EPILOGUE - THE RISE & FALL TO THE HUMAN EMPIRE

NOTE: This is the EPILOGUE of a book to be published later in 2021.

We are if anything as Homo sapiens a most interesting species. We invent words that lead to language, thinking in these words that lead to thoughts, selective thoughts that become philosophies, building our lives around these philosophies into religions, treating these religions as sanctuaries of truth, then fighting to the death to defend these religions as truth personified when they are inventions of our imaginings to protect us from ourselves.

From the opening chapters of our existence those many millenniums ago, we have felt self-conscious and vulnerable to the forces outside, a gift of our consciousness. Alas, we have always been fearful of the unknown and the unknowable, consumed with self-doubt, wondering why we are here, and why we have been separated from the animal kingdom of Mother Nature that terrifies us, problems these other species don't experience as they simply exist instinctively.

To combat this self-doubt, misgivings, fears, and this sense of loneliness, we have created an artificial world which we treat as reality. This includes God that exists in our consciousness as an invention as many "Secular Age" youth of postmodernity are inclined to believe.

It was the seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), who posited the philosophical wager that human beings gamble with their lives that God either exists or does not. Since we do not know whether God exists then we should play it safe rather than risk being sorry.

[Being born during The Great Depression as an Irish Roman Catholic and instructed in my early life by the good Sisters of St. Francis, my long life has often played havoc with these early certainties. I am a renegade Roman Catholic, but a Roman Catholic nonetheless, thankful that I had this early nurturing which has served me well in my many careers. I confess to being a Catholic writer seeing life through that specific lens and filter with that inevitable biased perspective. Ideas have always fascinated me, even controversial ones. That said, I am not inclined to be either a proselytizer or a crusader. My hope is only to stimulate thought in others to be better in touch with themselves. Nor do I believe the "Good Books" were the works of other than men divinely inspired as they may be. In this "Secular Age," we are constantly bombarded with extraneous multi-faceted stimulation telling us what to think, what to believe, what to value, and how to behave. Our consciousness with its curiosity is without barriers less we construct them around ourselves.]

Words are our most sophisticated invention. We have created societies and civilizations out of words from primitive to modern, from pagan gods to the monotheistic God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We see the same God at the helm to guide our species through life to safety if not in this life surely into the next. Yet, each of these religions treats the monotheistic God as more divine than the others, warring endlessly with each other.

Pagan religions made human sacrifices. Christianity makes symbolically cannibalistic sacrifices in the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ (transubstantiation), while the purpose of both pagan and Christian rituals is to pay homage to their polytheistic gods or our monotheistic God.

With words, we have created sacred books such as the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran to preserve and reinforce our dependence on The Word and secure our existence beyond our mortality. We have gone to war with others of our species for failure to acknowledge and follow the beliefs of The Word or for our failure to conduct our lives consistent with The Word.

As evidence of the power of The Word, we have built magnificent churches, temples, synagogues, and cathedrals displaying our ingenuity centuries before the science of architecture and engineering had reached the heights it enjoys today, physical evidence that our species is in touch with the Almighty.

The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire is a modest attempt to show how the use of words has led to language than to mature ideas. We have in turn built our lives around ideas only to have them come crashing down due to man's shortsightedness. From the dawn of our consciousness, we have progressed and periodically regressed but always remained optimistic, even utopian, in the worst of times, believing we are equal to the challenge.

Anthropologists claim language was first a form of gossip built around the primitive anxieties of love and hate, envy and jealousy, fear and loathing, loneliness and isolation. It was neither an instrumental nor a terminal device of consciousness but simply a spontaneous intuitive response to ill-defined needs that have come to dominate our unconscious behavior. This was displayed in another sense during "The Hunting & Gathering" period remained a way of life for Homo heidelbergensis (700,000 to 200,000 years ago), a time when men would band together to forage for food by killing animals much larger, agile, powerful, and menacing. These men invented crude weapons and used their innate cunning to trap and subdue these prey. This success led to their survival and enhanced their sense of power using their consciousness.

EVOLVING FROM THE HUNTING & GATHERING PERIOD

Men and women next became farmers learning to till the soil and seed plants to provide food in abundance to supplement the need to kill animals exclusively for food, even leading to the domesticated of animals as beasts of burden, which led to the formation of small groups becoming larger groups and then small colonies.

These developments radically changed social existence as close-knit groups led to the formation of families transferring dominance of the group from women to men. Every aspect of human existence has evolved progressively, mainly spontaneously and situationally. This was true of the family, the home, the nature of morality and ethics as they were all inventions of "Men of Ideas" and over time reified into conventions, then defended as if designed by God as the case may be.

As farms, land became property, ownership of property became wealth, which led to power and dominance of the more resourceful property owners. At the same time, farmers who perfected weapons for hunting now employed these weapons to defend their property.

"Men of Words" and "Men of Ideas" escalated into prominence. First as servants to landowners then monarchs and kings who seldom had the time or inclination to learn how to read or write as they saw themselves as "Men of Action," depending upon these clerks to ensure their legitimacy and to sustain their dominance by keeping ledgers and tracking logistical support and supplies as indicators of their wealth and power.

On the pages of this book, we see the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: the Greek Civilization and the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the Spanish and British Empires, all manifestations of “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire.”

In each scenario, we see “Men of Words” as philosophers, theologians, economists, and psychologists providing "Men of Action" with the rationale to legitimize their prominence and dominance.

War is the leading catalyst to revolution from the Industrial Revolution, to the Age of Faith, to the Scientific Revolution, to the Renaissance, to the Reformation, to the Age of Enlightenment, to the Technology Revolution, and now the Information Age while the Secular Age as such is not yet defined but becoming increasingly prominent.

Doubt and misgivings are often the sparks to lift our species out of its comfort zone to eventually soar. We seldom think of motivation being so mundane, but it was quite apparent in the monasteries of the Middle Ages when monks with too much time on their hands followed their curiosity to the dismay of the absolute authority of the Roman Catholic Church, a curiosity that led to modern science, philosophy, and psychology. Words and ideas as presented are mutually interdependent as the primary narrative over mainly the last 500 years (see Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life,” 2000).

Words have led to systems of thought, and these systems have led to constructs by which we now live called by their advocates as democracies, oligarchies, capitalistic, social systems (such as communism), and theocracies, then at another level institutionally as universities, industrial and commercial corporate enterprises, think tanks, governments, and other citadels of intrigue and persuasion.

With these many millenniums as our history, we are running out of room, running out of water, running out of food, and running out of fresh air to breathe that continues unabated unless and until we change our ways of thinking, behaving, and living.

The irony is that with our species exalted consciousness and problem-solving capabilities we have become slaves to our appetites, and want our cake and eat it, too. This has unwittingly placed the survival of our species in jeopardy, as we are still obsessed with the new, failing to see with every new thing, something is lost with “cut & control” finality.

This observer has enjoyed a long life born when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were coming to power which was in the era of The Great Depression, and on the eve of what would become the Second World War in which nearly one hundred million would perish. It is this shortsightedness that I have come to identify as NOWHERE MAN seeing our species ineluctably moving into NOWHERE LAND. And for that reason, I have written this book.

[In the first sixteen years of this new century, I worked off and on to create 24 essays. Philosopher and novelist, Charles D. Hayes suggested that I post these as 24 individual essays on Amazon's Kindle, which I did in 2016, and now they have become this book. The title is credited to Ken Shelton, author, publisher, consultant, and friend who is familiar with my work.]

ADDENDUM

We have become a secular society with our civil religion the government and its economic mandates. Meanwhile, our corporate infrastructure has lost its integrity and the people’s trust. Rather than challenge this new corporate “Gilded Age,” reminiscent of its earlier appearance in 19th century American history when the “Robber Barons” (i.e., Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller) dictated economic reality, today the populace willingly embraces the new corporate “Robber Barons” of Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al, mesmerized by social media platforms blurring constitutional rights with no apparent interest in doing anything. Thirty years ago, Corporate America was king teetering on schizophrenic confusion. This caused me to write:

Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening or why. The era of free lunch supposedly ended in the 20th century. This century began with such paternal control and submissive obedience has now run amuck. No one (and nothing) is in control (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991, pp. 37-38).

Fast forward and we see government in the early 21st century bent on restoring the “free lunch” while the once-revered Executive, Legislative, and Supreme Court branches of the federal government appear frozen in forward inertia by divisive political intrigue unraveling in a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The Center for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health hide behind science failing to manage this with a consistent policy. The vacuum left behind has left citizens confused (i.e., masks/no masks, vaccinations/no vaccinations) as to how to protect themselves and their loved ones.

In this climate, millennial and centennial youth ignore the muddle with their cellphone prayer books ignoring the high jinx paranoia of the talking heads of CNN and FOX Cable News who fill the airwaves with their biased solipsistic narcissistic polarities.

Society is broken. The systemic “chain of command of authority” which once provided some sense of order has lost its relevance and impact: from parents in the home to academics in the classroom to leaders in the free enterprise system. It happened in ancient Greece. The seeds of decadence were palpable but ignored. We hear this in the lament of Socrates about the youth of his time:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

The same occurred in ancient Rome, again with the Roman Catholic Church, and currently to the Judaic-Christian culture as political correctness, political identity, and critical race theory distract from embracing issues that find society teetering on the precipice of its demise. Nobel Laureate poet T. S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men” (1925): ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’

A WAY OF LOOKING AT WHAT WE ARE AND HAVE BECOME

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – The more things change the more they remain the same thing.

French author, journalist, and critic, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808 – 1890) coined this expression that lives on to the present.

Déjà vu is one way of looking at “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire.” Man’s coping has much in common with his relentless attempt to survive while repeating the same errors in judgment, ad infinitum while continuously returning to the same well. We have never moved off our earliest superstitions.

The shaman was able to bottle man’s fears by making up what natural phenomena meant (sunrise, sunset, thunderstorms, torrential rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, extremely hot and frigid seasons, and so on). Religions were a natural progression from these early disturbing episodes from pagan polytheism to monotheism.

Continuing the idea that monotheism like polytheism is made up consistent with the legacy of the shaman, evidence of monotheism emerges first in Egypt in the 14th-century (1353 – 1336 BCE) during the reign of Akhenaten. The king was known to have worshipped Aten, the sun god, which constituted the first monotheistic religion in the world. Akhenaten’s exclusive worship of the sun god led Egyptologists to claim that he created the world's first monotheistic religion. However, modern scholars note that Akhenaten's cult drew from aspects of other gods—particularly re-Harakhte, Shu, and Ma’at—in its imagining and worship of Aten.

Others claim the world's first monotheistic God was Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4,000 years ago. Arguably the world's first monotheistic faith, it's one of the oldest religions still in existence. That said, some claim the first god was Brahma and that the Hindus are the creators of god. Brahma is also known as the Grandfather and later as the equivalent of Prajapati, the primeval first god. In early Hindu sources such as the Mahabharata, Brahma is supreme in the triad of great Hindu gods which includes Shiva and Vishnu.

The point is that Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism are relatively recent in the schemes of things yet consistent with the need for some deity outside ourselves to cope with life in its growing complexity and confusion.

Christianity, we see in these pages, has been self-conscious in its quest for dominance, relevance, and legitimacy. In that sense, it has been like other religions, that is, having fallen prey too often to behaving counter to what it claims its sacred mission. To sustain its existence, Christianity created the “Divine Right of Kings,” which is a European political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not, therefore, be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as parliament. Originating in Europe, the divine-right-of-kings can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–1625) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). This revolution was also called “The Bloodless Revolution,” which took place from 1688 to 1689 in England which involved the overthrow of the Catholic King James II, who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV (1643–1715) of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious beliefs. The American Revolution (1775–1783), the French Revolution (1789), and the Napoleonic Wars deprived the divine right doctrine of its remaining credibility.

The bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704), one of the principal French theorists of the divine right asserted that the king's person and authority were sacred; that his power was modeled on that of a Father’s and was absolute, deriving from God; and that he was governed by reason (i.e., custom and precedence).

In the middle of the 17th century, the English Royalist squire Sir Robert Filmer (1588 – 1653) likewise held that the state was a family and that the king was a father. He claimed, in an interpretation of biblical Scripture, that Adam was the first king and that Charles I (reigned 1625–1649) ruled England as Adam’s eldest heir. The anti-absolutist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote his First Treatise of Civil Government (1689) to refute that argument.

Before we dispense with this as mere history, the Pope for Roman Catholicism is the absolute authority in matters of faith and morals which he publishes in encyclicals (i.e., papal letters) to his bishops throughout the world. These encyclicals carry particular weight because they are formal documents.

In a secular sense, the lay world of American corporate society promotes the idea that the corporation is a family, and the CEO is the father figure along with his managers. Workers are meant to obligingly follow the chain of command of authority with departure from that structure treated as insubordination. This has unraveled after World War Two.

With the economic boom that followed that war, a majority of American parents anxious to exploit this opportunity both took jobs outside the home. This was not surprising as many women worked in American factories during the war (e.g., the symbolism of “Rosie the Riveter”) and enjoyed the feeling of independence making their own money. This had lasting consequences however as many children became their “own parents” and were left to their own devices. The war also gave birth to the “baby boomer generation” (born between 1946 – 1964), the largest and the longest living generation in American history.

Parents out of guilt for their absence working or preferring to be their children's best friend than authority figures showered their children with material things, things that were substitutes for love, and attention. Materialism became a substitute for affection as there was little time for simply caring. This led to what I call “the spoiled brat generation,” with no place for pain or suffering, disappointment or failure, struggle or growth, indeed, no place for a mature adult with a conscience. Individualism and independence have been the casualties with progress and success somebody else’s responsibility, say the government’s with the herd mentality the order of the day. I write in Be Your Own Best Friend (2017):

To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. The same holds true of ourselves.

Likewise, the doctrine of divine right was dangerous for both church and state. For the state, it suggested that secular authority was conferred, and therefore could be removed by the church. For the church, it implied that kings have a direct relationship to God and therefore may dictate to ecclesiastical rulers such as the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church. We never escape the foibles of our personal or collective worlds.

Today the patterns displayed in the theologies of our time continue to clash culturally with each other and with religions of the East in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as the West attempts to impose its moral agenda of free enterprise and human rights on national sovereignties of differing religious persuasions. Unhappily, the same embarrassing results occurred with indigenous natives of South America in the 16th century by well-meaning Christian Missionaries.

The Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of Roman Catholicism and gave birth to free enterprise and capitalism, ending, or so it seemed European feudalism. Yet post-World War Two Europe appeared reluctant to dismantle its pre-war national industrial centers that had a striking resemblance to feudalism as I experienced working for Honeywell in Europe in the 1980s.

Following the idea that everything is speculatively created as we go along, evidence of this was apparent when Rome fell and the Christian Church gained new life with the Supreme Pontiff of Catholicism establishing a power structure similar to that of the Roman Emperor. The Pontiff’s governing body consisted of the Roman Curia kin to the Roman Parliament, with the church's “command & control” hierarchy of the College of Cardinals, Catholic Bishops, Monsignors, Priests, and Monks similar to that of the Roman Army’s Generals, commissioned and noncommissioned officers, and soldiers. Indeed, the Emperor’s Praetorian Guard, a special force serving as the pope’s personal guard, was now the Swiss Praetorian Guard of the Pope in that symbolic role to this very day.

Indeed, industrialism in the West evolved with craftsmen out of feudalism during the middle ages forming small working groups called guilds where there were no bosses but workers of various skills committed to the same enterprise: e.g., producing wood, metal, glass, and machine parts. These craftsmen evolved into carpenters, sheet metal workers, and eventually tool & die, makers.

With war came the invention of new weapons in the American Civil War including battleships, submarines, and canon power providing new roles for tool & die, craftsmen. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, bicycle mechanic Henry Ford became a successful producer of the Model T Ford, while equally self-educated Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb that led to the public utility.

Henry Ford used the newly invented assembly line to economically produce his automobiles, cleverly coming up with the idea in January 1914 to increase hourly workers' pay to $5 a day when this was more than the weekly wage of many industrial workers. Doubling the average wage helped ensure a stable workforce and directly boosted the sales of his Model T Ford as workers could now afford to buy what they were making. It also laid the foundation for an economy-driven consumer economy. As a result, thanks to Henry Ford the working middle class took off more than one hundred years ago.

Thomas Edison exerted a similar influence on modern life. In addition to inventing the incandescent light bulb, he invented the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improved the telegraph and the telephone. More dramatically, the electrical age began on September 4, 1882. It was on that day that Edison Illuminating Company flipped the switch on his power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, providing electricity to homes at a price comparable to gas. Cleverly, because Edison used 100-volt direct current to power his new light bulbs, customers could be no further than ½ mile from the generator. But he needed a high-profile location to promote the system. Edison chose a site in the heart of New York's financial district, at 255 and 257 Pearl Street.

Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, were called “Robber Barons” because they created monopolies in railroads, steel, automobile manufacturing, et al, controlling these sources of revenue that resulted in huge profits while intentionally regulating prices restricting goods produced by competitors. Author Mark Twain called this period the “Gilded Age,” which occurred in the United States during the late 19th century, from the 1870s to 1900. It was a period of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States.

These “Robber Barons” continued to compensate their executives and managers modestly before and during World War Two. Managerial compensation compared to workers was then the equivalent of ten times that of workers – who earned approximately $12.98 per week for 59 hours of work in 1900 or $674.96 a year – or a little less than one-tenth of the $70,000 some executives earned.

Management as a class was a product of WWII. After 1946, management successfully sold the idea to the American public that “it” had won the war by successfully managing logistical support, the timely delivering of supplies and weapons to fighting men at the battlefront, while economically husbanding vital raw materials to effect a positive outcome of the war, thus implying its extraordinary role in the war’s triumph (see David Halberstam’s quote, p 69). A spate of books focused fixedly on management to confirm management’s essential role and that of the manager to motivate and mobilize the worker population to sustain America’s industrial might. To wit:

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid, 1964

Peter Block, The Empowered Manager, 1987

James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978

Saul Gellerman, Why Good Managers Make Bad Ethical Choices, 1985

Paul Hersey & Kenneth Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior, 1972

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960,

Peter Drucker, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973, et al

Management still in the 21st century is keen to continue to see itself as the parent and workers as its family, consistent with the “Divine Rights of Kings” of the middle ages with little sense that work, workers, and the workplace have radically changed with knowledge workers now superseding the position power of management, making management itself anachronistic and managers atavistic.

That said management’s compensation continues to soar as multiple levels of management were created during the boom years resembling empires that have been difficult to dismantle. Even so, management continues to cling to the idea of being indispensable with CEOs today earning as much as 300 or more times that of workers, growing a staggering 940 percent since 1978. Consequently, professionally trained engineers, statisticians, chemists, biologists, and other highly skilled professionals have opted to become pyramid climbers seeking their fortunes as managers leaving their professional credentials behind (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers, 2nd edition, 2014, The Worker, Alone, Going Against the Grain, 2nd edition, 2012).

Management guru Peter Drucker writes regarding executive compensation:

In the current version of business ethics in the United States, one side has all the obligations and the other side has all the entitlements. This is compatible neither with the ethics of interdependence nor with a universal code of ethics. It corrodes the bond of trust that times superior to subordinate (Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, John E. Flaherty, 1999, p 270).

Some thirty years ago this ethic and trust were already unraveling as the “Rise & Fall” of the corporation was evident in the tea leaves (see Work Without Managers, A View from the Trenches, 2nd edition, 2013).

The Covid-19 Pandemic accelerated this demise as virtual workers in their homes and not in brick & mortar centers is a new reality. More than 60 percent of professionals now prefer working at home, and 20 percent are willing to take less money to do so, seeing no reason for bosses and the constant disruption of work by managers whose only function seemingly is to get in the way of productive work. We can see how management has mishandled this pandemic from the Center for Disease Control to the National Institute of Health to the President of the United States to Congress to the Governors of the fifty states, to the media that takes political sides leading to the increasing confusion of many Americans.

At another level, our constitutional government, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the role of elected representatives and the voting public as the arbiters of civilian authority over the military and appointed officials have been bridged.

New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt writes:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to PERIL (2021), a new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China on January 8, two days after Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his election loss and in the second of two such calls. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”(Published September 14, 2021, Updated September 15, 2021)

Imagine President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warning the Japanese that the President of the United States was about to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end the Second World War in the Pacific.

Then remember in the famous civilian-military confrontation when President Harry S. Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command of the U.S. forces in Korea. This firing set off an uproar among the American public but the president held his ground and weathered the storm. On April 11, 1951, President Truman flew to Korea and met with General MacArthur who was saber-rattling at the time threatening to invade Manchuria and suggesting using the atomic bomb against China in Manchuria. Truman aware of the general’s flamboyance, said, “I’ll put that egotistical bastard in his place,” and he did flying to Korea and relieving him of his command, demonstrating publically that America’s democratic civilian authority took precedence over military authority.

Imagine if General Milley bypassed the President of the United States in 1945 as he did in 2020, with the bogus rationale that he had to console China by promising to forewarn China if the United States should ever plan on launching an attack. It is only a brief 75 years ago when the President of the United States was clearly in charge, only to find this republic three-quarters of a century later spiraling into confusion if not chaos while crippled with the COVID-19 pandemic. This young nation will be only 250 years old in 2025 yet appears to be unraveling as did the empires of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Great Britain, Spain, and the Roman Catholic Church. If there is an iota of truth to the alleged findings of Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, PERIL, our demise as an empire may be closer than we think. It is why “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” was written with its provocative assertion that the civilization we cherish and its Judaic-Christian culture appears to be unraveling.

To put this in perspective, French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon wrote in 1896:

The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation. Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

AMERICA’S VEXING CULTURAL DNA

There seems a pesky shadow to America’s DNA that follows a cultural schizophrenic narrative. The exact nature of schizophrenia isn't known, but it is believed to be a combination of genetics, environment, and altered brain chemistry and structure that may play a role in behavior. Schizophrenia is characterized by thoughts or experiences that seem out of touch with reality, disorganized speech or behavior, and decreased participation in daily activities in a consistent and meaningful way. Difficulty with concentration and memory may also be manifested in repetitive behavior patterns.

ISOLATIONISM

Donald J. Trump was spirited into office with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” This isolationistic ploy originated with General Robert E. Wood’s “American First Committee” in 1940, the foremost United States pressure group against entry into World War II. To be fair, many who supported the presidency of Donald Trump are embarrassed with the January 6, 2020 storming of the nation’s Capitol. One reader who has read this book in manuscript form defends Trump supporters:

Yes, history repeats itself, and for understandable and justifiable reasons. Until Trump, the US had been going the opposite direction for 30 years, hoodwinked by the globalists, who aimed to weaken nation-states and elevate transnational corporations, which they did. Trump did not equate globalism with fascism, but that label fits, recalling Mussolini's vision of a partnership of government with big corporations, marginalizing the citizens. The South Korean miracle relied totally on protectionism. So did Japan's. China too used protectionism, with impunity, until Trump rode in. The globalists meant for China to grow, exempting them from reciprocal free trade. All in plain sight. I'd call it corruption... 'the family' first. Successive US administrations, Republican and Democrat, we're happy to go along with it, turning a blind eye. Or were they just that stupid? Trump, being an outsider, was happy to say out loud what no one in 'the family' would ever say; the emperor has no clothes, and in the case of American workers, no good jobs and no corporate taxes to maintain infrastructure. So, America 1st was a long overdue reply to 'the family' 1st.

[“The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” traces societies across the globe and throughout history who react to circumstances rather than anticipating and then acting. This writer chooses to see Donald J. Trump as the exception.]

Consistent with our cultural DNA, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term largely on the promise of keeping America out of WWII, that is until the Empire of Japan bombed the United States Seventh Fleet on December 7, 1941, in the Hawaiian Islands at Pearl Harbor.

Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson was elected to a second term in 1916 promising to keep the United States out of WWI. That changed in 1917 when a German submarine sank the British ocean liner The RMS Lusitania in 1915 killing 1,198 passengers including 128 American citizens. In 1916 The SS Sussex, an unarmed ferry under the French flag was torpedoed in the English Channel with four Americans among the dead. The United States then mobilized for war. Prominent Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, an avowed isolationist, supported a “Declaration of War” when Wilson asked for this on April 6, 1917, declaring war on Germany, and subsequently on Austria-Hungary with bilateral Congressional support.

After WWI, Senator Lodge returned to his isolationism opposing the United States joining The League of Nations, an international organization largely the creation of President Wilson.

The unlikely presidency of Donald Trump suggested a return to isolationism with his rhetoric of “we/they” divisive tribal polarity with a direct appeal to the shattered mainly white working middle-class. When he failed to be reelected for a second term, these loyal supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2020, believing President Joseph Biden stole the election although winning the popular and Electoral College vote. Academic psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh writes in “HIVEMIND: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World” (2019):

We are at a watershed moment, for these new technologies have not only allowed us to access a world of information and communication but have also ushered in a revolution in our social functioning.

British Swiss writer Johann Hari adds in Lost Connections: Why You Are Depressed and How to Find Hope (2019):

“The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. Our obsessive use of social media is an attempt to fill a hole, a great hallowing that took place before anyone had a smartphone.”

Eric Hoffer claimed in “The True Believer” (1951) that people joined mass movements to escape their ineffectual and helpless individual selves often leading to fanatic zeal while embracing “mob rule” leaving their consciences and moral connection to the wider society.

When Donald Trump ran for the presidency, the mainly white working middle class had essentially collapsed with his rhetoric suggesting something outside itself must be the cause, seeing well-paying jobs going to low-paid workers in Mexico, India, South Korea, and China. These displaced or marginalized American workers rallied to the voice that declared they had done nothing wrong. No attention was given to workers' obsolescent skills or that they were being replaced by knowledge workers comfortable with robotics, electronics, and the changing requirements of work.

Rather than Europe and Asia being the cause, the culprit appeared to be our anachronistic education system, producing high school graduates who could neither read nor write with efficiency and college graduates with meaningless college degrees.

Meanwhile, a small nation, Finland, outperforms American students in nearly every essential category of learning in the postmodern era. This is starkly true of many American students in metropolitan areas. Still, the cry is for everyone to be a college graduate when many students would prefer a trade school education.

The COVID-19 pandemic intervened to neutralize Trump’s popularity with workers’ angst displaced by Joseph Biden’s surge to the presidency a man who had always existed in the background.

TURNING BACK THE HISTORICAL CLOCK & DEJA VU

Roman Emperor Constantine signed the Edict of Milan of 313 that proclaimed religious tolerance in the Roman Empire for Christians removing them from being persecuted. Christianity essentially became the state religion however not declared until 380 essentially crushing paganism to the point of extinction.

That changed in 361 when Julian became the sole Roman Emperor. He immediately restored Hellenistic paganism angered with Christianity for its claim to be the only true religion. Julian’s reign as emperor lasted only 18 months (361-363) being mortally wounded during the Battle of Samara in 363. He was only 31. The Christian Sozomen acknowledged that Emperor Julian did not compel Christians to offer sacrifices nor did he allow Romans to commit acts of injustice against Christians or to insult them. With his death, Christianity was restored as the Roman Empire’s religion.

Likewise, President Trump attempted to restore the affluent working middle class by executive edit that had previously materialized by circumstances after WWII when the war-torn world was now dependent in the short term on the United States for all its essential needs: i.e., food supplies, farm machinery, automobiles, home appliances, building materials, and manufactured goods including clothing, radios, televisions, etc.

American factories ran 24/7 during WWII and now in the 1950s and 1960s were again running 24/7 to supply the world. The labor unions of the United Auto Workers, Teamsters, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, United Steel Workers, et al, had their employers over a barrel with demands for higher wages and fringe benefits given without recourse. The optimistic corporate world even flirted with the idea of “lifetime employment” (see Work Without Managers, 1991) as the work of the moment established an affluent working middle class that extended from 1950 to the late 1980s however rapidly declining thereafter.

A post-war rise in unionism, the passage of the GI Bill, a housing program, and other progressive actions led to a doubling of the median family income in only 30 years (1950 – 1980), creating a working middle class of multiple ethnicities that included nearly 60 percent of Americans by the late 1970s. Today, it is less than 40 percent of what it had been at its peak.

Like Emperor Julian nearly 2,000 years before, President Trump misread the tee leaves in his attempt to turn back the clock to the “Golden Age of Manual Labor” making little allowance for the miraculous economic recovery of Europe and Asia that saw Sweden, Germany, France, South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan flooding the American market with automobiles, electronics, televisions, videos, computers, household goods, furniture, and appliances. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler suffering a marked reduction in demand could no longer afford the workforce of the earlier period. Moreover, it was evident that the “Big Three” automakers insisted on continuing to make large gas-guzzling big cars when the world and Americans now preferred more compact and economic vehicles.

THE ALL TOO HUMAN AMBIVALENT MEDIA

There was a time in the mid-twentieth century when the American media showed prudence and self-restraint. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt required cruel steel braces to stand up paralyzed from the waist down having suffered poliomyelitis when he was 39 years old. Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie had a mistress so did Roosevelt, but what was striking about Willkie's adulterous affair is how brazen and openly he campaigned for the presidency with her at his side against FDR in 1940. The press avoided schadenfreude, the German term for delighting in gossip having nothing to do with the political issues of the day.

In the late 19th century, eminent publisher William Randolph Hearst (1863 – 1951) promoted aggressive headlines that became known as “yellow journalism.” Newspapers across the land competed with an epidemic of sensationalized headlines that represented no legitimate well-researched news but instead provided eye-catching headlines for increased sales having nothing to do with the truth (or fake news).

In the current era of our civil religion, we have political correctness and critical race theory with divisive tribalism dominating journalism from the left and equally from the right both claiming to be guided by the facts. This has led to an ineffective national and foreign policy as Americans don’t know who to believe. This duplicity is displayed in an inconsistent COVID-19 pandemic message from public service institutions that claim to have no political agenda.

Strangely, journalism was politely silent when President Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924) suffered a massive stroke in 1919 in his second term with his wife Edith becoming essentially the shadow president for much of his second term. It was the worst crisis of presidential politics in American history, and it was handled badly by the press, Congress, and Wilson’s cabinet.

No one seriously suggested that Wilson resign, while his wife, Edith, controlled access to him, making presidential decisions by default and engineering a successful cover-up of his condition, including misleading optimistic reports from his doctors. Wilson died in his sleep three years after leaving office with his presidency a permanent casualty of his illness.

During Ronald Reagan's presidency (1981 – 1989), he developed unreported dementia in his second term, often falling asleep during cabinet meetings and having lapses in discussions, which led to his cabinet asking cerebral and popular Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee to observe the president.

Baker, who was fully capable of being president in his own right was however a team player and not one to rock the boat. He reported the president was in charge of all his faculties giving the president his unmitigated endorsement. It was at this point, similar to Edith Wilson's role as shadow president nearly seventy years earlier that Nancy Reagan, wife of President Reagan, assumed a similar role. She held the president’s cabinet and all its direct reports in check during the remainder of Reagan’s presidency. It wasn’t until 1995 or six years after President Reagan left office that he admitted to the press that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nancy Reagan, who now controlled his legacy, characteristically described his condition as “the long goodbye.”


ZEITGEIST or the SPIRIT of the TIMES

Journalists are members of a most human profession whose business is to tell us the stories of our time. “Human, All Too Human” was a book of aphorisms of polemical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) published posthumously by his sister Elizabeth-Foster Nietzsche in 1908, or eight years after his death. Nietzsche believed human nature’s hard moments could be overcome through understanding and philosophy claiming the individual must craft his identity through self-realization transcending the limits of God and the idea of the soul.

While this concept of “all too human” has proven prescient, Nietzsche understandably could not have had a sense that we would surrender the steering wheel of our lives to unconscious influences from within and without, above and below our sense of self, or that journalists on the left and right, and politicians of the same persuasions would look for justification, not in God or the soul, but human technology with scientists tracking these discoveries.

Educators and social scientists often see us moving from individualism to group and cultural norms, not as a regression but progression to a new reality. They may be right as sociologist Pitirim Sorokin (1889 – 1968) writes in “Social & Cultural Dynamics” (1937):

“We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day.”

Each of these phases of cultural development not only seeks to describe the nature of reality, but also stipulates the nature of human needs and goals to be satisfied, the extent to which they should be satisfied, and the methods of satisfaction. Sorokin has interpreted contemporary Western civilization as a sensate civilization, dedicated to technological progress and prophesied its fall into decadence and the emergence of a new ideational or idealistic era, again as with Nietzsche having no sense of the rise and dominance of electronic technology or its abrupt clash with culture and tradition now evident in a generation.

Research psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh gives a perceptive view of the implications of ubiquitous smartphones seemingly in everyone’s hands, the power of the Internet, and the accelerating sweep of social technologies in her book “HIVEMIND” (2019) providing reasoned discussion in the new spirit of the times.

Alas, the focus of “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” is not on technology, per se, but on how we constantly muddled our way through the ages periodically rescued by our instinct for survival and ingenuity. The narrative of this story could be metaphorically described as a locomotive that must first overcome enormous inertia to establish some momentum, but once that momentum is established it builds to acceleration that keeps quickening which becomes impossible to control, but nobody minds as they race past landmarks and sacred markings that they once cherished not realizing they are running from themselves as “Nowhere Man” to a place just over the horizon called “Nowhere Land.”

That said instinct and ingenuity were at hand in 1450 when Johannes Gutenberg (1400 – 1468) accidentally discovered and introduced the metal movable-type printing press in Europe, along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mold (see “The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture,” James Burke and Robert Ornstein, 1997, pp. 122-123).

Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony—and these materials remained standard for 550 years. This invention ended feudalism and the singular dominance of the Roman Catholic Church with Martin Luther’s (1483 – 1546) posting his 95 theses of protests against the selling of indulgences on the Wittenberg chapel door in 1517 which led to the economic dominance of capitalism.

This gave birth to the Protestant Movement, spurring the production of books principally the Bible, followed by a rush to the literacy of the populace sparking the education of the masses. This, in turn, led to the wide expansion of universities with science now the key to the Industrial Revolution and eventually the “Age of Enlightenment.” Within a short 42 years after Gutenberg’s invention, Queen Isabella II of Spain sponsored Christopher Columbus’s venture into the New World proving the planet was not flat but a globe, necessitating the rediscovery of what was knowledge and what was mainly conjecture.

European manners, morays, and morals changed as Europeans were shocked that pagans of the New World could have created sophisticated societies without Christianity or European cultural acumen. Here in 2021, we are on the brink of an equally amazing time in history with much of what has gone before as wisdom, and knowledge likely to look quite pedestrian as was the case when Gutenberg changed the world. Today, with smartphones, the Internet, and social media we continue to navigate between sanity and madness as we have throughout the centuries with NOWHERE MAN always in the shadows of NOWHERE LAND.