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Question: If one of those people from a century ago who believed “Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad [sic] to degeneracy and collapse” were able to view our current society, do you believe that he or she would feel vindicated? (Gestures around, gesticulating wildly.)
I’m not asking whether you believe that we are in a state of degeneracy and collapse. I’m pointing out that any worthwhile theory that liberalism will lead to degeneracy and collapse would necessarily contain a sub-belief that the people living through that degeneracy and collapse are, by definition, unable to recognize it as such. Our standards for what counts as degeneracy and collapse have been so warped that, like fish in water, we cannot even conceptualize that there’s a problem. Surely you can recognize that the reactionaries of a century ago would identify our current society as suffering from precisely the sorts of problems their theory predicted we’d be suffering through, even if you think their standards are bad or useless.
Answers:
Yes.
As @Stefferi states, they would probably have predicted that society would collapse more or less instantly upon the achievement of several prior levels of degeneracy. If they're wrong on every sub prediction, it might be fair to ignore or soften their future predictions.
Try to rank the Roman Emperors. The Biblical Jewish kings. Hell, American Presidents. All of them. The first few slots are bitterly contested, who was a better king Solomon or David? What order do Diocletian, Augustus, Hadrian go on the list? Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln are quite easily seen as GOAT or goat, depending on who is doing the rankings. Do leaders over bigger territories get extra credit over those who lead diminished geographies? But pretty quickly, you realize that none of those lists contains a preponderance of good leaders. Despite three very different polities, choosing their leaders by very different methods, the net result is similar: there are a handful of really great leaders, historically important geniuses who set their country's path for decades, sometimes centuries, to come; who are succeeded by mediocrities and losers, who fritter that momentum away over time. But it takes many mediocrities to lose the path, "There's a lot of ruin in a nation." Rome spent most of its history in "decline." The Old Testament is mostly just a series of kings turning away from the true faith, the modern Jews essentially are still running off the software created by a handful of great leaders between Moses and Solomon. This might just be a result of historiography, but it seems to me that decline and degeneracy are the normal state rather than an exceptional one; collapse comes much, much, much later than degeneracy can first be identified.
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The colapse to which these people were referring, and to which the OP is referring, is far more literal than that.
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You'd have to look at the culturally-invariant metrics like GDP, stock market performance, dominance of Silicon Valley, consumer spending, etc. Or the dominance of the US and “Western liberal democracy" to see that in spite of social norms changing, that the western democratic hegemony and America is still largely unchallenged and unassailed.
Surely we can distinguish technical developments from social developments. If there were no technical developments like computing, robotics, jet aircraft, standardized container shipping, then we would be in a much worse position economically and socially. Prosperity can paper over a lot of deeper issues.
Detroit used to be called the Paris of the West! It's now a byword for urban decline. It's only that advances in technology have been rapid enough to compensate for social decline. Maybe technology will save us from complete civilization collapse due to plummeting fertility. Medicine managed to suppress rising murder rates for example. In terms of purely social technology, we've declined massively.
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I mean, I’d point out that the usual Rome comparison degeneracy and collapse narrative tends to lead out that the Romans themselves believed they were going through a collapse at the time it was happening.
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They would probably have believed that current society has degenerated compared to theirs (which they'd already feel to be degenerate enough already), but they might be surprised that it hasn't collapsed. Indeed, if you were a reactionary in 1923, you might well believe that the entire Western civilization is going to destroyed inevitably by the onmarch of Jewish-Asiatic Bolshevism of the Soviet Union and generally the teeming hordes of Mongolic Asiatics breeding uncontrollably in China and such countries, and currently the Soviet Union is no more and, while China presents a challenge, it is certainly no longer due to uncontrollable breeding. Meanwhile, the Western liberalism chugs happily onwards.
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Do you believe 17th century Puritans if shown Belle Epoque would believe that society had degenerated? My answer will mirror yours, turning on the fulcrum of whether technological progress can make up for a supposed societal malaise. The question is, do these social restrictions (since this is all historical social norms have ever been) exist as ends themselves, or solely due to their influence on the material basis of that polity? And if the former, how exactly IS the prognostic of degeneracy supposed to be declared if not from the factors that should be downstream of that taint?
If social norms can be essentially good in and of themselves then they must by worthwhile of themselves, and any supposed or perceived deficiencies of them must be either illusory or not of importance compared to the moral/eschatological rectitude of the principals. In which case it's as unfair to say that people in a degenerate society can't notice said degeneracy as to say that a morally assured people should be capable of seeing their own self-righteousness: they're right because they are, and they are because they're right. Anything beyond that doesn't have any verifiable basis in reality.
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