The burden of civilization

Man’s trail is littered with the wrecks of dead civilizations and dotted with the graves of promising peoples stricken by an untimely end.

Sharp and insistent comes the query: Why? Civilization seems so good a thing! It means relative protection from the blind and cruel forces of nature; abolition of the struggle against savage beasts and amelioration of the struggle between men; opportunity for comfort, leisure, and the development of the higher faculties. Why, then, do we find so many branches of the human species never attaining—never really striving after—these eminently desirable boons? Also (yet more noteworthy!) why do we find still other stocks, after having attained civilization, losing it and falling back to the lower levels of barbarism or even of savagery?

Mysterious though this may at first sight appear, there is, nevertheless, an answer: Those stagnant or decadent peoples could not bear the burden of civilization. For civilization is a burden as well as a benefit.

This is inevitable in a universe governed by laws which decree that something may not come out of nothing. Civilization is not a cause but an effect—the effect of sustained human energy; and this energy, in turn, springs from the creative urge of superior germ-plasm.

Civilization is thus fundamentally conditioned by race. In any particular people, civilization will progress just so far as that people has the capacity to further it and the ability to bear the correlative burden which it entails. When this crucial point is reached, the civilization of that people either stagnates or retrogrades.

Lothrop Stoddard
The Revolt Against Civilization
The Menace of the Under Man