Occasionally we have turned from this "natural" way of life, to build
towns and cities, experimenting with large scale mass enterprises and
expanded aggregates of population, wealth and centralized authority to
which we have given the name of civilizations.
These civilizations, in their turn, have passed through a recognizable
life cycle--the cycle of growing, developing, maturing, aging, breaking
up and disappearing. One aspect of their civilized life was the keeping
of records. Another aspect was building with baked clay and stone. Baked
clay, some metals and stone, have withstood the wear and tear of time,
sheltered in the temples and tombs which we are uncovering, deciphering,
translating.
While engaged in these scholarly pursuits, our variant of the
pattern--western civilization--has been passing through the customary
life cycle. If we read the signs correctly, western civilization reached
the high point in its cycle toward the end of the last century. Since
then, for seventy-five years, it has been on the decline.
If we accept the cycle of civilization as one of the facts or sequences
presented to us by history, we may continue to pass submissively through
the successive stages of decline until western civilization is
liquidated by the same forces that wiped out preceding civilizations.
This would be the normal course of a cycle of civilization as it appears
in recorded history.
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