Quote - Yep.  I've been making the same point throughout my "active" portion of this thread.    The parallels are truly eerie -- for anyone who's studied the end of bygone civilizations

I know by now this is pointless nitpicking (in the eyes of some), but some very serious historians (actually, many) would argue the point of Rome's "fall," as well as the cause(s) thereof. Gibbon's "fall" of the Pax Romana has been largely discredited.

All civilizations, including ours, have had periods in which they waxed and periods in which they waned, and often, depending on what one looks at and how one measures, both at the same time. Every civilization that no longer exists, by definition and in some limited sense at least, "fell," and there is no reason I can think of why one should expect any civilization, or any particular mainstream cultural point of view, to last indefinitely.

Greek culture transformed due largely to the failure of the Polis and the rise of Alexander and was eventually adopted and adapted by the Roman empire, and Roman civilization transformed or declined due largely to economic and military factors and gradually became the Byzantine Empire, the barbarian kingdoms of the West, the eventual dominance of European Catholicism, etc.. And there were many, many factors, and given that those successors adapted some of their institutions and officialdom from the Romans, and even in some cases considered themselves a natural evolution of the Roman Empire, there was not exactly a "fall."

"Transformation" versus "fall" -- I suppose it comes down to how one defines one's terms again ...

In any case, while my instinct is to agree that a civilization in which all, or large portions of the population, are only interested in carnal pleasure (the argument presumably being at the expense of more productive and civic-minded behavior) would very likely prove problematic, it is at least arguable how much of the "fall" of these civilizations had to do with people pleasuring themselves to death, and claims that some massive portion of our population are doing that in the present are at least somewhat questionable.

What is factual is that there are now over 300 million people in the US, and over six billion people on the planet, and many of those people living in crowded, close proximity to one another. There are not only very many more people committing crimes and doing immoral things than in the past, there are also very many more people working, raising and taking care of their families, and living largely conventional lives of mostly conventional morality than in the past.

But of course we only rarely see the behavior and activities of the latter folks made into major nightly news stories.

What is also factual is that there has never before the last few decades been a civilization in which the everyman was being so thoroughly inundated -- through mass media, the internet, etc. -- with so much information about illegal and immoral goings on hundreds and thousands of miles away, much of which may have been happening (relative to per capita, of course) without our knowing it many years ago when information did not flow so freely, so far, so fully, or in such quantity.

What is possible is that many of us may not be adapting our attitudes to correctly interpret the meaning and significance of all this new information-rich reality.

And what is at least thinkable is that the perception that so many of us have that things are so terribly bad now might be at least partly due to the above factors.

Of course it is also possible that Xeno and Shonner are right, and the end is nigh, or nearly so.