Decline and Fall: The Idea of Progress

The perception of the rise of the modern is the mirror image of our tacit assumptions about the Middle Ages. This medieval period is a phenomenon that we take for granted, yet often with a sense that it represents something that we cannot quite explain, and which stands in ironic relation to our ideas of progress (which remarkably go into postmodern decline promptly after the modern transition). Sometimes it is the ‘Dark Ages’, though not everywhere so dark.

Note that as we move backwards the concept of the unilinear ‘evolution of a civilization’ loses its meaning. We enter a far larger sphere, the one Eurasian ‘civilization’ of which the European modernist offshoot is but a branch. The concoction, ‘Western Civilization’ blinds us to this unity. We speak of the Dark Ages, but it was quite a seminal period of gestation, as the influences of the Roman oikoumene began to ferment. The student was beginning to graduate. As we move backwards, our earlier hotspot steps are in different places, and yet development occurs nonetheless. And we also see the absence of a Dark Age in other areas, as the ‘medieval’ seems better-named the ‘mideonic’. Islam, and Sung China, are evidence of the many ‘mideonic’ peaks in our emerging large-scale ‘eonic world system’. What we mistakenly see as one ‘Western’ civilization is an illusion created by the fact that Archaic Greece and the rise of the modern (which we see as intermittent phases in our eonic sequence) both share common linguistic and cultural elements, but braided with Judaic, concealed Indic, and finally Islamic influences. The spread of the great religions is creating a foundation for a global culture, even as its effects crystallize as new sluggish civilizations. The attempt to make one ‘European civilization’ out of the successive transitions in Greece and Europe has hopelessly confused the issue. So ‘Western Civilization’ is a sophisticated paste up of basically tribal thinking.

We are immersed in the cascade of modern things, yet clock this from an arbitrary starting point, the end of a middle period. This is a good example of the way we already sense an ‘eonic effect’, in isolation, without realizing its significance. This chronicling begins in the sixteenth century. We should be confronted with the question, What is this ‘medieval’ period in the middle of? Our sense of a discontinuity, now with a suggestion that it is not a date but an interval of several centuries after about 1500, draws us backwards to grapple with clear reality of the long period of stasis that almost dwarfs the period of modernism that is now a world in itself, a new age of history well underway. We have forbidden ourselves the term ‘punctuated equilibrium’ but we can take the phrase apart and notice that our ‘Western Tradition’ is really two punctuations (at least) connected by a long static equilibrium. In fact, the term is misleading, since our sluggish middle is by no means in equilibrium, save relative to the unique periods of truly foundational advance. Technology proceeds apace, economic networks are growing apace. Prior sources of advance are diffusing. Cultures that long ago entered the Neolithic and then remained on that plateau are starting to reckon with the later achievements of the Sumerians onwards.

The pieces of our puzzle fall into place quite easily once we have rightly posed our question of the rise of the modern in terms of its mirror image, a middle, if not a decline and fall. This Roman decline is perhaps confusing because it is not the entire interval of this middle, and only its last stage, and then only in the relationship of the Roman to the modern worlds. We are looking for the beginning of this ‘middle’, and we find it at once in the period of the rise of our Roman World, and the next era of discontinuity, so visible in the onset of the Classical World. The overall pattern is utterly simple. We see the rise of the modern, after a decline and fall, and the rise before this decline brings us to the age of the Roman Republic, and this to the world ca. -600, where a host of changes is rapidly transforming the world it finds. Even as we insert a place marker, to zoom in for close observation, we should wonder, why stop there, just under two and a half millennia separate two punctuations. We shall be curious in advance of the period, now finally an object of archaeological enquiry, taken by an equal interval to about -3000, our destination.

The issue confronts us stubbornly, why do we use the term ‘Middle Age’? We begin to see that, while a case can be made as to the emergence of a more advanced culture from a less advanced medieval culture, the reality is actually more complex. Two things are possible now, two evolutions, general development from medieval to modern times, and the decisive change of evolutionary direction that we see in the second type of ‘eonic evolution’. The problem with old accounts disappears here, for the medieval world is not so primitive as the first type of evolutionary account implies. What we can say is that the rise of the modern world dramatically changes the direction of world history. And it is also true that this has some of the qualities of resumed advance. It would seem that progress had dried up at the fall of the Roman Empire, and come to a halt. The difficulties in the idea of progress are essential to explore, for its current form doesn’t quite match the evidence, if we had wished to extend it to an evolutionary context. Promptly its critics are in ascendant. But a facile critique of the idea of progress too often forgets its ultimate implication: the renunciation of the hard won victories of modern revolutions in pulling out of a kind of global slump. If we have no idea of progress then this fact should not concern us. In fact we secretly believe in progress in some form. Part of the problem is the arbitrary misuse of the idea in an evolutionary context, where biologists understandably challenge its surrogate status as a ‘law of evolution’. But the idea of progress, in our context, is a beast in its proper forest, the contentious pulling out of a ‘medieval doldrums’ to forge a new world, and advance human knowledge beyond what it had been before.

Ideas of progress We see the birth of the idea of progress in the celebrated battle of the Ancients and Moderns, a splendid symptom of the new era coming about. If it is not a sound theoretical idea, it is an inspiring ‘banner of the regiment’. The idea is associated, in some ambiguity as to whether it is a force of history or the decision of its proponents, with the onset of a new era that is occurring around those who are immersed in it, and it points then to a motion against the stasis of medievalism fixing the perceptions of a revolutionary era.[i]

Progress, as an idea, is destined to equivocate as we distance ourselves from the modern divide, but it is clearly bound up in the very use of the term ‘modern’. The confusion is the more vexed since the ‘theory about progress’ is really an ‘action script’ of those beating the drum of their definition of advance. The idea of progress is attacked on evolutionary and religious grounds, but we will both embrace the idea and generalize it to a less ideological version, as eonic progression. As we pass the divide the great idea fueling the new era starts to equivocate as the ideology of those who experience a windfall. The idea splits into its own critique, in the classic leftist spectrum, indeed reflects the radicalization of the revolutionary incidents, as these leave behind the first stage of economic freedom for a new definition of progression, found in the invocation of permanent revolution. The confusions of the twentieth century, the shock of World War, make the concept of automatic progress appear simplistic. This split however is born earlier and becomes a fissure in the wake of revolutionary changes in the generation leading up to 1848. It is almost as if the idea appears to give history a push as it reaches a new threshold, then suffers contradictions amounting to a ‘what next?’ Here is more evidence of an intermittent something, its business done as it ignites other processes in its wake.

The classic work on the Roman Empire, of Edward Gibbon, occurs with ironic timing at the dawn of our new age, to open a very basic and provocative question about the movement of civilizations, their change of direction, and the nature of history in the large. It is one thing to move against the theocracy of the medieval world, quite audacious indeed to suggest that history should resume its march from where it left off, in the times and places of the onset of one of the great religions. This rationalist dispatch of the entire world of Christianity is misleading but evokes a far larger issue than the implicit, yet secondary, question of the relation of rationality, or science, and religion that is the theme of this champion of the secular. Yet in a strange way Gibbon is right: the rise of the modern resumes its advance as if from the Axial Age. We will scrap the theories of cyclical civilizations, and produce another showing progressive cyclicity, obviating decline altogether.[ii]

Cyclical metaphors Here we should insert a reflection on our Great Transition and the way our movement toward a cyclical theory will also produce a counter-cyclical initiative. Theories of cycles produce great confusion. We are not bound to cycles of advance and decline! Decline is only the failure of ‘free action’ in the wake of ‘eonic determination’. Think of the cycles of jump-starting the car. The point is not to end up stalled or cycle forever in fresh attempts to begin! The point rather is to successfully terminate the jump-start sequence with induced action proceeding on its own.

This contrast, implicit in the Enlightenment worldview, raises one of the most perplexing questions of historical dynamics, the long range persistence from sources of new historical formations. We will discover an unsettling fact: history seems to wander. A short attention span, here, means cultural processes deviate over millennia. Consistency over a century isn’t enough. This concern of Gibbon is only indirectly a question of the sacred and the secular. Christianity is secure in its great contribution to history. But Gibbon is wondering at the strange collision of Athens and Jerusalem, and its outcome in the deviation from the parallel Athens source. It will take us to the foundational era of the Hellenic, for the Enlightenment is not the first, but the resumption, so to speak, of the career of rationality in world history.

It is the strange reality of world history, this second inning comeback of the modern world. We speak of the Scientific Revolution, yet consider that the Greeks initiated science. Its progress was in limbo for centuries. Of philosophy, we place its foundations among the Pre-Socratics, or Plato and Socrates, yet find its great themes resumed and reechoed in the prodigious movement beginning with Descartes and Bacon. Democracy itself, even throughout the eighteenth century an object of ambivalence, destined to surge in the wake of the revolutionary era, finds its first occasion among the Greek city-states. We look at history as the chronicle of places and cultures, perhaps in search of a candidate for the term ‘evolution’, yet find a ‘sub-evolution’ of critical categories taking place in a hopscotch pattern of displaced regions. We cover this up to some degree with a concept of Western Civilization, although this does not alter the fact that we are looking not at the ‘evolution in place’, but a more general process that starts abruptly in certain places, picking up its business where it was left off, somewhere else.

In many ways, the failure to properly answer to the enigma of Rome’s fall lies, not just in the indispensable requirement of close empirical research into the particulars of causality, which could include the effect of lead poisoning in primitive plumbing, but in the failure, once again, to consider the problem in light of historical evolution, or at least as one whole beginning at the beginning, although this is implicit in Gibbons’ formulation. The problem of Rome and its fall, better served with a new idea of evolution extended to a greater whole, is a holistic one of the emergence of a tribal nation from kingship to republic, a grand tradition nearly a distant memory by the time of the transition to empire in the time of Caesar. We should as well consider the question of the fall of the Roman Republic, as that of the empire.

This is a very large-scale question indeed, and puts the question of decline into the basket with the question of genesis, and this examination of the source takes us to the beginning, not just of the Roman world, but of virtually the whole of the Classical era, as such. And this is in the context of Eurasia as one whole. We begin to grapple with the fact that Europe was a sideshow to a more centralized history, focused in the Middle East. As we move backwards we see Rome whelping from a litter of kin emergent worlds in a strange parallelism.

The slow passage of Athens to Rome is itself a complex question as to whether this is one or two worlds, given the Latin ability to echo all things Greek. But however we consider this, we see the outcome favors Rome over the long term. A vast new oikoumene is created, and it will be on the fringes of this in a colonized European sector that we see the next great advance. It would seem that Rome was almost the candidate to fulfill the task of persistence by default, for it is rising as the creative era of the Greeks is waning, or at least stabilizing in its Hellenistic last phase, as the first born of the new oikoumene that will transform the Mediterranean, passing slowly into the Roman then Christian and Islamic versions, these religions as empires claiming the end state of the entire Classical outcome. The ‘Holy Roman Empire’, speaking generically, will persist until the very days of the French Revolution, yet still echoes the Hellenistic world wrought by Alexander the Great. Thus one clear suggestion is that our decline of Rome might be a trifle overworked, for there while there is a clear decline in the century after Aristotle, but only a step down.

We are ready to move backwards again toward antiquity in search of the right perspective on the rise of the modern world. We have asked ‘middle of what?’ There can be only one answer, and we can move on, to examine the onset of our middle period. As we explore the world of the Classical Greeks we know that we are in the presence of another or our seminal eras, further, that as we zoom in on the phenomenon, it shows a strong resemblance with the rise of the modern world.

[i] Robert Nisbet, in History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), has an interesting conservative depiction of the rise of the idea of progress as the Great Renewal beginning in the sixteenth century, distinguished from the Renaissance period. Nisbet’s defense of Progress, in a postmodernist period, would seem forlorn, almost an Alamo. As the idea wanes, the conservative picks it up, and leftist thought becomes postmodern!

[ii] F. W. Walbank, in The Awful Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1969), p. 107, notes, “Gibbon’s formulation was one of fundamental importance; quite simply and unequivocally it broke with all cyclical, mystical-biological and metaphysical theories of decline, and stated clearly the ‘naturalistic’ view. The cause of decay was to be sought in the system itself.” Solomon Katz, The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), Michael Grant, The Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire (New York: Routledge, 1999), Aldo Schiavone, The End of the Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).