When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.
True for the empire, not true for the republic (which still took decades but not centuries)
When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
1970 or so. There is this version of it
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
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Kinda hard to pin down a date.
When I think of the current social and political trends, I'm reminded of Asimov's quote about anti-intellectualism in 1980. Or Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer-prize winning book, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life", published in *1963*.
These things aren't new. They just wax and wane in power, over time, and recombine in new and interesting ways to yield long-term trends.
In the case of Rome, it depends how you define "fall". There were certainly some military setbacks and also some bad climatic conditions (which affected central America and China around the same time.) Probably better to say that Rome was in decline for a long time.
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