Are we Rome in decline, a dying society? One may doubt that we have reached that point of dissolution, where in the phrase of Giovanni Battista Vico men “finally go mad and waste their substance.” One may doubt the ultimately astrological intuitions of an Oswald Spengler. In fact, civilizations are not ruled by the stars. But something is there.
The crisis transcends America. There is a near universal conviction that something is radically wrong, unaccountably awry, and the feeling is more than troubled; it is bitter. Nowhere in our Western world today is there a revolutionary who could say, as did the youthful William Wordsworth greeting the French Revolution, that “all the world was young and to be young was very heaven.” The new mood is dark and it brings to mind an astute dictum of Oswald Spengler’s: “Only the sick man feels his limbs.”
There is a sense of possibilities foreclosed, of problems too big, of a failure of nerve of a whole society. But perhaps it is not so much a matter of diminishing elan as of age. The world is not new anymore; modern individuals carry a vast weight of self-conscious history on their backs. Indeed, what underlies the contemporary sense of unease, the striving for forced, and false parallels with the Rome of the winter years, is just this very sense of deja-vu. We feel, even if our grasp of detail is shaky, that somehow it has all happened before and will happen again. Thus the search for the pattern of history in our day.
To the English historian Arnold Toynbee, his message was a little less dark. The breakdown of a society was not an inner necessity- the consequence of some darkly apprehended, if indefinable, universal law. According to his A Study of History, breakdown occurs when a society fails to respond successfully to challenge. In Toynbee’s system, the “creative minority” that leads the civilization in its growth phase suffers a failure of creativity and self-confidence. aaa aaaa
The society, homogenous in its earlier phases, splits into a “dominant minority” that no longer leads by exerting a magnetic charm over the mass but rules by regimentation and repression. Toynbee sees this process of decline as a lengthy affair. The society breaks down to enter a period of intermittent fratricidal wars; this is the “Time of Troubles.” Though the years of decline may be interrupted by seemingly successful rallies, once the breakdown occurs and the society is splintered, nothing can save it.
As the fragmentation increases, the dominant minority will attempt to pacify the society by erecting what Toynbee calls a universal state- an empire on the model of Rome that secures a dubious peace at the cost of repression, standardization, and ultimately the death of all creative thought. aaa aaa
To Toynbee, a sure sign of incipient decline is not merely the drying up of creativity but the tendency of the ruling elite to adopt the habits, thought, and dress,diversion and religion of those whom the society in its growth phase attracted rather than repressed, intimidated rather than imitated, so that, as in late republican Rome, the great senatorial families found themselves practicing the vices of their slaves and worshiping their gods as well. To Toynbee, this is seen as a disdain for classical painting such as Botticelli for example in favor of pop art; the absence of ancestral style. Somewhat cynically, its hard to put too much faith in the pieties of a Toynbee and the type of verbal religiosities he entangles the reader with. But, something is there; but our focus on morals, societal trends, and given situations usually leads us to distraction from the basic economic structure and its endless search for the “new”:
Joseph Heath: For example, it is Veblen who, at the close of the 19th century, observed that “The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition. One’s neighbors, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one’s neighbors, or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high degree of utility… It is evident, therefore, that the present trend of the development is in the direction of heightening the utility of conspicuous consumption as compared with leisure” that reveals a more profound grasp of the underlying dynamics of the capitalist system….
ADDENDUM:
Heath: …Yet in retrospect, it seems clear that many of these critics were simply appalled at how many of their own “leisure class” habits Veblen’s critique unmasked. (His classification of “high culture” as merely another form of conspicuous consumption was a particular sticking-point with Theodor Adorno, who described Veblen’s attitude in this regard as “splenetic,” “misanthopic,” and “melancholy” [1941, 393 & 407])….
….Status is the central concept in Veblen’s analytical framework. Status is, in his view, more fundamental than class, private property, or any other economic concept. Indeed, a proper understanding of status is essential to understanding any of the routine assumptions made by
economists, such as the “irksomeness” of labor and the desirability of leisure (Veblen, 1898). Veblen conceives of status among humans as a stratification system, no different in principle from the hierarchies that structure social relations throughout the animal kingdom (from the “pecking order” among chickens to the dominance relations among our closest primate ancestors). It is grounded in judgments that establish an invidious comparison, which Veblen defines as a “comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value” (1899, 34)….Read More:http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~jheath/veblen.pdf