I was discussing this topic with my wife this morning, focusing of course, on the current collapse of the United States in an orgy of ignorance.
I think the issues, as you rightly note, of the collapse of cultures and the loss within (and often without) that culture of the knowledge it builds, are complex.
The religious philosopher and historian - and I write this as an atheist - Elaine Pagels, once wrote - if I recall correctly in her book The Origins of Satan - that most cultures would have found the declaration of what the slaveholder called "self evident truths" to be absurd.
Perhaps it is more forgivable to say "created" (or born) equal than it is to say "are equal."
This weekend we're watching the 6 hour documentary the Emperor of All Maladies based on the book of the same title by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a truly great scientist working on the biology of cancer in particular, and cell biology in general.
I am not his equal. He is by far my superior. I cannot hold a candle to his intellect.
Now, I am nonetheless comfortable in my life, not rich but relatively secure. I am therefore free, without resentment, to applaud Dr. Mukherjee at my leisure, to appreciate what he does, without a shred of resentment that he is far better educated than I am.
But of course, the work of Dr. Mukherjee would not be possible were it not - although we don't think about it - the people who drive the trucks to dispose of his laboratory and medical waste, the people who work in the cafeteria at his institution, the janitors, the security guards, and, in fact, the miners who dig the metals for his instruments, the people who work in third world less than safe chemical plants to make the early stage intermediates that go into the synthesis of the wonder drugs he extols. I know of these things by experience.
Some of these people we don't see are subject to resentment, not just of their long working hours, sometimes in three or four jobs in which they can and often do experience abuse, emotional and otherwise. They do not have the luxury of contemplating the value and importance and beauty of Dr. Mukherjee's work.
What I am arguing is that enlightenment depends on the efforts of the unenlightened. Enlightenment is, in a very real sense, a luxury. The slaveholder of the noble rhetoric about equality was able to muse about equality because he asserted that he owned human beings and was entitled to steal, without compensation, all of the value of their work. Slaves were not reading the works of John Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau. They were not permitted to read. We no longer, formally, have slavery, but we do have an oppressed underclass, not just here, but abroad.
What I am saying is that in every period of enlightenment there is a subculture, rightly or wrongly, of darkness, just as in periods of darkness there are people who are enlightened.
A great culture can persist for many years without the balance between these forces being disturbed, but these inequalities cannot persist forever. Further there are external forces beyond human control, disruptions to climate, access to water or food, that can drive these disparities to a surface where people are governed by passions and not reason. These things are happening now. We are experiencing a disappearance of resources at precisely the time that obscene unequal distributions of wealth are observed.
My wife asked my opinion as to why we are incapable of doing something about the obvious insanity now dominating our government. I remarked that the slaveholders and non-slaveholders who wrote the US Constitution, which contained some compromises we may now find deplorable, lived in a time where electrons, never mind electronics, were unknown, where the simplest communications might take days or weeks to accomplish, and what they were working to build was based on the world in which they, and not we, lived. Their work proved spectacularly successful, because it was based on measured, slow change, change they deliberately felt should be slow, so as to prevent the rise of unconsidered passion. This was not a world with an internet, computers, mass instantaneous communication. They wrote a document for their times, not our times. Their structure is obsolete.
Now it is true that cultures that collapsed millennia ago did not have the exact kinds of changes I have described in our present case, but their stability depended on broad acceptance of the power structures they represented. When those power structures can no longer support themselves, when the assumptions under which they exist are weakened either by internal or external threats (such as military threats, themselves reflections of external instability cf. Germany in the 1930's) they can and do collapse.
German science died because the structure under which it was built, the Imperial Prussian State, was weakened by leadership that could not be flexibly adjusted.
I would argue that American greatness and American Science around which that greatness was built is dying because of the inflexibility it shows to correct a vast mistake driven by instantaneous communication that whipped up the passions of an intellectual underclass, essentially the mob rule that James Madison, slaveholder, so abhorred.
These remarks are not meant to demean the underclass, or to suggest that they do not have basic human rights. Of course they do. FDR helped the United States survive a crisis by extending the benefits of wealth to those who did not possess it, to acknowledge those human rights. Thus he worked to defuse resentment, prevented it from festering until it exploded. I'm not sure we have done quite as well as he did in modern times. In fact, I'm sure we didn't.
The specific causes of collapse are variable, but collapse itself seems to be inevitable. Human culture seems to inherently contain the seeds of instability.
I do not know what or how much will survive this current American tragedy, comparable to the times of the idiot Czar Nicolas II, the petulant spoiled thug Wilhelm the 2nd, to give a recent example of societal collapses - the Nazis would not have perhaps existed, nor certainly come to power without the First World War. German science did not collapse in the immediate aftermath of that war; the country was still producing great art, science, and culture all through the 1920's, but the ground work of its collapse was ever present and had its roots well before that "Great War" started.
History, should it survive as a discipline, will be astounded at the collapse of the United States in the 2020's, its rapidity and its banality, but the groundwork was laid, perhaps by a kind of smug self satisfied inertia, driven by unequal distribution of wealth, and the uncritical acceptance of the well advertised lie distributed in a mass format. This, I suspect, may be something of a cultural universal irrespective of the particulars of technology by which it thrives, inequality enforced by unequal access to social and economic mobility.
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