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Arguably, the latter. For instance, one of the flaws of the western tradition is the insistence on egalitarianism. This has weakened the West as a consequence of undermining institutions and degrading our behavior. Yet it stands unassailable because the concept of universal equality in all...

True, at that point you'd pretty much have to do a dissection, trying to find the strengths and weaknesses in order to found a completely new culture from the ground up. That would be tricky, because most of the ideological weak links are objects of faith for the western tradition.

Distinct possibility. Early farmers had less free time than their hunter-gatherer peers, and the emergence of high-density living along with domesticated livestock gave rise to nearly all of our modern diseases, and those we have since made extinct. This is leaving aside any arguable "social...

Well, yeah, the further back you go the more consequences every action has. The Greek concept of democracy, the Bronze Age Collapse, the Post Ice-Age dryout, any change to any one of which would cause so many changes that history would bear no resemblance to itself. Then you get to the...

You can't point at a single pivotal point because each of these built upon one another, some more strongly than others. And I think that some of them could have still happened in isolation and not resulted in utter downfall. For instance, Christianity hastening the fall and severity of the...