I think civilization is already falling. I think it has been for some time. As a student of history, I see several of the signs, and it fills me with a sense of anxiety and melancholy. Today, when we think of "civilization", it is usual to think in terms of Western civilization - technology, the scientific method, industry, progress, and a whole raft of idea bequeathed to the world by the West. As a man of European (i.e. Western) descent myself, I can't help but take a certain pride in the achievements of the Western world. And though I like to think I am largely above racist sentiment, I cannot help but feel a certain sadness at what I truly think is the coming eclipse of Western civilization. It would grieve me less if I thought the world were changing into something better, but with the rise of radical Islam, and the seeming dearth of any other strong ideological trends, I do look at the futrue with a certain apprehension.
It is highly popular in some circles these days to be intensely critical of Western civilization, far more so than of any other culture. Western civilization is condemned for things that others are not. It is judged by a different, and much harsher standard. Readers will not find this observation a surprise, I think. Just exactly why this is so, however, is a little harder to understand. It is usually an oversimplification to lay the blame for the condition of a society on a single event, and usually presumptuous for an individual to claim to have found the cause for anything so complex. Yet I think that I have identified
a cause. I believe it to be a very significant one. I believe that between the years 1914 and 1918, Western Civilization cut its own throat. I think it is still in the process of bleeding to death. What remains to be seen is whether or not the wound can be closed before it is too late.
This is all the more tragic an event, because there are, in hindsight, so very many ways in which it might have been avoided. It is water over the dam, however, and we are left in the aftermath. It might not be obvious to most, how such a remote and distant event as the First World War could lie at the root of so much of the uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and declining values that we face today, but I think it does. I also think that we are indeed declining in a great many ways. To be sure, we have advanced in others. The world (the Western world at least) is certainly less unjust to women and minorities than it was in the years before the Great War. White people are less smugly arrogant and sure of their superiority over the rest of humanity. These are certainly improvements. And yet in many other ways, things seem worse. It seems as though there are much fewer things in life that one can be sure of. Many people are less comfortable with feelings like patriotism, nationalism, and pride in their history than they used to be. Many long-held beliefs have fallen into disfavor, and indeed, it does seem as though there are fewer things than one can really be sure of. Life seems a lot more complicated.
I believe that the terrible carnage of the so-called "War to End All Wars" dealt a tremendous blow to the prevailing attitudes, convictions, beliefs, and values of Western Civilization. It resulted in a fundamental change in our perspective. Things were never the same again. In his great novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque said that his intention was simply: "to tell the story of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped the shells, were destroyed by the war." Probably no war of the twentieth century was more horrifying and shattering for the soldiers to endure. The trenches were a hell on earth. The sheer, overwhelming trauma of this caused many who lived through it to change many of their ideas, discard many long-cherished values and ideals, and question many old assumptions. Things have never been quite the same since.
In the introduction to his book Citizen Soldiers, the historian Stephen Ambrose compared American soldiers who fought in the Civil War, with those of the Second World War (he was actually citing America's leading Civil War scholar, James M. McPherson). He noted that in their letters home, the men of the Civil War spoke of cause and country, while the GIs seldom, if ever, did so. The soldiers of World War Two, when asked what they fought for, would almost invariably reply that it was for their buddies, the men in their squad. Ambrose notes that unit cohesion was probably just as important for Billy Yank and Johnny Reb as it was to any dogface, and cause and country were probably as important to the GIs as they were to Civil War troops. What accounted for the difference in what they spoke of, however, was the Great War. The GIs still lived in its shadow, as we do today. The terrible, senseless slaughter of the Western Front made patriotic words sound hollow and empty after all, wasn't it jingoism and nationalism of that sort that had helped bring the war about. Who can forget the images of smiling, eager young men marching off to war in August of 1914, confidently expecting to return home by Christmas to celebrate their victory? Their confidence proved tragically misplaced. Indeed, it was so badly misplaced that that kind of old-fashioned, patriotic bombast has made people distinctly uncomfortable, if not actually embarrassed, ever since.
I think this signifies a fundamental shift in attitudes, not just a change in the language we are comfortable using. World War One broke the world apart and remade it. There is no question that this is true in a political sense. What many don't realize is that it is true in a cultural sense as well. Is it any coincidence that so many of the basic assumptions and attitudes comfortably held by most people have been changing since 1918. Today, new theories hold sway on subjects like child-rearing and discipline, crime and punishment (or rehabilitation as some prefer), international relations, and so forth. Religion has been declining in the West, and this has reached such a point that many now refer to western Europe as a post-Christian society. Sexual mores have loosened dramatically. Revisionists are at work rewriting history. Many cherished heroes of yesteryear are now viewed in a different, and sometimes very uncomplimentary light. It would be impossible for me to list, in this short space, all the countless ways in which our attitudes and ideals have changed.
In this new era of moral uncertainty, people have been searching for new values and ideals to replace ones now seen as old-fashioned or outmoded. This has led many people to adopt and espouse sometimes radical new theories, often with unfortunate results, for one should not lightly cast aside the accumulated wisdom and practice of generation for untried new ways.
Does this mean I think we would be better off returning to the kind of value system that existed in Western society before the Great War? I am not sure I would go so far as to say that, even if it were possible. Do I think that society today would be healthier if World War One had never been fought? In many ways, yes. I think that we have become, to a certain extent, morally rudderless and being adrift is not usually a good thing. I think in morally uncertain climate of today, we are letting many of the greater aspects of Western society and culture slip away.
But I think we may be closer to collapse than many think, though I think it will be a collapse much like that of the Roman Empire in the West - a gradual breakup and transformation into something different; so gradual that the people who lived through it were not even aware just what was really happening. As final food for thought, I leave you the following essay, written by an Englishman, Robert Harris, just after the September 11th atrocity.
In an essay published last year, the author Tom Wolfe, with characteristic humility, summed up how he thought a future historian would one day write about America as it approached the year 2000: "American superiority in all matters of science, economics, industry, politics, business, medicine, engineering, social life, social justice and, of course, the military was total and indisputable. Even Europeans suffering the pangs of wounded chauvinism looked on with awe at the brilliant example the United States had set for the world as the third millennium began."
This is fine, and mostly true, but, even as I read it a year ago, I couldn't help feeling that a Roman could have written almost exactly the same at the start of the first millennium.
It would surely have seemed equally inconceivable to a wealthy homo novus - let us call him Lupus - lounging in his villa on the Bay of Naples, that the Roman imperium would falter. After all, Latin was the universal language. The great military threat from the east - the Parthian empire - had faded. Rome controlled the global economy. Roman society, to the extent that it was possible for an ambitious slave to see his children become full citizens, was open to talented outsiders. Where was there a cloud on the horizon? Lupus could have had absolute confidence that history had come to an end.
Well, if Wolfe's words seemed slightly hubristic even back in 2000, how much more so do they now, in the aftermath of the nemesis that has been visited on Washington and New York? We have been reminded, in the most horrible and graphic way, that no civilization is ever safe, that history doesn't end, that claims of "superiority in all matters" are illusory, and that all empires - perhaps even this one - must eventually pass away.
Of course, thank God, America is not going to collapse overnight, simply because two buildings, however symbolic, have been attacked. The Americans, like the Romans, are the world's most ingenious, resourceful and - when the chips are down - most disciplined people. They will still, I hope, be the dominant power on earth when I die.
Who knows: the American imperium may even see out my children's lifetimes as well. But for the first time since the end of the Cold War, one has the uneasy feeling that the future is not as settled and monolithic as it once appeared, that the American empire may one day go the way of the Roman.
It is, for a start, very hard for rational men and women, be they Romans or Americans, to combat the irrational. And the Romans in the first century, for all their superstitions, could be every bit as rational as we like to think we are.
Pliny the Elder, for example, admiral of the Roman fleet and the empire's greatest encyclopaedist, dismissed the notion of an afterlife: "Neither body nor mind has any more sensation after death than it had before birth." His theological position was almost humanistic: "God," he said, "is man helping man."
He did not realise, even as he was writing (this was 40 years after the death of Christ) that a cult religion from the east was beginning to take hold among the poor, which explicitly stated that there was an afterlife - one so glorious that martyrdom was a fate to be welcomed. Yet it was the spread of Christianity, more than anything else, that began to undermine the foundations of the Roman state.
How odd it is that America, of all countries - a nation that believes overwhelmingly in a supreme being, and which, to a sceptical European, often seems terrifyingly literal in its Christianity - should be surprised to find itself rocked by a handful of men who regard martyrdom as a sublime consummation.
The Romans' eventual solution - in the end, as we know, it was to prove no solution - was to adopt Christianity themselves. The Americans are hardly likely to do that with Islamic fundamentalism.
Instead, they will try to defeat the irrational by rational means - rationality, in the third millennium, finding its natural expression via the Tomahawk cruise missile, the B1 stealth bomber and the Apache attack helicopter. But whether these will prove any more successful than the mass crucifixions and pogroms of ancient Rome is doubtful.
In military terms, America, like Rome, certainly enjoys a massive technological superiority over its enemies - but with one crucial difference. Unlike the Romans, America - being a far more civilised society - is reluctant to take casualties.
Thus we live in an age in which an American pilot who gets lost over his target - as one did in Bosnia, when Nato finally took action - who ditches his plane and has to be rescued at great risk to his comrades, is regarded not as an embarrassing fool to be quietly cashiered, but as a national hero to be greeted by the president. How is such a military mindset going to cope with an enemy who is not only ready and willing but eager to die?
America has famously met and overcome such fanatics before. But the Japanese kamikaze pilots in 1945 were tools of a conventional military machine, controlled by a state: eventually, when ordered to do so, Japanese soldiers surrendered.
The nightmare that the West now faces is far more insidious and multi-headed. Every ton of bombs dropped on the fundamentalists' bases, and on the people of the states that harbour them, is likely to create only more martyrs, more fanatics, more terrorist atrocities.
In the end, it is the vast global success of the American imperium - its all-pervasiveness - that, like its Roman predecessor, renders it so vulnerable. Can it really hope to be everywhere at once?
Can it really prop up Israel, contain Iraq, appease Iran, intimidate Libya, bomb the Taliban back into the Stone Age (admittedly, by the look of them, not too great a distance), police the Balkans, deter the Chinese from invading Taiwan, build a space shield to ward off rogue Russian missiles, meet its obligations to South Korea, keep India and Pakistan from brawling with atomic bombs, cut off the drug traffic from Latin America, create fortress-like borders to prevent a repeat of Tuesday's horrors - can it do all this, and at the same time ward off recession and remain the motor of the world economy? As Enoch Powell used to say: one has only to pose the question to know the answer.
If this sounds anti-American, it isn't meant to be. I sincerely hope that America can manage it all. I don't want to see it retreat. I feel like the ancient Briton in the famous painting of the last Roman galley leaving England: I lie on the shore and stretch out my hand to a country that, for all its faults, remains the great protector of civilisation.
But the dust-covered streets of Manhattan, and the images of men and women, coated in ash, groping and gasping in the darkness, created an irresistible reminder of that other great symbol of Rome's eventual destruction: Pompeii.
President Bush said on Tuesday night that America wouldn't topple, even if its skyscrapers did. In the short term, thankfully, that is true. But the collapse of the World Trade Centre surely marks the end of the Antonine Age of American hegemony and the start of darker and more uncertain times.
Pliny (who died in the eruption that wiped out Pompeii) was perhaps a wiser man than Wolfe, when he observed in his Natural History that "this alone is certain, namely that there is no such thing as certainty, and that nothing is more wretched and conceited than man".
