Wessen Niedergangs???

Geschrieben von Skaari am 06. April 2003 20:37:26:

Als Antwort auf: Ursachen des Niedergangs (nach Beesley und Widdowson geschrieben von Andreas am 06. April 2003 19:28:41:

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>Proximate causes of decline
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>Mismanagement
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>Complex societies are difficult to understand and difficult to control. No one really knows what effects a particular
> law or tax will have. We are all familiar with the law of unintended consequences, where some measure has the opposite
> effect to that intended. This results from, among other things, the existence of poorly understood feedback loops
> among the institutions of an ensemble. The overall effect is that goverments are always at risk of taking decisions
> that propel their societies towards disasters. At the time, those decisions will have seem to be highly sensible
> and logical. In retrospect, their flaws will be apparent to all.
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>Decadence
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>Decadence implies that people stop practising the virtues that led their society to high levels of integration,
> organisation and cohesion.


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>Political decadence
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>Having achieved peace and order, people become more concerned with their rights; they become insubordinate;
> the government finds it harder to push through unpopular measures.
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>Economic decadence
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>Having achieved comfortable lifestyles, people become resistant to innovation; they prefer to enjoy their wealth
> than to work hard at creating more.
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>Social decadence
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>Having achieved success, people lose interest in religion (they do not need its solace); they are less tolerant
> of misfortune and more selfish; the attitudes that led to success are de-legitimised.
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>External factors
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>Sometimes blows from outside can bring down a society that is complex and fragile. These include:


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  • Invasion by less privileged peoples, attracted
    > by the society's wealth and good order
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  • Disease--new ones emerge from time to time and
    > can be devastating
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  • Environmental change--cooling or drought can make
    > a society fail
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>These are, however, the least important explanations
> of decline. They really do harm only when mismanagement and decadence have already diminished a society's resilience.
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>Ultimate causes of decline
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>Contradictions
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>Successful societies find themselves increasingly protecting what they have already achieved, with less effort
> to expend on further progress; their very success attracts challengers, and it is difficult to stop their secrets
> leaking away; the technologies and institutions that help a society towards success also help those who would destroy
> it (e.g. the Roman peace facilitated the spread of Christianity, which was hostile to traditional Roman values);
> ascendancy means that actors are relieved of the individually borne costs of integration, organisation and cohesion,
> but can still enjoy the global benefits.
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>Ambitions & capacities
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>Ascendancy permits the proliferation of overheads, i.e. institutions and activities that are considered necessary
> but tend to be ineffective at strengthening political, economic and social relationships; people do not accept
> that a certain level of welfare is sufficient and no more is needed; the more that is done, the more the demand
> goes out for further improvements; ambitions and aspirations ratchet upwards; however, the capacity to satisfy
> those ambitions does not grow so inexorably; organisation and integration are in continual flux; they are threatened
> by decadence and mismanagement; eventually a collision between ambitions and capacities is inevitable; that produces
> not a gentle adjustment but a crisis of confidence; aspirations are disappointed, the system loses legitimacy and
> collapse ensues.
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>Non-problems


>The above model has explained decline and dark ages in terms of the logic of human relationships. Many contemporary
>predictions of a coming social catastrophe rely on quite different kinds of explanation. They include the following:


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>Some of these concerns are quite ancient. They appear to have an obvious logic and they are readily believed
>in by ordinary people. Yet appearances can be deceptive. No historical society has ever declined solely from such
>causes, even if they have been relevant at all.
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>Population
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>People speak of the 'population explosion' as a disaster in the making. Yet population growth has always been
> associated with improvements in the human condition. Societies have always been capable of limiting their numbers
> and have only allowed them to grow when it has become possible to support a higher population. For example, the
> first population explosion occurred around the time of adoption of agriculture, when human numbers took off on
> the basis of a more assured food supply. Population growth means that there are more people enjoying life expectancies.
> It can only be regarded, other than by misanthropists, as a fundamental good. The latest population explosion is
> the legacy of the industrial revolution. It is the fact that population growth is now tailing off that shows that
> the present round of human achievement is exhausting its potential. When, in a new era, humans conquer the other
> planets, problems of living space will become irrelevant.
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>Resources
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>It seems obvious that if you keep taking stuff out of the ground, you will eventually run out. Yet, as the economist
> Julian Simon has pointed out, the cost of every natural resource has decreased over recorded history, showing
> that resources tend to become less scarce--affront to common sense though that may be. Simon points out
> the role of what he calls the ultimate resource, i.e. human ingenuity, which allows people to exploit new
> materials or find new ways of exploiting old materials. R Buckminster Fuller also pointed out the phenomenon of
> ephemeralisation, whereby new technologies tend to reduce the pressure on resources--for example, today's
> mobile phone is less demanding of energy and raw materials than its bulky predecessor, while being vastly more
> capable. In any case, humanity has just scratched the surface of part of one planet in the solar system. The supposed
> problem of running out of resources is a pure myth and fantasy.
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>Technology
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>It seems obvious that labour-saving technologies must put people out of work, especially the less capable people
> who are capable of doing only manual labour. On these grounds, many people opposed the introduction of the motor
> car as threatened all those whose living relied on horse drawn carriages (from stablemen to those who scooped up
> horse droppings from the street). Yet the motor car has created far more jobs than it ever took away. The problem
> is a static view of the world, seeing only the harm that is done to the existing order and not the benefits
> of doing things in a different way. Technological improvements have always been associated with growth in human
> numbers. Despite all the hyperbolic claims for artificial intelligence, we are still a long way from creating a
> machine as flexible as a human being--even the least capable of them.
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>Environment
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>People readily believe in the notion of environmental determinism, i.e. that a society's fortunes depend on
> the climate. Westerners for example are easily convinced that the heat and humidity of the world's tropical zones
> is responsible for the laziness and underachievement of the people who live there. This is despite the underachievement
> of the temperate zones for the first 4000 years of recorded history and the fact that the west owes all its basic
> knowledge to people who once lived in those hot and humid places. Modern Singapore has become a prosperous society
> despite heat, humidity and the need to import every vital resource, including water. To be sure, climate has an
> effect on social phenomena--droughts cause hardship and damage the economy--but there is no straightforward correlation.
> People can overcome climatic problems and do not necessarily succumb to them in a feeble manner. As for worries
> about climate change, the fact is that climate has been changing, often dramatically, since time immemorial. The
> thing is to adapt to it, not try and prevent it--which would be impossible. Historically, periods of cooling have
> been regarded as the problem and warming as a desirable amelioration. The current environmentalist perception of
> warming as a problem is simply perverse. Europe was extensively deforested in early modern times and there is very
> little natural about the landscape whatsoever. Yet the planet has not suffered any obvious adverse consequences
> and Europe is a perfectly pleasant environment in which to live. It may also be noticed that there has been a great
> improvement in the environment over the last few decades, with fish returning to once poisoned rivers and city
> smogs a thing of the past. People can solve the problems of pollution by moving forward with new inventions, successfully
> exploiting what environmentalists disparagingly call the technological fix. As recent history shows, technological
> fixes work.
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