On Decadence and Decline THOMAS
OUR AGE is situated with a strange exactitude on the coordinates of progress in science and of apocalyptic mood. This is rather unique in the annals of history, since people outside the West were generally not conscious of their own eventual role as determinator of the course of events. The ancients, whether Hindus or Greeks, saw history articulated by declining cycles (anakyklosis) , with degradation at the end of both the small and the great wheel. Naturally, the concept which logically followed, the “eternal return,” was pessimistic since it implied that the gods themselves acted mechanically (in fact, they too were subjected to necessity and fate-anan&) and that human effort, recurring endlessly on the same pattern in successive cycles, was basically meaningless. Let us bear in mind, however, that this spiritual pessimism was offset by a kind of useful reassurance that there will ’be no absolutely final conflagration, that the universe contains within itself seeds of renewal and that it is eternal, perhaps with a beginning, but without an end. This explanation made existence as bearable for the intellect as a system of belief can when it does not accept a personal God and counts only on the pragmatically available data of the human condition to make
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“sense” of life. Such a closed (as opposed to transcendent) system remains always that, it can, however, extend its limits through the sophisticated cosmic game of cycles within cycles and years within the Great Year. Christianity changed these perspectives radically, and indeed from at least Saint Augustine on we no longer hear of historical pessimism. More precisely, two lines assert themselves: one puts the emphasis on the eschaton, the ultimate meaning which will illumine all past events retrospectively, like the sweep of an immense reflector ; but since the Church accompanies mankind to the end of history and teaches the eschaton’s meaning “en route,” the other line stresses human cooperation with creation so as to bring all (historical) acts into harmony with the divine plan. This present-and futurorientedness negates decadence and explains the periods of decline as punishments for falling away from God and from the design of creation. In this sense, there is no real decadence because the just and virtuous (Noah, Moses, the Christian martyrs, etc.) put even the evil periods and the sinful city (Sodom) to a therapeutic Use.
This does not mean that the Christian 395
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centuries did not rehabilitate the concepts with which we are dealing. Yet, significantly, only when the substance of Christian faith itself began to be fragmented, corroded, questioned, that is at the Renaissance. To be sure, the collapse of Rome had been regarded with awe by Christian thinkers from Augustine to the Sicilian jurists of Frederick 11; but it could be seen, a t the same time, as having served the divine purpose, the universal expansion of the christiana respublica, and in this sense it was a renewal, The Renaissance, however, reintroduced thc pagan notion of the aging of states, on the model of the human body which grows old and dies. The humanists used the terms inclinatio and tempora fatalia, referring to the end of the Roman empire; later, in the eighteenth century, Herder spoke of the Abnuhme as the loss of vitality of certain political organizations? Then, from the Romantic Age to the present, the concept of decadence has been a household word. Willamowitz before the First World War --A D-..I ~ r - 1 : _.._ -rL-.. aiiu 1 a u i v i n c i y uuer agimd that “ies civilisations sont mortelles” ; Nietzsche had turned “decadence” into the condition of mankind‘s renewal (away from reason, towards instinct and will), as a rehabilitation of the “eternal return”; Rostovtzeff specified it as the rise of the proletariat against aristocratic norms (in Rome and in the Russia of 1917) ; Guardini provided it with a Christian frame of reference, and Ortega explained it through illustrations from art and literature.2 Finally, Toynbee supplied the categories, asserting that the rhythms of decadence may be scientifically studied. And then we did not even mention the enormous popularity and influence of Oswald Spengler. Is this amplitude of discourse by scholars sufficient for us to speak self-assuredly of the meaning and reality of decadence? A few years ago I read a book on the decadence of Rome by six scholars, each of whom attributed it to a different cause: a ) high taxes, b) bureaucratization, c) the penetration of Orientals into Italy,
evidenced by the gradual preponderance of Oriental names on tombstones, d ) the anarchy created by the legions, etc. Santo Mazzarino mentions the split within Rome’s higher classes, a split consummated by the end of the second century, between Christian spirituality and pagan institutions. Well known is also Max Weber’s thesis that the Roman wars were mainly slave-hunting expeditions and when the empire was finally surrounded (and partly populated) by strong barbarian settlements, the slavemarket simply dried up and economic activity, based on slaves, declined. Other theories could also be mentioned, but it is becoming obvious that our term loses its contours. It may then be correct to state with Gaston Boissier: What was the cause of internal ruin to which nothing resisted, which paralyzed the effects of great victories, which rendered useless the efforts of rulers, the skill of administrators, the Generals’ talents? I do not take it upon myself to discover the cause Is it what the pagans called Fate, what the Christians called Providence? These terms merely serve to confess one’s ignorance.’
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Indeed, questions and problems arise which confuse the issue of “decadence.” Can we, for example, not speak of two such periods in Rome, the first when the republic yielded to the empire for reasons we shall examine later, the second when paganism gasped its last-and thus only as of a third deoadence when Romulus Augustulus surrendered to Odoaker? These three “declines” cannot possibly have the same significance. We ought to distinguish between final periods and periods of decadence as such; Buizinga spoke of the “waning” of the Middle Ages4 as merely a change of life forms; the end of the Jewish State by Titus opened the diaspora which carried the seeds of Hebrew thought to many parts of the world; the end of the Aztec and Inca empires occurred abruptly when these two civilizations were at their zenith. Were all these events and periods Fall 1977
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forms of decadence? Did they have the same meaning for the people affected? In other words, may we not suspect that our concept of decadence is colored by more recent interpretations? It was probably Gibbon who most strongly shaped our thinking in this respect with his title, “decline and fall,” so that the notion has ever since been fixed in our minds in a certain way? Yet, what did Gibbon mean? Basically, that paganism was superior to Christianity (the par excellence Enlightenment thesis) and that with the symbolic victory of the Galilean over Emperor Julian (we remember the title of Ibsen’s “Nietzschean” play) the paradigm of decadence emerged. Julian had propounded, of course, the same interpretation ; but Eusebius before him and Augustine after him violently disagreed, as also such twentieth century historians as Henri Pirenne, Christopher Dawson, and William C. Bark, who either perceive continuity where others saw a cleavage, or estimate that the gain of Christianity over paganism outweighed the loss. Let us grant then that the concept of decadence is di5cult to circumscribe, formulate, and fill with adequate and verifiable content. Yet, the enterprise is not hopeless. An important suggestion as to its meaning may be derived from a well-known text, SO well known that we hardly pay attention to its words. In his funeral orationY6Pericles mentions three aspects of national existence from which we are able to understand both the meaning of the highest achievement (acme) and the temptations which threaten it (decadence). Pericles points out that in Athens a ) successive generations handed down a territory heroically defended and gradually enlarged ; b ) citizens participate in the political process under law; and c) the Athenians cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy.” National achievement thus culminates in the citizens’ willingness to make sacrifices for the common good, their understanding of this good as subject to rational choice 66
and debate, and their search for higher things. The limit is indicated to these three areas when Pericles suggests that the highest good (for the state) is their equilibrium, so that, for example, effeminacy in culture should not undermine the military and civic virtues. Pericles’ reference to Sparta at that point introduces an ironic element since the people he scorns as “seeking after manliness by a painful discipline from their very cradles” were the same who soon forced Athens to its knees-and thereby opened the great Western debate about decadence as such : should a nation practise “Spartan” or “Athenian” values? Can “Athens” avoid its fate, or should it become a “Sparta”? Is it worthwhile to live “in Sparta” and not to enjoy “life in Athens”? Whatever the choice, it seems from the Periclean oration that the responsible Greek thinkers and statesmen were aware that refinement may lead to extravagance, and knowledge to effeminacy. In other words, that the light of great achievements, in war, law, and culture, is surrounded by the shadows of decay. Note that while scorning Sparta it did not occur to Pericles to label it decadent; the character of his blame is rather that Sparta is too monolithic in political, military, and cultural matters, that its citizens are not educated to attend to all sorts of business, but (we would say it today) are trained as parts of a machine, to fit a collectivist regime. The opposite of decadence is thus situated by Pericles between collectivism and unmanliness.’ Almost three centuries later another Greek, Polybios, expressed very similar views (Book VI.): “The name of democracy cannot be allowed to a State in which the masses have authority to do whatever they happen to wish. But where it is traditional and ingrained to worship the gods, honor one’s parents, respect one’s elders, and obey the laws--in such States, provided that the will of the majority is supreme, the name democracy is appropriate.” Mutatis mutandis, some 397
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of this could be taken from Book VIII. of the Republic-but Polybios transcribed here not his readings, but his own experience in Rome during the Punic Wars. At that time Rome was still animated by the traditional vigor, whilc in Caahage the mob dictated policy. In Rome, the aristocratic Senate governed, leaning on old peasant wisdom and virtue, in Carthage the unruly urban multitude was manip ulated by its momentary passions, and in turn manipulated the state. The demarcation line between decadence and its opposite becomes thus clearer. Polybios (and we detect behind him the classical Greek thought, reinforced by his own observations in the western Mediterranean) found the acme in an equilibrium: between the two classes within the state, and further, among the elements which make up the ruling class. His work, after being an elaboration of the Pericles-Plato line of thought, takes an Aristotelian turn, namely when he examines the causes why regimes change. Once great perils are surmounted, he writes with the Pznic W P ~i: S=..id, new factors (of potential decadence) appear : luxury, ambition, rivalry, conflict between rich and poor, and between candidates for high positions. Hence demagogy, corruption, sycophantism ; the people, agitated and set into motion, refuses to obey and to remain within the framework of the laws. “The constitution will bear glorious labels : freedom and democracy ; but in fact, it will be the worst ochlocracy, rule of the masses.”* , We see here an early elaboration of the three elements on which our modern reflection about decadence rests: a state of equilibrium whose protective genii are the gods, the laws, and a well-functioning elite; the rupture of this arrangement by which progress (luxury, ambition, etc.) is presented as a movement towards dec1ine;O and, more important than all, the inevitability of this rupture for which the strictly human actions cannot account. This triple aspect of reflection on decadence shows the contemporary revival of pagan
and Greek concepts. In the Middle Ages the idea of God’s judgment seemed to be an adequate explanation of historical events, whereas today, when the concept of progress together with its paradigm, the Christian worldview, have entered an eclipse, we hear increasingly of decadence as a necessary end of human projects. For a while, popular literary heroes like Malraux, Junger, and Camus succeeded in rehabilitating the stoic attitude, the manful acceptance of the final ruin of all human-historical enterprises, but it is evident that such a stance can only appeal to a few minds and for short periods. Its aestheticism and predilection for a pose may even be themselves symptoms of decadence. We may now formulate a first approximation of decadence: the rupture of equilibrium occurs when the elite no longer functions adequately. The mass-mind takes over, the laws become both oppressive and un-enforced, and the gods are no longer regarded as guardians of the State. Illustrations abound. The Byzantine diplomat, Priscus, sent to Attila, reports of his encounter with a Roman refugee who tells him the reasons of his desertion from life in the empire: “In the empire, the laws do not apply to all people: the rich may violate them without being penalized; but the poor is punished with costly trial expenses even before the heavy sentence is imposed.” It was from similar exactions that the medieval serfs sought refuge in towns, themselves preferring the king’s protection to feudal overlordship. In our days a similar phenomenon to the preceding two may be observed: political parties and labor unions represent a stronger protective group than the states. At all times, the citizen seeks shelter from the bad laws in the arms of powerful “neo-feudalities” which are alone capable of defying the state and organizing their own area of loyalty and obedience.1° There are other forms and cases of dis,
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functioning elites. Polybios speaks with admiration of the Roman constitution of “checks and balances,” but he knows that even the best politeiu would not be effective without the men of high virtue and just public life who rule the republic. If these standards should decline and the people no longer consent to obey, the constitution will fall into evil hands. With these admonitions in mind we may take note of what was happening exactly a hundred years after Polybios’ observations and measure the progress of decadence. In the struggle for power between Pompeius’ and Cicero’s republicans, on the one hand, and Caesar’s democrats, on the other, the latter’s victory was won not only by Caesar’s generalship, also by default. The republicans (that is the political class, the elite) were apathetic, they retired from public affairs, while their sons, Rome’s jeunesse dorge, spent their days and fortune in debauch and extravagance. Pericles’ balanced words echo Gaston Boissier’s description: the sad situation of the past hall-century, the open sale of high dignities, the violence on the forum, the bloody battles accompanying the elections, the private armies of gladiators as sole protection against political enemiesshow the consequences of what Polybios and his host, C. Scipio Aemilianus, foresaw for Rome when luxury, ambition, and rivalry conquer the old pietas. Cato’s example, suicide rather than servitude under Caesar, won admiration, but was already so exceptional that it was judged excessive. Sacrifice for the republic was positively out of fashion.ll In his mercilessly lucid work, Ferrero writes of this era that no conservative reaction against the disorders were visible. In the civil war the party had not only lost men and wealth, also self-confidence.12 What were the consequences? To the conservatives’ lethargy and paralysis, the populares responded with proposing an altogether different regime, or rather a nonregime which needed brutal force, the legions of Octavius, to hold it together. Not political reforms, but a social
revolution was the democratic program: people wanted to be fed on state expense, demanded the distribution of the allied’s land, the sharing of wealth, the abolition of debts, and the right of unlimited assembly. The principle of mob rule asserted itself: the “right of assembly” did not produce citizens soberly debating the restoration of the common good, it resulted in the creation of “neighborhood associations” (collegia compitdicia) consisting of the poor and the slaves, exercising terror on the streets and voting in blocks for the candidates to office who paid them most. Boissier reminds his readers of the sections de quartier which distinguished themselves during the reign of terror in Paris through their denunciations, arrests, and torturemurders of whomever they sought to eliminate. Examples much nearer to us in time proliferate. A shorter overview will suffice for the late-empire. We saw the reasoning of the Roman whom Priscus found as a transfuge in the land of the Huns. He was of modest condition, yet representative of an entire society in which every citizen was tied to his function, whether a grain merchant, a butcher, a soldier or a corporation head raised to the rank of a “count.” Their person and property were at the mercy of the state, with the result that “the principle of rural serfdom was applied to social functions.’yls This frozen pseudo-order was constantly challenged by those trying to evade it, sooner or later everybody was forced into a situation of disloyalty to the state. The law was such that it could not be obeyed ; it reflected the intellectual condition of society in which two elites were fighting for influence: the pagan humanists and the expositors of Christian doctrine. If we look at their respective creativity we grasp aspects of decadence. The creativity of the first was exhausted, the humanists had nothing more to say except imitating the great genres of the past. But the nostalgic elegies and the timid hymns to the gods no longer sounded genuine, they were out of tune with the soul’s demand for
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a more vigorous fare. When the pagan senator, Symmachus, pleaded for the retention of the altar of Victory in the deliberative chamber (382 A.D.), all must have felt, not only Ambrose, his opponent, that this is a mere act of nostalgia in favor of a symbol in which few believed and for which only a handful was ready to fight. In contrast, we are struck by the vigor, in their lives and writings, of a Jerome, a Prudentius, an Augustine, an Ambrose, leaders in every sense, while their pagan counterparts retired with soul visibly wounded, to their estates to enjoy the last gentle moods of twilight. “The pagans,” writes Gaston Boissier, “were still numerous [in Julian’s time] , but since Constantine they were resigned and unwilling to resist. Youth, ardor, energy, hope of success, assured future, all the forces which give the impulse to great enterprises and make them victorious, were no longer on their side.”14 What does the picture, obtained from Greek and Roman experience, teach us about the general concept of decadence? This may be elucidated by gathering examples from the vast literature on decadence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and also from modem philosophical reflection on history. The latter’s primary objective has been the study of declining epochs, placed in the light of a non-Christian, quasi-pagan mood of “end of times” which mixes apocalyptic panic with the experience of civilizational resignation. This mood has obvious similarities with the Roman fourth and fifth centuries. We are witnessing again a rupture of equilibrium spread over many decades and culminating at this century’s end. If the process goes generally unnoticed, two reasons for it may be distinguished. One is that, like sixteen centuries ago, two ideasystems are inter-penetrating : then they were paganism and Christianity, MW liberal-democracy and what I prefer to call “monolithism” which is not quite the same as totalitariani~m.’~St. Jerome, for
example, was an accomplished humanist in the, pagan sense, at the same time he was a great father of the Church, the two worlds conflicting and colliding in the same man. Similarly, among the partisans of c’monolithism’ythere are many liberally educated gentlemen who know how to separate their manners from their politics. The other reason why the process of decadence (rupture of the equilibrium) goes unnoticed is that its central phenomenon, an elite’s abdication, cannot be accounted for in democratic-political terminology and by the political science which takes it cues from Zeitgeist. In the twentieth century there are not supposed to be self-asserting elites (aristoi), only invisible and camouflaged manipulators. We lack the elementary measuring rod of decadence, the very instrument which would indicate the conquest of the mass-mind. On the other hand, and for the same reasons, the mass-mind cannot be shored up as it was by Caesar and Octavius, since the ideology of progress points at universal equality and homogenization as its ideal. Under these circumstances, only the state and its bureaucracy can assume the function of an elite, but the notion loses thereby its free character and its dimension of personal responsibility?’ In the ensuing, politically devastated, milieu the state acts not only through its own bureaucratic apparatus, it also bureaucratizes other social agencies and institutions and establishes symbiotic relationships with any neo-feudalistic agglomerate which appears powerful either to resist it or to challenge it. One example would be the nationalization of chambers (boards) of lawyers, physicians, and others in so-called free professions. Some social thinkers, such as F.A. Hayek, attribute the process of bureaucratization to the course that industrial society has taken. “The greatest menace of all,” he writes, “is that the politics of the two most powerful groups: organized capital and organized labor, point in the same direction, (that is) the monopolistic organization of industry
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The decisions which the managers of such an organized industry would constantly have to make are not decisions which any society will long leave to private individuals The private entrepreneurs (will become) civil ser~ants.”~‘Yet,production a i such may not suffer from this gigantic concentration, so the democratic masses, Hayek adds, will not notice its nefarious effects since liberty is an aristocratic notion. We shall see that this was exactly Caesar’s conclusion too. The other side of the picture is that the state which displaces, abolishes, and finally absoybs the organic elites is, paradoxically, itself a weak state, having surrendered in the course of the eighteenthnineteenth centuries to the civil society-as voracious an entity as, under different circumstances, the state can be. Carl Schmitt made an astute observation when he called the state as it had developed since the Middle Ages a “European chef d’oeuute,” unknown, of course, in the vast, despotically organized areas of the world, and unknown also to the rest of history except for brief moments in Hellas and Rome. The tentacular penetration of civil society into all, so-far reserved, domains, destroyed this construction by insisting on the privatization of institutional functions, thus on the pulverization of the common good. If correctly diagnosed, the symptoms that Hayek noted suggest not so much the greed of the state as the anarchy of the private pressure groups which ambition to infringe on the monopoly of political activity, thus imposing on the state a blurred perception of its own functions. What Hayek feared, became fact: the broken equilibrium of state and society, an unhealthy interpenetration. Long before Hayek the phenomenon was understood by Hegel, then by R. Michels, V. Pareto, J. Schumpeter, K. Polanyi, and others.18 On the political-economic level our own period of decadence appears then as one of inextricable contradictions which confuse the citizens and prevent, or one might say pervert, the formation of elites. This
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is not to say that elites are permanent; Pareto was right, the history of man is the history of a continuous replacement of elites: as one ascends, -another declines. But this sequence is vitiated today by the democratic rules of the game, so that we are rapidly advancing towards the ochlocracy that Polybios detected on Rome’s horizon. Each new elite must not only be more “invisible” than the preceding one, it must also be more brutal to impose itself, organize the victory, and subjugate its adversaries. Whether we call this situation a “civil war” as in the time from SylIa to Octavius, or “class war” as the Marxists label it, it can be validly analyzed in the Periclean-Polybian framework. Within the vast and increasingly amorphous limits of liberal-democratic legality (where the distance between conceptual criteria and de facto rights and duties is becoming as large as in the time of Priscus the rhetor) the citizen’s life is again exposed to insecurity, proscription, and generally to fear of the protector no less than of the assailant. As in all periods of decadence, we feel the intolerable weight of necessity from which there seems to be no escape. Note the proliferating theories about the mechanism which brought .us here, and the fashion of deterministic hypotheses: galloping population growth, a planet-wide north-south confrontation, pollution of the earth, the rise of the robotman, the conquest by totalitarian regime. Elites are groups which do not believe in the inevitable, which fight it; eliteless societies sink into hedonism, they scorn the law, and, with a perverse pleasure, overthrow all values held sacred and the institutions embodying them. As Sallust writes of the Republic’s end, “there were citizens who from sheer perversity were bent upon their own ruin and that of their wuntry.” (The War with Catiline, XXXVII.) ’ The aforesaid helps us formulate our second approximation of decadence:
A society where no elite functions any more becomes ungovernable; a civil: war situation emerges where feudalities 4Wl
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fight for power, recruiting amorphous masses of citizens as their private sup port. This brings us to matters of culture, remembering Pericles’ words about extravagance and effeminacy. If one wishes to conjure up the stereotyped image of decadence, one evokes not so much Oriental satraps surrounded by dancing girls as Roman aristocrats participating at Trimalchio’s orgies, or Sodom’s unnatural sex feasts. Unwittingly, we thus respect the etymology of the word “decadence,” a fall from height, either from power, as in the first instance, or from religiousmoral faith, as in the second, but in both instances a fall into exhibited immorality, pleasure-seeking, lack of restraint. Thus decadence, in agreement with Pericles, says this to us: a politically powerful nation held together by noble ideals which inspired noble attitudes, has fallen away from these ideals and has correspondingly loosened these attitudes. From strong it has become weak, from purposeful, hesitant and resigned, from truth-believing, cynical. What it once conceived as reality (otherwise it would not have consented sacrifices for it), it now regards with indifference, skepticism, mockery. (Such a reality may be transsubstantiation, that is real presence, or national integrity, the natural law, and others.) It now believes that everything in this world is passing and illusory, thus it gives itself up to the moment’s pleasures and comforts. The burden of existence that it must carry makes it bitter because it measures everything not in terms of communal enterprise but in terms of satisfaction to the self. The English philosopher, C. E. M. Joad, has an unusual name for what is described here: he calls it “the dropping of the object.”lD By this he means a speculative attitude well known from the history of philosophical schools although never so blatantly, so picturesquely named. It is subjectivism ; the speculative non-recognition of the substratum of the world and
of existence, in short, the denial of reality, leads in philosophical discourse to statements like “beauty (or good, or truth, or God) cannot be known, I can only know my experience, that is what I find beautiful, good, true, divine.” In this way, everybody is locked up i n his solitude, there is no platform where experiences may be exchanged, where they could be found to refer to the same extramental reality.20 From such considerations Joad reaches conclusions with regard to the spiritual-social phenomenon of decadence, since if moral (or social, or political) judgment has no object, then persons A and B do not pass judgment on the same object: A judges his own opinion, and B his. “It is only where there is a general awareness of the object, coupled with a willingness to embrace a view of the universe which one is prepared to accept as independently real and not to analyse it away on subjectivist grounds”can there be a meaningful community.21 It might be argued that a nation or a society is a palpable fact and that nobody
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determined to abolish society, and the revolutionaries radically to change itshow by word and action that they recognize it as real. Yet, the last few centuries’ speculative utopianism proves that philosophical subjectivism (Hume, Kant, Fichte, Nietzsche-and in our days existentialism, psychologism, structuralism, and situation ethics) has deeply influenced political theory also, with the result that the real objects of politics-the common good, the institutions,22 hierarchy, authority, the state-are perceived as porous, unreal, endlessly manipulable and idealizable through purely subjective projections. We have reached the point where the utopian speculator conceives an “ideal community” merely for the purpose of constructing a suitable framework for his subjective system; not a real thing, but the the incarnation of an ideology.23 Through this analysis of the object we find that the recognition or non-recognition of the structure of reality (another, perhaps Fall 1977
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better term for “object”) has a great deal to do with decadence. “Decadence,” wrote Joad, “is a sign of man’s tendency to misread his position in the universe . . . and to conduct his societies and plan his future on the basis of this misreading.”% To those who disagreee, saying that “the dropping of the object” is too abstract a manifestation to have any impact on a whole society over the decades, one can only answer that, naturally, this is the more o r less conscious manifestation of an elite only, but that it spreads to the rest of the people in various forms, appropriate to their sphere of thinking. This is why the English philosopher is right when, in a quasiplatonic vein he points out that the philosopher’s task does not end with sifting, purging, and clarifying the opinions of others, it also includes the provision of reasoned arguments as to what should be their opinions. This task does not turn the thinking man into a seer or a dictator, it merely indicates his elite-role. It is sufficient to study attentively our thinking elite, the professors, politicians, journalists, the so-called “opinion-makers,” to find nearly everywhere a devastating relativism, dictated by a radical incomprehension of the nature of reality.25 Nietzsche, the Janusfaced Nietzsche, at once subverter of reality and matchless diagnostician of decadence, warned his century and ours: “The wasteland grows! Woe to him who hides wastelands within!” On which Heidegger comments that it is the source of Spengler’s proposition about the decline of the West.26 No wonder that such non-objectual thinking quickly becomes translated into corresponding attitudes. Not only speculative objects are denied reality, soon the nation is left unprotected, the law is ridiculed and explained away; knowledge turns into idle pastime and art into subjective outpouring. Admiration and applause go to the absurd, the superficial, and the transvestite. All this shows a loss of purpose and with it a loss of identity. The persistence of a formal legal system and of a network of customs may still create the impression
of stability and continuity; but they are a desiccated carapace under which men and women “hide the wasteland” where their soul used to be. We have discovered decadence to be not merely a “culture-critical” notion, or an invention of “the enemies of the open society,” but a philosophical concept too; it translates not into speculative figures of speech, but into a periodically experienced reality. In fact, this very recurrence, as it were a pathology of history, suggests the most disturbing aspect of decadence. If decadence occurs when the elite loses contact with reality, and, as Polybios remarks, such a peril arises as soon as a great (imperial) effort is over and a great (national) tension solved-then there is no conceivable way of averting it, it arrives with an almost mechanical predictability. But if decadence is part of national and societal destiny, we may return to the Greek notion of anakyklosis and give up belief in divine providence and its humanly not calculable wisdom. Further, if the correct view is the Greek view, and if Plato in the Republic only meant to design a paradigm, not an instrument of blocking decline, then man is not free in and above history, and the elite’s “loss of the object” is no less momentous an occurrence than its earlier attachment to the real. More than that, the loss of the object is then as clear a grasp of (decadent) reality as was the contact with the object in the preceding period ! The temptation to think along these lines-the essence of paganism-is, of course, very strong for Western man, and he returns to it periodically, with Frederick I1 Hohenstauffen, with Machiavelli, with Auguste Comte, with Teilhard de Chardin. It turns around the question whether there is a mechanism of history, hence a mechanism of decadence too. We have seen the evidence for it; is there a counter-evidence? In other words, is man responsible for decadence, at least in a limited degree, as he is also responsible for other occurrences in history?
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Both Pericles and Polybios were struck vanishing will, loss of object (substratum, by what they described as a rationally identity, raison d’ztre) by an elite. pursued expansion and Polybios particThe French historian and demogularly by the enterprise which drew so rapher, Pierre Chaunu, diagnosed decamany people into Rome’s o i k ~ m e n e . ~ ~dence in a recent interview in the following A telos seemed to direct the process, which, words: “Modern progressive society which however, was not some kind of a cosmic has been cut off from the Hebrew-Chrismechanism but, concretely, the realistic tian roots for the last two centuries, reaches grasp of a mission by the Roman elite, now the last conclusions: the greatest good a mission conveyed in down-to-earth and is not to have been born, and the second effective terms to the mass of peasants and is to die as rapidly as possible. But since even to the generality of the Italic allies. I our contemporaries do not wish to die think it was St. Augustine who remarked individually, they choose to be collectively in the defense of Christian belief in saints extingui~hed.”~~ The statement was made that the Romans too used to believe in in reference to the catastrophic natality the saints’ national equivalents: Scaevola, rate in Germany, now also in France as Brutus, Regulus. This suggests the power well as in other parts of the Western of the telos. Later, however, the telos is world. (In the United States the governlost sight of: the fourth-century Romans ment proudly announced some time ago and our own age reject the constitutive that the rate had reached “zero population factors of community: expansion, authorgrowth.”) Here again, not a nation but its ity, hierarchy, institutions. They are no elite (legislators, moral leaders, clergy) is longer regarded as parts of the social the responsible agent, with the “dropping animal’s substratum and as falling well of the object” perhaps more evident than within rational judgment; today the prein other instances. Is there a mechanism vailing science of politics insists that we at work? Is it a question of flux and reflux, should not “anthropomorphize” the comexpansion and shrinkage, force and debiIimunitarian phenomena, nor make valuety, youth and decrepitude? These spatial judgments above them. Thus, largely and biological images are customary in the under the impact of American behavioral literature of decadence, and their usage is science, we are left in politics with the constantly reinforced because it actually impoverished schema of interacting groups seems that the events marking the process tending towards absolute equality, an happen with a kind of inevitability, as obviously mechanical, neo-positivistic if a will were at work which, when model.*8 temporarily blocked at one point, springs forth at another. Indeed it seems that There is a striking parallel here with nothing contradicts the platonic thesis the present developments in the Church. about societies being always in a process There the telos also demanded expansion of decay. (missionary work, proselytism, the permeDoes it mean, let us ask it again, that ation of secular society by Christian truth) , authority (the magisterium) , hierhistory is determined and that both the rise and the decadence are governed by archy (the papacy), and institutional laws about which man is powerless? No structure. The reverse process takes place purely negative answer may be made to before our eyes: shrinkage (in seminaries this question. Yet, there are many imand clergy, regular and secular), doctrinal ponderables which contradict the mechavariations, loss of identity through ecunicist view. Boissier locates one at the tenmenism and cooperation with parties, ter of republican collapse: it is Caesar’s movements, anti-religious regimes and, fiintelligence and will. “Caesar saw that the nally, liturgical concessions to fashionable culture-fads. There is clearly a kind of Populist Party preferred social reforms to m4
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political liberty, and concluded correctly that the party would regard a democratic monarchy as an acceptable solution. So while spreading disorder Caesar managed to exhaust the republicans who became increasingly exasperated with a no longer controlled freedom, and brought them to a state where they were willing to sacrifice freedom for rest. He was hoping that (through this strategy) the Republic, shaken by the daily attacks which tired out even its firmest defenders, would collapse one day without noise and violen~e.”~~ Contemporary events help us grasp the gradual abandon of the elite function by the senatorial class, the impression of isolation in the mind of each, the increasing weariness to resist “public opinion,” in reality the orchestrated clamor of the street. There may be in these situations an invisible demarcation line: on one slope there are real events, to be sure, but more importantly there are sporadic, then increasingly rapid congealing impressions the sum-total of which amounts to a collective resignation. Once the other slope of the demarcation line is reached, events precipitate, their perception becomes blurred, and resistance is judged to be futile. This seems to be true of the republicans in Cicero’s and Caesar’s time, of the pagan society facing the Christians (there Constantine played the role that Caesar played in the previous situation), and of liberal-democratic modem society at the threshold of the “monolithic” (socialist, bureaucratic, collectivistic) age. Thus on one, perhaps decisive, level, there is a clash of wills in which some are confident of history’s
I t is the winning side-this is to state a pleonasm-which has now the compactness of conviction and of will.” Two reflections may serve as our conclusion. One is that while the phenomenon of periodic decadence is undeniable, and more: all such phenomena display similar configurations, rhythm, style, and psychology, the periods of acme show an equally permanent but extremely diverse grasp of the structure of reality. Thus it is true that communities decay, but on a higher than societal order they give both direct and indirect testimony of an existence which transcends theirs. In other words, history is not a substance which “thins outyyat one time and “thickens” at another, it is something subservient to the constitution of reality, whether this is perceived or not by men of a certain place-and-time. The second reflection is that society, like the individual, cannot be judged by its moment of agony, primarily because such moments seem to be all alike. It should be judged, and is indeed so judged, by the nature of its tebs, just like a man’s worth is not summed up in his decrepitude, but in consideration of the transcendent reasons for which he lived.
‘Santo Mazzarino, La Fin du m o d e antique, Gallimard, 1973, p. 182. *In La Deshumanizacidn del Arte and Ideas sobre la Novela (in one volume), ed. Reuista de Occidente, Madrid, 1925. ‘Gaston Boissier, La Fin du paganisme, Hachette, 1891, v. 11. p. 444. ‘The book was first published in 1924, in the Spenglerian afterglow. ‘“It seems to me that most historians of our day think the way Gibbon did,” that is they blame on Christianity and the Christian rulers all the mistakes com-
mitted. (G. Boissier, op cit., v. 11, p. 392. The complete histories of Thucydides, Modem Library, Random House, 1951 ; Book 11. ‘Half-a-century later, Plato took sides more categorically, by obviously opting for a “philosophical” Sparta over against the lethargic-tumultuous Athens he knew. Plato had found the Sophists’ attack on morality and knowledge a grave enough danger to want to freeze the intellectual freedom of which Pericles still boasted. The Roman general who was
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backing, others persuaded of her desertion. Observing both sides, one is struck by the fact (which helps us formulate our third approximation of decadence) that the losing, decaying side has abandoned all belief not only in the raison d’btre of its political forms and institutions, but also in a structure of reality underlying and guaranteeing life, effort, work, culture, and knowledge.
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Polybios’ sponsor in Rome, Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, confirmed all this in one Rash of insight, on the spot. He took my right ann, reports Polybios, and rold me: Yes, Polybios, all this is good. But I fear lest one day someone will say of my country (what we now say about Carthagei . ‘TncidPntally, if this statement is correct, then the notion of progress as it was formulated since the Aufklurung, is a speculative abstraction, serving partisan purposes. A continuous progress would soon lose its referent, or t o paraphrase Nietzsche, becoming would acquire the status of being. Real progress could no longer be measured, successive generations would equate their experience of i t with stagnation. ’‘See Thomas Molnat, Le Socialisme sans visage, particularly Chapter IT, “L’assaut des nbn-fhdalitk” Ed. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1976. “G. Boissier, Cice‘ron et ses amis, Hachette, Paris, 1865, p. 203. ”Grandeur et de‘caolence de Rome, vol. 111. La Fin d’une aristocratie, Lib. Plon, 1906, p. 43. l’Samue1 Dill, Roman Society in the last century of the western empire, Meridian Books, New York, 1958, p. 233. 14G. Boissier, La Fin du paganisme, v. I., p. 104. ““Cf.“L‘Etnt monolithique,” in Thomas Molnar, Le Socialisme sans visage. “From the time of Cicero on we read the Roman lament that good and upright men withdraw from public affairs. In today’s democratic age the calI is continually issued for “mass-participation,” for everyone checking every group’s power potential. It is assumed that oniy if aii and equaiiy participate, can society function adequately. “The Road to Serfdom, The University of Chicago Press, 1944, pp. 194 and 195. ”“Ricardo and Hegel discovered from opposite angles the existence of a society that was not subject to the laws of the State, but subjected the State to its own laws.” Karl Polanyi, The Great Trrmsformatwn, Beacon Press, Boston, 1944, p. 111. “C. E. M. Joad, Decadence, Philosophical Library, New York, 1949. ”Cf.Thomas Molnar, God and the Knowledge of Reality, Part IV,“The possibility and limits of knowledge.” Basic Books, New York, 1973. =Joad, op. cit., p. 382. =Let us
note that Freud regarded institutions a s symptoms of collective neurosis; in a similar vein Adorno;
for Marx they are bourgeois instruments for the mystification and better exploitation of the proletariat; etc. ”Cf. Th. Molnar, God and Knowledge of Reality, Part 111, “The Ideal Society a s the framework for absolute knowledge.” -.Toad, op. cit., p. 15. =My students relate that the ovenvhelming majority of their professors open their course by telling them that they should not believe anything that the professor says or that books write, and that they must think for themselves. This is what the Gnothi seauton has degenerated into! ”M. Heidegger, What is called thinking? (Was heisst Denken?), Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1968, p. 38. “E. Voegelin, The Ecumenic .4ge, Louisiana Statc University Press, Baton Rouge, 1974, p. 122 ff. =The latest aberrant illustration of this school of thought is the much-acclaimed A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls (Harvard University Press, 1973). ”The Gnostics of the first centuries A.D., Marcion as their outstanding figure, taught that matter, hence conception and birth, are evil; the same view guided the Cathars; it is again evident in statements and vogue of contraception and birth control advocacy. aoG. if proviBoissier, Cickron et ses amis, p. 305. dence does not find such a remedy [a man like Augustus to redress a corrupt people1 within, it seeks it outside. And since peoples so far corrupted have already become naturally slaves of their unrestrained passions-of luxury, effeminacy, avarice, envy, pridc, and vanity-and in pursuit of the pleasures of their dissolute life are falling back into all the vices characteristic of the most abject slaves (having become liars, tricksters, calumniators, thieves, cowards, and pretenders), providence decrees that they become slaves by the natural law of the gentes which springs from this nature of nations, and that they become subject to better nations, which. having conquered them by arms, preserve them as subject provinces. (The New Science of G . Yico, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, Cornell University, 1968, Conclusion, # 1105.)
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