I want to start this post with a
confession: I bought my first books from Amazon around September 2002
(actually, that was my second purchase at the then budding site, as I had
previously attempted to buy a book by William Burroughs which ended up being a
cassette recording of him reading Cities
of the red night, and which I think I never got myself to listening). My
first order included a nice, hardback copy in three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
cloth binding and all. Back then, I did with my Amazon orders what I was well
accustomed to doing with my brick-and-mortar book purchases: I kept on
indulging in them well before I had finished reading the haul from the latest
one (or with the ones previous to that), so there were always books that sat in
my nightstand unread for years, as I always found some newer, glitzier (or for
some reason just more urgent) ones to turn my attention to. Also, I used to
read multiple books in parallel back then, so finishing something or other always
seemed more pressing than going back to the ones that, inadvertently, had been
bought long ago. Be it as it may, the thing is that the imposing boxed set
containing the first half of Gibbon’s masterwork had been sitting for 16 years
in a corner of my library (the “history important books” corner, alongside the
much revised, commented and dog-eared editions of Toynbee’s Study of History, Spengler’s Decadence of the West and Collingwood’s The Idea of History).
Since then, my reading habits have
noticeably changed, as long ago I started reading a single book at a time, and
not opening a new one until I had finished the one I was currently engaged with
(no matter how boring or disappointing… indeed finishing boring and
disappointing books has turned out to be a most rewarding endeavor, and a
superb training method for attention and intelligence in general, see my posts Why reading boring books is good for you and Maybe even better ). I also reined my
obsessive-compulsive buying behavior, not ordering (or buying in a physical
store) anything until I had cracked open the last exemplar hauled in the
previous order. During those years of subtle but persistent change, whilst
occasionally I remembered with regret the mountains of unread books I had
accumulated in wilder, less disciplined times, I was still too attracted by the
allure of new volumes to pay much attention to the former. And thus the Decline and Fall languished in a corner
both of my physical library and of my mind, very occasionally giving a gentle
tug to my attention, reminding me it was still there, unfinished business from
the past. Long story short, a couple weeks ago I finally gave it a go, as it
fitted neatly within my overall intent of understanding better how
civilizations have collapsed in the past, to better be able to judge how our
own may develop, when its particular collapse seems more evident by the day.
A few words about Gibbon’s work,
then, before I turn my attention towards what we may learn from it. I (like
every other half-cultured rube) was already familiar with the basic shape of
the argument: the empire fell because of its internal contradictions,
exemplified by the loss of civic virtue of its elites, with a little help of
that obnoxious and most irrational heresy (Christianity) that was carelessly
elevated to the role of official religion by Constantine. Such sketchy outline
has been rehashed by so many later historians and thinkers (it very much
permeates the Essay on the History of
Civil Society by Adam Ferguson, and we can still find the basic idea of
elites losing their ability to respond to external challenges because of the
adoption of a universal religion better suited to proletarians underlying most
of Toynbee’s understanding of social dynamics) that it has become a commonplace,
and it’s difficult to evade or to challenge its main tenets. I had already high
hopes for the writing style, as it is generally acknowledged to be a high mark
of XVIII century English prose. Maybe I harbored unrealistic expectations, but
I found the prose a bit flat and unenticing. Not abysmal, mind you, but stilted
and clichéd at some points, and with some quirks certainly grating for modern
sensibilities (Gibbon almost never encounters anything coming from Asia, be it
a custom, a ruler, or a cultural artifact like a building, a painting, a vase
or a statue, which he doesn’t automatically qualify as “effeminate”).
Interestingly, it is a style that I’ve come to associate with German philosophical
writings of the following century (the same standard turns of phrase being used
and abused, the same highfaluting appeals to national character and the same
understanding of a certain kind of exalted, highly emotional spiritual
contemplation as the highest good, described in very similar and a bit
conceited terms), which may be explained by the influence that Gibbon exerted
on them (I may need to get to a contemporary translation to confirm that hunch,
though). Not entirely my cup of tea, although competently executed.
However, I also felt it a bit
lacking in the elaboration of a consistent theory of why things happened as
they did, where the particular events narrated (colorful and amusing as they
undoubtedly are) are weaved as different strands of causal ingredients that
serve to highlight a common thread, making us believe that things were as they
were for a reason. There is, of course, the underlying narrative I sketched
before (the Senate just went soft and corrupted, let unworthy rabble become
emperors, and in the end they couldn’t even defend themselves), but that
barebones narrative leaves too many questions unanswered: did the whole
senatorial class slumped wholesale into stupor and irrelevance? Doesn’t seem
likely, as with few exceptions it kept producing some very redoubtable
emperors; why did some noble families slid into irrelevance (other than by
being exterminated by political enemies, which at some points seemed like all
too common) while others kept on producing imperial scions for centuries? How
did the development of latifundia and the disappearance of tenant farmers
affect the civic spirit of both classes? (not that we should expect Gibbon to
provide a class-struggle based analysis that would only appear in the
intellectual scenario with Marx almost a century later); Why weren’t there any
significant technological developments in almost a millennium? Was that a cause
or a consequence of a society where more and more of the production was being
carried out by slaves, lacking thus the incentive to economize in manpower?
It is probably my fault that I’ve
come to enjoy “big history” (the “grand theory” as described/ warned against by
Quentin Skinner) and in contrast seem to enjoy less the traditional way of
telling it, which I find too much “one damn thing after the other” (long
chapters of Gibbon seemed to me little more than:
…so Valerian went to that city, and fought that battle and (probably, we
can’t be sure because our sources are crap and most ancient historians are not
really very reliable, ya’ know) lost it, so he was murdered by his soldiers,
who appointed Valerianus, who in turn went to that other city, where he fought
that other battle, which he won (yay!),but then lost a subsequent one, and was
in turn murdered by his soldiers (or slain in battle, according to a
not-very-reliable source again, lovingly quoted in Latin), who this time
appointed Valerianulus, who, who would have guessed! Went in turn to a third
city where he fought a battle that he either lost or won…
I get it that most of those dudes a)
reigned for just a few months b) didn’t do anything remarkable or leave any
perdurable trace other than minting a few coins and may be erecting some
memorial column or other and c) have reached us through chronicles written some
centuries after their deaths by unscrupulous hacks with an ax to grind and some
spurious interest in maligning/ whitewashing them, depending on the inclination
of their patrons, but the succession of their exploits sometimes makes for some
winding, unfocused and boring passages. So there you have it, I have the gall
to, being and absolutely shitty writer myself (and egregiously overindulging in
winding, unfocused and boring passages as much as the next guy), criticize one
of the universally accepted masters of the English language… in words he would
have considered fitting: o tempora, o
mores!
Which doesn’t mean I’m not highly
recommending the book. As Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks in the introduction (an
introduction that would have benefited itself from some judicious editing), Gibbon
is our first “modern” historian, trying to discern longer-term trends below the
hurly-burly of battles, murders, rapes, illegitimate accessions, revolts and
plagues that afflicted such unhappy and tumultuous interval of our common
history, and applying a discerning critique to the different sources he
masterly commands, trying to adjudicate between the sometimes wildly differing
reports of his predecessors with (mostly) unerring authority. Just be aware
that the discipline has evolved, language itself has evolved (mostly for the
worse, I’m afraid, as we use less and less words to express poorer and less
structured thoughts), and the classics, worthy of attention as they undoubtedly
are, keep growing more alien to us by the day, and thus their books present
some difficulties that should not be underestimated.
But surely of more interest to my
modern anxious readers than my (highly idiosyncratic) opinions on Gibbon’s work
is what I coyly suggested in this post’s title it may teach us about our
current predicament. To such juicy comparison I now turn, starting with a quick
recap of the underlying causes Gibbon identifies as being the real culprits of
the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization (although only the Roman half of the
empire is dealt with in the first three books, whilst the Eastern part would
get its own subsequent three volumes, I haven’t bought those… yet!):
1. Loss of public spirit by the elites
(senatorial class), and of civic virtue, sense of decorum, and of obligation
first and foremost towards the common good.
2. Extension of the benefits of Roman
citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Empire, thus debasing the value of
such citizenship, and the homogeneity of the social body (and thus losing the
ability to easily collaborate in common projects).
3. Loss of discipline of the legions,
that found there was more benefit to be had from deposing whoever happened to
be emperor, and then choosing a successor (whose first decision would then be
to rewards them generously in a vain attempt to ensure their loyalty) than from
defending the ever more porous frontiers against continuous Barbarian
incursions.
4. Loss of faith in the common
narrative shared by the elites (whose external manifestation was a traditional
religion whose beliefs were, in the author’s arch-famous words “considered, by
the people, as equally true; by the philosophers, as equally false; and by the
magistrates, as equally useful”). Needless to say, that common narrative would
be substituted by a new one, Christianity, that in Toynbee’s analysis was the expression
of the universal religion of the estranged proletariat that already exhausted
empires always formulate in their decomposition phase
Although of course Gibbon, like any other
thinker, could not avoid projecting in his understanding and interpretation of
events the forms, mores and most salient features of his own age, and his Roman
citizens are thinly veiled Englishmen in the eve of the Industrial Revolution,
threatened by external forces (mainly France) he identified with barbarism and
a lower level of civilization (a civilization he, of course, understood as
linearly progressing and having reached its apex in his own society) and
subjected to a loss of traditional virtues for the love of commerce and
material gain (the most forceful denunciation of such “corruption” of mores
being found in a contemporary of Gibbon, the already mentioned Adam Ferguson,
whose Essay on the History of Civil
Society was published the year after Gibbon’s first volume), the
parallelisms with our own age are nothing short of amazing:
1. Whatever you consider the elites of
our time (the media, politicians of every stripe, and millionaires, be them
from show business, sports or industry), the confidence or admiration the
public expresses in them is at an all-time low in all advanced societies. The
reason is their evident selfishness, self-regard, narcissism and disregard for
traditional norms of solidarity, decorum and simple common decency. Our
forebears called that “loss of public spirit and civic virtue”, and it
manifested itself in a perception of corruption and extended decadence not different
at all from the one we have.
2. Any attempt to somehow limit the
public benefits to the native-born citizens of those same advanced societies
where the elites are loathed and distrusted is regularly denounced by those
same elites (plus most of the academic establishment tasked with ideologically
justifying and perpetuating their dominion by the proper indoctrination of the
young), as nationalist/ populist/ retrograde and most uncivilized and hateful
drivel. The non-elite population can, with great difficulty, notice that those
who so ardently preach in favor of the extension of public benefits to all are pretty zealous to preserve the enjoyment
and transmission of their very private
benefits for themselves and their descendants only (see my Problem with open borders
), without noticing any contradiction at all. The fact is, advanced societies
(more markedly, Western ones, Asians are more circumspect in welcoming foreigners)
show a clear tendency towards universalizing the benefits of citizenship, and
that indeed causes tensions, fractures, and makes more difficult for them to
coordinate their actions.
3. The military, in those advanced
societies, has stayed loyal and disciplined so
far. Although the 70s and 80s saw their share of military coups (mostly in
East Asia, Africa and Latin America), a good deal of those devolved power more
or less peacefully to civilian leaders in the last decades, and the threat of a
“new authoritarianism” so far seems to come from the civilian part of the social
body. But beware men with arms in a fragmented society slowly sliding into
chaos and disorder, as ours is doing (so slowly, indeed, most commentators have
not yet noticed it). I would expect armies to have a much greater role (not
necessarily for the good) in the second and third decades of this century, but
will have more to say about them in a moment.
4. If we resort to François Lyotard’s
concept of “postmodernity”, it is precisely the loss of legitimacy of every previous
“grand narrative” what is most characteristic of our own time. Traditional
(Christian) religion is bleeding adherents and authority, but the “secular”
(whatever that means) alternative that appeared in the XIX century to crystalize
and exemplify the hopes and desires of the disenfranchised proletarians of the
then-crumbling world-system is as much discredited, if not more (I’m talking of
Marxism, as much a religion as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans or
Incas). Which means that the true universal religion (again, in a Toynbeean
sense) that captures the imagination of the proletariat of our times (the
non-elite masses that cannot share the ideological tenets of the dominant
belief system any more, and are thus growingly alienated) has still to take
shape, or, seen from a different perspective, is still up for grabs. May be that
role can be played by a re-energized Christianity (my own and very
idiosyncratic preference, although I wouldn’t bet on it), may be by a rekindled
nationalism (with whatever foreboding overtones you want to paint it: neo-reaction,
neo-fascism, traditionalism, populism…) if and when it somehow acquires the
ability to provide credible meaning and an action plan to a society sorely
lacking both. May be by something entirely new we still don’t have a grasp of.
So I would say, except for the
military running amok, we are quite advanced in a process of massive social
disenchantment and hopelessness and loss of faith in a common future not too
dissimilar to the one that precipitated the collapse of the Roman world. There
is one difference, though, and to that difference I will now turn my attention:
technology, which between the II and IV centuries of our era we believe was
extremely stagnant, is nowadays progressing royally, and will surely deliver us
from any kind of decline, decrease of living standards, or regression. Or so
they tell you, don’t they (the same people, remember, that defends openness and
generosity with the public goods they don’t use or need, while at the same time
guarding jealously from competition or access the private goods they have
amassed in an increasingly unequal system)? Well, I’ve got some bad news for
you: technology is not progressing at all in any meaningful sense, except in
one area: the ability of giant corporations to trade with your attention, which
should be your most precious asset and which you are squandering and giving out
for free (as attested by the fact that you are reading this blog -that is, if
you managed to make it this far!).
Want proof? I’ll give you three pieces of evidence: total factor productivity (the ability of the whole economy to produce more material goods -the classical four F’s we humans need to be contented: food, fiber, fuel and procreation) doesn’t rise significantly since the 70s of last century; the median salary (what half the population has to live with) has barely budged since that very same decade in almost all advanced economies, despite the average GDP per person having grown fivefold (which means most of the increase in wealth creation has been corralled by a tiny percentage of the population); and in most of those same advanced economies, the guys currently in their 20s-30s are wont to become the first generation since the Industrial Revolution that will not live better (in terms of material wealth) than their parents.
But hey, they will have Internet! Smart
phones (to communicate more impoverished messages with more brainless peers)!
cheap giant plasma TV screens (on which to look at utter rubbish)! That is,
they will have a shitty house, shitty clothes (very much like the ones I myself
wore as a teenager, for what I see), a shitty urban environment (public squalor
amidst great private wealth, albeit for the majority that great wealth will be
held by other people) and a shitty health, partly caused by the polluted
atmosphere and partly by the shitty food they will eat, which they will pay
with the shitty salary provided by a shitty, precarious job. But they won’t
mind, because they will also have a thousand shiny screens so their attention
will be almost continuously held by wonderful algorithms away from their shabby
surroundings into wondrous realms of amazement and entertainment and fun! I
doubt even the most refined virtual reality will, in the long term, prevent
them from at some point revolting and overthrowing such anti-humane,
meaningless system, but who am I to know?
Well, before being labelled a loony
pessimist and total nut (not that I would care), I’ll point my hypothetical readers’ attention to an
additional parallelism, as shocking as the previous three (remember, the one
about undisciplined armies is still the only element missing from a
full-decadence scenario, and we may not be as far from that as we like to
believe). Do you, dear reader, know which are the two only ages of recorded
history of “voluntary population contraction”? that is, of decreasing population
in the absence of major wars or epidemics, just by the sheer lack of belief in
the common future, by sheer lack of commitment with the continuation of one’s
own system of beliefs, by sheer abandonment of the participation in a shared
narrative that gives meaning to one’s life, and makes one want it to continue
in his descendants. A hint: one of those ages is precisely II-IV century
Europe, which saw Rome go from a million inhabitants to maybe a quarter of
that, and saw the surrounding fields and villages, all over the continent,
being depopulated and left uninhabited. And it was not a catastrophic event,
but the result of millions of individual choices, of individual couples
deciding that, in the end, life itself was not worth living (a question that
was already dangerously close to the balance for their Greek cultural
forebears), and if life was not worth living, it was not surely worth creating
or passing to the next generation. The barbarians kept crashing at the gates
until, when the gates finally went down, they came inside a mostly empty
territory, with nary a functioning army to stop them. The other only age that
has seen a similar phenomenon? Our own, our very current enlightened and
hyper-prosperous day. So prosperous indeed, that we have collectively decided
to enjoy ourselves so much that we don’t have enough time or energy to do
things as little enjoyable as raising the next cohort of enjoyers…
Don’t give me, then, sophistic answers
about the greatness of the technological revolution we are supposedly in the
midst of. About how the awe-inspiring creativity of the unchained human intelligence,
free of the bounds of superstition, held firmly by the wings of sacred Science,
and soon to be complemented by that of the machines we are creating, will soon
overcome every and all limitations and create a post-scarcity society where we
will all be rich as Croesus, healthy as a fit teenager, and live happy forever
in the land of plenty. We are a decadent, wasted, spent bunch of pathetic and
deluded hairless apes that have forsaken the traditions and rituals that gave their
short lives meaning. And, alas! Meaning is in the end more precious, and more difficult
to obtain, than material wealth, than bodily comforts. At some point in the
next three or four decades we will realize we are not a iota closer to “defeating
death” as the Egyptians priests were. Not a iota closer to developing a real general-purpose
artificial intelligence as Leibniz was. Not a iota closer to a society of
unlimited material riches freely available for everybody as the slave societies
of Greece and Rome.
Which brings me back to this post’s
title. Who are those “we”, exactly, bound to decline and fall? Because decline
is a relative concept, and for “us” to decline (relatively) somebody has to be (relatively)
rising. If we are to fall, it has to be at the feet of somebody else who is apt
to benefit from our falling. Some would say the Chinese are the ones better positioned
to succeed “the West” as Earth’s foremost society. Bollocks. I hereby enunciate
what I will call the “Vintage Rocker Rule” (VRR): “no society has ever become
hegemonic with a fertility rate below 2.5”. How many babies are Chinese women
having these days? A quick look at the CIA World Factbook tells us it is a
whooping 1.6. No wonder they have ended their one-child policy, but so far
everything indicates it’s too late, and the reversal is having almost no
effect. Since decades ago it was not the fear of punishment what kept Chinese
couples from having more than one little boy (and man! Did they prefer it to be
a male! As shown by one of the most skewed male-to-female ratios at birth ever
recorded), but the pressure of pursuing a competitive career in the crazy
environment of keeping-up-with-the Joneses-dialed-to-eleven of contemporary
Chinese society. So good luck dictating to the rest of the world how to behave
and what values to acquire when 50% of your population is 65 years old or older,
as theirs will be in a couple decades (when the USA finally crashes, if they
continue in their current course)…
The fact of the matter is, there are
no barbarians with the demographic oomph to seriously challenge the Western
model, with its accompanying dominant reason. Islam? Fuggedaboud it. In the
heart of Ayatollah-land (Teheran) devout ladies are having 1.4 babies on
average. Immigrant populations in the social democracies of Europe are freaking
out conservatives and nationalists of their host countries keeping a fertility
significantly above that of the natives, but they can’t escape the pull of the
times, and in 2-3 generations they revert to the mean (as Mexicans are doing in
the USA). The only geographically significant place substantially resisting the
trend towards sub-replacement fertility is Sub-Saharan Africa, which doesn’t
offer much, at this moment, of an example of social organization one could
think is required to present a semi-credible bid for world domination. But, if demography is destiny, just give them time…
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