Critique of “Day of Empire” by Amy Chua

At one level I thoroughly enjoyed Day of Empire by Amy Chua. Since my middle- and high school days I have always enjoyed history classes and reading history books. The ancient empires of Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome have always fascinated me, and Prof. Chua presents a very readable and concise review of both these ancient and some more modern states and civilizations. The descent of the western world into the Dark Ages after the advanced states and cultures of Greece and Rome are a fascinating mystery. 

Over the years historians have tried to explain and identify causes for the rise and subsequent demise of these empires, both as and interesting exercise in itself, but sometime also in the (probably vain) hope of perhaps learning from history to avoid the demise of whatever the current empire happens to be. Unfortunately the evidence seems persuasive that we humans do not learn from history - remember the “war to end all wars”. And then there is the current “limited military activity” in Libya showing how little we have learned from our futile 10 year engagement in Afghanistan.

And therein lies the rub. Prof. Chua’s Day of Empire argues as its central thesis that

... every society that could ... be described as having achieved global hegemony -- was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. Indeed, in every case tolerance was indispensable to the achievement of hegemony. Just as strikingly, the decline of empire has repeatedly coincided with intolerance, xenophobia, and calls for racial, religious and ethnic “purity”.

It is one thing to review history (as much as an unbiased review of history is ever possible, especially where the available records are often written significantly after the fact, based on oral histories and temple inscriptions) and highlight interesting events, “facts” and trends. It is quite another thing to present mostly tenuous, more often meaningless, “evidence” of ethnic, racial and religious “tolerance” as a common cause for the rise and decline of these hyperpowers.

Even if one accepts the proposition that there is a time-correlation between the rise of these hyperpowers and whatever one defines as “tolerance”, and between the decline of these empires and a rise in intolerance (and this correlation is at best tenuous in Prof. Chua’s presentation), one cannot then conclude that this is a cause-effect relationship. This is a very common error which scientific illiterates make, that (even statistically significant, which these most certainly are not) correlations from one variable to another imply a cause-effect relationship.

It is a commonly observed phenomenon that in times of plenty, when there are sufficient resources, wealth and power to provide everyone the real or imagined feeling of well being and “upward mobility”, that “tolerance”, both ethnic and religious, tends to increase, while in times of scarcity such tolerance declines and can even “flip” to xenophobic intolerance. Thus, accepting the “correlation” which Amy Chua tries to highlight, one can just as legitimately argue that the “tolerance” is a result of the growth of the empire (and not a contributing cause), and that once the empire stops growing, or even goes into decline, the resulting decline in opportunity and feeling of well-being causes the observed intolerance.

On top of this common “correlation fallacy”, it is extremely far-fetched to try and identify “tolerance”, the concept and definition of which has evolved and changed dramatically even over the short history of America, not to mention the almost 3000 years covered by Prof. Chua’s hyperpowers, as the one unifying cause/effect of the rise and decline of these hyperpowers. And to then try and use this “insight” as a basis for defining techniques for delaying, or even avoiding, the decline of American hegemony is the hight of arrogance.

Even if one could come up with plausible commonalities on what caused past hyperpowers to decline and in some cases disappear from the face of the earth, it would still be next to impossible to apply these insights as preventative measures to forestall the decline of America -- even if the US where an autocratic dictatorship, and that alone would be equivalent to the death of America as we know it.