Placing Caesarism

I started this blog to investigate how our civilization has chosen to encourage the life of the mind. In a previous post, I explored the topic of the Fall of Rome and how it tugs on the imaginations of many of my friends and collaborators. Last year, I finally sat down and read Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, and it took me through a veritable Aeneid of Rome-anxiety.

The germane concern beneath the fall-of-Rome comparison is thus: is our civilization reaching a historically precedented point of creative enervation? Even without approaching “collapse,” have we terminally lost our appetite for refinement and reason? Have we flopped intellectually to a point where we can only understand force and compulsion? Are we, in short, marching toward Caesarism?

This, I think, is what really motivates us to stare at Rome. But maybe it doesn’t need to be just Rome.

Spengler’s magnum opus has brought me up to speed on how the “us and Rome” comparison has been made for the last century, and his anxiety about the futility of intellectualism totally dwarfs mine in a way that’s oddly relieving. Refreshingly, as well, Spengler endeavored to compare us not merely to Rome but to every civilization that’s ever existed. It’s reframed the problem in my mind: perhaps we’re not worried about Rome as such, but about the character of Caesar.

Reflecting on Decline, I had a few points to clarify for myself:

• What Spengler actually thinks the succession of cultures and civilizations looks like;
• How he thinks the emergence of Caesarism plays out in detail, specifically within Western history;
• How Spengler thinks we can compare ourselves to the Aztecs, to India, and to China.

The result is many lines of flight from the original concern, as I summarize below. Since so many of Spengler’s successors live in his lacunae, I hope that I and my readership can live there consciously, appreciating that when we worry about Caesarism, we do so standing within a complex tradition. And it’s certainly better to feel like you’re in good company confronting this feeling.

The Succession of Civilizations

For Spengler, there is a life cycle by which cultures emerge, begin to actualize their potentials, and age until they become civilizations. A culture becomes a civilization once it has completely decided all of its inward potentials, at which it can only expand outward and try to mold the world in its image. Every civilization in history has reached a stage he calls Caesarism when the expansion is in full swing and the arts and sciences can’t command attention to discover anything new. Caesarism is the terminal phase of a civilization, wherein it flails outwardly until its geographical circumstances condemn it to be overtaken by younger and more energetic cultures. Polymath he is, Spengler offers several examples of this process, and he’s clear that the march of Western civilization toward Caesarism is the central anxiety of the book.

Centrally, Spengler insists that the Rome of the Fifth Century is an example of a new culture overtaking an older civilization. It’s Christian (“Magian”), he says, and not Classical. From my own understanding of Roman history, it was under the pious Justinian that the Empire shut down the Classical theaters of Constantinople. What happened was cultural forms explicitly blotting out old ones — not exactly a sense of continuity as much as transmutation from a spent civilization into a young culture still capable of pieties. This complicates the question of what we’re after when we ask about the “fall of Rome” — for Spengler, we should primarily be concerned about the arrival of a Caesarist period when younger cultures can simply take over.

(Specifically, Spengler sees one culture emerging in the Hellenic Archaic period following the Bronze Age collapse and culminating in the creation of the civilization of Rome. He sees another culture emerging in Judea and Mesopotamia in the Second Temple period, transmuting into early Christianity, and culminating in the civilization of the Abbasid Caliphate. This is a little confusing, but think seriously about how the people practicing early Christianity have so much more in common with early Muslims than they do with Germans.)

Put another way, Rome the Classical polity didn’t fall, but was rather dissolved by Christianity and became Rome the Christian polity. Brown’s delineation of Late Antiquity as a fundamentally different era seems to borrow from this. Indeed, the preface of The World of Late Antiquity explicitly nods to the radical change that overtook the Mediterranean Basin in just a few critical decades. Here, the delineation missing in my last post: the continuity of a polity is not the same thing as the continuity of a civilization. He couldn’t be consoled from our fears of collapse by the existence of a Byzantine Empire onward until 1453.

To this point, Spengler enumerates several examples of where the achievements of one civilization are passed on to another and lose all of their context or meaning. This is a corollary to his primary observation that all cultures operate on their own cadences. For instance, he insists along with his contemporary Johann Huizinga that the Renaissance can’t be seen as a “rediscovery” of Classical culture as much as it was a projection of Gothic values and ideals into a new imagined Classical past — it’s not as if the Medici could actually believe in the real presence of the Greek Gods on stage the way Aristophanes’s audience might. Similarly, German Philhellenism could only have be a searching for a German national identity in the ruins of Athens and made a mockery of itself by producing all those inaccurate paintings of bone-white statues and men in togas. And so on.

This paints the picture for me. Caesarism in Rome meant the end of creative potentials in Roman arts and sciences. (He enumerates a lot of examples, but for your own purposes try to come up with a philosophical or artistic development in the Classical world after the year 100 CE.) These were not reborn in the time of Justinian or during the Italian Renaissance. When we worry about the collapse or waning of a civilization, we have to be clear-eyed about what that civilization actually is as an artistic and scientific lineage. And we have to do so because, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s our own anxiety about what our generation could really contribute to this lineage.

Caesarism in Western Civilization

Now, Spengler is very detailed in how civilization shores up its institutions and eventually dissolves its capacity for new arts and sciences. He thinks it’s quite consistent between historical civilizations and even has more or less a slide rule for measuring the length of different periods of this cultural lifecycle. As for how it happens, the story is not really so different from Marx’s tale about the accumulation of capital. Unlike Marx, he doesn’t see one grand Hegelian narrative across all of human history, but rather sees the process unfolding across the lifecycle of each individual culture-civilization. But, critically, he had himself convinced it happened reliably enough to every past civilization that we could actually try to predict our own future using his system.

The process begins with a moment of what today’s political scientists would call state-formation: when Louis XIV moves all of the French nobles off their land into Versailles to keep them in one place, or when the Roman senators all move up to the Capitoline Hill, or when the Abbasids found Baghdad to host the court of the Caliph. The monarch does this to force them to complete administrative procedures quickly and to create reliable processes that constitute the Weberian mechanisms of state. The nobles, moved away from land that originally bound them to a personal contract, become a courtly aristocracy now (as Marx would say) alienated from their ancient origins and concerned mostly with how to spend their money lavishly in the capital city.

Evidently inspired by what Nietzsche had to say about the development of language, this courtly existence evolves into the city as the bourgeoisie start to imitate the communications of the aggregated elites. Whereas previously language lived in letters between the few literate and dispersed elites, it came to live in conversation and in the exchange of professional services and the procurement of luxury goods. (This bourgeois language is what allows the development of the German Bildungsbürgertum from whom Nietzsche and Spengler were both descended.) The bourgeois allow the shallow and alienated imitation of cultural forms anywhere. Witness European colonies and treaty ports, or Chinese corporations in Indonesia, or the Koine Greek language taking over Central Asia. As Spengler points out, the motivation that animates these languages is now purely economic rather than spiritual or strictly national. The cultural potential for provinces to produce nobility with ancient rights is saturated, and civilization is born.

With the expanse of language into the economic, rather than courtly-historical realm, comes the rise of the City. Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Ctesiphon, Constantinople, Baghdad, Paris, London, New York. It becomes pure intellect that binds the bourgeois — not philosophy for the soul-searching of aristocrats, but commerce, science, any form of deliberate and refined action. The man of the city becomes alienated from the “cosmic rhythm” of the soil, his ancient customs, his “race”-mannerisms. The city is home, and that’s why we call him the burgher or bourgeois. Once the cities are built, says Spengler, country life is revealed as slow and unsatisfactory, and the primary tension of civilization becomes the Marxian conflict between town and country. (He goes so far as to prophesize that the cities of the year 2000 might expand to 20 million inhabitants.) After this moment, all cultural potentials come from urban intellect.

Finally, Caesarism begins with the arrival of the masses into the cities. The bourgeoisie have intellect to bind them, but displaced peasants-cum-laborers are after bread and games and nothing else. Cities grown, and their amusement and intellectual race pull in human lives away from the social fabric of the countryside, the very social fabric that birthed the culture. The masses grow with the cities, and they yearn only for the “cosmic rhythm” that they have been pulled away from. Think of the world of Spengler’s other contemporary, Jose Ortega y Gasset: the confused mob overflows city parks and theaters, babbling phrases that no longer even pretend to imitate the courts of the past. The function of language is reduced to economic expectations, and it’s employed by an unstructured mass of people with no formal institutional roles and no particular attachments to any project — historical or economic. It’s this, the Ortega moment, where Spengler sees the saturation of scientific and artistic potential. Language becomes a shouting match, and Caesars who can bellow over everyone else will eventually emerge.

For us in the West, Spengler claims, the first stirrings came with the French Revolution but clearly the rule of the mass consummated in the Great War. In this period, corresponding to the two hundred and fifty years between perhaps 1850–2100 AD or 300–50 BCE, what might be called “Napoleonism” evolves into full-blown Caesarism. His point can be seen in the evolution of military organization: by 100 BCE, armies in Rome are no longer loyal to the Senate itself. Soon after, Marius has to murder the entire aristocracy and give the military over to the mass. Similar developments happen in China during the Warring States period or the mass-mobilizing armies of the Great War for whom no alliance had any meaning rooted in tradition or world-government structure.

Who are the figures of Western Caesarism? We suppose Rhodes (as mentioned at the top), Bismarck, Hitler, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, and Johnson. Men for whom politics is biopolitics, who speak directly through the radio to the mass, who lead with force more than even pure commercial interest. Men for whom cultural forms have become purely formal, decorative, dead objects and for whom it is not a conflict of ideas but of concrete and largely formless institutions. Roosevelt’s policies performed a similar “murder of the aristocracy” — in a short decade, managing to completely cull wealth-ostentation and the practice of keeping servants, setting an expectation of national full employment, and shattering the British Empire. We have to compare them, according to Spengler’s slide rule, to Gaius Julius himself, to Tiberius, to the Flavians — men who conquered and made provinces of the East not for ideological reasons but simply because there was no other cure to anarchy.

For Spengler, Classical history per se is pretty much “over” after Actium. Christ is born, the Empire gets itself into full swing, all sense of local patronage collapses, and the die is cast. Arts and sciences and letters can’t find an audience, and the main source of advancement for good brains is up the meritocratic ladder of the Roman Army. Brown will tell you how it becomes so unbearable that Magian culture has to fill in all the cracks as the old Classical institutions turn into a rusty war machine. Depending on how you read the slide rule, Justinian arrives in Magian history as a Charles V or a Louis XII, the Caliphs arrive as Napoleons, and Seljuk Sultans arrive as Caesars. But, I digress, and will leave Magian musings to a later post.

And when does Spengler think the masses will finally have their way with Western Civilization? Spengler discusses how the “dictatorship of money” ruled in Rome until finally being crushed under the heel of Diocletian. That’s in 300 CE! Lining up with Spengler’s slide rule, we would expect to live under the process of Caesarism until something like the year 2450 (!). At this point, says Spengler, the “primary values of the soil” — the cosmic rhythm that the masses seek to return to from their alienation, retake their place on the throne in a closing act of civilization.

I’m not sure I can really believe in a 400-years-out extension of the present era, but frankly, maybe I should. It would certainly take away, for instance, the election-by-election anxiety that American news media have taken to monetizing. And it helps center Spengler’s ethical thrust in all its strangeness: if we’re going to be stuck in a terminal state for multiple generations, what can our own do?

Caesarism in Other Civilizations

So what does a closing act look like, in Spengler’s mind? How has it ended for other civilizations? He has one clear answer and several examples where he totally lacks them.

For a good example, we go to the example of Mexico City. Spengler thinks we can glimpse our future in the history of the Aztecs. As I mentioned in a previous post, I think that explaining the decline of the West in terms of a freak event like Cortes showing up and annihilating the population of the Volcanic Belt of Mexico with disease is suspect: we have to believe that Columbian exchange is completely extrinsic to anything about Aztec civilization. But, fine, assume that an extrinsic event didn’t wipe them out and Cortes became simply another foreign conqueror exactly as the Aztecs thought him to be. How does their timeline line up?

Looking at the few strange paragraphs Spengler writes about the Aztecs, it seems that the rise of the Toltecs (roughly the year 950 CE) lines up next to the beginning of the Classical period of the rise of Caesarism (350 BCE) and the present age of Napoleon (1800 CE). By this token, the beginning of the Aztecs proper is 1400 CE, aligning with Classical 100 CE (Augustus) and Western 2250 CE (forthcoming). From Aztec militarism to the absolute end (the plague of 1520 CE) is another 120 years, which would be Classical 220 CE (Crisis of the Third Century) or Western 2370 CE. Diocletian, which the Aztecs never make it to, would have emerged from Cortes’s lineage some time around 1600 CE.

Spengler clearly mentions the Aztecs to demonstrate what happens when a youthful (at this point in time, Western) civilization collides with an older tired one. Read Tzvetan Todorov if you don’t know the story of Moctezuma’s incurable pessimism and belief in cyclical time — it certainly speaks to an image of the Aztec empire as the last polity in a rather spent civilization that began with Teotihuacan in the First Century BCE. I can see how the clash of Aztecs with the West kind of rhymes with the takeover of Rome from within by Christian (”Magian”) civilization. He actually talks about how Russia is its own civilization waiting to take over Western civilization, which is its own strange point of departure into hopefully some future posts about Eurasianism.

But, given that we have both India and China for comparison, let’s take a look at what happens after civilization reaches its “closing act” in a less dramatic capacity.

First, India. Spengler refers to a millennium of Indian culture between the Vedas and the Buddha (1500 BCE — 500 BCE), followed by the imperial phase of Indian civilization (500 BCE — 600 CE) ending with the fall of the Gupta Empire at the hands of the Huns. Then, supposedly, it’s contact with the Caliphate that exposes the entire Subcontinent to the influence of Magian culture. Indian civilization terminates in Buddhism the same way that Classical civilization terminated in Stoicism or Western civilization threatens to terminate in socialism.

This seems to hold up, perhaps, except for some major events such as the resurgence of Puranic Hinduism. While it’s true that Islam conquered India, it did so properly only in the relatively late phases of its own civilizational arc (i.e. under Turkish-Persian sultans) and therefore would not be expected to breathe much new life into the ways of the Subcontinent. Thus, it’s somewhat unclear to me if Spengler believed India to have become entirely Magian between its first contact with the Caliphate and the appearance of Robert Clive (roughly 750 CE — 1750 CE). And if so, why in 1911 did so many of the older cultural forms persist in earnest? For instance, he observes that Indian traders in British East Africa had the advantage of being older, more commercially-cynical intellects operating in a more youthful milieu. Or, as he highlights in certain places, why was Indian art still around in its fixed and exhausted forms, not somehow supplanted by the Magian ones? There’s an entire millennium lost in Spengler’s analysis here, and moreover no explanation about what India might yet become.

Second, China. China similarly got started as a culture around the Axial date of 1500 BCE, which would mean the termination of its civilization phase at approximately 500 CE. (Spengler dates the fall of the Zhou in 441 BCE, for instance, as comparable to the execution of Louis XVIII.) This poses the same question as above, but with even greater geographical restriction: what culture or civilization, pray tell, took over China in the Seventh Century? Without question the Middle Kingdom became Buddhist under the Tang, and experienced a whole artistic flourishing, but it’s surprising under Spengler’s analysis to see this without the obvious emergence of a new culture. And what of the Mongol conquest? What of the Ming? The Qing and the dominance of the Eighteenth Century? Are we to look at some fifteen centuries as just countless generations of imperial rehash? And, as above, what of its future? Nothing?

The analysis of Chinese history is possibly the largest lacuna I can find in Spengler’s analysis, and I’d love to be wrong in my assessment here. He has some very interesting things to say about Chinese cultural forms themselves — the world conceived of as a great landscape, the idea of the intense directionality of the dao, the drive toward harmony instead of Western will — but the chronology just baffles me and makes me wonder if the whole measuring stick of two-millennium civilizations is just overfit.

As a bit of personal commentary — I get the idea that a civilization works and works until it actualizes all the potential of its prime phenomenon, and that it then sits until something more youthful comes along, but I’m really not satisfied with his descriptions of the two largest world civilizations. I shudder, much the way Spengler must have, to think of how much we have yet to learn from the cavernous vaults of East Asian and South Asian history. I can see why Spengler was loathe to acknowledge this huge stumbling block: if we have to throw out the very strong prediction of two-millennium empires, Spengler has to make a much more general and less haunting prediction about the course of civilizations. I’d love to be pointed in the direction of more reading about Spengler’s Chinese predictions.

Overall, though, there’s a clear picture of how it all ends. The mass takes over and politics becomes purely expansive in some military-economic sense, with good brains being more and more straightforwardly drafted into the service of pure expansion. After so many generations of leaders who are pure strongmen leading formations of pure force, alienation is complete and the civilization is saturated. It’s this mode of Caesarism we should fear, Spengler is clear, since there’s no collapse that’s guaranteed. It’s merely the decline into ossified cultural forms that create no space for creativity. Hence, Decline of the West.

Conclusions

To summarize everything I’ve worked through above:

• Spengler’s is a robust and profoundly impactful theory of cultural evolution;
• It doesn’t really matter to Spengler when or why civilizations collapse as much as we fear the arrival of Caesar because it means creativity has dissolved;
• Civilizations are not the same thing as polities and Byzantium was not a continuation of Rome;
• Hence, “Late” Rome, under Spengler’s reading, actually is the Second and Third Centuries to which I compared contemporary Western society;
• The mass urbanization of the Twentieth Century heralded for Spengler the triumph of the masses and the creeping in of Caesarism;
• Like with the Aztecs and to an extent with the Indians, Rome witnessed the arrival of a younger and more energetic culture and this most proximally caused the collapse of Classical civilization;
• Spengler is as fixated on Rome specifically as Brown is: we can’t really explain e.g. the Tang Dynasty using the pseudomorphosis theory of civilizations and there’s no real nod to this as work yet to be done.

Hence, when we talk about the “fall of Rome,” we should see that we’re inheriting Spengler’s pessimism about how much fruit Western civilization has yet to bear. What potentials remain for the next several generations? How does one live boldly in a world marching toward an era of pure force?

Rome, I should add, fell thanks to a geographical contingency: barbarians on the border. They had been pushed in there for centuries by factors involving Eurasian geography. Chinese geography (and wall engineering) was evidently sufficient to protect them from ever being overrun by barbarians for fifteen centuries after their civilization, according to Spengler, was spent. Aztec and Incan civilization should have been able to expect the same if not for the arrival of Spanish caravels (although Spengler has strangely nothing to say about the Incas). One has to wonder if the geography of North America might not grant some longevity to a hollowed-out Western civilization. You can start thinking about all sorts of geographical questions: Walter Scheidel and biogeography and agriculture and so on.

Of course, this is all a bit of a tangent. To wonder about the fall of Rome and to compare it to our own time is really an existential question about the purpose and potential of the toil of this generation. Perhaps total nullity awaits us by the year 2400, but the question is really a proximal and ethical one.

Spengler himself was wracked with this anxiety despite claiming to have all the answers about how civilization ages. Why was it not satisfactory for him to become cynical and commercial and atheistic the way he seemed to believe all civilizations eventually become? What kindling of hope did he hold on to, and was he able to believe in it more than he believed that the contributions of his own generation were condemned to pathetic limitation?

I don’t know. To repeat, Spengler has influenced so many subsequent thinkers that we’d do well to imagine sitting in their company as we ruminate about Caesar. And he’s provided so many examples to think about that we can go far simply pulling the threads that he’s picked loose. Read the book or at least nod to its influence when you bite your nails at night.