The degradation of the modern American culture, including its 2008 financial and economic crisis, and the modern rejuvenation of Asian cultures are best understood within the context of 4,000 years of human history. Such are the consequences of the dynamics of cultural change, responding to societal variables of wealth, energy, and human values. This work provides a unique and formidable science-based framework for civilization development that complements and enhances the work of preeminent historians and sociologists. Accordingly, the foundation for societal progress is placed on restrictive scientific definitions, principles, and concepts of energy and wealth consumption, rather than solely on behavioral perspectives derived from empirical data and historical events. Society's dynamic forces are linked to the cultural deterioration and collapse of Ancient Greece and Rome, Imperial Spain, and Great Britain. Specific chapters are devoted to stagnation of Western civilization, Asian and Islamic resurgence, deterioration of the American culture, and ecological degradation of North America's largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay; collateral damage of socio-economic profitability. The characteristics of America's current cultural deterioration parallel those of previous great civilizations. These include abuse of wealth and energy resources; excessive individual and national debt; lack of cultural civility, discipline, integrity, and ethics; unaffordable militarism, escalating income and wealth disparities; unresolved crises in health care and public education; and stultifying cultural complexity and bureaucracy. Themes include the underlying principles responsible for the eventual deterioration of all known civilizations; the basis for the recurring, sequential periodicity of civilization success and failure; and the roles and significance of militarism and religion in civilization growth, decay, and rebirth; Addres
Wealth, Energy, and Human Values
The Dynamics of Decaying Civilizations from Ancient Greece to AmericaBy Thomas P. WallaceAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Thomas P. Wallace, Ph.D.
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4389-7627-3Contents
Foreword: The Inevitable Exhaustion of Civilizations................................................................................ixPreface: The Mysteries of Decaying Civilizations: A Scientific Perspective.........................................................xvChapter 1 The Role of Energy in Society's Organizational and Functional Systems.....................................................1Chapter 2 Wealth, Energy, and Science-based Economics...............................................................................23Chapter 3 The Driving Force of Cultural Complexity and Disorder.....................................................................50Chapter 4 Socio-economics: A Wealth-Energy Based Perspective........................................................................74Chapter 5 Socio-economic Transformations: Labor Power and Social Energy.............................................................98Chapter 6 The Mechanisms and Energetics of the Human Social Order...................................................................129Chapter 7 The Characteristics and Dynamics of Sociocultural Transitions.............................................................163Chapter 8 Periodicity of Human Advancement: Ancient Greece to the Twenty-First Century..............................................191Chapter 9 Properties and Characteristics of Sociocultural Stagnation................................................................229Chapter 10 Ecological Ramifications of Modern Socioeconomic Progress: Chesapeake Bay and the World's Oceans..........................270Chapter 11 Sociopolitical Evolution of Economic Power: The Stagnation of Western Civilization........................................290Chapter 12 Degradation of the American Culture: Abuse of Founding Principles.........................................................319Chapter 13 Shifting Twenty-First-Century Civilization Patterns: The Asian and Islamic Resurgence.....................................404Chapter 14 The Mechanistic-Thermodynamic Paradigm: A Unifying Perspective of Civilization Prosperity and Failure.....................440Appendix A The Fundamentals of Thermodynamics Applied to Socioeconomics..............................................................469
Chapter One
The Role of Energy in Society's Organizational and Functional Systems
"The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." Oswald Spengler
A multidisciplinary review of the literature regarding the evolution of societies, cultures, civilizations, and empires reveals common patterns of formation, growth, maturation, and eventual decline. Historians, political economists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and psychologists offer various interpretations and rationales for historic events and cultural attitudes, behaviors, and transformations. However, there is universal agreement that something appears to occur within mature civilizations that ultimately and significantly reduces their power, wealth, and global stature. The literature is abundant with theories, models, and rationalizations regarding the fates of past civilizations including debates as to if, and when, their destiny may appropriately be described as disintegration, stagnation, collapse, or death. Generally, authors attribute the historically observed sequence from a society's genesis to growth followed by decline as a consequence of people's inherent human instincts and cultural influences in an evolutionary process referred to as a sociocultural transition. However, some of the same authors admit that a complete and satisfying understanding of why successful civilizations ultimately decline is lacking and has not been revealed from social science approaches.
Additionally, authors tracing the evolution of cultural transitions employ the descriptive phrase cultural dynamics, but with rare exception, such literature is devoid of appropriate models that mention a driving force or an energy source necessary to energize such dynamics. The Encarta Dictionary defines "dynamics" as "the forces that tend to produce activity and change in any situation or sphere of existence." Basic physics, as well as intuition, tells us that a force requires an energy source. One wonders what such authors view as the energy source of the forces they refer to as responsible for the dynamic functions of a culture. Perhaps, it is simply a restrictive view of the energy humans absorb by consuming food and the dynamics involved in their daily activities implementing impulses of human nature.
As will be demonstrated, a thermodynamic-based economic model identifies the dynamics that drive all human existence including the economic, social, and political activities of a society. Such a model must employ strict science-based definitions of national wealth, wealth-energy resources, and related financial and economic parameters and must not violate the laws of thermodynamics. The activity and change resulting from these societal dynamics are the consequence of an almost-infinite number of specific mechanisms and conditions representing society's operational functions. It is instructive to consider a small-scale analogy of a chemical reaction to societal functional processes of existence (e.g., the complex biochemical process of photosynthesis). Such chemical processes consist of many sequential interrelated reaction mechanisms, occurring over time, under various potential sets of conditions. Depending on the nature of the specific reactants and conditions, desirable and undesirable products may be realized, with each potentially producing additional multiple products, thereby propagating a continuous multi-step process. Such mechanisms are fueled by some form of internal or external energy and conform to the laws of thermodynamics. This analogy will be more fully developed in a later chapter in conjunction with a model for civilization development.
Joseph Tainter, in The Collapse of Complex Societies, notes the mystery that surrounds the historic decline of all known civilizations: "Collapse is a recurrent feature of human societies, and indeed it is this fact that makes it worthwhile to explore a general explanation." Further, he states: "Explanations of collapse have tended to be ad hoc, pertaining only to one or a few societies, so that a general understanding remains elusive." The "general explanation" and "understanding" that "remain elusive" are due to a lack of recognition of the role wealth- energy resources play in providing the dynamics that drive the day- to-day functions of a society. More specifically, the second...
