Outside the Box

Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?

John Mauldin

March 6, 2012

I had my nose in Niall Ferguson's newest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, at every possible moment during my recent trip to Hong Kong and Singapore. It's powerful and very, very timely, and I strongly recommend it. To help get the word out, I asked Niall for a short, somewhat personal piece on the thinking behind the book – in other words, what moved him to write it?

What you're going to find in the piece below for this week's Outside the Box, as well as in the book, is an author who is very concerned about our civilization's prospects – and unafraid to say so. I mean, the last time I looked, "saving the world" had gone distinctly out of fashion. And then, and then, we all grow up and get pretty focused and incremental about things: if we can just address the problem or three right in front of us, we're reasonably content.

But leave it to a Harvard history professor to break out of the box and go tilting at the big picture. And when you think of it, we're all pretty concerned at this point, however we frame the issues. Everywhere we turn, it seems, we find the forces of polarization and dissolution gnawing at our social fabric, and Yeats' fateful line about the center not holding starts to feel uncomfortably prophetic. Maybe it's about time we all thought bigger and worked harder at getting along, while we still can.

Niall turns to a notion put forth by the social scientist Charles Murray, who has called for a "civic great awakening" – a return to the original values of the American republic. We could do worse.

I want to congratulate Niall and Ayaan on their new baby, Thomas Hirsi Ferguson! May he grow up in a world that is flourishing.

Your holding out hope for our future analyst,

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box

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Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?

By Niall Ferguson

As a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since that first encounter with the greatest of all historians, I have pondered the question whether or not the modern West could succumb to degenerative tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by Gibbon. My most recent book, Civilization: The…

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Ernest Deeds

March 6, 2012, 6:47 a.m.

Concise analysis of the world economic and social advances & the resulting American decline. My hope is that some leader will appear to voice this situation and offer a plan to combat the obvious downward spiral we are now in.
  Ernest Deeds
  Retired physician

Bhupinder Bahra

March 6, 2012, 6:01 a.m.

I’d be very interested in finding out how Niall square’s his view with that of George Friedman (The Next 100 Years)? George’s central argument is compelling - that fundamentally there is no viable single contender to US global domination over the next 100 years. He argues that the US is in its ascendancy, and that with its massive navy, through control of ALL oceanic trade routes and of space it will continue to have unequalled influence over the rest of the world.

Nick Jacobs

March 6, 2012, 3:32 a.m.

A fine article by Niall Ferguson. By the way, the World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey is part of the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report 2011-2012 which can be downloaded freely from their website:
https://wefsurvey.org/index.php?sid=28226&lang=en&intro=0

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