Ibn Khaldun on Civilizational Decline
Writing by abuhatem on Monday, 31 of March , 2008 at 4:10 am
I have been reading a lot of good political theory for the past week. No, not the boring authoritarian communist statism that is Plato and his pitiful Republic, nor the totalitarian democrat (to use Israeli historian J.L. Talmon’s term) Jean Jaques Roussaeu, but the less ideological musings of Burke and his modern defenders such as Hayek.
Burke and Hayek both make a strong case for tradition and its role in politics. They make, if you may say, a secular case for social conservatism. Traditional values are rational simply by their traditional nature, due to their withstanding the wisdom of the ages and achieving a sort of permanence, these values have made the case for providing a sound basis for human happiness for generations. Burke discusses the permanence of morality rejecting the dangerous rants of the post-Enlightenment philosophes of his time, who like our time, seek to re-invent the wheel creating a new moral code. Burke also discusses the role of morality and traditional behavior in preserving societal cohesion.
Hayek takes it a step further. For Hayek, the spontaneous order of the market which organically develops society and civilization depends on tradition which it builds upon. No system of laws, Hayek says, can ever fully encompass a society and so the evolution of law depends on its traditional foundations in applying to new cases. His position is identical to that of both the Catholic Church and orthodox Sunni Islam - that God’s permanent law is unchanged but the “community of scholars” together have an understanding of applying this law to modern cases. A revolution, throwing out old laws for new ones, a doing away with tradition, will throw the baby out with the bathwater. As Hayek said:
Since we owe the order of our society to a tradition of rules which we only imperfectly understand, all progress must be based on tradition. We must build on tradition and can only tinker with its products.
Of course both Burke and Hayek did not reject all change. Both accepted economic freedom and the results it had in continually improving the material quality of civilization through technological innovation.
Enough with Burke and Hayek. Because they reminded me of perhaps my favorite writer. Not really a political philosopher in the modern or classical sense - indeed he shunned political philosophy as unnecessary - but a historian, sociologist, and economist (and the father of all three fields!) Ibn Khaldun. Ibn Khaldun’s theory of civilizational decline is very modern if you think about it. For Ibn Khaldun all civilizations eventually fall when they reach the stage of senility, analogous to the senile state of man. There are two main causes for these declines but they are interrelated. Firstly, economic freedom is transgressed. And secondly, morality disappears.
Economic freedom is transgressed when injustice, which for Ibn Khaldun (as in the Aristotelian and Islamic sense) primarily entails a transgression of property rights by the sovereign, occurs. The State which seeks to continually create new cultural programs to highlight its prideful status, over taxes its citizens yet receives lower and lower revenues because of this and eventually destroys the economy of the civilization through its injustice.
The transgression on economic freedom ties directly into morality and tradition. In the senile age of the dynasty, luxury increases and the people become more enamored in the sensate. People begin to lose the ‘asabiyah or group solidarity bonds which existed amongst families and peoples. Their religion, a fundamental aspect of their group solidarity, begins to decrease. Immorality increases, traditional morality disappears, and society becomes fragmented. Fragmentation leads to decline.
I have read Ibn Khaldun many times but I recently read an academic paper on his theory that transgressing economic freedom leads to decline and I was pleased that this was being noted of. The author of the paper said that if Ibn Khaldun had known of modern democracies and limited governments which preserve economic freedom he may have changed his mind on this inevitable rule of history. However, at the same time, who knows if we won’t meet the same fate - although I don’t agree with historicism.
The bottom line is that traditional values are important. In a future blog post I hope to more fully summarize Burke, Hayek, and Ibn Khaldun’s views on tradition in society. For Ibn Khaldun, tradition’s main task other than promoting virtue is societal cohesion.
The reason why people read and note of Ibn Khaldun today is because he thought differently. Other Islamic political philosophers of their day - such as Ibn Rushd, Ibn Bajjah, al-Dawani, and al-Farabi, simply just copied and pasted Plato believing he was some sort of standard of truth and intelligence. However, it is interesting that Muslims do have this tradition of political thought, and although much of it is cluttered with neoplatonist garbage, if you throw that out you can find some real gems. Maybe I will post about those some time as well.
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