Progress and Decline

by LOVELL THOMPSON

1

DECLINE and fall.” The words have threatened us with increasing insistence ever since Gibbon wrote them into a title over one hundred and fifty years ago. First there was a premonition that the pattern of the failure of Rome might somehow be applied to a later day. Then with Lord Acton’s familiar phrase, “Power corrupts,” premonition became more explicit. Thus word by word a terror and an idea grew until now it stands before us a fully developed thesis — deterministic, appalling, convincing. Yet as time unrolls the carpet of events it becomes possible to see that we are not quite sticking to the apocalyptic schedule. Moreover, there seem to be some aspects of decline that are distinctly tolerable; and that in turn begins to make us wonder just what the distinction is between progress and decline.

During the last fifty years a lot has been said about the evolution of history and a science has been formulated which has brought us to the border of a new understanding of ourselves and a new understanding of our destiny. The science is the science of history; which as at present constituted suggests that civilizations, like men, grow old and die.

It was Brooks Adams who, about 1895, first undertook the dark journey toward the ends of knowledge and set down a description of the cycle of human society in a book entitled The Law of Civilization and Decay. He pictured society as ruled in its formative stages by fear, and in its final stages by greed. Fear and greed brought about the consolidation of peoples into societies by military and economic means which ultimately became self-consuming, thus achieving an end to integration and a redispersal of people upon the land. Brooks discussed the writing of his book at length with his brother Henry, who found its pessimism congenial. It was Henry who gave the new study a name — the science of history — and it was he also who foresaw the danger that would beset it. His fear and doubt are described in an astonishingly prophetic passage which was written in 1893 and which is here sharply abridged: —

If this science pointed to a socialistic triumph, would society as now constituted tolerate the open assertion which should affirm its overthrow? If on the other hand the new science required us to announce that huge armaments, advancing materialism, declining arts, were to be continued, exaggerated, no one would listen with satisfaction. If finally society must revert to absolute faith and a revealed religion, it commits suicide.

Henry’s interest continued throughout his life. His two greatest books, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and The Education were odd secret elaborations of Brooks’s thought.

Brooks Adams’s book was a hasty sketch of the new idea. The major statement of the thesis comes from Oswald Spengler. The Adamses were dazzling and distressed. Spengler was terrified and perverse and greatly gifted. His approach is more vague, more mystical, and more illuminating than that of Adams. He gives to each civilization a personality shaped by the land of its birth. In Spengler’s view, when this personality has attained full expression it dies in the last analysis from a lack of purpose. Under the discipline of his magic, the rise of the pyramids, the death of Rome, the chaos of China, and the mystery of the Dark Ages become logical links in an inevitable chain of events.

Since Spengler much has been written about the cycle of civilization, but the first book to achieve Spengler’s breadth of view and at the same time a real breadth of distribution was the one-volume abridgment of Arnold J. Toynbee’s Study of History. The essential contribution that Toynbee makes to the Adams-Spengler thesis is the suggestion that what Spengler has pictured as a single personality might better be thought of as a family group, having a family likeness but many lives.

The author of the Study of History seems to be a bit like the bird that is supposed to clean the crocodile’s teeth. He goes through history from tooth to tooth with such a fine assiduity that the great, grim conclusion never bites him. He is not resigned to destruction like Brooks Adams; he does not revel in it like Spengler; he suspends judgment for the next volume.

The absolute value of any philosophy is a thing to be doubted. It is suspect as a cover-up for the errors of the age rather than the matrix of events. Today we are in some need of a rationale with which to face the possibility of despair, and at least one thing can be said with assurance about the deterministic outlook to which the scientists of history incline: it relieves the individual psyche of responsibility. Moreover, time has now begun to demonstrate a kind of eerie relevancy in the vision of progress which Brooks beheld when he looked out upon the twentieth century from the shelter of the nineteenth, and which through later philosophers of history has come at last to popular consideration.

Ever since the first white blackbird was pecked to death, there has been instinctive resistance to the new idea. The science of history, as Henry Adams pointed out, offered little that men would willingly believe, and the difficulty of acceptance has been aggravated by a disfiguring murkiness in all the presentations.

The scientists of history have employed an anthropomorphic terminology and the pathetic fallacy in the exposition of their findings. They have described the abstraction of the body politic in terms which can only apply to quaking flesh. Taken in by their own melodrama, they have been led on to use the false analogy of the diseases of deterioration and irregular old age to describe a process which must be assumed to be natural if it is to be assumed at all. Finally, they have supposed that a society may be valued only in terms of its monuments, which is in all probability to judge the individuals of which it is composed by their frustrations rather than by their fulfillments.

2

BECAUSE the whole argument has been emotionally off its feet since the beginning, it has wanted calm evaluation by ordinary men. We have been fascinated by the latter-day Isaiahs whose prophecy seemed half fulfilled; but none can read them without a sense of desolation, and neither the deep resignation of Brooks Adams nor the moralistic quaver of Arnold Toynbee will assuage the empty nightmare fear.

A science of history is to some extent an art of prophecy, and so to the same extent events today are proving or disproving the validity of such a science. Let us attempt to check the prophecies of the scientists against the state of the world today.

Brooks Adams felt that in Rome the engineer and the slave had replaced the craftsman: “They first ran up a cheap core of rubble . . . afterwards veneered with marble.” To one who lived with the pretentious mansions of fifty years ago that may have seemed an answer for America also. It doesn’t seem like the whole story now. The welder forty stories in the air cementing the steel joints of a skyscraper is not the slave that Brooks Adams saw. The great private houses of Mr. Adams’s day are falling into ruin now or being taken over by the charitable tax-exempt. In their place the universal small house breeds in every meadow.

About the small house Toynbee, on the other hand, has a phrase that is more appropriate. It is, “standardization through disintegration.” His picture is of a society losing its coherence and preparing to return to its original simple pattern of individual units. Yet for those who have not heard it called “disintegration,” the servantless little house with television and washing machines and flowers and equality might look almost idyllic. Prophecy seems to have gone beyond coincidence, but somehow fallen short of truth.

The small house on wheels presents another aspect of decline. Nothing in Brooks Adams’s cosmogony provided for the trailer. Child of the ship’s cabin and the tepee, the prairie schooner and pullman, the trailer might easily have been seen by a prophet gazing into a crystal ball. But if Mr. Adams had seen it, with ivy at its window, plying demurely at the heels of its roadmaster upon the broad black strip with its white center line stretching geometrically to the vanishing point on the horizon, he might have been excused for not understanding in 1890 just what it was that he saw.

On the other hand, in Spengler’s vision, two decades later, there is a space where the trailer would look almost inevitable: —

Infinite space is the ideal that the Western world has always striven to find. Dramas like that of the emigration to America — man by man, each in his own account, driven by deep promptings to loneliness — or the Spanish Conquest, or the California gold rush, dramas or uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatsoever upon the home feeling. No other culture, not even the Chinese, knows them. . . . We see emerging everywhere the prime symbol, Limitless Space.

In Toynbee’s vision there is room for the trailer only between chapters, but his thinking is consistent with the pattern that the trailer suggests. One feels that it would be important to him to know the motive of the driver and the waterer of the ivy. Are they, in short, rats who are leaving the ship because it is run by incompetent men, or are they men who leave the ship because it has been infested by overcompetent rats? Are these proletarian founders of a new society or betrayers of an old? Most probably Toynbee would regard the couple in the trailer as members of an internal proletariat fleeing disaster.

An external proletariat is in Toynbee’s view made up of half-digested immigrant groups — the overcompetent rats — whose customs color the culture of the land of their adoption. Today, the music to which we dance no longer springs from sources indigenous to our culture. It finds its inspiration in the barbarian days of other cultures from Central Africa to the South Pacific. To Toynbee, this phenomenon is “ barbarization by contact with an external proletariat”; and that, says Toynbee further, is an example of the “receptivity of the dominant minority in a disintegrating society.”

He was not the only one to make the point: —

Although the monied aristocracy remained supreme down to the final disintegration of the West, emigration began very early to modify the base of society, by the injection of a considerable amount of imaginative blood.

Thus Brooks Adams, in the nineties, appears also to suggest the African source of tin-pan alley and the advent of Irving Berlin, but he is speaking of the reign of Claudius. Spongier confirms the findings of his colleagues: “The end is a sunset reflected in forms revived for a moment by pedant or eclectic. . . . We today are in this condition — playing a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art.”

So we disintegratees discover that Rodgers and Hammerstein are chanting a vesper song in the enchanted evening of a most unusual day. Perhaps this is true. There is indeed a curious relevance, and yet even in anthropomorphic terms there seems to be something to be said for disintegration. The grace of cultural humility — the gift of being able to accept beauty in other cultures — may be the rich recompense of fading strength. Now at last we may be set free in some measure of the egoism and frustration of youth. The sunset is more beautiful than the dawn. Progress and decline seem to merge.

Mr. Toynbee’s abridger has supplied at the back of his book a most careful summary-outline of the whole. From it let us take a single sentence which seems consistent with the two elder seers and which will serve to carry us forward to what, for many of us, now replaces art and literature: —

Vulgarity and Barbarism in Art is the price commonly paid for the abnormally wide diffusion of the art of a disintegrating civilization.

Examples of vulgarity and barbarism in art are all about us. The pseudo-primitivism of a James Thurber or a Grant Wood or the animated cartoons of Walt Disney or a piece of sculpture of Gaston Lachaise is no less than a rendering of the sorry fix in which we find ourselves by men who are caught in the slack tide of cultural development and have been forced to make novelty replace progression.

Against this background, such a major expression of our age as the modern picture magazine is seen to be a profoundly sinister symptom. It reveals the standardless eclecticism of our taste. This condition is what Toynbee refers to in ringing polysyllables as the “nemesis of creativity; Idolization of an ephemeral self.”

Yet do we really expect to achieve universal education without building up the mean at the expense of the extremes; and is that bad? So much that is good, so much that we have sought so long, now is set forth to us as the symptom of death and decay — it makes us wonder if all the angles are being covered. Knowledge is progress, progress is growth, growth postulates death. Is it just like that?

3

WHEN the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be”; virtue and “health” may not be one. The only good society may be an aged and ailing one. Perhaps it is not a moral equivalent for war that we need. It may be a peaceful equivalent for morals. Passion spent is such an equivalent. That is what Brooks’s devil in Massachusetts told him. That is the inference in Spengler’s work, and finally that is what Toynbee declines to face, when he poses an immortal society based on Christian faith. Let us continue to check our progress toward boundless death against the storm charts of our despondent pilots.

Brooks Adams, for example, seemed to foresee one of the great social changes of our day: —

As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age.

With such a note as this, the whole new mushroom crop of infants lullabyed to dreamland by the radio, of delinquent children and of teen-age tasters of forbidden sweets, comes into focus as a new and mighty cast of flightless nestlings, dropped prematurely from their cradles, squawking and croaking for food and diversion in the undergrowth of society. Other corroborative examples of the creeping death spring up on every hand. Yet are our children really more uncared for than Goldilocks or Cinderella or Cuchulainn or Oliver Twist or even Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Moreover, if the Prince and the Pauper were to meet today they would have more than their faces in common. They would have a common tongue of box scores and Bob Hope cracks, for both are nurtured at the single mighty breast of TV. Then hasn’t something new occurred on which the prophets did not quite set the proper value? This new expanding freedom of communication is one of the privileges of decay, one of the beauties of the “abnormally wide diffusion of art.”

Consider so homely a thing as the modern department store — certainly one of the greatest monuments to materialism ever raised by an expiring society. It stands like a pyramid looking up and down the ages for its equal.

All of our philosophers foresaw the weekday plight of the assembly-line slave but not the weekend joy with which he mass-consumes that which he mass-produced, for mass consumption must accompany mass production. Who buys the paint and the power saws, the hand cultivators and the larkspur seed, and the manuals of instruction? Some theorist should puzzle over the fearful and simple springtime joy that perfumes the hardware counters and the model kitchens. May it not be the seed of a new freedom from guilt?

Brooks Adams suggests that it becomes cheaper to import labor than to breed it when the peak of economic competition is reached. However, when you consider the recent change in the tax law permitting the division of income between husband and wife, you see that government has set a heavy price upon the carefree and loveless life — the wife, if not the children, becomes a fiscal necessity. Our lawns can be cut by the fruit of marriage at a positive profit. For the moment at least the income tax is providing us with a relative freedom from privilege.

Growth toward death, virtue only for the ailing knowledge that binds, a peaceful equivalent for morals, spending your way out of depression, all are merely different statements of a reversal of values that occurs when society arrives at the top of the divide on its wheels of progress and begins to roll forward down the other side. May it not be easier to hold ourselves back than to urge ourselves forward? Washing machines, radio audiences, income taxes; these are techniques new to history. They must affect the terms of our decline. We have failed to realize what every child with a sled well knows — the technique for taking a flexible flyer up hill is not the same as for taking it down.

In one way or another it is the reign of reason that the anatomists of history fear: —

In the last stage of consolidation, the economic, and perhaps the scientific intellect, is propagated. - BROOKS ADAMS

Then style fades out honey-combed with intellect, fragile, ready for self-destruction. — OSWALD SPENGLER

Philosophy discourages those who feel its attractions from throwing themselves into missionary work on its behalf. — ARNOLD TOYNBEE

The three wise men suddenly turn up naked and trembling in the light of their own brilliance. Is intellect then a poison so to be feared?

We cannot advance without thinking — without whittling down the precious ingredient of progress which is ignorance. It is ignorance — that is, something more to learn, a vacuum to be filled — that has moved the world. Each man for himself and devil take the foremost. It is ignorance that blinds the wise to the folly of power, and ignorance that teaches the less wise to accept starvation. If ignorance is vanquished what wise man can there be so complacent as to accept responsibility for another’s destiny, what fool so foolish as to trust his in another’s hands? In such a world absolute vice becomes the ruler and again we have the reversal of the rules: Corruption confers power, absolute corruption absolute power.

Clearly intellect is not of itself a thing to be feared but rather the surrounding evils which intellect will not stoop to extirpate. Yet it must be remembered that intellect now has new tools. Now the question comes, Is man to abjure reason and intellect merely to outlive the ice age like the turtle?

4

WE HAVE been trying to check prophecy against events and we have found some inconsistencies. We have already seen how the ideals of our time become the symptoms of decay under the frosty touch of such a phrase as “the abnormally wide diffusion of art in a disintegrating society” and this again suggests that the great monuments of history are monuments of frustration; “challenge and response” is what Toynbee calls it. Let us then consider two great monuments of our own time which, if they are monuments, are monuments of frustration and seem to indicate that “decline” whether it be desirable or otherwise is not indubitably at hand. These monuments are the Empire State Building and the Atomic Bomb.

First then, the Empire State. Remember the apparently materialistic impulse that fired its rocketlike spring toward heaven and the beautiful severity of its steel skeleton as it first rose out of the chaos of New York style; and remember the inappropriate passage from Brooks Adams on Roman architecture, “They first ran up a cheap core of rubble.” Now remember its acres of windows catching the horizontal sun or glowing in the winter dusk: —

The window as architecture is peculiar to the Faustian soul, and the most significant symbol of its depth experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge into the boundless.

That is Spengler speaking of the early Gothic, and Henry Adams: —

You must try first to rid your mind of the traditional idea that Gothic is an intentional expression of religious gloom. The necessity for light, was the motive of the Gothic architects. They needed light and always more light until they sacrificed safety and common sense in trying to get it.

And now at last think of the mighty shaft capped with its idle mooring mast and read in the last paragraph of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: —

Of all the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the Gothic cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be the slender nervure . . . the visible effort to throw off a visible strain — never let us forget that faith alone supports it, and that, if faith fails, Heaven is lost.

Spongier says that in a disintegrating society “Worldly arts drive out the great art of developed stone. . . . The artist appears, and ‘plans’ what formerly grew.” That may have been true when Gustave Eiffel designed his tower or when Richardson designed Henry Adams’s Washington mansion. Chartres Cathedral and the skyscrapers of New York are alike anonymous accretions of circumstance.

Ever since Gibbon, classical Rome has been used as the historical counterpart of our own time. Brooks Adams mentioned it and Spengler particularly regarded New York as an expression of megalomania and megalomania at a stage when culture had ceased to develop and could only expand in size without changing in form. In the Empire State Building there is much more than American megalomania and coincidence. It does not correspond to the materialistic Rome of Lucretius. It seems to represent, in Henry Adams’s words, “an anonymous aspiration — the visible effort to throw off a visible strain, all our haunting nightmares are expressed as though it were the cry of human suffering.” It is too youthful a symbol to spring from the sidewalks of Megapolis. In short it indicates an unconsidered factor at work in the process of our evolution.

Toynbee believes that new ground may fertilize an old society. Perhaps what actually happens is that primitive conditions block the full flow of knowledge from generation to generation so that the agent of life — ignorance — springs up once more like yeast in the loaf. Ignorance taking the form of innocence and greed and hope threw up the magnificent shaft of the Empire State.

We begin to see how the prophets have been relevant but wrong. Let us hear then Spengler’s prophecy that the Atomic Bomb is an improbable nightmare: —

The more dynamics exhausts its inner possibilities as it nears its goal, the more decidedly the historical characters in the picture come to the front. . . . The course of this process is marked by the appearance of whole series of daring hypotheses, all of a like sort, which are only apparently demanded by experimental results and which, in fact, world feelings and mythology imagined as long ago as the Gothic Age.

Above all this is manifested in the bizarre hypothesis of atomic disintegration which elucidates the phenomena of radioactivity, and according to which uranium atoms that have kept their essence unaltered in spite of all external influences, for millions of years, quite suddenly without assignable cause explode.

It was at the outset of the Gothic . . . that the myth of the world’s end . . . the twilight of the gods, arose . . . the passionate thrust into distance is Faustian. Force, Will, has aim where there is aim. There is, for the inquiring eye, an end. That which the perspective of oil-painting expressed by means of the vanishing point. . . .

It appears that Spengler underrated the danger. The hypothesis was not bizarre and the world’s end is far closer to us than myth. The great pessimist lived in a fool’s paradise; but how relevant when you consider that the star — the farthest thing that man can look at, the vanishing point of Western man’s passionate thrust into distance — on a field of dark and dirty blue, the color of the sea on an ugly night — western ocean of mystery — the sea the Mayflower crossed — became the symbol of the greatest power the world has known. The insignia on the wing of the plane that carried the atom bomb.

Spengler closed the circle of knowledge too soon. Green pastures of terror and ignorance open before us on which intellect still may feed.

5

IT IS true that war and starvation are frequently the means by which a great civilization is dissolved, and even if this were not so it might be hard to consider with equanimity the return of our greatgrandchildren to flint and steel. Yet, whatever may await, there is no harm in trying to apply the law of history to our own advantage. We may or may not be able to escape the patterns of our destiny. In any case the first step is to escape the language of despair and self-reproach — the only tongue in which those patterns have been set forth. There is nothing decadent about walking up a hill and sliding down the other side.

Maybe we will never build another Empire State; the innocence that built it is gone. We don’t want one any more. We may not speak of lost arts, only lost desires; and the desires, remember, are those that spring from inadequacy and frustration. So we should speak of lost needs rather than lost desires.

The meek resolve the dilemma of progress by making no progress. That choice is not open to all of us. The solution that Toynbee suggests, which may be briefly stated as trust in the Christian God, looks alarmingly like the one that Henry Adams threw out half a century earlier as suicide — but there are other possibilities. Die we may. No doubt we will, but for civilizations as well as men it also matters when and how.

Those areas in which we seem to have diverged from the script that has been written for us suggest means whereby we might tinker with history’s time machine. Remember that there appeared to be factors at work which the prophets did not assess. Spengler’s dismissal of the atomic bomb is the most sinister and most striking indication. Reside this new field for intellectual conquest in the infinitely small, the Empire State Building appears to indicate some renewal of youthful folly. Time perhaps has been expanded for us, both backwards and forwards, and we may make use of this uncertain reprieve from uncertain destiny.

An old society protects itself from inanition by expanding; in radio, in television, in the high-speed press it has new power of expansion. It also gains a few scary moments of growth by “buying” through immigration or subjugation a few new links to feed in at the lower end of the chain of progress. It tries to feed the top back in at the bottom by giving away accumulations of goods in the classic form of bread and circuses. Today in America we have replaced the bread and circuses with model kitchens and larkspur seed; and the arts of mass consumption are doing something to enable our tax exemptions, when they grow up, to make the machine replace the mob. We are not competent to do more than snap at the heels of the problem but the elements of a new technique of survival are here.

Above all these new techniques stands something newer yet, the possibility of a strategy of survival which may be derived from the new knowledge of the physiology of events which the scientists of history have brought us and which like evolution is becoming a part of the thought of all men. As in the case of Scrooge a prophecy may modify the very thing it foretells.

However, survival can’t be purchased with a nickel and a box top. We have already been given some insight into the kind of price we shall have to pay. In art we must accept simplification in order to gain expanding acceptance (Toynbee calls it vulgarization). “Custom-built” and “mass-produced” are two words that do not go together — we must accept standardization but it is a reaction to and a defense against disintegration; it is not standardization through disintegration. Furthermore, we may standardize at new highs. The income tax assists us to preserve the primitive family unit in spite of the “pressure of economic competition which regularly intensifies with social consolidation.”

These symptoms of decay are defense mechanisms working in our favor. The processes of consolidation involve the relationships of men. As the techniques of power improve, one man comes to exercise authority directly over many. Thus the units of which society is formed, the pyramids of command, flatten out, become larger and less elastic. The difference is the difference between plate armor and chain mail. In time, if there is time, we might evolve a mathematics of sociology, consciously creating structures best fitted to meet various strains.

It will help also to limit our objective. Why insist on an earthly immortality? We may strive for a preliminary goal of a golden age of a thousand years and thus we may resolve the dilemma of progress short of the maturity of death.