Casey is an historicist. Remember Popper’s criticism of historicism in The Open Society and its Enemies?
The very fact that the NYT likes him is a red flag.
Can Newton’s second law of thermodynamics be made to apply to civilizations and empires? As a metaphor, perhaps - but as a rule?
There are analogies between the US now and Rome then, and Casey has pointed out a few. But is Rome a precedent that proves a principle? Are there any real precedents to our predicament in our time? Is there a compelling principle of decline and fall?
Change is certain, analogies are detectable, but are there set patterns of change?
If there were, we could all be prophets.
A superb analysis. Yes, analogies are detectable with Christianity and the barbarian invasions, but there are no historical laws or forces compelling the West to mimic Rome. And yet, I find his arguments provocative indeed.
I think it is inevitable that all governments become corrupt and parasitic. And he’s probably right that at some point they are beyond reform, and we may have reached that point.
I don’t think the collapse will be “entertaining” to watch, though.
Doug Casey is a “legendary investor”. His view of the past and future is one of market waves: bulls and bears, upturns and downturns, rises and gains and declines and falls. The market performance chart is implicitly his working analogy for America as an Empire or a civilization. (The metaphors taken from physics, or worse, biology or evolution - particularly all that nonsense of living organisms growing to an unsustainable point of complexity - for the dynamics of decline do not bear scrutiny.) His conclusion for those who see the end of American civilization and his three options are entirely predictable from his market view of the world. It is the advice of an investment advisor perceiving a coming bear market or a total or partial collapse in a sector of the economy: 1. Stay in the market (America), but move out of certain business sectors (Detroit or Chicago) and into nearby (“down the road a bit”) foreign markets in Mexico which will preserve some American civilizational values (growth stocks) just as Portugal kept some of the Roman infrastructure going after the fall of Rome. 2. Sell up and leave the market entirely, live on savings in your own private civilization. 3. Keep up, somehow, even as fiction, the old diversified-risk portfolio; believe in the upturn; life goes on.
In offering the third option, Casey adopts a Roman stoicism, which endured the fall of Rome and came to define the virtuous British and American national character. If we take to heart the (end-of-empire) Rudyard Kipling’s advice to his son to treat those two imposters Triumph and Disaster just the same, will we be able to man-up and ignore with stout hearts and good cheer, the failure of our aqueducts, the confiscation of our property, and the ruin of our posterity?
Thanks for this provocative response. I do not know anything about Casey, but by pure happenstance, I came across his thoughts on the parallels between the fall of Rome and the incipient fall of the USA. I was taken by his Gibbonesque understanding of how the superstitions of Christianity and the barbarian invasions contributed mightily to Rome’s demise. I believe Gibbon also spoke of a third factor which I think he called Rome’s immoderate greatness. I suppose one could note the similarity with an “unsustainable point of complexity”. I also note Jillian’s correct objection to Casey’s historicism. Nonetheless, recognizing their shortcomings, I found his essays an enjoyable read.