The Life and Death of a Civilization

The life and death of a civilization is a good deal like the life and death of an individual organism. Between birth and death, the lifecycle moves steadily toward degeneration and death. The length of that lifecycle however is determined by the behavior of the organism. The organism can behave in ways that extends its lifespan or in ways that cut it short. And so can a civilization.

There are of course catastrophic forms of death for both a living organism and a civilization. But setting those aside, the lifecycles of both move from a vigorous youth, toward an increasingly ambivalent middle age, followed by degeneration and death. For a living organism, degeneration follows as the body becomes increasingly incapable of flushing the toxins that are byproducts of its normal functioning... and from copying errors in its DNA.

A living system is one whose parts organically replace themselves when they wear out. The human body replaces its cells over and over again throughout a person's lifetime. Every seven years the human body has replenished itself anew. We can think of this as akin to a generation in a civilization. By that measurement, the United States of America as an independent nation is in its late eighties. Almost a century if you count colonial times. Most of Europe is a good deal older. Israel is a confused 13 year old. Australia is a late twenty something, looking toward its thirties.

But all of these countries are suffering from fairly similar maladies, call it a virus, the black death, the Influenza pandemic that swept a bloody scythe in the 1920's. And their prognosis' are looking fairly grim.

The first problem is fairly obvious, flushing the toxins. Toxins build up naturally in the human body. As the body grows older, it becomes less capable of flushing those toxins out of its system. Crime is one such obvious toxin. So is illegal immigration. Political corruption, just to name a third. Each is a normal byproduct of a civilization's functioning. In a health civilization, they can be controlled and flushed out when they become dangerous. In a weakened state however, they poison and sicken the body politic, and can even contribute to killing it.

Secondly there is the DNA copying problem. To reproduce its sub-parts a living organism needs to make accurate copies of them. In a civilization that means passing down core laws, beliefs and practices from generation to generation. In a living organism, multiple copies produce increasingly error prone copies, much like a game of broken telephone does. The bad copies can then result in mutated cells, cancers and failures. In a civilization, bad copies of its values and principles can mean a generation raised on mutated beliefs, that allows cancers to thrive within the body politic.

We might look at the United States Constitution as an example of the nation's core DNA. The information that each generation needs to successfully replicate the United States of America. From generation to generation, what we've been doing is making copies of the Constitution. You might protest that we have the original copies on display in their specific wording. However that really doesn't matter, because every generation has "interpreted" the Constitution in ways relevant to its own agendas and understanding. This has led to copying errors in our national DNA. Each succeeding re-interpretation of the Constitution has been an increasingly mutated one, resulting in an increasingly mutated understanding of American law and government.

Of course no civilization, like no living organism, can exist forever. But the lives of our civilizations are imperiled through a combination of factors.

First of all, we have become increasingly incapable of flushing our toxins. The resulting toxic buildup is doing severe damage to our basic systems, and each toxin is not an isolated problem, but are intertwined. Immigration continues to drive crime. Political corruption drives immigration. Islamic terrorism depends on all three.

Secondly, copying errors have led to the loss of our ideals. We are living in a system in which cancerous cells thrive, and healthy ones are attacked by a dysfunctional immune system which has been hijacked to function in a diseased organism. The loss of meaning has corrupted and inverted our political system, making it cancerous. And our political immune systems, the press, law enforcement and academia, are working to fight healthy cells, while letting diseased cells through, and generating even more extreme copying errors.

Third of all, we are under attack by a virus known as Islam. This has occurred even while we are already succumbing to the virus of socialism, one we have been fighting for well over a century, 28 years in human cellular generations. This virus has corrupted our DNA quite badly, resulting in a dysfunctional immune system and a body at war with itself.

If our civilizations were healthy, the Islamic virus would pose no threat. But in our current weakened state, the effect is similar to that of a man with a damaged immune system coming down with the flu. What might be a mild problem to a healthy organism, is fatal to a weakened organism.

This trinity of problems highlight what we are suffering now, as well as the solution. To survive we must restore our DNA to a clean, or at least a cleaner copy. We must rebuild our immune systems to begin fighting the diseased cells and to repel the external viruses. That means rebooting our national ideals, laws and government to a clean state in order to compensate for the copying errors. With that as the bellwether, we can then clearly divide cells into healthy and diseased ones, and begin treating any part of the immune system that attacks healthy cells, as rogue and cancerous... and destroy it.

No civilization lives forever, but what we are undergoing now is not natural, instead a particular political species, one that has shown a great ability to cultivate knowledge, be technologically and creatively productive, is under attack from without and within. And should it perish, ultimately the diseased cells will die with the healthy. For like the virus that kills its host, only to die in turn, the destructive force means death even to itself. While the living organism represents the future of the world.