I think that apogee of western civilization was in 19th century. And now we observing steadily decline. Why? Because we moved production to East, thinking 'they will produce goods for us'. Comfortable, don't you think?

Moreover we don't have ambitious goals. Only consuming... That's new religion, alas! When you consume so much you don't have time for creative activity. Similiar proceses happened in the past, that's true. Rise, apogee, decline.

It's important to have relatively equal competitors, like in medieval Europe, ancient Greece, Apennine Peninsula (8th to 3th century BC). If we have much stronger opponents then we probably will be conquered.

Language maybe will surive but civilization may collapse. When summerian civilization was only history, in Mesopotamia their language still existed 2000 years after! (higher culture). Civilizations falls but languages have chances to survive. We know ancient greek language but this civilization gone for good.

, there is the thread by called Are we on the verge of a cultural collapse?, where this is discussed. Have we been in decline since the 19th Century would perhaps be a view you should explain more.

My question was more about the essential link of language to culture, so I'll comment this part.

Language maybe will survive but civilization may collapse. When summerian civilization was only history, in Mesopotamia their language still existed 2000 years after! (higher culture). Civilizations falls but languages have chances to survive. — HangingBishop

It does beg the question just how "dead" that culture is if the language is alive.

For example, We do have still Latin, which just in the last Century was a very popular language to be studied (and obviously differs from modern Italian language). The last bastion of the Roman Empire, the Catholic and also the Orthodox churches are still quite alive and kicking, even if religiousness isn't so prevalent as earlier. Above all, we do see an inherent link from Roman and Greek culture to our present Western Culture.

Just think, even if the present nation states wouldn't be around in a thousand years, yet students in the Universities (or similar higher levels of education) would still study English, would read about the history of the United States and would claim that their culture, one thousand years into the future from us, is a direct descendant of the democratic experiment of the United States and the French Revolution and still would read what the "Founding Fathers" wrote, how dead would American or Western culture be? How extinct would that make our culture, really?

(Buildings that Ancient Romans and Greeks could relate to in present day Washington DC)


The important question here is if evolution of a culture really means the same thing as the collapse of a culture. I don't think that it's the case at all. A collapse means the end of the culture, literally. It's the example where you have to have an archeologist to dig pieces from the ground to make some hypothesis about what happened when the local people don't know who built the ruins in the area. That isn't evolution, but an observable cut off with the past.

If a country like Japan can justifiably claim that it has had an emperor from the 7th Century AD, it also is totally natural for the Japanese culture to have evolved and changed. The might be a heated discussion in Japan about Japanese identity and culture, yet it is hard to argue that there has been a collapse of the Japanese culture, even if Japan lost WW2 and was occupied. And obviously, the Japanese language is still the same language. That language of an ancient culture is spoken is in my view proof that something even from ancient culture is still quite living among us.

You mention my thread on the idea of cultural collapse. When I saw the thread you created last night I wondered how they related, although even though mine was only a couple of months ago it actually feels like years ago, because even though people often speak of time speading up, I feel that this current one seems to have lasted about 5 years, because it has been extraordinary, with periods of lockdown.

If I think about my own thread, I think I was aware of some aspects of the debate you raise, but probably thinking more in terms of the economic collapse being primary to the collapse of culture.I was wondering if the pandemic is going to affect human civilisation so much that life becomes so much about survival that the arts and other aspects become redundant.

I think I was also thinking of the myth of the fall of Atlantis, but I am aware that this is myth, and not sure how this myth relates to history. But I do think that we are at a critical point in history, and we were so even before the pandemic, in terms of the way we have depleted human resources through overpopulation and consumer culture.

Only about a week ago, before London was put into tier 3, and is now on the highest level, I was walking in the city late at about 10 pm and it was so deserted, almost like a post-apocalyptic world. I grew up believing in the end of the world in a religious sense, but questioned my religious backgrounds but still have questions about the future of humanity, especially in relation to the damage which we have done to the planet.

Having read your post, I think that if we are on the verge of cultural collapse presently it would be different this time to the previous ones, and do think that it may be ',The End of the World As We Know it,' as in the REM song. I have to admit that sometimes I wonder if we are at the end of human civilisation. I hope that I am wrong, and perhaps we are just at the end of some cycle. I am aware that it is unlikely that the pandemic would be the actual end, but I think that there are some major nuclear risks in the world presently, especially given tensions such as between the US and China. However, I try not to think in complete doom and gloom thinking, and hope that there may be rebirth beyond the death of a likely end to consumer society.

If I think about my own thread, I think I was aware of some aspects of the debate you raise, but probably thinking more in terms of the economic collapse being primary to the collapse of culture. — Jack Cummins

Notice how there is a division between what is basically economic history and the classical history. Today it's harder to make the point of something being a result of economic factors, not societal factors. Even more hard is to refer to factors in culture. Yet these factors do seem very important to people even in this Milennium.

I have to admit that sometimes I wonder if we are at the end of human civilisation. — Jack Cummins

Many have had that feeling since Antiquity I guess. And this one interesting thing we have with "the present": as we live in the present, we always insist that just now is the absolutely crucial time of humanity. Yet that's just our point of view. Not likely for history: not every decade is a huge turning point.

The times when our culture was on the verge of destruction might have been those few times during the Cold War that one or the other side contemplated that the other side was implementing an out of the blue nuclear strike.

Sometimes we learn only later what have been the very dramatic times:

I think that there are some major nuclear risks in the world presently, especially given tensions such as between the US and China. — Jack Cummins

Compared the time above in 1983, it isn't so bad. First, the number of nuclear weapons have dramatically decreased since the 1980's (when basically the Soviet Union finally countered the US dominance in nuclear deterrence as the "missile gap" had been in favor of the US before). And China has a "rational" nuclear deterrent as it basically has under 100 ICBMs or so. Rational in that sense, that it didn't opt for the thinking of either US or Russia and would have multiplied it's arsenal.



Just how vulnerable our society is to collapse in tragedies like war or pandemics is also a very important question. In Antiquity and later written texts were few and far between, educated people rare. Romans burning the library of Alexandria or the Mongols ravaging Baghdad amounted to a huge loss a knowledge. Now we aren't dependent on one physical place were our valued books are stored in as then. In all cases, even if we downplay the past, it is very likely that it was only a minority of who were literate in Antiquity.

One factor that makes us less vulnerable for societal collapse:

One might say that "our culture" does do pretty well. Consumer products are all over the place, Megacities all over the world look like little (or rather, large) Manhattans, more an more people speak english and you can get chummy with almost anyone. Sure, what guys saw for 2020 when reading "End of History" when it was published wasn't probably the situation we have now. Thing is, the spreading of the culture has kind of eaten its children. Most prominently jobs going away from the western countries, but also one might say that the global warming is a product of our culture spreading. At the same time, the global warming and the virus as well as jobs going away seems to have given a rise to some kind of increased sense of responsiblility among citizens. Being a super leftist by US standards, I still like the concept of MAGA, and countries coming together to fight the Virus. Globalization might have it's merits, but a national state is a construct that definitely does have theirs too. Trump (I think, as the leftist I am) might not have been in my opinion much of a president, but he did touch on things that I think are hoasome for a western national state to thrive, and consequently for the western civilization.

For most of history, the life of the next generation didn't really differ much from the previous one. That only started changing when technology and economic growth started to have a significant enough impact. Since the 1400s, the difference between one generation and the next was more observable than before. Correlating with the acceleration of advances of technology and economic growth, mostly those two things I'd say. Since at least the 1800s, each generation experiences the death of their culture, I think things are moving way too fast to call it evolution. Go back or forward sixty years and there'll be no familiarity, you'll feel like a stranger in your own country.

The technology, the infrastructure, the politics, the public opinions, the laws, the state of the institutions, the clothing people wear, the way people talk and what they do for entertainment, everything. I can read up about the culture of the 1930's but the culture of that period is very much dead, it's not still being practised and I can't go "live" 1930's culture just by going outside and interacting with normal people. Merely speaking the same language and living on the same land, that's not culture. When one speaks of culture they're not talking about that.

I think that the feeling of "my culture is deteriorating" is almost certainly correct. Drastic change seems inevitable, moral decay is not the cause, it's not strange or complicated, it's the technological and economic advancement which is driving the change. Each subsequent generation has it harder because the culture is going to change faster as it correlates with ever rapidly developing technology.

As for the links between ethnicity, land, language to culture, I think it's good stuff for politicians, filmmakers, businesspeople but ultimately superficial.

Language, religion and high culture are the only components of a nation that can survive when it reaches the end of its historical duration. These are universal values, which, because they serve all of humanity and not only the people in which they originate, justify it being remembered and admired by other peoples. The economy and institutions are only the support, local and temporary, that the nation uses to continue living while generating the symbols in which its image will remain when it itself no longer exists. But if these elements can serve humanity, it is because they have served eminently the people who created them; and they served them because they translated not only their preferences and idiosyncrasies, but a happy adaptation to the order of the real. We call this adaptation “veracity” — a supralocal and transportable value par excellence. The creations of a people can serve other peoples because they bring with them a veracity, an understanding of reality — above all, of human reality — that is valid beyond any determined historical and ethnic condition.

That is why these elements, the most distant from any economic interest, are the only guarantees of success in the material and practical field. Every people strives to master the material environment. If only a few achieve success, the difference, as demonstrated by Thomas Sowell in Conquests and Cultures, lies mainly in “cultural capital”, in the accumulated intellectual capacity that the mere struggle for life does not give, which only develops in the practice of language, religion and high culture. No people ascended to the economic and political primacy only to later dedicate themselves to higher interests. The reverse is true: the affirmation of national capabilities in those three domains predates political and economic achievements. France was Europe's cultural center long before Louis XIV's pomp. The English, before taking over the seven seas, were the supreme suppliers of saints and scholars to the Church. Germany was the radiating focus of the Reformation and then the intellectual center of the world — with Kant, Hegel and Schelling — before it was even constituted as a nation. The United States had three centuries of devout religion and a valuable literary and philosophical culture before embarking on the industrial adventure that elevated them to the peak of prosperity. Scandinavians had saints, philosophers and poets before coal and steel. Islamic power, then, was from top to bottom a creature of religion — a religion that would have been inconceivable if it had not found, as a legacy of poetic tradition, the powerful and subtle language in which the verses of the Koran were recorded. And it is not unrelated to the fate of the Spanish and Portuguese, who were quickly moved from the center to the periphery of history, due to the fact that they achieved success and wealth overnight, without possessing a strength of intellectual initiative comparable to the material power conquered.

The millennia experience, however, can be obscured until it becomes invisible and inconceivable. It is enough for a narrow-minded people to be confirmed in their materialistic illusion by a petty philosophy that explains everything by economic causes. Believing that they need to solve their material problems before taking care of the spirit, these people will remain spiritually poor and will never become smart enough to accumulate the cultural capital necessary to solve those problems. The gross pragmatism, the superficiality of the religious experience, the disdain for knowledge, the reduction of the activities of the spirit to the minimum necessary for the conquest of the job (including university), the subordination of the intelligence to the party interests, such are the structural and constant causes of the failure of these people, and then an entire nation.

I think that what you have just written in the above post is an excellent critique on the whole debate on culture and language.

I think things are moving way too fast to call it evolution. Go back or forward sixty years and there'll be no familiarity, you'll feel like a stranger in your own country. — Judaka

I assume you are well under 60 then. :wink:

60 Years? If we would be transported 60 years back to the year 1960, I think we would survive in the countries we live in (assuming we wouldn't be deported as illegal immigrants from nowhere). You see, you would understand the language spoken in 1960. You could drive a car that they had those days (there a lot of them still around). You would be familiar to cook a meal in a 1960 kitchen and familiar to what to buy from your local stores in 1960. You would know how your country works in 1960. You wouldn't have trouble adapting to that society, perhaps you would be missing only your smartphone. Likely you would have the ability to spend the next sixty years knowing that there won't be WW3 and things will improve. Yet make it the same place you live now in 1760 or the year 960 AD, then you would be clueless.

In fact our personal window to those times are our parents and grandparents, if we have the luxury to have them around still. I would always encourage people to ask their grandparents and especially their great grandparents, if they have them, to talk how thing we back then for them. How they personally felt during those times. It is history directly linked to you, as you have a bond to your grandparents. Those stories they tell are worth telling to your children later. As you said, it feels more than evolution, hence those stories are invaluable.

A great commentary, thanks Rafaella. :up:

Language, religion and high culture are the only components of a nation that can survive when it reaches the end of its historical duration. — Rafaella Leon

Or reaches a point of evolution that we cannot see other similarities between the past and the present (the example of ancient Japan and modern Japan, for example).

I like it very much when people quote Thomas Sowell, one of those great living American economists and social theorists, who likely will be cherished only after his death (he is now 90). Unfortunately now he is viewed as politically incorrect by some.

the difference, as demonstrated by Thomas Sowell in Conquests and Cultures, lies mainly in “cultural capital”, in the accumulated intellectual capacity that the mere struggle for life does not give, which only develops in the practice of language, religion and high culture. No people ascended to the economic and political primacy only to later dedicate themselves to higher interests. The reverse is true: the affirmation of national capabilities in those three domains predates political and economic achievements. — Rafaella Leon

This is a great point as the idea of "cultural capital" might seem today vague and old fashioned, and we might focus on the measurable, like economic or social indicators that are easy to compile in statistics. That sounds a lot more scientific and is simply more easy to do. Narrative history is so unacademic these days.

Yet Sowell's Cultural capital is in line with the views of the classic historians and what they have said earlier of the reasons for the rise of a culture. Cultural capital of that has then later given the societies economic wealth and political power is understandable. Nial Ferguson put this in a modern context of talking about "killer-aps" that are behind the dominance of a specific culture. These killer-aps still have a direct link to the ideologies and religion that the societies have cherished.

It isn't military of economic power itself. The greatest conquers of all time, the Mongols, have not given us much, even if everybody understands that they are good with horses and Mongolian ponies are very sturdy and tough animals. And with economics influence, not much that Spain got than the ability to fight wars and get inflation with all that gold looted from America.

There are many foreign nations today which have more in common with my home country (Australia) than 1960s Australia. I could live in many countries and survive but I'm not sure that's the point. Immigrants from Korea, China, middle-east, India, Europe and so on can adapt to living here.

I would have to adapt to an even greater extent than an immigrant does when coming here if I were to go to 1960's Australia. What I eat, what I do for entertainment, what I do for work, the way I talk, the way I dress, I'd have to change everything to fit in or simply because what I do now is not available.

The life of many my age (20s) is dominated by things which weren't even around in 2000 but that simply isn't the case if you're living in 760 or 1760, 20 years before that, people were doing the exact same and not much has changed.

It seems to me that if you can point out a few similarities to show present culture didn't just come from nowhere then it's the same. So 1960s to 2020, there's 99% changed, 1% the same, there's no objective answer I guess. You say "that's the same culture evolved" and I say "no that culture is dead and now there's new stuff", doesn't really matter. Either way, everyone now is going to experience rapid cultural changes and technological advancement is driving it.

Perhaps you should take a real time machine and sit down and have a discussion with healthy and sharp people who are in the age range of 70 to 80 years old. Those are people who were similar to you in the 1960s. Can you understand each other or is there such a huge void that it's impossible for you to understand them and for them to understand you? Many times we think that people especially before our time were totally different. Yet you can see documentaries, movies from the sixties and see how different it was. Or as I purposed, talk to people that have lived during the time.

Once a person reaches adulthood he or she is quite the same person for a long while. I assume you will be yourself, quite the same, even after five or ten years. Likely your friends will be the same and your family will be around and they will be the same. Or you think that you will talk differently, think differently and behave totally differently with people around you in the year 2030? Change from 20's something to 30's something isn't so radical as becoming a young adult from a teen.

I did notice similar thinking to yours (and this is no offense) with some social history students in the university back in the 1990's. They thought that especially the 1950's (and earlier times) were a time that they would not have been able even to breathe, so conservative and archaic they pictured the 50's to be (compared to the sixties, were they saw everything transforming to modernity). One student girl portrayed such hideous environment of the 1950's that our professor finally couldn't remain silent and she said: "Hey wait a minute! It wasn't like that. I lived in the 50's."

So 1960s to 2020, there's 99% changed, 1% the same, there's no objective answer I guess. — Judaka

Of course the matter is subjective. But notice what you say about 99% changing in 60 years. That means in seven years roughly 12% has changed, if the change happens in a steady pace. Meaning that 12% of everything you have or do would have not been existing or possible in the year 2013. Yes it was the Iphone 5C and not the Iphone 12, it was 4G and not 5G broadband back then. Yet some could argue that the difference isn't so radical.

Changes of course happen. Something obvious when we are enjoying our lives during a ravaging global pandemic (love it when you truly know that you are living through historical times).

I do not think that having the same culture is necessary to understand another human being. I do not want to add a litany of disclaimers based on what people you might think I sound like. Posters on this thread are talking as if it is reasonable to compare the cultural change in periods before the 1800s and now. That we can compare the Byzantine empire to the US and look for similarities and differences. The facts are that within the Byzantine empire, a family can do say, blacksmithing, for generations, with the exact same technology, selling the exact same thing, doing things in the exact same way. Drastic cultural change is not inevitable, things can stay the same but that's not true anymore.

You don't even need to use very recent examples, compare WW1 to WW2, just 30 years go by. The differences are just dramatic, politically, economically, militarily, technologically, culturally, everything. Even though many people lived through both wars and it's only 30 years. This kind of change is simply not possible before, I assume it is not necessary for me to actually go through all the changes? This can't happen in the Byzantine empire or whatever.

Of course the matter is subjective. But notice what you say about 99% changing in 60 years. That means in seven years roughly 12% has changed, if the change happens in a steady pace. Meaning that 12% of everything you have or do would have not been existing or possible in the year 2013 — ssu

It is not steadily changing, it is exponentially changing. Honestly, culture is not about "what you can do" and "who you can understand" it's about what people DO do and how they do it. 2013 to 2020 is more than a 12% change culturally speaking, if you look at "what is the average young person doing today" and then asked "did that exist in 2013" or "was that popular in 2013" then yeah, more than 12% would be a "no". Even if something was popular in 2013, it will most likely have adapted to be here in 2020, things are not staying the same. Do we really need to do a deep dive into this? Do you really think that between 2013 and 2020, there's been insignificant cultural and technological changes? It's actually well beyond a 12% difference, such an estimate is much too conservative.

Do you really think that between 2013 and 2020, there's been insignificant cultural and technological changes? — Judaka

Let's first remind ourselves what the term culture encompasses.

One often used definition is by Edward Tylor and is the following: "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Culture being those customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group naturally evolves. It would be a problem if culture would be stagnant and wouldn't change even if the World around us is changing, yet it is totally possible to talk about cultures.

The way you see it is rather difficult, meaning that let's say American Culture (add race/ethnicity/place if you want) of 2013 is so different of American Culture of 2020, because those customs and beliefs have somewhat changed (12%?). Well, if you cannot see ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING similar in the beliefs, arts, norms, morals, laws and customs in the 60's America and the present, then it's hard to talk about cultures. What you are talking about seems more proper to talk about a sub-culture.

Yet historians do use these broad complex terms and look at longer timelines. And many WOULD see a connection between America of 2013 and 2020, starting from things like people talk the same language, the nation states have not changed (still there is the US, Canada and Mexico...) and the people celebrate the same festivals like the Holiday season etc.

It's really very subjective but if you want to include stuff like "Americans still use English" and other basics then 1% is hyperbole but if you consider a small change, nonetheless a change then I don't think I'm hyperbolising. English is still used but so much about how it is used has changed between the 1960s and now that I can justify saying there's a significant cultural difference. The devil is in the detail, you can say "Americans of the 1960s did or thought X and so do people of 2020" but is it even remotely the same? So what exactly are you talking about, tell me a few things that you think are unchanged from the 1960s to 2020. The question isn't really whether it's changed or not but if it's changed too much for us to even care that it's the same culture. The demographics and nuances of nearly everything that existed in 1960s American culture is going to have been morphed in some way if it still exists in 2020.

Even if we say "people played baseball in the 1960s and still do in 2020" and say that the changes in how it's played, watched, reported on and everything else are different doesn't matter. The demographics, the cultural significance, opinions on the sport and a vast amount else will have and at some point, you just admit it's not the same. We can do this for American's political views, views on morality, work, ethics, whatever. I don't think there's "nothing similar" but nothing is the same and most things are very different.

I think what you're saying would make more sense if we changed your quote from "the complex whole" to "the broader whole" because you're literally talking about things like Americans using English and celebrating Christmas. How is that taking the complexity of culture into account? I don't know about 1960s America but the way people talked in 1960s Australia was very different to now, to the extent that I would have a much easier time talking English with a foreigner because I wouldn't understand the slang and terms.

As the topic is cultural decay that ends in a cultural collapse and what are the reason how this happens, it should be obvious that the focus is on dramatic long-term changes, not on how cultures evolve and subcultures emerge and change in one person's lifespan. The perspective has to be far more than one year, decade or even a generation.

People living in Northern America talking English (and Spanish) and celebrating Christmas are indeed those kind of things that are a part of culture. How English is spoken and how Christmas is celebrated has and will change over the years, yet it is obvious that we can and do talk about these issues on a more long term perspective.

For example, Modern English is defined to have emerged in the 15th Century and has been around at least since 1550. Naturally that Elizabethian English would be harder to understand, I guess, than the English used in the 1960's, but still understandable. The English of William Shakespeare is understandable even today.

On the one hand, the ancient Sumerian culture is still alive in anyone who knows the story if Noah's ark, but their language, like Latin, hung around as a special priestly code before sinking into oblivion.

I think about that when I watch Korean movies and TV shows. If the west disappeared tomorrow, its culture would still be alive as part of Korea.

Or maybe I'm not interpreting "culture" correctly?

Nice write-up, ssu.

It seems to me that language and culture are intimately linked, maybe even one and the same, at least insofar as culture is conveyed through language.

But if the two are distinct, does the death of language lead to the decay of culture, or is it the other way about? The Rosetta Stone, for instance, the “language”, persists to the present day, much longer than the cultures that it is derived from.

I think about that when I watch Korean movies and TV shows. If the west disappeared tomorrow, its culture would still be alive as part of Korea.

Or maybe I'm not interpreting "culture" correctly? — frank

I think you are interpreting it correctly.

Especially in our time of globalization there is a huge interaction between cultures, which things like the internet and social media just enforce this unification. I remember one history book putting it aptly by talking about an era of "New Hellenism". Even if a bit of hyperbole, Fukuyama's "End of History" shows just how far spread Western Culture has become. As you said, if the West or the US dissappeared tomorrow, the cultural influences would continue. The only exception would then be naturally that nothing new would develop from Western Culture. And this creativity is absolutely essential for a culture to exist: otherwise it becomes just old traditions and old songs, that people don't listen to anymore. Yet Korean and Japanese cultures are perfect examples of being very Western, yet obviously being very different and surely cultures that will continue to exist even with the Western influence. Perhaps the question is that once something is truly universal, is it something that it specifically part of a certain culture anymore. Should we be talking about a global culture?

(It is very fitting that across the Roman Pantheon, earlier the temple to the gods of ancient Rome and from the 7th Century AD a Catholic Church) there is a McDonalds. In other places that wouldn't have been tolerated, yet Rome is different.)

But if the two are distinct, does the death of language lead to the decay of culture, or is it the other way about? The Rosetta Stone, for instance, the “language”, persists to the present day, much longer than the cultures that it is derived from. — NOS4A2

You tell me the example of a culture, not a sub-culture, that isn't linked to a language. Things like the literature and songs are obviously part of a culture. If a culture has made advances in science and technology, which have become universal, that obviously is then a part of that culture persists today, yet as part of other cultures. Yet that would be more of cultural heritage, which we usually are totally ignorant of.

Another question would be, if you are the last person that can speak a language, then how much is there left of that culture linked to that language when you die? Is it some recordings in a databank in some university computer done by a linguist that interviewed you and others before you died? The local school that desperately wants to get the youth interested in learning the language? If there aren't any, what can be said about the culture in general? When it comes down to a few old people, how much do they have to carry? Today usually when a language dies, there's a record of the last person that spoke the language.

The only exception would then be naturally that nothing new would develop from Western Culture. And this creativity is absolutely essential for a culture to exist: otherwise it becomes just old traditions and old songs, that people don't listen to anymore. — ssu

Right. There are periods of decline and then periods reform and renaissance.

The way you know the culture is actually done is that the fragments are stored in a museum, and as you say, no one speaks the language anymore.

I would be completely onboard with the idea that language users keep a culture alive, for it is language that transcends generations keeping them all connected to the same parts of the world that each respective culture may find uniquely valuable/important...

Yes. The importance of language is obvious in that anthropology, the study of human societies and cultures and their development, has as one of it's main fields linguistic anthropology:

There are periods of decline and then periods reform and renaissance. — frank

To note that renaissances can happen is important as it's not obviously only a story of a culture emerging, enjoying it's apogee, decaying and then dying out and having only remnants in museums and possibly giving cultural heritage to newer cultures. That breaks the doom & gloom attitude towards existing cultures.

What is cultural collapse?

Is our culture decaying? — ssu

Maybe, but how would we know? Is there some reliable measure of cultural health analogous to individual physical health--blood pressure, white blood cell count, the ratio between high density lipids (good) and low density lipids (bad), weight, etc.? In what year did "our culture" begin? What is "cultural decay"? Is decay different than change? Yada, yada, yada.

I suspect that a lot of people thought their culture was decaying even as it was gathering steam, ever since a novel method of knapping rocks into tools was introduced on March 5th, 70,258 BCE.

Go back or forward sixty years and there'll be no familiarity, you'll feel like a stranger in your own country. — Judaka

@Judaka, who is 20 something, thinks a changing culture becomes indecipherable over a 60 year span; maybe in less time than that.

My father died at 102 in 2007. He grew up farming with horses. He had fond memories of air shows where a plane was brought into town on a rail car and assembled. The pilot flew around, did some tricks, and then the plane was taken apart and moved to another small town. (The range of the planes was short.) A few years later (1927) Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris, non stop. During his life radio, television, computers, jet passenger planes, men landing on the moon, distant planet fly-bys, organ transplants, and so on and so forth became commonplace.

Q: How did people communicate in 1960 without cell phones?
A: When they were away from home they could use pay phones, which back then were everywhere. 5¢ or 10¢ was all that it took to make a local call. Phone booths usually had a very thick white-page and a yellow-page phone directory, listing just about everybody in the city. If there was no phone book, directory assistance was free. The sound quality of the calls were almost always at least very good, but there were no apps. If you wanted to take pictures, you used a camera with a role of film in it. If you wanted to know how to get to some location, you looked at a printed map. If you wanted to know what was happening, you bought a newspaper.

Judaka: borrow a book from the library, or buy one to read on your phone--something like The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren, published in1949. There is some slang you might not get, but I am confident that you will be able to understand 1949 English, and that the low-lifes depicted in 1949 Chicago will be comprehendible. Or try Incident At Owl Creek Bridge, a short story by Ambrose Bierce published in 1890. It's a great story and again I predict that you will be able to understand 1890 English.

Read more history. You might be surprised to discover that Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both put their pants on one leg at a time. Life in ancient Egypt MIGHT be incomprehensible, but you'd be able to understand what people were doing in Boston in 1776.

What is cultural collapse? — Judaka

That is the question, isn't it.

We probably can't see it except through a long-range rear-view mirror.

Cultural / Societal / Civilizational collapse could be defined as:

the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence.

Notice the "loss of cultural identity". Societies can fall to environmental disasters they cannot cope with, and such genocidal occupations from foreign invaders or mass migrations that the society cannot heal from. Either this can happen dramatically quickly or then it will take a very long time usually by cultural assimilation. The political system, a nation, can quickly collapse, but likely a specific culture doesn't. And I would argue that one of the last things to die is language.

If so, what are people then talking about cultural decay of our time? Especially about the still quite dominant Western Culture decaying or even collapsing.

Here I think people have simply another things in mind. There are simply many discourses that people follow when they talk about cultural collapse or cultural decay.

Many likely aren't implying that our culture would end up for archaeologists to dig up and with nobody speaking English, but likely that we lose some crucial parts of our culture. If we don't hold up values that once were important, many will see it as cultural decay. Decadence as I earlier posted, is seen as one reason. Yet for example Arnold Toynbee believed that there are no laws that explain the phenomenon of the rise and fall of civilizations. Every civilization passes through its own stages and eventually declines after reaching its heights according to Toynbee.

What then is the decline of a culture? With the language dying away I am talking about a quite literal death, yet likely many will make an argument of decline in some other manner. Of course, this begs the question about what culture is about.

The archetypal experience of culture in the 1960s is very different than in 2020, few things have remained the same. That is the result of the many changes occurring, mostly as a result of technology, these changes trickle into all aspects of life. Within a culture, we can talk about clothing, music, entertainment, speech, media, laws, philosophy and much more. If we singled a topic out, started a thread about "changes in X from 1960s to 2020" would we struggle to find things to talk about? No, in fact, most of these things have changed drastically from 1960 to 2020. That is the basis for my claims.

If I went back to the 1960s, what of my culture remains? All my clothing, the foods I eat, the music I listen to, what I do for entertainment, the way I talk, my education, my work, my philosophies and pretty much everything about me would be out of place. That is just the truth.

I don't really dispute anything that you're saying, humans are humans and culture is not the be-all and end-all of understanding people. I'm quite nature orientated, I don't think people from different cultures are that different but their cultures are and that's all I'm saying.


So if a country is nuked into oblivion you call that "cultural collapse"? Doesn't that sound quite inappropriate? If the UK is nuked to oblivion but people in Sierra Leone still speak English then their culture is preserved?

By your definition, a culture "declines" by being annihilated, pretty much and really only that. Mostly by foreigners or maybe a natural disaster (not sure how many times that happened within the last millennia). Why did Australian aboriginal culture "decline" for example? Because Europeans with guns came to Australia, forced them off their land, killed them and tried to breed them out of existence. Not too much "cultural decay" there that's just being invaded by a stronger foreign power.

Western culture will morph into something totally new before something like that happens, what else could stop that besides some end of the world disaster?

Cultural / Societal / Civilizational collapse could be defined as:

the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence. — ssu

This definition fits the 'fall of the Roman Empire' fairly well. In 476 Odoacer rang down the curtain on the Roman Empire (according to many historians). It may have been this German fellow who sent the regalia of Roman office to Constantinople, recognizing that the western Roman government was defunct.

'Roman identity' didn't evaporate over night, of course; but it did begin to become less specific. The city of Rome was physically deteriorating, and if I remember, Ravenna, NE of Rome, was the occasion of government. The western provinces were undergoing their own transitions. The center did not hold, but the empire didn't descend into darkness--the dark ages.

In Britain, the Roman establishment left fairly quickly, and the empty property was abandoned. The native locals, by and large, did not move in and redecorate. For one thing, they were preoccupied by another aspect of the decline of the empire -- population movement. Two German groups moved to Britain (the Angles and Saxons) which accelerated the demise of the Gaelic culture. The Gaelic people (in England, anyway) weren't wiped out--they were gradually submerged into the AS / Viking population.

Holy Mother Church, operating out of Rome in Western Europe, mounted and sustained a long effort to convert pagans to Christianity which was more or less successful. The collapse of Roman government and military, the movement of people, and the infusion of a vigorous new religion are all part of the collapse of western empire and the rise of Western Civilization. Languages changed too. Latin was localized, becoming Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, et al. Many of the former local languages (Gaulish, Frankish, etc.) ceased and desisted.

Other civilizations--in the Western Hemisphere, for instance--suffered a fast collapse after the Spanish/Portuguese/English conquests. Different than the Roman collapse, but collapsed, never the less.

Western European Civilization appears to be neither declining nor decaying. In some ways it has become the global civilization (industrialism, capitalism, centralized. managerial states, media, trade, et cetera). Has it peaked? Too early to tell. Will it now decline if it has peaked? IF it has peaked, then it has to either plateau or decline, because that's what the word "PEAK" requires.

Starting from Gibbons onward (and very likely with similar views given by even older historians), the most cherished reason for cultural decay has been seen as moral decay, the culture becoming decadent, rude and obsessed with wealth and losing it's belief in the values that the culture has upheld as important earlier. The moral judgment is quite apparent. — ssu

Well, Gibbon wrote regarding his history of the fall of the Western Empire that he had "described the triumph of barbarism and religion." As for barbarism, he credited the barbarians with having the sense to seek to preserve the great temples and monuments of the Empire, but noted that the Christian leaders and their followers sought to destroy all trace of pagan Greco-Roman civilization. They were, in fact, very successful in doing so; what we have of what was written during classical civilization is very little, thanks in large part to the fondness early Christians had of burning whatever they could find they felt wasn't Christian in origin.

Gibbon was very much a man of the Enlightenment, and I think it's fair to say he thought that the fall of pagan civilization resulted far more from what he felt was the negative influence of Christianity than "moral decay" unless that decay was due to the acceptance of Christianity.