Rise & Fall in History
Historians have documented and testified about the fact that history moves in a polygonal or broken line with ups and downs. It’s a fact that great civilizations and empires have developed and flourished in the past, but then at some point they crashed and vanished in the course of time. Some examples of such empires are Babylon, China, The Aztecs and Mayas, Greece, Rome, the Ottoman Empire etc. What might have been the cause of their decline and demise? Pandemics, war, the role of religion, seismic and cataclysmic disasters could have been some of the cause of their distraction.
The famous British historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations rather than the history of nation-states like Sparta or of ethnic groups. He defined civilizations according to cultural rather than national characteristics and maintained that “civilizations come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet”. By the same token, when a state or empire develops and becomes a dominant power usually through armed conquest at the expense of a weaker state, it attracts the interest of competitive states and rising powers which challenge their status and want to claim their dominance, oftentimes in order to protect themselves from future attacks.
The result is competition and wars that keep rising to feed this vicious circle of violence. Samuel Huntington, an American political scientist, adviser and academic writes: “Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.” ― Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order . This serious and valid statement constitutes that history is not really reliable and trustworthy but rather full of inaccuracies, prejudices and biased statements. Therefore, an often-used phrase is that history should be re-written which is in reality very controversial and fallacious because history cannot be altered as we please an in reality, we are lacking eye-witnesses.
As a matter of fact, we can observe that history follows the law of causality which governs our world affairs from time immemorial to the present day. Certainly, we are not just spectators but those who shape our destiny by our decisions and what is happening here and there. We don’t need a fatalist approach because we, as human beings, carry a higher degree of responsibility and commitment to bring about and create conditions which can secure the existence and sustaining of a respectful community or state. However, we should not ignore that morality and ethics constitute an important factor for creating a better world. One of the facts of the fall of empires was decadence and degradation as well as debauchery and corruption. Above all statesmen and rulers should be aware of this reality. Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
Let us not be forgetful about history and learn from the lessons it teaches us i.e., not to repeat the same mistakes. The phenomenon of rise and fall of nations or civilizations is due to the fact that the world has never learned to live in peace and keeps pursuing antagonism and conflict. Humankind is not a bunch of belligerent fighters who want to conquer new lands and expand their territorial interests. We are to be beings of light, a worldwide community of brethren who seek happiness and security and peace is the only way to achieve that ambitious goal.
