by Kerry Bolton
Sima defines “The Way” as based on “filial piety, compassion, humanity, righteousness, loyalty, trustworthiness, ritual, and music”; the function of music being that of “harmony”. The changes that occur are either superficial and have not touched the essence of “The Way” or they are deviations. While changes in material culture are superficial, what subverts “The Way” are changes in beliefs, including, according to Sima, Buddhism, Daoism, and “perverted practices” such as geomancy. When influential at the imperial court Sima opposed any changes in customs and beliefs.83 He was an avid Confucian.
The Golden Age of the Zhou dynasty, based on ritual order, was subverted by King Weilie of Zhou in 430 B.C., undermining imperial authority and leading to the fall of the Zhou. The “dynastic cycles” of rise and fall were caused by the inability of successive dynasties to recover the harmonious social order of the early Zhou, defined by and operating through correct rituals. Sima writes in Zizhi tongjian that “among the emperor’s duties there is none greater than ritual”.84
Influenced by Buddhist cyclic principles, the Samurai ethic refers to the “flow of time” in the ethical treatise Hagakure, by Jocho Yamamoto (1659-1719). In his commentary on Hagakure for the present, the Japanese literary figure Yukio Mishima, alludes to this cyclicism. Mishima states: “Lamenting as he does the decadence of his era and the degeneration of the young samurai, Jocho is also a realistic observer of the flow of time…” Resisting the flow of time rarely produces desirable results, he states.85 Citing Book Two of Hagakure Mishima quotes: “The climate of an age is unalterable. That conditions are worsening steadily is proof that we have entered that last stage of the Law”.86 Jocho employed the analogy of the seasons, reminiscent of Spengler, in describing the historical cycles: “However the season cannot always be spring or summer, nor can we have daylight forever”. According to Jocho’s advice, one should not look to nostalgia and the return of obsolete forms, nor to the superficiality of what is “up to date” while “detesting the old fashioned”, but should “make each era as good as it can be according to its nature”.87
“Progress” & Its Dissidents
The assumption that there is a line of human ascent was given intellectual legitimacy by the Enlightenment philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet, a primary influence in the French Revolution, who served as secretary of the Paris Assembly, albeit dying in a Jacobin jail in 1794. Condorcet has remained an influential figure in the prevalent notion that history is one of “progress” through science. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind was Condorcet’s magnum opus that has had a seminal influence on “modern” thinking. Condorcet assumed an “unbroken chain” of human history.88 He assured his readers that historians no longer need make assumptions about the past; all is now clear and man’s past, present and future can be mapped out with confidence by “collecting and arranging facts”. This has formed the basis of “modern” history ever since. Condorcet wrote:
“From the period that alphabetical writing was known in Greece, history is connected by an uninterrupted series of facts and observations, with the period in which we live, with the present state of mankind in the most enlightened countries of Europe; and the picture of the progress and advancement of the human mind becomes strictly historical. Philosophy has no longer anything to guess, has no more suppositious combinations to form; all it has to do is to collect and arrange facts, and exhibit the useful truths which arise from them as a whole, and from the different bearings of their several parts”.89
The triumph of progress is assured and will usher a universal state of equality through the supremacy of the rational mind. Despite precisely those “Enlightenment” doctrines having brought Condorcet to a Jacobin prison and to his death, we are assured that mankind is “perfectible”, even if a liberal use of the guillotine might be required along the “progressive path” of human perfection, based on “the constancy of the laws of nature”. In triumphal spirit Condorcet assures us history teaches that mankind will reach Utopia:
“There remains only a third picture to form,—that of our hopes, or the progress reserved for future generations, which the constancy of the laws of nature seems to secure to mankind. And here it will be necessary to show by what steps this progress, which at present may appear chimerical, is gradually to be rendered possible, and even easy; how truth, in spite of the transient success of prejudices, and the support they receive from the corruption of governments or of the people, must in the end obtain a durable triumph; by what ties nature has indissolubly united the advancement of knowledge with the progress of liberty, virtue, and respect for the natural rights of man; how these blessings, the only real ones, though so frequently seen apart as to be thought incompatible, must necessarily amalgamate and become inseparable, the moment knowledge shall have arrived at a certain pitch in a great number of nations at once, the moment it shall have penetrated the whole mass of a great people, whose language shall have become universal, and whose commercial intercourse shall embrace the whole extent of the globe”.90
Here we see the doctrines of the American Founding Fathers and of Karl Marx alike: of our “modern” democracy, socialism, liberalism, communism and capitalism; and of precisely the doctrines that the USA has tried to impose on the world, whether by Hollywood or by bombs. This universal Utopia would be ushered by an enlightened elite, who knows best how to organise humanity to ensure its “happiness”. Condorcet wrote of this elite: “This union having once taken place in the whole enlightened class of men, this class will be considered as the friends of human kind, exerting themselves in concert to advance the improvement and happiness of the species”.91 How this happiness is to be achieved, wrote Condorcet, is through “commercial intercourse” embracing the whole world.
To these sweeping philosophical assumptions from the Enlightenment, a more “scientific” façade was applied with the use of evolutionary theory the following century. There was an optimism of the 19th century with the introduction of the Machine Age as the ultimate in human potential and of infinite duration. This optimism among the highest intellectual circles was cogently expressed by leading 19th century evolutionist Dr. A. R. Wallace in a book optimistically entitled The Wonderful Century (1898):
“Not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it but… it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era of human progress. … We men of the 19th century have not been slow to praise it. The wise and the foolish, the learned and the unlearned, the poet and the pressman, the rich and the poor, alike swell the chorus of admiration for the marvellous inventions and discoveries of our own age, and especially for those innumerable applications of science which now form part of our daily life, and which remind us every hour of our immense superiority over our comparatively ignorant forefathers”.92
Perhaps few passages more succinctly expresses the antithesis between the modern and the traditional. Dr. Wallace epitomises the darwinian outlook, of which he was the primary proponent alongside Charles Darwin, not just in terms of biological evolution, but in terms of how this evolutionary doctrine is applied to history and society. We “moderns” see history and society as evolutionary. Our era is regarded as the apex of history, with all other civilisations as preludes. It is hubris and egotistical blindness. Never mind that the ruins of prior civilisations such as that of the Roman, Chinese, Incan, Egyptian, or Aztec attest to periods of history millennia ago that had technical grandeur every bit as magnificent as that of the “modern” world, and one day some civilisation millennia hence, will be excavating the ruins of New York City.
As for the present state of historical scholarship, Francis Fukuyama, when deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff, delivered a lecture at the University of Chicago in 1989, subsequently printed in The National Interest, and expanded as a book in 1992, tellingly called The End of History. Fukuyama’s influential treat
ise is that there is nothing beyond liberal-democracy, and that this will achieve universal supremacy. Fukuyama sees the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War as ushering a new dispensation. He sees the universal order of liberal-democracy as “the triumph of the West”:
“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. [Emphasis added].
“For better or worse, much of Hegel’s historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man”.93
Fukuyama’s “triumph of the Western idea” cannot distinguish between “Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran”. The epitome of Western civilisation is “consumerist Western culture” spread to every corner of the globe, to every hill-tribe and Amazon forest dweller, Asian peasant and Siberian villager. This is the culmination not just of Western achievement, but of history. What Marx saw as the “march of history,” of “progress” culminating in the “end of history” with the triumph of Communism over the world, Fukuyama sees for liberal-democracy, which he regards as the ideological foundation of “consumerist culture”. It is the messianic aim of the USA as the carrier of a culture-pathogen throughout the world, as expressed approvingly and in similar terms by another U.S. strategist Colonel Ralph Peters, considered in a closing chapter. For now, we are tracing the historical origins of the “Idea of Progress” that is itself a symptom of Western decline. Fukuyama, as heir to the European Enlightenment that engulfed the remnants of Europe’s traditional society through revolution, sees “human history” as a linear evolution through a “series of stages”, as did Marx. He misses the ebb and flow of history, the rise and fall of cultures, each with their own analogous epochs of birth, flowering, decay and death, succeeded by the birth of another High Culture. To Fukuyama and the progressives, the meaning of all history is just a prelude, a series of footnotes to the end of the path: liberal-democracy and its consumer society. Alexander the Great thought the same about his own “universal civilisation”.
The Western intelligentsia do not recognise that their type and their ideas have all been seen before. They are the products of an epoch of decline and death, not the heralds of a new dawn. Their “progress” is a phantom that will end in collapse. They are the harbingers of a disease that they mistake for health, with which they aim to infect all others in the name of “progress”. They call this infection “liberal democracy”; in medical pathology it is called syphilis.
Before this epoch of “Enlightenment scholarship”, which is based on the collection of data, as Condorcet put it, the traditional outlook was a clear perception of how history unfolded. There was a perception among Christian philosophers that putrefaction had entered the world after the Fall of Man, which meant that the social organism grows old and dies like other organisms. Man’s decay walked beside his increase in knowledge. With knowledge comes arrogance, or “hubris” as the Greeks called it, and self-destruction, when man seeks to become “god”. Can we not recognise this decay today alongside our “modern” technology that accompanies the primacy of matter over soul? It is Icarus ascending to the heights and falling to his death, Adam eating the fruit of knowledge and being expelled from Eden.
Amidst the flowering culture of Elizabethan England, the poet John Donne perceived that despite the greatness of his era, there was a degeneration of mankind from a formerly higher state:
“As the world is the whole frame of the world, God hath put into it a reproofe, a rebuke, lest it seem eternall, which is, a sensible decay and age in the whole frame of the world, and every piece thereof. The seasons of the year irregular and distempered; the Sun fainter, and languishing; men lesse in stature and shorter lived. No addition, but only every yeare, new sorts, new species of wormes and flies, and sicknesses which argue more and more putrefaction of which they are engendered”.94
Godfrey Goodman, chaplain to Elizabeth I, stated that the further something proceeds from its source the more corrupt it becomes. “And as we see decline and decay in individual parts of nature, as for instance in man, so the universe itself must partake of the nature of its parts and pass through the cycle of youth, old age, and death”.95 Ibn Khaldun, the Arab Spengler, said much the same during the 14th century.
The epochal crisis of World War I prompted a reconsideration of the West’s optimism. Scientists and philosophers, including Carl Jung and Oswald Spengler, reconsidered what the modern epoch of Western civilisation had lost when materialism and science made the soul redundant and as Nietzsche said, “killed God”. and despite his own aversion to Christianity saw nihilism as the result:
“The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him’ - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.96
Carl Jung, who opposed the mechanistic, materialistic direction of modern science, including the psychiatry of his former mentor Sigmund Freud, saw in the fetish for “progress” something different from that of the darwinian optimists: that the layers of man’s psyche were not keeping apace with the rapid developments of modernity, which would mean a fractured personality, suppressing those levels of the psyche that are the legacy of our ancestors. Modern man therefore denies most of what he really is.
“A great horde of worthless people do in fact give themselves a deceptive air of modernity by skipping the various stages of development and the tasks of life they represent. Suddenly they appear by the side of the truly modern man - uprooted wraiths, bloodsucking ghosts whose emptiness casts discredit upon him in his unenviable loneliness. Thus it is that the few present-day men are seen by the undiscerning eyes of the masses only through the dismal veil of those spectres, the pseudo-moderns, and are confused with them. ... This, however, should not prevent us from taking it [proficiency] as our criterion of the modern man. We are even forced to do so, for unless he is proficient, the man who claims to be modern is nothing but a trickster. He must be proficient in the highest degree, for unless he can atone by creative ability for his b
reak with tradition, he is merely disloyal to the past. To deny the past for the sake of being conscious only of the present would be sheer futility. Today has meaning only if it stands between yesterday and tomorrow. It is a process of transition that forms the link of past and future. Only the man who is conscious of the present in this sense may call himself modern. Many people call themselves modern - especially the pseudo-moderns. Therefore the really modern man is often found among those who call themselves old fashioned”.97
This crisis of Western civilisation received much attention from the German thinkers during the post-World War I Weimar period. Nietzsche was a primary influence on them, including Spengler and Jung. Unlike the British assumption of the inherent goodness of “progress”, and the French “positivist” philosophers, who have had such a terminal influence on Western philosophy, the German thinkers delineated the contrasts between Kultur and Civilization with the latter representing the decadent epochs. It was Spengler in particular who explained this dichotomy. The differences between Kultur and Civilization are summarised by Jay Sherry in a doctoral thesis98 on Carl Jung:
“The dichotSomy of Kultur/Civilization had become a polemical reference point during the war and was carried over into the Kulturkampf of the Weimar period. The following schematic list might be the best way to organize all this”:
Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico, (1668-1744), considered the father of historical-philosophy, looked at history as something knowable by considering the human condition. At odds with the Enlightenment philosophers, retaining his Catholicism and his belief in the imminence of the divine in nature, Vico rejected the faith in unlimited “progress” that was already beginning to dominate the sciences. He also rejected the Enlightenment faith in “reason” by maintaining the importance of the “imagination” in culture. Vico, looking to antiquity, understood history not as an unfolding of infinite “progress,” but as a cyclic ebb and flow that saw civilisation going through cycles represented by “poetic man,” “heroic man” and “reasonable man”. Vico saw religion as a necessary binding element, again being at odds with the rationalist philosophers.