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Any small human activity, the local bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of selfsacrifice and service on the part of the members.
Other peculiarities of the period of the conquering pioneers are their readiness to improvise and experiment. Untrammelled by traditions, they will turn anything available to their purpose. If one method fails, they try something else. Uninhibited by textbooks or book learning, action is their solution to every problem. a b Kjeilen, Tore. "Sir John Bagot Glubb and the Fate of Empires". Encyclopædia of the Orient. Archived from the original on 10 March 2021 . Retrieved 8 November 2023.What are some common features of an empire's culture in its declining period? Glubb describes developments like these: A voice from the past speaking directly to the present about sex, drugs and society. Arthur John Hubbard discusses the rise and fall of the great empires of the past from the Orient to ancient Rome with a refreshingly brusque tone. The Age of Decadence – the empire is getting old… Civil dissensions arise. The boat is sinking, and instead of collaborating to repair it or to build a new one, political factions fight each other over the leftovers. Immigrants flood the cities. Memories of old rivalries reappear. In response to the sinking of the empire, the helpless citizens react with aggressiveness or with a mentality of “after me, the flood”, an atmosphere of pessimism and frivolity arises. People live for themselves and for the moment, thus accelerating the breaking apart of the empire. The Age of Intellect is accompanied by surprising advances in natural science. In the ninth century, for example, in the age of Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass before Western Europe discovered that the world was not flat. Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos.
These sudden outbursts are usually characterised by an extraordinary display of energy and courage. The new conquerors are normally poor, hardy and enterprising and above all aggressive. The ambition of the young, once engaged in the pursuit of adventure and military glory, and then in the desire for the accumulation of wealth, now turns to the acquisition of academic honours.
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When I was about seven, my Dad drew up a contract in which I promised him 50 per cent of all my future royalties. It’s nice he believed in me, and even nicer that I’ve been reliably informed it has no legal standing.
Glubb's father was Major-General Sir Frederic Manley Glubb, of Lancashire, who had been chief engineer in the British Second Army during the First World War; his mother was Letitia Bagot from County Roscommon. [ citation needed] He was a brother of the racing driver Gwenda Hawkes. Liddell Hart and Lawrence were long friends after the war until his death, Lawrence explained to Hart better than anyone.The Age of Affluence – A transition has taken place, a turn has been taken. As commerce increases, a new generation of merchants appears who does not see any merit in the old values of honor and glory, but only places value on monetary gains. As Glubb explains, the heroes of an empire's people change over time as their values do. Soldiers, builders, pioneers and explorers are admired in the initial stages of the empire life cycle. Then successful businessmen and entrepreneurs are esteemed during the ages of commerce and affluence. The merchant princes of the Age of Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by endowing works of art or patronising music and literature. They also found and endow colleges and universities. It is remarkable with what regularity this phase follows on that of wealth, in empire after empire, divided by many centuries.
As people cynically give up looking for solutions to the problems of life and society, they drop out of the system. They then turn to mindless entertainment, to luxuries and sexual activity, and to drugs or alcohol. In the parabolic trajectory of an empire, what comes next is “High Noon,” the transition from conquest and commerce to affluence. “Service” is replaced by “selfishness.” A defensive mindset takes hold of the nation, manifested in such tangible signs as Hadrian’s Wall and the Maginot Line. Conquest and military readiness are seen as immoral by a stagnant, wealth-focused citizenry. Here’s a prediction. Putin is the strong man you’ve been looking for, a geopolitical genius who will create a triumphant Russian civilization that rapidly overtakes a dying, corrupt, over-extended GAE. Meyer, Karl E.; Brysac, Shareen Blair, Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East, W.W. Norton, 2008, ISBN 978-0-393-06199-4 pp 259–92. As he notes in his examination of a number of previous empires, the processes of history often repeat themselves. We shouldn't believe that America will automatically avoid the fate of other great empires that declined and fell in the past.Expansion leads to the “Age of Commerce,” which features a great increase in trade and material wealth, especially when formerly fragmented lands are brought under one umbrella. (Glubb is very concerned about small states forming “an insuperable obstacle to trade and co-operation,” for which reason he is desirous of the creation of a European super-state. He expresses no hesitation at this goal, another strike against him, given what we see the European Union has devolved into. “Great power” is a term nobody would apply to it.) In the beginning of the Age of Commerce, virtues such as “courage, patriotism and devotion to duty” are still ubiquitous, but part of the Age of Commerce is that enterprise is turned toward seeking new forms of wealth, which leads to the “Age of Affluence.” The turn to a focus on money erodes virtue; it “silences the voice of duty.” Somewhere in here is the noontime of the empire. Yet the first signs of internal decay become visible, in particular a loss of initiative as organizations of the society calcify and virtue seeps away. The habits of the members of the community have been corrupted by the enjoyment of too much money and too much power for too long a period. In 1913, Hubbard was aware of the changes that were taking place in the Western and non-Western world. He would be astonished to see the result of this process. Particularly, he would be surprised that the Western world is far better off than it was 100 years ago; however, the higher the rise, the harder the fall. He might conclude that these victories are only prolonging the inevitable: the fall of Western civilization. Hubbard might even be more surprised to know that the Chinese civilization, one that awed him, is on the rise and has global domination ambitions. A minor point here, but the North Vietnamese Commies did expand significantly after their victory. They seized South Vietnam (larger than their own country), and also established de facto rule over Laos and eventually Cambodia, which they retain to this day. One would hardly call them a civilization, but still, Glubb had a point
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