Boxing in the Fog

Those who’ve wondered what it might be like to be in the sky inside wondrous clouds massively crowding a blue sky would have their answer this morning down on the ground on the shores of Wolverine Lake in the Village of Wolverine Lake, MI. The clouds are down to inspect the lowest reaches. The fog hides all details. Houses, trees, cars, and the doomed remains of snow (the temperature is trying to pass 50 ° F) are only barely sketched in. All else is a white mist. So much, for starters, about the fog.

As for boxing, today is Boxing Day in England, the second day of Christmas elsewhere in Europe. It is also a holiday for all Federal Employees—but only because the 25th fell on a Sunday this year. More is available on Boxing Day in an early post on this blog, titled “The Day After ” (link) written some seven years ago. In that post the links between Christmas and the ancient Saturnalia are also traced. So it is very foggy on this Boxing Day of 2016. If you had the vague impression (as Brigitte and I did until I wrote that post) that Boxing Day is celebrated by boxing matches, you will be corrected. But that interpretation lingers. And checking the news while glancing out the window this morning, I imagined that our politicians, serving or just elected to serve, are well described by the view at Wolverine. They’re boxing in the fog—and no punch ever lands in this thick mist.

This blog began with a post on cyclic history (link). There I suggest that theories of cyclic history are much more likely to be true than belief in a Progressive March toward Perfection. Based on my teachers of history, we’re now part of a great decline in culture. It has happened before, is happening now, and will again a thousand or so years from now, give or take. Cyclic history is not an exact science. The past, however, keeps recurring.

Brigitte brought an example of that to my mind this morning. A story in the Times Digest tells of ISIS fighters smuggling weapons tied to the bellies of sheep. Okay. That’s in 2016 (still). The story reminded Brigitte of a Greek saga that, she thought, clearly mirrored it. I had a very vague memory too—and went to look it up. It turned out that Brigitte’s memories still work with relatively fine precision. When Odysseus falls into the hands of Polyphemus, the Cyclops, around about the 1200 BCs, he and his men manage to escape the Cyclops’ clutches by hanging on to the bellies of Polyphemus’ sheep that he, the Cyclops, lets out of his cave to graze.

Not an exact parallel, to be sure. Are we to associate ISIS with Odysseus? And the Cyclops with one Donald the Trump. Not very close. But the time distance between 2016 and 1200 BC is some 3,216 years. Thus it is likely that in the year 5232 AD some such tale may have some currency. But a true Cyclops has only one eye. That’s strong evidence that Trump might not qualify. In this fog, it’s hard to see the truth.

History’s Cycling Reveiled

Action and reaction. The aggressive expansionary tendencies of Westerndom, let’s call it, massively stimulated a “modernizing” reaction in one Turkish soldier who fought on the wrong side, let us call it, in World War I. The man was Abdul Kemal Atatürk. He rose to the leadership of Turkey and transformed that country from a traditional Muslim state into a modern power—by, among other things, forcing dress codes on the population. He ruled from 1923 to 1938. One of the last dress codes he instituted was a 1934 law relating to Prohibited Garments, principally those that signaled religious affiliations. The veil was one of these. Atatürk, in effect, intended to establish a secular state. In that effort he did his utmost in limiting the effective influence of religion, in his context the Muslim religion. Among groups prohibited were Sufi lodges and associations.

Today comes news that, in Turkey, parliament has once more permitted those who wear a veil to do so again—yes even if they work for government in public offices. Amidst the great cycles of history there are little ones that do not take a millennium or two to develop. The veil in Turkey, ripped from the faces of women in 1934 is restored in 2013. The old Turkish traditionalists—all dead, of course, but presumably taking a peak through little windows in heaven—are nodding and saying: “Well, it’s a beginning.”

The more skilled observer of cycles remains more neutral. Every beginning is but the first step to an ending. Every unveiling becomes a reveiling. And so it goes, round and round.

The Deformation

May you live in interesting times.
     Supposedly a Chinese curse

Monique commented on LaMarotte saying, “I am beginning to get the feeling that ‘times’ are always interesting… Has any human lived an entire life during peaceful, tranquil, times in which rationality and thoughtfulness prevailed? I wonder. Perhaps, only those whose lives have been particularly short...”

This got me thinking that different kinds of “interesting times” have a different “feel”. The sum of evil seems always the same, but the feel of it can certainly be different. Brigitte and I lived through World War II; it had its share of horrors, but the feel of the thing was different. The best explanation for a different “feel” may lie in the relative unity of humanity as it faces its troubles and in the trend of events. If unity is high and the trend is towards coherence, the feel is positive, otherwise negative. The troubles themselves are unchangingly the same.

Contrast troubles in business caused by growth and those caused by disappearing markets. Same problems, different feel. We might see it writ large as well. Herewith a look at Western Civilization.

At the beginning, chaos and a transcendental Inspiration (Christianity). Then in order: Formation (called the Dark Ages), High Middle Ages, the Renaissance (the exploitation of the success of the High Middle Ages), the Reformation, the Enlightenment (product of the Reformation), Modernity (the exploitation of the Enlightenment), and now, finally, we’re in the midst of The Deformation.

Some comments. The Dark Ages are well named because western civilization was then in the womb, and it’s dark in the womb. If cells participating in the formation of an embryo had consciousness, they’d call this period “interesting times.” The Dark Ages were not a period of peace but of turmoil—but the trend, the tendency was toward coherence. That coherence peaks in the High Middle Ages; in the year 1000 AD Europe “clothed itself in the white mantle of churches” (more here); in the thirteenth came its glorious peak. The Renaissance is a period of relaxation, exploitation—and of corruption. Comes the Reformation. It was a bloody—an interesting—time but its tendency once more constructive. The second peak in western civilization is not ours but the Enlightenment, which came to be exploited as Modernity. And now the excesses of modernity are producing what here I call The Deformation. It will end in chaos again—and in that total darkness, perhaps, another Inspiration.

Why not another, a third peak? My own view is that the cycles of Western culture are “lossy,” to use a modern term. At every stage less of the original transcendental Inspiration remains in force, has been lost. The culture therefore becomes ever more material in character. Therefore, if my own “feel” is right, this period, the Deformation, no longer carries anything that will help this culture peak again. And for that reason the “feel” of these times is not a good one—even though all of our troubles are the same old, same old—wars, rumors of wars, plagues, earthquakes, tsunamis, and corruption. But unity is fracturing. The center isn’t holding. It was a transcendental vision. But how many, today, actively share it? At the individual level, of course, nothing is lost. But we’re talking about the great collective.

Cyclic History in Brief

Now the natural tendency of humanity is upward, in the direction of the ethereal—and that tendency is much helped by hardship, which concentrates the mind. When hardship is overcome, the upward striving weakens because attention is then collectively scattered, and if things don’t worsen, a slide develops toward the physical. The choices are spiritualization or commercialization. In due time marching in what for humans is the wrong direction produces disorder and then chaos. With chaos hardship grows—whereupon it is once more natural to seek the heights.

Two Takes on History

For those who share my interest in the deeper past—and attempts at grasping its enormous complexity and maddening structure—I recommend two fascinating and original essays by Paul Rodriguez on The Ruricolist, titled Xerxes and Civilizations.

James Joyce, writing in Ulysses, wrote the sentence, “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” The words are usually attributed to Joyce directly with the “Stephen said” omitted—yet one more indication how rapidly context is usually lost even in our own time. Joyce died in 1941 when I was not yet five. The quote stayed with me because history has fascinated me throughout my life; Paul’s second essay sums up some of the imponderables that any attempt at making sense of the big picture, so called, bedevils the would-be sage.

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.

Technology: Linear Advance

Nowhere are the urban roots of the word ‘civilization’ more evident than in the neglect which historians have lavished upon the rustic and his works and days. While the peasant has normally been a lively and enterprising fellow, quite unlike the tragic caricature of combined brutishness and abused virtue presented in Millet’s and Markham’s ‘Man with the Hoe’, he has seldom been literate. Not only histories but documents in general were produced by social groups which took the peasant and his labours largely for granted. Therefore while our libraries groan with data on the ownership of land, there is an astonishing dearth of information about various, and often changing, methods of cultivation
which made the land worth owning.

Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change, Oxford University Press, 1962

The quote comes from one of the most useful and enlightening books of history I’ve ever picked up. I read it in the late 1960s, a period in which I was myself deeply involved in studies of modern technology. The book provided an angle of vision of the past one rarely encounters, from the ground up, but from a higher ground than the immediate view of daily life—another neglected region of history. Much as perusing Brigitte’s college textbook on biology opened my eyes to the continuity between human societies and what, since then, I’ve called “chemical civilization,” so Lynn White’s book, bringing to view the work of really obscure specialists, made me aware of the fact that a generally cyclic model of history must be balanced, for completeness, with a linear view of technology. Technology gradually advances; the gains made are never entirely lost—although they may lie dormant when circumstances don’t favor development. The book is still available at reasonable cost here.

What White’s book illustrates is that waves of technological change have always stimulated and also shaped social development, but the processes have been slower and less noticeable in a single life time. His focus is on military developments arising from the invention of the stirrup—a mind-blowingly interesting story with surprisingly large radiations—on through developments in agriculture, including the development of the “modern” plow and three-crop rotation systems, both acting to transform agricultural society and enabling population increase. He ends with the development of inorganic sources of power—water, wind, and chemical. The books also happens to be written by someone with a feel for language. Unfortunately Latin quotes are left in Latin. White evidently saw his audience as other scholars, not as the illiterati of the next generation over; such quotes, alas, are not too many.

I would say more, but a fall from a ladder has produced two badly cut and richly stitched fingers. I am owed kudos for posting anything at all. What I would write about is the ultimate technological development of our times, energy, and how we may adapt to its inevitable disappearance… The less said, perhaps, the better.

History Footnote

I’d just finished yesterday’s posting (“history is a lens for examining our own times”) when Brigitte came in and handed me a letter in that morning’s New York Times. It was under the heading UNINTERESTED IN HISTORY, EVEN THE TURNING POINTS. Part of that letter was the following paragraph:

During the 1980s, I taught United States history to American soldiers stationed in South Korea. In one fairly typical class, not one of the students had heard of the Battle of Gettysburg. Perhaps their high school teachers considered the subject a mere matter of military history. But most of the people who fought and died at Gettysburg were ordinary Americans, and our lives would be very different now if the ones wearing blue had stayed home.[Richard Joffe.]

This letter illustrates just how difficult it is to maintain a democracy when people are brought up poorly (because marriages shatter), are poorly educated (because curricula morph like sci-fi monsters), flickering images replace words on paper—and so an ad nauseam. The little things do matter. The basics are—basic.

The Lens of History

I’ve been attracted throughout my life to methods of seeing that which is much smaller or much greater than eye can focus. We don’t need tools at our own natural scale. We need not engage in social science to understand our own clan—meaning all the people to whom we are related by blood or marriage. The eyes and ears suffice. When ours was a young family first sinking roots in the United States, we didn’t even need a bank statement to know our net worth. We had a sheaf of treasury notes accumulated during service in the Army, and we could just count the envelopes; and we kept most of the money we earned at the apartment in cash.

Later I learned the power of statistics—and came to admire and value the services of our statistical agencies. Doubtless the greatest humanity has ever produced are resident, right now, right here in the United States. This is not an exaggeration. A start at celebrating them is recorded here, but I haven’t gone beyond an introduction. In any case, there is nothing quite like lenses that will bring the seemingly invisible into focus, and therefore praises to the makers of the Hubble telescope and NASA for putting it up in the sky; and equal praises to honor Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), one of the modern day’s pioneers.

Knowledge dependents on pattern-acquisition, as it were: seeing enough of very large things so that their lawful behavior becomes evident. And in this category I also place mythologies at the exalted and histories at the mundane end of the spectrum. Mythologies sum up the totality of human intuition about the nature of transcendental reality. History is our lens for understanding the immediate arrangements of society writ large.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back, I was looking back at Rome again. I’m now and have always been fascinated by the transition between the republican era and the later monarchical phases, the Roman Empire. It really was monarchical although the Romans did not want to use the word “king.” The imperator was what we call “commander-in-chief,” and I smile a little in noting how that phrase developed legs during the last administration; so did the word “decider.” But never mind that. I would emphasize that the transit of Rome from republic to empire was not some kind of symbolical transformation of the sort our modern media love to engineer and then to detect in what they are pleased to call analysis. No. The transition followed a century of social disturbance beginning around 133 BC and ending in 27 BC. It was a period in which the powerful and moneyed oligarchy that ruled Rome was first challenged in 133 by the election of Tiberius Gracchus, restored to dominance by Sulla (around 82 BC), followed by Caesar’s rise to power after a major civil war (48 BC), and ending with the rise to power of Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian (later Augustus) in 27 BC.

Worth noting here is that this brief period holds most of the events and the personalities the American public knows about Rome from the movies: Caesar, Cleopatra, Anthony, and Brutus. A few other, later figures appear because they were particularly violent: Caligula, Nero.

Ultimately the battle here was between the moneyed class of large scale ownership (in the Roman context this meant the ownership of land and slaves)—and the people without means or relying on small parcels of land, handicrafts, or shops. The power, when it finally shifted, came to be vested in the state (not the little people), the state controlled by a single person, and that person backed by armed forces of which he was the commander-in-chief, thus imperator. The emperor also held all other meaningful political offices for life. As a tribune-for-life he had absolute veto powers over legislation, as censor-for-life he could order a census or appoint or remove senators, he was princeps of the Senate, meaning “first, most eminent, chief”; from this word we get the later meaning of prince. He was also the pontiff, thus the chief religious officer—butI need not go on. He essentially formulated, proposed, and caused legislation to be passed and then enforced by a bureaucracy consisting principally of his own servants, free and slave. The state had become the sole ruler and the emperor the sole ruler of the state. The Republic of Rome came into being in 509 BC and ended with Caesar in 48—a span of 461 years. The Empire lasted to about 476 AD, thus another five centuries. After the imperial period began, the change in power was never again a collective enterprise. It took place by family arrangement or by violent intervention backed by a military force.

What brought the transition about? The abuse of money-power. In the Roman setting it took the form of vast importation of slaves who displaced and impoverished the ordinary citizen. And in our case? We need but look around.

Let’s use the lens of history to look at our times. Using it suggests that those who say that we’re in an imperial time today are just idly chattering, symbol-mongering. No. We’ll know it when it comes. We’re presently enduring the misrule of a vast moneyed oligarchy. But other illusions need also to be set aside. Those who dream of revolution, whereby the “little people” will finally take power from the forces of capital, should not romantically imagine a process that will end in “direct democracy.” Never. Democracy—the kind we actually value, the kind that is still practiced at the local level of small communities—belongs to a middle stage of civilization, the time when the middle class actually has power. When that class gets shouldered aside by the vast oligarchies that currently rule us, the stage is being set for a century of chaos. That century will be violent—as were the 106 years that separated the tribune Gracchus from the emperor Augustus. After that the vote won’t matter any more. But a kind of order will return. And at the working level—which never really changes—the responsible people will, once again, clear off the rubble, mop up the blood, and get back to doing the necessary.

Economic Foundations

The writing of blog entries, with the implied possibility that people all over the world might just chance to see it, has a somewhat bracing effect on something that I’ve engaged in all of my life—the keeping of diaries or notes. When doing the latter the only presumed audience is yourself, and the reasonable use of the time is to clarify ideas. But when you have the feeling of people peering over your shoulder, you tend to feel the pressure to get things right, to look things up. The process becomes more stimulating. You tend to follow up on hunches and seek out the hard copy of things you remember reading. Thus one of my recent posts somewhere reminded me that the late Stephen J. Gould had written a scathing book about abuses in science. Gould has figured in my thought as a genuinely original thinker—on evolution and much else. It was he who proposed an explanation of evolution (with Niles Eldredge) by a process of “punctuated equilibrium,” thus abrupt departures over against gradualistic changes based on tiny increments. I happen to have a minor (and meaningless) link to the man in that we shared the same literary agent over many years. In any case, having been reminded, I found one of three copies I own of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and put the book on my nightstand. But this only by way of introduction—and a little plug for a fine writer on difficult scientific subjects.

I spent several nights perusing the book, particularly the dreary story of how IQ testing began and why it is the sham that it is. But the other night, and now we’re getting warmer, I dreaded once more being awash in the abuses of thought to which Modernity is prone. And not wishing to get out of bed again for one of those midnight hunts of my shelves, I just eased out a volume within my reach but buried deep in time and began rereading Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ. The book was there because quite a long time ago I was restudying the reign of Diocletian—and in the course of that discovered that both that great emperor as well as Constantine were what today we would call Serbs—not Italians at all. In fact when Diocletian retired—to raise those prize chickens of his—he did so in what is today Split, the largest coastal city of Croatia on the Adriatic.

I skipped the introductory chapters that take us to the dawn of Caesar’s time and began reading Chapter VI, “The Agrarian Revolt”—and once more felt the shock I’d felt on the last reading years ago, as my marginal notes throughout the book make clear. I put a representative quote on another blog, visible here, explaining the causes of the revolt which, in due time, set the stage for Caesar’s rise and the days of empire in Rome: slavery. My marginal notes and my refreshed memory of the first reading have to do with the economic foundations of civilization. Ancient civilization was undoubtedly based on agriculture; and Rome’s slow-motion collapse began with the introduction of slavery on a large scale. Rome had transformed its economic base from yeoman farming to military conquest—which yielded the slaves and impoverished its masses. And for me this has obvious parallels in that American civilization was also founded on agriculture; indeed, it was heavily supported by—guess what? Slavery. When cotton was king, it was slaves that produced it. Only later, when we discovered a new kind of slave, did the economy shift from agriculture to industry. That industry, in turn, manifesting predominantly in manufacturing, depends on energy slaves, the fossil fuels.

Now it is worth noting that the imperial period of Rome dawned when the importation of slaves on a grand scale began to deform the Roman Republic—as the quotes on LaMarotte clearly show in summary. We face a similar but two-pronged challenge today, albeit we appear to be at an earlier stage of the problem. And these things are all too clear to me because, for the past twenty years, I’ve either been directly or indirectly the chronicler of manufacturing in the United States—in a statistical series originally called Manufacturing USA and now Manufacturing & Distribution USA. I looked up some data the current editor, Joyce P. Simkin, has complied in the latest edition. It shows decline in manufacturing employment (this predates the automotive collapse) from 17.8 to 13 million people between 1982 and 2006. The decline has been accelerating. This is one prong of the challenge—our yielding a function to imports, not of slaves, as it were, but to those who work at much lower wages than we pay. The second prong of the challenge is that manufacturing in the modern sense is unimaginable without fossil fuels, and we can now clearly see that these fuels will be pretty much exhausted by the end of the twenty-first century.

When I then peruse the shocking consequences to society that the heavy uptick in slavery produced in Rome, I find it entirely appropriate to suggest that we should put our house in order, at every level, in anticipation of bad times to come—not just the usual bad times that come routinely, punctuating our equilibrium, but major transformations that will make the future, even if we master fusion power, utterly different from what we see all around us today.

The Third Stance

One of the intriguing patterns Arnold Toynbee thought he had discovered in the late stages of a civilization was that its elite elements polarize into archaists and futurists, thus into those who seek solutions in the past and those who seek them in a radical break with the past. But this sort of view was not particularly original even in the mid-1930s when the first volume of Toynbee’s A Study of History appeared: the left and right were clearly visible and painted in appropriate colors already. Toynbee’s discernment showed itself because he suggested that neither of these orientations had much of a future. Futurists and archaists would engage in a more or less meaningless battle until disorder finally triumphed. But Toynbee also saw emerging at late stages of mature civilization a third element: neither of the left nor of the right—neither of the West nor of the East, to echo the Koran’s Niche of Lights (24:35)—but an elite that looked up, as it were, detached itself and turned its sight toward the transcendental, rose above the battle yet in the midst of life, in but not of the world, and, from this curiously immaterial but yet fixed point, it begins the process from which a new culture can eventually arise. Toynbee called this third position “transfiguration,” and “etherialization.” He saw it as a detachment from the macrocosm and a return to the microcosm—put very simply: “Stop fixing the world and start improving you.”

This was not merely an abstract codification of historical fact. Toynbee wasn’t merely looking back, discovering Christianity in the rotting womb of a decadent Rome, and rendering this picture as a general historical rule. But he did see, beginning around about the turn of time from B.C. to A.D. the rise of multiple original religious impulses. These included Gnosticism (before it became Christianized), the revived cults of Isis and Cybele, and, most notably, Mithraism. Indeed those times were very similar to ours beginning around the early 1960s. All manner of old religions were invading the Roman realm in new guises, including Eleusinian, Dionysian, Orphic, and neo-Platonic cults and groups, and—among them—a new Jewish religion. One element—that third element—of the society supported them all. Christianity eventually emerged as the victor and, in the process, also absorbed features of others. Rome became Christendom, a new culture.

This is a divergence from my theme but interesting in the context. Toynbee also noted the behavior of two proletariats, as he called them: the masses. The internal proletariat, thus within the limits of the civilization, tends in the late stage to become alienated from the dominant (read governing) minority—the turn-off. And the external proletariat (read third world) becomes antagonistic to the Imperium and, rather than striving to be included in it, begins to fight it.

I’ve often wondered what it might really have been like in old Rome—knowing full well that big abstractions almost completely lose the meaning that they try to synthesize. What does "archaist" actually mean in daily life? The answer, I find, is three-fold: study history, look around, and look inside. At my birth in 1936 the zillion cults of this latter day, not least weird religions from abroad, were not even faintly visible either in Hungary or in the United States. Hare, hare, hare! There was neither culture war at home nor yet its equivalent that we call the War on Terror now. And my own personal history has been a gradual detachment from the macrocosm, if you like. With the passing of the decades, I’ve come to see more and more clearly that the big battles aren’t worth fighting. You win today, but in the see-saw the other side will triumph tomorrow and think that a new epoch has begun. And so it shall be until a new dispensation eventually gives meaning to the whole again. That will take place when we are once more properly oriented to the greater reality.

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.