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That seems to be the core of the issue, then. You can't have a meaningful debate about a specific thing being caused by "ambient cultural softness", if you think the very concept is incoherent.
I can imagine "ambient cultural softness". I gave two examples above, I can probably come up with more if I had to. A vegan group house that eschews violence and practices non-violent communication is soft. The Papal Enclave is soft.
I simply don't think it's a useful metric for gauging or predicting the life cycle of a civilization. The Pope has bodyguards with rifles, who are willing to use violence so he can keep his hands clean.
A concept can be entirely coherent and entirely useless. I'd react the same way if someone claimed that it's the coolness of the hairstyles in fashion that predict the rise and fall of civilization. Extending moral softness to the scale of civilization is about as useful.
Ok, then I guess it's an argument over definitions? If so, these are kind of fruitless. You can argue that your definition of ambient cultural softness is useless for the purpose of predicting what will happen to a nation / group, but that does nothing to argue against the definition of people you're disagreeing with.
I don't know if you could have picked a worse example. Even in today's secular era, you'd still probably find literal millions of people who'd voluntarily take (and for that matter "give") a bullet for the pope. The Swiss Guard are hardly a central example of soldiers of fortune or rent-a-cops, either.
How is that a bad example? The Papal Enclave exists as a nominally independent state. It preaches Christian charity and forbearance, and I believe it's probably at least 500 years since a Pope had to crack skulls with a mace (and that too was probably another pope). There is no major nation that can get away with that kind of nominal pacifism, barring those that have military alliances with stronger powers, which is just another form of outsourcing all the nasty brutish threat of violence.
Please, by all means share your definition of cultural softness. If I know what you mean, then we can move to productive debate.
Oh, come on, you were clearly using the present tense, and referring to the Vatican's armed bodyguards, not the past tense and referring to when they used to have an actual military. If we stick to your actual original argument, you could not pick a worse example precisely because this is an instance of a group recruiting it's security forces from within itself, the very opposite of what I brought up as "ambient cultural softness".
I actually agree that you can make an argument that the Catholic Church is in decline, and you can put forward many arguments for that, but this was is terrible.
You're right that this is a special circumstance, but you're reversing the effect for the cause. The military alliance with stronger powers resulted from the Church's strength - the current allies had, until very recently, so many Catholics that a refusal to protect the Vatican would result in outright rebellion. Even the Vatican's outright enemies, like the communist block in Europe, had to tread carefully in their relations with the Vatican. Things have changed since then, but that's a very recent development.
Huh??
The Vatican military/Swiss Guard is a tiny paramilitary force. It has no hope of holding up against anything much larger than a terrorist attack. It doesn't need to, because of good relations with their neighbors, and because it's in the middle of Italy.
Notice that you have changed the standard of what constitutes a group from nation states to an entire religion and all its adherents. I think that says something, and strays from the original point of contention (and when I gave specific examples of softness, I chose smaller groups because I think it's a shitty standard at the level of nation states). The Papal Enclave doesn't recruit primarily from within the Vatican, as far as I'm aware. That is a form of outsourcing. I might as well argue that the late Roman Empire was recruiting from itself, because the barbarian tribes at the borders had partially or strongly Romanized.
That is an incomplete definition at best.
Again, These were your words:
Who were you referring to, if not the Swiss Guard? You can modify the argument, if you want. I said myself that I actually think the Catholic Church is in decline, but the actual argument you actually made was not a good one.
I will again point out that the good relations with it's neighbor are a result of it's strength, not the source of it's peace. Even today, if Italy tried to antagonize the Vatican, it would find itself in massive shitstorm.
I mean, you're the one that gave the Vatican as an example. It's not a nation-state, so the rules are different. Why should I exclude people who consider themselves to be mebmbers of the group, and are willing die for it, as not part of the group?
Alright, but it's a start? Particularly when you started off by denying that an inability to recruit from within the group has anything to do with softness?
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