Column: Changes in the world and human feelings
By Charles Jeanes
A new world order is at hand. But if the most powerful state in that order (at least for now), the United States, refuses to engage in reality and insists on fighting for a delusion then a repeat of the worst excesses of the 20th century will occur. America would not “win” in such a scenario—any more than the British Empire did at the end of World War II. — B. J. Weichart
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/unipolar-moment-over-america-still-hasnt-noticed-bw-122925
Introduction
In the Arc earlier this month, I referred in a note to changes in our species and in human civilizations. My purpose today is to find some pattern in how societies change and people react to change.
In this edition, I aim to explore more fully what is perhaps the hardest thing historians try to do. History records human doing and being over time, and the clear and irrefutable fact is that humans change. Yuval Harari says that is the real truth of what he as an historian does: study change. (And why does Harari value historical studies? He says, to “liberate us from our past.” A worthy goal.) For an extended tangent on historians and History, please see the Appendix.
I do not know a single person who is not at present more aware of and awake to changes happening in our human world than they were before the US President took power a year ago. Donald Trump began what is arguably a revolution over the globe, in geopolitics, economies, and war-preparations, and shows no sign of moderating his pace of transforming his world.
How did we get to this seemingly-sudden rupture, a so-obvious break with the less-anxious recent past?
Is there anything in historical study that can comfort people who want some answers for dealing with the surge in anxieties caused, apparently, by a single man’s power and the actions of his nation-state?
When civilizations change: rise and fall in strength of empires and the human feeling of loss
My focus is on change, and change that leads to swift alteration in the fortunes of masses. I intend a very truncated overview of imperial societies and states, and the feeling attendant on their trajectory.
Empires’ impacts on masses of people are obvious, and when empires die, their loss is felt widely and deeply. Explanations for the loss obsess the intelligentsia and artistic classes. There is no consensus.
This will be my hypothesis: imperial strength invariably deteriorates after the early period of conquest and consolidation, and the experience of fading – slowly or rapidly – is painful and anxious for those who witness it. The people who live in the twilight era, are not the people who built the empire and are quite aware of their altered characters. Is it the ‘fault’ of the later generations that their empires fail?
The people who conquered, then consolidate an empire, rarely if ever have lived long enough to witness the denouement of imperial decline, and the feeling of it.
We in Canada and the West are now feeling the giddy descent from ‘greatness’ of the USA after its imperial victory in WWII. Trump’s MAGA adherents want that back. It is disturbing and upsetting.
But the process has many precedents. The novelty for us is that our long lives mean that the same people – we, the Boomers – who enjoyed the rise, now are suffering in the decline. We knew the (self-celebrating) zenith and anticipate a (suffering) nadir we fear lies below us in the near future.
I was born as the American empire peaked. As the Chinese curse has it, “interesting times.”
Macedon and Rome
Alexander the Great, King of Macedon and Emperor of Persia, was dead at 32 years old, barely time enough to conquer his vast Asian empire, leaving him no time to consolidate. His generals divided the empire, and their sons and grandsons lost it all. Four generations on, the Macedonian Conquest was no more than memory. The winners in the grand game of empire were relatively few. The wars caused chaos for some decades, with some regions much harmed, and others, like Egypt, prospering.
Alexander’s brief empire had vast effect. What endured was the Hellenization of large populations and lands. Each piece of the former empire maintained some Greek culture and Rome became the heir of Greece as the empire of the Mediterranean basin while leaving Persia – Asia — outside.
A great deal of writing and deep thought has been devoted to the question of Roman imperial decline and fall. How did such an empire, so strong and secure and well-governed for centuries, decay and slip into a state where it could fall apart? Who or what is to “blame” for that?
I would observe that the Romans who constructed the empire were not the same people who lost it. Quite unlike Alexander’s constructed state, Rome’s was not made swiftly nor lost in a few generations. Romans lost their Republican political order when they gained an empire, yet the patrician elite and the rich middle classes all did well for a few centuries, as the consumers of the empire that the republican armies and governments had created before the birth of Jesus; Romans were winners for a long time.
Edward Gibbon declared it was Christianity that hollowed out the empire and made it vulnerable to barbarian overthrow. Not accepting the simplicity of Gibbon’s conclusion, I do recognize that in countless ways the Romans changed from the time of the republic to the era of collapse. The feeling of people from the fifth century on, such as St. Augustine and Boethius, was to see the hand of God in the fall of the empire, and attribute sinful humanity as the root of all causes for this fall.
Christendom and Islam
Two medieval empires were founded on the strength of religious fervor, one in Europe among the Franks and the other in the mid-East and north Africa among the Arabs. The Franks’ Christian empire was at its peak when Charlemagne ruled, the king crowned emperor by a pope; he pushed his borders into Spain, into east Europe and Italy, and particularly north against pagan Saxons in a proto-crusade. The Arabs’ wide empire was built with amazing speed from the time of Muhammad to the mid-eighth century; Islam was the cement that held it together. The Arabs were an ethnic elite in their Caliphate.
In both cases, the initial success of empire-builders, based on military supremacy and deep religious conversions, was not a long-lasting phenomenon, and succeeding generations witnessed the fracture of unity in the empire, as pieces were broken off by independent rulers and the original invincibility was lost. For the people living in the long shadow of the greatest days of empire, the feeling as recorded in the sources was one of sorrow at the loss — and guilt that God/Allah was sending loss as punishment.
The salient point is this: the Founders of these empires were men of passionate conviction about the Faith of their people, and this intangible, immeasurable quality absolutely conduced to their success.
China and Japan
China is unique in history for the enduring persistence of a Chinese culture among the Han people in the two great river basins of the Hwang Ho and Yangtze, where the perennial agrarian village life of millions of peasants anchored a series of imperial dynasties. Emperors had the “mandate of Heaven” for awhile and when the mandate was withdrawn the dynasty changed in a period of chaos – only to be once again restored. Each collapse was mourned; each was relatively transient and eventuated in the clear perseverance of the Chinese ‘Way.’ Europe post-Rome was a theatre for inter-state contests; Chinese suffered fewer such wars than Europeans. Chinese emperors were often very unwarlike men.
The Chinese who suffered most when the empire collapsed lived in the 19th- 20th century when Europeans tore China apart and began what today the Chinese call “the century of humiliation.”
[See Appendix] https://scholars-stage.org/china-was-never-an-empire-of-the-mind/
The Japanese Empire had a very brief, recent, rise-and-fall, when it seized large parts of China and south-east Asia only to be defeated and lose all in a war with America. The miracle is how quickly the post-1945 Japanese people rebuilt their land, politics, and economy, became staunch Western allies, and prospered. But for the immediate period of defeat and ruin, the prospect for the people was horrid. One must have great respect for a people and a culture that could recover from such devastation.
The Japanese who constructed the empire (1890-1940) were not the same who felt its loss post-1945. The qualities in fierce militarism, a culture of samurai values, had to be jettisoned for a new Japan.
https://www.academia.edu/116907160/The_Roots_of_Japanese_Militarism
Britain and America
For Canadians of European descent, the period when the British Empire was supreme – say, 1805 to 1915 — as a naval, globe-spanning dominion might seem a fine era. Or not. English chauvinism was not ennobling during that era, and many imperial acts were deplorable. But there were clear advances as well, in democracy, rights, and economics the British exported for a few favoured settler populations.
Canada itself was born in that era as a copy of British-Christian culture, and the security of Canada rested on the firm foundation of imperial power. When the empire faded due to two massive wars with Germany, Canadians did not feel that loss as grievously as the English felt it, for we passed from the benign protectorate and prosperity of the British Empire into the sphere of an American Empire, where we never felt – until today – that our neighbor would be hostile to Canada’s freedom for self-rule.
America is an empire in decline — but uniquely in history still armed with vast military and economic power to severely damage many of its global ‘enemies’ as it slides into decadence in its systems. We – Canadians and Europeans, net beneficiaries of the US hegemony – face stark, wrenching changes.
No one can be immune to feelings of anxiety as the changes in America under the present regime break all sense of normalcy and precedent. Democracy is in peril there, and that People, who once seemed a beacon of liberty, now terrify many who oppose the presidential agenda. The Americans who built their empire since WWI are not the people who are suffering its decline. They are of diminished capacities.
Cultural degeneracy enabled by new technologies and capitalist logic, have combined to hollow out the great democratic experiment. America is not gone, yet, but it is not the healthy society it once was. To be ‘great’ again is a meaningless idea, for no society freezes in one form and holds it in ‘perfection.’ Advances in rights have been overbalanced by losses in other spheres of American culture. Americans today are incapable of the world leadership earned in 1945. That world is gone and they went with it.
One only has hope, rather than facts, to rely upon for optimism about their future, and our own.
Conclusions
What I wanted to do today was indicate in a very general way the pattern in human history that is beyond measurable data: the common feeling of living in an era of decline, of quasi-anarchic changes in world order. Our twilight follows after a period of sunny stability — such as when the empire’s Pax Romana established, and then lost, peace within European borders. I, born in 1951, have watched it.
None of the empires I sketched above had permanent dominion over the worlds they had come to rule. All declined, disappeared, and became memory. History recorded them, some with grief for their loss and some with loathing for their crimes; often the same empire was seen both ways from different perspectives. Empire unarguably has winners and losers whose perspectives are radically dissimilar.
Our best intentions and efforts at improving human prospects – e.g. world court, Geneva Conventions, Red Cross, League of Nations and U.N. — are not to be laughed at. Serious human good has resulted from these institutions mitigating violence and catastrophe. But this is the observable fact: humans do not arrive at a plateau of order and maintain it without persevering in the early cultural underpinnings as underlay the original peace. We change with time; our societies alter accordingly. Entropy is a ‘law.’
I write ‘cultural’ as a form of shorthand for a constellation of factors in human being that make human societies flourish: a quality of human being which is incalculable and is elusive and impermanent. That quality itself is not constant in all times or places. It is malleable, and finds expression appropriate to its time. Roman patrician leadership cannot be equated with the British “code of the gentleman” or with American notions of “man of character” — yet empires do not thrive without their intangible qualities.
In this time, the comfort historians can offer is a very relative one. To know our feelings today are like those of our fellow-humans in the past is a tepid response. But historians know nothing of the future, despite those of our profession who dearly desire to be “scientists of the history of human behaviour.”
______________________________________________________________________
Appendix: Historians and what they do
A conversation that comes up among historians (and very little beyond their particular circle) is on the topic of their specialty, History, and its status. It is relatively recent – i.e. occurring only since the early nineteenth century – as an academic argument; History has been a profession and an academic discipline only since about 1800. Yuval Harari, whom I mentioned in the Introduction, says history is “the science of studying ourselves as we experiment, evolve and change”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tvSTzFARoQ
The question is usually posed as an either/or choice. Is History a Science? Or is it to be counted (rather less-prestigiously) among the Humanities in the Academy? Or, are historians scientists?
This argument sounds quaint to our ears in 2026 but it was not an inconsequential disagreement for more than a century. It seemed of huge importance for historians to be taken seriously as Scientists in the era from Marx to Mao, but today is not so regarded. Karl Marx was the founder of History as Science, in his own mind and in the minds of many other intellectuals since. The immense prestige of Science in his era meant many of these minds wanted the status that came with the title “scientist,” and none more-so than Marx himself. But this is the reason for wanting scientific status: scientists can predict phenomena. To be the professional oracles of modern and post-modern humanity seems to motivate historians of the “History is a Science” school-of-thought. Newton discovered ‘laws of physics.’ History lacks laws.
Having just read an excellent essay in Harper’s magazine on the absurd claim that the study of politics is Political Science – in the January 2026 edition – I am quite certain for myself that to call History a Science is nonsense, no matter what refinements [Cliometrics, Cliodynamics, clioScience etc.] are declaring that it’s true, that History ought to be regarded as if it were chemistry or physics, with predictive powers. No historian – or human, more generally – knows what comes after today’s crises.
Marxism-Leninism is in the vanguard of manifestos asserting the scientific status of History. It proclaims laws of history, claims to inform “the science of revolution” — and is perilous when it is in possession of transformational political power. Any human who believes him- or herself in possession of knowledge that commands the future, because their dogma comprehends human history, is a dangerous person when their power is totalitarian. Such people are often moral monsters.
One of the few great Powers among the many states of our human world is still describing itself as belonging to the Marxist-Leninist theory. To that giant society we must turn for a quick note.
China: the Politico-economic Enigma and the Other Model for power and affluence
China and the Chinese state and empire, for so long in history a civilization that was hegemonic over a vast territory well beyond its own imperial borders, is again in 2026 a society, economy, political system, and socio-cultural force. China faces one major alternative model for human order, the USA (or ‘the West’ i.e. nations in the EU + US). Today the G7 capitalist nations in the former Free World loosely form the alternative model for what China offers. The USSR, once another rival, is gone.
In 2026 it seems the system called “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” – which includes a very large capitalist element in the State-economy planned by the Party – is truly the one coherent alternate model to the West. There’s now a world dominated by the G2 in economic power, China and the US.
We used to divide the world in three, with the ‘Free World’ of the West opposed to the Sino-Soviet ‘Communist bloc’, with the Third World unaligned. Now, around the two poles of the world economy represented by the West and China, other nation-states arrange themselves like iron filings on a magnet.
Is there still a Third way? No obvious counter-model is presenting itself. Russia is an anomaly, great in military power, struggling in economics. Islamic and Indian civilizations have staked claims to be alternatives as real paths to humanity’s future; they are mistaken, for their insistence on a religious foundation for society flies in the face of all that has happened since modernity arrived. Africa has not yet found what might be called a pan-African path. Thinkers like Charles Eisenstein calls for a transformed ‘planetary humanity’ to lead us to a more beautiful world with new consciousness.
Here I wish only to observe this immense curiosity in China: the ancient order of Chinese civilization had a core that seems to run unbroken through all the imperial dynasties from the first Q’in empire to the fall of the empire in 1911. On top of that deep foundation – which is just too complex to sum up with –isms [state-centrism, Confucianism, Chan Buddhism, mandarinism, autarchism, etc.] – Mao and the Communist Party planted Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong Thought. The two are a very imperfect fusion (in fact, not truly fused at all) and this makes understanding China a daunting prospect.
[A fine essay, on why studying China is so hard for ‘Sinologists’ working with Western expectations, can be found here: https://chinaheritage.net/journal/sinology-vs-the-disciplines-then-now/ ]
Xi Jin Peng, who has arisen to dominate China in 2026 as no other leader since Mao has done, is a great mystery for Western observers. Is he a revolutionary? No. Is his Communism meaningful – can we see him applying political, economic, and social principles learned from the Marxian tradition? It would take a book to answer that.
Some sample readings:
https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-making-of-xi-jinping-chinas-absolute-monarch/
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/centenary-propaganda-and-chinese-socialism-xi-jinping-characteristics
Marx and Me
My own life-long engagement with the Marxian system for historical studies has left me with no clarity of its truthfulness but in no doubt that it has been of immense fruitfulness for historical scholarship.
The Marxian tradition is not unified; its instruments for investigating historical facts are controversial. Only a fool would dismiss the entire system without knowing it to some depth before deciding what are its strengths and what are its deficiencies. At this late stage in my intellectual evolution, I am an ex-Marxian historian with great respect for the power of the instruments. Once upon a time, I called myself a Marxist, and was briefly an activist for a Canadian communist party. I was 23 years old.
Marxian failures originate in an inescapable truth: the entire fabric of the time and place Karl Marx wrote his studies, generate the limitations in understanding that his system has. He understood the meaning of a human being in ways quite limited by his era and its possibilities. For me the failures of Marxian thinking begin and continue in this circumscribed comprehension of human being. No one of his time surpassed him. In 2026 our sciences have indeed superseded the knowledge available to Marx.
