Fantasies of decline can make you powerless
BY OLIVER BATEMAN December 29, 2021
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He is also a co-host of the “What’s Left?” podcast
Theories of decline are on the rise: we are inundated with stories about impending civil war and looming climate apocalypse; studies show that civilisation could collapse within a few decades; eccentric “cliometricians” warn of a miserable decade ahead.
Sounds like bad news, right? Perhaps. But it has always been this way. Historian Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History describes declinism from its nineteenth-century origins in concepts of racial and intellectual degeneration to its late twentieth-century manifestations in the eco-pessimism of Al Gore and Ted Kacyznski. Herman’s major point — that theories of decline evolve in a dialectical fashion both with theories of progress and with competing theories of decline — is about as unexciting a perspective as any author can offer, so it should hardly come as a surprise that his work failed to stem the tide of warmed-over apocalyptic literature.
Unorthodox Truth 