Introduction. A correspondent who has made a notable success in the financial world recently sent me two essays – of which he was the author – that revealed a keen sense of history, anthropology, and literature, as applied to the analysis large-scale economic trends. Whereas my own extremely limited economic knowledge inclined me at first to trepidation, I soon found the writer’s insistence on the human character of markets and money refreshing. I had recently taken over my department’s “Business in Literature” course, in the context of which, at the beginning of the semester, I asked the students to read The Gift (1925) by Marcel Mauss. The Gift proposes, among other theses, that the modern market remains human only insofar as it preserves certain archaic customs related to gift giving. Why does a restaurateur put bread on the table as soon as the guest sits down? When the guest takes the bread, he has accepted a gift, and he must reciprocate the gift-giver somehow – say, by buying a meal. No doubt in a “planned economy,” the planners would reject le pain à volonté as an inefficient allocation of resources, whereupon the transaction would become purely transactional and less-than-fully human. The restaurateur’s gesture contributes, in its gentle way, to civilization. The planner’s rational objection de-civilizes. Indeed, the planner is likely a plunderer also, with a covetous redistributive interest in the guest’s domestic larder.
Like Mauss’s idea of archaic exchange, my correspondent’s idea of finance refused to isolate economics from other institutions including religion. The human element will appear to efficiency experts as exiguous to the economic paradigm when in fact it is essential. By a coincidence, I was also teaching my “Science Fiction” course during the same semester, where a number of the texts dealt with history on a large scale, using the actual historical knowledge as the basis of speculating about the future, near and far. The same texts insisted that civilization tends to be a transient affair – canceled fairly regularly by catastrophes of various kinds, human and natural. My correspondent in his writings indicated a similar intuition. His vision of economic promise found its balance in his wisdom about political miscalculation, ideological perversity, and the unforeseen. I wanted to respond to the writer’s two rich texts. What follows, protecting the correspondent’s anonymity, is that response. I tried to place my appreciation of the essay-writer’s vision in context of my own recent reading, with the emphasis on one or two new titles by the literary anthropologist René Girard, Emmet Scott’s re-consideration of Henri Pirenne’s claim that Classical civilization survived until about 650 AD, in Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited (2012), and the works of two Edwardian futurists whom I particularly cherish, H. G. Wells and W. Olaf Stapledon. I ask my readers to trust me. The mixture is not as arbitrary as it sounds.
I. Dear “X”: I approach your two essays – in one way among others – by putting them in the context of my other current reading, to which belongs the inveterate re-reading of the “pillars” of my general understanding of things, such as René Girard and Eric Voegelin on the one hand and H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon on the other. (With much in between.) Yet in respect of your essay on Leo Strauss the most powerful resonance came neither from Girard nor Voegelin, nor Wells nor Stapledon, but rather from Emmet Scott and Henri Pirenne. Scott has recently published a vindicating commentary on Pirenne, whose Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937) advanced the thesis that Classical civilization ended, not in the late Fifth Century, as the usual narrative insists, but rather in the first half of the Seventh Century. Pirenne also argued that the cause of the collapse was not the incapacity of the Gothic aristocracy to sustain the Greco-Roman achievement, but the depredations of Islam and the blockading of trade in the Mediterranean. If there were a “Dark Age,” so Pirenne asserted, it would come between 700 and 900, a radical adjustment of the accepted chronology.
Scott, applying eighty years of archeological and philological research to Pirenne’s argument, finds that the massive cumulus of scientific knowledge supports it. Scott calls attention to a remarkable fact that other students of the Middle Ages find inconvenient to their theories: An almost complete lack of archeological remains in the three-hundred-year period beginning in the fourth decade of the Seventh Century. As Scott writes, archeologists find the gap uncomfortable and look for ways to rationalize it away, while historians, in their embarrassment, prefer to ignore it entirely. The gap does not fit in the postmodern, multiculturalist worldview. Why should this be so?
Two characteristics of this gap beg attention. The first is that the gap is universal – it obtains in Western Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Near East. The second is that when recovery comes, it comes in the formerly least developed areas (Gaul, Germany, and Britain), suggesting that in the Seventh-Century collapse of orderly life, it was the most civilized regions that proved most vulnerable to the inimical cause. Not to be coy: The cause was the violent intolerance and ceaseless, ideologically driven aggression of Islam – constant raiding for slaves and portable wealth and destruction for its own sake to punish the infidel.
From these data innumerable corollaries arise. For example – and taking them in no particular order: A long-enduring, sophisticated social order with a complex and differentiated economy and a standing military cannot effectively defend itself against fanatical, “asymmetrical” warfare waged by a convinced enemy, even when he is socially primitive compared to the defenders; barbarians who have decided for civilization but are not yet entirely civilized make better champions of civilization than do the bourgeoisie and elites of a settled, mercantile order (Romanized Spain does not stop the Islamic onslaught but Merovingian France does); the civilized media of data-storage are extraordinarily vulnerable to destruction (the cut-off of the papyrus trade beginning around 640 made the bureaucratic organization of the Late-Classical world in Western Europe impossible); and the disruption of any one key element of the civilized order invariably and swiftly affects every other element, leading to the precipitous disintegration of the whole.
There is one other, particular, corollary of the stratigraphically attestable, actual Dark Age to which Scott directs our interest, namely that, in being universal, this hiatus of organized life is as true in the Muslim-dominated areas of the Mediterranean world as it is in the holdout areas. In other words, the immediate effect of the Jihad, whether in Spain or Anatolia, or in the original Islamic areas of conquest and the Islamic homeland itself, was the near-complete abolition of civilized existence, including the outright destruction of many cities and the two-century abandonment of others.
With that, what one can now only call the myth of the Islamic “Golden Age” bursts like a bubble, and along with it the canard that Islam “saved” Europe from or “tutored” it out of its recalcitrant barbarism. The initial phase of Islam was the end of orderly life wherever the holy war extended itself in a perverse triumph of savagery over civilization.
All of this is fascinating on its own, but the implications run deeper than Islam and the West. Perspicacity might discern, in the resemblance of the Seventh-Century Dark Age with another Dark Age, the strengthened plausibility of an alarmist view about our own contemporary prospects. What is that other Dark Age? The archeologists have named it “The Catastrophe” and they assign it to a relatively short period of about fifty years between 1200 and 1100 BC. In sum, once “The Catastrophe” had run its course (beginning in the Greek Peninsula and working its way through Anatolia, the islands, and the Levant, coming to a halt only in Egypt and Assyria), every civic center of the Late Bronze Age had been reduced to burnt-out ruins, after which for three hundred years the cultural character of the archeological remains reverts to that of the Neolithic. Among the poignant signs of “The Catastrophe” are Linear B tablets from Pylos in Greece that apparently record the last defensive orders issued by the king before the unnamed enemy sacked the palace and put it to fire and desperate diplomatic letters sent by the king of Ugarit to his Hittite ally begging military assistance against invaders. Vainly, as it seems. Absent from the evidence left by the Bronze Age “Catastrophe,” either archeological or philological, is any hint of the cultural or ethnic unity of the destructive agents or any explicit hint of ideological motivation.
Nevertheless, an ideological motivation or its equivalent can be inferred. Once we have inferred it, we can speak of the unity-of-motive of the destroyers. Here Girard’s anthropology offers itself as helpful.
II. Dear “X”: We know about the Late Bronze Age societies that they were prosperous and functional right up to the moment of their sudden violent dissolution. If Pirenne and Scott were right (and their evidence is massively convincing), we would know the same facts about the Late Classical societies of the early Seventh Century. They too were prosperous and functional right up to the moment of their sudden violent dissolution. Indeed, in North Africa, Spain, Italy, and Gaul, population and wealth appears to have been increasing in the two centuries between 400 and 600, reversing a trend of falling population and declining affluence that characterizes the Roman Empire during its final pagan phase. Justinian’s plague of 560s cut into populations all around the Mediterranean, but the recovery from it happened in short order. By 600, agriculture had become increasingly productive; the introduction of the moldboard plow brought new formerly hardscrabble regions into arability.
Thus the historical record offers two occasions – in the Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age and in the Mediterranean world as a whole around 700 AD – when a network of kingdoms forming a single large mercantile economy collapsed precipitously under attack, with the immediate prolonged sequel of depopulation, de-coinage, illiteracy, and the return of primitive barter before the belated arising of a new civilization, in the form either of the Polis-civilization or the Frankish Kingdom.
On both occasions, the agency of destruction was a large-scale commotion of savage peoples whose interest in plunder cannot be separated from their nihilistic ire against the communities that they sacked. Whether it is the “Peoples of the Sea,” as indicated by Egyptian records, or “Arab Raiders,” as indicated by Byzantine and Spanish chroniclers, we confront a mobilized mass that forgoes the prospect of regular tribute or “protection money” for the sake of satisfying its urge for total punitive annihilation of the civilized “other.” Even the Assyrians, who were the scourge of their day, attacked to acquire, not to destroy. It is, to borrow Nietzsche’s word for it, ressentiment in action on a continental scale and in a holocaustic style. The remains of the burnt-out cities are filled with the arrowheads of the attackers, a sign that those attackers slaughtered the people. In Girardian terms, again whether it is the “Peoples of the Sea” or the Seventh-Century Muslims, the mentality of the destroyers can only be that the very existence of organization and wealth constitutes an affront to those who feel and believe their comparative inferiority to it. The invidious mass, in a spasm of covetousness, wants the things that the urbanites possess (the urbanites having very likely committed the folly of flaunting their chattels), but it plans to seize them only once, while simultaneously obliterating the means of producing them in all its tangible and intangible aspects, along with the producers themselves.
Now the Late Bronze Age “Catastrophe” has been known for a long time and the hiatus of civilization commencing in the Seventh Century AD has gradually been coming to light via its glaring archeological deficit for fifty years, but little cognizance of either event has entered into the journalistic discussion of history. Popular humanities discourse remains dominated by the liberal ideas of continuous “progress,” of an equation between early Christian Europe and cultural benightedness, and, as the Strauss essay puts it, of a vapid and yet fiercely dogmatic non-anthropology, deriving from the Enlightenment, that selectively refuses to locate an innate propensity for perverse or evil activities in human nature. The adjective “selective” is necessary because the ideologues of political correctness are quick to see evil in Christianity and the West, just as they are quick to treat Islam like a pet, whitewashing its intolerance and brutality. Reviews of Scott’s book – and the attitude of humanities faculties to Girard – show indeed a high level of emotional hostility against notions that violate the existing intellectual consensus, which in many instances is nothing less than a case of epistemological nihilism.
The same attitudes show up in foreign policy in the inability of the USA to name its enemy or even to admit that it actually has an enemy. But it is actually worse than that. The establishment moves to penalize and quash those who insist that there is an enemy, and who are willing to name names.
[The correspondent had quoted Tennyson in the epigraph to one of his essays.] The quotation from Locksley Hall indeed summarizes the utopian purblindness of the contemporary West, not only in its positive aversion to anthropological, but also in its allergy to actual historical knowledge – to the facts about its own past, and to those facts especially about the struggles with inimical powers by which the West defined itself. Matthew Arnold had a clearer, starker view of the human prospect: No “Parliament of Man,” in Tennyson’s phrase, but only “ignorant armies” that “clash by night,” in Arnold’s. That is what the future heralded. And Arnold could give the cause: The withdrawal of faith, and not only “faith” in the sense of commitment to Christian doctrine, but faith in the meaning and value of civilization, whose internal enemies of the last century, all of whom seem to be driven by resentment, have been at least as pernicious as any external enemy. Then again the notion of a “withdrawal of faith” subtly misses the point. It might pay to think like Girard (and to a certain extent like Voegelin): There is never really a vacuum of faith, but rather one thing always shoves aside another. According to the idea of “progress” the thing shoved aside must, in some Darwinian sense, be inferior to that which does the shoving. Such a view is a delusion, especially where it concerns Christianity and its relation to the earlier religious dispensations.
A writer recently put it this way: “When a society disavows the Gospel and goes boldly to its Post-Christian phase, it must find another morality than the Christian one to guide its organization. The only other morality being the Pre-Biblical, the sacrificial morality, the ‘new’ principle will in fact be the old one of responding to crises by fomenting mobs and expelling or immolating scapegoat-victims. Contemporary mobs tell us precisely who they are – echoing the exculpatory claim of those who joined together to murder Jesus – when they boast of representing, or indeed of being, the ‘ninety-nine per cent,’ whose utopia will appear when the scandal of the wicked, well-poisoning one per cent at last goes into liquidation. Voegelin rightly argues that the ideologies, including liberalism, resemble the ancient religions. Girard rightly argues that the ancient religions were invariably sacrificial.”
III. Dear “X”: The theme of religious dispensation is bound up with the theme of gaps in the history of civilization. In Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, Scott writes: “That so many of the Roman cities in the Near East and North Africa were abandoned is striking and in complete contrast to what happened in Europe. In the latter region the Roman towns were continuously occupied throughout the fifth and sixth centuries and into the Middle Ages… The Roman centers of the Middle East and North Africa, by contrast, were, with a handful of exceptions, completely abandoned and the surrounding countryside was transformed into an arid or semi-arid wasteland.” It is not plunder, but destruction. Again, beginning in the Seventh Century, “Muslim pirates based in North Africa made large parts of the Mediterranean shore-line uninhabitable.” Those who lived in coastal areas moved, by exigency, into fortifications. (There is a word for this in Italian that refers to the event: Encastellamente.) Life could thrive only inland, away from the harassment of the razzias. “A state of perpetual conflict,” Scott writes, “exists between Islam and the rest of the world.” A similar conflict must have existed between the civilized peoples and their destroyers in 1100 or 1050 BC.
In Battling to the End (2009), his study of Clausewitz, Girard writes: “Mimetic theory… obliges us to see history on a larger scale and as involving very long alternations.” He also writes that: “Humans are… immersed in order and disorder, in war and peace [simultaneously]. It is becoming more and more difficult to draw a line between the two realities that, until the French Revolution, were codified and ritualized.” Girard remarks that, “there are no differences anymore” and “reciprocal action is so amplified by globalization, the planetary reciprocity in which the slightest event can have repercussions on the other side of the globe, that violence is always a length ahead of our movements.”
Girard warns against the trend of enemies in the new violent world to become doubles in a general breakdown of differences. Scott argues that this has already happened once, although he makes no reference to Girard. Scott devotes an Epilogue to the Western reaction to Islam in the latter’s first five centuries. He sees in theocracy, which distinguishes the Middle Ages as such from the precursor classical civilization, a curious Western reflection of the Caliphate. One should mention that somewhere in The Decline of the West, Spengler tosses off a line to the effect that Charlemagne acted more or less like the “Caliph of Frankistan.” So Scott is not the only one to have noted the resemblance. Scott goes beyond Spengler’s figure of speech, however, in noticing that two of the features of medieval life, namely the Inquisition and the idea of Holy War, also mimic Islam. The Inquisition began in Spain, just after the Reconquista. The Crusades were, to switch to Girardian terms, a mimetic response to three centuries of Jihad. The accelerated metamorphosis of liberalism after 9/11 into a rigid orthodoxy of political correctness, often explicitly siding with Islam in Islam’s diatribes against the West, is a similar mimetic phenomenon.
Both the Strauss essay and the globalization essay call attention to the fact that the Western crisis has been deepening for a hundred years at least. Both also suggest further deepening of the same crisis: “The twentieth century was great and terrible, and the twenty-first century promises to be far greater and more terrible.” Of course, “for the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as for those who consider themselves cosmopolitan today, this sort of hysterical talk about the end of the world was deemed to be the exclusive province of people who were either stupid or wicked or insane (although mostly just stupid.” Battling to the End contains the following exchange between Girard and his interlocutor:
Benoit Chantre. You have often said that Christianity freed us from our sacrificial crutches, but at the same time it made us responsible for our destiny. Were not the “crutches” that we lost the only way to meet the danger? In other words, is not one of the consequences of Christian revelation that we no longer believe in catastrophe, even though it is scientifically predictable?
René Girard. Quite right.
Girard speculates this way in Battling to the End on the concept of reciprocity: “Some definitions give it a cosmic turn: It would refer to the action of the moon on the tides.” Girard asks: “What if our little everyday wars were in line with natural laws?” His answer is: “If they were, then it would suffice for them to go uncontrolled long enough for there to be worldwide consequences.” And they do go uncontrolled because they go unnoticed. And they go unnoticed because it is forbidden to think about human nature, about religious ideas, and about the possibility that a liberal-positivistic optimism might be a type of arrogant folly.
The West thus finds itself in the current nightmarish pickle. Islam, which is in a perpetual sacrificial crisis wherever it extends itself, immolates internal scapegoats by the tens of thousands every year – but in the main Islam is obsessed with external scapegoats (infidels); the West, having disavowed the Gospel, is also in a crisis that increasingly resembles a sacrificial crisis, but it focuses almost exclusively on internal scapegoats (politically incorrect dissenters from the dominant liberal orthodoxy). Islam is totalitarian; the West is increasingly totalitarian. Islam has always been mobilized; the West has experienced bouts of increasing mobilization since the French Revolution, and these bouts have been ideologically driven. All of this omits to take into account China, which is involved in another mimetic rivalry with the West of which the West seems mostly oblivious. In his meditation on Clausewitz, Girard emphasizes the continuity and intermingling of war as such and trade. It is all reciprocity, and “as soon as the rhythm of exchange accelerates, reciprocity appears as what it is: consistent with the law of the duel.”
The early twentieth Century futurists – like Wells and Stapledon – exercise fascination on an open mind of the present because they thought accurately as far out as a century in the future. They could and did think apocalyptically and they were fascinated by the patterns of economic disruption and social breakdown. Wells and Stapledon could see, for example, that entire nations could be locked in a catastrophic relation of rival-doubles and that in their mimesis they could escalate swiftly to mutually assured destruction. Wells wrote The World Set Free, a story of nuclear warfare, in 1913, which the globalization essay identifies as “the previous peak year” to a recent peak year of globalization, and he published it just prior to the breaking-out of war in 1914.
Foreseeing that control of atomic fission would represent a magnitude of increase in available power, Wells describes the result in these terms: “If there was a vast development of production there was also a huge destruction of values. These glaring factories working night and day, these glittering new vehicles swinging noiselessly along the roads, these flights of dragon-flies that swooped and soared and circled in the air, were indeed no more than the brightnesses of lamps and fires that gleam out when the world sinks towards twilight and the night.” When the economic disruptions eventuate in an escalation from trade-wars and embargoes to actual war, and technicians adapt atomic fission to bellicose purposes, the situation spirals precipitously out of control. The Central Powers destroy Paris. In a vignette, Wells narrates the preparations on a French airfield for retaliation. “We’ll give them tit-for-tat,” the French aviator says; “we’ll give them tit-for-tat.” “Tit-for-tat” leaves nine out of ten European cities in smoking ruins.
IV. Dear “X”: In the earlier War in the Air (1906), Wells foresees an arms race that assimilates all nations in a contest of global rivalry. When rivalry tips into open hostility, the economic consequence is pronounced: “Once the war began there was no stopping it. The flimsy fabric of credit that had grown with no man foreseeing, and that had held those hundreds of millions in an economic interdependence that no man clearly understood, dissolved in panic.” The terrible logic of the war is Clausewitizian and Girardian:
It was impossible to end a war by any of the established methods. A, having outnumbered and overwhelmed B, hovers, a thousand airships strong, over his capital, threatening to bombard it unless B submits. B replies by wireless telegraphy that he is now in the act of bombarding the chief manufacturing city of A by means of three raider airships. A denounces B’s raiders as pirates and so forth, bombards B’s capital, and sets off to hunt down B’s airships, while B, in a state of passionate emotion and heroic unconquerableness, sets to work amidst his ruins, making fresh airships and explosives for the benefit of A. The war became perforce a universal guerrilla war, a war inextricably involving civilians and homes and all the apparatus of social life.
In Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), the testy balance between America and China polarizes the world of the mid-Twenty-First century. Having averted a war through negotiation, the conflict nevertheless continues as one of cultural and economic competition:
China, owing to her relative weakness and irritation caused by the tentacles of American industry within her, was at this time more nationalistic than her rival, America. Indeed, America professed to have outgrown nationalism, and to stand for political and cultural world unity. But she conceived this unity as a Unity under American organization; and by culture she meant Americanism. This kind of cosmopolitanism was regarded by Asia and Africa without sympathy. In China a concerted effort had been made to purge the foreign element from her culture. Its success, however, was only superficial… [The] manner of life of the average man remained American. Not only did he use American cutlery, shoes, gramophones, domestic labor-saving devices, but also his alphabet was European, his vocabulary was permeated by American slang, his newspapers and radio were American in manner, though anti-American in politics.
Stapledon writes: “Just as Western states had been all too often organized under the will for military prestige, so the new China was organized under the will for prestige of culture.” When rivalry heightens and conflict threatens, “the cause was both economic and sentimental,” and “the economic cause was the demand for fuel.” One could easily multiply the details, some of which are closer to the mark than others. It is the general picture – the late-Twenty-First Century “doubling” of America and China – that vindicates Stapledon as a prophet. China might not have alphabetized, but American consumerism has “Sinified,” as a trip to any Wal-Mart will witness.
Many diseases afflict the contemporary world, not least the disease of complacency, which cannot imagine a change in the status quo. Ominously, the historical record tells us that at least twice since 1000 BC, high civilization has succumbed to a surprising onslaught, which then opens out on a radically impoverished dark age that lasts for three, four, or five hundred years. No doubt a survey of Asian civilizations would reveal similar, civilizational “extinction events.” The world is littered with the remains of dead civilizations. Myth tells of many more. The probable agent of the Seventh-Century Catastrophe, Islam, is still active, still in rivalry with the descendent-world of the world that it destroyed, and it is already in possession (Pakistan) of nuclear weapons (soon to be joined by Iran).
Meanwhile the West is itself in a spiral of disintegration, spinning towards class-warfare, violent ideological conflict, and ugly racially motivated skirmishes.
The West’s survival, now in doubt, depends on the West’s conscious recuperation of its own origins. At the very beginning of Last and First Men, perhaps the most audacious of all scientific romances, the far-futural narrator tells a man of the mid-Twentieth Century that, “The first, and some would say the greatest, achievement of your own ‘Western’ culture was the conceiving of two ideals of conduct, both essential to the spirit’s well-being.” The narrator then names the names: “Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in that flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of neighbours and of God”; and “Socrates, delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech.” Restoring the West to spiritual vigor will require the revitalization of those two ideals.