Provocative fictions ... or facts?

Snopes.com, which vets urban legends to test for authenticity, judges that the status of the following text may be "various":

At about the time our original 13 states adopted their new constitution, in the year 1787, Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at The University of Edinburgh) had this to say about "The Fall of The Athenian Republic" some 2,000 years prior:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

• From Bondage to spiritual faith;
• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage."

The text goes on to attempt an inference about the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections, which is both dubious and of no interest to me. However, whatever the status of the foregoing text, and whether it was really by "Lord Woodhouselee, Alexander Fraser Tytler" or not, the provocative idea it suggests is worthy of some consideration, even if not altogether new. The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is full of references to the cyclical rises and falls of Israel's fortunes as she walked with God, then turned away from God, and then repented and turned back to Him, repeating the cycle. One thinks of the imagery of the Prophet Hosea. If one has read Gibbon, it's hard not to recall the pace of the decline and fall also of the Roman Empire, and hard to avoid drawing parallels to our own time. One reads historical texts and finds that in every generation, nearly, the elders seem to find the younger generation headed to hell in a handbasket. Yet when one observes the larger sweep of history, there are genuine turns of the tide, as when the Greeks spoiled the invasion of the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, or when Rome actually fell in AD 476, or when Byzantium fell in 1453, or when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed in 1945, or the US abdicated her effort in Vietnam in 1975, or the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Was September 11, 2001 symptomatic of some deeper turning point in U.S. history? Or was it something more culturally significant, such as the declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder and legitimation of abortion with Roe v Wade, both in 1973? Is Oswald Spengler (the author of The Decline of the West) right, are civilizations like organisms? Do they have a natural lifespan and die? Or do they just become spiritually corrupt and suffer divine judgment implode under their own decadence? Maybe Mel Gibson's new film, Apocalipto, will offer a provocative suggestion as to the fate of the Mayan civilization. Even Herman Dooyeweerd gave a series of lectures entitled In the Twilight of Western Thought. Is it only Catholics who take the long view? AmChurch may die in ten or twenty years, but the Catholic Church will be forever. As they say, "Eternal Rome." Or again: "The Catholic Church," said G.K. Chesterton, "is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age." Cheers.