May 24, 2024
Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, somebody once said (maybe the philosopher George Santayana). But who knows history? The student protestors against Israel’s invasion of Gaza have been frequently dismissed as ignorant of history, oversimplifying a complex situation into a simplistic “oppressor versus oppressed” narrative. However, whether they are right or wrong, I rather doubt that all the protestors are ignorant of the region’s history. Maybe some are, but the protests have mostly been at elite schools where students presumably acquire a better-than-average historical grounding. To be sure, for my entire teaching career, I have heard horror stories about students’ appalling ignorance of history and the American political system: many of them can’t name the dates of World War II or a single Supreme Court justice. But it’s hard to believe that’s true at Yale or Columbia. Oh, there is plenty of ignorance on a grass roots level. If you believe that democracy depends on an informed citizenry, you may be tempted to despair by the fact that, in a recent survey, 17% of the respondents said Biden was responsible for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. We won’t talk about the people who blame him for inflation, despite the fact that no president has power over inflation, whether his name is Biden or Trump.
Students do often say they dislike history as an academic subject, that it is just a meaningless list of names and dates, and is not relevant to their practical career concerns. Perhaps what they really dislike is bad teaching. History is a narrative, a story, and the names and dates matter insofar as they are part of a story, a story that deeply matters. In the case of American history, it matters because we are part of that story and derive our identity and values from it. But American history cannot be understood, much less judged, apart from world history. In a globalized world, that is more deeply true than ever. A historical narrative is an interpretation, and students also need to learn that interpretations differ because the values of the narrators differ, even when they are based on the same evidence. There will always be students who resist, though what they are resisting is not just history but education itself. Some claim they simply cannot memorize, although they can effortlessly reel off sports statistics or the details of Taylor Swift’s discography. Others claim they will forget all that information ten minutes after the exam, and that knowing it is not necessary in real life. Surely people have managed to live without knowing history for, well, most of history. What was the world doing before the Greeks invented it?
Well, repeating it, for one thing. In Virgil’s Aeneid, the Trojan Aeneas is promised a new Troy elsewhere after the fall of the original, even though it will not be called Troy. It will be called Rome, and through a long speech by his father Anchises when he descends to the Underworld and also the images on his shield, forged by Vulcan, Aeneas learns that the new civilization he founds will grow into a worldwide empire. However, the purpose of this empire will not be power, wealth, and glory but justice and peace, the pax Romana. Aeneas, and his author Virgil, hope fervently that an empire will put an end to the endless cycles of senseless violence symbolized by the Trojan war. The Roman Empire, in the eyes of Virgil, was a progressive utopian dream, yet of a radically innovative sort, not—like most utopias—a small, isolated, static society, changelessly perfect, but an all-encompassing civilization constantly working towards the enlightenment and improvement of its subjects over time. Long afterward, the British Empire modeled itself upon the Roman imperial dream in the Aeneid: it was the “white man’s burden” to bring enlightenment and the benefits of civilization to a savage world. It is too easy to dismiss this as entirely a self-interested rationalization. Both Virgil and the British imperialists knew well enough that their ideal was the opposite of what most empires have been. The Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Persian: these are manifestations of greed and the will to power. They are the kingdoms of the earth that Jesus rejects when they are offered by Satan.
But Virgil desperately clung to the dream of a benevolent empire because he grew up during the years of anarchy and civil war that engulfed Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar, with their violence and constant insecurity. Sadly, however, neither the Roman nor the British Empires turned out to be the solution to the cycle of violence and greed, but rather repeated that cycle on a larger scale. The Roman Empire seems to have begun declining and falling from the moment it was born. The very first Emperor, Augustus, cracked down on dissolute behavior in a circle that included his own daughter; the poet Ovid got caught up in the crackdown and was exiled to the Black Sea for the rest of his days. And we all know about the later psychopathic tyrants, the Neros and Caligulas. It is intriguing how many creative artists seem to be thinking about history these days. Yorgos Lanthimos, the satiric Greek director whose previous film, Poor Things, did unexpectedly well last year at the Oscars, has a new film, Kinds of Kindness, whose first section, he said, in an interview when it was premiered at Cannes, was partly inspired by his reading about Caligula and wondering what it would be like to have total control over other people. The later Roman Emperors demanded to be worshipped as gods. When this happens, the ego suffers what Jung calls inflation, and the result is megalomania. I remember reading somewhere, a long time ago, a passage from Jim Morrison, of all people, saying that Caligula wished his subjects had a single neck so he could cut off all their heads at once. I think he went on to say that TV made that possible; nowadays we would say the Internet. Donald Trump, who is our Caligula, Robespierre, and Red Queen rolled into one, has made increasingly clear that his plan for governing if he is re-elected can be summed up in the phrase, “Off with their heads!”
Lanthimos is not the only director thinking about history, specifically Roman history. Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming film, Megalopolis, is a science fictional version of the Cataline conspiracy of 63 BCE. To which most of his audience will say, “The what?” Why base a film on an event that most people have never heard of? Cataline tried to overthrow the decadent and increasingly dysfunctional Roman republic, but failed. In Shakespeare’s time, Ben Jonson had great hopes for his tragedy Cataline, but unfortunately it resembled its hero and flopped. Jonson accepted the negative Ciceronian view of Cataline as an aristocratic malcontent. But it is not the only one possible: Ibsen’s first play, in 1849, is also about Catiline, but views him as something of a heroic rebel in the light of the attempts at democratic revolution across Europe in 1848. Apparently Cataline wanted to cancel the debts of all members of society and restructure the government so that all classes had a role in governance, not just the elites. Coppola’s futuristic version of Cataline, played by Adam Driver, is a visionary who wants to recreate his declining society as a utopia, ands has been influenced, Coppola has said, by the workers’-revolution theme in the famous silent film Metropolis. The word Coppola uses, however, is “megalopolis,” and that word became common through its use in the historian Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West in 1918.
Why did Rome decline and fall? We were taught that Rome did not fall because of external enemies but from internal decadence, a moral rot that hollowed it out from within: Roman orgies, bread and circuses, all that. The intense spirituality, otherworldliness, and asceticism of much early Christianity was in this view what Jung called enantiodromia, the compensatory swing to its opposite when any tendency becomes too one-sided. On the other hand, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire argues that Christianity was the decadence that sapped the vitality of the Empire. By preaching a renunciation of this world in favor of contemplating the next, Christianity detached citizens from the kind of participation necessary for the health of society. Christianity also preached a distrust of reason and encouraged all sorts of naïve superstitious beliefs.
These are equal-but-opposite moral explanations for Rome’s fall: take your pick. Spengler’s view is rather different. Spengler speaks of “cultures,” and says that they behave like organisms. As Northrop Frye explains in an essay about Spengler, “Everything that is alive shows an organic rhythm, moving through stages of birth, growth, maturity, decline and eventual death. If this happens to all individual men without exception, there is surely no inherent improbability in supposing that the same organic rhythm extends to larger human units of life” (180). What produces growth is energy. A culture starts out with a certain quantity of energy, which it expends in various forms of cultural creation. But when that energy dwindles, the culture becomes what we call decadent, and when it is exhausted, the culture dies, sometimes overcome by younger, still vital cultures. A culture declines, then, not because of some moral failure, the cultural equivalent of the “tragic flaw” of the hero in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. It simply grows old, naturally and inevitably. Eternal youth is no more possible for a culture than for an individual.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud expounds what is essentially the same theory in psychoanalytic vocabulary. A culture requires of its citizens a large amount of “sublimation,” that is, a rechanneling of libido, or psychic energy, from the service of the individual and the pleasure principle into the various tasks of creating and maintaining the culture. This involves, however, a good deal of renunciation and repression, and, as the energy level declines, there is a “return of the repressed” in the form of antisocial sexual and violent fantasies and impulses. What is true of organic life is a version of what the second law of thermodynamics calls entropy, which is disorganization, the disintegration of form into chaos. In a closed system, meaning one in which no new energy is added from outside, entropy steadily increases. When that happens, as Yeats says, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Thomas Pynchon, who was trained as an engineer, has an early story titled “Entropy.” His early work, including his first two novels, V and The Crying of Lot 49, is haunted by a vision of the modern world falling apart entropically.
The cultural cycle in Spengler moves through four phases of youth, maturity, age, and death, analogous to spring, summer, autumn, and winter, also to the passage of the sun from beginning to end of day. Spengler identifies other cultures and attempts to deal with them in a cursory fashion, but his real interest is in the parallel between the two great cycles of history that still organize much of our historical thinking, the Classical and what Spengler calls the Western, though that is misleading since Classical culture is also Western. The fourfold correspondence of these two cycles is roughly as follows:
1. A spring or youthful phase, whose values are “heroic.” Dawn. Classical: Homer. Western: the medieval heroic poems and romances.
2. A summer or mature phase. Zenith. Classical: small city-states, especially Athens; drama as a focus of the community. Western: the Renaissance; small towns and modest cities; Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as a focus of the community.
3. An autumn of sophisticated self-consciousness, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. Afternoon and evening. Classical: the Hellenistic period. Western: the 18th-19th centuries, including the Romantic revolution.
4. A winter of decadence and decline. Nightfall. Classical: the Roman Empire, mass urban populations, wars. Western: modern times, mass urban populations (the megalopolis), wars.
This is the kind of thing that some people dismiss as “totally unscientific,” “arbitrary,” and the like. Be that as it may, as Frye says, “it won’t go away” (187), because it is a piece of late Romantic mythmaking that, whether or not it is respectable by scholarly standards, articulates what many people feel intuitively. In Frye’s words:
What seems to me most impressive about Spengler is the fact that everybody does accept his main thesis in practice, whatever they think or say they accept. Everybody thinks in terms of a “Western” culture to which Europeans and Americans belong; everybody thinks of that culture as old, not young; everybody realizes that its most striking parallels are with the Roman period of Classical culture; everybody realizes that some crucial change in our way of life took place around Napoleon’s time. (187).
It turns out, then, that Virgil’s forlorn hope that the newly-founded Roman Empire would be a way of breaking out of the endless cycle of history, with its tragic ending in breakdown and violence, was misplaced. The Empire is not an alternative to the historical cycle but rather its final phase. And we too are living at the end of something. And, increasingly, we know it.
If the cycle of rise and fall is inevitable, then there is no use knowing about history. In fact, the less we think about it, the better. Being preoccupied with it would be like always reminding ourselves that we are someday going to die. A refusal to contemplate history, turning inward to what consolation there may be in private life, has been one recourse, at least since Matthew Arnold expressed it memorably in “Dover Beach” around 1851. Hearing the sound of the sea at dusk, the speaker remarks:
Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery
He goes on to say that the sea of faith was once at the full, but now we hear only the melancholy roar of its withdrawal. His conclusion is famous:
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The speaker, despairing of the cycles of history, turns instead to love. Others turn to mindless distraction. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist Montag forces his wife’s friends to stop watching their wall-sized TV and listen to him recite Arnold’s poem. One of the women breaks out sobbing and tells him he must be sick to like such a thing. The turn from history to love is expressed more simply in Sam Cooke’s popular song “Wonderful World” (1960):
Don't know much about history Don't know much biology Don't know much about a science book Don't know much about the French I took
But, the singer says, if you loved me like I love you, “What a wonderful world this would be.” A 1978 version by Art Garfunkel adds additional lyrics:
Don't know much about the Middle Ages Looked at the pictures then I turned the pages Don't know nothin' 'bout no "Rise and fall" Don't know nothin' 'bout nothin' at all
But the indifferent turning away from history can be fatal to a democracy. Such indifference produces what the journalists are calling “low information voters,” who pay no attention to politics, domestic or international, and it is such voters who might very well vote for Donald Trump because they don’t know how much evil he has done or how much his mental state has degenerated, or who might vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. because of his famous name, not knowing that he is not merely anti-vax but a believer in at least a dozen conspiracy theories. The rise-and-fall vision of history is not new with Spengler. In the Middle Ages, its image was the Wheel of Fortune. The medieval solution was again to detach from history, fixing on hopes for achieving a supernatural world above the turning cycle of time. But as for living in this world, Spengler’s kind of cyclical fatalism is not only unhealthy but in the end impossible. To reject history is to reject the sense that life has any meaning or larger pattern. It’s a bitch and then you die. No one can live like that in the long run. No matter how many video games you play, how many beers your drink, how much fentanyl you take, how much you try to avoid thinking about anything, the human mind needs a sense of order and meaning the way the human body needs vitamins.
Deprived of what, in The Productions of Time, I call a vision of order, the mind will manufacture one, or become psychologically addicted to those false visions of order we call conspiracy theories, which proliferate right now as defenses against the feeling of entropy, against a feeling like that expressed by a voice in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” The reflexive response to entropy, as Pynchon shows throughout his work, is paranoia, the sense that there is an order to the world, but one that is hidden, cryptic, and ominous. Paranoia, conspiracy thinking, and cults are really a kind of psychic deficiency disease, an attempt to compensate for the lack of a real sense of order. Meaning is at the apex of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, identified with self-actualization itself, as his descriptions of that condition make clear. Once the lower needs are met, in the self-actualized state new, higher needs arise, needs that are also values. Maslow called them Being-values or B-values (like vitamins—the deficiency-disease analogy again, lol). In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, he makes a chart of some of them, along with the “metapathologies” that arise from their absence. Three of the B-values and their contrasting metapathologies are as follows (308-09):
B-Value: Justice. Specific Metapathologies: Insecurity; anger; cynicism; mistrust; lawlessness; jungle world-view; total selfishness.
B-Value: Order. Specific Metapathologies: Insecurity. Wariness. Loss of safety, of predictability. Necessity for vigilance, alertness, tension, being on guard.
B-Value Meaningfulness. Specific Metapathologies: Meaninglessness. Despair. Senselessness of life.
The B-Values are not just ideals but forms of cognition, ways of seeing and experiencing. Another chart lists “Characteristics of Being-Cognition and Deficiency-Cognition of the World. In it, the very first item descriptive of B-Cognition reads: “Seen as whole, as complete, self-sufficient, as unitary. Either Cosmic Consciousness (Bucke), in which whole cosmos is perceived as a single thing with oneself belonging in it; or else the person, object, or portion of the world seen is seen as if it were the whole world, i.e., rest of world is forgotten. Integrative perceiving of unities. Unity of the world or object perceived” (249). An enormously popular book in Maslow’s time was Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), which sprang from Frankl’s experiences in the concentration camps during World War II, where he noticed that those best able to survive the hardships of the camps were those who had a strong sense of life’s meaning and purpose. He later originated a form of therapy based on helping people develop their own sense of purpose.
Yet what is all this but cheerleading if we remain irrevocably trapped on the Spenglerian hamster-wheel? The answer to this question was in fact the intellectual breakthrough of Northrop Frye’s life. The Decline of the West made a great impression on Frye when he was still in his teens. While working on what became Fearful Symmetry, his landmark book on Blake, during World War II, he realized that Blake had his own version of the historical cycle, expressed as the conflict of two mythological characters: Orc, the spirit of energy and desire, and Urizen, the spirit of restraint and repression. The revolutionary Orc rises up against Urizen’s tyranny, but the attempt always fails. Orc is either defeated or ages into the reactionary Urizen. Blake’s first attempt at an epic, The Four Zoas, foundered in its attempt to break out of what he called elsewhere “the same dull round,” what Frye came to call the “Orc cycle,” and The Four Zoas was abandoned in manuscript.
Blake’s eventual answer, which became Frye’s, starts by questioning Spengler’s assumption that human identity is “natural” and therefore fixed and predetermined. The assumption is not totally wrong, for we began as animals, but to reduce us to our origins is to fall victim to what is these days called biological essentialism. In fact, we have two identities, a natural self, consisting of the body and ordinary ego consciousness, but also what Paul calls a spiritual self and what the Romantics called the imagination, a creative power that potentially enables us to recreate ourselves, our lives, our history. There were precursors to this Romantic belief. The critic Stephen Greenblatt titled a book Renaissance Self-Fashioning after this passage from Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), in which God says to Adam: “We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, though mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape though shalt prefer” (quoted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Shorter 11th Edition, volume 1, 400-01). Most literary and cultural theory in my lifetime has been skeptical, to say the least, about such a sentiment, but a certain kind of visionary hopefulness stubbornly persists in certain quarters, and this newsletter is one of them.
Another precursor of both Blake and Frye was Giambattista Vico, whose book The New Science (1725) articulates a cyclical view of history that on first glance looks much like Spengler’s. In it, humanity passes through an age of the gods, an age of heroes, and finally an age of the people, after which there is a ricorso and history runs back to its beginnings again. James Joyce structured his last work, Finnegans Wake, on a Viconian framework. The book ends in mid-sentence, that sentence being completed by the fragmentary opening sentence, so that the book goes around in a circle. The whole narrative is the dream of a mythological character named Finnegan. In his previous book, Ulysses, the character Stephen Dedalus says that “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” but Finnegan never wakes up, and we are in his nightmare, which is history. Yet there is something in Vico that, however tentatively, differentiates his view from historical determinism. That something is summed up in the catchphrase Verum factum: The truth is what we have made. We cannot fully understand nature because we have not created it; only God understands nature. But we can understand our culture and our history because we have created them, thereby laying the theoretical groundwork for both history and the social sciences. So far as I know, Vico stops with understanding, and does not go on to say that what we have created, we can recreate. But the possibility is at least latent in his theory, which would suggest that the final ricorso might be a return to the beginning, but on a higher level, so that the closed circle would be turned into a spiral, which is the typical Romantic progressive view of history. Goethe was deeply impressed by Vico, and I suspect that some such suggestion is why. Frye himself became interested in Vico in later life for the same reason, as explained by Nella Cotrupi:
In both Blake and Vico, the exploration of this creative power unfolded as a polemic against thinkers who rejected the epistemological function of the imagination, or, as Blake would have it, of “vision,” and privileged instead analytical reason and logical deduction. Blake’s case against Locke was a replay of Vico’s case against Descartes. Thus, for Frye, Blake and Vico came to represent essentially the same principle, one which the Latin shorthand verum factum has come to summarize. In the 1987 essay titled “Blake’s Bible,” Frye essentially restates Vico’s formulation of the verum factum principle, the idea, that is, that truth or meaning is made, not perceived. (24)
This is the passage that Cotrupi is referring to:
We think we fall asleep at night into the illusions of dream, and wake up in our bedrooms in the morning facing reality again. But of course everything in the bedroom is a human construct, and whatever humanity has made it can remake. We gradually discover that this principle applies to everything: what is real is what we have made: verum factum, as Vico says. (434)
In a related essay, “Blake’s Biblical Illustrations,” we find Frye’s way of understanding why Vico did not quite break out of the limiting cyclical vision of history:
In Vico’s day there had been no permanently successful example of a democratic culture, and he had no evidence for any essential change in the nature of his cycle. But Blake, with the American, the French, and the beginning of the Industrial revolutions before him, felt, at least for most of the productive period of his life, that a far-reaching change was taking place in human fortunes, of a kind that the apocalyptic visions in the New Testament finally did seem to be really pointing to. (69)
This may be starting to sound complex and abstruse, but the heart of it is very simple. Why should we study history? In order to realize that we are not trapped. Right now, there is an increasing number of people who are on the verge of giving up hope. All that they see ahead of us is climate catastrophe and rising authoritarianism. Perhaps it is the apocalypse, the end of the world, and these disasters are the form the ricorso will take this time, smashing us back into the Stone Age, as they used to say. But that is not what Blake meant by apocalypse, which literally means “revelation.” Apocalypse means “expanding eyes,” a phrase that I lifted from Frye, who lifted it from Blake. We may picture the historical cycle as a circle that we are attempting to open like an eye, like that weird eye on the back of a dollar bill. The eye is surrounded by Latin. All of it is from Virgil, so we are back, by “a commodious vicus of recirculation,” in the punning dream language of Finnegans Wake to Virgil’s dream of escape from the fatal cycle of force and fraud. We may be uncomfortable with the inference, but the phrases signal the aspiration of a newborn United States to become what the Roman and British Empires failed to become, a project of renewal and liberty, not through imperial power but through the new power of democracy. By its very nature, democracy implies that humanity can direct its own course, that progress is possible, that the closed cycle may be opened out into a progressive spiral. The title of historian Heather Cox Richardson’s newest book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023), speaks directly of awakening from the nightmare of history. The Latin above the dollar bill’s eye is from Virgil’s Aeneid, and says that Providence has blessed our endeavor. The phrase below it is from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a mysterious poem that speaks of the historical cycle in positive terms, of a miraculous child, born of a virgin, whose birth will return us to the Golden Age. For a thousand years, it was called the “Messianic” eclogue and regarded as an unconscious prophecy of the coming of Christ. Novus ordo seclorum can be translated “a new order of time.”
At the end of his life, Shelley, who, like Blake, never lost faith in the dream of redeeming history, wrote a verse drama, Hellas, inspired by the Greek war for independence from the Turks. It has a famous chorus whose last lines cry out bitterly, “The world is weary of the past, / Oh, might it die or rest at last.” But that chorus also contains a prophecy of renewal that sounds very much like the famous passage from the Fourth Eclogue, except that, for the atheist Shelley, the renewal will come, not from the transcendent power of God or the gods, but by an inward power that lies hidden in every one of us, waiting its hour to be born:
The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
Or, in the words of the Incredible String Band, back in my youth when Joni Mitchell sang that we had to get ourselves back to the beginning of the cycle, back to the Garden:
Sleepers, awaken! The night has gone and taken Your darkest fears and left you here And the sun it shines so clear And the sun it shines so clear Oh wake for the world looks wonderful
Sam Cooke would approve. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, even when the journey is a circular one, and that first step is coming to know something about history.
References
Cotrupi, Caterina Nella. Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Biblical Illustrations.” In The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-1990. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Indiana University Press, 1993. 62-80. Also in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Edited by Angela Esterhammer. Volume 16 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2005. 402-18.
Frye, Northrop. “Blake’s Bible.” In Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. 419-35.
Frye, Northrop. “Spengler Revisited.” In Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Indiana University Press, 1976. 179-98. Also in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Edited by Jan Gorak. Volume 11 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2003. 297-314.
Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Penguin, 1972.