historian Christopher Lasch ascribed the preoccupation to the collapse of organic communal bonds and the elimination of the element of play from our working lives, while the integral theorist Ken Wilber has argued that because our secular, materialistic society increasingly gives us no other viable outlets for our spirituality, we land on sexuality as one of the few remaining options that appears to take us beyond the confines of the everyday self. Authors such as D. H. Lawrence exemplified that view of sex as a gateway to higher states. Freud, himself notoriously fixated on the sexual dimension of human experience (and condemned by Lawrence as a rationalizer of our sacred, irrational passions), noted that we gravitate toward perverse sexuality in particular because it seems to offer us a higher species of satisfaction completely divorced from the procreative, i.e., productive, sex act. In the words of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, “Against a society which employs sexuality as means for a useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself,” thereby seeming to defy the strictures of the capitalist order.
But even these commentators are not considering the long view. Having just recently read Sir John Bagot Glubb’s sadly neglected 1978 short book/lengthy essay, “The Fate of Empires,” I was properly primed for the long view. Glubb, after fighting in World War I and then proceeding to devote decades to further military service as a British officer in the Middle East, attaining such a level of trust in the Arab world that he commanded the Arab Legion in Jordan, had ample occasion in his later years (he lived to nearly 88) to reflect upon history, both that of the Middle East and beyond. His essay, a formidable installment in the tradition of cyclical conceptions of the rise and fall of empires—the most famous exponents of which are the German visionary Oswald Spengler and the noted British historian Arnold J. Toynbee—posits six successive stages that all empires go through in the process of their upstart rise and protracted decline.
First comes the Age of Pioneers, when a fierce, semi-barbarous people previously lacking many pages devoted to them in the annals of history, bursts out onto the scene, making a splash, overrunning land belonging to more refined and established neighbors. In the Age of Conquests, the reach of these rough men of action expands, as they rapidly innovate, adopting and adapting to their own needs military and other technologies developed by their adversaries, and then sweep heedlessly, with aplomb but little ceremoniousness or fanfare, across many miles of physical and conceptual territory. Next—with some overlap—comes the Age of Commerce, when these people, now somewhat settled and established, turn from enrichment through military acquisition to the more peaceful path of trade. Still possessed of vigor, patriotism, the sense of duty and moral virtue, these erstwhile barbarians begin to civilize themselves, constructing landmarks, monuments, institutions of state, culture, and education and transforming themselves from a mere people into a civilization. Toward the end of the Age of Commerce, as the transition to the oncoming Age of Affluence takes hold, the lifepath of the empire reaches what Glubb calls its “High Noon” (“the age of Augustus in Rome, that of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, of Suleiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, or of Queen Victoria in Britain…[and] we might add the age of Woodrow Wilson in the United States”), when “immense wealth accumulated in the nation dazzles the onlookers,” while “[e]nough of the ancient virtues of courage, energy and patriotism survive to enable the state successfully to defend its frontiers.” But, warns Glubb, “beneath the surface, greed for money is gradually replacing duty and public service. Indeed the change might be summarized as being from service to selfishness.”
From hereon in, the slow and then accelerating tumble along the downslope begins. The Age of Affluence brings with it a defensiveness, in which the now-wealthy nation becomes more concerned with shoring up what it has than in making forays into new frontiers. Internally, parents now see education for their children primarily as a means to pass along social and material privileges, and the martial virtues of earlier epochs recede, giving way to an all-around softening of morals. In the succeeding Age of Intellect, we come to believe that the light of boundless human reason—rather than the kind of blind faith and passion of earlier epochs that we now see as pre-civilized—can guide us forward to an ever-brighter future. Universities proliferate and predominate culturally well past the point of any natural need for the services they provide. The blather of talking heads fills the airwaves, inevitably yielding an upsurge in division and disagreement. No longer to be found in any large supply are the simple, straightforward, unquestioningly dutiful, and patriotic men that once served as the bedrock upon which (and by whom) the pillars of nationhood were erected.
Finally comes the Age of Decadence. Internal divisions and disagreements are now persistent, endemic, and seemingly irresolvable. There is an influx of foreigners, who, Glubb notes, while not inherently better or worse than a nation’s founding race, are inherently different and, thus, even when they seem integrated, tend to have dual loyalties and, thus, may be less willing to lay down their lives for their adopted motherland in its time of need. The welfare state comes into being, and an attitude of sympathy and philanthropy toward other peoples takes hold, as, in marked contrast to the now-gauche belief of olden times that “the dominant race has the right to rule the world,” we come to think that one and all are entitled to civilization’s bounty. Writes Glubb, “The impression that it will always be automatically rich causes the declining empire to spend lavishly on its own benevolence, until such time as the economy collapses, the universities are closed and the hospitals fall into ruin.” The practice of religion declines, and materialism is rampant. Sexual morals go lax, and “much obscene sexual language c[o]me[s] increasingly into use, such as would not have been tolerated in an earlier age.” There is “[a]n increase in the influence of women in public life” (insights like that, no matter their accuracy, are likely why Glubb’s brilliant essay is not on many university reading lists today). The spirit of the times is informed by an overriding medley of pessimism and frivolity (“eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die,” as the saying goes), and national heroes are no longer those great paragons of old but, rather, frivolous figures befitting the times: “The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius.”
Recognizable as this picture of a declining civilization may seem to us, what is noteworthy is that Glubb was not merely writing as an old, battle-hardened military man reflecting on the dissolute England that “those kids today” had created in his latter years in the 1970s. He was rather drawing repeatedly on illustrations from the historical declines of empires across the ages, from imperial Rome to the Caliphate of Baghdad in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, about which he was most knowledgeable. But to broaden my purview still further, I picked up a copy of Prophets of Doom, a well-constructed 2023 book by the University of Buckingham’s Neema Parvini, offering vivid and succinct portraits of the ideas of 11 prominent thinkers, Glubb included, whose conception of history were similarly cyclical, entailing successions of civilizations that would rise and then fall amidst declines in unity, moral virtue, patriotism, and the authority of political and social elites to command the allegiance of the masses. Such accounts may be contrasted with the linear, progressive view of history, in which things just keep getting better and better on every level. Parvini traces the latter view to the Bible, in which redemptive divine providence is waiting for us at the end of our long road to the promised land, and he sees like-minded models of history as, in essence, secularized versions of the divine providence narrative.
Reared as we are within that Biblical paradigm, it may strike us as natural and intuitive, but, as Parvini reminds us, it was far from being a widespread, much less universal, conception before the modern age. Hesiod believed in the Four Ages of Man, a story of decline—from the Golden Age to the Silver Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age—which later Classical thinkers saw as cyclical. Another kind of shorter-term cyclical history—a succession of regimes from barbarism to kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, ochlocracy (i.e., the rule of the mob) and back to barbarism—was elaborated by other Greek thinkers culminating in Polybius. Even after the Bible came to predominate in the West, the common medieval view, deriving from Saint Augustine, was not progressive but regressive, six ages of decline, i.e., Man wallowing in accumulating sin until the Last Judgment would come to wash it all away. Only with the Renaissance and the groundwork laid by figures such as Petrarch and Francis Bacon did a counter-narrative emerge in which the New Age, succeeding our Dark Age, heralded an ever-ascending upward trajectory as we erected our ever-more marvelous constructions upon a Classical foundation infused with the spiritual glue of Christian revelation.
Against this important background adduced in his introduction, Parvini launches into his 11 profiles, presented chronologically and ranging from thinkers with whom I was quite familiar or had read significant work from—Glubb, Spengler, Toynbee, Giambattista Vico, Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Peter Turchin—to those about whom I was far less informed: Arthur de Gobineau, Brooks Adams, Pitirim Sorokin, and Joseph Tainter. What emerges, as advanced by various of the figures profiled, is a picture, limned both ideologically and empirically, somewhat similar to Glubb’s, not his specific six stages but a general pattern in which a close-knit tribe, bonded by fear and by a shared mythology, marches brusquely onto the world’s stage, seizes territory held by more “civilized” peoples, establishes, over time, civic and religious institutions as it builds up a settled society, complexifies, urbanizes, bureaucratizes and, as more time passes, turns the critical eye of reason upon its own foundational myths and practices, loses its unity, patriotism, and single-mindedness of purpose. It grows effete, revels in luxury and materialism, wallows in sexual immorality, softens, buckles under the weight of internal divisions and is, in the end, overtaken and/or literally taken over by more vibrant others bearing some resemblance to the fallen people’s own earliest stages. Writes Parvini in his “Conclusion,” after offering his own summary of what his profiled thinkers have in common:
“The alternative to what I have outlined in this book…is the belief that things as we have known them since 1945 will continue indefinitely into the future, for 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, as GDP goes ‘up and up’ and Progress marches on, [and] should be recognized by all but the most hopelessly utopian reader as being at best wishful thinking, and at worst stupidity.”
It is, I believe, more than anything else, the undeniable reality of technological progress that lulls us into accepting the more general—and plainly false—proposition that things will just keep on improving in every respect. While it is hard to overstate the extent to which our lives have improved from achievements such as indoor plumbing, heating and air conditioning (the jury is still out on smartphones as far as I am concerned, while social media has clearly been a total debacle), on every other level I cannot say our society is getting better rather than worse with time.
Regardless of whether Steven Pinker or Nassim Nicholas Taleb is correct that the violence of human societies has or has not declined over time, other hallmarks of decline are all around us. Just as so many of Parviini’s “prophets of doom” describe in their depiction of an empire’s end-stages, our elites, even as they increasingly resort to desperate, authoritarian measures to keep the masses in line, have become soft, smug and weak, while energetic, rough-and-ready barbarians are invading. An unabated current of opportunistic foreigners is illegally streaming in through a border that is supposed to be the dividing line between self and other, and thus we are losing our very sense of self as these unassimilated and unassimilable lawbreakers are stripping away what little remains of our once-robust American identity.
And that loss of identity, of unity, is palpable: Political fissures are probably more acute now than they have been at any time since the days of the Civil War. We no longer know how to disagree respectfully or stay friends with people of a different political persuasion. We are increasingly ill-mannered, coarse and vulgar in our words, our appearance and our behavior. Profanity is ubiquitous. We dress grotesquely, with globs of flab flopping out of ill-fitting, flesh-baring garments. Our art, music, and literature are likewise increasingly banal and grotesque, trafficking in shock value and superficial appeals to race, gender, and sexuality. Monumental works of ages past have been cut out of canons and curricula on account of these same superficial characteristics—or, when all else fails, on account of their “elitism,” another word for making too great a demand upon our diminished capacities for immersion and reflection.
More and more of us, in that connection, are losing faith in our system of education, with formerly elite universities having become ideological silos cultivating closed-minded, intolerant, and emotionally brittle wing nuts. In Glubb’s “Age of Commerce,” “Boys’ schools are intentionally rough. Frugal eating, hard living, breaking the ice to have a bath and similar customs are aimed at producing a strong, hardy and fearless breed of men. Duty is the word constantly drummed into the heads of young people.” But as part of the all-around softening that happens during subsequent ages, we get what we have today, when schools create children that require “safe spaces” and are easily offended and “triggered” by anything remotely difficult or simply challenging to the dominant progressive worldview. Everyone, from students to star athletes, is ever undergoing “mental health crises” and being celebrated for doing so. We are told, as well, that everyone suffers from “trauma,” a term previously reserved for Holocaust survivors or victims of childhood sexual abuse or violent rape. How, we might rhetorically ask, can a populace too fragile to abide the ordinary stresses of education and employment possibly survive a true test of its mettle that comes with violent external challenges to its autonomy?
Progress in our technological capacities has also not substantially improved our actual working lives. Contrary to the expectations of Adam Smith—who believed technology would free us up to spend our time on more gratifying pursuits than our work generally entails—we are still working long and hard, while our sense of having less and less time for ourselves, what some sociologists have called the “experienced pace of life,” has only grown as we feel ever-more-frazzled by the demands our capacity for 24/7 communication makes on our time. Income inequality and instability have likewise increased; while in earlier eras, wages and job stability had to be sufficient to support the reality of one male head-of-household income earner per family, the entry of women into the workforce en masse has unmoored those expectations, so that now, the common expectation is that it will require more than one average income to keep families afloat. That same fact—a workforce in which both genders participate—also means that the absolute number of working hours per capita has increased dramatically, even if each individual man may be working fewer hours than his Industrial Revolution-era counterpart.
Nor have two-earner families and the sexual revolution done wonders for gender relations, as Left and Right commentators from Lasch to Christopher Caldwell have observed. While the divorce rate has crept back down after peaking around 1980, that is likely because people are not getting married in the first place: The marriage rate is at an all-time low, and approximately 40% of children today are born out of wedlock, as compared to under 10% in the 1940s.
It is not surprising to anyone, in this light, that self-reported life satisfaction is near a record low. As of September, 2023, 63% of Americans were pessimistic about the direction of our moral and ethical standards, with only 16% being optimistic, and even though Republicans were more pessimistic than Democrats, a substantial 54% of Democrats—those, presumably, who are more likely to have a progressive worldview—also fell into the “pessimistic” category. The same survey reported that 59% of us were pessimistic about our system of education, and this was before the aftermath of the October 7th attacks in Israel exposed the deep-seated rot that had overtaken our once-venerated universities, from their presidents to their students. It is only fitting that the leader of this declining civilization should be, himself, in the throes of conspicuous cognitive decline, even as a presidential debate could devolve to the level of bickering over golf handicaps.
And so, then, why not an LGBTQIA+ pride parade, coming as the culmination of a whole month devoted to taking pride not in any remarkable achievement or notable accomplishment but, rather, in mere deviation from what little remains of a long-abandoned sexual norm? And why not another whole month when others can pride themselves on having been born black? And after that is over and done with, why not spend the rest of the year and all the not-that-many years we have left priding ourselves on our unabashed hedonism, our licentiousness, our superficiality, and our vulgarity, on our finally having overcome the repressive weight of our own unbearably glorious cultural patrimony? What else, after all, do we have to be proud of?.
Alexander Zubatov is a lawyer in New York, as well as an essayist and poet. He can be found on X @Zoobahtov
