IN passing from the breakdowns of civilizations to their disintegrations we have to face a question like that which confronted us when we passed from the geneses of civilizations to their growths. Is disintegration a new problem on its own account or can we take it for granted as a natural and inevitable sequel to breakdown? When we considered the earlier question, whether growth was a new problem, distinct from the problem of genesis, we were led to answer the question in the affirmative by discovering that there were, in fact, a number of ‘arrested’ civilizations which had solved the problem of genesis but had failed to solve the problem of growth. And now again, at this later stage in our Study, we can meet the analogous question with the same affirmative answer by pointing to the fact that certain civilizations, after breakdown, have suffered a similar arrest and entered on a long period of petrifaction.
The classic example of a petrified civilization is presented by a phase in the history of the Egyptiac Society which we have already had occasion to consider. After the Egyptiac Society had broken down under the intolerable burden that was imposed on it by the Pyramid-builders, and when thereafter it had passed through the first and the second into the third of the three phases of disintegration—a ‘time of troubles’, a universal state and an interregnum—this apparently moribund society then departed unexpectedly and abruptly, at a moment when it was apparently completing its life course, from what we may provisionally regard as the standard pattern if we take for our norm the Hellenic example in which these three phases first came under our notice. At this point the Egyptiac Society refused to pass away and proceeded to double its life-span. When we take the time-measure of the Egyptiac Society from the moment of its galvanic reaction against the Hyksos invaders in the first quarter of the sixteenth century before Christ down to the obliteration of the last traces of an Egyptiac culture in the fifth century of the Christian Era, we find that this span of two thousand years is as long as the combined span of the birth, growth, breakdown and almost complete disintegration of the Egyptiac Society, reckoning back from the date of its passionate reassertion of itself in the sixteenth century before Christ to its first emergence above the primitive level at some unknown date in the fourth millennium B.C. But the life of the Egyptiac Society during the second half of its existence was a kind of life-in-death. During those two supernumerary millennia, a civilization whose previous career had been so full of movement and of meaning lingered on inert and arrested. In fact it survived by becoming petrified.
Nor does this example stand alone. If we turn to the history of the main body of the Far Eastern Society in China, in which the moment of breakdown may be equated with the break-up of the T’ang Empire in the last quarter of the ninth century of the Christian Era, we can trace the subsequent process of disintegration following its normal course through a ‘time of troubles’ into a universal state, only to be pulled up in the course of this stage by a reaction of the same abrupt and passionate kind as the Egyptiac reaction to the Hyksos invaders. The Southern Chinese revolt, under the leadership of the founder of the Ming dynasty, Hung Wu, against a Far Eastern universal state which had been established by the barbarian Mongols, is strongly reminiscent of the Theban revolt, under the leadership of the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Amosis, against the ‘successor-state’ which had been erected on part of the derelict domain of the defunct Egyptiac universal state (the so-called ‘Middle Empire’) by the barbarian Hyksos. And there has been a corresponding similarity in the sequel. For the Far Eastern Society has prolonged its existence in a petrified form instead of passing expeditiously through disintegration into dissolution by way of a universal state running out into an interregnum.
We may add to these two examples the various fossilized fragments of otherwise extinct civilizations which have come to our notice: the Jains in India, the Hinayanian Buddhists in Ceylon, Burma, Siam and Cambodia, and the Lamaistic Mahayanian Buddhists of Tibet and Mongolia, all of them fossilized fragments of the Indie Civilization; and the Jews, Parsees, Nestorians and Monophysites, who are fossilized fragments of the Syriac Civilization.
If we cannot extend our list farther we can at least notice that, in the judgement of Macaulay, the Hellenic Civilization came within measurable distance of a similar experience in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian Era.
‘The spirit of the two most famous nations of Antiquity was remarkably exclusive. . . . The fact seems to be that the Greeks admired only themselves and that the Romans admired only themselves and the Greeks. ... The effect was narrowness and sameness of thought. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves, bred in and in, and were accordingly cursed with barrenness and degeneracy. . . . The vast despotism of the Caesars, gradually effacing all national peculiarities and assimilating the remotest provinces of the Empire to each other, augmented the evil. At the close of the third century after Christ the prospects of mankind [sic] were fearfully dreary. . . . That great community was then in danger of experiencing a calamity far more terrible than any of the quick, inflammatory, destroying maladies to which nations are liable—a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilization. It would be easy to indicate many points of resemblance between the subjects of Diocletian and the people of that Celestial Empire where, during many centuries, nothing has been learned or unlearned; where government, where education, where the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where knowledge forgets to increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the earth or the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither waste nor augmentation. The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other political, the one from within, the other from without.’ 1
This merciful release for which, on Macaulay’s showing, the Hellenic Society in the Imperial Age was indebted to the Church and the barbarians, is a relatively happy ending which cannot be taken for granted. So long as life persists it is always possible that, instead of being cut off sharp by Clotho’s beneficently ruthless shears, it may stiffen by imperceptible degrees into the paralysis of life-in-death; and the possibility that this may be the destiny of our Western Society has haunted the mind of at least one distinguished historian of the present generation.
‘I do not think the danger before us is anarchy, but despotism, the loss of spiritual freedom, the totalitarian state, perhaps a universal world totalitarian state. As a consequence of strife between nations or classes there might be local and temporary anarchy, a passing phase. Anarchy is essentially weak, and in an anarchic world any firmly organized group with rational organization and scientific knowledge could spread its dominion over the rest. And, as an alternative to anarchy, the World would welcome the despotic state. Then the World might enter upon a period of spiritual “petrifaction”, a terrible order which for the higher activities of the human spirit would be death. The petrifaction of the Roman Empire and the petrifaction of China would appear less rigid because [in our case] the ruling group would have much greater scientific means of power. (Do you know Macaulay’s essay on “History”? He argues that the barbarian invasions were a blessing in the long run because they broke up the petrifaction. “It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarism to escape the fate of China.” There would be no barbarian races to break up a future world totalitarian state.)
‘It seems to me possible that in such a totalitarian state, while philosophy and poetry would languish, scientific research might go on with continuous fresh discoveries. Greek science did not find the Ptolemaic realm an uncongenial environment, and I think, generally speaking, natural science may flourish under a despotism. It is to the interest of the ruling group to encourage what may increase their means of power. That, not anarchy, is for me the nightmare ahead, if we do not find a way of ending our present fratricidal strife. But there is the Christian Church there, a factor to be reckoned with. It may have to undergo martyrdom in the future world-state, but, as it compelled the Roman world-state in the end to make at any rate formal submission to Christ, it might again, by the way of martyrdom, conquer the scientific rationalist world-state of the future.’ 1
These reflections show that the disintegrations of civilizations present a problem which demands our study.
In studying the growths of civilizations we found that they could be analysed into successions of performances of the drama of challenge-and-response and that the reason why one performance followed another was because each of the responses was not only successful in answering the particular challenge by which it had been evoked but was also instrumental in provoking a fresh challenge, which arose each time out of the new situation that the successful response had brought about. Thus the essence of the nature of the growths of civilizations proved to be an elan which carried the challenged party through the equilibrium of a successful response into an overbalance which declared itself in the presentation of a new challenge. This repetitiveness or recur-rency of challenge is likewise implied in the concept of disintegrar tion, but in this case the responses fail. In consequence, instead of a series of challenges each different in character from a predecessor which has been successfully met and relegated to past history, we have the same challenge presented again and again. For example, in the history of the international politics of the Hellenic World, from the time when the Solonian economic revolution first confronted the Hellenic Society with the task of establishing a political world order, we can see that the failure of the Athenian attempt to solve the problem by means of the Delian League led on to Philip of Macedon’s attempt to solve it by means of the Corinthian League, and Philip’s failure to Augustus’s attempt to solve it by the Pax Romana, upheld by a Principate. This repetition of the same challenge is in the very nature of the situation. When the outcome of each successive encounter is not victory but defeat, the unanswered challenge can never be disposed of, and is bound to present itself again and again until it either receives some tardy and imperfect answer or else brings about the destruction of the society which has shown itself inveterately incapable of responding to it effectively.
Can we say, then, that the alternative to petrifaction is total and absolute extinction? Before answering in the affirmative we may remind ourselves of the process of apparentation-and-affiliation which we noticed at an early stage of this Study. The Solonian Respicefinem and a suspension of judgement may be for the present our wisest course.
In our study of the process of the growths of civilizations we began by looking for a criterion of growth before we attempted to analyse the process, and we will follow the same, plan in our study of disintegrations. One step in the argument, however, we may spare ourselves. Having decided that the criteria of growth were not to be found in an increasing command over the human or the physical environment, we may fairly assume that loss of such command is not among the causes of disintegration. Indeed, the evidence, so far as it goes, suggests that an increasing command over environments is a concomitant of disintegration rather than of growth. Militarism, a common feature of breakdown and disintegration, is frequently effective in increasing a society’s command both over other living societies and over the inanimate forces of nature. In the downward course of a broken-down civilization’s career there may be truth in the Ionian philosopher Heracleitus’s saying that ‘war is the father of all things’, and, since the vulgar estimates of human prosperity are reckoned in terms of power and wealth, it thus often happens that the opening chapters of a society’s tragic decline are popularly hailed as the culminating chapters of a magnificent growth. Sooner or later, however, disillusionment is bound to follow; for a society that has become incurably divided against itself is almost certain to ‘put back into the business’ of war the greater part of those additional resources, human and material, which the same business has incidentally brought into its hands. For instance, we see the money-power and man-power won through Alexander’s conquests being poured into the civil wars of Alexander’s successors, and the money-power and man-power won by the Roman conquests of the second century B.C. being poured into the civil wars of the last century B.C.
Our criterion for the process of disintegration has to be sought for elsewhere; and the clue is given to us in the spectacle of that division and discord within the bosom of a society to which an increase in its command over its environment can so often be traced back. This is only what we should expect; for we have found already that the ultimate criterion and the fundamental cause of the breakdowns which precede disintegrations is an outbreak of internal discords through which societies forfeit their faculty of self-determination.
The social schisms in which this discord partially reveals itself rend the broken-down society in two different dimensions simultaneously. There are vertical schisms between geographically segregated communities and horizontal schisms between geographically intermingled but socially segregated classes.
So far as the vertical type of schism is concerned, we have already seen how frequently a reckless indulgence in the crime of inter-state warfare has been the main line of suicidal activity. But this vertical schism is not the most characteristic manifestation of the discord by which the breakdowns of civilizations are brought about; for the articulation of a society into parochial communities is, after all, a feature which is common to the whole genus of human societies, civilized and uncivilized, and inter-state warfare is merely an abuse of a potential instrument of self-destruction which is within the reach of any society at any time. On the other hand, the horizontal schism of a society along lines of class is not only peculiar to civilizations but is also a phenomenon which appears at the moment of their breakdowns and which is a distinctive mark of the periods of breakdown and disintegration, by contrast with its absence during the phases of genesis and growth.
We have already come across this horizontal type of schism. We encountered it when we were exploring the extension of our own Western Society backwards in the time-dimension. We found ourselves led back to the Christian Church and a number of barbarian war-bands which had come into collision with the Church in Western Europe inside the northern frontiers of the Roman Empire; and we observed that each of these two institutions—the war-bands and the Church—had been created by a social group which was not, itself, an articulation of our own Western body social and which could only be described in terms of another society, antecedent to ours: the Hellenic Civilization. We described the creators of the Christian Church as the internal proletariat, and the creators of the barbarian war-bands as the external proletariat, of this Hellenic Society.
Pursuing our inquiries farther, we found that both these proletariats had arisen through acts of secession from the Hellenic Society during a ‘time of troubles’ in which the Hellenic Society itself was manifestly no longer creative but was already in decline; and, pushing our inquiry yet another stage back, we further found that these secessions had been provoked by an antecedent change in the character of the ruling element in the Hellenic body social. A ‘creative minority’ which had once evoked a voluntary allegiance from the uncreative mass, in virtue of the gift of charm which is the privilege of creativity, had now given place to a ‘dominant minority’ destitute of charm because it was uncreative. This dominant minority had retained its privileged position by force, and the secessions which had ultimately resulted in the creation of the war-bands and the Christian Church had been reactions to this tyranny. Yet this defeat of its own intentions— through the disruption of a society which it was attempting, by perverse methods, to hold together—is not the only achievement of the dominant minority that came to our notice. It has also left a monument of itself in the shape of the Roman Empire; and the Empire not only took shape earlier than either the Church or the war-bands; its mighty presence in the world in which these proletarian institutions grew up was a factor in the growth of both of them which cannot be left out of account. This universal state in which the Hellenic dominant minority encased itself was like the carapace of a giant tortoise; and, while the Church was reared under its shadow, the barbarians trained their war-bands by sharpening their claws on the tortoise-shell’s outer face.
Finally, at a later point in this Study, we tried to obtain a clearer view of the nexus of cause and effect between the loss of the leading minority’s faculty for creation and the loss of the faculty for attracting the majority by charm rather than by force. And here we put our finger on the creative minority’s expedient of social drill—as a short cut for bringing the uncreative mass into line—in which we had already found the weak spot in the relation between minority and majority in the growth stage. On this showing, the estrangement between minority and majority which eventually comes to a head in the secession of the proletariat is the consequence of the breaking of a link which, even in the growth phase, had only been maintained by playing upon the well-drilled faculty of mimesis; and it is not surprising to find that mimesis fails when the leaders’ creativity gives out, considering that, even in the growth phase, this link of mimesis has always been precarious by reason of a treacherous duality—the revenge of an unwilling slave—which is part of the nature of any mechanical device.
These are the threads of inquiry into the horizontal type of schism that are already in our hands; and perhaps the most promising way of pursuing our inquiry farther will be to draw these threads together and then spin out our strand.
Our first step will be to take a closer and wider survey of the three fractions—dominant minority and internal and external proletariats—into which it appears from the Hellenic example, as also from other examples at which we have glanced at earlier points in this Study, that a broken-down society splits when a horizontal schism rends its fabric. After that we will turn, as we did in our study of growths, from the macrocosm to the microcosm, and there we shall discover a complementary aspect of disintegration in the increasing distraction of the soul. Both these lines of search will lead us to the, at first sight, paradoxical discovery that the process of disintegration works out, in part at least, to a result which is logically incompatible with its nature—works out, that is to say, to a ‘recurrence of birth’ or ‘palingenesia’.
When we have completed our analysis we shall find that the qualitative change which disintegration brings with it is exactly opposite in character to that which is the outcome of growth. We have seen that, in the process of growth, the several growing civilizations become increasingly differentiated from one another. We shall now find that, conversely, the qualitative effect of disintegration is standardization.
This tendency towards standardization is the more remarkable when we consider the extent of the diversity which it has to overcome. The broken-down civilizations bring with them, when they enter on their disintegration, the extremely diverse dispositions— a bent towards art or towards machinery or whatever the bent may be—that they have severally acquired during their growth. And they are also further differentiated from one another by the fact that their breakdowns overtake them at widely different ages. The Syriac Civilization, for example, broke down after the death of Solomon, circa 937 B.C., at a date probably less than two hundred years removed from the original emergence of this civilization out of the post-Minoan interregnum. On the other hand the sister Hellenic Civilization, which emerged out of the same interregnum coevally, did not break down till five hundred years later, in the Atheno-Peloponnesian War. Again, the Orthodox Christian Civilization broke down at the outbreak of the great Romano-Bulgarian War in A.D. 977, while the sister civilization, which is our own, was unquestionably growing for several centuries longer and— for all we yet know—may not have broken down even yet. If sister civilizations can run to such different lengths of growth-span, it is manifest that the growths of civilizations are not predestined to any uniform duration; and indeed we have failed to find any reason a priori why a civilization should not go on growing indefinitely, once it has entered on this stage. These considerations make it plain that the differences between growing civilizations are extensive and profound. Nevertheless, we shall find that the process of disintegration tends to conform in all cases to a standard pattern—a horizontal schism splitting the society into the three fractions already mentioned, and the creation, by each of these three fractions, of a characteristic institution: universal state, universal church and barbarian war-bands.
We shall have to take note of these institutions, as well as of their respective creators, if our study of the disintegrations of civilizations is to be comprehensive. But we shall find it convenient, so far as it may prove possible, to study the institutions for their own sake in separate parts of the book; 1 for these three institutions are something more than products of the disintegration process. They may also play a part in the relations between one civilization and another; and when we examine the universal churches we shall find ourselves compelled to raise the question whether churches can really be comprehended in their entirety in the framework of the histories of the civilizations in which they make their historical appearances, or whether we have not to regard them as representatives of another species of society which is at least as distinct from the species ‘civilizations’ as these latter are distinct from primitive societies.
This may prove to be one of the most momentous questions that a study of history can suggest to us, but it lies near the farther end of the inquiry we have just been sketching out.
The German Jew Karl Marx (1818-83) nas painted, in colours borrowed from the apocalyptic visions of a repudiated religious tradition, a tremendous picture of the secession of a proletariat and the ensuing class war. The immense impression which the Marxian materialist apocalypse has made upon so many millions of minds is in part due to the political militancy of the Marxian diagram; for, while this ‘blue-print’ is the kernel of a general philosophy of history, it is also a revolutionary call to arms. Whether the invention and vogue of this Marxian formula of the class war are to be taken as signs that our Western Society has its feet already set upon the path of disintegration, is a question which will occupy us in a later part of this Study, 3 when we come to look into the prospects of this Western Civilization of ours. In this place we have cited Marx for other reasons: first, because he is the classic exponent of class war for our world in our age; and, second, because his formula conforms to the traditional Zoroastrian and Jewish and Christian apocalyptic pattern in unveiling, beyond a violent climax, the vision of a gentle finale.
According to the Communist prophet’s intuition of the operations of his familiar spirit, Historical Materialism or Determinism, the class war is bound to issue in a victorious proletarian revolution ; but this bloody culmination of the struggle will also be the end of it; for the victory of the proletariat will be decisive and definitive and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, by which the fruits of the victory are to be harvested during the post-revolutionary period, is not to be a permanent institution. A time is to come when a new society which has been classless from birth will be old enough and strong enough to dispense with the dictatorship. Indeed, in its final and permanent acme of well-being the New Society of the Marxian Millennium will be able to cast away not only the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but also every other institutional crutch, including the state itself.
The interest of the Marxian eschatology for our present inquiry lies in the surprising fact that this lingering political shadow of a vanished religious belief does accurately plot out the actual course which the class war or horizontal schism in a broken-down society is apt to follow as a matter of historical fact. History duly reveals to us in the phenomena of disintegration a movement that runs through war to peace; through Yang to Yin; and through an apparently wanton and savage destruction of precious things to fresh works of creation that seem to owe their special quality to the devouring glow of the flame in which they have been forged.
The schism itself is the product of two negative movements, each of which is inspired by an evil passion. First, the dominant minority attempts to hold by force the privileged position which it has ceased to merit. Then the proletariat repays injustice with resentment, fear with hate, violence with violence. Yet the whole movement ends in positive acts of creation: the universal state, the universal church and the barbarian war-bands.
Thus the social schism is not just a schism and nothing more. When we grasp the movement as a whole we find that we have to describe it as schism-and-palingenesia. And, considering that secession is manifestly a particular manner of withdrawal, we may classify the double movement of schism-and-palingenesia as one instance of the phenomenon we have already studied in a more general aspect under the heading of ‘withdrawal-and-return’.
There is one respect in which this new variety of withdrawal-and-return might seem at first sight to differ from the examples we have previously studied. Were not they the achievements of creative minorities or individuals, and is not the seceding proletariat a majority, as opposed to a dominant minority? A moment’s thought, however, suggests—what is obviously the true picture— that, though the secession is the work of a majority, the creative act of establishing a universal church is the work of a minority of creative individuals or groups within the proletarian majority. The uncreative majority in such a case consists of the dominant minority and of the rest of the proletariat. We found, also, it will be remembered, that in the growth stage the creative achievements of what we called the creative minority were never the work of the whole minority en masse but always that of one group or another within it. The difference between the two cases is that whereas, during growth, the uncreative majority consists of an impressionable rank and file which follows, by mimesis, in the track of the leaders, during disintegration the uncreative majority consists in part of an impressionable rank and file (the rest of the proletariat) and in part of a dominant minority which, apart from the responses of aberrant individuals, stands stiffly and proudly aloof.