It seems doubtful that the sitting US president will have spent much time with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I feel confident that several of his lines in the “Song of Myself” might still resonate with Donald Trump. “I know perfectly well”, the poet says, “my own egotism”. Whitman is not alone in this self-consciousness. “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”, he goes on, “I show that size is only development”. A line like that could be the motto of any New York property developer. Whitman then asks, bringing a rare end-rhyme to development: “Have you outstripped the rest? are you the President?” Mr Trump could coolly answer: Yes.

With all this in mind, it is worth noting that Whitman penned a fair number of fraternal lines about China. In a poem of delirious cosmopolitanism, “Salut au monde”, he claimed: “I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl.” We would now write Whitman’s “Yiang-tse” as Yangtze and his “Amour” as Amur; but what matters is that China’s rivers were flowing in the Brooklyn poet’s mind in the middle of the 19th century.

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Assassinating the Ayatollah was uncivilised

By David Lloyd Dusenbury

Whitman even went to Qing-dynasty China, in a poetic transport, to see for himself how the common people lived. “I go among them”, he dreamed. “I mix indiscriminately”. And he found the people of China to be, in the blinding light of his ecstasy, no different from him or from the Americans of his day. “Each of us [is] inevitable”, he thrummed, “Each of us [is] limitless.”

We do not know what it is in Whitman’s ultra-democratic poetry that stirred something in a young Xi Jinping. But as China’s paramount leader returns to the US for another state visit, he surely knows that America has long dreamed of his people.

And it is not only in poetic reveries that the West and China have been friendly. Before the full-bore Industrial Revolution; liberal trade policies (and concomitant trade wars); and the high-watermark of Western imperialism in Whitman’s 19th century, the West and China had several hundred years of largely peaceful cultural, commercial, and intellectual contact. From roughly 1500 to 1800, China and the West rather candidly recognized each other as the world’s most advanced civilizations. Leibniz — a baroque savant and China-watcher avant la lettre — did not hesitate to call them “the two most cultivated parts of the world”.

More recently, and no less importantly, the 21st century’s two great powers were ultimately aligned in all three of the 20th’s great contests: the First World War, Second World War, and the Cold War. This is currently better known in Beijing than it is in Washington, London, and Brussels. And, because we rarely hear it in the West, it’s worth taking each conflict in sequence.

A couple of years before Whitman’s poems began to appear in translation in the pages of the New Culture Movement’s Young China magazine, the Chinese republic declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The casus belli was a lawless German strike, in February 1917, on a French transport ship sailing in international waters. Hundreds of Chinese nationals aboard the vessel had drowned. In March 1917, the Chinese parliament voted to break diplomatic relations with Germany. But this brought no change to Germany’s scandalous U-boat policy. In August 1917, Beijing then joined London and Paris, Petrograd and Washington in their titanic struggle against the Central Powers.

China’s man in Washington at the time was a formidable diplomat with an evocative name: Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo. In a letter printed a month or so later, in The American Journal of International Law, Wellington Koo notified the US Secretary of State of his government’s grave decision: “I have the honor to inform you that China… declares that a state of war exists with Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Notably, Wellington Koo stressed in this letter that his government would “observe all the stipulations of the conventions signed at the International Peace Conferences at The Hague”. The Republic of China, founded in 1912, would uphold the laws of “civilized warfare” that Imperial Germany had relinquished. In other words, Wellington Koo’s Asian republic was more civilized than one of Europe’s great monarchies.

In the Second World War, meanwhile, the Republic of China staked a similar claim, fighting alongside Washington in defense of civilization. But now, the lawless power China had to resist was Japan: a monarchical Asian ally of a post-monarchical Nazi Germany. On 7 December 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor without formally declaring war. This “treacherous” strike was made in violation of the conventional laws of war and later judged to be illegal — which is to say, uncivilized — by a postwar tribunal. The more immediate effect of Pearl Harbor was to forge a momentous link between the US and China.

Why so momentous? Well, on 1 January 1942, a statement titled the “Declaration by United Nations” was drawn up and signed at the Arcadia Conference in Washington, DC. The ur-document of the United Nations, it had four original drafters and signatories: the US, UK, USSR and China. It is no coincidence these four great powers still form the core of the UN Security Council (with France joining later). China belongs to the innermost circle of powers that created the postwar order, and the UN.

Just a couple of days after the Arcadia declaration was signed, Chiang Kai-shek — or “Generalissimo Chiang”, as he was known — accepted the “supreme command over all forces of the United Powers… in the Chinese theater”. The idea for this centralization of “United Nations” forces in Chiang’s hands came from President Roosevelt himself. And there can be no doubt that FDR had a strategic vision for what he called “the gallant people of China”. By May 1942, he was declaring that “in the future a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in eastern Asia but in the whole world”.

China remained “unconquerable” at the close of the Second World War. But its anticolonial struggle had not decided the issue of a decades-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. Of course, Chiang and the Republic of China did not hold the mainland; in the bitter fight for sovereignty, the Maoists prevailed. A successor republic, a “People’s Republic”, was formed in Beijing in October 1949. And with it, a steely party-state was formed which had immense debts to one of America’s other wartime allies: Stalin’s USSR.

The cruelties of China’s civil war and the fantastical complexity of early-Cold War geopolitics cannot be dealt with here. But two brief points can be made. First, China’s postwar settlement in no way cancels out the vast sacrifices made by the “gallant people” of the country during the Second World War. Second, the communist ascendancy in China was not preordained. Indeed, certain actions by the US may have moved the dial in favor of Mao and his Soviet-backed troops. Frank Dikötter has stressed in a recent book that it was FDR’s successor, President Truman, who put an arms embargo in place in 1946: not on Mao and his communist brigades, but on Generalissimo Chiang and his nationalists.

A 1946 New York Times headline tells us why: “Aid to China Hinges on Ending of Strife and Unification of Nation”. Truman confirms this in a personal note he sent to Chiang. In it, the US president made clear that his government’s “generous attitude” towards the Republic of China was highly conditional: Chiang had to demonstrate “genuine progress” towards achieving a “peaceful settlement” with Mao. In hopes of seeing a coalition government formed in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital, Truman leveraged US money and materiel, imposing more than one ceasefire which, in Dikötter’s view, “changed the course of the civil war”.

The early years of the Cold War were therefore treacherous and highly complex. There is much we still do not fully understand. But however we choose to reconstruct that era, it’s clear that a dangerous bloc-formation swiftly formed within the “Big Four” powers that built the UN: the US and UK in the “West”, the USSR and China in the “East”. And no one disputes that China, having aligned with Washington and London in the century’s first two global conflicts, took a hostile posture during the third. This revolutionary, Soviet-backed posture of Mao’s China held up for roughly two decades.

But it is surely worth noting that, for a great power with a 2,000-year history, that’s the blink of an eye. The People’s Republic of China had only been in existence for 22 years when President Nixon touched down in Beijing to make his visionary overtures in February 1972. In the years that followed, Maoist China decided to normalize relations with Washington. And, less than 20 years after that, due in part to the West’s strategic rapprochement with China, the Cold War ended.

This point is especially important. The liberal Nineties narrative of the USSR’s dissolution is highly Eurocentric — but modern China has never been a geopolitical periphery. Any rigorous account of the collapse of the USSR must frankly reckon with the fact that it was not only the Western powers, but the Western powers plus China, which created the conditions that doomed the Soviet system.

Strange to say, the US had a strategic commitment during the Cold War to what we would now call a sort of multipolarity. Cultivating ties with peripheral communist regimes was part of this strategy: Washington’s heavy investment in Tito’s Yugoslavia is a case in point. Nixon’s grand maneuver in 1972 was to invite Mao’s Beijing, a central communist regime, to form a third pole in the bipolar world order of the Seventies. And, indeed, a new pole was formed. “Without abandoning its communist trappings”, as Bruce Mazlish puts it, “China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors has been pursuing its own amalgamation of socialism, Confucianism, and capitalism in a unique blend.” The PRC’s scale is unique, too, and the systemic effects of its late-Cold War opening are often missed in Western discourse.

The triumphalist liberal narrative of the Nineties is also ideologized. Any serious account of China’s reopening to the West must reckon with the fact that it was not instigated or navigated in the early days by Western liberals. Whatever we make of this fact, the breakthrough diplomacy in China was undertaken by Western conservatives: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with some fine diplomatic play by Margaret Thatcher. Beijing has not forgotten who conceived its Cold War détente with the West. Nixon is highly respected in 21st-century China, as he seems to be among a growing number of young Americans.

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But China cannot be reduced to a partisan question in the West. It is too massive, too comprehensive, for that. Our ideologies do not capture it. And it cannot be stressed too heavily that it was Western diplomacy in the Seventies — not politics, not ideology — which drew Beijing back towards Washington, London, and Brussels. It was diplomacy which made “unconquerable China” a stabilizing presence in late-20th-century geopolitics.

It’s probably too much to hope for President Xi to be given a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass during his stay in Washington, DC. But there is, in any case, a pair of words that Whitman brings forward in “Salut au monde” that still speak to the occasion. As he gazes out on the world of the 1850s, Whitman tells us that he sees “barbarisms” and “civilizations”. Not much has changed, perhaps. But this is no time for great-power barbarisms. The stakes are too high.

The task, then, is for China and the West to exemplify their long-related civilizations. Today, we’d be more likely to call them the world’s largest economic zones, and it’s tempting to see these tensions, over AI or rare earths, as insurmountable. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to make the shift to brute economic calculation. For diplomacy is, ultimately, a civilizational legacy. And if diplomacy is what we need in the early 21st century, then surely we can find the strength and calm to engage in it: by returning to the deeper traditions which made several centuries of relatively peaceful trade and intellectual exchange possible between a strong China and a powerful West.

The novel is also a covert assault on ruling-class British ideology. Among other things, it’s a dark parody of R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian classic Coral Island, in which a group of marooned children manage to pull through by sheer public-school spirit and backbone. Jack, the proto-fascist character in Golding’s version, is a hangover from this stiff-upper-lip heritage, but is one of the first of the boys to surrender to barbarism. Golding saw himself as something of an outsider in British middle-class society and was plagued by feelings of social inferiority. For all its literary renown, Lord of the Flies is an act of revenge on the Establishment.

The anti-humanist thesis which shapes the novel is familiar enough. Human beings are in the grip of dark, primordial powers which a skin-deep civilization is too feeble to restrain. Once that civilized veneer cracks, these malevolent forces will break through and play havoc with our moral idealism. Civilization is just a sublimated form of savagery. All this is a rather vulgarized version of Sigmund Freud’s view of the relation between ego and unconscious. But it’s also an outlook deeply influenced by the history of British imperialism, which involved a confrontation between so-called civilization and so-called barbarism. The most subversive moment in that history is recorded in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which the imperialists find a mirror of themselves in the so-called natives. The Other turns out to be as close as breathing. The stiff upper lip is a shield against the fact that there’s something sinisterly attractive about the chaos and bloodlust which the “natives” supposedly represent. Mrs Moore, the sensitive, humane middle-aged woman at the centre of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, feels the vibrations of meaninglessness emanating from the Marabar Caves and loses her grip on life. Joseph Conrad, a naval officer like Golding, speaks in his novel Nostromo of the imperial project as being as pointless as trying to plow the sea. At the very moment when the colonialists need a robust identity in order to impose some order on a resentful population, they are overwhelmed by a sense of cosmic futility. They can only accomplish this project if they are far from home, but being far from home is also what can sap their faith in the enterprise.

This happens in a different way in Lord of the Flies. The terrifying beast which the boys fear is real enough, but it’s inside them, not out in the ocean or deep in the jungle. In promoting its bleak case about humanity, however, the novel stacks the cards in one flagrantly obvious way. The idea is to show that men and women will quickly revert to primitivism if the pressures on them are sufficiently powerful. But Golding’s characters are not men and women but children. And since children are only semi-civilized in any case, it’s no great surprise that they should take to sticking pigs and smashing each other’s glasses. Boys (even choirboys) will be boys. They will also be adults, but they aren’t yet. What if Golding had put the members of a Yorkshire brass band or a bunch of chartered accountants on the island? There’s no assurance that they would have behaved impeccably, but it’s unlikely that they would have torn themselves apart with such alacrity.

Novelists quite often stack the cards to ensure the results they want. Take, for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a satire of Stalinism. The book shows how swiftly the project of building socialism succumbs to a brutal authoritarianism; but to illustrate the point it uses farm animals, and farm animals aren’t remarkable for their ability to engage in complex social or political operations, any more than children are. If you set your case up in a particular way, the conclusions you’re looking for will fall obediently out the other end.

Golding’s novel is an example of what one might call the Room 101 syndrome. In Orwell’s 1984, Room 101 is where you confront what you fear most, and how you cope with this terror is the ultimate test of who you are. The hero has an understandable aversion to having rats burrow through his cheeks, and breaks under this hideous prospect. He cries out to his torturers to do it to his partner instead, and the guilt of this betrayal destroys him. But why should how you act in a moment of extremity be taken to define who you are? A lot of us would betray anyone at all to avoid our tongue being chewed by rodents, including the odd babe-in-arms, but to claim that this reveals our “real” self is absurd. The extreme doesn’t necessarily define the norm. The belief that to press someone to their limit is to discover who they are goes hand-in-hand with the equally dubious claim that everyday existence is inherently inauthentic. Once you peel it away, you reveal the real thing. Once you put children in a situation where there are no civilized restraints, you find out how uncivilly unrestrained they are.

Jack Thorne’s vividly imaginative recreation of the book for television deletes its religious dimension. The dead parachutist on the islands, presumably the pilot of the doomed aircraft, is referred to in the novel as “a dead man on a hill”, a reference to Calvary, and the role of the child Simon (Simon Peter, Jesus’s right-hand man) is to bring the good news that there’s nothing to fear about it. Instead, he is murdered for his pains, as indeed was Simon Peter. Christianity, however, doesn’t maintain that human beings are irretrievably corrupt, whatever Golding may think. It rejects both the bright-eyed progressive view that we’re naturally selfless and compassionate, but also the sour-faced reactionary case that we’re a bunch of deep-dyed villains who can be saved only by a gratuitous act of divine grace.

It isn’t, however, a question of steering judiciously between these two different viewpoints. It’s rather a matter of grasping that they’re opposite aspects of a single situation. The very powers which allow us to forge genuine progress (healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and so on) are also the powers which enable us to commit genocide. It’s the self-contradictions of the human species which are at stake here. Because we have bodies of a certain kind (laboring, communicative, cooperative, and so on) we can develop technologies far beyond the capability of squirrels. This is why squirrels have no National Health Service, as far as we can tell. But it’s also why they can’t stockpile nuclear weapons. They can’t send vital resources (sacks of nuts, etc.) to less privileged squirrels overseas, but neither can they run secret torture facilities like the CIA.

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Jane Austen was no Romantic

By Terry Eagleton

The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent make-up. Christianity is both a great deal more pessimistic than the liberal and considerably more optimistic than the conservative. The doctrine of the Fall, which has nothing to do with a divinely prohibited apple, suggests that we’re in a sorry mess, as a quick glance around the globe might confirm; but the Christian Gospel also holds that we have a capacity for self-transformation, and that if only we can let go of the present there’s a glorious future in store for us. It isn’t, however, attainable without passing through loss, deprivation, suffering and death, if only in symbolic terms.

For some progressive thinkers, neither world wars were supposed to happen. They seemed to be inexplicable disruptions of a history which had been marching upwards and onwards at least from the Victorian era, or even from the 18th-century Enlightenment. Charles Dickens may have scourged the evils of his age, but he thought it vastly superior to any previous phase of history. For some conservative thinkers, the Holocaust is eloquent testimony to the callowness of this vision of progress. Today, we are fearful about our future, but we tend not to ask whether a species capable of such atrocities really deserves to survive. If it’s finally wiped out by climate catastrophe or nuclear war, might not this simply amount to getting its comeuppance?

We should recall, however, that if a lot of men and women spent their time planning and executing the Holocaust, a lot of others gave their lives to bring the Nazi regime to an end. Besides, if Lord of the Flies is a parable of the darkness of the human heart, then it could give comfort to the malign forces its author fought against a few years before he came to write it. If violence and cruelty are built into our natures, then it might be that our responsibility for torture and murder is diminished. We are, after all, only being faithful to the kind of animals we are. But the Second World War wasn’t the result of human nature. It was the consequence of a complex set of historical factors, any one of which could have been different. There may have been no need for William Golding to give his crew orders to fire on the enemy. And if there hadn’t been, he may not have written the novel now showing on television.

It was small by modern standards, and the site now known as Göbekli Tepe is about two dozen acres. It is a complex of 20 circular compounds and limestone T-shaped pillars richly decorated with pictograms of animals, insects and humanoid figures (some headless) who may be humans — or gods. Alongside the large enclosures huddle smaller domestic structures. For reasons that we will never fully comprehend, our Stone Age ancestors had created the world’s oldest urban settlement. Archaeologists are certain of one thing, however — the site was sacred for the worship of gods and the fulfilment of holy duties.

About 4,000 years later and 400 miles to the south east, the first urban civilisation arrived in the swamps of ancient Mesopotamia. Uruk was probably their first true city. Much about Uruk is also lost to time. But its archaeology, and the ancient Sumerian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, both tell a tale in which settlements such as Uruk began life as holy sites created on island mounds in the marshes. Sumerian cites continued to be defined by their temples. People met there to trade, but they came there to pray.

Most urban creation myths have similar patterns. Divine or heroic intervention is localised, enshrined and worshipped. In the process a specific place or an entire city is imbued with sanctity and, via pilgrimage, ritual or festival, the very patterns of travel and trade that boost prosperity are nurtured and encouraged. Ancient Rome had multiple myths. The temple of Saturn was located at the base of the Capitoline Hill (where Saturn was supposed to have founded the pre-Roman city) and also on the edge of the forum. The festival of Lupercalia to secure Rome’s health and fertility was held each February in the holy cave of the Lupercal beneath the Palatine Hill, in which the she-wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus.

Across time and continents, holy cities celebrate the location of a physical interaction between man and god. Jerusalem, which suffers from a surfeit of competing sanctities, is too obvious to discuss. Varanasi in India is where Brahma’s head was dropped into the ground. Lhasa in Tibet literally means “the place of the Gods”. Medieval Europe was bejewelled with shrines deified by a vision of Christ or of the Virgin Mary, or by the births, acts and martyrdoms of Christian saints. Shrines and trade, pilgrimage and travel, were all interwoven just as the sanctity of God and of the city were stitched together.

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Sometimes the very process of reconstruction was sacred, as appears to have been the case in the ancient Peruvian city of Caral, with its pyramid temples. Love of place was real not abstract. In 431 BC the Athenian statesman Pericles beseeched his fellow citizens to love their city in his famous funeral oration: “I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her.” The word for love that he used, eραστά or erastai, was the word for erotic not chaste love.

So far, so ancient — but what do Lhasa or Periclean Athens or Göbekli Tepe have to do with us? Here’s the point. If you regard your towns as places of moral and religious purpose then you don’t just build nice churches, you create better places, more resilient and more beautiful, more worthy of the eternal, not just the here and now. For most of our history hôtels de ville and Rathäuser, town halls and market places, parliaments and public baths, almshouses and hospitals, were built not just to perform a transaction but to elevate our service to each other: a civic temple in the town square, not a featureless box on the ring road.

From Rome’s Baths of Caracalla to Palladio’s Basilica Palladiana in Vincenza, we have historically created our buildings and streets to be as good as we can afford — not as cheap as we can bear. That is why the 500-year-old Fuggerei social housing in Augsburg, Bavaria is better than nearly any social housing built in the last century. That is why until 70 years ago we created places which, today, we visit for the sheer pleasure of being there. Perhaps it is no surprise that one of the world’s most beautiful modern cities, Singapore, has, uniquely among former colonial cities, raised statues to their colonial founder, Sir Stamford Raffles. They are in communion with the past, the better to look to the future.

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The ideologues behind the RAAC crisis

By Nicholas Boys Smith

My favourite example of the (to modern eyes) needlessly magnificent is the glorious Piece Hall in Halifax, Yorkshire. I will never forget the first time I saw it. Emerging through that dark small door into what must, on a sunny day, be one of the most gloriously luminous urban enclosures in Europe, stole away my breath. A quadrangle of delicately Doric arcades behind which 315 merchants’ rooms sat ready for business, a heady mix of souk, forum and fell. What lifts it from the superb to the sublime is the location, the gently sloping topography which results in three arcades to the east and two to the west, with the Pennines rising headily behind. That a building created purely for commercial purposes 240 years ago should be so joyous tells us something important about the culture of our past. Here is the capitalism of the merchant-prince and “civic pride”, not of robber barons and “devil take the hindmost”.

And yet today our towns and our cities, our streets and our squares, are designed to a narrow purpose. They are meant to be efficient and safe; they pay their way; they minimise liabilities. Windows are too high to fall out of, or too small to waste energy; cladding is robust enough to survive the warranty period but never intended to last through the centuries. Generosity is wasteful, stewardship for the naïve. Almost every planning discussion I have descends into a discussion of viability, unit density and efficiency ratios. We live, in short, in utilitarian places. We have lost sight of the fact that while the city has always been a market and a crossroads, a bridge and a city wall, it also used to be a sacred place.

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Even though we are richer than ever before in human history, and even though we have at our instantaneous command powers and technologies undreamt of even a century ago, we are somehow conspiring to create places which are less loveable and more perfunctory than would once have been considered civically acceptable. The utilitarian approach to city-making is failing us, creating throw-away places with throw-away meanings. This is bad for the planet, but it’s also bad for us. Create places to last a little longer and we might burn a little less carbon every year. Create places which aspire to, even if they do not achieve, divine beauty, and we may all find the ineluctable hardships of life that much easier to bear.

Empirical research consistently demonstrates that people are happier when they are religious, surrounded by beauty, and intrigued not depressed by their neighbourhood. Meanwhile longevity is plateauing and depression is rising, particularly among the young. In an ironically utilitarian twist, rediscovering the holy in our world would be a good way to help us lead happier and healthier lives. We need to rediscover the language of the sacred city, of creating a place that speaks to our desire for purpose and our innate sense of the divine. Of course, our sacerdotal will not be the same as our forefathers’. More street trees, and less stained-glass I would imagine — less purely Christian, more ecumenical. Less “the faith”, more “faith”. It’s a trick that the British Monarchy have been pulling off for years.

Why don’t we try? For the lives of our fellow citizens, for the re-weaving or our civic life, and for the delicacy with which we tread upon the planet.

There are, of course, regional variations. The British, tied by geography to Europe’s fortunes, tend to favour the definitive fall of the Western empire in AD 476. The Americans, ever fearful of an over-mighty executive, linger on the collapse of senatorial authority in 49 BC. And it is also more than a journalistic trope, with the unacknowledged legislators of our world also playing the same game. Elon Musk recently suggested that today’s baby drought is analogous to the low birth rates of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship. Marc Andreessen has compared California to Rome circa AD 250. Joe Rogan, meanwhile, is beginning to suspect that all this gender business might have a worrying ancient precedent.

Such appeals to the past are only human. The fourth word in Virgil’s Aeneid is Troiam. This is the first fact that we learn about Aeneas: he is from Troy. Virgil does not even bother to tell us his hero’s name until the 92nd line. Doubtless, the poets of Ur and Hattusha had their own Troys. And perhaps the first men who placed one mud brick upon another sang of flooded valleys, choked caves and herds that no longer ran. But Rome has been our common loss since the early Middle Ages. As Virgil looked back to Priam, so we look back to Virgil. In 1951, it was perfectly natural for W. H. Auden to compare a dying Britain with a dead Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form…”

But journalists and billionaires do not work in a poetic register. They deal in facts and lucre. When they say that Britain or America is following imperium Romanum down the dusty track to oblivion, they seem to be speaking literally. This is not a mistake that Virgil would have made. It is all very well to evoke Rome as an elegiac warning. But if we believe that there are concrete lessons to learn from the Roman Empire’s decline and fall, then we will have to examine the mother of cities as she really was. The results are surprising.

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By Tom Holland

In AD 384, 400 years after Virgil composed his Aeneid, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus had a bridge problem. Symmachus was Urban Prefect of Rome, a role of huge responsibility. By the fourth century, the city of Rome was no longer the imperial capital of the western empire; it had been replaced in 286 by Mediolanum (modern Milan), which was a good deal closer to the empire’s febrile northern borders. But Rome remained the nation’s hearthstone. Her good governance was of the highest priority. The Urban Prefect dispensed justice, organised games, fed the mob and looked after the material fabric of the city. It was not an enviable position. One man had to keep the vast, turbulent metropolis ticking over with the minimum of rioting. Symmachus was well aware of the touchiness of the Roman pleb. His own father had been burned out of his house and chased from the city after making a catty remark of the “let them eat cake” variety during the wine shortage of 375.

The bridge problem went like this. Around 382, the emperor Gratian ordered that a new bridge be built across the Tiber. It soon became clear that construction was taking too long and costing too much. Two years later, as the project neared completion, one span collapsed. Such waste of public funds could not be ignored, and so an inquiry was launched. A specialist diver was engaged to examine the structure; he discovered that the job had been bodged. The engineers responsible for the project, Cyriades and Auxentius, were summoned to account for their failure. Each blamed the other, before Auxentius, who had been caught backfilling sections of the bridge with bales of hay, fled the city — pockets doubtless jingling with public gold.

On the face of it, this sounds like a very late Roman story: a nation once famous for its engineering prowess could no longer build a bridge across the Tiber without everything going horribly wrong. But I’m not sure that’s true. Problems arise all the time, and in themselves tell us very little about a society. What matters is the response to those problems. And Symmachus’s dispatches to the imperial court make it clear that his response was considered and comprehensive. The bridge was completed in the end, and stood for over 1,000 years until its demolition in 1484. Now think of 21st-century London: remember what happened the last time we tried to build a bridge across the Thames?

Peter Brown, in his excellent new autobiography Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History, identifies the kind of dogged, even cheerful resourcefulness exhibited by Symmachus as one of the hallmarks of the later Roman elite. Brown’s long historical education, which has taken him from Oxford to Berkeley to Princeton, began as a child in Forties Dublin. Born into a Protestant society unmoored by Irish independence, he observed “what it was like to face the end of empire on the ground — in the small world of the little big men of the provinces — and to do so with dignity and good nature”. Embattled but not embittered, Brown’s family taught him that “a lively and imaginative culture could coexist with constrained political and economic circumstances. It was, perhaps, a good start with which to approach the world of late antiquity…”

This is the lesson of Symmachus, who dealt uncomplainingly with his own constrained political circumstances. The governing class of his generation was under extraordinary pressure, and yet it managed to keep the show on the road, to hand its civilisation on to the next generation despite the dramatic changes wrought by increasing barbarian incursions and the transformations brought about by an insurgent Christianity. Gratian had ordered a bridge to be built and Symmachus was going to damn well see it done.

Indeed, spend a few hours reading his dispatches and you would agree that asking whether Britain is “declining like Rome” is nothing less than an insult to the Roman Empire. The city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, by the Vandals in 455, and finally swallowed up by a new Gothic regime in 476. But while the legions held on the borders and the lawyers argued in the forum, while the tax revenues rolled into the treasury and the grain shipments cruised into Ostia, Symmachus and his friends do their duty to the patria. There had been crises before, after all, and Rome had always muddled through. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that men like Symmachus acquire the glamour of an endangered species.

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Even after the disaster of 476, there were still men around to keep the cogs turning. Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus held multiple public offices during the early sixth century. His masters were Ostrogothic kings, not emperors, and the capital was no longer at Mediolanum, but at Ravenna. None could doubt that the western Roman Empire was at an end, especially when compared to the eastern empire centred on Constantinople, which was about to flourish anew under the reign of Justinian. And yet, what do we find Cassiodorus doing? He did not waste his time on elegies for a lost world. He was far too busy for that sort of thing. Many of the city’s great buildings were falling into disrepair, so he decreed that Rome’s main brick depot be refitted with a view to manufacturing 25,000 new roof tiles every year. He chased the Governor of Lucania for his region’s taxes. He ensured that teachers of Rhetoric were properly paid. When a Goth settler seized the land of two Italians and reduced them to slavery, Cassiodorus was there to intervene.

This is not to minimise the impact of Rome’s collapse. As Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown, the post-Roman West was a bit of a dump. Timber supplanted dressed stone, flagged floors gave way to beaten earth. Coinage vanished. Cows shrank. Honorific statuary disappeared, as did indoor plumbing. The Roman ceramics industry, which had pumped out vast numbers of high-quality, wheel-thrown vessels for centuries, ground to a halt. Britain’s decline was among the most dramatic. In one moving passage, Ward-Perkins draws attention to a small object excavated at the Sutton Hoo ship burial. This famous site, which yielded intricate gold jewellery and elaborate ceremonial armour, also contained a small pottery bottle. Even the humblest Roman family would have regarded such an item as an unremarkable piece of household clutter. In seventh-century Britain, that small bottle sat naturally among the exquisite grave goods of a celebrated man.

And this is revealing. When our journalists and billionaires ask whether Britain or America is “declining like Rome”, they are really thinking about the grim realities of the early Middle Ages — a time of deprivation rather than plenty. And perhaps they are right to do so. However terrible life was in the post-Roman West, it was nothing like as bad as a similar rupture would be today. Most of us lack both the land and the knowledge to grow our own food. The support structures provided by extended family networks and stable local communities — the mortar of the pre-industrial world — have been fatally weakened. Many people rely upon regular medical intervention simply to stay alive. Our most basic goods are imported from the other side of the planet, as is the fuel required to power the machines that make contemporary life possible. Above all, centuries of peace have left us ill-equipped for the return of a society in which war is commonplace and might makes right. A fourth-century Roman would regard modern Britons as laughably weak, ignorant and dependent.

If Rome’s fall still resonates today, it is only because we know so little about the subject. Popular images of Roman decadence — Caligula drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar; Nero’s Golden House — are largely drawn from the first century, when the empire was at its height. Later emperors had no time for such diversions. They were an overworked and harassed bunch who often died violent deaths, but they often got the job done. In a sense, to ask whether the modern West is “declining like Rome” is to ask whether we are governed by people with the grit of Symmachus and the tenacity of Cassiodorus. One might as well compare a woollen toga to a polyester T-shirt.

This week, Holland came to the UnHerd club to talk about Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Freddie Sayers: Let’s kick off with the very first year in your book.

Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere?

FS: It seemed to me, when I was reading Pax, that there was a recurring theme: a movement between what’s considered decadence, and then a reassertion of either a more manly, martial atmosphere, or a return to how things used to be — to the good old days. With each new emperor in this amazing narrative, it often feels like there’s that same kind of mood, which is: things have gotten a bit soft. We’re going to return to proper Rome. 

TH: It’s absolutely a dynamic that runs throughout this period. And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. There’s this anxiety that this wealth is feminising them, that it’s making them weak, it’s making them soft — even as it is felt that the spectacular array of seafood, the gold, the splendid marble with which Rome can be beautified, is what Romans should have, because they are the rulers of the world.

That incredible tension is heightened by class anxieties. There’s no snob like a senatorial snob. They want to distinguish themselves from the masses. But at the same time, there’s the anxiety that if they do this in too Greek a way, in too effeminate a way, then are they really Romans? And so the whole way through this period, the issue of how you can enjoy your wealth, if you are a wealthy Roman, without seeming ‘unRoman’, is an endearing tension. And of course, there is no figure in the empire who has to wrestle with that tension more significantly than Caesar himself.

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FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be.

TH: And, you see, this is the significance of AD 69, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, because the question is, are the cycles of civil war expressive of faults? Of a kind of dry rot in the fabric of the Empire that is terminal? Of the anger of the gods? And whether, therefore, the Romans need to find a way to appease the gods so that the whole Empire doesn’t collapse. This is an anxiety that lingers for several decades. It looks to us like this is the heyday of the Empire. They’re building the Colosseum, they’re building great temples everywhere. But they’re worrying: “Have the gods turned against us?”

And of course, there is a very famous incident, 10 years after the Year of the Four Emperors, which is the explosion of Vesuvius. And this is definitely seen as another warning from the gods, because it coincides with a terrible plague in Rome, and it coincides with the incineration (for the second time in a decade) of the most significant temple in Rome — the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, the most sacred of the seven hills of Rome.

Romans offer sacrifice to the gods or you pay dues to the gods rather in the way that we take out an insurance policy. And if the gods are busy burying famous towns on the Bay of Naples beneath pyroclastic flows, or sending plagues, or burning down temples, then this, to most, is evidence that the Roman people have not been paying their dues. So a lot of what is going on — certainly in the imperial centre — in this period, is an attempt to try and get the Roman Empire back on a stable moral footing.

FS: The question of gender and sex crops up a lot in your book. It did strike me that pretty much all of the extremely masculine generals in your book — many of whom go on to become emperors — are having sex with young men. 

TH: Well, it wasn’t just young men, but we’ll come to that. There is always a temptation to emphasise the way in which the Romans are like us, a mirror held up to our own civilisation. But what is far more interesting is the way in which they are nothing like us, because it gives you a sense of how various human cultures can be. You assume that ideas of sex and gender are pretty stable, and yet the Roman understanding of these concepts was very, very different to ours. For us, I think, it does revolve around gender — the idea that there are men and there are women — and, obviously, that can be contested, as is happening at the moment. But the fundamental idea is that you are defined by your gender. Are you heterosexual or homosexual? That’s probably the great binary today.

For the Romans, this is not a binary. There’s a description in Suetonius’s imperial biography of Claudius: “He only ever slept with women.” And this is seen as an interesting foible in the way that you might say of someone, he only ever slept with blondes. I mean, it’s kind of interesting, but it doesn’t define him sexually. Similarly, he says of Galba, an upright embodiment of ancient republican values: “He only ever slept with males.” And again, this is seen as an eccentricity, but it doesn’t absolutely define him. What does define a Roman in the opinion of Roman moralists is basically whether you are — and I apologise for the language I’m now going to use — using your penis as a kind of sword, to dominate, penetrate and subdue. And the people who were there to receive your terrifying, thrusting, Roman penis were, of course, women and slaves: anyone who is not a citizen, essentially. So the binary is between Roman citizens, who are all by definition men, and everybody else.

A Roman woman, if she’s of citizen status, can’t be used willy-nilly — but pretty much anyone else can. That means that if you’re a Roman householder, your family is not just your blood relatives: it’s everybody in your household. It’s your dependents; your slaves. You can use your slaves any way you want. And if you’re not doing it, then there’s something wrong with you. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate”, so the orifices of slaves — and they could be men, women, boys or girls — were seen as the equivalent of urinals for Roman men. Of course, this is very hard for us to get our heads around today.

The most humiliating thing that could happen to a Roman male citizen was to be treated like a woman — even if it was involuntary. For them, the idea that being trans is something to be celebrated would seem the most depraved, lunatic thing that you could possibly argue. Vitellius, who ended up an emperor, was known his whole life as “sphincter”, because it was said that as a young man he had been used like a girl by Tiberius on Capri. It was a mark of shame that he could never get rid of. There was an assumption that the mere rumour of being treated in this way would stain you for life; and if you enjoy it, then you are absolutely the lowest of the low.

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FS: And yet, there are love stories in this period. In your book, you describe Trajan as having “such a passion for boys that an Assyrian king looking to win the emperor’s favour had secured it by getting his son to perform some barbaric dance”. So that’s the kind of decadent type that you’ve been talking about. But then the book ends with the love affair between the Emperor Hadrian and Antinous, which feels very emotional and very different.

TH: Of course, sexual moral standards impose enormous strains on people. Not everyone’s sexuality is suited to cohering to a governing moral code. And for people who enjoyed being a passive partner, who gained emotional sustenance from it, it must have been excruciating.

The great erotic ideal for Roman men in this period is less girls than boys who look like girls. It’s all very Blur: “Boys who like girls, who like…” These boys, known as delicati, would wear make-up, have their hair done in feminine styles and dress as girls. The more feminine they looked, the more of a status symbol they were, and so senators were willing to lavish fortunes on them. As always, it was Nero who took it the furthest. It was said that he kicked his beloved wife, Poppaea Sabina, to death because she’d nagged him for being out late at the chariots. It’s probably not true because he adored her. But after her death, he went looking for someone who resembled her. He found a boy, castrated him and, from that point onwards, this poor boy, Sporus, had to live as Poppaea Sabina.

FS: You say in your book that “an immense reward was offered to anyone capable of implanting a uterus into the eunuch”. He’s literally trying to turn Sporus into a woman.

TH: Of course, he can’t do that. But when Nero dies, this poor boy becomes a trophy of war. First, Otho takes him, and then Vitellius has an idea that he thinks will make him popular with the Roman people: he will order Sporus to dress up as Persephone, and then have him gang-raped to death by gladiators dressed as Hades in the arena. He thinks this is tremendous entertainment — kind of like the World Cup — and that everyone will love it. Of course, Sporus kills himself. I mean, as you would, faced with that. It’s horrible, horrible stuff. But while this scale of exploitation is to our way of thinking unspeakable, it was morally justified to the Romans.

FS: What about the story of Hadrian and Antinous?

TH: Antinous is a stunningly handsome boy who Hadrian seems to have met on his great journey around the Empire. At this time, between Nero’s reign and Hadrian’s, the making of eunuchs had been made illegal. So I think there was a sense that Antinous has the beauty of a eunuch, which makes him incredibly precious. Hadrian sends him back to Rome to be given the cultural upbringing that a partner of Caesar should have. And then, I guess when he’s aged around 15, he comes under Hadrian’s wing.

Now, to our way of thinking, that would be grooming, pure and simple. But that’s not how the Romans saw it. It’s not how the Greeks saw it, either, because they recognised that Hadrian was behaving like a Greek. He wears a beard, like a Greek philosopher. He was known as a young man as Graeculus, the little Greek. There’s a sense in which Hadrian’s adoption of a beautiful Greek boy is like Zeus sweeping up Ganymede to be his cup bearer — or like Hercules and Hylas.

FS: Would you say he had a special licence?

TH: Yes, as the Greeks felt it was flattering to them. But the question that is unknowable is how Antinous felt about it. I personally cannot imagine he would have been anything other than, on one level, very grateful to have been raised up from a provincial backwater. However, it’s also possible that it inflicts untold psychic damage on him, because Antinous ends up dead under very mysterious circumstances in Egypt, at exactly the time when he is starting to sprout a beard and to bulk up. There were many different theories circling around: did he kill himself? Was he murdered? Was he offered up in sacrifice to the gods? Another theory, which I have some sympathy with, is the idea that he faked his own death and ran away. But we just don’t know.

FS: What’s going on in your head when you are researching these characters? Does it make you think differently about our own morality today? 

TH: The Roman historian Livy says of his people: “We are known across the world as having the justest punishments.” This is a society that flings people to the lions, sponsors gladiatorial combat and stages crucifixions. But the Romans don’t think what they’re doing is in any way morally depraved; they think it’s absolutely justified.

This is what inspired me to write my previous book, Dominion, which argues that our moral standards, our ways of seeing the world, are rooted in the great Christian revolution. The reason it is so difficult for us to see the world through the eyes of Romans is because our gaze is smeared over with Christian assumptions. My ambition in this new book is to write a kind of anti-Dominion, which looks at the world entirely through Roman eyes. The Christians in this narrative, who feature in a couple of paragraphs, are like Mesozoic shrews in an ecosystem dominated by dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are crashing around, bellowing and generally being Roman, while the Christians are so tiny you barely see them. But of course, as with the mammals, it’s the Christians who in the long run will inherit the world.

FS: Is there anything you think the Romans were right about that we’ve lost in the Christian era?

TH: The question that haunts me, whenever I write about the Romans, is why am I so fascinated by them? When I went to Sunday school, and saw pictures of Jesus in front of Pontius Pilate, I was always on the side of Pontius Pilate. He was kind of glamorous: he had eagles, he had purple robes. By contrast, Jesus was a massive scruff. I much preferred the Romans, and I think that this speaks to something that is kind of inherent. There is a certain admiration, and a dread, and an appeal in power.

It’s hard for us to acknowledge this, partly because we are so influenced by the weathering effect of centuries and millennia of Jewish and Christian thinking. It’s also because we exist in the shadow of the Fascists. And the Fascists were the first group of people in the history of Christian Europe who consciously repudiated not so much the institutions of Christianity — as the French or the Russian revolutionaries did — but the core morality of Christianity. They absolutely rejected the idea that the last should be first, that the strong and the rich have a duty of care to the weak and the poor. And that’s why I think we see the Nazis as the embodiment of evil. I think we’ve internalised the fear that identifying with the Romans is to risk becoming Fascists.

FS: Do you think that the incredible success of the Roman Empire was due to the fact that so much power was concentrated in one person? 

TH: [Edward] Gibbon famously said that mankind was at its “most happy and prosperous” in the period following the rule of Vespasian and his two sons. Listening to me talk about this period, you might think, “well, that’s insane, it sounds horrible”. And of course, for lots of people, it was horrible. Yet, by and large — with the exception of the Year of the Four Emperors and the occasional revolt — vast stretches of the world that had previously been convulsed by conflict were stable. The whole of the Mediterranean was bound together under a unitary power; the Romans call it mare nostra, “our sea”. And that’s the only time this has ever happened in recorded history. The result was an equivalent of globalised trade; different areas of the Empire start specialising in aspects of economic activity that they’re particularly suited to, confident that there is a single framework of law, that there are shipping lanes that will be patrolled, that they won’t be attacked by pirates. This is, by relative standards, a golden economic period.

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FS: In your book, you quote Pliny saying: “Who would deny, now that the greatness of Rome’s Empire enables opposite ends of the globe to communicate with one another, that life is improved by the interchange of commodities, by a partnership in the blessings of peace and by the general availability of things.” This does sound a bit like today’s semi-globalised free market.

TH: In the introduction, I quote a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who argues that the Roman Empire in the second century, under Trajan and Hadrian, had the wealthiest economy prior to the emergence of modern capitalism in the Netherlands and England in the 17th century. I’m not remotely qualified to say whether or not this is true, but it is clearly the case that this is a spectacularly wealthy period. And people like Pliny absolutely do celebrate it.

There are, however, people who see this wealth as evidence of Rome’s monstrosity. The greatest, most influential anti-imperial text ever written is the Book of Revelation, with its vision of the whore of Babylon. Babylon — which is Rome — is described as a city that is glutted on the wealth of the world, and its downfall is precipitated by the cutting of trade links that bring wealth into the city. So it’s very clear-eyed about the fact that the metropole is dependent on the links that it has with the outer provinces.

There are Romans who are extremely anxious about this, the most influential of whom is Tacitus, the great historian. Tacitus writes the biography of his father-in-law, Agricola, the governor of Britain. He describes how Agricola fostered the art of civilisation on the island: getting the natives to wear togas, to enjoy fine dining, to have baths. He says that the natives mistook these things as the marks of civilisation, when they were actually marks of their servitude. He is not writing this as a lecture in post-colonial studies. He’s not saying, “Oh, it’s terrible that we’ve conquered the Britons”. What he’s saying is that Britons are being seduced into the moral decrepitude that has already paralysed the Romans.

In Tacitus’s eyes, the greatness of the Empire is destroying everything that originally made the Romans great. That’s why he thinks Trajan is the best of emperors, because he’s embarking on all these brilliant conquests. He conquers the Dasians, then the Mesopotamians. But it all goes horribly wrong when Trajan, like so many others in Western history, invades Iraq. He pushes it too far. He has to pull the legions back out of Mesopotamia. It is then that he decides that Roman power has a natural limit after all, because the people beyond it don’t deserve the gifts of Roman civilisation.

This is why Hadrian builds frontier systems along the Empire, of which Hadrian’s Wall is the most famous. It’s not in any way an admission of defeat. It’s the equivalent of that enormous fence that they built around Glastonbury during the festival. It’s saying: “People on the inside, you can have a good time, hear Elton John and go glamping. But all you proles outside, you can’t come in.” That’s basically what Hadrian’s Wall is.

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FS: Today a lot of people worry that we are somehow rather like the Roman Empire in its declining phases. There’s the sense that this world that seemed totally everlasting is crumbling and breaking. I was filled with hope reading your book because it starts with what feels like the end of the world — the chaotic Year of Four Emperors — and is followed by 100 years of peace. So maybe, we are in a moment more like AD 69 than the actual end of the Roman Empire. Does it feel to you like we’re on the downslope of a civilisation?

TH: I think we are going through a process of moral change that is more analogous to the Reformation than anything you get in Roman history. But I think that Rome provides us with a model: we are shadowed by the sense that if you have a moment in the sun, if you have greatness, then you are doomed as an empire to decline and fall. And I think the contrast is with China, an equally great empire in this period, getting very rich. Of course, over the centuries, China, as Rome does, will succumb to barbarians. The Chinese Empire will disintegrate, be reconstituted, disintegrate, be reconstituted, and yet, in a sense, always remain China. An entity called China endures.

We do not, in the modern world, have a sense of there being a land of the Romans, because that has long gone. And so I think that for us, probably far more than for people in China, there is the sense that golden ages are illusory, and that the greatest empire is merely a provocation, and that it will succumb and be destroyed. The lessons from the Book of Revelation and Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have fused to create a sense that you can’t be great in the long run. That is why the Roman imperial architecture of Washington, say, provides such scope for apocalyptic visions, because you just have to look at the Lincoln monument to think: “Oooh, your fall is coming, you’re doomed.” That is also, of course, what made the [January 6, 2021] Capitol riot so emotionally satisfying for so many people, particularly the shaman with his horns. It is hardwired into our minds that this is what happens to places that call themselves the Capitol. Barbarians do come, and the order collapses.

FS: I think now is a great moment to take questions.

*          *          *

Question One: How much credit can you give the emperors for Pax Romana? And how much was it just good timing and circumstance?

TH: That is a great question. Because of course, the emperors are the focus of most histories. And when you’re writing, it is quite difficult to get perspectives that are not centred on the imperial capital. I think that there are very few emperors who qualitatively affect the running of the Empire, and the course of events. Hadrian is one of them. So is Augustus. Augustus, I think, is the greatest political genius, certainly in the history of the West, and perhaps of all time. Reconstituting the imploding Republic; setting Rome and her Empire back on firm foundations; and doing so to such effect that, with the exception of the Civil War of AD 69, peace endures for essentially two centuries, and Rome as a world empire endures right the way up to the 15th century: that is a stunning, stunning achievement. No other emperor over the sweep of Roman history can rival that.

Hadrian is a significant figure — an emperor who stabilises the Empire by constructing what in effect is a frontier, although it’s not cast as that; by acknowledging the natural limits of the Empire; and, above all, by integrating the Greek world into the fabric of Roman imperial culture, so that in time we can talk of Greco-Roman culture. I think the next significant player is Diocletian, for his achievement in stabilising the Empire when it looks as though it might completely disintegrate at the end of the third century. And then, of course, there’s Constantine, his licensing of Christianity. So I would say that, between Augustus and the final collapse of the empire in the West, there are really only three significant emperors.

Question Two: There are centuries in between those figures. Who’s running the Empire then? Is it the deep state of Rome that’s in charge? 

TH: The truth is that it’s the legions that are keeping it going. Without the legions, there is no peace. We tend to think of peace — Pax, the title of the book — as a slightly passive noun. But for the Romans, it’s very active. Pax is something that you impose at the point of the sword. It is maintained by the presence of legions, along the frontiers. These legions have to be paid for. And there’s a case for saying that the whole Roman Empire is an army with a piggy bank attached to it, the whole Empire essentially exists to provide the legions with the money that then enables the Empire to exist. “Legio” originally meant a levee. Every city in the ancient world, every tribal entity, had a levee of those men who were able to fight. A legion ends up something very different: a professional army, stationed where it has to be stationed. This is such an odd thing to have. And again, it’s the genius of Augustus that enables these to be set up. Without the legions, there is no Empire.

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Question Three: Did women figure in the Roman Empire at all? Was there a woman behind the throne? Or were they really all very subservient in this period?

TH: Roman men have a kind of ambivalent attitude towards women in their families. Because, on the one hand, it is the role of a man to keep his subordinates in order, and women rank as subordinates. A paterfamilias has power of life and death over all his family. There’s no matriarchy in Rome. But having said that, historically, women have important roles to play in dynastic politics, that is the way that the Republic functioned. It depended on women going out and marrying other people, and then, if needs be, leaving them and marrying someone else. Their role, basically, is to stick up for their father and brothers; their husbands, by and large, are less significant.

Then, in the reign leading up to Nero, women become incredibly powerful, because if a man can have the blood of Augustus in his veins, then so do women, and that gives them a massive, divinely sanctioned authority. By and large, the men who are writing the histories are terrified by this. Think of the role that Livia has in I, Claudius, reconstituted in The Sopranos as the most terrifying mother perhaps in any drama. Messalina’s very name is a byword for sexual depravity. There’s Agrippina, the mother of Nero. These woman are portrayed in the histories as kind of terrifying predatory viragos. And that is a kind of tribute to the power that they have, in the wake of the extinction of the family of Augustus. (That power is obviously cut off and women again, certainly in the sources, start to play a more subordinate role.) I mean, you do not offend a powerful woman.

If you are lower down the scale, I think your life is pretty terrible. If you’re a slave girl, you are there to be raped. The Roman legal and sexual dynamics licenses pretty much perpetual rape if you are subordinate in a powerful household. I mean, the same is true for boys, but women are likely to be sexually abused throughout their life. And that is why Christianity is so radical, because Paul, when he’s writing to, say, the Romans of Corinth (Corinth is a Roman colony, so they’re culturally Roman to the Romans in Rome), he is saying to the male householder: “You are playing the role of Christ, your wife is playing the role of the church, therefore. That’s why you must have a monogamous, enduring relationship. Christ doesn’t go around raping the scullery maid. You mustn’t.” And that is the transformation that Christianity brings to sexual ethics.

Question Four: You talked a lot about the radical break that Christianity represented — the contrast with the extremely ruthless, pre-Christian, Roman world. Do you think there’s a case to be made, as I seem to recall Gibbon did, that Christianity was the ultimate example of the Romans getting soft?

That is what Gibbon says. And it’s also what Nietzsche says. Nietzsche says Christianity is a slave morality. I think actually the opposite. I think that the thing that enables people in the long run to continue feeling Roman, even when the sinews of government have been cut, and the imperial hold has gone, is that they retain a shared identity as Roman which has come to be fused with Christianity. And the reason that Christianity is so successful — the reason, if you’re looking at it in Darwinian terms, why it’s adopted — is that, in this period that Pax covers, this is a world that is full of different cultural centres. You can go and pay sacrifice to someone in northern Britain, or in Syria, and these are all gods. But in the long run, the heft of these cultural centres depends on them being local. I mean, as with the temple in Jerusalem, it’s the fact that they are local that matters. Christianity changes that.

The Christian people have no metropolis. This is what seems so odd to the Romans in the early years of Christianity. They are a kind of universal people — that ultimately makes Christianity so suited to an empire that is universal in scope: you can have churches, anywhere, and they’re all consecrated to the same God. So it doesn’t matter if it’s in Egypt or in East Anglia. And that enables a sense of being Roman to endure for as long as it does. So I think that actually Gibbon gets it the wrong way around. With Pax Romana, you get this extreme world, extreme development, a concentration of wealth, inequality increasing.

FS: The Gini coefficient.

TH: I have no idea what that is. Do I need to know what that is?

FS: A lot of people obsess about this — the gap between the very richest and the very poorest.

TH: The Romans didn’t care about that. In fact, if you were at the top end, they were all in favour of it. Roman society was founded on the principle that you defined yourself against the people who were below you socially. Right from the beginning, the Romans had an obsession with identifying where they stood in the social spectrum. They had a censor. A censor wasn’t someone who went around cancelling people or closing down newspapers; a censor was someone who, every few years, would go around, working out how much money each individual citizen had, and also his moral worth. And then kind of calibrating, and assigning them to a social class.

You could go up and you could go down. This really concentrated the mind.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a neuroscientist and philosopher who has amassed a huge following since the publication of The Master and his Emissary (2009), which sets out the idea that our society has become dominated by narrow left-brain thinking, while the wiser right-brain should properly be in charge.

Dr McGilchrist visited the UnHerd Club last week. Below is an edited transcript of his conversation with Freddie Sayers.

Freddie Sayers: Let’s start at the beginning. What is the difference between the Left-brain and the Right-brain?

Iain McGilchrist: You may think, if you know anything about hemisphere difference, that the left hemisphere is boring but reliable — like a decent accountant, it keeps good records but is not actually great company. And that the right hemisphere is this flighty thing that is given to fits of passion and painting. This is not a good way to think about it at all.

The brain is billions of neurons — nerve cells that connect — and its power consists in those connections. So why would nature have endowed us with a brain that has a whopping divide down the middle, with just a small connection between the two? The world around us doesn’t divide neatly into a left world and a right world, so why would the brain?

What my research over 30 years — and my collaboration with John Cutting in the initial phases of that — reveals is that these two manners of being in the world are to do with the way in which we attend. Now, that may not sound very exciting. In fact, when I first realised that the basic thing here was attention, the penny didn’t immediately drop. What’s special about attention? Well, attention is actually how our world comes into being. If you attend to something in one way, you see one thing. If you attend to it in another, you’ll see something quite different.

These two kinds of attention came about for an evolutionarily important reason. Every creature has to solve this conundrum: how can I eat and yet stay alive? That doesn’t sound difficult, but if you think back: for most of history, a creature has to be able to target something, follow it with its eyes, and get it very accurately. To do that it has to have very narrow attention. But if that’s the only attention it is paying, it won’t last very long, because he won’t see the predator overhead, it won’t see its mate and its offspring that also need feeding. So there needs to be two kinds of attention, and so different are these kinds of attention that they can only come about by having two centres of awareness.

The left hemisphere has a very narrow beam, targeted on a detail which it can see very precisely. It fixes it and grabs it (and the left hemisphere controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing and the getting). Whereas the right hemisphere has a broad, open, sustained vigilant attention, which is on the lookout for everything else without preconception. So on the one hand you’ve got an attention that produces a world of tiny fragments that don’t seem connected to one another — a bit here a bit there, a bit elsewhere — that are decontextualised, disembodied. Whereas with the right hemisphere we see that nothing really is completely separated from anything else — that ultimately, all this is on some level seamlessly interconnected, that it’s flowing and changing rather than fixed and static. Uniqueness is something the right hemisphere sees, while the left hemisphere sees just an example of something that it uses or needs. The right hemisphere is the world in which we live; the left hemisphere’s world is, if you like, a map, a schema, a diagram, a theory — something two dimensional. So we’ve got this one world, which is composed of things that are mechanical, useful, inanimate, reducible to their parts, abstracted, decontextualised, dead; and another world, which is flowing, complex, living, changing and has all the qualities that make life worth living.

FS: These two modes of attending have with them accompanying philosophies, accompanying ways of seeing the world. And your thesis seems to be that as a whole society, not just as individuals, we have become overly dependent on the left hemisphere, and are neglecting the wiser right hemisphere. How has this happened?

IM: Things work well as long as the left hemisphere is carrying out work it’s deputed to do by the right hemisphere. Rather like we use a computer. The computer doesn’t really understand the data we draw from the complexity of life. That’s not its job: its job is to process data very fast, and hand us back some that we then make sense of.

The Greek and the Roman civilisation began with a sudden outburst of flourishing in which the two sides worked very well together. Then over time, they moved more and more towards the left hemisphere’s point of view. I think this is because civilisations tend to overreach themselves. They tend to amass an empire, and then everything has to be administered: there are rules and procedures, and everything is rolled out under a bureaucracy. And what this privileges is a simple, sequential, analytic way of understanding, rather than the more complex, holistic understanding that is required and is provided by the right hemisphere.

What I think happened during the Renaissance was this sudden flowering in which there were great steps forward in so many aspects of life — a great richness. (This is not about the humanities versus the sciences by the way, nor is it true that the humanities are somehow right hemisphere and sciences somehow left hemisphere; good science and good reasoning involve the right hemisphere as much as the left.) Then towards the end of the 17th century came a sense that science had solved all our problems and we were beginning to understand how to control everything ourselves.

Unfortunately, we now believe that if we just had a little bit more power (which is the raison d’etre of the left hemisphere: to grasp, to get) — if only we could do a bit more manipulation — we would solve everything. But at the same time, we’re making an unholy mess of the world in so many respects. We’re destroying nature, we’re destroying humanity. We’re certainly destroying this civilisation. I’d say we’re taking a sledgehammer to it. And so, this is a very sad outcome for this know-it-all left hemisphere.

There are several reasons why I think the left hemisphere has become more potent. One is that it’s the one that makes you rich. It’s the one with which you do the grabbing and getting. Another is that it’s much easier to explain the left hemisphere’s point of view: “If we do this, it leads to that.” When you start to openly analyse what your civilisation is about, rather than getting on with it, then you lean more and more into this left hemisphere point of view. A.N. Whitehead, who I consider one of the all-time greatest philosophers, said: “A civilisation flourishes until it starts to analyse itself.” And that’s remarkable because Whitehead was a mathematician and a physicist, but he was able to see the limitations of science and reason.

I happen to believe our science is not scientific enough. It’s too dogmatic. I happen to believe our reason is not reasonable enough, it’s too dogmatic — and it’s dogma that’s always the problem. We need science, we need reason, but we also need to see that they can’t answer all our questions. Love is very real. Anyone who’s experienced it knows that it’s one of the realest things that can happen to you — but according to science, for it to be real, you’ve got to be able to see it in the lab, measure it, manipulate it.

And then you start thinking about all the other amazing things that we experience. Music: it’s wonderful, it can change your life, but it’s just notes. What is the note? Absolutely nothing? Thirty thousand nothings make up Bach’s B minor Mass, one of the most powerful things you can hear. How did that happen by amalgamating so many nothings? It’s because it’s all in relation. What I’m suggesting is that relationships are primary. The things we notice only become what they are because of the relationships.

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FS: You kicked off with the Enlightenment. Is that where it all went wrong? Have we become gradually more and more left-brained, or are there particular points when the left brain has been dominant?

IM: There have been movements back and forwards, corrections at various times. After the Enlightenment came Romanticism — the name “Romantic” seems to imply that it’s not serious or important, but in fact, the thinking and the art that came out of the period is very great indeed. There was a correction. But then the power of the Industrial Revolution led to this machine-like way of thinking about living things, and we’ve never really lost that.

There are great artists in Modernism and Postmodernism. But it’s interesting: the ways of seeing the world that normally would only happen to somebody who had an injury in the right hemisphere began to be represented in the visual arts in the 20th century. There’s a wonderful book called Madness and Modernism about this topic, showing how things you find in schizophrenia are now happening, and are being portrayed in our culture.

It’s not that we’ve all got schizophrenia — of course we haven’t — but what I think is that we’re all neglecting the right hemisphere. Schizophrenia is a case in which the left hemisphere has gone into overdrive, and the right hemisphere has been wound down or is not really being listened to, and this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we are now in a world which is fully deluded. We’re all fairly reasonable people, but now it’s quite common to hear people say — and for them to go completely unchallenged — things that everybody knows are completely impossible. They don’t have any science behind them. There are aspects of our culture that have become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic and very hubristic. “This is right, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.” That’s the way the left hemisphere likes to be. Cut and dried, black and white. But the right hemisphere sees nuances, gradation: there’s good and bad in almost everything.

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FS: Do you think we have ever been in a moment as left-hemisphere-dominated as we are now?

IM: No, I think this is hitherto unseen.

FS: Do you think technology has something to do with that?

IM: Definitely. I’d like to make a distinction, by the way, between what I would call a rationalistic approach and being reasonable. Being reasonable was something I remember from when I was growing up. There were reasonable people and they were admired. The idea of education was to make you reasonable. But now, that has been supplanted by something quite different: a rationalising framework such as a computer could follow. So we’ve been pushed by the increasing sophistication of machines — the intoxicating feeling that we have power over the world —  into viewing the world in this reductionist, materialist way. And the trouble with power is that it’s only as good as the wisdom of the person who wields it. And I don’t notice that we’re getting wiser. In fact, I think that would be an understatement. So it’s rather like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers and then hoping there’s going to be a happy outcome.

FS: So we’re not living in an age of reason, after all?

IM: We’re living in an age of rationalising and reductionism in which everything can be taken apart. I suppose there was an almost equivalent period — it was very short lived — of Puritanism, when it was absolutely not tolerated for you to disagree with a certain way of thinking — which was, in fact, a very dogmatic, reduced, abstracted way of thinking. But I think at that point, we hadn’t reached the stage that we’re at now. Because at that time in history, people lived close to nature. Most people belonged to an inherited culture, a coherent culture. Art had not been turned into something conceptual, but was visceral and moving. Religion had not been presented as something that only a fool or an infant would believe. These are all very arrogant positions that we now hold.

We know that some things are key to human flourishing: proximity to nature; a culture; some sense of something beyond this realm. They make people healthier, both physically and mentally. We’ve done away with that and now all we’re left with is public debate.

FS: Those people who do dissent in this rationalist framework are often demonised as kooks. It’s a very heretical thought: that they may actually be the wiser ones in our society. How can we distinguish between those alternative voices that are actually wise, versus the ones that are kooks?

IM: Just having a differing point of view doesn’t mean you’re necessarily wise. You could be kooky. But nonetheless, I think those who are wise do have a position very different from the one that is now instilled in us in schools and through the media and so forth — which is, in fact, a very impoverished vision of life. It’s lost all its beauty, its richness, its complexity and become very simple, sterile, repellent. And so, I think, if we could begin to suspend our judgments, we’d be making steps forward.

I would say that a civilisation cannot thrive if differing points of view cannot be heard. Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest philosophers of the last 100 years, who was herself a German Jew and experienced Nazism, said that: “Once something can’t be said, you’re already in a tyranny.” So, it is indisputable that we are all now living, in Britain, in 2023, in a tyranny, because there are people who say, “You can’t say these things and there will be terrible consequences if you do.”

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FS: You’re a big advocate of science, but you’ve written that you feel as if it’s taking a wrong turn. When does science become scientism?

IM: When it quite simply says that science can answer all of our questions — even though science is only supposed to admit things which can be proved to be the case, and it cannot be proved that science can answer all our questions. So it’s not a scientific assumption, it’s an assumption of faith. Scientism is a faith. Much as there are religious fundamentalists, which I very much regret, there are fundamentalist atheists, who I regret just as much. I think a reasonable person is somebody who has an open mind. It’s rather like a figure of fun in earlier philosophy called Simplices, who wants to learn to swim. And so, he just sits on the bank, and he reads about how to swim, but in fact, you can’t learn how to swim until you get into the water.

I think there are good scientists — and there are now, at last, good life scientists: biologists who are being imaginative and talking in a holistic way. They’ve got a long way to go to catch up with physics: I find that the scientists who are most interested in my work are actually physicists. Because these two different hemispheres are rather like the differences between the wave and the particle: the one is specifiable here, exactly at this moment in time, and the other is actually existent over a broader area and is not certainly specified.

FS: You had an appendix in the first volume, entitled “Why we should be sceptical of public science”. Tell us about that.

IM: Public science is not the same as science. Public science is run by administrators. And they have various bees in their bonnet — about how we should all do this and that in order to be healthy. Usually, when you come to examine the science, it’s much more complicated than that.

There’s also a problem with peer review. Peer review is the basic idea of science — you send it to another scientist. What do they think about it? There are all kinds of pitfalls in this. It can be corrupted. In order to have a career as a scientist you have to have published, but one of the problems for many scientists is finding anyone who’s willing to publish what they’ve done. And there are now journals, a lot of them based in China, that will basically publish anything as long as you pay them. You’d be very credulous to believe that everything that is said to be science is science.

So, I’m not attacking science, I’m just saying that science is not immune from all the problems that go with being a human being. It’s practised by humans, with all their greed, their ambition, their competitiveness. And so it’s a minefield — you have to use your discrimination. When people say something, look it up.

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FS: The world you describe has gone very wrong. But do you have hope that this can be fixed, that this civilisation can be righted? Or do you think now is the time just to withdraw and hope for the best?

IM: I think it is extremely unlikely that this civilisation will survive, but most civilisations have not lasted for more than a few 100 years. I think life will go on, but it won’t be life as we know it. None of us is going to live forever. We’re all only here for a while and we enjoy the gift we’ve been given. And then the world moves on and something else will come and they will have their gifts and their problems.

Trust is crucial here. You can’t trust when you’re in a virtual sphere of billions of people. Trust is the most important thing for civilisation. If we can trust one another, we can honourably work together with much simpler needs, closer to the earth — not the extravagant and fantasy lives that we now lead.

What can we do now? We can begin the work of limiting the damage we do to nature. I think we also need to reestablish some sense of who we are and what we’re doing here. Although we’ve got all this power, and machines that can “think”, they can’t think at all, they can only process information extremely rapidly. We’re not really wise.

One of my answers, when people say, “What should we do?”, is pray. And by that, I don’t mean, as Heidegger said, “Only God can save us now.” I don’t mean that God will suddenly come down with his divine hand, sort everything out, and it’ll all be okay. That’s not going to happen. What I mean is that we adopt a different, less arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world; that we have some humility; that we re-kindle in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder, in this beautiful world, and with it bring some compassion to our relations with other people. Not shouting them down, vilifying them, telling them they’re frightful, but reasonably talking and saying, “Okay, you disagree with me. I’m interested, explain your point of view.” What we mustn’t do is follow the strident shrieking voices, whatever they may be saying.

FS: That is a wonderful moment to take some questions.

Question One: Is there a difference between the male and female brain?

IM: Yes. This question always comes up. And the trouble is that, to answer it in a sensitive way, I’d have to spend quite a lot of time answering it. To put it very simply: I think it’s certainly not true that the right hemisphere is somehow female, and the left hemisphere male. If anything, it’s the opposite. For example, what’s established beyond doubt is women’s excellence lies in skills that are often linguistic. Whereas men may be much less linguistic, but more able to manipulate things in space. That is a right hemisphere property largely, and linguistic fluency is largely a left hemisphere property.

In utero, it is testosterone that causes the right hemisphere to expand. Women’s hemispheres are more similar to one another. I think it’s pretty indisputable that male brains are more specialised, the left and right. Whereas in female brains, there’s more overlap between the left and right. So there’s more of the right about the left and more of the left about the right than there is in a man. And this means that if a woman has a stroke on one side, she’s more likely to be able to recover using the other hemisphere than a man. Neither is better. It’s just different ways of being.

Question Two: I’m thinking about how we’re moving towards the left. Do you think that it has anything to do with language and speech? In a podcast with Sam Harris, you were saying speech comes from the left side of the brain. And so speech inherently has to be limiting; it has to break things down in order to communicate.

IM: Yes, undoubtedly one of the big developments of the human brain is language and speech. And 97% of speech, in most right handers, is in the left hemisphere. In the case of left handers, it’s 60% in the left hemisphere, 40% in the right, but I don’t think we should get over-excited about that. The point that you’re making, I think, is that the business of being able to articulate something in language requires a certain degree of analysis and categorisation, and that the really important things in life don’t lend themselves to this process — the divine, love, music, all these things I keep coming back to. These things are enormously limited if I’m trying to do them in language, unless that language is poetry.

I see poetry as a way of language undercutting itself — doing something that ordinary language can’t do. And the interesting thing about poetry is that it’s very much right hemisphere dependent, because it involves all these implicit things like metaphors and tone. The right hemisphere is much better at this; the left hemisphere can read a repair manual for a lawn mower. There’s a difference between certain kinds of language. But broadly speaking, yes, the advent of language, and particularly speech, favoured the left hemisphere over the right.

FS: And so the left-hemisphere-dominated culture will see a decline in literature, in poetry and imagery?

IM: And creativity in general, because it’s so dependent on the ability to hold many things together that may not look like they gel, rather than collapsing them into certainty. We know from accounts of creativity that the important thing is not to say, “Oh, I see what it is.” Because as soon as you’ve done that, you’ve plonked it into a left hemisphere box with a label on it. You have to resist that and allow the thing to come into being and then it will be a true poem, not just a piece of verse.

The postmodern thing is a disaster, it’s basically collapsing into: “There is nothing really there, we make it all up.” I accept that in intellectual history, there has been a shift away from a narrowly analytic way of thinking, but I’d say that’s only in pockets within academia. And what is much more common is this post-structuralist, post-modernist, anything goes attitude in which everything is equally true. Well, if everything is equally true, why don’t we all just cut our throats now?

I believe there is such a thing as a truer view, a truer pronouncement. But it’s not that there’s something out there that we have to get to by a chain of reasoning. It’s something that we have to feel our way towards and have a sense of, and then it comes more and more into being. There aren’t any rules for defining what exactly is true. You see, because we idolise rules and procedures, we think that if there aren’t rules and procedures for something, then it can’t be real. But all of the really real things are not susceptible to this proceduralisation.

One of the problems with universities now, as with schools, as with the medical profession, and with the whole of life, is the sudden explosion of bureaucratic procedures and thinking. There are manuals upon  manuals that you’re supposed to read and observe and follow. And then we’re surprised that professionals, who are skilled people who have learned things through experience, want to leave the profession because they’re effed off with the way in which they’re cheated by managers. I had a very, very distinguished colleague — a professor of neuro-psychiatry at the Maudsley — and he was queried by a manager about why he’d sent a patient for a scan. And he said, when I have to explain to a manager why I’ve sent a patient for a scan, it’s time for me to leave the profession. And he did.

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Question Three: Could we say that we’re living in a world where the very reasons for doubting are doubted and there is this crusade for certitude?

IM: Absolutely. One of the first things that differentiates the hemispheres is that the left hemisphere has to have certainty. There’s a famous picture used by Wittgenstein, which is actually taken from a Victorian children’s comic, which shows either a duck or a rabbit depending on how you look at it. The right hemisphere is able to hold those two images together without collapsing them, but the left hemisphere is unable to. It’s either a duck or it’s a rabbit. It’s black and white, dogmatic thinking. Whereas the right hemisphere is the devil’s advocate. It was so called by V.S. Ramachandran, a very great neuroscientist. It’s the one that says, “Yeah, but maybe not.” And if only we had more of that voice, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

FS: The one area that we haven’t spent much time on is the sacred. Do you think this must be part of the story: that the need for certainty is also an insecurity because there is an absence which religion used to fill?

IM: I think to some extent, although I would say that any religion that peddled certainties was not a religion, properly speaking. It was a dogma or doctrine. Not that there’s no reality about it, but there is no single way of thinking about this or realising it or seeing it. Everybody has to make their own way there.

I wouldn’t like to say exactly what I believe in religious terms, but what I definitely believe is that all the great religions — and the great mystical traditions of Buddhism and Taoism — have central truths that they hold in common, and that these are a kind of wisdom that is not appreciated unless one is brought up in a tradition that helped one see them. And our tradition is dead against seeing them. It’s much simpler just to say, “Oh, it’s all nonsense, because I can’t see any of this. I can’t measure any of it.”  But I don’t think that is reasonable; I’d be much more cautious. I think I have had experience of such a realm — in my appreciation of the beauty of the world. It spoke to me and still speaks to me of something beyond this realm. When I first heard the great polyphony of Renaissance, I thought, yes, it can move the emotions, but it’s not primarily either intellectual or emotional. In fact, it’s spiritual.

I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

He had his own reasons for evoking a spirit of that kind. Even so, it remains good advice today, when comparable discords press toward what promises to be an equally explosive resolution. As 2022 stumbles blindly to its close, the clarity of mind Yeats sought is a condition worth cultivating. Listen past the barnyard gabble of the mass media and the porcine gruntings of politicians rooting at the public trough, and you might just hear the events of the last year sounding the notes of an ancient melody.

Books published in the midst of today’s clatter lack the distance from current contentions to make that melody audible. This is why the book that comes first to mind as I reflect on 2022 is Yeats’s longest and strangest prose work, A Vision. There are several good editions of this work available; those that take the second (1937) edition as the basis for their text are best, since Yeats revised the work substantially after the first edition of 1925.

It used to be fashionable to ignore the massive role that occultism played in Yeats’s life and poetry. Like many other creative minds of his era — D.H. Lawrence and Hilda Doolittle among them — Yeats found in the teachings of occultism a potent source of inspiration. He and his wife Georgie were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult organisation of their time, and both achieved the rank of Adeptus Exemptus, the highest level of initiation the order offered. Georgie Yeats herself was responsible for the core ideas and imagery in A Vision. Working out the details of the system and putting it in vivid prose was her husband’s task.

A connection between occultism and the creative arts may seem improbable to those who lack exposure to the occult traditions of the Western world. To those not so hindered, it is obvious. Occult training teaches the ability to recognise in the seemingly prosaic events of daily life the presence of myth and symbol. The chattering classes of Yeats’s time thought of progress, as ours think of it today, as a simple objective reality out there in the world. Occultists like the Yeatses recognised (and their equivalents today still recognise) progress as a deeply ambivalent mythic narrative that may or may not have anything to do with the facts on the ground.

A Vision is, among other things, an antidote to the mindless acceptance of that myth. Like the hexagrams of the I Ching or the cards of the tarot, it presents a sequence of archetypal patterns as a model for the events of human life. Yeats’s sequence comprises 28 stages modeled on the symbolic 28 days of the lunar cycle, from new moon to full moon and back to new. Each stage is defined by the two fundamental relationships of the human spirit; that between the will and the object of its desire, on the one hand, and that between the mind and the objects of its understanding, on the other. The first two are Will and Mask in Yeats’s terminology, the latter two Creative Mind and Body of Fate. These paired faculties move in complementary cycles around the wheel of the 28 phases, giving each phase its distinctive character.

Each human life completes the cycle of the phases between birth and death. Each human soul completes the same cycle on a broader timescale as it passes from life to life — the Yeatses, like occultists generally, accepted reincarnation as a matter of plain fact as well as a source of mythic symbols. Each political, cultural, literary, or artistic movement follows the same course, and so does each civilisation as it rises and falls.

Always there are the first inchoate fumblings, drawing toward coherence as the person, the soul, the movement, or the civilisation passes through childhood and approaches its coming of age. Always there is the struggle to achieve unity of being around some half-understood theme. Always, once the full moon is past, the struggle to bring the theme into manifestation descends into pantomime, going through the motions replaces meaningful effort, and words that once set minds and hearts aflame turn into meaningless catchphrases. The inner life trickles away into empty form, and the outworn form dissolves into a void from which some new phenomenon of opposite tendency will emerge.

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All this doubtless sounds very abstract. In Yeats’s hands, it is anything but. The book begins with an introduction, “A Packet for Ezra Pound”, a lively prose poem that weaves together the surroundings of Yeats’s last years with an account of the book’s conception and writing. There follows “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends”, which presents the entire structure of ideas in the form of a lively fiction with comic elements. (It really is a pity that Yeats never did anything else with comic prose; he was very good at it.) In the chapters that follow he outlines the structure of ideas underlying the 28 phases, and then proceeds through the phases one at a time, using as examples biographies well known in his time.

From there, another philosophical chapter puts the phases in context. Afterwards comes a chapter on the soul’s journey from death to rebirth, and then the two chapters that speak most precisely and unforgivingly to our condition in the waning days of 2022: “The Great Year of the Ancients” and “Dove or Swan”. Here he sets out the way of looking at historical change implicit in A Vision in uncompromising terms.

Today’s popular thought likes to imagine history as a straight line, either ascending from the primitive squalor of the past to some Hollywood destiny or other out there among the stars, or descending from a vanished Golden Age toward some equally cinematic doom that is always about to arrive but never quite manages the feat. Now and again someone suggests instead that history moves in cycles, and is promptly shouted down by all right-thinking people. Yeats also recognised the cyclical nature of history, but saw it as a process that moves one way and then the opposite way, driven back and forth by contending forces.

As Yeats knew well, the Greek philosopher Empedocles got there more than two millennia ahead of him, and William Blake put the same vision into his Mental Traveller and his prophetic books. Yet the insight still has power to shock. “What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Siena and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?” Yeats wrote. “What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish?”

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Yeats remembered that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was written and performed for one of the most sacred religious festivals of the Athenian year, received in much the same spirit that European audiences a century ago directed toward the Passion Play at Oberammergau. He knew just how great a reversal of religious feeling took place when Christianity and Islam in the western half of Eurasia and Buddhism in the eastern half supplanted the faiths of the two millennia preceding them. A reversal of a similar kind awaits every movement in human society, politics, and the arts, just as it awaits our civilisation in due time. The supposedly straight line of history does not just bend, it curves around and heads in the other direction.

That way of thinking allowed Yeats moments of startling prescience. He wrote, “What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity — only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle — which is the decadence of every civilisation?” Those discords are a matter of history now, and the bundle will join them in due time. More generally, the blank incomprehension shown by today’s privileged classes as they face a world that refuses to behave according to plan comes as no surprise to readers of A Vision. Those baffled looks show up reliably in the very late phases of a civilisation, as the last sliver of moonlight gives way to a fertile darkness where something new and very different will be born.

Our position in the wheel of the phases was no mystery to Yeats, for that matter. He identified 1927 as the beginning of the 26th phase, and sketched out briefly what lay ahead. The dissolution of our collective discourse into furious bellowing of empty slogans is as typical of the last phases of the cycle as it is familiar to us today. Yet the great difficulty readers will have in approaching A Vision is precisely that it flies in the face of all our modern assumptions about history and change. Yeats was under no illusions here:

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvelous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

On 28 May, 1979, the occasion of Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then president of France delivered a speech in Athens and declared: “Europe without Greece would not be Europe… We are all, in our language and thought processes, children of Greek civilisation…” Today, he concluded, “Europe is rediscovering Europe.”

A century or so earlier, the Cambridge mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that “the safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”. Not to be outdone in philhellenism, commenting in 1941 on the Greek resistance to the Italian and German invaders, Winston Churchill famously added: “Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks.”

Surely any people showered with such lavish praise by influential foreigners would be forgiven for taking a certain pride in their culture. For Greeks used to hearing folks like Giscard d’Estaing insist that Greece is Europe, and vice versa, telling a pollster that they do not believe their culture to be superior would be tantamount to questioning the superiority of European civilisation. In fact, from a Greek’s perspective, it is the equivalent of asking the French, German, Spanish or Dutch to respond, with a yes or no answer, to the silly question: “Is European civilisation better or worse than other civilisations?” In this sense, modern Greeks are neither more nor less culturally chauvinist than Europeans who celebrate European civilisation as if the horrors of European colonialism had never happened.

But ask us Greeks about modern Greek culture and you will get a very different response. Sure enough, we have our fair share of looney ultra-nationalists, some of whom believe that Darwinism applies to every human except the Greeks, who stem from some divine extra-terrestrial gene. Yet the vast majority of my countrymen and women think very little of our contemporary culture, ways and behaviours. The past decade, especially since our wholesale bankruptcy, has left us reeling, insecure and verging on self-loathing.

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Yes, we still appreciate the glowing successes of Greeks who left Greece in search of a better life elsewhere. Yes, we celebrate the odd athletic victory and we appreciate the beauty of Greece’s land, sea and environment. Yes, we maintain some pride in uniquely Greek concepts like philotimia — a penchant for acting in a dignified way simply for the hell of it. But at the same time, we fear that these qualities, natural and spiritual, have been diluted terribly in recent decades; partly because we neglected and cannibalised them (our monstrous investment in tourism, for example), and partly because of a European Union that helped us lose our way.

When Giscard d’Estaing made his 1979 speech, a year before northern Europe formally admitted us to the EU, most Greeks rejoiced. Alas, we soon realised that a general loss of dignity was the hefty price we would end up paying for the privilege. I am often asked why Europe first let us Greeks into the Common Market and later into the euro. The correct answer sounds improbable today: because, back in 1979 when Giscard was waxing lyrical about Greek civilisation, the Greek state had one of the lowest levels of public debt in Europe and its citizens had next to none. Yes, we were a poor people but we managed within our modest means, living and breathing paradigms of parsimony. That’s what we brought into the EU: low debt and high levels of home ownership — a combination that was the Western banker’s wet dream.

Even in 1999, just before we were admitted to the euro, barely any Greeks had a mortgage, let alone a credit card. However, to enter Europe we had to lower our trade barriers and, later, to dismantle all capital controls. Immediately, a tsunami of imports, money and loans left northern Europe for Greece. Not that we resisted it, hungry as we were for the material trappings of modernity. Before we knew it, our factories were shut (and converted into warehouses for the imported washing machines and fridges that were once manufactured here); our bank accounts went from thin black to deep red; our dignity and philotimia were torn asunder.

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It was only a matter of time before the global debt and banking bubble burst, before the same Europeans and Americans who once praised us as the pillars of Western civilisation turned on us. Conveniently ignoring that they had insisted we borrow mountains of their money — so we could buy their cars, washing machines and haute couture — they did not hesitate to call us all sorts of names unfit to print here.

Worse still, under our breath, we call ourselves similar names. When talking to each other, we have no qualms of being highly self-critical, often bordering on self-hatred. No Greek I know would, for instance, disagree with David Holden, the Times journalist who in 1972 depicted Greece as “rich in talent and poor in resources, developed in its tastes and underdeveloped in its capacities”. And so partly out of a false dedication to not disappointing those who talk up Greek civilisation, and partly due to our anger with ourselves and with a Europe that led us astray before treating us like cattle that lost their market price, we respond to idiotic survey questions with fake pride. Of course, we know it is fake — but, then again, fake pride is the last resort for those who have forfeited the real thing.

Sounds like bad news, right? Perhaps. But it has always been this way. Historian Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History describes declinism from its nineteenth-century origins in concepts of racial and intellectual degeneration to its late twentieth-century manifestations in the eco-pessimism of Al Gore and Ted Kacyznski. Herman’s major point — that theories of decline evolve in a dialectical fashion both with theories of progress and with competing theories of decline — is about as unexciting a perspective as any author can offer, so it should hardly come as a surprise that his work failed to stem the tide of warmed-over apocalyptic literature.

As a historian, I always regard with bemusement the various attempts at laying down universal “laws of history”, much less writing the history of the future. The former, even in the hands of individuals such as Peter Turchin or biophysicist Jared Diamond, seems too close to writing an adversarial legal memorandum: first you state the laws, then you fit the facts, which at any rate are always disputed. The latter is closer to fiction than to history, more interesting for what it tells us about an author than for the validity of its claims.

“The collapse of the world is a young man’s game,” Peter Karsten, my dissertation advisor, used to tell me, citing both the history of English property law — which historians F.W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock framed as a perpetual conflict between parents seeking to protect their estates and children interested in selling them to experience fleeting material pleasures — and his own experience as a young officer on a destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. His point was: no matter how apocalyptic the times, life goes on, much as it always has, for good and (mostly) for ill.

Scattered along the stages of life’s way are, of course, a handful of catastrophic events, born of weather or war or whatever other time and tide-tossed horrors mankind must face. More common are tiny tragedies such as the closing of a family business, the diminution of a hometown, the untimely death of a breadwinner — all collapses of a sort, setting lives on downward trajectories, and sometimes difficult for even the sharpest minds to distinguish from broader trends that might actually imply planetary extinction or the “passing of a great race”, whatever those concepts would entail.

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The discourse of decline and collapse, then, plays out primarily on this personal level. For example, Peter Turchin first theorised “elite overproduction” as the source of societal collapse in his 2016 book Ages of Discord. But the idea that there were too many would-be elites floating around was at the front of my mind five years earlier, when I was applying for tenure-track history positions. And even after I secured one of these coveted jobs, the effort left me scarred; I came to regard the humanities as a dying field enthralled by mumbo-jumbo, an ember near extinction that served as a microcosm for the world itself.

Beyond the realm of the personal, at the level described by Herman, decline and collapse represent a topic with perennial appeal for public intellectuals and their publishers. Books on the subject are always among the best-selling releases in any given year: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Earth in the Balance, The Twilight of Democracy, The Democracy Trap, Democracy on Trial, Giving Up on Democracy, The Frozen Republic, The Selling of America, The Bankrupting of America, The Endangered American Dream, and Who Will Tell the People all appeared within a ten-year span between 1985 and 1995, during which time the United States continued to hold peaceful federal and state elections while my own household priorities were related to bare-minimum subsistence and survival.

It is simple enough to explain the public’s thirst for this material — personal setbacks of any sort can make a person feel as if the whole world is coming to an end. For public intellectuals, the incentives to produce it are irresistible. Predictions and forecasts are some of the easiest pieces to write, particularly if their reckoning is far enough in the future that their author can change directions if the winds begin to shift. And as Pierre Bourdieu noted in his essay “The Metamorphosis of Tastes”, intellectual work constitutes a field where supply — increased as colleges and universities graduate more would-be public intellectuals — creates its own demand. Elite overproduction of this sort might not serve as a bellwether for social unrest, as Turchin argues, but it represents a useful shortcut when determining how much writing will be published relating to the relationship between social unrest and elite overproduction.

After all, the prophets of decline rely heavily on the work that came before them. One of the most obvious genealogies runs from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose pioneering work in its expurgated, pro-German form prompted Oswald Spengler to write his own historical analysis of concepts like “race”, “blood”, and cultural creation in the West. Spengler in turn inspired Arnold Toynbee to produce an even longer series of works, which borrowed Spengler’s concept but welcomed the West’s gradual decline. All the while, everyone else was reading them in order to respond to their work, with a 1928 Time review of the second volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West noting that “it was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathise or revolt”.

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When one views declinism at a far remove from its truth or falsity, its professional function becomes apparent: it is a fun and easy thing for intellectuals to argue about. These ideas become mere pieces on a chessboard, with the moves of the authors improved and refined over the course of their careers. This is not necessarily good or bad, but rather the nature of the marketplace of ideas.

However, this work, when consumed carelessly and in bulk, can exact a significant toll on members of an already-atomised society. Even sophisticated readers of decline and collapse literature find themselves reacting to it on the personal level — more personal than ever before in a society of extremely siloed “selves” and “identities” four decades past the “culture of narcissism” examined by Christopher Lasch. In such a world, even people far removed from poverty struggle to imagine their posterity. Millenarian fantasies of death and hellfire sell well when the people building society cease to imagine a future. The idea of the world ending in one’s lifetime certainly offers a romantic prospect for some melancholy souls.

But the world, even the world of recorded history, will likely outlast these naive notions. The Annales School of historical writing’s concept of the “longue durée”, with its emphasis on the impact of slow-changing factors such as geography and climate, offers a mature counterpoint to “histoire événementielle”, the event-driven historical approach that popular historians struggle to avoid, given the ease with which every minor political scandal or protest march can be laden with significance and transformed into a portent of the end times.

My own perspective on the matter aligns most closely with G.K. Chesterton’s, as articulated in his short essay “A Much-Repeated Repetition”. There, Chesterton noted that “although the life of man is a terrible thing at many times and in many places” and “he has much to put up with in any case”, he “has not to put with the horror of history repeating itself”. The future outcome of human history remained a mystery to him, but he was sure that tyrants laid to rest did not rise from the ground again like blades of grass. “In history a thing recurs,” he wrote, “but it never recurs quite exactly.” The story of mankind remained “literally a story: that is, a thing in which one does not know what is to happen next”, and thus a narrative in which one still has an active role to play throughout their lifetime.

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Is this the end of the world?

By Douglas Coupland

A heavy dose of declinism can ease an anxious mind by providing a compelling justification for passivity and quiescence, but this is also its most invidious side effect. Under its influence, one might sneer at small things you can do right now, focused interventions that can turn the tide of this or that event.

But we are never quite as powerless as we assume. For example, the campaign against critical race theory in education was largely the work of one man, Christopher Rufo. His efforts, love them or hate them, appear to have played a part in the outcomes of several 2021 American elections.

Mind you, victory or defeat in a process as mundane as an off-year election hardly means the end of world. But this, thank heavens, is precisely the point.

For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.

They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home. 

As archaeologists and historians have increasingly begun to stress, our globalised world has seen two antecedents in the past: in the interconnected, hyper-specialised trading systems of the Bronze Age, and those of the Roman Empire at its height. When both buckled under a wave of unexpected shocks, the result was not decline or recession but total collapse, a process defined by the great theorist Joseph Tainter as “fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. 

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This is, as Tainter observes, “a suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated” society, where “the flow of information drops, people trade and interact less” and “specialization decreases and there is less centralized control”.  This is not a Spenglerian moral fable of societal decline, but an inexorable process whereby growing complexity and sophistication bring with them a growing fragility: when a combination of shocks arrive, the entire society is suddenly forced to reorganise itself. It is not an extinction event or the end of the world: life goes on, just in a poorer, simpler fashion.

The great trading civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean present just such an example. As the archaeologist Eric H. Cline notes in his recently reissued book 1177 BC, for more than two thousand years the great civilisations of Egypt, Western Asia and the Aegean had formed a single interconnected trading system, dependent on complex trading networks that “were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts”.

When crisis struck, shortly after 1200 BC, it took down all the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean simultaneously. As Cline notes, “perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession”. A “domino effect” followed, in which, thanks to the globalised nature of their world,  “the disintegration of one civilisation led to the fall of the others”.

The collapse of Roman civilisation, a product of an overextended, underfinanced empire weakened by internal feuding among its political elites, presents another apposite example. As the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins emphasised in his 2005 book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the most remarkable aspect of Roman civilisation, archaeologically speaking, was the ability of even the poorest members of society to afford cheap and high-quality consumer goods, enabled by immense specialisation in production and an interconnected trading network that spanned the entire empire.  

Yet after Rome collapsed, such goods were only available for the very richest members of society. In the production of ceramics, the use of coinage and the construction of stone buildings, the Western half of the empire suddenly sank back to a level of societal complexity lower than in Iron Age prehistory, not returning to a Roman level of sophistication until the later Middle Ages. And indeed, as Ward-Perkins warns, the Roman economy’s complexity was the precise reason its collapse was so total: “economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists — sometimes working hundreds of miles away — for many of their material needs.” While this worked well in times of stability, it precipitated collapse when trade routes were disrupted.

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Crisis is the new normal

By Aris Roussinos

Like Friedman, or Biden, Ward-Perkins observes that today “we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing”. Yet he draws a very different conclusion about the desirability of this situation, noting that now “we would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency”. 

Yet of course, even as they were living through its early stages, the Romans were unaware their society was collapsing. Yes, goods were harder to come by, infrastructure was increasingly degraded, urban life was increasingly unsettled, economic growth was only a memory, and new religions boomed as people tried to make sense of their declining prospects. But even still, the military failures on the empire’s eastern fringes barely impacted life in the imperial centre. For some people, great profits could still be made: for most, things went on much as before, though with a lower standard of living with each passing year. No doubt, things will improve soon, Romans told themselves: this is only a temporary blip.

The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. This is the process of what Greer terms “catabolic collapse” — “the stairstep sequence of decline” where decades of crisis are followed by decades of seeming improvement, though the underlying society is left weaker and less resilient before the next crisis hits: “rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.” 

This gloomy view accords well with the Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis that the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, has led us into a period of civilisational entropy and decay. For him, we experience “life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck”. It is a period where the state can no longer guarantee its citizens order or security, where “deep changes will occur” in an unpredictable fashion, and where every last effort to squeeze profit out of a collapsing system further undermines the social structure.

For Streeck, this interregnum is a time when personal wealth dwindles and financial insecurity becomes the norm. Indeed, as Streeck observes, it is a period where “as growth declines and risks increase, the struggle for survival will become more intense”. It offers “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”. It is not a vision of hell, or of the kind of apocalypse fantasised by Hollywood, but simply of a degraded version of the present: a world closer to the modern Global South than our recent past. It is not necessarily a sudden cataclysm, but a process that will take decades, perhaps even centuries, to fully reveal itself.

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Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. As Ward-Perkins warns, Rome’s system of complex supply chains “worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted”.

The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. As Tainter notes, “the whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator” of decline. A focused effort on domestic resilience is, after all, in itself evidence of reduced civilisational complexity: as trade routes wither and consumption begins to drop, we should strive to ensure that we are heading towards a controlled descent and not a sudden, cataclysmic crash. The imperial centre may not hold, but our lives must go on.

When “Return” seems to be the future, it’s easy to forget that in the 20th century, modernism was popular. The Victorian city centres whose demolition we now mourn were dismissed as relics of the past. Many celebrated their replacement with modern, progressive steel-and-concrete boxes.

But less often asked than “Why is it all so ugly?” is: how did we get here?

This might seem an odd way to start an article about Remembrance Day, and the centenary of the Poppy Appeal. But writing about how we commemorate the Great War, over a century after it ended, is to ask: what, exactly, are we remembering? And why?

Of course, when we memorialise that war, we honour its 10 million dead and 23 million mutilated. But, less obviously, we also mark the start of an ongoing, monumental collective effort of forgetting.

The most visible traces of that forgetting are everywhere around us, in the modernist art, architecture and anti-culture that seemed, to contemporaries, not just necessary but essential in the wake of the Great War: a wholesale reboot of human culture.

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At root, the modernists hoped that somehow, if they could only make everything, clean, rational and anti-traditionalist enough, we’d never have to go to war again.

Why, then, did Europe go to war? Popular sentiment today holds that the Great War was fought for democracy. This is also the story America has always told about its own involvement in the conflict. But it’s far from clear that the modern-day abstraction of “democracy” was uppermost in the minds of British people in 1914, when the war began.

The Europe of 1914 was a place of competing empires, where the word of hereditary monarchs still had meaningful sway. The heads of state of three of the main belligerents were first cousins: George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas of Russia. As historian Miranda Carter shows, the glittering, solipsistic worlds of these three royal cousins became ever more out of kilter with the industrialising empires they ruled.

Ever more intricate webs of alliances, woven by statesmen in the name of realpolitik and balancing competing interests, drove Europe’s imperial powers inexorably toward disaster. After the assassination of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, Britain declared war on Germany partly out of treaty obligations to Belgium, but more broadly to maintain that balance.

It wasn’t until America’s 1917 entry into the fray, under Woodrow Wilson, that anyone talked about “democracy” as a motivating force in the conflict. Wilson’s liberal internationalism blamed an inherently unstable dynamic of “power politics” for the bloodbath, and sought a new way of ensuring peace through “collective security”.

Though it’s widely understood today that Wilson’s efforts helped to create the conditions for a reprise of world war in 1939, recent writers see in Wilson’s project the first germs of the “liberal international order”. The settlement imposed on Germany after 1918 was, after all, America’s first go at imposing democracy at gunpoint.

So from the perspective of grand historical narratives, the poppy marks the end of the 19th-century world of great-power politics, and the long, slow ascent of the supposedly universal Pax Americana.

From the perspective of the ordinary citizen, of course, the poppy simply marks an unimaginable loss. You’ll find a memorial in every parish up and down the country, some huge and some simple plaques. They’re markers of a collective grief, all the more unspeakable because so universal.

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The death of Britain's dignity

By Mary Harrington

In some British families, World War I killed every adult man. The memorials where their names are carved remind us that the schemes of statesmen impose a terrible cost, in empty seats at dinner tables in ordinary homes.

But today even those who remember the fallen are almost all gone themselves. So what, in fact, is the loss we’re left to remember? It’s perhaps most clearly visible in the things we no longer feel able to celebrate, except in subcultures such as Reactionary Architecture Twitter.

For the Great War saw the beginning of the end for faith in the foundations of European culture. By the end of 1918, Tsar Nicholas was beheaded by revolutionaries, Kaiser Wilhelm was deposed and exiled, and George V presided over a broken, debt-ridden empire. The war precipitated a crisis in institutional Christendom. It spawned the first Communist state. And it shattered confidence in Western civilisation.

Patriotism took a hammering; and, perhaps more profoundly, so did institutional Christianity. Most Christian denominations on both sides of the war supported the conflict: according to historian Philip Jenkins many at the time viewed it as “a holy war”. Notoriously, in 1915 the Bishop of London declared it the duty of “everyone that puts principle above ease” to “kill Germans […] not for the sake of killing, but to save the world”.

The aftermath saw an elite backlash not just against nationalism, but also traditional religious faith and cultural forms. As historian Anna Neima shows, after the Great War all energy among the world’s avant-garde focused on how human society might be re-imagined, such that nothing as horrifying could ever happen again — by transcending borders of faith or nation.

Humanity, such visionaries hoped, might be induced to forge links across mere national identity in favour of something higher. In the early Twenties, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, founder of the utopian Santiniketan-Sriniketan community, expressed this vision in a letter to fellow utopian Leonard Elmhirst as “a great meeting of world humanity”.

The elites who corresponded, shared inspiration and travelled between these and other utopian communities, reads like a Who’s Who of high modernism. Figures as diverse as Amartya Sen, Anton Chekhov and Aldous Huxley were shaped by contact with these attempts to forge humanity anew atop the smoking rubble of the imperial 19^th century.

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Some went on to found their own visionary communities: in due course, Elmhirst founded his own at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon. In time, Dartington served as a petri dish for further influential modernist innovations, including progressive education and battery farming.

At Dartington and other communities like it, all traditional practice was to be thrown on the scrap-heap. Classical music; realist painting; traditional architecture. Everything should be new, stripped of the atavistic loyalties that had powered the slaughter of millions and left Europe in ruins.

Very little survives now of the original reasons to mourn, and none of the original mourners. But we go on remembering every year. Because even if there’s no longer anyone alive who feels the real-world loss of those ten million who lost their lives, we still feel the shock of the catastrophe that ended Europe as the heart of world civilisation, in the name of realpolitik.

Today, with a century of hindsight, it’s clear that Wilson’s enthusiasm for “national self-determination” itself contained a measure of realpolitik. For in practice, the high American ideal of nations shaping their own destinies meant unravelling the dominions of America’s Old World imperial rivals.

And the liberal internationalism Wilson inaugurated has itself, ironically, come adrift in another set of poppy fields: those of Afghanistan. Now, the American civilisation that took the torch from Europe is itself embattled, under economic and cultural siege in a once-again multipolar world. And as the ghosts of 19^th-century style realpolitik stir and begin to mutter, so too the poppy has become a site of culture war.

For some, the poppy is about patriotism, jingoism, an unreconstructed Kipperanschauung. So we get the annual row over wearing a poppy on telly, or a tabloid scandal about some zealot setting fire to poppies to signify their contempt for those who hew to a sense of national identity.

And as we drift ever further through the digital looking glass, so too the byproducts of Remembrance Sunday get steadily more unreal. This year, you can commemorate the end of institutional Christendom, the collapse of four empires, and 100 years of the poppy, with a limited edition NFT inscribed with the names of 118,000 fallen Canadians. Or if you say “Dulce et decorum est” three times into the mirror, the Poppyman will appear (maybe).

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But perhaps we go on remembering, ritually, every year, as a means of acknowledging that the West did in fact once have an astonishing, vivid, remarkable culture — and that we blew it all, along with millions of lives, in two immense bonfires between 1918 and 1945.

This week, I’ve watched my small town putting up the wrought-iron soldier silhouettes that mark Remembrance Sunday here every year. Metal outlines round empty air, they’re perfect emblems for how we reacted to that disaster.

They stand as markers for the ghostly persistence of that old Europe, whose spirit burned out in the Great War. And they’re perfect metaphors for the collective decision we made in its aftermath, to evacuate our civilisation of everything suspected of having caused that cataclysm.

It turned out that this meant evacuating our civilisation of, well, everything. And having more or less completed that emptying-out, no one is quite sure what to believe any more. But if history suggests anything, it’s that now the end of history has ended, something will eventually come along capable of mobilising people at scale, for another round of grand historical events.

As ever, when that happens, it’ll be statesmen who shape the bigger story. And no doubt this will be formed of countless little ones. We can only hope these don’t end up told in empty seats, around dining tables in ordinary homes.

In one regard, this was perfectly predictable. In any given decade since the grid’s invention, there was a one in eight chance that such an electrical collapse could occur. In 2013, a report had warned that an extreme geomagnetic storm was almost inevitable, and would induce huge currents in Earth’s transmission lines. This vulnerability could, with a little effort, have been completely addressed for a tiny sum of money — less than a tenth of what the world invested annually in text messaging prior to the great collapse of 2024.

And it wasn’t as if the profits of some powerful industry depended on leaving the vulnerability open; the fossil fuel industry had a reason to oppose sustainable power, but the grid’s vulnerability enriched no one. In fact, every person on Earth stood to benefit from fixing the flaw. And yet it remained, never a priority, perhaps because nobody could predict when the fuse would be lit.

The burst of plasma leapt from the Sun’s surface on 9 May, 2024. It was detected by Earthbound space-weather observers, who track these dangerous Coronal Mass Ejections. They made the usual calculations and issued the standard warnings. Had the grid been promptly disconnected, the crisis might have been lessened. But as was invariably the case with geomagnetic storms, they could not say how seriously — or even if — this burst would disrupt power, so the scientists’ warnings were largely ignored by grid managers, who don’t like blacking out vast areas on the remote chance of a severe problem. Crossing fingers had worked pretty well in the past. This time it did not.

The plasma cloud had hit the Earth just so, inducing violent current fluctuations that burned up numerous electrical power transformers from the inside. The blackouts that started in May 2024 were not universal at first. The eastern third of North America was among the most extensively affected areas, with 30 massive transformers completely destroyed. In ordinary times, a single replacement transformer took three years to deliver. Suddenly the world faced an emergency need for more than 100.

Few who faced the initial blackouts had any idea what had happened, how big an area was affected, or that substantial grid repair would take years. The blackout cut them off from power, yes, but also from information. Most assumed their electricity would be back within hours or days. When night fell, the solar storm filled the sky with a spectacular display of northern lights visible as far south as Costa Rica, all the more dramatic in the places that had suddenly gone dark — a dazzling final curtain for industrial civilisation. This brilliant sky created a festive atmosphere.

By the second and third consecutive nights, the mood became increasingly panicked. People started trying to flee the blackouts by car. Most, not knowing how far it extended, made their situation worse. Without power, no gas was available, and so these first refugees were forced to abandon their vehicles haphazardly. Roads became blocked. The military tried to keep order, but their attempts to calm the population with false promises and inadequate aid caused them to be viewed with suspicion and hostility and sometimes targeted. Desertions became common as soldiers set out to protect their families.

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Even where the power remained on, life was not normal. Those near the blackout border quickly faced armed raids from the dark zones. Residents fled toward the powered interior. Wave after wave of refugees arrived — drawn to anything functional, quickly overwhelming it and creating new refugees. As everyone saw chaos erupt around them, they became intensely focused on immediate needs. Everywhere, there was hoarding. The sound of gunfire became ubiquitous as armed syndicates emerged to overwhelm isolated preppers. The distinction between offensive and defensive killing was lost. Canned and freeze-dried food became inconceivably valuable. Currency became worthless as people realised society was unrecoverable.

Humans model danger based on their own experiences and those of their ancestors. Solar storms were nothing new, in 2024, but the jeopardy they posed to humanity had increased only very gradually since the last really big storm, in 1859 — the year Darwin had published The Origin of Species. That storm caught the eye of a British astronomer named Richard Christopher Carrington, who noticed unusual solar activity and linked it to the spectacular aurora that had appeared. What became known as the Carrington Event damaged telegraph systems and delivered shocks to a number of operators. Some found they could send messages even with the loss of power, because the storm had induced currents in the wires. Fascinating, but not the stuff of the nightmares, on a planet not heavily dependent on industry. And as our civilisation became overwhelmingly electrical, solar flares never produced enough harm to focus our collective attention — there was no real prelude to the event that precipitated our downfall.

In the initial weeks after the collapse, the military was tasked with a vital mission. Even dormant nuclear reactors — and their spent fuel pools — need to have cold water circulated through them constantly to prevent reactor meltdowns and devastating fuel-pool fires. Regulations required that each complex have a week’s worth of backup diesel generator fuel on hand. Many had four times that amount, but none had planned for a blackout that would last a year or more, and that is what they were facing in the best-case scenario. It fell to the Army to make sure these backup diesel generators and pumps never failed or ran dry. For six months, they accomplished that mission across all the affected reactors, with one exception.

The Army had quickly found that for most reactors, creating a defensible perimeter around the site and delivering fuel by helicopter was the most reliable approach. In the third week after the collapse, a helicopter clipped a light pole in the fog and crashed at the North Anna reactor in Virginia, spilling its fuel and sparking a devastating fire that engulfed the generators. Retardant dropped from above was sucked into the air intakes, and the combination killed the power, which remained out long enough for the reactor cores to meltdown and slump. The containment breached, forcing the site to be abandoned.

As the fuel pools boiled and ran dry, the heat from radioactive decay caused the cladding on the fuel rods to burst into flame; a plume of highly radioactive smoke rose above the site, contaminating the region and driving essential governmental functions out of Washington D.C., one of few Eastern seaboard cities that had been successfully stabilised. The danger of the radioactive fallout was kept officially quiet, but rumours spread, confirmed by those few citizens with access to battery-powered Geiger counters. This sparked a massive refugee crisis as the region’s population fled their homes, dodging precipitation, every squall now raining radioactive isotopes onto the earth below. Ultimately, the spreading collapse of civilisation would cause every nuclear reactor complex on Earth to be abandoned, guaranteeing that all of its radioactive material would escape into the environment and begin to circulate.

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Meanwhile, the population was nearly helpless as the skills they had acquired for the pre-collapse world were rendered useless. Many thought that, with modern weapons, they could hunt their way through lean times — the result being that populations of every terrestrial animal one might think to eat crashed all at once. Hundreds of thousands of humans fled into the wilderness, many with no idea how to function there. The result that first summer was unprecedented wildfires — some started carelessly, some set deliberately by people hoping to flush out animals. In North America, 100 years of foolish forest management centred on fire suppression had left a giant tinderbox. Post collapse, there was no firefighting effort to contain these blazes. They burned, hot, until they went out, desertifying vast landscapes, killing many, and creating ever more refugees with nowhere to go.

The fires had another consequence. They filled the atmosphere with smoke, noticeably cooling the Earth for several years, delaying and masking a much bigger and more devastating effect. Vast quantities of carbon were transferred during the fires from living plants into heat-trapping gasses. At the same time, the sudden collapse of the world economy had brought industrial activity to a standstill — along with the pollutants it incessantly expelled into the atmosphere, which had had a cooling effect. The globe began to warm precipitously, hitting a tipping point in the fourth year after collapse, when the Arctic thawed sufficiently to set off the “clathrate gun”, where enough frozen methane was liberated to trigger positive feedback, with each newly thawed ton elevating the temperature enough to liberate yet more methane. The temperature of Earth jumped 7 degrees Celsius in 20 years, throwing every ecological process that endured the initial collapse into chaos.

The radical warming of the climate delivered a terrible blow to traditional agricultural systems, which were becoming the only source of food. Suddenly, every farmer lived in an altered habitat, and the crops they were expert in producing were no longer at home. Large-scale agriculture had already failed, utterly, in the first year of collapse. The really big crops had all been engineered to maximise profit under stable circumstances, and they didn’t grow at all without the fertilisers and machines around which they were designed. Most livestock had been killed by desperate people with no experience preserving meat and most of their bulk putrefied where they fell.

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The southern hemisphere fared better and held out longer because most of industrial civilisation was in the north, and the atmosphere and oceans are very slow to mix across the equator. But ultimately, they did mix, and the devastating rise in the Earth’s temperature spared no one. When the last human died on the shores of Comoros, it was for lack of food. Her family had learned to survive on gathered shellfish but ultimately even they, protected for so long by their isolation from the chaos, gave out, when the macroscopic ecology of the southern oceans gave way.

If there is a lesson to be gleaned from the cascading failures that ended our species and destroyed our planet, it is this: it didn’t need to happen. The vulnerability of the transformers was a solvable issue (as was the vulnerability of our nuclear reactors, our agriculture, our information infrastructure and our populations.) The fact that solar flares could precipitate a catastrophic power outage had been well understood, but minimising this hazard never became a global priority. All it would have taken is money and time. Once the transformers were destroyed, money became meaningless and time had run out.

Back in 2021, the sun was predicted to reach its next solar maximum in 2025. Humanity crossed its fingers one last time.