Decline and fall: Why golden eras end

No golden age rivals our own. Half of all improvements in human living standards over the past 10,000 years have taken place since 1990. But what happens next for us isn't fate, it's a choice, says historian, lecturer and commentator Johan Norberg.

He mines lessons from golden ages of the past in his new book, Peak Human, which examines what we can learn from the rise and fall of golden ages.

Golden eras tend to end badly, he says.

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“In all these instances of the seven golden ages I've looked at from ancient Athens and onwards, they face many disasters. Often all the horsemen of the apocalypse are there, plague, famine, war.

“But the one thing that really ruins it all is usually some sort of loss of creativity, some sort of loss of hope and optimism. People begin to think that it's hopeless to invest in a better day tomorrow, to farm, to create, to innovate. And in that case, things go downhill.”

The golden ages he studied all had a “death to Socrates” moment, he says.

“Just like ancient Athens, which took great pride in being intellectually open, a democracy of sorts. But they decided to execute their greatest philosopher, Socrates, when they feared the world, when they panicked, they wanted a scapegoat. And that's something you see in most of these eras.

“They at some point begin to crave some sort of stability at any price, some sort of orthodoxy. And then many of the great thinkers, dissenters, the intellectual pioneers, they are branded as scapegoats, and they're punished for their thoughts.”

He sees tell-tale signs in this era, he says.

“I am worried, and that's actually one of the reasons why I wrote this book. The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, he wrote about two different mindsets. It was the Athenian mindset of being open to explore, to discover, to innovate, to acquire something new, new knowledge, new partners, more wealth. That creates golden ages.

“But then we also have this Spartan mentality of shutting the world out to try to preserve what we already have. And to me, it looks like in the past 10 to 15 years or so, we've rapidly moved from an Athenian mindset to more of a Spartan mindset.”

Civilizations prosper, he argues, when they embrace trade and new ideas, but decline when they lose cultural self-confidence. The Song dynasty in China in the 10th century being a prime example, he says.

“They were the richest civilisation on the planet and they prospered through trade, innovation, through intellectual innovation.

“And they were actually quite close, according to many economic historians, to unleash an industrial revolution some four or five hundred years before Europe got there.”

Eventually a new group came to power, the Ming dynasty, he says with a very different mindset.

“They said, look, enough with all this change and innovation. We need some stability. We need to protect what we already have.

“They decided to abandon ocean-going shipping, to ban international trade, ban intellectual innovation, and even burning the maps so that nobody would get the idea of entering out into the unknown in the future.”

That resulted in several centuries of stagnation, he says.

“From having been the richest civilisation on the planet, they became a desperately poor country that could be carved up by colonial powers.”

A similar inwardness led to the decline of the great Arab civilisations, he says.

“They were the greatest civilisation. When we were in Europe in our dark ages. And that's what European scholars said as well, they had to go to the Arab world and to see Baghdad to learn about things like algebra, algorithms, arithmetic, and new science and better technology. And that's because they were incredibly open and tolerant.”

Eventually they turned inwards, he says.

“There was a rift in Islamic faith between the Shia Muslims and the Sunni Muslims. They began to use religion as a weapon against other dynasties, other places.

“And then they all started to compete, competing fanaticisms in a way, going further in burning the heretics, creating government-run madrasa schools, and blocking all that tolerance. And that ended that Islamic golden age.”

So, what of the era we live in now? Pessimism is corrosive he says.

“I think our choice, just like the choice of our ancestors, is whether we think that there's a chance that we can create a better world tomorrow for our kids and for our future.

“And in that case, to fight for it and to also accept some unpredictability, because it's always unpredictable where if we empower more people to experiment, to test new ideas, to listen to other ideas and to invite foreigners and merchants, it's always unpredictable.”

If we hunker down in an effort protect what we have, we will repeat the mistakes of the past, he says.

“In that case, I think we are turning off the taps of novelty, of growth and of innovation. So that's the choice that we're facing."