How Disintegration Begins

A civilization does not necessarily collapse when its problems begin.

For a long time, the buildings remain standing. Government offices continue functioning. People go to work, raise families, conduct business, and carry on with ordinary life.

But something can begin changing underneath.

Arnold Toynbee called this process disintegration.

The later Han dynasty provides an interesting example.

By the end of the first century A.D., the prosperity of the earlier Han period had diminished. China experienced droughts, famines, floods, and economic problems. Wealth and land became increasingly concentrated among powerful families, while many small farmers were reduced to dependency upon wealthy landowners.

Political problems followed.

But the deeper problem was that the established understanding of society was becoming less believable.

Earlier Han Confucianism had taught that the world was rational. Heaven had established an order. The emperor occupied a legitimate place within that order, and individuals had responsibilities within their families and society. People believed that proper conduct mattered.

By the second century, many people were losing confidence in that system.

One of the more striking examples involves the family.

Kong Rong, who lived from A.D. 153 to 208, is reported to have questioned why there should be any special relationship between parents and children. A father, he argued, had merely been satisfying his own desire when a child was conceived. Why should that create a lasting obligation?

In a civilization built heavily upon Confucian ideas of family relationships, this represented an enormous change.

People also questioned the government. If the emperor was supposed to bring order to the world, why was the government producing disorder? If the emperor ruled according to Heaven's decree, why should people continue believing in the system when it no longer seemed to work?

Eventually the Han government became increasingly corrupt, struggles for political power intensified, civil war followed, and the dynasty officially ended in A.D. 220.

But the disintegration had begun before the empire disappeared.

Toynbee's analysis of civilizations helps us see why.

A civilization is held together by more than laws and institutions. People share assumptions about what life means, what obligations they have to one another, what authorities are legitimate, and what is worth sacrificing for.

When those assumptions cease to be convincing, the society may continue functioning for quite some time.

But something important has been lost.

The same thing can happen within an individual life.

Our lives also depend upon relationships, commitments, habits, beliefs, and assumptions about what matters. We may continue going to work, paying bills, raising children, attending church, and fulfilling our responsibilities even while our confidence in the meaning of those things is gradually disappearing.

That is one reason disintegration can be difficult to recognize.

It does not always look like catastrophe.

Sometimes it looks like continuing to do everything we have always done while increasingly wondering why any of it matters.

Toynbee's answer was not that every challenge produces disintegration. Quite the opposite. Challenges are necessary for growth.

Disintegration begins when we lose the ability to respond creatively to them.

The external collapse may come much later.