Carroll Quigley’s 1961 book The Evolution of Civilizations describes the stages a civilization goes through as it grows, expands, decays, and falls. Ben Landau-Taylor tells us how Quigley’s theory works, and where our civilization sits in this process today.
Transcript
Introduction to the series (00:00)
Wolf: Welcome everybody to a broadcast of The Students. I’m Wolf Tivy. This is Ben Landau-Taylor. You may know us, I’m the founder of Palladium Magazine. Ben was previously involved in Bismarck Analysis.
Ben and I have been colleagues for some years now. We engage in quite a lot of philosophical discussions with us and our friends. Collectively, we’ve started to call this scene The Students, or at least I have. And so I wanted to start recording some of these conversations and broadcasting them, not just to the public, but also just to our friends, to our circle of friends, to people who might be interested in hearing more about the kinds of things that we’ve been discussing because we’ve been putting quite a lot of energy over the years into understanding the world, understanding our place in the world, understanding how to think about the world, generally the project of philosophy. So we are students of philosophy, and we’re here today to talk about Carroll Quigley’s ideas on the evolution of civilization.
So Ben has done quite a lot of reading of Quigley over the years, and we’ve had a number of great discussions about the subject. So I wanted to turn things over to him to give us a little brief lecture on who is this Carroll Quigley guy? What does he have to say about the matter of civilization? It’ll be a more conversational format. I will be basically asking questions of Ben as he goes through his ideas of the importance of Carroll Quigley.
So Ben, I’ll turn it over to you. We’d love to hear about civilization.
Defining civilizations (01:37)
Ben: Thank you. Yeah. So I’ll be going over, especially The Evolution of Civilizations is my favorite of Quigley’s works, which I don’t say lightly. Anyone who’s been in our scene has probably heard me recommend this book before. It’s one of my favorites.
I’ve read it several times.
Wolf: Yeah. It tends to end up on all our reading lists.
Ben: Yes. So Quigley was a historian in the 20th century. Most of his most significant works are from around the ‘60s—including this one, where he takes a very macro, very zoomed out, he’s not sort of going by, this is why these things were happening in 1937 instead of 1939. He’s talking about things on the timescale of centuries, of epochs, of the evolution of civilizations. And there’s a bunch of different theories out there of how civilizations rise and fall.
It’s a very common and kind of very obvious idea when you’re looking at history. This book is my favorite one that I’ve read of giving this sort of big macro lens—on what goes on and sort of what is the big most important structures of history to be paying attention to as you’re looking out over this and trying to understand how the world works, how history happens, why it happens—the way it does.
And yeah. So, there’s a claim here, there is such a thing as a civilization. Civilizations evolve.
Wolf: So Quigley’s use of the term civilization is similar to the way Spengler uses the term culture. Is that right? Because I think they use it differently, right?
Ben: Yes. So I haven’t read the whole Spengler. I started it. I need to get back into it, but—
Wolf: Right. As we all do
Ben: yeah.
He uses different terminology for, it starts as culture, becomes civilization.
Wolf: Yeah. That’s—
Ben: In Spengler, it’s sort of a particular stage in the life cycle of these, you can call these big things by any name.
So what is Spengler’s term for sort of the macro thing that goes through these life stages of culture or civilization?
Wolf: Culture. Culture. So yeah, he calls them cultures, cultures being the kind of organic body of ideas and people and material technologies. For example, Western culture or what he calls Faustian culture. You have classical culture, et cetera.
Everyone makes sort of similar divisions, right? But his stages are, I don’t know the detailed stage model, but I think culture he sort of reserves for the earlier models, but he also uses for the whole thing. And then the later stages, he uses the term civilization when it starts to crystallize and become sort of institutionalized. And yeah. So I guess let’s hear about how Carroll Quigley describes the phenomenon.
Ben: Yeah. So he’s using civilization the way Spengler uses culture, and yeah, there’s a lot of the similar divisions. There’s Western civilization, classical civilization. There does seem to have been a breakdown in discontinuity in between these. If you look at Chinese history, it looks like there have been three distinct civilizations with a similar sort of breakdown, discontinuity, and then a new thing sort of arising, drawing from the old in a similar way that—
Wolf: So we’re all pretty familiar with the Western—history. In the Chinese model, how is that divided? Is that kind of Confucian civilization, pre-Confucian, and modern or—how would you divide it?
Ben: I call them, just the words I like to use for it, is ancient Chinese civilization—which is the—
Wolf: Ancient
Ben: sort of ancient sort of half legendary stuff, and then unifying into the universal empire under the Han, and then sort of disintegrating during the Three Kingdoms era, and then totally being overrun with the five barbarians around 400-ish AD, if I remember right. And then after that, medieval Chinese civilization arising around 600 AD-ish, with the Tang dynasty, the Song dynasty continuing for quite a long time. Sort of politically gets conquered by the Mongols, but sort of ends up absorbing them into itself. And then eventually gets disrupted and falls apart around the year 1900 in the face of invaders from Western civilization.
Wolf: Yeah, the end of the Qing dynasty. Yeah.
Ben: Yes. And then we seem to be towards the beginning of a third, which I’m calling modern Chinese civilization, which seems to have cohered in the late 20th century.
Wolf: Right. Interesting. Yeah, and that’s sort of this hybrid of Western civilization, many of the material technologies and organizational technologies of Western civilization with this huge Chinese heritage.
Stage one: Admixture (07:11)
Ben: Right. And the first stage, so Quigley has his seven stages. Why seven? Why not eight? Why not six?
These are kind of arbitrary. I would probably do six, but—
Wolf: So what are Quigley’s seven stages? How do civilizations rise and fall? What are the life cycle that they go through?
Ben: Yeah. So the first stage, as we were seeing a little bit with the modern Chinese civilization arising—with different influences is admixture. So you have an area where there isn’t currently a flourishing civilization. Very often because one collapsed there in the not too distant past. And then there’s a bunch of different influences which sort of mix together, and then not every admixture mixes into a civilization, in fact, most don’t.
But every civilization begins with admixture. So, the historical consensus, which I think is right, is that our civilization, Western civilization, was formed primarily of admixture between the remnants of the Roman society and—the Germanic invaders coming in—with an infusion from Jewish society via Christ. And that those are the main elements that admixed into Western civilization. And modern Chinese civilization obviously draws a lot on the heritage of medieval Chinese civilization, obviously a lot of Western influence—a lot of Soviet influence. Does Soviet count as part of the West?
This is a great way to start a fight, but—one thing about these civilizations is that they’re such big ponderous things, it’s hard to draw exact distinctions, like—
Wolf: Right. They’re not quite discrete. They sort of flow in and out of each other. Like, is Eastern Rome and Western Rome, are they different civilizations? Maybe.
Is the Western-Soviet split, is that separate civilizations? Maybe.
Ben: Yeah. And Quigley often uses the analogy of a bunch of quartz crystals sort of growing out of each other, and it’s like, okay, is this one crystal? Is this two crystals? Where exactly would you say this crystal stops and the next one starts?
Wolf: Well, I mean, crystals is almost too exact because crystal structures are so low entropy. You can place which atom is in which crystal, right? Because the atoms are all lined up in a particular pattern, and then the next crystal over, there’s a grain boundary, and the atoms are lined up. The angle’s different, right? And you can actually just tell which atom is in which crystal.
But I think I get the sense with civilizations, things are always a lot smoother than that. It’s more like colors.
Ben: Yeah. The rainbow is another example he uses. Yeah, so—
Wolf: So there’s the mixture part is kind of the first initial stage, and then how does it move on from there?
Ben: Yeah. So one other thing I did want to get to on the admixture thing. There’s a very common pattern you’ll see where any civilization will have sort of its core area, which is where it first begins and which ends up being the heartland, and where most of the transitions will generally happen first in the core and then later in the periphery. So in classical civilization—the core was approximately the Aegean Sea, the Greek mainland. And then you had peripheral areas which they then expanded into the Black Sea, into Italy—which became Rome.
And Western civilization has its core in the European heartland, and then peripheral areas like the United States, et cetera. And you will very frequently see a new civilization arise on the periphery of the previous one. So, where you’re getting Western civilization’s core was the periphery of classical civilization, or with the Chinese civilization, you see it sort of going south. With ancient Chinese civilization having its core on the Yellow River, and then medieval on the Yangtze, and then it’s too early to really say, but looks like probably the core of the modern one on the southern coast.
Wolf: Yeah. And sort of the, what is it? The Greater Bay Area, the sort of Guangzhou—et cetera.
Ben: Right. And so this core periphery distinction ends up being a secondary theme throughout a lot of it. So just wanted to—make sure we got mentioned before we move on to stage two.
Stage two: Gestation (11:56)
Wolf: Right. And stage two then?
Ben: Stage two is gestation. Once you’ve got these things together, it’s not like immediately we’ve got our new way of life, we’ve got our new fully functional pattern of how everything works. It takes a while for things to cohere into a functional, unified way of life, basically.
Wolf: Right. For the entropy to kind of... A mixture creates a lot of entropy. There’s a lot of things that don’t work together. Those need to be worked out over time.
Find the combinations that actually do work as it kind of purifies into some new form.
Ben: Right. And so in our history, we have the Dark Ages period of—you’ve definitely got your different influences, but people are still working it out. How are these sort of half savage barbarian kings going to interface with Christianity? What is a bishop? How do they relate to the people who they lead and—all these very fundamental questions take a while to work out.
And this can often be a century or two centuries or something. And then as part of this, when this process of admixture and gestation is happening, sometimes, and the times which end up being referred to as the development of a new civilization, one of the things that comes together is a economic engine that is expansionary. Where—
Wolf: They figure out how to make it work.
Ben: Right. Where to get a little more technical about what exactly it means for them to figure out how to make it work. So Quigley has, there’s a few critical parts, which means there has to be invention of new ways of doing things. There has to be accumulation of surplus. So it’s not just that there’s wealth, but that some particular guy is the one who’s like, “All right, I’ve got a big pile of the resources.”
And then allocation of surplus back into the engine of wealth. So, in classical civilization, the basic engine was basically slavery. Where you would have war, which would then, especially in Roman times, you would have war—which would take slaves, and you would put them on the plantation, and then the plantation owner would then have enough money that he could buy his really sick armor and then go off to war, and this was a cycle—that could feed into itself. And then, now you operate the machines, you produce objects which you sell. There’s profit.
The profit goes back into the machines or—at least this was going on 150 years ago. We’ll get into what’s going on with our economic system later. But the basic idea is someone is accumulating surplus—and then reinvesting it back into the engine of wealth creation. This has taken a few different forms over the course of history.
Wolf: Yeah, and I understand in Western civilization in particular, doesn’t Quigley have the idea that there’s been actually multiple engines of expansion since sort of the medieval era. Like for example, in the medieval era, the engine of expansion is kind of this feudal system based on certain crop rotation kind of ways of cultivating the land, ways of relating to the serfs that work the land, and then that kind of progresses into the more modern logistical commerce and so on.
Ben: Yeah. So though it’s not exactly just a straight line progression—which is—
Wolf: Yeah. More like replaced or supplemented.
Ben: Yeah. So one of the big differences between a lot of the historiography I’ve seen in Quigley’s theory—you often see these ideas of like, oh, you get this, and then it progresses into the next one. And it’s sort of like going from success to success. But in Quigley’s model, there’s kind of a breakdown, and you can’t get the next stage without the previous thing having a breakdown—which we’ll talk about that in stage four, but there’s a few things about stage three—the age of expansion, which I want to go over before we start getting—to how things break down and how things get—circumvented.
Stage three: Expansion (16:15)
Wolf: Yeah. So let’s talk about the age of expansion then.
Ben: Yeah. So the claim is basically, once you’ve got this economic engine working well, then by definition, you are now in the age of expansion, and this ends up being sort of the foundation of a lot of aspects of society working well. And so when you have this economic engine working, you’re going to see a bunch of different types of expansion. You have expansion in population. You have expansion in territorial extent.
You have expansion in knowledge. And you have expansion in wealth. And that these will all go along with each other. And that this is basically downstream of having a society where the wealth engine is working, and everyone can be basically participating in doing the thing that they’re supposed to do, and they just get a lot of the nice stuff and it’s not that there’s no social tension, but that it’s reasonably limited because the core of the society is basically just working. And so the need—
Wolf: Yeah. Well, it’s easy—
Ben: to fight with each other is less.
Wolf: It’s easy to defer internal conflict when you can externalize the conflict into growth.
Ben: Right. Whether that be economic growth or throwing the Muslims back out of Spain or whatever—it might be.
Wolf: Right. And I guess I would add, or I would ask, how does Quigley view kind of the refinement and improvement of the engine of expansion itself? I imagine in the beginning, you sort of have the initial ideas. They’re just starting to work, but as it really institutionalizes, as it gets to its more mature forms, it can become quite sophisticated. If you look at, for example, industrial production at the beginning, it’s like, okay, we’re starting to use tools to optimize, new kinds of tools to optimize production of cloth or various other things.
And then by the end of it, we have this massive complexity of machine tool industry and fossil fuels and all these different things going on, which I guess I would count that expansion of complexity to be one of the dimensions of expansion. I just wonder how Quigley talks about that aspect.
Ben: Yeah. So I think within the schema that he’s laying out in the book, he would categorize that under the progress of invention and the progress of wealth. Where he’s basically looking at that as the physical technology side—more so than as the social and economic structure of how the thing is working. Whereas in the theory, the social structure is kind of in its strongest and most functional form as you’re exiting the age of gestation and into expansion—then in the earlier days of it, then the social form of that is sort of in its best, purest—most aimed at its purpose—where the purpose is the production of wealth, the production of physical goods, and their distribution throughout society. And that the social form is most fit at the beginning of the age of expansion, and then it will start being encumbered by the creeping ossification or corruption or institutionalization is the word that he uses.
I don’t like the word very much. It’s not really clear what he means by it, unless you’ve already gone over the definitions.
Wolf: Right. This is like Spengler’s civilization. He sort of thinks of it as a bad thing, and most people think of civilization as being the thing under discussion or the good thing.
Ben: Yes. And so you will often get the continued progress of the technological sophistication even as the social engine behind it is starting to sort of grow these barnacles. And the way that the barnacles grow, basically, is with any social structure, not just the economic ones, but anything. It’s going to be formed for some purpose. For an economic one, it’s to produce wealth.
For a military one, it is to protect and/or to conquer. For education, it is to teach the young or to teach the—to teach people, perhaps they’re old. And then over time, it gets turned more and more, like people inherit it and they start basically trying to turn it towards their own personal purposes.
Wolf: Yeah, they start to divert those flows. So where at the beginning it’s like the flows are at its most pure, the flows are flowing back into reinvestment in the engine of expansion. But you’re saying as it kind of matures, more and more of those flows are redirected into barnacles.
Ben: Yes. And in capitalist economic systems, which is to say the pursuit of profit within a price system—the way this tends to happen is in the early stages, one pursues profits by trying to reduce prices.
Wolf: Right. By increasing—
Ben: Or by trying to produce more.
Wolf: Yeah, increasing production, increasing prices.
Ben: Right. And then as in the later corrupt stages, you try to increase profits by restricting production.
Wolf: Right. You regulate your competitors or tax things or—yeah.
Ben: And in the commercial capitalism, which is the second of the two instruments of expansion or economic engines that the West has had—which was when it was in the sort of Medici era—this eventually sort of got encumbered by massive limits.
There was all these guild privileges and all of these—oh, we have to make sure that the gold isn’t flowing out of our country and—
Wolf: Yeah. How would you count the mercantilism kind of ideas in that? Is that later, or is that the sort of end of that system, or—what do you think?
Ben: So in Quigley’s telling, this is the barnacles on the system of commercial capitalism. Where it was the state’s expression of how we are protecting the privileges of our traders—in a way that is intended to cause us to have more money by limiting production in these particular ways, by limiting trade in these particular ways. Where in contrast to the earlier stuff, where it’s we’re going to cause more trade, we’re going to open up these routes, we’re going to—move more stuff around is the way we’re going to get rich. Rather than we’re going to erect the right pattern of barriers to make sure that our guys get rich and theirs don’t.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, this sort of makes me recall some of the work we did with Palladium. One of our authors, Nico Villarreal, used to talk a lot about the crisis of profitability that happened in the 1960s that led to the financialization as kind of this shift in the privileges that protected the profits of the financiers at the expense of America’s kind of fundamental industrial production and—at the expense of the American worker, obviously, with offshoring and everything.
Ben: Yes. There have been stages of this getting progressively more and more so since basically the late 1800s. It’s kind of been a one-way ratchet.
Wolf: Right. And this is the thesis, the one-way ratchet idea is kind of the thesis behind all of these rise and fall of civilization ideas, that it’s not just this continuous steady state. It’s you get this growth of an organic body that has some metabolism, but then error or parasites and mistakes, kind of improper flows kind of accumulate in the thing until it can no longer sustain itself.
Stage four: Conflict (24:28)
Ben: Yes. And so this brings us to stage four—which is the period where the expansion is still continuing. It’s not that the thing is just totally gone. But what’s happened is that the rate of expansion is—visibly like slowing down.
Wolf: Right. And people are starting to feel this.
Ben: Right. And as a result, they start turning more towards internal conflict—in order to try to keep getting their own stuff.
Wolf: Yeah, to get advantage. It’s the rational thing, right? There comes to be more opportunity in internal conflict than in continuing the engine of expansion, external conflict.
Ben: Right. And so the claim is that the reason for the rising conflict, the fundamental thing which is behind all of it, is that the—economic engine is slowing down. And that means that not just economically, but politically and culturally and spiritually—people are going to end up at each other’s throats. Because the fundamental source of do we have the stuff that we want is you have to go into these other areas in order to make sure that you can carve out your own slice of the pie. And so this is a period of much sharper class conflict within the society.
Wolf: Right, of course. Yeah.
Ben: One of the areas where I disagree with Quigley, but I’ll first just lay out his theory—is that this is also an area where you see a lot more imperialist war as an effort to resolve this and make sure that the political unit can get enough—of its stuff.
Wolf: Right. So basically to sort of force the matter of expansion more than previously, maybe the expansion had come more naturally to the engine of growth. But is the idea behind the kind of force of the imperialist war aspect to be it’s the system itself is starting to feel that pressure as well, starting to want to force the matter?
By fiat.
Ben: Yeah. And by, “Oh, we want more stuff. We’re accustomed to having more stuff than our ancestors.” “We can’t get it internally, but those guys across the border have some stuff, so-” “Maybe we can take their stuff. Maybe we can enslave them and make sure they’re working on our farms.”
Wolf: Yeah, we can offshore our farms to their labor markets.
Ben: Yeah. So Quigley’s claim is that this also then is a big driver of war, which I don’t actually agree with him there. I think that you get—
Wolf: Interesting. What’s your disagreement?
Ben: I think you get plenty of war in all of the periods, basically. And when I look—over the historical record, it doesn’t seem to me like there’s more in this period. Which is not to say that you can’t find plenty of imperialist war during stage four.
Wolf: Do you think that the causes or nature of the war changes through these stages? I would imagine sort of in the admixture stage, war is going to be a lot more about whose tendencies are going to be represented. In the gestational phase, maybe likewise. Age of expansion, you start to have war between the core engine of expansion and its rivals. And then as it slows down, you’ve got maybe more of this internal war, maybe more of this imperialist war.
That would kind of suggest a change in the character of the wars, but I wonder if you see that in the historical record.
Ben: My impression is that war is generally a lot more pedestrian than that. And generally much more just bound up in the individual personalities of the people getting involved. And then—if you’re a historian looking back from 200 years later, you can sort of find themes in it. But I don’t think that these are causally about... When you’re looking at why did Charlemagne invade this duke?
It’s not going to be like, “Oh, this was an expression of how to solve the European problems.” No, it’s because he was the type of guy who was like, “Yeah, we’re going, we’re winning. This is rad.” “Who’s that guy to stand up to me? Doesn’t he know that I’m the emperor?”
Wolf: Yeah. He wanted to be emperor, and he had this ability to do that with his feudal system that—
Ben: Right. And then—
Wolf: his elaborations on it
Ben: and then later on, you can come along and be like, “Oh, and then he created a novel military system,” which ended up causing Western civilization to be able to protect its frontiers and hold off the invading pressures from other civilization. That’s not wrong, but that’s not the main thing behind why that war.
Wolf: I see. And so this age of conflict, these imperialist wars, can you give us examples that Quigley uses or that you would point to—to kind of point to that era of historical development?
Ben: Yeah. So one of the really clear ones is if you look at the ancient Greeks, and when you start seeing the Peloponnesian War as you’ve got these—different city states fighting over each other and enslaving each other for what are, especially from the Athenian side, largely informed by commercial interests. And then after that with Alexander, you can see a bunch of guys writing that we just need Persian slaves if we’re going to keep this going.
Or if you look at the First World War, there was a fair amount of discourse around, there was all of these people talking about, “Oh, we need colonies in Africa for this reason or that reason.”
Wolf: Right. Yeah, it was conflict over colonies to some extent. Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. So you can certainly find plenty of cases of imperialist war during these periods that are explicitly motivated. I just think you can also find that during the other stages also. That’s just—you get a lot of war. That’s what humans do.
Wolf: And so how does the age of conflict progress and resolve?
Circumvention or decline (30:53)
Ben: So this is the really interesting part of the theory—for me, is that this is sort of the one part of the seven-stage progression—where there’s a big fork. Where the normal thing that happens is that you just keep getting more decay and sort of gradually more encumbrance on the engine of expansion on the economic engine. Which is, in large part, made worse by these additional conflicts going on. And you keep getting these various imperialist wars, and eventually it degrades to the point where reform within the system is no longer possible. And during the various imperialist wars, somebody eventually just wins and unifies the entire civilization into a single political unit, bringing you to stage five, which is the stage of universal empire.
Of which Rome conquering classical civilization is the case that we are going to be most familiar with. But this doesn’t always happen. Because the other thing that can happen is that the economic engine can be circumvented by a new economic engine. And as you were saying, this is how you get there being multiple economic engines in series in the history of Western civilization. Where Western civilization, first, the economic engine was feudalism, where you had—these manorial lords who owned the land and would extract the crops from the people who were working on the land—turned that into military power, and be able to be starting new manors and clearing land with the surplus they were extracting.
And then over time, that sort of decayed and became less functional for its military purposes, and you just got much more customary encumbrances on the agricultural side of things. And what happened here was not that then the agriculture got fixed. It was not that it got sort of reformed from within the feudal frame. What happened was these new guys who were living in town started doing this other thing—which just sort of eclipsed the old feudal stuff. And—you shifted to a new economic engine where the main game in town was this long-distance trade in luxury goods and the products of crafts within these new towns.
Wolf: And this is sort of what starts to get called conventionally early modernity. Yeah.
Ben: So he places the second age of expansion from about 1420 to 1650.
Where you’ve got this commercial capitalism and you’ve got like—
Wolf: Yeah, the Renaissance, the birth of capitalism. Right.
Ben: Trade through the North Sea, through the Mediterranean, across the European heartland. And the people who are making the big fortunes and then redeploying it into the method of accumulation are largely these long-distance traders and also the sort of local guild masters—and craftsmen. And you still have your nobles. Their thing is much more turned towards its own self-serving purposes. The sort of various encumbrances and corruptions on that system are not dealt with.
They’re just kind of grown around and sort of slowly sidelined.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. And then the next engine of expansion after that, is that colonialism, or is it industry, or some combination?
Ben: Yeah, it’s industrial capitalism.
You get this period after the second age of expansion where there’s just more and more of these encumbrances. Jean-Baptiste Colbert is one of the really interesting figures here of—the agent of this French state who’s coordinating this sort of gigantic symphony of guild policies and taxes and import and export restrictions. And you start getting these East India Companies. What’s an East India Company? Well, they’re the only person who is allowed to trade with the East Indies.
Everyone else, it’s illegal. It’s like, that’s kind of weird.
Wolf: They get this granted monopoly to trade. Yeah.
Ben: And so the trade system ends up being it’s much more about, “Oh, we’re making money by placing restrictions on the flow of trade.”
Wolf: Right. At least the internal competitive dynamic is about placing restrictions, even if the overall system’s still very much expanding.
Ben: Right. But at a lower rate than it had been previously. Until it gets circumvented by industrial capitalism, which is—rather than by making profits by moving goods over long distances to a market where they’re valued more—the basic operation is you are operating machines. And the machines make stuff which you then sell for more than it costs you to operate the machines. Very famously, this started with cloth.
And then you get the steam engine, and it starts being applied to all sorts of things.
Wolf: Yeah. So this is kind of showing this fork that you’re talking about is this kind of indeterminism in the model, that it doesn’t have to be this kind of finite lifespan. Spengler is often known for the single idea of the sort of baked-in doom from the start, right? That it starts with some way of understanding space, some way, some fundamental conceptual dynamics that this culture is going to proceed on, and it goes until this inevitable doom of that culture, and that’s that. And this is sort of an idea that I’ve always been drawn to, is that there’s actually quite a lot of room for contingency, either by great men through acts of will and invention or some new economic engine can come in and save things.
There’s a lot more of a role for agency in this more—indeterminate model.
Ben: And it doesn’t get you the true immortal civilization because your new engine—
Wolf: It has to be different
Ben: is going. And it can buy you another couple hundred years, but eventually it will itself become encumbered. And then it will either be again circumvented or not.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s not going to bail out the previous encumbrances that grew up on the system, but it can sort of rescue a lot of the dynamic capital in a way.
Ben: Yes. And so if you look at medieval Chinese civilization, they also had a case of the sort of landholder based engine of expansion being circumvented by a commercial based one. This was much more based along internal trade along the canals, which had been built out for the agricultural engine in the first period. And then just massively, massively, massively expanded during the medieval Chinese civilization’s second age of expansion.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. That reminds me of the early industrial expansion in England. If you look at the canal density across Europe, England had some of the best logistics because it had just so many rivers and canals that were just quite advantageous for that. This was remarked on by Nick Szabo—if you remember that blog.
Ben: And it’s a bit of a tangent, but I just have always been so struck by and have to mention, it’s really shocking the density of canals that England was getting in the 1700s, while being the huge advantage, which until the invention of the railroad was one of their—main things that let them develop, was still not really up to what the Chinese were able to do in 700 AD.
Wolf: Right. And the Chinese did not get an industrial revolution—from that.
Ben: Right. It helped them tremendously commercially. I’m just so impressed by their early canal work. I always have to mention it whenever it comes up. So I apologize for the tangent.
Wolf: No, that’s great. But that shows another one of these indeterminisms, right? It’s not that like, oh, you achieve a certain logistical density and then you achieve phase shift into industrial mode. There’s so many other factors—in how these things go.
Ben: And I’ve talked about this elsewhere, I’m not going to go super in depth, but yeah, there were a bunch of ways that the medieval Chinese civilization was just socially not structured to be able to have an industrial revolution at the time. It would’ve been a very surprising transformation.
Wolf: Yeah. Is this around the same time or is this, I think it might be later when they do the big treasure ships where China sort of had a chance to engage in an age of naval expansion, but—for social reasons, basically could not—bring itself to do that.
Ben: So that was around 1400 where—
Wolf: So it’s later
Ben: where they destroyed Cheng Ho’s treasure fleet. Which is basically, I use that as just the pin that you stick in for this is the end of the second Chinese age of expansion, and them moving into their second age of conflict. Because it’s just such a clear, okay, we are now moving from the expansionary mode to the restrictive fighting.
Wolf: Yeah. We start to feel the need to prevent things.
Ben: Because the reason why that was shut down was because it was empowering the wrong factions in the imperial court.
Wolf: Right. There was some reason materially that they felt the need to prevent things. They now were starting to draw their power from preventing rather than enabling.
Ben: Yeah. So when exactly, you’re not going to be like, “Oh, we shifted to this age in the year 1398.” But by that point, you are definitely out of the age of expansion.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. You can put a pin—
Ben: Into the age of conflict
Wolf: in these particular historical events. And talk about how they’re caused.
Stage five: Universal empire (40:56)
Ben: Right. So my sense is that something roughly a third of the time you get one of these circumventions, you get a new instrument of expansion, and you go back to stage three. But the rest of the time, you then go on to the universal empire. Which is kind of a funny period because it’s generally perceived as a golden age. Even because it is—
Wolf: Everything’s peaceful. There’s, you know
Ben: Gibbon was writing about the early Roman Empire as like, if you’re going to look at when was the happiest age of man, it was under the good emperors in the first century AD. And the political problems are resolved. It is an age of peace. And this thing has sort of stamped down on the social problems with its boot and sort of—
Wolf: Well, it’s sort of like you imagine this sort of eternal late 20th century Europe, like everything’s nice, everything’s clean. Everything’s worked out. We’ve removed the military question. We’ve removed the political questions. We’ve kind of got the system worked out, but then fundamentally there’s a stagnation.
Ben: Right. And sort of this is the period from which circumvention is no longer possible. Whereas at this point, the entrenched interests are just so entrenched that it just will not work to try to circumvent them with a new economic engine anymore. It’s just not going to fly.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, that reminds me, just this Europe case, this case of Europe under the Pax Americana as we sometimes call it. As far as Europe is concerned, there is a universal empire. It’s America. But in America, we still have all this, or at least this is speaking from decades ago, we still have all this dynamic potential.
There’s still all this stuff going on. We still have these external competitors with things like China. So I wonder does Quigley claim that these stages are sort of lockstep, like the whole domain of influence is sort of moving through these stages together? Or can they be patchwork, like one part is experiencing temporarily maybe a universal empire, while some other part the wheels are flying off?
Ben: Yeah. So it’s definitely patchwork—for two reasons. One being that these things are just so big. But also, there’s just a general pattern with all of these stages—most legibly in the universal empire cases, but in all of the stages—you see them happen first in the core—and then only later in the periphery. So Alexander unified Greece before Rome unified the entire classical civilization.
Wolf: Right. America unified Europe before anyone has unified the world.
Ben: Yeah. Or I don’t think the American empire over Europe really stuck, but there were a bunch of—in the 20th century age of conflict, there were a bunch of attempts to unify Europe.
Wolf: Yes. With varying results.
Ben: Yes. But it looks to be like the European Union, it sees itself and its telos as unifying the core. That’s its goal. And it is too soon to say whether that’s going to stick. It very plausibly could.
It very plausibly—could fall apart.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about how these things fall apart then. You get this age of universal empire, it starts to feel like everything’s just solved, it’s the end of history, but fundamentally, you have some kind of stagnation, which becomes a decline. And so how does that happen, and where does it lead?
Ben: Yeah, so basically what happens is just the economic engine just isn’t working the way it should.
It is generally tuned to the privileges and special purposes of particular individuals, rather than serving the purpose of just growth and increased wealth. And that just gets worse and worse to the point where then it eventually undermines the sort of universal empire golden age. And you enter into this sort of long, sickly era of decay.
Wolf: Right. So you get your kind of very comfortable European negative 1% per year retirement era. But at some point you realize that you’ve lost all power to resist external forces or internal—parasitism and so on.
Ben: And you’re like, man, our whole thing of having these citizen farms worked by foreign slaves in order to produce our people who could become soldiers isn’t really working well enough. Maybe we should try hiring some of those foreign barbarians to serve in our army.
Wolf: Right, yeah. We’ll do this big mercenary thing, and—it turns out how it turns out.
Ben: In the Roman case, you start getting the foederati.
Just the whole thing just starts sinking, and there are attempts to revive it that are sort of local. Maybe they’ll be successful in this little corner, but they’re not going to change the overall direction of it. And the thing just is it’s too incoherent, it’s too non-functional to be able to reform from within. So eventually, this sixth age of decay—is superseded by the seventh age of invasion. Where the thing is just no longer coherent enough to maintain its borders, and then whoever happens to be available will end up coming in and conquering.
Stages six and seven (46:20)
Ben: And so the reason that you get conquered is not because the invader was necessarily so tough, it’s that you were just not able to maintain—your own coherence.
Wolf: Well, this comes to the matter of our own time. Obviously within Europe and within America, we see a lot of this. The politics is starting to become about these pseudo invasions, I guess, of very foreign people coming in, somewhat with political sponsorship from within the system, somewhat as an external force. And we seem to be kind of teetering on this question, which is, is this the final invasion of the age of decay or is this just part of the kind of decline of our engine of expansion that we have to start bringing in these foreign slaves to work within our political structure and our economic structure? And so I wonder how Quigley would kind of parse the migration politics of our own time in this model.
Ben: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, Quigley himself died around 1970 or so.
Wolf: Right. But let’s resurrect his corpse and ask him these questions.
Ben: Yeah. My own view on this is I think that we are in stage four. I think that we are in the stage of conflict that—goes after the industrial period of expansion. Where the economic structure of industrial capitalism is still kind of working, kind of corrupted and encumbered, but—there is still expansion happening.
Wolf: Yeah, especially when you count China into the system.
Ben: China is a different civilization.
Wolf: But our growth is very much tied to the fact that our production is in China.
Ben: Much of it, but we’re also just inventing our own crazy robots that can talk to you and stuff like that.
Wolf: Right. Here we are in San Francisco where there are still new things happening.
Ben: Yes. We are not going as fast as in the Wright brothers times, but the thing is going.
Wolf: It’s definitely going, yeah. And arguably, some people are in fact arguing that it is about to go very fast because of the supposed gains unlocked by some of this automated software and intellectual work done by these machines.
Ben: Yes. Well, if they—get the self-improving recursive God mind, then yeah. But that is a technological question rather than a evolution of civilizations question, so I’m going to punt that because—God knows how many conversations have been derailed by that.
Wolf: Yeah. But to bring it back to this model then, that’s another one of these contingency points, right? Does the new technology actually work out and—restart the engine of expansion or create a new engine of expansion, or is this a sputter and a failure?
Ben: Yes. And to go to your—
Wolf: That puts this huge role of, again, of agency into the course of history.
Ben: Yes. And to go to your earlier thing, bringing in the mass migration—that looks to me like one of the moves in the internal social conflicts rather—than a invasion which the civilization is unable to prevent.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. It’s not that they’re too weak.
Ben: Because in the rare cases where someone is like, “No, we’re not going to do that,” it’s actually very easy for them to not do it. So it’s not that they can’t resist the invaders, it’s that—
Wolf: It’s that the internal politics
Ben: it’s that there are many internal constituencies that see that as the winning move in their internal struggles.
Wolf: Right. And this is sort of analogous to under the age of universal empire in Roman times, the kind of replacement of the Roman farm workers with foreign farm workers, or the bringing in the foreigners as political clients, and so on. All of this stuff happened also in Roman times.
Ben: Yeah. And in the sort of Marius and Sulla age, you see these bringing in too many of the foreign slaves and undermining the... All of the rural people are very upset that they’re being pushed out, and you get the—Gracchi as sort of like your textbook age of conflict, internal struggle stuff.
Wolf: Right. And so this starts to feel very familiar then. So it’s not that we actually have become so weak that we’re being invaded by foreign societies. Rather, it’s that our internal politics is, with the internal engine of production slowing down, our internal politics is starting to become more negative sum, more zero-sum at least, and people are starting to pull these moves of prevention against each other in the age of conflict, and part of that involves bringing in new constituencies or—other things like that.
Ben: And especially when you have a universal suffrage mass democracy and so forth.
Wolf: Yes. Exactly. It’s—
Ben: Which is another one of the contingencies.
Wolf: Right. Exactly. It’s one of these winning moves in democracy, as we figured out you can actually replace the people if they don’t vote the right way
Ben: Oh.
Wolf: Among other ways to use them.
Ben: Yes. Which I think this is a very important point because when you’re in stage four, you can circumvent and you can get another age of expansion, and in fact, we have done it twice before. Whereas once you are in the age of universal empire, the age of decay, the age of invasion—I just know of no cases of it being reversed once it gets to that point.
Wolf: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s sort of interesting, I guess, to sort of continue on this migration politics thing. It’s a case where there’s a circumvention of the ossified structures of democracy, but it’s not a circumvention towards a new kind of expansion. It’s kind of just costly.
Ben: Oh.
Wolf: At least as far as I can tell.
Ben: Yeah. I don’t think I would call that a circumvention of democracy. I think that if you’re looking at the circumventions of democracy, because that is still being used, that is sort of a move within the democracy game.
Wolf: Right. I guess it doesn’t make it obsolete. It is a valid move because democracy remains strong.
Ben: Right. Whereas if you look at, I think there are a lot of circumventions of democracy happening.
Wolf: Right. And that’s more like the bureaucratic—
Ben: Yeah. That’s more like the European Union is just like—
Wolf: Yeah. Ursula von der Leyen decides
Ben: “No, this is what the Europeans has decided,” and if your democratically elected government wants your tax policy to be this way, like—
Wolf: Good luck
Ben: “I’m sorry, the European Commission has decided that all tax policies must conform to X, Y, or Z.” So those are things I would call circumventions of democracy.
Wolf: I see. Yeah. That’s a good point. It’s not strictly a circumvention because it doesn’t work independent of democracy. It’s not working—
Ben: Right. It is a competitive move within democratic—democracy.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. So then if we’re in this age of conflict, then that also kind of is why maybe we feel this immense historical sense of possibility. Right. Because this is where a lot of the contingency rests.
Are we going to circumvent the problems of the current system with new ideas, new forms of organization, new economics, or are we going to stagnate into—some kind of universal empire that locks it all down?
Ben: Right. And the only time that you can circumvent these things, you cannot circumvent an economic engine when it’s at its height.
Wolf: Right. It’s only when it reaches these moments of crisis—where it becomes clear that the thing’s broken, and people are casting around for where’s the opportunity, where’s the new thing.
Ben: Right. Because when the feudal nobility is just working well, like—
Wolf: That’s the game to play.
Ben: Right. And if you try to circumvent them, they’ll just beat you. But it’s when they’re sort of ossified and doing a bad job at their job—that it becomes possible for... If you look at how the guilds circumvented them, the guilds got their economic engine, and then as a result of that, they started putting together infantry formations, and beginning these town... The towns were sort of the one place in all of Europe that could field disciplined structures of pikemen.
And this became really necessary to the monarchs, and so they could negotiate for the cities to have privileges. When if you try to do that in Charlemagne’s day, he just would’ve run over you and burned down your house.
Wolf: Yeah, because you wouldn’t have actually been able to do that. The knights were too dominant in Charlemagne’s time.
Ben: Right. And so it’s because the thing is just not working well that it becomes possible for something new to not just work on its own terms, but then also carve out a larger piece of society rather than just getting crushed in a political conflict.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, the system’s no longer able to suppress or just beat on its own merits the new thing. And so as soon as the new thing starts to prove to be where the growth is, also insofar as this kind of investment in society and people choosing where to put their time or where to put their capital, it’s also going to shift over to the growth of the new thing. But that only happens at this crisis where it actually eclipses the old engine of expansion because the old engine of expansion has reached its limits. Mm-hmm.
Ben: And like—
Wolf: And so I guess this is the question is has this industrial capitalism on the mode that we’ve been practicing it, has it actually reached its limits?
Ben: So I think that the Western version of it—it has clearly gone from a stage three version to a stage four version.
Wolf: Right. It’s clearly just encumbered in barnacles and no longer dynamic.
Ben: Right. It is run by those managerial types who just don’t know any more about the factories that they’re nominally overseeing—than like a Roman latifundia owner who doesn’t work on the farm knows about it.
Wolf: Right. Well, it’s interesting that the term managerial actually is this really good term here, or is a really interesting term because, yeah, in the West, managerial means some jerk coming out of the university who doesn’t really know anything except how to make the spreadsheet numbers go right. Whereas in the Asian case, which is maybe where the new version of industry is happening, the manager, managerialism means Japanese wartime bureaucrats, the planning bureaucrats, and the sort of tradition of knowledge that also is very closely involved in why China’s working right now is because they actually have a lot of this. They have people who know how to manage an economy.
Ben: Right. So the idea of industrial capitalism in principle, obviously it still works. They’re doing it. And it’s like you are pursuing your core economic engine is the operation of industrial machines in order to pursue profits within a price system. And there are differences in the way the state interfaces with that price system is—somewhat different, but the basic structure is it’s working.
And so to the extent that it’s encumbered here, that is clearly—
Wolf: It’s a social fact
Ben: a feature of our social system—not a universal thing about how does industrial capitalism work with this type of technologies.
Wolf: Yeah. So this gets to the lie of the term developed country, right? It implies that there’s some stage of development at which you have reached the kind of limits of the system, or it has—achieved development. But actually what’s happened here is we achieved some level of development and then kind of got off the train, for social reasons, for historical reasons having to do mostly with the internal politics around the matter rather than material reasons about the actual possibility of production itself.
Modern applications (58:57)
Ben: Yes. Although again, I do have to emphasize that we’ve still got one foot on the train. If you were to restrict only to the West and be like, in the course of human history, how is our industrial and technological expansion going? This is basically the second most rapid period in the history of the species. We just really notice that because 100 years ago—
Wolf: It was even more rapid
Ben: was number one.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. And so this kind of comes to the, yeah, it’s still going, the engine’s still there. So this comes to the question of okay, how do we apply this model maybe to get out of this partial slump or what looks like we don’t want to get doomed into the age of conflict and just have the whole thing end up locked down. So what would the circumvention actually look like?
If we tried to speculate about that, it won’t necessarily be new material technology, though that could help to kind of open up a new front in the industrial expansion. But I think also we would be talking about new social technology. There’d be some social circumvention of the system of encumbrances that the current system has. This is what the Quigley model would predict is that the way out, the way back into production, the way back into growth would be social circumvention of how industry has ended up so encumbered. And what do you think that would look like?
Ben: Yeah. So unfortunately, there aren’t any around as I’ve been looking that I’ve been able to be like, “Oh, that one seems great.”
Wolf: Yeah, that looks like it, right.
Ben: Yeah. And my own mind is very much within the industrial capitalism frame. I find it very hard to step outside of it.
Wolf: Right. So within a paradigm, it’s very hard to see the next paradigm.
Ben: Right. So, but I have looked for the next paradigm. I haven’t seen it. Which is unfortunate. I would love to be like, “Oh, yes, this is the thing and we need to nurture that,” but I haven’t found it yet.
I’m still looking.
Wolf: Right. So some candidates, I’ll throw out candidates, and I’d love to hear what you think and what you think Quigley would think about it. So the first candidate, obviously we’re here in San Francisco, maybe less obviously for the audience, but, for us, very obvious. San Francisco is at the forefront of certain kinds of software technology, especially AI these days. And for the last 30 years, I think Silicon Valley has had this very, let’s say, an independent version of industrial capitalism or pseudo industrial capitalism that—has been powered by distinct social technology, somewhat circumventing the type of industrial capitalism that has been happening elsewhere in the West.
This idea of creative destruction, the idea of founder-led companies, the sort of VC model, startup model, the move fast and break things. There’s all these very social ideas of modes of social organization that feel like they work to some extent because they have escaped containment of how industry is otherwise kind of locked down, and maybe even software has succeeded because it’s less locked down than, say, in material production. So how would you rate what goes on in Silicon Valley in this model?
Ben: So I think it works extremely well, and it is in many ways much more functional. But I think that’s actually because it is an older form that is much closer to the pre-managerial industrial capitalism as it was practiced in, say, the 1800s or something. Of move fast and break things. Just make the thing, sell it for cheaper.
Wolf: Right. This sounds like something Henry Ford would say.
Ben: Right. Everyone’s like, “Oh my God, Elon Musk, he understands his technology, and he owns and operates his things personally.” And if you go back to—
Wolf: He’s actually just a time traveler from 100 years ago.
Ben: Yeah. If you go back to 1890, they’d be like, “Oh, so you mean a company?”
Wolf: Right. Yeah. One of those guys. One of those guys.
Ben: So I think that it is more functional because it is—basically operating on something much closer to the stage three—
Wolf: So how do we end up with this anachronism, though? Because part of the model is the way it ends up in this encumbrance, the way you end up in this conflict, the way you end up in the sort of stagnation phase is the flows start to get, or part of the whole raw picture is the flows start to get diverted. You get all these barnacles, you get all these encumbrances on the thing. And so now there’s this sort of pseudopod of the body that’s coming out here that’s less encumbered, and it’s more like what it was. Why is it able to do that?
Is there some social technology difference or is it just we’re far away from New York?
Ben: Yeah. So I think it comes from being the frontier, where you always see every stage starts at the core and then moves sort of concentrically outward. And many people, since before I was born—
Wolf: So the stagnation just hasn’t caught up with us.
Ben: Yeah. And people were calling the internet the Wild West and—it’s the new thing out on the forefront. And so the things on the frontier generally have the transition happen later. The transition happened in Europe earlier than in America, happened in this frontier of American production later. We can see it’s not fully gone, but the thing is more financialized and managerial than it was in 2005.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. No, it’s very clear that things that had happened elsewhere, a generation previous are now or have recently happened in Silicon Valley.
Ben: Yes, and the thing happens in the frontier later is just a very normal pattern with all of this.
Wolf: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s talk then about Asia, the Asian economies. Obviously, you’re claiming that this is a separate civilization. I think they are rather independent. Our ruling classes here are not able to encumber what happens there.
Therefore, it’s a separate civilization.
Ben: Yes. And China is just early stage three, and so their thing is doing stage three things. And like—
Wolf: But it’s stage three of their own path that’s maybe reminiscent of ours, but—it’s kind of independent.
Ben: You have seen something sort of like commercial capitalism many times. Industrial capitalism was invented with the Industrial Revolution. But in the same way that manorial landholding has been an instrument of expansion many times, I expect that industrial capitalism will be an instrument of expansion many times. There have been basically four instruments of expansion that have ever been used.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, if you look at medieval Japan, which I’m a little bit more familiar with than China, feudalism is very much a term that gets used to describe that for good reason.
Ben: Right. It is kind of eerily close to European feudalism.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. Okay. So then if we’re searching for this new instrument of expansion, new engine of expansion, let’s clarify a theoretical point then. What’s the difference between what you’re calling being on the frontier and a new instrument of expansion circumventing the encumbered old order?
So to some extent, there’s the sort of a fixed frontier structure, we’re far from New York or whatever, but there’s also this frontier of there’s new forms of activity being innovated, right? There’s maybe this AI thing, we’re going to be able to fire all the workers and get rid of all the labor law or whatever. Or that’s really kind of a lot of what happened with software is it’s sort of this new thing that is able to expand into a new frontier faster than the encumbrances of the old order can kind of keep up. And so what’s the difference between that process, which we’re kind of calling a frontier here, and the process of a new instrument of expansion circumventing the core?
Ben: So one big difference is that when you see a new instrument arise—it will generally arise first in the core. That’s where the Industrial Revolution started. That’s where the commercial capitalism started.
Wolf: Interesting. Yes. So we would expect then as we reach this age of encumbrance, age of conflict, the way that that’s going to get resolved is actually going to be closer to... Does that mean the East Coast of America? Does that mean Europe?
What do you think? Where should we be looking? Where should we be cultivating? Where do we sprinkle the fertilizer?
Ben: Yeah. So, Europe is the core of Western civilization. And so these are not ironclad laws, but this does suggest that if there is a circumvention, then more likely than not—
Wolf: It might be in Europe
Ben: it will start in Europe.
Wolf: Right. Yeah. So there’s definitely a case to be made, and if you look at kind of the things happening in Europe, maybe you have this, things are very encumbered in Europe. You would expect anything that breaks out of the encumbrance in Europe is going to be very much immunized against that. And so, that could mean maybe some new kind of politics, some new kind of social organization, some new kind of...
I sort of doubt some new kind of technology’s going to come out of Europe, but maybe. They do have a lot of smart people.
Ben: Yeah. Unfortunately, they have to come here to do their thing.
Wolf: Yeah. But that also brings up the matter of the military core, right? So obviously, Europe is not the military core of Western civilization currently.
Ben: Right. And in fact, when you get a universal empire, almost all the time, it is a periphery state going back and conquering the core.
Wolf: Right. And so this is obviously what’s happened. And is it at that stage, with the European core no longer being militarily sovereign or sufficiently militarily sovereign, does that doom them to stagnation under the American umbrella, or could they sort of circumvent their way out the side of that?
Ben: Yeah. So if we are in fact in stage five universal empire—then that would mean it’s too late. I don’t actually think that we are in the universal empire.
Wolf: Right. And these uncertainties, again, are like—
Ben: Yeah. This one—
Wolf: this is ways that the model is not rigid, right? The model is heuristic. It’s suggestive. It’s not ironclad laws.
Ben: Right. And because the stage transitions are so fuzzy, and they’ll happen like 70 years later in one place than another, and—this sort of thing is just quite hard to... Basically, when you’re looking back 80 years later, it’s much easier to tell. Quigley was writing in the ‘60s, and he’s like, “We seem to be seeing the birth of new civilizations in China and the Arab Middle East.” And it’s like, okay, one for two.
But from where he was looking, you can’t actually tell those apart. It takes a long time.
Wolf: Yeah. No, it does take time. Like, it’s okay, why didn’t the Arabs work out? Well, they didn’t quite manage to achieve some kind of revolution that gave them sufficient sovereignty.
Ben: So the Quigley lenses would say that they were only working on the political plane and never got an actual functioning economic engine of any type.
Wolf: They never had their Deng. The Arab nationalism never had its Deng moment, or where—
Ben: But the important part of the Quigley lens is not the political unification, but that he was able to make things work economically.
Wolf: Yeah. That’s how I mean to invoke Deng—is the guy who allows the economic experiments that actually create the new model.
Ben: Yes. And that just never happened in the Arab world.
Wolf: Yeah. And so applying the universal empire model to the kind of European question, that would suggest America has its boot on Europe, Europe’s never going to be able to get up again, and they’re just going to sit there and stagnate under multicultural social democracy—until the end of time, or until the end of—
Ben: So this—
Wolf: The end of Western civilization
Ben: from the American perspective, this suggests we should let up the boot.
Wolf: Well, yeah. This is in many ways the policy of the Trump administration is to at least try to gesture in that direction to some degree.
Ben: Yeah, in some ways.
Wolf: In some ways. Yeah. It’s like you—
Ben: Militarily, they want them to be doing more, but like—
Wolf: It’s sort of like this game of telephone thing, where I think people who see this analysis have influenced the new foreign policy with respect to Europe, but it hasn’t quite gotten translated into the true expression. So let’s suppose we’re also on the other end of, or we’re still in the age of conflict, and maybe there still is some hidden dynamism in Europe. That might be the nationalist politics there. It might be something going on with how things end up interacting with the—
Ben: There’s certainly a lot of dynamism in the Europeans who then come to San Francisco. So like—they’re coming from somewhere.
Wolf: Yeah. No, there’s still the human capital, the social fabric. There’s something there, for sure. And I’m always impressed. This is something actually I’d like to do with this project, The Students, is go and talk to the Europeans who seem like they are working on these dynamic frontiers of social and philosophical thinking because I am often impressed when I meet someone from Sweden or Southern Europe or England, their philosophical scenes, their political scenes, their social innovations.
It’s like, wow, these guys are actually doing interesting things that we’re not. And that are very promising. So I’d love to look into those and—find out what that looks like.
Ben: That would be super fun.
Wolf: Yeah. We should have those conversations with them. Is there anything else you’d like to say about Quigley? Is there more to discuss in his philosophy?
Ben: There’s a ton of good stuff. At some point, I definitely want to talk about one of his other masterworks, “Weapon Systems and Political Stability.”
Wolf: Yes. Very important.
Ben: But I think that this is a good overview of “The Evolution of Civilizations.”
Wolf: Right. This has been a fantastic conversation. It’s been very interesting to learn more about Quigley’s ideas about “The Evolution of Civilizations,” compare it a little bit to the way other people have thought about it, and try to apply it to our own times to accomplish our project, which is to escape out the side of decline, which is what the philosophers are always up to. And yeah. So this has been a conversation of The Students.
Thank you, Ben, for joining me.
Ben: Thank you. This was a great time.