Every civilisation imagines that history has been leading towards itself. Earlier societies rose and fell because they were primitive, superstitious, technologically backward or badly governed; we possess science, universities, central banks, computers, nuclear weapons, welfare systems and artificial intelligence, so presumably the old rules no longer apply. The Romans undoubtedly had their own version of the same confidence, as did the British at the height of their empire. The interesting thing about Sir John Glubb's The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival is that he regarded precisely this inability to recognise ourselves in the past as one of the recurring characteristics of great powers approaching decline.

Glubb was not an academic historian constructing a grand theory from the safety of a university office. John Bagot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha, had served in the First World War, was wounded three times, spent decades in the Middle East and commanded Jordan's Arab Legion from 1939 until 1956. By the time The Fate of Empires appeared in 1976, he had spent much of his life watching political orders rise, struggle and disappear. His essay was therefore less a formal theory of history than an attempt to identify patterns recurring across very different civilisations.

His most famous proposition was also his most vulnerable to criticism. Looking across Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome, the Arab empires, Ottoman power, Spain and Britain, Glubb suggested that periods of national greatness averaged roughly 250 years, or about ten generations. He did not claim that an alarm clock rings at year 250 and the barbarians immediately enter the capital. The chronology was approximate, the cases differed enormously and the boundaries between an empire's rise, supremacy and decline could themselves be disputed. The number is better regarded as an observation than a historical law, and attempts to add 250 to the founding date of a modern nation and announce its scheduled collapse turn Glubb's historical speculation into numerology.

Far more interesting than the 250-year figure is the sequence Glubb thought he could see beneath these otherwise different histories. Great powers tended to move through an Age of Pioneers, an Age of Conquests, an Age of Commerce, an Age of Affluence, an Age of Intellect and finally an Age of Decadence. These stages overlapped and were not mechanically inevitable, but Glubb believed the resemblance between distant civilisations was too striking to dismiss. The beginning is characterised by energy: a relatively obscure people suddenly breaks out of its previous limitations, its members courageous, improvisational, confident and frequently ruthless. They have not yet accumulated enough institutions to become imprisoned by them, and they take risks because they have comparatively little to lose. Their leaders act rather than commissioning committees to determine whether action is procedurally appropriate.

Success then produces conquest, conquest produces security, and security makes commerce possible. Roads open, territories become connected, merchants flourish and wealth accumulates. Glubb did not regard commerce as a weakness; quite the opposite, since it is one of the achievements of successful imperial order. But the incentives of the society gradually change, and the ambitious young man who once sought honour through service or conquest increasingly seeks wealth through trade. Then comes the Age of Affluence, and here Glubb's argument becomes uncomfortable for modern Western readers because prosperity does not merely solve problems. Sustained prosperity changes the people enjoying it, and the virtues required to create wealth are not necessarily the virtues produced by possessing it. Glubb thought that prolonged affluence gradually displaced duty, courage and service with personal enrichment, comfort and status.

Education itself changes accordingly. Its purpose moves away from producing citizens capable of sustaining the civilisation and towards acquiring qualifications capable of producing higher personal incomes. There is something almost prophetic in that observation. The modern university speaks endlessly about transformation, justice and changing the world while simultaneously operating one of the most elaborate credential markets ever constructed. Students accumulate debt to obtain certificates allowing entrance into professional occupations, universities compete through rankings, branding and international markets, and employers demand qualifications for jobs that previous generations learned by doing. Education becomes both moral theatre and an economic sorting mechanism.

Glubb places the Age of Intellect after the Age of Affluence. Once a civilisation has accumulated sufficient surplus wealth, it can support universities, scholars, philosophers and intellectual specialists on a vast scale. This too is initially an achievement. Science advances, knowledge expands and institutions preserve accumulated learning. Yet intellect contains its own temptation because a civilisation eventually becomes sufficiently sophisticated to construct elaborate arguments against the assumptions upon which it was built. Intellectual brilliance can coexist with political paralysis. Every proposition generates a counter-proposition, every tradition acquires a specialist devoted to exposing its injustices, and every act becomes surrounded by arguments explaining why action would be morally complicated. A society once confident enough to build an empire eventually becomes uncertain whether it possesses the moral right even to preserve itself.

That is where Glubb's work becomes relevant to the peculiar hubris of the twenty-first-century West. Our confidence does not normally take the old imperial form of proclaiming racial or national superiority; indeed, Western elites frequently proclaim precisely the opposite. The modern hubris is the belief that our unprecedented sophistication has liberated us from historical recurrence. We possess economists who can manage recessions, central bankers who can manufacture liquidity, epidemiologists who can model disease, climate scientists who can model centuries, intelligence agencies that can monitor the planet, psychologists who can reconstruct social relations, educational experts who can redesign childhood and increasingly artificial intelligence capable of processing quantities of information no human mind could comprehend. Surely a civilisation equipped with all this knowledge cannot stumble blindly into decline like Rome.

Glubb's answer would probably have been that the sophistication is part of the pattern rather than an escape from it. Late civilisations do not necessarily collapse because everybody becomes stupid; they can collapse while possessing extraordinary intellectual resources. The problem is the relationship between knowledge, character and collective action. Glubb's Age of Decadence was marked, in his summary, by defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the welfare state and weakening religion. He attributed the underlying condition to prolonged wealth and power producing selfishness, love of money and declining duty. Some elements of that list are plainly products of Glubb's own period and assumptions and should not be treated as diagnostic commandments, yet the overall pattern is difficult to read today without experiencing the uncomfortable sensation of recognition.

Consider frivolity and materialism together. Never has a civilisation possessed greater capacity to transmit knowledge, and never have so many of its citizens carried devices capable of accessing almost the entire accumulated intellectual inheritance of humanity. The same machines are disproportionately employed watching fifteen-second videos, celebrity quarrels, pornography, advertising, political abuse and strangers performing dances. Western societies are richer by historical standards than almost anything Glubb examined, yet economic debate frequently proceeds on the assumption that another percentage point of consumption is the ultimate measure of national success. Governments celebrate GDP growth even when citizens cannot afford houses, fertility collapses, public infrastructure deteriorates and social trust declines. A civilisation can become extremely skilled at calculating the price of everything while becoming uncertain about what anything is for.

Consider pessimism and the weakening of religion. The civilisation that produced modern science, constitutional government, industrialisation and extraordinary increases in life expectancy increasingly teaches its children to understand their inheritance principally through its crimes. Slavery, colonialism, racism and war deserve historical examination, but a culture incapable of teaching why its civilisation is worth inheriting should hardly be surprised when its descendants feel little obligation to preserve it. Glubb did not argue that religious societies were incapable of decadence; history would make such a proposition absurd. His deeper point concerned the erosion of a source of duty standing above individual appetite. When transcendence disappears, something else must answer the question of why a person should sacrifice present comfort for people not yet born.

The welfare-state component requires more care than Glubb sometimes gave it. A wealthy civilisation caring for the sick, disabled and elderly is not evidence of decadence and may instead be evidence of civilisation. The problem arises when reciprocal obligation disappears and entitlement becomes detached from contribution. A social insurance system built upon solidarity can survive only while enough people believe they owe something to strangers and future generations, so the fiscal problem eventually becomes a moral one. Immigration presents the same need for discrimination. Glubb observed that great imperial centres repeatedly attracted foreigners, which is hardly surprising because successful societies attract people. Rome did, Baghdad did, London did and America does. The more serious Glubbian question is whether the receiving society possesses enough confidence to assimilate newcomers into a common civilisation, or whether it has become so uncertain of itself that it no longer knows what assimilation would mean.

A confident society can absorb outsiders because it expects newcomers eventually to become insiders. A decadent society can reach the opposite position, simultaneously importing large populations while teaching that its own historic culture has no particular claim to continuation. The problem then is not simply numbers but civilisational confidence. Perhaps Glubb's most important insight is that decadence is systemic rather than biological. He explicitly rejected the idea that declining societies consist of physically degenerate individuals incapable of courage or achievement. The people may remain individually intelligent, strong and industrious; what deteriorates is the system binding their efforts into a functioning civilisation.

That distinction is crucial because collapse does not require everyone to become useless. Rome in decline still produced able generals, administrators, craftsmen and thinkers. A modern Western country could contain brilliant scientists, courageous soldiers, successful entrepreneurs and loving families while its institutions become progressively less capable of maintaining borders, infrastructure, public order, fiscal stability or a common national purpose. This also explains why collapse can surprise contemporaries. People look around and see restaurants full, aircraft flying, universities operating, elections occurring and sharemarkets trading, and nothing resembles the Hollywood version of civilisational collapse. Glubb's argument instead concerns deterioration in the relationships beneath the visible machinery: duty becomes entitlement, service becomes careerism, political disagreement becomes factional hatred, wealth becomes consumption, education becomes credentialism, and institutions increasingly consume the accumulated capital of earlier generations.

The infrastructure may continue operating long after the culture that constructed it has changed profoundly. The late imperial citizen can therefore mistake inheritance for achievement, living among institutions, technologies and accumulated wealth created through centuries of sacrifice and assuming their continued existence demonstrates the superiority of his own generation. We inherit electrical grids and assume electricity is natural, constitutional government and assume peaceful transfers of power are natural, universities and assume organised knowledge is natural, and high-trust societies and assume strangers obeying rules is natural. We inherit functioning currencies, professional bureaucracies, scientific institutions and sophisticated militaries and imagine these things simply continue because modernity has discovered how to operate them. History says otherwise because institutions are accumulated human achievements requiring maintenance, legitimacy and cultural transmission, and they can be consumed faster than they are rebuilt.

Glubb was particularly interested in why societies fail to learn this from history. His answer was that history is usually studied too narrowly and too patriotically. Each civilisation studies its own story as exceptional, dividing the human past into separate compartments instead of comparing recurring patterns across peoples and centuries. He thought that if nineteenth-century Britons had studied the rise and decline of the medieval Arab imperial world seriously, they might have recognised much of their own future. That observation applies even more strongly today because modern politics operates on an extraordinarily short time horizon. Governments think until the next election, corporations until the next reporting period, journalists until tomorrow morning and social media until the next notification. A twenty-year problem appears remote and a century is almost metaphysical.

Civilisations operate on the opposite scale. Demography, public debt, institutional trust, educational decline, infrastructure, cultural assimilation and the transmission of values unfold across generations. By the time their consequences become unmistakable, the decisions producing them may have been made fifty years earlier. This is why collapseology, for all the crankishness that sometimes surrounds it, asks a legitimate question that conventional politics systematically avoids: what makes complex societies capable of continuing? The question is more useful than predicting an apocalypse because Rome did not end everywhere on Tuesday afternoon, while the British Empire receded without Britain ceasing to be a wealthy and important country. Imperial systems can fragment, shrink, transform or transfer power without their populations disappearing, and Glubb himself distinguished between the recurring internal processes of decline and the diverse external events through which the final loss of power occurred.

The lesson is therefore not that America, or Australia must collapse in some particular year because somebody has added 250 to 1776, or 1788. The United States could remain immensely powerful for generations, just as Western civilisation could reinvent itself in ways no cyclical theory predicts. The more important lesson is that no society receives an exemption from consequences. Wealth can be consumed, debt can accumulate, borders can cease functioning, birth rates can remain below replacement, infrastructure can decay, institutions can lose legitimacy, universities can become detached from the civilisation financing them, military superiority can disappear, and political factions can become so hostile that defeating one another matters more than preserving the system within which they compete.

Technology does not repeal any of this. Artificial intelligence may raise productivity enormously, robotics may compensate for ageing populations and biotechnology may extend healthy life, but a society possessing extraordinary technology can still make catastrophic political decisions. Rome possessed the finest infrastructure of its world, while Britain possessed the greatest navy and industrial economy of its age. Technical superiority is an advantage, not immortality. Indeed, technology may intensify late-civilisational hubris by giving rulers the impression that every social problem is susceptible to management. If fertility falls, manipulate incentives; if citizens become discontented, model their behaviour; if crime increases, expand surveillance; if debt becomes burdensome, adjust monetary policy; if social cohesion weakens, launch another government programme. The possibility that the system itself is producing the disorder becomes almost impossible for the system to contemplate.

Glubb called his essay not merely The Fate of Empires but The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, and the second half of that title matters. Identifying historical patterns is useful only if recognition creates the possibility of escaping them. There is no reason to believe decline must be irreversible because civilisations are not biological organisms programmed to die after a predetermined number of heartbeats. Glubb's 250 years should therefore be treated as a warning against complacency rather than a countdown clock. Human beings possess memory, and memory creates at least the possibility of deliberately refusing to repeat what earlier societies did, but doing so requires the quality Glubb thought declining civilisations increasingly lacked: humility.

Hubris tells every dominant civilisation that its power proves its wisdom, while historical humility asks whether power has merely concealed its mistakes. Hubris says wealth demonstrates successful institutions; humility asks whether the wealth was accumulated by earlier institutions now being dismantled. Hubris says sophisticated experts can manage whatever difficulties emerge; humility remembers that previous civilisations also contained intelligent people who believed they understood their world. The great value of Glubb is therefore not that he discovered an iron law giving empires 250 years to live, because he did not. His value lies in forcing prosperous societies to look into an historical mirror they instinctively avoid.

The face in that mirror is disturbing because it is familiar: enormous wealth, extraordinary intellectual sophistication, political factionalism, declining confidence, weakening duty, obsession with entertainment, institutional complexity and a growing assumption that the achievements inherited from the past will somehow maintain themselves. Perhaps the resemblance is superficial and the West really is different. Perhaps science, democracy and technology have created a civilisation capable of indefinite self-correction. Every civilisation at its zenith would have preferred some version of that answer, and Glubb's warning is that none of them got to decide the matter merely by declaring themselves exceptional.

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