‘Immoderate Greatness’: Why Our Civilisation is Doomed
A review of ‘Immoderate Greatness,’ by William Ophuls; CreateSpace, 2012.
All civilisations are subject to decay. This is the main theme of William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness, a rather disquieting book that sets out how and why a culture of civilised people emerges, rises, stagnates and then collapses. Like Giambattista Vico, the 18th-century author of The New Science, Ophuls does not think this process can be stopped. The passage of ascent and decline is inevitable, and has to do with the intrinsic properties of that thing we call civilisation. The only way to stop it, or reverse it, he suggests, is live together in such a way that it could not be called a civilisation. Which is asking quite a lot.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves. The hallmark of any civilisation, writes Ophuls, an independent scholar who writes on the ecology of scarcity, is continuous growth. The population must grow, the infrastructure must expand, the use of resources must increase. And all of this, he says, leads to diminishing returns. We find we need more and more just to stay where we are, and the end result is stagnancy and inefficiency. And so, frustrated by this, we grasp for more, plundering the natural world, depleting its—and our—resources and, in Malthusian fashion, plunging ourselves into crisis. (Consider AI, predicted by Daron Acemoglu, a leading expert on the macroeconomics of AI, to increase productivity by just 0.66 percent. Thanks to the creation of data centres, needed to power AI, the emissions at Microsoft alone have shot up by 30 percent.)
We find we need more and more just to stay where we are, and the end result is stagnancy and inefficiency.
One way that a civilisation sustains its growth is by increasing the complexity of its systems. By introducing processes and bureaucracy, we can keep things running as they should. Unable to control the person, it seems, we control the system and let that mould the person into the kind of creator or consumer we wish her to be. But soon this makes the system brittle. Too complex and fragmented to respond well as a whole unit, the system grows vulnerable to shocks from outside, which are unavoidable. You, reader, may even have witnessed this yourself in certain companies: process and bureaucracy increase productivity for a while, but soon everyone is smothered and tangled up in red tape, like a fly in a spider’s web. If revenue does not keep growing, jobs are lost, and this creates gaps between people and departments so that communication suffers. Things, in other words, begin to crumble.
The material success of the ‘successful’ civilisation, Ophuls writes, inexorably brings about a decline in the morals that were necessary for the forming and sustaining of social bonds and trust. We get used to getting what we want in such a civilisation. We grow complacent—or corrupt. To deal with the chaos caused by this fragmentation of society, power becomes more concentrated; this is something Patrick Deneen and others have observed about advanced liberal societies: that more individual freedom leads, paradoxically, to greater state intervention. But when power is too concentrated, those who wield it become less effective. And so the state itself gets weaker. And in this weakened state, it cannot stand up for itself against ascendent rival civilisations. Soon, it collapses.
Well, gosh, you might think. Are things really so bad? The troubling thing about Ophuls’ gloomy little book is that it is not at all difficult to find proof of what he is saying, at least in the Western world. But I do not think Ophuls is not trying to get us down. There are parallels between Immoderate Greatness and Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful in that what both seem to call for is humility. If growth and our need for growth is the cause of overreach and collapse, then we must, like the Buddhist, learn to need little and want less. Desire is both the principal theme and the problem that emerges out of Immoderate Greatness.
The troubling thing about Ophuls’ gloomy little book is that it is not at all difficult to find proof of what he is saying.
There is a suggestion at the end of the great counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre’s Considérations sur la France that abolishing those institutions and features of life that seem to have no rational explanation unleashes untramelled desire. He warns that by tearing down the monarchy, the Church and the traditional hierarchy of France, the revolutionary may get his world of égalité, but such a world is one governed by individual appetite. A world governed by appetite — which for the Buddhist, as the Second Noble Truth tells us, is the cause of suffering— is intrinsically unstable. For Bishop Eric Varden, the Norwegian writer and Trappist monk, this is why the clergyman takes his vow of chastity. It disciplines the strongest expression of his appetite. (Amusingly, I read someone recently describe the experience of male sexuality as ‘like being chained to a lunatic.’)
For Ophuls, then, it seems to be the case that just as unrestrained desire may satisfy a person at first, but will soon bamboozle him and then make an awful mess of his life (and often the lives of those around him), desire, in particular the desire for greatness, also brings civilisation to its knees. If the final note our grim narrator strikes sounds a bit unpleasant to the ear, it is for the simple reason that the desire for greatness is a powerful one, and really, reader, do you have the impression we are all getting more humble?
