History has Crumbled a Thousand Nations

History has crumbled a thousand nations. Some nations leave nothing but skulls and shell fragments, while other dead cultures have given us knowledge of writing, horse-back writing, and farming. These counties tell a common story about their rise to power and their decline into myth. Anthropologists make it their business to study societies and cultures, especially ones that come out of pre-history. Their discipline alone is not enough to expose the secrets of the rise and fall of man. They need the help of economists and moralists to explain the death of empires. It seems manifest that when a nation looses it’s morality, it also looses it’s economic edge which eventually spells extinction unless the people repent, as it were. 

Let’s examine what made man successful in the first place and then that kind of things might have defeated him. From the dawn of the human epoch in the earth’s history, man has been a creature of creation. Where the animals were victims of the environment, man wasn’t going to lie down and die. He was going to stand and fight. He would have made good prey animal for he was slow and came without a lot of hair to chew through if man had not of invented weapons. 

Imagine a huge jungle cat looking for a nice, lean, defenseless human to devour only to find that man with a sharpened cane like a two legged scorpion. This invention rivaled the wheel, because suddenly man became the alpha predator, competing with wolves and lions for game. Biology has never equipped any animal with tooth or claw as efficient as a manmade spear. 

Man went from hunted to hunter, and the spear led man to Africa, Asia, and Europe. This mass migration is the best evidence to man’s enormous success as a species. However, without continued innovation man soon found that his greatest success became his greatest blunder. The archeological record reads that many animals could not compete! large carnivores were the first to go followed by the prime prey animals. Mans progression was stopped. Only small, nomadic bands could survive, and that by following the migrations of their prey. 

This was the first empire of man. There might have been no authority or government, but man came to dominate the world from old Ireland to the ancient Philippines. This was his rise, but they had a flaw and it was entirely moral in character. Man did not manage his environment correctly. He lived in neolithic decadence when food was good and did not consider his limited supply. This was the first instance of what might be called conspicuous consumption. The only thing that can be any worse is that man became indolent due to his success. His basic needs were being fulfilled during the golden age of hunter-gatherer society, and he stopped inventing, meaning he stoped thinking. 

The moral issue was that man was living off of the success of earlier humans, he wasn’t creating his own success. he once again became a victim of his environment. This happens in all times and in all cultures. Thousands of years after the first hunter-gathers, there appeared a new idea: farming. Some ancient human discovered that he could control where plants grow, and even that he could affect the hereditary genetics of the plant. Thus on this one idea, a new empire was born. Man was now able to settle land. He was enabled to build houses and towns. Food surplus meant an increase in time, which he used to invent new tools and technologies. This new culture quickly wiped out surrounding hunter-gather cultures.

But alas, farmers fell into the age old trap of history: pride, conspicuous spending, and indolence. Once again they became the serfs of nature. Technology slowed, and man began doing only what they were taught by their ancestors. God looked down from the heavens and saw that man was ripening in iniquity and sent a lesser ice-age to stir them up to remembrance. What this ice age did was rob the land of water. Oceans were receding because the water was being frozen and stored in the north. This caused a mega-drought in places that used to be ideal farm locations. Man had become unable to invent and prosper. They were completely reliant on a single food source. Many died. Many reverted to hunter-gatherers, almost like a Paleolithic dark age. A remnant of that culture were able to find small hamlets to settle and keep farming alive, but they were forced now to find new ways to adapt farming to a hostile environment. 

This has been the pattern of history from Stone age cultures like the Natufians, to bronze age cultures like the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, to the Romans, and modern cultures like the old British empire or even our own. Progress stops when we stop thinking, inventing, and living a solid moral life. Different revolutions have pushed man into the future because of someone’s ability to think and invent. From the Cotton Gin to the Internet this has been true. 

It’s a warning to us that if we stop doing these uniquely human processes, that we will ultimately decline and fall, as individuals and nations. Today, many people go through school to be trained, but not to learn how to think for themselves or how to invent. This is the one critical failure of the modern schooling system. It suggests that the rising generation will not be able to cary the torch forward. However, we here can overturn the trends of history. That is what this blog is all about. If the world would remember the principles of wisdom and moral living, then humanity will prosper in the land. And that is true for all people in all places.