Arthur Herman - The Idea of Decline in Western History

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Copyright 1997 by Arthur Herman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herman, Arthur

The idea of decline in Western history / Arthur Herman

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-684-82791-3
eISBN: 978-1-451-60313-2

1. Civilization, WesternPhilosophy.

2. Regression (Civilization)

I. Title.

CB245.H429 1997

909.09912dc20 96-36285

CIP

FOR BETH

PART ONE
THE LANGUAGES OF DECLINE

2. Afloat on the Wreckage
Arthur de Gobineau and Racial Pessimism

3. Historical and Cultural Pessimism
Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche

4. Degeneration
Liberalisms Doom

PART TWO
PREDICTING THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

5. Gilded Age Apocalypse
Henry and Brooks Adams

6. Black Over White
W.E.B. Du Bois

7. The Closing of the German Mind
Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West

8. Welcoming Defeat
Arnold Toynbee

PART THREE
THE TRIUMPH OF CULTURAL PESSIMISM

9. The Critical Personality
The Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse

10. The Modern French Prophets
Sartre, Foucault, Fanon

12. Eco-Pessimism
The Final Curtain

Every time I mentioned to friends or acquaintances that I was writing a book on the decline of Western civilization, the response was almost invariably, Well, is it or isnt it? I then had to point out that this was a book about the idea of Western decline as part of modern thinking, not a pronouncement on whether modern civilization was actually doomed or not.

I would point out that while intellectuals have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for more than one hundred and fifty years, its influence has grown faster during that period than at any time in history. Western cultural ideals and institutions enjoy more prestige now than they did during the heyday of European colonization and empire. The Wests essential contributions to our contemporary world include the role that science and technology play in enhancing material life, our belief in democracy, the rights of the individual, and the rule of law, as well as the liberating effects of free market capitalism and private ownership of property. As we now approach the twenty-first century, these beliefs seem to be more and more the unshakable pillars of the modern global outlook.

Yet when I point this out as evidence that, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the West might be greatly exaggerated, I usually meet with strong skepticism. It became apparent to me that if I took a poll among my lecture audiences at the Smithsonian Institutionwhich tend to be older than my college audiencesthe vote would be overwhelmingly in favor of the verdict that civilization, that is, the modern West, stands on the brink of dissolution.

We live in an era in which pessimism has become the norm, rather than the exception. Two decades ago John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that every publisher wants his authors book to be entitled The Crisis of American Democracybecause he knows that that title will sell. That observation seems even more true today. A long string of crisis books have appeared, preparing us for the twenty-first century as an erea of deep dislocation and uncertainty, with the West, which largely means the United States, increasingly unable to exert any influence on the outcome. America and Europe have lost their long-held position of global dominance, they argue; we had all better prepare for the worst rather than the best. Here is a standard opening:

Hardly more than a quarter-century after Henry Luce proclaimed the American century, American confidence has fallen to a low ebb. Those who recently dreamed of world power now despair of governing the city of New York. Defeat in Vietnam, economic stagnation, and the impending exhaustion of natural resources have produced a mood of pessimism in higher circles, which spreads through the rest of society as people lose faith in their leaders. The same crisis of confidence grips other capitalist countries as well.

These words come from the preface to Christopher Laschs Culture of Narcissism. Published in 1979, it warned that bourgeois society has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it and that the political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture. Lasch quoted distinguished historian David H. Donald: The age of abundance has ended, ushering in the bleakness of the new era.

Less than a decade later, American and European politics witnessed a massive return to the virtues of free enterprise, bourgeois values, and a new age of abundance, as oil prices fell and non-Western countries began to turn to American-style capitalism, not socialism, to invigorate their industrial economies. Yet already Paul Kennedy was arguing in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) that Americans were about to face the same fate as the British at the end of the nineteenth century: their decline as a world power. The United States was suffering from

Kennedys prediction of Cold War overstretch proved correctbut for the Soviet Union rather than the United States. Less than three years after Kennedys book appeared, the Soviet empire (which he had scarcely mentioned) disappeared, while America moved into position as the worlds sole superpower.

Of course, facts alone cannot make or unmake a theory of history. Pessimism and optimism are attitudes the scholar brings to his analysis of events, not conclusions that arise from that analysis. Kennedys claims about imperial overstretch fit in too well with the prevailing gloom about the fate of American society as it approached the end of the twentieth century. Political analyst Kevin Phillips used Kennedy to compare Washington, D.C. to imperial Rome and nineteenth-century London, the bloated, arrogant capital of an declining empire ruled by abusive and entrenched elites. Too much of what happened then is happening again, he wrote. Economic polarization and a declining middle class move hand in hand with an expansion of luxury and moral permissiveness, loss of old patriotism, and complaints of moral decaythe diagnosis of decline (as in Phillipss own writings) standing as evidence of decline itself.

The black critic Cornel West used Kennedys image of the eclipse of U.S. hegemony in the world as the backdrop for his own summary of Americas woes in Race Matters (1993). West warned that American society was being ravaged by a silent depression of declining industrial jobs and sinking incomes, and a collapse of community. Cultural decay in a declining empire had created rootless, dangling people and a powerless citizenry that includes not just the poor but all of us.