IN
the preceding part of this Study we have been wrestling with the admittedly difficult question of how civilizations come into existence, but the problem now before us might be thought to be too easy to deserve consideration as a problem at all. Once a civilization is born, and provided that it is not nipped in the bud, as has been the fate of what we have called abortive civilizations, may not its growth be expected as a matter of course? The best way to find an answer to this question is to ask another one: Do we find, as a matter of historical fact, that civilizations which have surmounted the successive perils of birth and of infancy do in fact invariably grow to ‘manhood’—in other words, do they invariably proceed in due course to achieve a control over their environment and way of life which justifies us in including them in the list compiled in the second chapter of this book? The answer is that some do not. In addition to the two classes already noticed, developed civilizations and abortive civilizations, there is a third, which we must call arrested civilizations. It is the existence of civilizations which have kept alive but failed to grow that compels us to study the problem of growth; and our first step will be to collect and study the available specimens of civilizations of this category.
We can readily lay hands on half-a-dozen specimens. Among the civilizations that have come to birth in response to physical challenges there are the Polynesians, the Eskimos and the Nomads, and among civilizations that have arisen in response to human challenges there are certain peculiar communities, like the ‘Osmanlis in the Orthodox Christian World and the Spartans in the Hellenic World, which have been called into existence by local accentuations of the prevalent human challenges when these have been keyed up, through peculiar circumstances, to pitches of unusual severity. These are all examples of arrested civilizations, and we can see at once that they all present a picture of the same general predicament.
All these arrested civilizations have been immobilized in consequence of having achieved a tour de force.
They are responses to challenges of an order of severity on the very borderline btween
the degree that affords stimulus to further development and the degree that entails defeat. In the imagery of our fable of the climbers’ pitch (see pp. 49-50) they are like climbers who have been brought up short and can go neither backward nor forward. Their posture is one of perilous immobility at high tension; and we may add that four out of the five we have mentioned were in the end compelled to accept defeat. Only one of them, the Eskimo culture, is still maintaining itself.
The Polynesians, for instance, ventured upon the tour de force
of audacious oceanic voyaging. Their skill was to perform these stupendous voyages in frail open canoes. Their penalty was to remain, for an unknown but undoubtedly lengthy period of time, in exact equilibrium with the Pacific—just able to cross its vast empty spaces, but never able to cross them with any margin of security or ease—until the intolerable tension found its own relief by going slack, with the result that these former peers of the Minoans and the Vikings had degenerated into incarnations of the Lotus-eaters and Doasyoulikes, losing their grip upon the ocean and resigning themselves to being marooned, each in his own insular paradise, until the Western mariner descended upon them. We need not dwell here upon the Polynesians’ latter end, since we have touched upon it already apropos of Easter Island (see p. 83).
As for the Eskimos, their culture was a development of the North American Indian way of life specially adapted to the conditions of life round the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The Eskimos’ tour de force
was to stay at or on the ice in the winter and hunt seals. Whatever the historical incentive may have been, it is evident that, at some point in their history, the forefathers of the Eskimos grappled audaciously with the Arctic environment and adapted their life to its exigencies with consummate skill. To prove this assertion it is only necessary to recite the catalogue of the material appliances which the Eskimos have elaborated or invented: ‘kayak, umiak (women’s boat), harpoon and bird-dart with throwing-board, the three-pronged salmon-spear, the compound bow, strengthened by a backing of sinews, the dog sledge, the snow-shoe, the winter house and the snow house with the lamps for burning blubber oil, and the platform, the summer tent and lastly the skin garments’.
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These are the outward and visible signs of an amazing feat of wit and will; and yet ‘in certain directions, for instance as regards social organization, the
Eskimo display somewhat inferior development. But it is a question whether this inferior social differentiation is due to primitiveness, or whether it is not rather a result of the natural conditions under which the Eskimo have lived from time immemorial. No deep knowledge of the Eskimo culture is needed to see that it is a culture which has been obliged to employ an immensely large part of its force simply to develop the means wherewith to gain a livelihood.’
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The penalty which the Eskimos have had to pay for their audacity in grappling with the Arctic environment has been the rigid conformation of their lives to the annual cycle of the Arctic climate. All the bread-winners of the tribe are obliged to carry on different occupations at the different seasons of the year, and the tyranny of Arctic Nature imposes almost as exacting a timetable on the Arctic hunter as is- imposed on any factory worker by the human tyranny of ‘scientific management’. Indeed, we may be inclined to ask ourselves whether the Eskimos are the masters of Arctic Nature or her slaves. We shall meet with an equivalent question, and we shall find it equally difficult to answer, when we come to examine the lives of the Spartans and the ‘Osmanlis. But we must first consider the fate of another arrested civilization which has been evoked, like that of the Eskimos, by a physical challenge.
While the Eskimos grappled with the ice and the Polynesians with the ocean, the Nomad, who has taken up the challenge of the Steppe, has had the audacity to grapple with an equally intractable element; and indeed, in its relationship to man, the Steppe, with its surface of grass and gravel, actually bears a greater resemblance to ‘the unharvested sea’ (as Homer so often calls it) than it bears to terra firma
that is amenable to hoe and plough. Steppe-surface and water-surface have this in common, that they are both accessible to man only as a pilgrim and a sojourner. Neither offers him anywhere on its broad surface, apart from islands and oases, a place where he can settle down to a sedentary existence. Both provide strikingly greater facilities for travel and transport than those parts of the Earth’s surface on which human communities are accustomed to make their permanent homes, but both exact, as a penalty for trespassing on them, the necessity of constantly moving on, or else moving off their surface altogether on to the coasts of terra firma
which surround them. Thus there is a real similarity between the Nomadic horde which annually follows the same orbit of summer and winter pasture-ranges and the fishing fleet which cruises from bank to bank according to the season; between the convoys of merchantmen which exchange
the products of opposite shores of the sea and the camel caravans by which opposite shores of the Steppe are linked with one another; between the water-pirate and the desert-raider; and between those explosive movements of population which impel Minoans or Norsemen to take ship and break like tidal waves on the coasts of Europe or the Levant and those other movements which impel Nomad Arabs or Scyths or Turks or Mongols to swing out of their annual orbits and break with equal violence and suddenness upon the settled lands of Egypt or ‘Iraq or Russia or India or China.
It will be seen that the Nomads’, like the Polynesians’ and the Eskimos’, response to the challenge of physical nature is a tour de force,
and in this case, unlike the other cases, the historical incentive is not altogether a matter of conjecture. We are entitled to infer that Nomadism was evoked by the same challenge that evoked the Egyptiac and Sumeric and Minoan Civilizations and that drove the forefathers of the Dinka and Shilluk into Equatoria —namely, desiccation. The clearest light that we have as yet on the origins of Nomadism has been thrown by the researches of the Pumpelly Expedition in the Transcaspian oasis of Anau.
Here we find the challenge of desiccation, in its first incidence, stimulating certain communities which had previously lived by hunting to eke out their livelihood in less favourable conditions by taking to a rudimentary form of agriculture. The evidence shows that this agricultural stage definitely preceded Nomadism.
Agriculture also had another—indirect but not less important— effect upon the social history of these ci-devant
hunters; it gave them an opportunity of entering into an altogether new relation towards wild animals. For the art of domesticating wild animals, which the hunter, by the very nature of his occupation, is unable to develop beyond very narrow limits, has vastly greater possibilities for the agriculturist. The hunter may conceivably domesticate the wolf or the jackal with whom he disputes or shares his prey by turning the wild beast into a partner, but it is almost inconceivable that he should domesticate the game which is his quarry. It is not the hunter with his hound but the agriculturist with his watch-dog who has it in his power to accomplish the further transformation which produces the shepherd and his sheep-dog. It is the agriculturist who possesses food-supplies which are attractive to ruminants like the ox or the sheep, that would not, like dogs, be attracted by the huntsman’s meat.
Archaeological evidence at Anau indicates that this further step in social evolution had been accomplished in Transcaspia by the time when Nature gave her screw of desiccation its second turn. By achieving the domestication of ruminants, Eurasian man
had potentially recovered the mobility which he had forfeited in his previous metamorphosis from hunter into cultivator, and in response to the further incidence of the old challenge he made use of his new-found mobility in two quite different ways. Some of the Transcaspian oasis-cultivators simply used their mobility in order to emigrate progressively—moving ever farther on as the climatic trend towards desiccation increased in severity—so as always to keep abreast of the physical environment in which they could continue to practise their existing way of life. They changed their habitat in order not to change their habits. But others parted company with them in order to respond to the same challenge in a more audacious fashion. These other Eurasians likewise abandoned the now untenable oases and launched themselves and their families and flocks and herds upon the inhospitable surface of the Steppe. These others, however, did not embark as fugitives seeking a farther shore. They abandoned their former staple of agriculture as their ancestors had abandoned their former staple of hunting, and staked their existence on their latest acquired art, that of the stock-breeder. They flung themselves upon the Steppe, not to escape beyond its bounds but to make themselves at home on it. They became Nomads.
When we compare the civilization of the Nomad who has abandoned agriculture and held his ground on the Steppe with the civilizations of his brethren who have preserved their agricultural heritage by changing their habitat, we shall observe that Nomadism displays a superiority in several ways. In the first place the domestication of animals is obviously a higher art than the domestication of plants, inasmuch as it is a triumph of human wit and will over a less tractable material. The shepherd is a greater virtuoso than the husbandman, and this truth has been expressed in a famous passage of Syriac mythology.
‘Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain. . . . And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering; but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.’
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The Nomad’s life is, indeed, a triumph of human skill. He manages to live off coarse grasses that he cannot eat himself by transforming them into the milk and flesh of his tame animals, and in order to find subsistence for his cattle, in season and out of season, from the natural vegetation of the bare and parsimonious
Steppe he has to adapt his life and movements with meticulous accuracy to a seasonal time-table. In fact the tour de force
of Nomadism demands a rigorously high standard of character and behaviour, and the penalty that the Nomad has had to pay is essentially the same as the Eskimo’s. The formidable environment which he has succeeded in conquering has insidiously enslaved him. The Nomads, like the Eskimos, have become the prisoners of an annual climatic and vegetational cycle; in acquiring the initiative on the Steppe they have forfeited the initiative in the world at large. They have not, indeed, passed across the stage of the histories of civilizations without having left their mark. From time to time they have broken out of their own domain into the domains of neighbouring sedentary civilizations, and on some of these occasions they have momentarily carried all before them; but these outbreaks have never been spontaneous. When the Nomad has issued from the Steppe and trespassed on the cultivator’s garden, he has not been moved by a deliberate intention to depart from his customary cycle. He has responded mechanically to forces beyond his control.
There are two such external forces to which he is subject: one force which pushes and another force which pulls. He is sometimes pushed off the Steppe by an increase of desiccation which puts his former habitat beyond even his powers of endurance; and again he is occasionally pulled out of the Steppe by the suction of a social vacuum which has arisen in the domain of some adjacent sedentary society through the operation of historic processes such as the breakdown of a sedentary civilization and the consequent Volkerwanderung—causes which are quite extraneous to the Nomad’s own experiences. A survey of the great historic interventions of the Nomads in the histories of the sedentary societies seems to show that all these interventions can be traced to one or other of these causes.
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Thus, in spite of these occasional incursions into the field of historical events, Nomadism is essentially a society without a history. Once launched on its annual orbit, the Nomadic horde revolves in it thereafter and might go on revolving for ever if an external force against which Nomadism is defenceless did not eventually bring the horde’s movements to a standstill and its life to an end. This force is the pressure of the sedentary civilizations round about; for, though the Lord may have respect for Abel and his offering and not for Cain and his, no power can save Abel from being slain by Cain.
‘Recent meteorological research indicates that there is a rhythmic alternation, possibly of world-wide incidence, between periods of relative desiccation and humidity, which causes alternate intrusions of Peasants and Nomads into one another’s spheres. When desiccation reaches a degree at which the Steppe can no longer provide pasture for the quantity of cattle with which the Nomads have stocked it, the herdsmen swerve from their beaten track of annual migration and invade the surrounding cultivated countries in search of food for their animals and themselves. On the other hand, when the climatic pendulum swings back and the next phase of humidity attains a point at which the Steppe becomes capable of bearing cultivated roots and cereals, the Peasant makes his counter-offensive upon the pastures of the Nomad. Their respective methods of aggression are very dissimilar. The Nomad’s outbreak is as sudden as a cavalry charge. The Peasant’s is an infantry advance. At each step he digs himself in with mattock or steam plough, and secures his communications by building roads or railways. The most striking recorded examples of Nomad explosion are the intrusions of the Turks and Mongols, which occurred in what was probably the last dry period but one. An imposing instance of Peasant encroachment is the subsequent eastward expansion of Russia. Both types of movement are abnormal, and each is extremely unpleasant for the party at whose expense it is made. But they are alike in being due to a single uncontrollable physical cause.
‘The relentless pressure of the cultivator is probably more painful in the long run, if one happens to be the victim of it, than the Nomad’s savage onslaught. The Mongol raids were over in two or three generations; but the Russian colonization which has been the reprisal for them has been going on for over four hundred years—first behind the Cossack lines, which encircled and narrowed down the pasture-lands from the north, and then along the Transcaspian Railway, which stretched its tentacles round their southern border. From the Nomad’s point of view, a Peasant Power like Russia resembles those rolling and crushing machines with which Western industrialism shapes hot steel according to its pleasure. In its grip the Nomad is either crushed out of existence or racked into the sedentary mould, and the process of penetration is not always peaceful. The path was cleared for the Transcaspian Railway by the slaughter of Tiirkmens at Goktepe. But the Nomad’s death-cry is seldom heard. During the European War, while people in England were raking up the Ottoman Turks’ Nomadic ancestry in order to account for their murder of 600,000 Armenians, 500,000 Turkish-speaking Central Asian Nomads of the Kirghiz Qazaq Confederacy were being exterminated—also under superior orders— by that “justest of mankind”, the Russian muzhik.’
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Nomadism was doomed in Eurasia from that moment in the seventeenth century when two sedentary empires, the Muscovite and the Manchu, stretched their tentacles round the Eurasian
Steppe from opposite quarters. To-day our Western Civilization, which has now spread its tentacles over the entire surface of the globe, is completing the extirpation of Nomadism in all its other ancient domains. In Kenya the pasture-lands of the Masai have been cut up and cut down to make way for European farmers. In the Sahara the Imoshagh are seeing their hitherto impenetrable desert fastness invaded by aeroplanes and by the eight-wheeled automobile. Even in Arabia, the classic home of Afrasian Nomadism, the Badu are being forcibly converted into fallahin, and this by no alien power but by the deliberate policy of an Arab of the Arabs, ‘Abd-al-Aziz Al-Sa’ud, the king of the Najd and the Hijaz, and the temporal head of the Wahhabi community of puritanical Muslim zealots. When a Wahhabi potentate in the heart of Arabia is fortifying his authority with armoured cars and solving his economic problems with petrol pumps and artesian wells and concessions to American oil interests, it is evident that the last hour of Nomadism has struck.
Thus Abel has been slain by Cain, and we are left to inquire whether the curse of Cain is duly descending upon his slayer.
‘And now art thou cursed from the Earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be upon the Earth’.
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The first clause of Cain’s curse has manifestly proved ineffective; for though the oasis-cultivator has certainly found himself unable to raise crops from the desiccated steppe-land, his migrations have carried him into regions whose climatic conditions have favoured him; and thence he has returned, with the driving force of industrialism behind him, to claim Abel’s grasslands as his own also. Whether Cain will prove to be the master or the victim of the industrialism that he has created, remains to be seen. In the year 1933, when the new economic world order was threatened with breakdown and dissolution, it seemed not impossible that Abel might be avenged after all; and that Homo Nomas, in articulo mortis,
might yet linger on to see his slayer, Homo Faber,
go down, distraught, to Sheol.
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So much for the civilizations that have suffered arrest as the penalty for a tour de force
in response to some physical challenge. We now pass on to cases in which the superlative challenge has been not physical but human.
The superlative challenge to which the Ottoman system was a response was the geographical transference of a Nomadic community from its native environment on the Steppe to a new environment in which it was confronted with the novel problem of exercising dominion over alien communities of human beings. We have already seen
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how the Avar Nomads, when they found themselves expatriated from their cattle ranges on the Steppe and stranded in partibus agricolarum,
tried to deal with the sedentary population which they had conquered as though it were a human flock and sought to transform themselves from shepherds of sheep into shepherds of men. Instead of living off the wild herbage of the Steppe through the transforming medium of tame animals, the Avars (like many other Nomad hordes who have done the same) proposed to live off the cultivated crops of the ploughland through the transforming medium not of animal digestion but of human labour. The analogy is tempting to apply, and it works out in practice up to a point; but the empirical test discovers in it one almost fatal flaw.
On the Steppe the composite society constituted by the Nomads and their non-human flocks is the most suitable instrument that can be devised for dealing with that kind of physical environment; and the Nomad is not, strictly speaking, a parasite on his non-human partners. There is a reasonable exchange of benefits: if the flocks have to yield not only their milk but their meat to the Nomads, the Nomads have in the first instance secured for the flocks their means of livelihood. Neither could exist in any considerable numbers on the Steppe without the aid of the other. On the other hand, in an environment of fields and cities, a composite society of expatriated Nomads and indigenous ‘human cattle’ is economically unsound, since the ‘shepherds of men’ are always economically—though not always politically—superfluous and therefore parasitic. From the economic standpoint they have ceased to be shepherds keeping watch over their flocks and have turned into drones exploiting the worker-bees. They have become a non-productive ruling class maintained by the labour of a productive population which would be better off economically if they were not there.
For this reason the empires established by Nomad conquerors have generally suffered rapid decadence and premature extinction.
The great MagribI historian Ibn Khaldun (A.D.
1332-1406) was thinking in terms of Nomad empires when he assessed the average
duration of empires at not more than three generations or a hundred and twenty years. Once the conquest is achieved the Nomad conqueror degenerates because he has passed out of his own element and become economically superfluous, while his human cattle recuperate because they have remained on their own ground and not ceased to be economically productive. The ‘human cattle’ reassert their manhood by expelling or assimilating their shepherd masters. The dominion of the Avars over the Slavs probably lasted less than fifty years, and proved the making of the Slavs and the undoing of the Avars. The empire of the Western Huns lasted no longer than the life-span of a single individual, Attila. The empire of the Mongol Il-Khans in Iran and ‘Iraq lasted less than eighty years, and the empire of the Great Khans in Southern China no longer. The Hyksos’ (Shepherd Kings’) empire in Egypt lasted a bare century. The span of more than two centuries during which the Mongols and their immediate local predecessors, the Kin, ruled continuously over Northern China (circa
A.D.
1142-1368) and the longer span of over three centuries and a half during which the Parthians were masters of Iran and ‘Iraq (circa
140 B.C.-A.D.
226/232) were distinctly exceptional.
By these standards of comparison the duration of the Ottoman Empire over the Orthodox Christian World was unique. If we date its establishment from the conquest of Macedonia in A.D.
1372 and the beginning of its end from the Russo-Turkish treaty of Kiichiik Qaynarjy in A.D.
1774, we shall be assigning it a period of four centuries without reckoning the time it took, before that, to rise and, after that, to fall. What is the explanation of its relative durability? A partial explanation can, no doubt, be found in the fact that the ‘Osmanlis, though economically an incubus, served a positive political purpose by providing the Orthodox Christian World with the universal state which it was unable to achieve for itself. But we can carry our explanation much farther than that.
We have seen that the Avars and their like, when they have trespassed from the Desert on to the Sown, have attempted—and failed—to deal with their new situation as ‘shepherds of men’. Their failure seems less surprising when we consider that these unsuccessful Nomad empire-builders in partibus agricolarum
have not attempted to find any sedentary human equivalent for one of the essential partners in the composite society of the Steppe. For this Steppe society does not consist simply of the human shepherd and his flock. In addition to the animals which he keeps in order to live on their products, the Nomad keeps other animals—the dog, the camel, the horse—whose function is to help him in his work. These auxiliary animals are the chef-d’oeuvre
of the Nomadic
Civilization and the key to its success. The sheep and the cow have merely to be tamed, though that is difficult enough, in order to be of service to man. The dog and camel and horse cannot perform their more sophisticated services until they have been not only tamed but trained into the bargain. The training of his non-human auxiliaries is the Nomad’s crowning achievement; and it is the adaptation of this higher Nomad art to sedentary conditions that distinguishes the Ottoman Empire from the Avar Empire and accounts for its vastly greater durability. The Ottoman Padishahs maintained their empire by training slaves as human auxiliaries to assist them in keeping order among their ‘human cattle’.
This remarkable institution of making soldiers and administrators out of slaves—an idea-which is so congenial to the Nomad genius and so alien from ours—was not an Ottoman invention. We find it in other Nomad empires over sedentary peoples—and this precisely in those that have had the longest duration.
We catch glimpses of military slavery in the Parthian Empire, for one of the armies that frustrated Mark Antony’s ambition to emulate Alexander the Great was reported to have borne only 400 free men on its strength out of 50,000 effectives. In the same way and on the same ground a thousand years later the’ Abbasid Caliphs maintained their authority by purchasing Turkish slaves from the Steppe and training them to be soldiers and administrators. The Umayyad Caliphs of Cordova maintained a slave bodyguard recruited for them by their Frankish neighbours. The Franks supplied the Cordovan slave-market by making slave-raids across the opposite frontier of the Frankish dominions, The barbarians thus captured happened to be Slavs; and this is the origin of the word ‘slave’ in the English language.
A more celebrated example of the same phenomenon, however, was the Mamluk regime in Egypt. The word mamluk means in Arabic something possessed or owned, and the Mamluks were originally the slave warriors of the dynasty founded by Saladin, the Ayyubids. In A.D.
1250, however, these slaves got rid of their masters and took over the AyyQbid slave-system on their own account, recruiting their corps not by procreation but by the purchase of relays of slaves from abroad. Behind the facade of a puppet Caliphate this self-owned slave-household ruled Egypt and Syria, and held the redoubtable Mongols in check at the line of the Euphrates, from A.D.
1250 to A.D.
1517, when they met more than their match in the slave-household of the ‘Osmanlis. Even that was not the end of them, for under the Ottoman regime in Egypt they were permitted to perpetuate themselves as before,
by the same method of training and from the same sources of recruitment. As the Ottoman Power declined the Mamluk Power reasserted itself, and in the eighteenth century the Ottoman Pasha of Egypt came to be virtually a state-prisoner of the Maml
ks, as the Cairene ‘Abbasid Caliphs had been before the Turkish conquest. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era it seemed an open question whether the Ottoman heritage in Egypt would revert to the Maml
ks or fall to some European Power—Napoleonic France or England. Actually both these alternatives were ruled out by the genius of the Albanian Muslim adventurer, Mehmed ‘Ali, but he found more difficulty in settling with the Maml
ks than in keeping the British and French at bay. It needed all his ability and ruthlessness to exterminate this self-perpetuating slave-corps after it had kept itself alive on the alien soil of Egypt, by constant drafts of Eurasian and Caucasian man-power, for over five hundred years.
In discipline and organization, however, the Mamluk slave-household was far surpassed by the somewhat younger slave-household created by the Ottoman dynasty for the establishment and maintenance of its dominion over the Orthodox Christian World. To exercise dominion over the entire body social of an alien civilization is evidently the hardest task that a Nomad conqueror could set himself, and this audacious enterprise called out, in ‘Osman and his successors down to Suleyman the Magnificent (A.D.
1520-66), a supreme display of the Nomad’s social capacities.
The general character of the Ottoman slave-household is conveyed in the following passage from a brilliant study by an American scholar.
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‘The Ottoman ruling institution included the Sultan and his family, the officers of his household, the executive officers of the Government, the standing army of cavalry and infantry and a large body of young men who were being educated for service in the standing army, the Court and the Government. These men wielded the sword, the pen and the sceptre. They conducted the whole of the government except the mere rendering of justice in matters that were controlled by the Sacred Law, and those limited functions that were left in the hands of subject and foreign groups of non-Muslims. The most vital and characteristic features of this institution were, first, that its personnel consisted, with few exceptions, of men born of Christian parents or the sons of such; and, second, that almost every member of the Institution came into it as the Sultan’s slave, and remained the Sultan’s slave throughout life—no matter to what height of wealth, power and greatness he might attain. . . .
‘The royal family . . . may rightly be included in the slave-family [because] the mothers of the Sultan’s children were slaves: the Sultan himself was the son of a slave. . . . Long before Suleyman’s time, the Sultans had practically ceased either to obtain brides of royal rank or to give the title of wife to the mothers of their children. . . . The Ottoman system deliberately took slaves and made them ministers of state. It took boys from the sheep-run and the plough-tail and made them courtiers and the husbands of princesses; it took young men whose ancestors had borne the Christian name for centuries, and made them rulers in the greatest of Muhammadan states, and soldiers and generals in invincible armies whose chief joy was to beat down the Cross and elevate the Crescent. . . . Grandly disregarding the fabric of fundamental customs which is called “human nature”, and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children for ever from parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold upon property, gave them no definite promise that their sons and daughters would profit by their success and sacrifice, raised and lowered them with no regard for ancestry or previous distinction, taught them a strange law, ethics and religion, and ever kept them conscious of a sword raised above their heads which might put an end at any moment to a brilliant career along a matchless path of human glory.’
The exclusion of the free-born Ottoman aristocracy from the government, which seems to us the strangest part of the system, was justified by results; for when the free Muslims did at last force an entry into the household, in the later years of Suleyman’s reign, the system began to break down and the Ottoman Empire entered on its decline.
So long as the system stood intact, recruits were obtained from various Infidel sources of supply: from beyond the frontiers by capture in war, by purchase in the slave-market or by voluntary enlistment; from within the Empire by a periodical levy of children by conscription. The recruits were then put through an elaborate education, with selection and specialization at every stage. Discipline was severe and punishment savage, while on the other hand there was a deliberate and unceasing appeal to ambition. Every boy who entered the Ottoman Padishah’s slave-household was aware that he was a potential Grand Vizier and that his prospects depended on his prowess as shown in his training.
We have a vivid and detailed description of this educational system in its heyday from a first-hand observer, the Flemish scholar and diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who was the ambassador of the Hapsburg Court to Suleyman the Magnificent, and his conclusions are as flattering to the ‘Osmanlis as they
are the reverse towards the methods of contemporary Western Christendom.
‘I have’, he says, ‘envied the Turks this system of theirs. It is always the way of the Turks, whenever they come into possession of a man of uncommonly good parts, to rejoice and be exceeding glad, as though they had found a pearl of great price. And, in bringing out all that there is in him, they leave nothing undone that labour and thought can do—especially where they recognize military aptitude. Our Western way is different indeed! In the West, if we come into possession of a good dog or hawk or horse, we are delighted, and we spare nothing in our efforts to bring the creature to the highest perfection of which its kind is capable. In the case of a man, however—supposing that we happen to come upon a man of signal endowments—we do not take anything like the same pains, and we do not consider that his education is particularly our business. So we Westerners obtain many sorts of pleasure and service from a well-broken-in horse, dog and hawk, while the Turks obtain from a man whose character has been cultivated by education the vastly greater return that is afforded by the vast superiority and pre-eminence of human nature over the rest of the animal kingdom.’
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In the end the system perished because everybody pressed in to share its privileges. Towards the end of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, admission to the Janissary Corps was made open to all free Muslims except Negroes. Numbers were increased; discipline and efficiency declined. By the middle of the seventeenth century these human watch-dogs had ‘returned to nature’ by reverting into wolves who harried the Padishah’s human cattle instead of watching over them and keeping them in order. The Orthodox Christian subject population was now cheated of the Pax Ottomanica
which had originally reconciled it to bearing the Ottoman yoke. In the great war of A.D.
1682-99 between the Ottoman Empire and the Powers of Western Christendom, a war which ended with the first of a series of losses of Ottoman territory which continued thereafter till A.D.
1922, the superiority in discipline and efficiency passed definitively from the Ottoman to the Western camp.
The sequel to this decay of the Ottoman slave-household has brought to light the insuperable rigidity which was its fatal defect. Once thrown out of gear, it could be neither repaired nor remodelled. The system had become an incubus, and the Turkish rulers of later days were reduced to imitating the methods of their Western enemies, a policy long pursued half-heartedly and inefficiently but at last carried through with drastic completeness by
Mustafa Kemal in our own day. This metamorphosis is as wonderful a tour de force,
in its way as the creation of the slave-household by the early Ottoman statesmen. Yet a comparison of the results of these two performances brings out the relative triviality of the second. The makers of the Ottoman slave-household forged an instrument which enabled a tiny band of Nomads, who had been ejected from their native Steppe, not merely to hold their own in an unfamiliar world but to impose peace and order upon a great Christian society which had gone into disintegration and to threaten the life of a yet greater Christian society which has since cast its shadow over all mankind. Our latter-day Turkish statesmen have simply filled part of the vacuum which has been left in the Near East by the disappearance of the incomparable structure of the old Ottoman Empire by erecting on the desolate site a ready-made go-down of a standard Western pattern in the shape of a Turkish national state. In this commonplace villa-residence the Turkish legatees of the arrested Ottoman Civilization are to-day content—like the Zionist legatees of the fossilized Syriac Civilization next door and the Irish legatees of the abortive Far Western Civilization in the next street—to live henceforth in comfortable banality as a welcome escape from the no longer tolerable status of being ‘a peculiar people’.
As for the slave-household itself, it had been ruthlessly ‘put down’—the proper fate of a watch-dog who has gone wrong and taken to worrying the sheep—by MahmQd II in A.D. 1826, in the middle of the Graeco-Turkish war, fifteen years after the analogous institution of the Mamluks had been destroyed by Mahmud’s nominal subject—sometimes ally and sometimes rival—Mehmed ‘Ali of Egypt.
The Ottoman institution came perhaps as near as anything in real life could to realizing the ideal of Plato’s Republic, but it is certain that Plato himself, when he conceived his Utopia, had the actual institutions of Sparta in mind; and in spite of the difference in scale between Ottoman and Spartan operations there is a close resemblance between the ‘peculiar institutions’ with which each of these peoples equipped itself for the accomplishment of its tour de force.
As we noticed in the very first example cited in this Study (see p. 4), the Spartans made a peculiar response to the common challenge which was presented to all Hellenic states in the eighth century B.C. when the population of Hellas was outgrowing its
means of subsistence. The normal solution which was found for this common problem was colonization: the extension of the area in Hellenic hands by the discovery of new lands overseas and their conquest and settlement at the expense of the local ‘barbarians’. This proved a fairly simple matter on account of the inefficiency of the barbarian resistance. The Spartans, however, who, almost alone among Greek communities of any importance, did not live in sight of the sea, chose instead to conquer their Greek neighbours, the Messenians. This act confronted them with a challenge of unusual severity. The first Sparto-Messenian war {circa
736-720 B.C.) was child’s-play compared with the second {circa
650-620 B.C.), in which the subject Messenians, tempered by adversity, rose in arms against their masters. Though they failed to achieve their own freedom, the Messenians succeeded in deflecting the whole course of Spartan development. The Messenian revolt was so terrible an experience that it left Spartan society ‘fast bound in misery and iron’. Thenceforth the Spartans were never able to relax, never able to extricate themselves from their post-war reaction. Their conquest took the conquerors captive, much as the Eskimos have been enslaved by their conquest of an Arctic environment. As the Eskimos are fettered to the rigours of their annual cycle of livelihood, so the Spartans were fettered to the task of holding down their Messenian Helots.
The Spartans equipped themselves for performing their tour de force
by the same method as the ‘Osmanlis, adapting existing institutions to fulfil new needs. But whereas the ‘Osmanlis could draw upon the rich social heritage of Nomadism, the Spartans’ institutions were an adaptation of the very primitive social system of the Dorian barbarians who had invaded Greece in the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung. Hellenic tradition attributed this achievement to Lycurgus. But Lycurgus was not a man—only a god; and its real authors were probably a series of statesmen living as late as the sixth century B.C.
In the Spartan system as in the Ottoman, the outstanding feature, which accounts both for its efficiency and for its fatal rigidity and ultimate breakdown, was its grand disregard for human nature. The Spartan agoge
did not go so far as the Ottoman slave-household in disregarding the claims of birth and heredity; and the free citizen landholders of Sparta were in exactly the opposite situation from the free Muslim landed gentry of the Ottoman Empire. Virtually the whole duty of maintaining the Spartan dominion over Messenia was imposed upon them. At the same time, within the Spartiate citizen-body itself, the principle of equality was rigidly enforced. Every Spartiate held from the
state an allotment of land of equal size, or equal productivity, and each of these allotments, cultivated by Messenian serfs (Helots), was sufficient to provide maintenance for the Spartiate and his family and thus enable him to devote the whole of his own energies to the art of war. Every Spartiate child, unless ‘reprieved’ as a weakling and put out to die by exposure, was condemned from the age of seven onwards to the Spartan curriculum of military education. There were no exemptions, and the girls were trained in athletics as well as the boys. Girls, like boys, competed naked before a male audience, and the Spartans seem in such matters to have achieved a sexual self-control or indifference similar to that of the modern Japanese. The production of Spartiate children was controlled on drastically eugenic lines, and a weakling husband was encouraged to secure a better male than himself to sire the children of his family. According to Plutarch, the Spartans
‘saw nothing but vulgarity and vanity in the sexual conventions of the rest of mankind, who take care to serve their bitches and their mares with the best sires that they can manage to borrow or hire, yet lock their women up and keep them under watch and ward in order to make sure that they shall bear children exclusively to their husbands—as though this were a husband’s sacred right even if he happens to be feebleminded or senile or diseased’.
1
The reader will notice the curious parallel between Plutarch’s remarks on the Spartan system and the comments, already quoted, of Busbecq on the slave-household of the ‘Osmanlis.
The leading features in the Spartan system were the same as in the Ottoman—supervision, selection, specialization and the competitive spirit—and in both cases these features were not confined to the educational stage. The Spartiate served fifty-three years with the colours. In some respects the claims made on him were more exacting than those made on the Janissaries. The Janissaries were discouraged from marrying, but if they married were allowed to live in married quarters; the Spartiate, though compelled to marry, was forbidden to lead a home-life. Even after marriage he continued to eat and sleep in his barracks. The result was the almost incredible and certainly crushing public spirit, a spirit which the English find difficult and repulsive even under the pressure of war and quite intolerable at other times, which has made the word ‘Spartan’ a by-word ever since. One aspect of that spirit is illustrated by the story of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae, or the story of the boy and the fox. On the other side, we have to remember that the last two years of the Spartiate
boy’s education were generally spent in the Secret Service, which was simply an official murder-gang, patrolling the countryside by night for the purpose of destroying any Helots who showed signs of insubordination, or indeed of inconvenient character and initiative in any shape or form.
The ‘single-track’ genius of the Spartan system leaps to the eye of any visitor to the present-day Sparta Museum; for this museum is totally unlike any other collection of Hellenic works of art. In such collections the visitor’s eye seeks out and finds and dwells on the masterpieces of the Classical Age, which approximately coincides with the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. In the Sparta Museum, however, the Classical art is conspicuous by its absence. The pre-Classical exhibits are remarkable for their promise, but when one looks for their sequel one looks in vain. There is a complete gap in the sequence, and all that follows is a crop of standardized and uninspired work of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The date at which the early Spartan art breaks off is approximately that of the overseership of Chilon in the middle of the sixth century B.C., and for that reason this statesman is often assumed to have been one of the authors-of the system. The almost equally abrupt resumption of artistic production in the age of decadence is posterior to 189-188 B.C., when the system was forcibly abolished by a foreign conqueror. It is a curious illustra’-tion of the rigidity of the system that it lasted for two centuries after its raison d’etre
had disappeared—after Messenia had been irrevocably lost. Before this date the epitaph on Sparta had been written by Aristotle in the form of a general proposition.
‘Peoples ought not to train themselves in the art of war with an eye to subjugating neighbours who do not deserve to be subjugated [i.e. fellow-Greeks, not’ lesser breeds without the law’, whom Greeks called barbarians]. . . . The paramount aim of any social system should be to frame military institutions, like all its other institutions, with an eye to the circumstances of peace-time, when the soldier is off duty.’
1
Two characteristics, common to all these arrested societies, stand out conspicuously—caste and specialization; and both these phenomena can be embraced in a single formula: the individual living creatures which each of these societies embraces are not all of a single type but are distributed among two or three markedly different categories. In the Eskimo Society there are two castes: the human hunters and their canine auxiliaries. In the Nomadic Society there are three: the human shepherds, their animal auxiliaries and their cattle. In the Ottoman Society we find the equivalents of the three castes of the Nomadic Society with the substitution of human beings for animals. Whereas the polymorphic body social of Nomadism is constituted by the assemblage in a single society of human beings and animals who could none of them survive on the Steppe without their partners, the polymorphic Ottoman body social is constituted by the opposite process of differentiating a naturally homogeneous humanity into human castes which are treated as though they were different species of animals; but for our present purpose this difference can be ignored. The Eskimo’s dog and the Nomad’s horse and camel are half humanized by their partnership with man, whereas the Ottoman subject population, the Ra’iyeh
(which means ‘flock’), and the Laconian Helots are half dehumanized through being treated as cattle. Other human partners in these associations are specialized into ‘monsters’. The perfect Spartiate is a Martian, the perfect Janissary a monk, the perfect Nomad a Centaur, the perfect Eskimo a Merman. The whole point of the contrast which Pericles draws, in the Funeral Oration, between Athens and her enemy is that the Athenian is a man, made in the image of God, whereas the Spartan is a war-robot. As for the Eskimos and the Nomads, the descriptions given by observers all agree in asserting that these specialists have carried their skill to such a point that the man-boat in the one case and the man-horse in the other manoeuvre as organic units.
Thus Eskimos, Nomads, ‘Osmanlis and Spartiates achieve what they achieve by discarding as far as possible the infinite variety of human nature and assuming an inflexible animal nature instead. Thereby they have set their feet on the path of retrogression. Biologists tell us that animal species which have adapted themselves too nicely to highly specialized environments are at a dead end and have no future in the evolutionary process. That is exactly the fate of the arrested civilizations.
Parallels with such a fate are furnished both by the imaginary human societies called Utopias and by the actual societies achieved by the social insects. If we enter into the comparison we shall find in the ant-heap and in the bee-hive, as well as in Plato’s Republic
or in Mr. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
the same outstanding features as we have learnt to recognize in all the arrested civilizations—caste and specialization.
The social insects rose to their present social heights, and came to a permanent standstill at those altitudes, many millions of years before Homo Sapiens
began to emerge above the mean level of the rank and file of the vertebrate order. As for the Utopias, they
are static ex hypothesi.
For these works are always programmes of action masquerading in the disguise of imaginary descriptive sociology; and the action which they are intended to evoke is nearly always the ‘pegging’, at a certain level, of an actual society which has entered on a decline that must end in a fall unless the downward movement can be artificially arrested. To arrest a downward movement is the utmost to which most Utopias aspire, since Utopias seldom begin to be written in any society until after its members have lost the expectation of further progress. Hence in almost all Utopias—with the noteworthy exception of that work of English genius which has given this whole genre of literature its name—an invincibly stable equilibrium is the aim to which all other social ends are subordinated and, if need be, sacrificed.
This is true of the Hellenic Utopias which were conceived at Athens in the schools of philosophy that arose in the age immediately following the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War. The negative inspiration of these works is a profound hostility to Athenian democracy. For, after the death of Pericles, the democracy had dissolved its brilliant partnership with Athenian culture; it had developed a crazy militarism that had brought devastation upon the world in which Athenian culture had flourished; and it had capped its failure to win the war with the judicial murder of Socrates.
The first concern of the Athenian post-war philosophers was to repudiate everything that for two centuries past had made Athens politically great. Hellas, they held, could only be saved by an alliance between Athenian philosophy and the Spartan social system. In adapting the Spartan system to their own ideas they sought to improve upon it in two ways: first by working it out to its logical extremes and secondly by the imposition of a sovereign intellectual caste (Plato’s ‘Guardians’), in the likeness of the Athenian philosophers themselves, upon the Spartiate military caste, which is to be taught to play second fiddle in the Utopian orchestra.
In their condonation of caste, in their penchant
towards specialization and in their passion for establishing an equilibrium at any price, the Athenian philosophers of the fourth century B.C. show themselves docile pupils of the Spartan statesmen of the sixth. In the matter of caste the thought of Plato and Aristotle is tainted with that racialism which has been one of the besetting sins of our own Western Society in recent times. Plato’s conceit of ‘the Noble Lie’ is a delicate device for suggesting that between one human being and another there may be such profound differences as to constitute a distinction like that between one animal species and
another. Aristotle’s defence of slavery is along the same lines. He holds that some men are meant ‘by nature’ to be slaves, though he admits that in actual fact many are enslaved who ought to be free and many free who ought to be slaves.
In Plato’s Utopias and Aristotle’s alike (Plato’s Republic
and Laws
and the last two Books of Aristotle’s Politics)
the aim is not the happiness of the individual but the stability of the community. Plato proclaims a ban on poets which might have issued from the mouth of a Spartan overseer; and he advocates a general censorship over ‘dangerous thought’ which has its latter-day parallels in the regulations of Communist Russia, National-Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Shintoist Japan.
The Utopian programme proved a forlorn hope for the salvation of Hellas, and its barrenness was demonstrated experimentally, before Hellenic history had run its course, by the mass-production of artificially manufactured commonwealths in which the main Utopian precepts were duly translated into practice. The single commonwealth laid out on a patch of waste land in Crete, which is postulated in Plato’s Laws,
was actually multiplied a thousandfold in the city states founded by Alexander and the Seleucidae in partibus Orientalium
and by the Romans in partibus Barbarorum
during the next four centuries. In these ‘Utopias in real life’ the little bands of Greeks or Italians who were fortunate enough to be enrolled as colonists were liberated for their cultural task of making the light of Hellenism shine upon the outer darkness by having assigned to them an ample labour-force of ‘Natives’ to do their dirty work. A Roman colony in Gaul might be endowed with the entire territory and population of a barbarian tribe.
In the second century after Christ, when the Hellenic World was enjoying an Indian Summer which contemporaries, and even posterity, long mistook for a Golden Age, it looked as though Plato’s most audacious hopes had been fulfilled and transcended. From A.D.
96 to 180 a series of philosopher-kings sat upon a throne which dominated the entire Hellenic World, and a thousand city states were living side by side in peace and concord under this philosophic-imperial aegis. Yet the cessation of evils was only a pause, for all was not well beneath the surface. An impalpable censorship, inspired by the atmosphere of the social environment more effectively than it could ever have been imposed by imperial fiat, was eliminating intellectual and artistic vitality with a vengeance which would have disconcerted Plato if he could have returned to see his whimsical precepts so literally realized. And the uninspired respectable prosperity of the second century was followed by the chaotic passionate misery of the third, when the
fallahin turned and rent their masters. By the fourth century the tables had been completely turned; for the once privileged ruling class of the Roman municipalities, in so far as it survived at all, was now everywhere in chains. Chained to their kennels and with their tails between their legs, the conscript aldermen of the municipalities of the Roman Empire in extremis
could hardly be recognized as the ideological descendants of Plato’s magnificent ‘human watch-dogs’.
If we glance, in conclusion, at a few of the numerous modern Utopias we shall find the same Platonic characteristics. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,
written in a satirical vein, to repel rather than to attract, starts from the assumption that modern industrialism can be made tolerable only by a rigid segregation of ‘natural’ castes. This is achieved by sensational developments of biological science, supplemented by psychological techniques. The result is a stratified society of alphas, betas, gammas, deltas and epsilons which is simply Plato’s invention or the ‘Osmanlis’ achievement carried to extremes, with the difference that Mr. Huxley’s alphabetical castes are conditioned into really becoming so many different species of ‘animals’, like the human, the canine and the graminivorous species that co-operate in the Nomadic Society. The epsilons, who do the dirty work, really like it and want nothing else. They have been made that way in the pro-creational laboratory. Mr. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon
portrays a society in which ‘every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.’
Typical and interesting again from a slightly different standpoint is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.
Four hundred years before the narrator’s visit, the Erewhonians had realized that they were being enslaved by their mechanical inventions. The man-machine combination was becoming a sub-human entity like the man-boat of the Eskimos and the man-horse of the Nomads. So they scrapped their machines and pegged their society at the level it had reached before the opening of the Industrial Age.
NOTE. Sea and Steppe as Language-conductors
At the beginning of our account of Nomadism we noted that the Steppe, like ‘the unharvested sea’, while it provides no resting-place for sedentary mankind, affords greater facilities for travel and transport than cultivated lands. This resemblance between sea and Steppe is illustrated by their function as language-conductors. It is well known that a seafaring people is apt to spread its own language round the
coasts of any sea or ocean on which it has made itself at home. Ancient Greek mariners once put the Greek language into currency all round the Mediterranean. The prowess of Malayan seamanship has propagated the Malay family of languages as far as Madagascar on the one side and the Philippines on the other. In the Pacific the Polynesian language is still spoken with extraordinary uniformity from Fiji to Easter Island and from New Zealand to Hawaii, though many generations have passed since the vast spaces which separate these islands were regularly traversed by Polynesian canoes. Again, it is because ‘Britannia rules the waves’ that English has lately become a language with a world-wide currency.
A corresponding dissemination of languages round the cultivated coasts of the Steppe, through the traffic of the Nomad steppe-mariners, is attested by the geographical distribution of four living languages or groups of languages: Berber, Arabic, Turkish and Indo-European.
The Berber languages are spoken to-day by the Nomads of the Sahara and also by the sedentary peoples of the Sahara’s northern and southern coasts. It is natural to assume that the northern and southern branches of this family of languages were propagated into their present domains by Berber-speaking Nomads who trespassed, in times past, out of the Desert into the Sown in both directions.
Arabic is similarly spoken to-day, not only on the northern coasts of the Arabian Steppe, in Syria and ‘Iraq, but on its southern coasts, in the Hadramaut and the Yaman and on its western coasts in the Nile Valley. It has also been carried farther westward again from the Nile Valley into the Berber domain, where it is now spoken as far afield as the North African coast of the Atlantic and the northern shore of Lake Chad.
Turkish has been disseminated to various coasts of the Eurasian Steppe and is spoken to-day, in one dialect or another, throughout a solid block of Central Asian territory extending from the east coast of the Caspian to the Lob Nor and from the northern escarpment of the Iranian Plateau to the western face of the Altai Mountains.
This present distribution of the Turkish family of languages gives the key to the present distribution of the Indo-European family, which (as its name implies) is now so strangely sundered into two isolated geographical groups, one domiciled in Europe and the other in Iran and India. The present Indo-European linguistic map becomes intelligible if we assume that the languages of this family were originally propagated by Nomads who were tenants of the Eurasian Steppe before the propagators of the Turkish languages made themselves at home there. Europe and Iran both have ‘seaboards’ on the Eurasian Steppe, and this great waterless ocean is the natural medium of communication between them. The only difference between this case and the three cases previously cited is that in this case the language group has lost its hold on the intervening Steppe region across which it was once disseminated.