A Kind of Climate Change

Reading Toynbee’s A Study of History again, closely, after a number of decades shows, even in my highly abridged version (which takes twelve volumes down to two), how detailed Toynbee’s work was and therefore how fine-grained the historical patterns from which he built up his theories of change. Toynbee’s work appeared beginning 1934. Oswald Spengler’s first work became visible in 1918, Pitirim Sorokin’s sociology dates its start to 1937. These works of cyclic history therefore appeared in a period of Western culture Toynbee would have characterized as a Time of Troubles. Toynbee’s language, like that of the others, is scholarly, very dense. The ideas expressed are ultimately quite incapable of being made use of in any meaningful, collective, practical, purposive way even if the people could internalize the meanings presented. The great patterns in history are more akin to climate change than anything else. It’s possible to build up a clear-enough picture of what is happening and what has happened in the past, but moving vast masses of humanity to respond intelligently to the challenge is too daunting a task even for the occasional stellar figure that appears in the realms of action.

The Ship of Philosophers

On September 28, 1922, Communist Russia, at Lenin’s behest, sent at least 160 philosophers and intellectuals from Petrograd to Stettin, in Germany, aboard the Oberbürgermeister Haken. Another ship was also involved, the Preussen. Lenin’s active agent in this venture was Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka, vividly familiar to all who have watched Reilly, Ace of Spies. On board the Oberbürgermeister Haken was Nicolai Berdyaev, the philosopher. Berdyaev had also spent some time in Lubyanka prison. Dzerzhinsky interviewed him there but found Berdyaev firmly centered in his philosophy and not apparently political. Berdyaev’s fate was therefore kinder than Reilly’s. The philosopher lived in Berlin for a while, eventually in Paris; he died there in 1948.

The ship of philosophers produced for Brigitte the association of The Ship of Fools. To set that in perspective, that name first attached to a satirical book of the same title by one Sebastian Brant published in 1494 and illustrated by Albrecht Dürer. The more famous painting of it is by Hieronymus Bosch from the same period (shown). The book parodies the vices and abuses of its times. An interesting association between “church” and “ship” and “fools” had long been present in earlier mediaeval times, what with navis meaning ship as well as the nave of a church, and corruption present in the Church. Hence…

Another passenger on that ship of the philosophers was Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist-historian, a great teacher of mine, albeit only through his writings. And, come to think of it, on our own endless migration from the homeland caused by World War II, one of our stops along the way was also Stettin, now Szczecin in Poland.

My illustration comes from Wikipedia (link) by a round-about-way from Russia. The inscription beneath it says: “The ship with the long name ‘Lord Mayor Haken’ was one of those small passenger ships that, by way of many lines, linked the harbors of the Baltic one with the others. They were smaller than today’s Helgoland ships but were quite stately.” Another source on this subject may be found here.

The Culture of Emotion

We speak not strictly and philosophically, when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. [David Hume, Of the Passions]

This well-known passage by Hume (1711-1776) should be read in its full context to bring out its full bouquet. That context may be perused here, but I will try to give the highlights. As Hume understands emotions, they are basic and prior to reasoning. They are produced by the prospect of pain or pleasure; they are comprehensive intuitions of the totality of a situation in which reasoning is summoned only to illuminate causes and effects. “A passion is an original existence,” as he puts it, thus not a concept; it is akin to facts like feeling thirsty, sick, or being more than five feet high. Reasoning, by contrast, rests on concepts; these Hume considers as mere representations, “copies” of authentic reality—like (as we might say) photographs rather than flesh and blood. Let me sharpen this. Hume arranges reality in such a fashion that conscious reasoning becomes a secondary activity, subservient to raw reality. The last, the raw, he considers authentic. After a lengthy elaboration of this point, he concludes this passage by saying:

In short, a passion must be accompanied with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then, ’tis not the passion, properly speaking,which is unreasonable, but the judgment.

Welcome to Modernity. I discovered the quotations cited, and read the richer context in which they are embedded, in trying to understand what may be the roots of our modern “culture of emotion.” I have something of an aversion to the Enlightenment and have not studied its luminaries, least not Hobbes and Hume, but one is sometimes obliged to look. I came this way because, in another context, I was again reminded of pop culture’s favorite question, especially when it wishes to signal sensitivity. That question is “How do you feel about that.” Feeling is authentic. Thought and feeling are opposed. And the implication of the question, almost always, is that in some way the gruffy hero, doing his usual insensitive rampaging, is not “in touch with his feelings” and needs to be—gently—reminded.

As I encountered Hume’s views on passion, I thought: Well, well, well! Wouldn’t you know it! What philosophers scribble gradually soaks into the soil and becomes reflexive wisdom two, three hundred years later. Not surprisingly, the entry on “Emotion” I found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, while it mentions Plato’s and Aristotle’s views (barely), relies entirely on figures from the Enlightenment—and their modern elaborators. Not a single prominent thinker of Christendom is so much as mentioned. These are the experiences which cause me to agree with writers like Pitirim Sorokin and, more generally, with the cyclic historians.

Not that, mind you, the modern analysis of emotion is “all wrong,” or anything like that. This is a vast and complex subject, almost permanently vexing because the body-soul duality is so effectively resistant to conceptual parsing. My point here is cultural. In spiritual (ideational) periods, the higher aspects of soul-function are stressed, in materialistic (sensate) times those closer to the physical and sensuous get the nod. If the two were absolute equals, this wouldn’t matter, but if a hierarchical order places one above the other, demoting the higher will have tangible consequences for social well-being.

But the most ironic and meaningful aspect of this modern tendency—this emphasis on emotions—is that in many, many cases the motive behind this invocation of emotions in popular art is nobler than its expression. It has become impossible to appeal to the spiritual ranges in humanity; the impulse to do so, however, is still present. Therefore a word like “feelings” is used to point at something that really transcends mere feelings. Conversely, in media commentary we also encounter frequently characterizations of events or performances as “spiritual” when, in actuality, they are just emotional. My sense of discomfort arises, I think, because I’d just as soon hear a spade called a spade.

Endormement—Just an Idea

Those familiar with theories of cyclic history will have heard of Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968), a Russian-born but U.S.-settled sociologist. He wrote Social and Cultural Dynamics, a four-volume work, in which his theories are laid out. I’ve mentioned him in one of the early posts here once before. Among such systematizers Sorokin differs from others because he associates cycles in history—at least here and there, when he is not driven by moral outrage—with what looks like a natural tendency for people to go to extremes, to recoil from them and change their ways, and then, in turn, to go too far in the other direction. He identifies three periods which he calls ideational, idealistic, and sensate. In the first cultures turn inward and emphasize the spiritual, in the last they turn outward and emphasize the material, and the middle term, always transitional, is a synthesis of the two. Idealistic periods mark the change from one dominant orientation to the other. Within our own history, the Medieval period (Christendom) is associated with the ideational, the Renaissance is the middle term; it marks the transition to Modernity which, in Sorokin’s view is a sensate, materialistic orientation.

I’ve pondered this scheme throughout my adult years and find some merit in it. It’s great for labeling things in a facile sort of way, but if you take the ideas seriously, more is revealed. For instance: Throughout most of the Renaissance and well into the so-called Enlightenment, indeed still laxly holding the loyalty of the masses today, the religious viewpoint dominant in the Medieval times was and remains visible and active. The categories Sorokin imposes are elite views, not those of the ordinary people. Ordinary people are influenced, to be sure, conform to the elite opinion more or less, but they’ll continue to cross their fingers, to believe in God (and not just in the trenches) and—despite the orthodoxy entrenched at the moment—will on the one hand believe in a hierarchical reality in the gut in materialistic eras and manage, on the other, somehow to satisfy the flesh even in the most severely ascetic and spiritual periods too.

Thus I interpret Sorokin as saying that elites go too far in one direction and then have to change course. It is elites that exhaust the potentials present in certain ways of experiencing reality and then, drained of inspiration, turn about and behold value in the long neglected. At the very peak of humanity, however, but tiny in headcount, are individuals who manage to develop a true balance. The natural and well developed state is synthesis.

This is the sort of stuff I ponder on my walks—while avidly keeping a look-out for rabbits. It is amazing how many I manage to see. They hide very well. Seeing them, counting them, pleases me much. My top count is fifteen rabbits on a walk. Rabbit counting keeps my body and my senses busy while my thoughts range all over eternity.

Anyway, on one of these walks, it occurred to me a year or so ago that we may very well be going through another age of transition—and never mind the outer indicators which would entirely contradict this. The thought came to me in thinking of the Romantic movement—and figures like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Blake, Shelley. Byron belongs here too, but I’ve never read him. And so do Goethe and Schiller who—thanks to my years in Germany—are part of my heritage. The thought came to me. Lordy. These guys are like angels bearing trumpets, and just as the eighteenth began to yield to the nineteenth century, they all blew their trumpets to announce the coming of a new Age of Faith.

And then, as I walked along—no rabbits anywhere to distract me—I got to thinking. If what I sense is true, and we’re going through another Renaissance… Stop right there. The name isn’t right. It might be another idealistic period—in the course of which the spiritual and the material will be fused into another splendid vision—but calling it a rebirth isn’t appropriate. If what is coming is another religious age, down the ways, birth—a plunge into the harsh realities of matter, the slap on the new-born bottom, the screams of baby outrage, the messy removals of umbilical cords, no, none of this will do. Instead, approaching the more subtle orders of the spiritual, dreaming is more appropriate. So I got to thinking and devised a new name for our era. Obviously it must also be in French. And to satisfy the beady-eyed materialists, it should have a slightly negative tonality that they can exploit while the rest of us will know better. So herewith I offer the word Endormement. The times are getting ever darker—and therefore it may be time to sleep. And perchance to dream.

Orienting Ourselves in Time

In my childhood a three-fold structure dominated history. It divided into ancient, medieval, and modern. Prehistory formed a shadowy fourth but wasn't really history at all, just background. It was left to anthropologists. I was nineteen or thereabouts (1955) when I discovered that some people saw a different pattern. Three scholars had emerged in the early 1930s in Europe; they offered a cyclical view of history. History was not, repeat not, a progression from the primitive to the enlightened, a latter-day fellow-traveller of Darwin's. It was rather the story of closely-knit social groups. They formed cultures and, for a time, gave meaning to the meaningless succession of social change.

The three scholars were Arnold J. Toynbee (A Study of History), Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), and Pitirim Sorokin (Social and Cultural Dynamics and, in a shorter version, The Crisis of Our Age).

These men did not always agree. They gave variable interpretations to what they saw. Nevertheless they saw the same pattern. Spengler saw cultures as living entities, no more intelligible than living individuals: they're born, mature, and die. Toynbee saw elites meeting challenges until they failed. Sorokin saw a succession of cultural forms always in the same sequence—inward, mixed, and outward in orientation, corresponding to periods of religious faith, "renaissances," and secular-materialist eras. The last stage, according to Sorokin, always falls into chaos. From the chaos then rises another religious culture.

The pattern common to all three? A denial of linear development. The assertion of a cyclical process in which either fate itself (Spengler) or human failure (Toynbee and Sorokin) lead to the termination of a vast collective enterprise.

Does it matter who is right? The linear historians who, since my youth, have augmented the classification by introducing yet another era, the Post-Modern? Their cyclical opponents? They were never warmly embraced in their own time and are today largely forgotten. Human life is very short. Most people don't feel a strong urge to be oriented in the vast ocean of time. Having at least two ways of assessing what transpired during my life was very helpful. And, looking around, I'm inclined to side with the cyclical historians.