I don’t think there’s too much argument about western civilization being in decline. It has clearly lost its mojo, its direction, and its momentum. At best, it’s coasting right now. But Andrew Potter’s On Decline takes such shabby aim at the issues that the book itself becomes proof that western civilization is in decline. It is not comprehensive, innovative, insightful or even eloquent. Rather, it is narrow, superficial, ill-informed and incomplete.

Potter has written a long rant, divided into chapters by topic, but it is clearly all him, ranting. His method is to have read a book, decided it was important, and taken the author’s thoughts back into history and sweeping generalizations of Potter’s own imagination. It has little to do with reality. His conclusions seem baseless. His grasp of the difference between correlation and causation is gauzy, even as he criticizes others over it.

He enthusiastically cites Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now for all the wonderful charts proving how world trade had flatlined since the time of Jesus, and has rocketed in just the last hundred years. But Pinker’s charts are all bogus. No statistics on international trade balances go back to the time of Jesus. This is right from the Donald Trump handbook, where if you tell a lie often enough, it gets taken for truth. Potter is aiding the spread of Pinker’s nonsense. He takes up numerous Pinker points without having read any of the criticisms of them, and projects backward to show just how dynamic western civilization has been. For example, there’s Pinker’s claim that the poor in western countries today live better than kingsdid 500 years ago, because even the poorest have refrigerators and cell phones. And this proves, what exactly? Poverty is relative to the others around you. You can have a refrigerator in your shack, but you will still die early and miserably, often from all the horrible processed food consumed out of that refrigerator.

He attacks the nostalgia industry, claiming civilization has run so short of new ideas, it relies on the old, and has now actually run out of the old, too. It used to be there was a nostalgia fad, say 25 years later. But they have been accelerating to the point where we’re up to the present in nostalgia, he observes.

This has nothing whatever to do with lack of new ideas, and everything to do with capitalism. Looking for new holes to fill, entrepreneurs see how easily money can be made in nostalgia, and want to be the first to exploit another as yet unexploited era. If there’s a way to be nostalgic for 2020, someone will jump on it and not wait until 2050 to revive the music, clothing and hairstyles for fun and profit. Decline plays no role here.

In economic growth, citing works by Tyler Cowen only, Potter complains about stagnation, where growth has slowed and little additional progress is made on many fronts. Well, the American economy is red hot this year, but I don’t think anyone believes this means it has shaken the long term decline. An economy is not the cause of decline. Growth per se is not the end of the story. The boom/bust cycle is not desirable, no matter how much Potter complains about slow growth. He is clearly in the camp of bigger growth at all costs. There are plenty who would say that has been the problem, not the solution. But there’s no room for analyses in this rant.

He takes the time to get nitpicky over the selfishness, self-centeredness and the general lack of solidarity in western societies today. He claims this is a new development and evidence of our decline. I refer him to Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels instead of the book he cites. Swift accurately portrayed all those same weaknesses and far more, 300 years ago. This is not something that just came up since the 1960s, as Potter claims. Or he can read the brand new I’ll Forget It When I DIe!, which tells the story of an Arizona town deporting nearly 1200 men in animal boxcars, dumping them in the desert in another state. Anyone who disagreed with policy was booted out, and city border guards prevented them coming back, along with all suspicious visitors – like lawyers. And all because they wanted fair wages. This was a hundred years ago, in the brand new state of Arizona. Decline is always with us. It didn’t just begin after JFK was shot.

One observation of his from the 1960s, is spot on though. When JFK told the country he was giving it the goal of a man on the moon before the end of decade, it focused the nation. But “Sixty years after Kennedy’s speech to Congress, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to make the case that accomplishing hard tasks, solving hard problems, committing to collective action, is a particular ambition or ideal or expertise of democracy.” There is no question that democracy has gone stale for many people, but that is a function of not updating the constitution to fit our current situation, as the founders specified for Americans to do. It is a sign of stupidity, not decline.

His take on democracy is naïve and superficial: “The full speed of freedom is a clarion call from another era. Where democracy, technology, and progress were once aligned and facing full-on toward the future, today democracy is in retreat, technology is stagnating, progress is a dirty word. Politics is eating the world and we have become a culture obsessed with the past.”

While there is little doubt democracy is no longer ascendant, technology is hardly stagnant. Quite the opposite; it is moving so fast it has lost many of us. Rather than Tyler Cowen, Potter should have read Alvin Toffler. Technology is piling up innovation upon innovation, and poor humans have not been able to assimilate them all or leverage them for their best effect. The result is the average American checking their phone over 200 times a day, lost in a flood of apps and data. As Katrine Marçal put it in her new book Mother of Invention, the problem is that new technology is not being designed to adapt to people’s needs, but instead requires people to adapt to its requirements. Example: passwords a minimum of eight characters, with upper case, lowercase, numerals, letters and symbols all required, plus 3-5 security questions, two-factor identification, stored device cookies, and lockout for a typo. And different for every site. Life gets more complicated with every labor-saving device that hits the market. If anything, technology is not stagnating; it is leaving us in its dust.

Potter complains instead that washing machines are slower, smaller and less powerful than they were in the 1960s. Nonsense. But the book is chock full of these assumptions and baseless claims, all evidence of decline to him. You want to call him on every one, then (if you’re generous) you let it go, assuming he has an important point to make based on that thought. But you’d be wrong.

His attack on social media also breaks no new ground, except possibly for this color on the power of reasoning: “You can’t reason your way out of social media’s toxicity any more than you can reason your way out of a traffic jam or an arms race.” Good one. Vague enough to use all over the place.

Religion is on its way out, he says, which is a good thing, showing an appreciation for reason. His explanation for the rise of religion once again relies on one theory, that it was an effort by leaders to maintain a level of morality among tribal members as they became too numerous to deal with individually. That’s okay, but hardly the last word. Whole libraries analyze the rise of religions. And while Christianity might be in decline, you cannot say that of Islam. So what exactly is the point?

Let’s be clear. Civilizations have life cycles just like everything else. They build, flourish, decline and die. The entire cycle typically takes less than 500 years. There are whole shelves of books on the declines and falls of civilizations. There is little doubt western civilization has had better days. It will probably spend its last efforts trying desperately to undo its environmental excesses. The massive changes now underway will kill off numerous countries and give rise to new ones. That’s not as much decline as it is revolution.

Despite his claim that we are all overfocused on the past, On Decline is not about the future. It is a long, bizarre complaint that proclaims its own nostalgia for a simpler time when new technology was a godsend, when people helped each other for the common good and so on. Like all nostalgia, it was never true. On top of everything else, Potter has fallen into his own trap.

David Wineberg ( )