In a post from January called Degeneracy Pressure, I remarked on the similarities between a collapsing star and a collapsing civilization. In both cases the differentiated parts of the system that once created stabilizing and uplifting forces have been transformed, by an irresistible alchemy, into a homogeneous, inert mass that exerts a crushing gravitational pressure. One by one, as catastrophic thresholds are crossed, the structural members of the system fail and give way, until at last nothing remains to give it form — and the star, or the civilization, falls in upon itself and winks out of existence.

Of course the analogy is not perfect. A star is a simple thing, really, and the course of its collapse is, in general terms, entirely determined by its mass and a few physical laws. A civilization is not so simple, but its collapse does, nevertheless, proceed in what we might call a ‘lawful’ way, and we can identify some of the principles at work.

For example:

One of the central mechanisms by which high civilizations seem always to fail is by declining birthrates among their most successful and intelligent classes — the very segment of the population that is necessary for carrying forward the civilization’s ever-increasing heritage of knowledge and culture, and for providing sufficient numbers of offspring in the succeeding generation having the qualities, both innate and acculturated, that are necessary to receive it.

To connect this to our stellar-collapse analogy, we could say that the mass of accumulated culture becomes too great for a shrinking structure to bear. But unlike the physical structure of a star, the scaffolding of civilization can fail not only by quantitative, numerical attrition of its load-bearing members, as described in the quoted passage, but also by their qualitative degeneration and decay.

Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially ‘memetic’ — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”: given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse.

Our reader and commenter Dom, in our most recent Open Thread, has linked to an article that illustrates this process.