Finis Saeculi

This past week marked the ninth time we've celebrated New
Year in a new century and millenium (no, for the last time, the new century did NOT begin on January 1, 2000, and the sentiments of millions to the contrary aren't going to change the laws of mathematics or centuries of calendrics; but no matter). We still haven't figured out a snappy name for this lost decade of ours (the "Naughts"? The "Oughts"? The "Os"? Ouch!), and most of the Western world is still enmired in '80s nostalgia, for reasons that aren't altogether clear. Still, the events of the last few years have inspired a sort of permanent fin de siecle malaise that refuses to go away. The Y2K apocalypse failed to materialize, but we've been in more or less permanent economic crisis mode since the stock bubble -- the first stock bubble -- burst in spring of 2000. We've been at war with a lot of people since 9-11. And of course, we've had epochal natural disasters galore, all of which might lead us to suppose that the end, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer once put it, is "pretty seriously nigh."

Now the official name of my church has the words "Latter-Day" in it, signifying that we Latter-Day Saints see this historical epoch as the last before the Second Coming, that at some time in the indeterminate but not far-distant future, the Lord is going to come down and clean house. This sentiment is far from peculiar to my faith; folks have been reading the end of days into every major catastrophe in recorded history, and probably in just as many of which our historians are ignorant. How, for example, must the doomed Tambora civilization have reacted when their island exploded beneath them in the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, an event that obliterated perhaps 100,000 Tamborans, as well as their unique culture and language, in a pyroclastic cloud less than two centuries ago? What was it like for those who witnessed the unexampled calamity of the Black Death, which wiped out somewhere between a third and a half of all Europeans? And what of those whose unhappy lot was to endure history's most desolating wars firsthand -- the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, the Islamic wars of conquest, the Mongol invasions, the Thirty Years War, and of course, the horrific conflicts and pogroms of the century just passed? It is a fair guess to speculate that all of those eras had their doomsayers and dances macabres, and with some fair justification.

In point of fact, the world has come to an end many times, as we know from historical, archaeological, and geological records (with the first I include sacred writ). We are all apt to regard the times and circumstances of our lives as uniquely privileged -- the Way Things Are, and presumably, always will be. From time to time, of course, The Way Things Are changes abruptly, catastrophically. It happened in the days of Noah and in the days of the nameless Pharaoh who tried to refuse Moses' demands -- "Knowest thou not that Egypt is destroyed?" Pharaoh's counselors inquired, yet that stubborn potentate from an era that had abruptly passed away refused to bow to the inevitable. Instead he went after the Israelites with the only strength that remained to him -- military -- and we know the rest.

The same transpired with the Nephites and the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon -- each civilization, all its other resources exhausted, taking final refuge in military conflict, the only strength left to them. So also with Rome -- the Western Empire, at least, which continued to fight and despoil her enemies long after her other resources -- her wealth, her religion, her cultural vitality, even her population -- were spent. The days of Stilicho and Aetius have little to display other than gargantuan battles like Chalons -- which Jordanes correctly (for his era)characterized as signaling the world's end.

The world came to an end again in spring of 1453, when the Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Roman Empire, if Bury's authority is deferred to) died with a whimper at the hands of the appalling child-conquerer Mehmet. Unsympathetic historians are apt to view the fall of Constantinople as something akin to euthanasia, since by the time of the Ottoman supremacy, the once-proud Byzantine state had contracted to a rump consisting of Constantinople itself and a few outlying city-states like Trebizond and Mistra. But to the Constantinopolitans, the vessels of civilization throughout the Dark Ages of Christendom, the fall of their city into the hands of the infidel was a token of the end of days. As Mehmet's cannon blasted through their walls that had stood for more than a millenium, none of them could imagine the world as it was to become. Few of them, including their valiant last emperor, would live to see the new age anyway.

If there is one certain verdict offered up by history and archaeology, it is that nothing built by the hands of man endures forever. Even empires -- the mightiest of all the works of the hands of men -- seem to have their life cycles, as Spengler and many others have observed. Each of them at its apogee was a sort of novus ordo saeculorum -- a new order of the ages, or as some might style it, a "new world order" -- that encapsulates the way things must always be. But all of them perish, and the same will surely come to pass for our civilization, sooner or later.

A question that needs answering is: Why? Why, for all his considerable ingenuity, has man never been able to create a permanent civilization? After all, many of his lesser contrivances -- fire, the wheel, writing, animal husbandry, and the like -- seem to have become permanent fixtures. We see no rise and fall of language, for example, although languages can and do become extinct. Languages evolve over time but lose none of their vitality. Yet civilizations -- at least, the defining features of high civilization -- do wax and wane over great but measurable intervals. Art and engineering flourish and then fail, trade rises and falls, economies prosper and then decline, and eventually, even military science and power dwindle to naught.

From my reading of history, a number of factors are always involved in the decline of great civilizations and states. They include economic and financial decline, social decay, empire building followed by eventual military defeat, internal political intrigue, and Caesarism. All of these factors were present in the decline and fall of the great powers of the last two millenia -- Rome, Byzantium, Venice and the Italian city states (chiefly Genoa, Pisa, Florence, and Amalfi), the Baghdad Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and the Russian Empire/Soviet Union. Each of these has followed a trajectory in which all of the abovementioned factors have more or less coincided during the period of decline.

To cite an example less familiar than Rome: the city-states of the Italian peninsula, especially Venice, were the torch-bearers of Western Civilization during the Middle Ages. From them issued many of the great advances in art, science, and technology that laid the foundation for a later age. The enterprising Venetians, for example, mastered the technology of ship-building and invented modern accounting, allowing them to become the military and financial superpower of the Mediterranean Basin. It was these islands of civilization in the decrepit Middle Ages that provided the soil where the Renaissance germinated. Yet it was these same cities that were constantly rent by factional intrigue, Ghibelline on Guelph, quarreling over the seemingly trivial matter of Holy Roman imperial versus papal supremacy, respectively. So too were their once-mighty finances corrupted by the inflationary practices of the great Italian banking families, creating periodic financial panics that sapped morale and capital alike. The Venetians and the Genovese spent much of their strength warring against one another, in the Mediterranean, in the Bosporus, in the Black Sea. Each regarded the entire world as its exclusive commercial franchise and exhausted its resources building armadas to fight the other and lobbying the rest of the world for diplomatic alliances. Internally, Venice jettisoned her enlightened republican form of government for a fearsomely efficient police-state apparatus and network of international espionage. When the Age of Exploration opened up the wider world for colonization, the Italian states were no longer able to hold their own, and had to yield to newer, younger powers with the resources to extend commerce and colonization to Asia and the Americas. The coup de grace was the Napoleonic conquest of Italy, the first and last time in her twelve hundred year independent history that Venice was occupied by a foreign military force.

But all of these factors are mere efficient causes. The final cause of civilizational collapse even Spengler was unable to fathom -- he was content to note that all civilizations follow such a trajectory, and rather prosaically likened it to the life cycle of a living organism. Yet Spengler discovered the reason for historical cyclicity without fully appreciating it, in my opinion. His great insight -- that history in its teleological sense consists of the rise and decline of cultures, not states, and that each great culture is at heart characterized by a prime symbol that informs its arts, sciences, laws, even languages -- contains the grand key for understanding why it is that manmade civilizations cannot endure.

By Spenglerian taxonomy, the "West" is a cultural and not a geopolitical term, on a par with other great cultures such as the Classical or Appolonian culture (Greco-Roman), the Middle Eastern or Magian Culture (embracing Persian, Byzantine, and Islamic culture), the Indian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, and the Mayan. Each of these, Spengler argued, coalesced around a prime or ultimate symbol (also termed a "world-symbol"), born of a distinctive religious and cosmological worldview, which set boundary conditions on the path of development that the culture would follow. In the case of the Classical or Apollonian world, that world symbol was the fixed point in space, which the polyhistor Spengler showed quite convincingly to be manifest in Greco-Roman art, architecture, engineering, even historiography. For Western or "Faustian" culture, the prime symbol is infinite space. It is manifest in the whole panoply of cultural conceits that are distinctively Western: the assumption of infinite progress, the modern mathematics of infinities, limits, series and infinitessimals, the upward reach of Western buildings, from cathedrals to skyscrapers, and the privileging of music as an art form over more bounded forms of representation like painting and sculpture.

In my mind, Spengler's case for prime or world symbols is overwhelming; to his taxonomy (he identified four such, the other two being the "world cavern" for the Magian culture and the "infinite way" for the Egyptian), I add my own modest contribution: the "cosmic wheel," sign of infinite recursion and the prime symbol of the Indian or Brahmanic culture, for reasons I may address in a future post, but not this one. I am, in a word, persuaded that Spengler's insight is both critical and correct.

But how does such a model give rise to a theory of cultural cyclicity? From the nature of signs themselves. Recall from our earlier discussion of symbols a la Charles Sanders Peirce that these are signs indeed, endowed with a vitality and a fulness that other, more degenerate sign types, like icons and indexes, do not possess. Recall also that symbols are not mere convenient abstractions; to the realist, they are real, just as love, law, and other concepts are real. Being real they have the power to cause real events. And being of the nature of signs, that is, mental representations, they obey what Peirce called the Law of Mind. In other words, they do what thoughts do, progressing, changing, and, most especially, becoming more general as they lose intensity. All signs, in other words, evolve and ultimately morph into new signs. They tend to spread, but as they spread, their focus and power diminishes. This is the way it is with a "train of thought," which is nothing more (or less) than semiosis, the continual production and modification of symbols, each one predicated on the previous one by some mode of association.

If one accepts this portrayal of things as they really are in the realm of thought (which is, after all, the realm of the Infinite -- "My thoughts are not your thoughts," God has said), then it is easy to see that the prime symbols that underlie culture must have a similar tendency to spread and then to lose vitality. In the end, they give way to new symbols, and a new culture is born.

Now a vital point to be gleaned from Spengler is that these prime symbols arise in the first place from religion, that culture comes about in the final analysis as a consequence of man's reaction to the numinous and the spiritual. The word "culture," coming as it does from cultus, "religion," captures this notion very neatly. In the high flower of civilization, every culture is inspired by religious impulses first and foremost. When decay sets in -- when its prime symbol begins to degrade -- then secular is substituted for religious as a wellspring of civilization. In the classical world, the Stoics and Epicureans betokened this decay, and in India, the replacement of Brahmanic Hindusim with the so-called "philosophy religions" embodied a similar process.

While I think Spengler oversimplifies his argument a bit here, since the sacred and the secular so often coexist for lengthy periods, the former occasionally reasserting itself over the latter, his basic insight is sound. Who can argue that the West's greatest music, greatest painting, and greatest sculpture has already been produced, and most of it during the long age of faith from the high middle ages to the end of the nineteenth century? Even literature, something of a laggard, will probably never produce another Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Dickens, Trollope, or Tolstoy. In the realm of mathematics and physics (especially the latter), an awareness is beginning to sink in that we will never see another Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Euler, Gauss, or Pauli, that their latter-day inheritors are mostly glorified technicians reduced to tinkering with so-called "standard models" or dabbling in grandiose theories, like superstrings, that will likely never be empirically verifiable. For all its superficial brilliance, ours is an age of technicians, bureaucrats, and copycats.

And it is not by accident that we live in a time of secularism ascendant. Little wonder that many of our most eminent scientists -- Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins come to mind -- are avowed atheists. The universe for them is a device, and machines -- the ill-fated LHC, for instance -- are the only means adequate to evaluate it.

All of which brings us back to our New Year's question: How nigh is the end? Well, things are bad, but they've been worse. Our burgeoning global recession still isn't a patch on the Great Depression, and our wars and rumors of wars pale beside the world wars of the last century. Natural disasters? Things haven't been this bad, since, oh, the seventies. Anyone remember the great Bangladesh cyclone or the huge earthquakes in China and Iran back then? My guess is that the seventies were at least as bad a decade as this one. And we haven't seen anything like the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919 since, well, 1919. So by any such metric, things could be a lot worse, and have been, even in living memory.

The most troubling indicator, in my mind, is the reflexive militarism that, for several generations, seems to have replaced wise foreign policy for the United States. Like Rome, Venice, and Athens in their declension (not to mention the Nephites and the Jaredites), we seem determined to continue doing the one thing that we can still do better than anyone else -- impose our will militarily. And this condition is not lost on a number of our self-styled prognosticators, though they may fail to grasp the full historical implications; the rest of the world, Zakaria informs us, is rising to equal and perhaps surpass us in every realm but one, the military -- where (he and his epigones in the DC think-tanks assure us) America will maintain full-spectrum dominance for the foreseeable future. Valens and his legions at Hadrianople doubtless believed the same.

In the longer term, there can be no doubt as to the road we are on. The scriptures, more straightforward than Spengler, teach that civilizations fall when men forget God. And this is precisely what has happened to Western man, as his world-symbol, and the spiritual perspective behind it, have been lost. Those of us with so-called "stained-glass minds" live our lives as fish out of water in a world unsympathetic to the faith that once moved our civilization. In a coming day, we must suppose, the symbols of eternity will be restored among a believing remnant. Culture will be renewed and history, as it has always done in ages past, will resume its upward march.

These are my views on the cyclicity of history -- and on why, indeed, such a thing as history exists at all. I think I'll watch an episode of Buffy for some added perspective. Good night.