The Idea of Decline in Western History

Arthur Herman

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781451603132
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.

PART ONE
THE LANGUAGES OF
DECLINE

CHAPTER 1
PROGRESS, DECLINE, AND DECADENCE

Everything degenerates in the hands of men.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The idea of decline is actually a theory about the nature and meaning of time. So is the idea of progress. The notion of history as progress stands largely discredited today among intellectuals, and especially among historians. They debate instead the origins and history of “the idea of Progress” and how it has served as a powerful cultural “myth” in Western thought.1 The origin and significance of the myth of decline have attracted less notice. Yet the two ideas are actually opposite sides of the same coin. Every theory of progress has also contained a theory of decline, since “inevitable” historical laws can just as easily shift in reverse as move forward. Likewise, whenever we meet a theory about the decline of Western civilization, we can probably find lurking underneath a theory of progress.

Virtually every culture past or present has believed that men and women are not up to the standards of their parents and forebears. In the earliest Greek literature, Homer’s Iliad, we find a description of Ajax picking up with one hand a chunk of stone, “which the sturdiest youngster of our generation would have found difficult to lift with both hands.”2 Two hundred years later, in the seventh century B.C., the poet Hesiod saw the entire cosmos governed by a process of generational decay, beginning with a golden age when gods ruled and men lived in peace and harmony, followed by a silver age, a bronze age, and finally an iron age when men are forced to live by the sweat of their brow and suffer their fate (at the hands of landlords, kings—and wives). The resemblance of Hesiod’s iron age to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is striking; but “iron age” is also the translation of the Kali Yuga of Hindu and Vedic religion, the last and worst of all human epochs, when “the strong, the cunning, the daring, and the reckless” rule the world. Similar myths appear in Confucian China; among the Aztecs, Zoroastrians, Laplanders, and numerous Native American tribes; and in Icelandic and Irish sagas, not to mention the Book of Genesis.3

To whom can I speak today?
The iniquity that strikes the land
Has no end.

To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals. 4

The sentiments seem recognizably modern, even though the author actually lived in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, circa 2000 B.C.

Why is this sense of decline common to all cultures? It may simply reflect the human experience of bodily changes from childhood to maturity and the inevitable decay of physical and mental capacity in old age. The collective memory of the past tends to be of a world endowed with powers that now seem lost. In fact, those endowments and losses seem to form the key stages of human existence itself, which Shakespeare would sum up as the Seven Ages of Man.

The genius of the Greeks was to expand this basic physical self-awareness into a philosophy of the nature of time and change. For the Greeks, time is change: what we were and what we have now—good, bad, or indifferent, but perhaps especially good—comes to an end. The philosopher Heraclitus saw the entire cosmos as governed by a single law of change: “Everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest.” Sophocles’ Oedipus understood this all too well:

Time destroys all things,
No one is safe from death except the gods.
The earth decays, the flesh decays,
Trust among men withers, and distrust takes its place. Friends turn on friends,
And cities upon cities,
With time all things change: delight
Into bitterness, even hatred into love. 5

The Greek word for time, chronos , was also the name of the god who devoured his own children.

A sense of the transitory nature of human existence permeated both Greek and Roman literary culture.* It underlay the myth of Arcadia, the imaginary pastoral paradise where shepherds and shepherdesses enjoyed the pleasures of life with none of the sorrows, as well as the motto carpe diem . Life was too short, and happiness too fleeting, to permit any postponement of gratification.

Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today;
Be fair or foul or rain or shine,
The joys I have possessed in spite of Fate are mine … 6

But the Greco-Roman view of time also contained the conviction that events do not occur at random but according to a repetitive cycle, from birth, life, decline, and death to rebirth. The Greek term for this cycle was “revolution,” anakuklosis . Plato saw the Greek city-states evolving according to a recurrent cycle. The Greek historian Polybius theorized that political systems followed a series of revolutions as monarchy decayed into tyranny, leading to aristocracy, which decayed into oligarchy, which led in turn to democracy followed by anarchy, requiring the restoration of one-man rule or monarchy.7 The medieval version of this cycle was Fortune’s wheel. Man was held in the hands of fate like the thread on a spinning wheel. By rotating the wheel, Fortune raises some men up as kings and heroes and popes, and then with another turn of the crank sends them back down again. Their fame is purely “fortuitous,” with no rhyme or reason.†8

Man’s one resource in the face of Fortune and blind circumstance was his virtue. Originally, virtus meant courage in battle, but it came to include manly integrity in all spheres of life. Virtue was the inner strength necessary to overcome the “slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune,” as Shakespeare put it, and to forge one’s own destiny. Virtue’s emblem was Hercules, the hero and slayer of monsters whose physical strength enabled him to defy impossible odds. Hercules was by far the most popular god both in the ancient world and during the Renaissance, the hopeful symbol of the individual’s ability to determine the direction of his own life against blind fate.9 In the Middle Ages, virtue took on Christian overtones and Fortune became identified with sin, the realm of corrupt flesh and the Devil. In the Renaissance, Machiavelli revived the opposition between Virtue and Fortune in pagan guise. As the author of The Prince explained, “Fortune is a woman,” who requires a strong man to tame her and control her. For that reason, “she is always well disposed toward younger men, since they are less cautious and more aggressive.”

Virtue versus Fortune, virtue versus corruption, and still later the clash between Kultur and Zivilisation : in each case, history is determined by an inevitable conflict between human character and impersonal fate. The ancient Greeks believed that this conflict made possible the growth of knowledge and the arts, as man struggled against primal nature and the surrounding darkness, as in the myth of Prometheus. Similarly, Plato’s philosopher struggles against the forces of ignorance and opinion as he ascends from the shadowy Cave of Illusions to the pure Realm of Ideas. The historian Thucydides saw the same struggle transforming Greece from rude barbarism to the city-state or polis .10 In the end, however, there was no escape from fate. Even the gods were ruled by its decrees; all must eventually return into the primal darkness, or chaos in Greek, and start anew.

That is, until one day someone arrives who has so much virtue (plus the unanimous support of the gods) that he manages to halt the relentless cycle of doom and set it in reverse, restoring the lost Golden Age. In the classical world, that man turned out to be Augustus Caesar; the restored Golden Age was imperial Rome:

Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy;
Born of time, a great new cycle of centuries Begins. Justice returns to earth, the Golden Age
Returns, and its first born comes down from heaven …
With him shall hearts of iron cease, and hearts of gold
Inherit the whole earth … Thus have the Fates spoken,
In unison with the unshakeable intent of Destiny.

Virgil’s “Fourth Eclogue” was composed in 40 B.C. to celebrate Augustus’s victory at Actium over Marc Antony and Cleopatra. Virgil proclaimed that fate, instead of being pitted against humanity, was now on its side. With destructive Fortune stopped in its course, there was no limit to the possibilities for empire, both in time and space.

Caesar Augustus, son of a god, destined to rule …
his empire shall expand
Past Garamants and Indians to a land beyond the zodiac
And the suns yearly path.

The cyclic motion of Fortune and history now becomes the “translation of empire” from east to west following the course of the sun, from the empires of the Orient, Egypt, and the Middle East (whose rulers likewise conjoined a heavenly and earthly order) to the Greeks and then to Augustus and his successors.

The myth of universal empire sustained Roman imperial propaganda until the age of Justinian. It proposed a new role for human rulers: creating a dominion based not on conquest or even heroic virtue, but on universal harmony—“to practice men in the art of peace” by dissolving contingent difference into a single immortal whole. The human arts and sciences would flourish and any hint of conflict—or decline—would vanish. For premodern Europeans, then, empire and imperialism had positive, not negative, connotations. Imperial Rome’s various successors and imitators took up the mission of establishing a universal empire that would be global, permanent, and harmonious. It influenced that central Christian image of Christ on Judgment Day, the “king of kings” into whose universal empire all previous and present ones would be dissolved. To late-antique Christians, Rome’s universal empire had seemed to presage Christ’s Catholic (in Greek, the katholikos or “universal”) Church:

What is the secret of Rome’s historical destiny? It is that God wills the unity of mankind…. Hitherto the whole earth from east to west had been rent asunder by continuous strife. To end this madness God has taught the nations to be obedient to the same laws and to all become Romans. Now we see mankind living in a single city…. This is the meaning of all the victories and triumphs of the Roman Empire: the Roman peace has prepared the way for the coming of Christ.11

Charlemagne and the German Holy Roman emperors all strove to build this single “Christian empire” during the Middle Ages, while in the age of absolutism a series of secular rulers, from England’s Elizabeth I to the “sun king” Louis XIV, appealed to the same expansive, irenic ideal.12

For the pagan world, the best that could be hoped for in a world governed by fate was a fixed stability in time. Universal empire was a kind of stalemate with history: it promised that the future would bring nothing bad, but also nothing new. But Christianity, through its Hebrew antecedents, introduced a different perspective. Time was governed not by fate but by the will of Yahweh. History’s movement was no longer cyclical but linear, running from Genesis to Judgment Day, according to God’s purpose. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” He tells His faithful. “I am the first and the last.” In the new linear view, the future becomes more important than the past in determining man’s meaningful relations with other men, as humanity pushes irresistibly forward to Christ’s Second Coming. A future event and final purpose—the millennium or return of Christ to govern his universal empire—directs all of history and our actions in it.13

The central text for the millennialist perspective on history was the New Testament’s Book of the Revelation of St. John, or (in its Greek version) the Book of the Apocalypse. From the apocalyptic perspective, the things in the world are never as they seem. The beast with seven heads and ten horns, symbolizing the Roman Empire under Nero, seems powerful and immortal. All the world “worshiped the beast, saying, who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” (13:4). But the beast is actually weak and insignificant, because he has no place in God’s final purpose. As the angel explains, “The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition; and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder …” (17:8). The Empire of the Beast and the Scarlet Woman will, improbably enough, be destroyed by the Lamb and his followers, the then tiny Christian sect, since they are the Lord’s Anointed. In history, it is the rebel, not the ruler, who finally emerges victorious. “These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them; for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings; and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful” (17:14). The apocalyptic prophet brings comfort to the oppressed and afflicted by pronouncing God’s doom on the status quo, and announcing what will take its place.

This apocalyptic view found its first practical application in A.D. 410 when Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, learned that Rome had fallen to the Visigoth barbarians. Augustine told his dismayed parishioners that this was not the end of the world, but a glorious new beginning. He announced that the fall of Rome opened the way to the building of a Christian world order to replace the corrupt earthly Babylon of paganism. He called this future eternal city the New Jerusalem, in which all the faithful will be finally united with God once and forever.

Augustine’s City of God became the foundation of Christian theology in the medieval West. The Catholic Church, which already had established its base in Rome, quickly identified itself with this New Jerusalem, and the notion that papal Rome was indeed the Eternal City became an imperishable part of the Church’s self-image. But all through the Middle Ages a tension remained between a Church establishment that identified itself as the new universal empire and the apocalyptic identification of earthly empire with the Antichrist. A succession of prophets and rebels—Joachim of Fiore, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and Savonarola—insisted that the Roman Apostolic Church in fact bore the mark of the beast. More often than not these rebels ended up at the stake, and the Church’s claim to power remained unshaken. But then one managed to elude his persecutors and create his own “true Reformed church.” For Martin Luther, the Catholic Church was nothing more or less than Babylon—“it would be no wonder,” he wrote in 1520, “if God would rain fire and brimstone from heaven and sink Rome into the abyss, as He did Sodom and Gomorrah of old”—and the pope the Antichrist. “If he is not,” Luther exclaimed, “then somebody tell me who is!”14

Protestants and Catholics alike explained the religious wars of sixteenth-century Europe in terms of the Apocalypse and the struggle against a menacing Antichrist. Salvation seemed to require the violent and catastrophic destruction of everything that had come before, as massacres and atrocities mounted on both sides. Only with the ebbing of sectarian passions in the seventeenth century did a new, less catastrophic vision of history as redemption emerge: the idea of Progress.

PROGRESS AND CIVILIZATION

On the eve of the modern era, then, there were numerous ways that Europeans could talk about change, time, and history. There was the myth of the Golden Age, with its appeal to what the poet Petrarch called dolce tempo della prima etade (“that sweet ti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE THE LANGUAGES OF DECLINE
• PART TWO PREDICTING THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
• PART THREE THE TRIUMPH OF CULTURAL PESSIMISM
• AFTERWORD
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX