Leadership, Hope, and the Ten-Generation Cycle of Collapse

One of the books my classmates and I are reading in seminary right now posits that we are living through a time of social collapse. Heavily referencing the work of Sir John Glubb, Margaret Wheatley argues in her book Who Do We Choose To Be that civilizations last about 250 years, or ten generations, before they fall apart. Glubb’s research studied a variety of empires across the world and found that as time goes on, people become more indulgent and morality decays, eventually leading to a collapse. Near the end, people idolize celebrities: athletes, actors, and musicians. Well educated people with a high standard of living forget what it means to work hard and struggle. No empire can survive the laziness, selfishness, and entitlement that comes at the end of the ten generation cycle. As Wheatley points out, with a compellingly ominous tone, the United States has been around for its 250 years. We are in the tenth generation. Now is the time of decay and collapse.

In the face of such astounding peril, such insanity and institutional failure, we need leaders to arise who can navigate the challenges of the modern world. We need people who can stare into the face of moral decay and guide us through the fall, for this fall is inevitable. We need to be the brave pioneers of a new era, so that the tenth generation of this fallen kingdom may lead to the first generation of the next order, calling back to a time when people were strong and rugged, not weighed down by the ease of our contemporary life. And we will certainly soon throw off such ease, because this fall is inevitable.

There is something valuable in calling for leaders who will be brave even if the world is collapsing around them. Certainly, we should raise up leaders for future generations who can grapple with the challenges of the world realistically while also leading compassionately. I cannot disagree with the call for leaders who can deal with the world's problems as they are, but I must also wonder if the problems presented are really the world’s problems as they are.

Do civilizations collapse after moral decay sets in over ten generations? Maybe sometimes, but not as a rule. Simply moral decay is not the reason for collapse. It wasn’t moral decay that led to the fall of Rome, it was shifting political structures and mass migration of people from the north and east. And I think most historians would credit the Mongol invasion more than moral decay to the collapse of Islamic empires. And knowing the history of the United States, it baffles me to think that our time now is considered a time of moral decay. In our past, people owned human beings as slaves. We broke treaties and massacred and displaced millions of Native Americans. There were people who waged terroristic campaigns against black people and anyone who supported fully integrating them into society and treating them as human beings. Why would we see our current circumstances as more morally decayed than our past?

And are we really more in a time of collapse than during the civil war? And is the world ending now more than it was during the two World Wars when millions of people were killed in battle or systematically murdered by fascists? Could Americans, anxious over the cold war and the threat of nuclear annihilation at any moment, really reassure themselves that everything would be fine because they were only the eighth or ninth generation? The bombs will not fall now because our 250 years are not yet up.

The truth is, every generation feels as if it is on the verge of collapse. In every generation, there are poor people who struggle and suffer to get by while rich people live in ease and comfort. Every generation has a defining crisis of its time. My parents had to live through much of the Cold War. My generation faces the challenge of climate change and radical shifts in the political climate of the United States. These crises relate to one another as history unfolds a long chain of complicated conditions that connect one generation to another. We do a great disservice to history when we reduce the story of our ancestors to ten generation cycles of rise and collapse. It isn’t true. It’s very reductive. And it misses so much that went into the complex web of ideas and actions that led history to where we are now.

But we also do a disservice to our own leaders and the leaders of tomorrow when we craft the narrative of an inevitable fall. I don’t want to lead as part of the generation that will see civilization collapse. I want to lead as someone who sees continuity with tomorrow. I want to pass off my accomplishments to my successors who will rise to face their own challenges in their own times. One may ask if there is actually a difference in how we lead whether we believe we are at the end of our civilization or just a part of the long chain of history.

While this could be argued, I think the answer is yes. I think there is some inflated self-importance in believing that you are living through the end of time for your nation. Whatever works are to be achieved must be achieved now. This is the concluding chapter of our story. You will see its end. But if we are part of one continuous project, then this moment isn’t more important than the others. What came before was just as significant as what will come after. You are a part of God’s project that lasts much longer than your lifetime. We lead from this place of active patience and humility. It is not for us to see the end of things or their beginning. It is only for us to faithfully do our part in the time God has given us.

But more than that, we must have hope for tomorrow. Not that the people of tomorrow will be pioneers on the next phase of the endless cycle of growth and collapse, but that tomorrow brings us another step closer to the return of Christ. The tomorrow we look for is not a segment of a ten generation cycle that will bring us something better, rather it is the dawning of the kingdom of God, whose reign will know no end. We believe in a tomorrow, complicated and messy, full of its own challenges because God promised us that the sun will keep rising on new days and new ages until that final day dawns and the night passes away forever.