...each civilization is born in some inexplicable fashion
and, after a slow start, enters a period of vigorous expansion,
increasing its size and power, both internally and at the expense
of its neighbors, until gradually a crisis of organization
appears.
When this crisis has passed and the civilization has
been reorganized, it seems somewhat different. Its vigor and morale
have weakened. It becomes stabilized and eventually
stagnant. After a Golden Age of peace and prosperity,
internal crises again arise.
At this point there appears, for the first time, a
moral and physical weakness which raises,
also for the first time, questions about the civilization's ability
to defend itself against external enemies.
Racked by internal struggles of a social and
constitutional character, weakened by loss of faith in its older
ideologies and by the challenge of newer ideas incompatible with
its past nature, the civilization grows steadily weaker until it is
submerged by outside enemies, and eventually
disappears.
...The Age of Expansion is generally marked by four kinds of
expansion:
(1) of population,
(2) of geographic area,
(3) of production, and
(4) of knowledge.
The expansion of production and the expansion of knowledge
give rise to the expansion of population, and the three of these
together give rise to the expansion of geographic
extent...
...Eventually, in most civilizations the rate of expansion
begins to decline everywhere.
it is this decline in the rate of expansion of a
civilization which marks its passage from the Age of Expansion to
the Age of Conflict. This latter is the most complex, most
interesting, and most critical of all the periods of the life cycle
of a civilization. It is marked by four chief
characteristics:
(a) it is a period of declining rate of expansion;
(b) it is a period of growing tensions and class
conflicts;
(c) it is a period of increasingly frequent and increasingly
violent imperialist wars; and
(d) it is a period of growing irrationality, pessimism,
superstitions, and otherworldliness.
All these phenomena appear in the core area of a
civilization before they appear in more peripheral portions of the
society...
...The decreasing rate of expansion of the Age of Conflict
gives rise to the other characteristics of the age, in part at
least.
After the long years of the Age of Expansion,
people's minds and their social organizations are adjusted to
expansion, and it is a very difficult thing to readjust these to a
decreasing rate of expansion.
Social classes and political units within the civilization
try to compensate for the slowing of expansion through normal
growth by the use of violence against other social classes or
against other political units...
...The diffusion of material elements from one society
to another has a complex effect on the importing society.
In the short run it is usually benefitted by the
importation, but in the long run it is frequently disorganized and
weakened. When white men first came to North America,
material elements from Western Civilization spread rapidly among
the different Indian tribes. The Plains Indians, for example, were
weak and impoverished before 1543, but in that year the horse began
to diffuse northward from the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century
the Plains Indians were raised to a much higher standard of living
(because of ability to hunt buffalo from horseback) and were
immensely strengthened in their ability to resist Americans coming
westward across the continent. In the meantime, the
trans-Appalachian Indians who had been very powerful in the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to receive
firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually whiskey from the
French and later the English by way of the St. Lawrence. These
greatly weakened the woods Indians of the trans-Appalachian area
and ultimately weakened the Plains Indians of the trans-Mississippi
area, because measles and whiskey were devastating and demoralizing
and because the use of traps and guns by certain tribes made them
dependent on whites for supplies at the same time that they allowed
them to put great physical pressure on the more remote tribes which
had not yet received guns or traps. Any united front of
reds against whites was impossible, and the Indians were disrupted,
demoralized, and destroyed.
In general, importation of an element of material culture
from one society to another is helpful to the importing society in
the long run only if it is
(a) productive,
(b) can be made within the society itself,
and
(c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial
culture of the importing society without demoralizing
it.
The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon
so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their
ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability
to destroy them in a material sense with firearms.
When one society is destroyed by the impact of another
society, the people are left in a debris of cultural elements
derived from their own shattered culture as well as from the
invading culture. These elements generally provide the instruments
for fulfilling the material needs of these people, but they
cannot be organized into a functioning society because of the lack
of an ideology and spiritual cohesive...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/01.html#1
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