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The Disintegration of Traditional Civilizations

In the summer issue of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published an article by Samuel Huntington under the title “The Clash of Civilizations?” whose themes he enlarged in 1996 in the book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Contrary to his predictions, this clash has not taken place because the seven or eight civilizations that he had identified for these confrontations were already dead at that time or, at least, in a rapid process of disintegration. This paper continues a line of questioning that began with ideas that I first articulated in papers at two Eric Voegelin symposia at the University of Hong Kong in March and April of 2010. The title of the first paper was “The Death of Civilizations: Huntington, Toynbee and Voegelin – three Variations on a Theme.”[1] The second paper dealt with “On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror.”[2]

My perspective on the fate of traditional civilizations is informed by Toynbee’s and Voegelin’s understanding that those civilizations whose metanarratives of meaning emerged in the so-called Axis-time of history have exhausted their life lines.[3] They have not been reenergized by bursts of new spiritual truth quests. Surprisingly enough, it was Niccolo Machiavelli who hinted five centuries ago, before the take-off of Western civilization as the privileged and overreaching representative of this type of historical formation, at a comparable constellation. He suggested in book two of his Discourses (II, 5) that civilizations are endowed with a certain amount of cosmic energy – he actually called it virtu, a quality that characterized extraordinary human beings as well as civilizational entities – an energy that keeps civilizations going for an undetermined period of time. Yet once this time line is exhausted, the virtu moves on and leaves the old civilizational configuration behind as an empty shell. His human history unfolds as a process that seems to be held in balance by an equalizing economy of extremes, since, as he writes, “the world has always been in the same condition, and that there has been just as much good as there is evil, but that this evil and this good has varied from province to province.” He asserts “that the world as a whole remained the same. The only difference was that the world’s virtu first found a home in Assyria, then flourished in Media and later in Persia, and at length arrived in Italy and Rome.”[4]

This Machiavellian transformation of the medieval trope translatio imperii, the migration of empire, has a surprising apocalyptic ending despite the fact that Machiavelli was never under the influence of or attracted by Jewish, Christian or Islamic apocalyptic thinking. He kept his distance from this type of religiously motivated visioning, engaged nevertheless in a kind of secular eschatology when writing about the end of the known world order because all resources had been exhausted. He refers to floods, epidemics and famines “recorded everywhere in history, their effect in obliterating the past is plain to see.“ He is anticipating a time of overpopulation when humans “can neither obtain a livelihood nor move elsewhere since all other places are occupied and full up and when the craftiness and malignity of man has gone as far as it can go . . .” At that point in human history, he claims, “the world must needs be purged in one of these three ways, so that mankind, being reduced or comparatively few and humbled by adversity, may adopt a more appropriate form of life and grow better.”[5]

Five hundred years after Machiavelli developed in his Discourses this end scenario for the then known world of European societies, we find ourselves in a situation of ecological implosion that spells out his scenario of epidemics, floods and famines for the world as a whole. As in Machiavelli’s case, we don’t need to invoke the sacred language of religious apocalypse in order to read the signs of an approaching global atrophy of life. The results of human “craftiness and malignity,” the one-dimensional direction of industrial and post-industrial development have brought us to a point of no return. Machiavelli didn’t find any political recipe for preventing the catastrophe from happening, but we are much worse off in that regard. He was still thinking about the Italian city states being threatened by larger political formations in Spain and France, the Germany across the Alps and the expanding Ottoman Empire across the Adriatic Sea. He therefore recommended that the Italians needed to come together. His failure to inspire his contemporaries to pick up the charge, pales compared with the political inaction today.

Machiavelli’s contemporary world was Europe, specifically the city states of the Italian peninsula. For his broader historical arguments, he drew on the Roman republic, the Greek polis and Near Eastern civilizations. Our contemporary world covers six continents and makes us see the interconnectedness of problems and the inescapable need for global solutions. The grandiose vision of the new American President, Donald Trump, for a rebirth of American greatness illustrates in an almost pathetic way how out of reach he is with the problems he will be facing. Yet the contemporary outlook for the world isn’t much brighter when looking elsewhere.

Europe needs greater political integration to solve common problems like the economic inequities between the more affluent Northern part and the economically more challenged Southern parts of the European Union (EU); the massive migration from war torn regions in the Middle East and Sub-Sahara Africa; the impact of climate change and the aggressive posturing of Russia’s Putin at the Eastern borders of the EU and in Syria.  Instead, a wave of narrow-minded right-wing nationalism, with occasional references to either deep Catholic or Protestant  Christian roots to emphasize anti-Islamic sentiments, the United Kingdom indulged in the splendid isolation of the “Brexit,” hoping for reviving a “special relationship” with the USA that was always more mythical than real.

This primarily English nostalgic return to its past contributes to and reinforces the narrow minded right-wing nationalism with occasional references to anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic and generally xenophobic sentiments that are sweeping the continent from the North to the South, including the United Kingdom and France, not even sparing Germany, which seemed to have been immunized against the temptations of nationalism by successfully processing the memory of its history. Austria rejected in early December 2016 the temptation of following Trump’s shrill nationalist marching orders, whereas on the same day Italy was encouraged, at least partly, by Trump’s Siren song to add Matteo Renzi’s administration to the 60 or so governments of Italian post-WWII history.  The Danish TV-series Borgen captures in an uncanny way the anti-European closure of the mind in the traditionally open-minded Scandinavian societies. Moving to the East of the EU, we see not only right-wing governments changing Poland and Hungary, but also Putin’s Russia marching in the direction of an autocracy presiding over a country longing for either a Stalinist or Czarist revival of the imperial past, sanctified by the Christian-Orthodox Church.

Similar retrograde cultural moves can be observed in Asia, where Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is longing for a restoration of his country’s historical greatness and shedding most responsibility for the violent liabilities of the imperial Showa period (1926-1945) and wanting to rewrite the Japanese constitution in order to lift constitutional restrictions on military operations overseas.  Regularly appearing at the Hiroshima remembrance event on August 6 and pleading for a world free of nuclear weapons, he intimates, without directly saying so, that Japan became a victim of American nuclear terror. When he and other members of the Japanese political class are speaking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and hinting at Japanese victimhood, they never ask themselves how the events were seen in other parts of Asia, especially China and Korea where the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 were celebrated as the end of Japanese terror in their countries.

Obama was the first sitting American President who went in May of 2016 to the Hiroshima Memorial. One doesn’t need to speculate that the two leaders may have come to an understanding that Abe should symbolically reciprocate Obama’s politically important gesture. Obama didn’t apologize, and nobody expected Abe to apologize for the surprise attack in 1941 either. Whether Abe’s and Obama’s joint visit to the Arizona Memorial on December 27, 2016 in the waters off Pearl Harbor, where the battleship was sunk on December 7, 1941 with more than 1200 sailors still buried in the ship is the beginning of a pro-active processing of Japan’s imperial past  has to be seen. Unlike the USA, China remembers that the Pacific War didn’t start in 1941 but  in 1931 when Showa Japan invaded Manchuria.

The current Emperor, Akihito, or his son and Crown Prince, Naruhito, has to emulate the example of the former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. On a state visit to Poland on December 7, 1970, when standing in front of the memorial to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and the subsequent destruction of it by the Germans, he fell on his knees. This gesture became seen as the beginning of a process of reconciliation with Poland and is recognized today globally as an exceptional moment of reconciliation. In the year 2000 Poland erected a monument near the Ghetto memorial, on a square named Brandt Square, remembering on a sculpted plaque Brandt’s Kniefall or genuflection. Instead of insisting on Japan’s historical greatness, the representatives of the Japanese state should go to Nanjing and perform a similar symbolic act of contrition in front of the Memorial of the estimated 300,000 Chinese that were killed in the massacre of December 1937, the estimated death toll that was introduced at the Tokyo Trial (1946-48). As important as President Barack Obama’s presence at the commemoration ceremony in August 2016 may have been to show his commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons, maybe it was a symbolic gesture that should have waited until the Japanese had shown the contrition that people in China, Korea and other parts of Asia have been waiting for since the end of the war in 1945.

The President of the Peoples Republic of China, Xi Jinping, issues frequently memos against the danger of Western ideas.[6] The rather bizarre aspect of this ideological strategy is that he uses the traditional Chinese power language of the legalist thinker Han Fei-Tzu (280-233 BCE) and his recommendations from the third century BCE in order to encourage the remaining true-believing Maoist cadres in the communist party to keep up ideological standards. Han Fei died before the Ch’in Emperor united the warring states of China and created in 221 BCE the Chinese empire, silencing all critique by killing the Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist and other intellectuals and destroying their manuscripts.

Xi Jinping doesn’t need the intellectual support of Han Fei in contemporary China to justify the suppression of critical dissent, including artists, writers, feminists, human right lawyers, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong, Christian churches and other religions. He does that anyway. Yet being a kind of founding intellectual of the Chinese empire, that lasted more or less until Sun Yat-sen proclaimed the republic on January 1, 1912, Han Fei lends legitimacy to Xi’s major goal of presiding over a China that has regained its power position after centuries of being invaded by Asian and Western powers. It remains a mystery, how this regained power will be able to fill the meaning vacuum that has emerged after the collapse of Maoism. Attempting to revive Confucianism and other ancient intellectual traditions after Maoism’s terminal assault against them seems to be an empty, dishonest and meaningless gesture, despite the fact that even some Western scholars believe in this regime sponsored resuscitation project.

Compared to the Japanese and Chinese attempts at regaining contemporary civilizational stature through the manipulation of history and culture, the Indian case appears to be rather comical. In order to overcome the British colonial legacy in the management of all state functions and the Western life style of the Anglophile elites, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decreed a Yoga Day. According to Shripad Naik, India’s first minister overseeing yoga and traditional medicine, the vestiges of a Western lifestyle left behind by colonial powers have to be purged. The New York Times quotes him as saying: “Earlier, our people used to get up before sunrise and sleep before sunset, but now our lifestyle has changed. They are going to the pub, they will go in the middle of the night, at 12 or 1, and eat chicken and many, many new dishes.” He recommends going to sleep by 9 p.m. and getting the news from the Hindi-language press.[7] As strange as this justification of the Yoga training may sound, it is also part of a Hindu nationalist revival movement. “The daily shakhas, as the drills are known, were designed to “create an all-Bharat national consciousness.” Bharat is,” as the New York Times reports, “the Hindi name for India.”[8] Muslim opposition in parliament against the Hindu revivalist motivation of the Yoga initiative incensed one right wing member of parliament to suggest “that those displeased by the sun ‘salutation drown in the sea.’”[9]

Having talked about political attempts at bringing civilizational formations back to life or using the symbolic remnants of these formations for contemporary ideological purposes, let me move on to other endeavors to bring about a radical renaissance of past civilizational greatness. Christianity is a good illustration in the realm of comparative religions. In 2017 the two living popes, if they are still alive in that year, will travel together to Germany, at least I assume that the present Pope, Francis, will invite the retired Pope, Benedict XVI, to visit his home country. I’m not completely sure about the reason why Francis picked that year but I guess he wanted to go there, maybe actually be there on October 31, because that will be the 500th anniversary of the day when the greatest rebel in the Catholic Church rocked its foundations. On that day Martin Luther distributed at the front door of the church in Wittenberg his Ninety-Five Theses, which begin with these words: “Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place.”[10] Having established his theological and academic credentials, he moved on to launch his assault on the institutional church which has abandoned the “truth” he wants to rescue.

When moving in the occidental orbit, the two popes are representing two ways of making the church visible in the secular world. Benedict stands for the spiritual core and doesn’t mind being seen as an elitist mystic who is consciously keeping his distance to the secular world and alienating ordinary believers. However, in his first Encyclical Letter, God is Love, he almost undermines this self-understanding when he says: “In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. . . .  I wanted here – at the beginning of my Pontificate – to clarify some essential facts concerning the love which God mysteriously and gratuitously offers to man, together with the intrinsic link between that Love and the reality of human love.”[11] Francis may actually be not all that far removed from Benedict, though the reality of human love may find a somewhat different interpretation.

One of his advisors is Leonardo Boff, a prominent liberation theologian from the 1970s (who by the way got his academic degrees in Catholic theology at the University of Munich when Voegelin was teaching there.) Pope John Paul II and his dogmatic enforcer Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Benedict, saw in Boff a theologian with a radical Marxist agenda. Boff was prohibited from teaching and publishing and left the Dominican order and later the church. It seems that Francis has not forgotten this Latin American chapter of Catholic theology. Whether he chose the name Francis for his pontificate because of having read Boff’s extraordinary book on St. Francis, I don’t know.

Boff’s view of St. Francis deserves to be quoted because he succeeds in making us see in him the kind of charismatic person who is capable of initiating a leap-in-being, as Kierkegaard labeled in the middle of the 19th century major shifts or transformations of the spiritual truth quest. This is Boff’s image of St. Francis: “For our age, Francis is more than a Saint of the Catholic Church and founder of the Franciscan family. He is the purest figure (gestalt) of Western history, of the dreams, the utopias, and of the way relating panfraternally that we are all searching for today. He speaks to the most archaic depths of the modern soul, because there is a Francis of Assisi hidden within each one of us, struggling to emerge and expand freely among the moles of the modern age.”[12]

Yet Boff’s critical reading of the context in which Francis operated makes it clear why neither he nor Boff himself can in the end succeed. Quoting a passage about this institutional context makes it also clear why the question whether Boff ever listened in Munich to Voegelin or read his books is not an utterly absurd question because Voegelin would have agreed with Boff’s critique of the institutional church. Boff writes: “Beginning with Constantine and Theodosius, the Church is led to accept the hegemonic spread of Western culture. This implies taking the place of political power. From a base, the Church is transformed into a cupola, introducing a division between the simple faithful (plebs christiana), who continue to be the base, and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who are transformed into a body of dignitaries (nobiles), the cupola.

In order to carry out its new historical function, the hierarchy allied itself with the powerful of society and the state. From this coalition between church and state . . . .is born the historical-cultural phenomenon called ‘Christianity.’ Christianity resulted from the alliance between sacerdotium and imperium.”[13] At a later point in that chapter he quotes Joseph Ratzinger saying: “Francis’s no to that type of Church could not be more radical. It is what we would call a prophetic voice.”[14] For Voegelin it was always clear that these prophetic voices were never tolerated by the church and that this suppression of visionary questioning contributed to its intellectual inability to challenge the radical secularism of the enlightenment. It will be interesting to watch what happens when Pope Francis travels in 2017 to Germany whether he will attempt to vindicate some of Luther’s prophetic anger and try to redirect his creative thinking into reforming the Church.

But let me finish about the withering away of traditional civilizations and the desperate attempts of keeping them alive, with some remarks about an entirely different story, the story that makes people shudder when they read about it or see pictures in the news about its activities. It’s the story of ISIS (and its various offspring like, e.g., the Nigerian movement Boko Haram). Talking about this supposedly Islamist movement, I want to make it clear that I think ISIS has as much to do with Islam as Christianity had with Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany and Buddhism with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Yes, there obviously exist affiliations and connections about which one can speak. After all, as most Italian Fascists were Catholics and most Nazis were either Catholics or Protestants and most of the Khmer Rouge were Buddhists, most of the people that have joined ISIS were either Muslim or have become so. Recognizing this religious identity of the people doesn’t make the movements and the regimes they have created manifestations of the respective religions. I do not want to make this point a major issue of discussion but emphasize something else that may make it easier to come to an understanding of what ISIS really is.

When I was in the process of writing this paper, I took a look at the summer issue of The New York Review of Books (Aug. 13, 2015). Two pieces caught my attention. One was an article about “The Mystery of ISIS” whose author, however, wanted to remain anonymous. The other was the review by Christopher Browning of the book by Istvan Deàk, Europe on Trial. The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution during World War II, a book I had just reviewed myself for The Journal of World History[15]. Both articles address a similar question, namely how to make sense of the terror both regimes have become identified with. The author of the ISIS piece profiles the various leaders of ISIS in a way that makes one see the striking similarity to the ruling elite of Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge Cambodia. These figures are consumed by the reckless conviction that they are called upon by history to remake the world according to their ideological vision. Like Hitler and his circle and the brotherhood surrounding Pol Pot, the ISIS leaders are convinced that they are not bound by any religious, ethical or legal restrictions. The fulfillment of their historical mission makes them stand above all laws and allows them therefore to kill whoever and how many they choose. In that regard, the mystery of ISIS is nothing else but a renewal of the questions people asked after 1945 about Germany and after 1979 about Cambodia.

Deàk makes clear in his book that Nazi Germany could not have so successfully accomplished its continental ethnic cleansing project if Nazi occupied Europe would not have collaborated. One detail is especially important to be mentioned in this context to better understand the appeal of ISIS to foreigners, namely the attraction the Nazi empire at war represented to many young Europeans. The figures Deàk quotes about the volunteers from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands and Eastern European countries are staggering. They affirm the attraction of evil for people who are, as Pascal observed in the 1650s, overcome by ennui or boredom. Let me quote Pascal’s Pensées (#622): “Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a complete state of rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces the nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair.”

The thousands of foreigners that have followed the call of ISIS, four thousands of young Europeans have gone from 2001 to 2014 to Syria alone,[16] can be easily connected with any of these existential conditions. Two elements may be missing from Pascal’s list that Freud would have added as deeply archetypal aspects of human nature, namely the license to kill as the starkest fulfillment of libido dominandi and the permission to rape infidels as satisfaction of the sex drive. Reading Rukmini Callimachi’s “Report on the State of Terror, A Bureaucracy of Cruelty,” makes it clear that both killing and raping are used by ISIS as recruiting enticements for young men.[17] Her extraordinary report supports my suggestion that we should look to the Nazi and Khmer Rouge regimes as equivalent political facilitators of the horrendous crimes and not see Islam as the main enabler of this type of violent terror.

The regimes of terror are not the end of history. Yet the disintegration of the Axial civilizations that have been exclusively identified with human history do not constitute this end either. History has no end but remains an open ended field of processes, which need, as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry suggest in their book The Universe Story (1992), new narratives of meaning that include the whole range of human agency and the cosmic realm of evolutionary creativity. Whether this configuration will lead to a new ‘Axial Age’ remains to be seen.

 

Notes

[1] M. Henningsen, “The Death of Civilizations: Huntington, Toynbee, and Voegelin –three Variations on a Theme,” in: European Journal of Social Theory (Vol. 14), May 2014, p. 147-164.

[2] M. Henningsen, “On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror,” in: P. Caringella, W. Cristaudo, and G. Hughes (eds.), Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final. (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012), p. 13-153.

[3] See Robert M. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2012.

[4] N. Machiavelli, Discourses (London: Penguin Books 1970), p. 266f.

[5] Ibid., p. 290.

[6] Chris Buckley, “China Takes Aim at Western Ideas”, in: The New York Times (Aug. 20, 2013) and Chris Buckley/Andrew Jacobs, “Maoists in China, Given New Life, Attack Dissent. Buoyed by President XI”, in: The New York Times (Jan. 5, 2015).

[7] Ellen Barry, “Modi’s yoga drive takes aim at bad habits”, in: The New York Times (June 16, 2015).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Translated by C.M. Jacobs/ H.J. Grimm, Philadelphia, Fortress Press 1957, p. 7.

[11] Benedict XVI, God is Love. Deus Caritas Est. Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Publication No.5-758, 2006, p. 2.

[12] Leonardo Boff, Saint Francis. A Model for Human Liberation. New York: Crossroad 1982, p.19.

[13] Ibid., p. 53f.

[14] Ibid., p.114.

[15] The review was published in The Journal of World History (vol.26, no.), 2015, p. 675-681.

[16] Ben Taub, “Journey to Jihad,” in: The New Yorker (June 1, 2015), p. 39.

[17] Rukmini Callimachi, “Enslaving Young Girls, The Islamic State Builds a Vast System of Rape. Militants use Methods as Recruiting Tool While Claiming Quran’s Support”, in: The New York Times (14 August, 2015).

 

Also available is Jürgen Gebhardt’s “Modernity Reconsidered: Multiple Modernities, Universal History and the Quest for a Civilizational Paradigm.”

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Manfred Henningsen is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, where he taught from 1970 until 2020. He received his PhD under Eric Voegelin in Munich in 1967. His dissertation was a critical assessment of A. J. Toynbee’s A Study of History in the general context of comparative philosophy of history. It became published in 1967 as Menschheit und Geschichte (Mankind and History). From 1968 until 1974 he edited and contributed, together with Juergen Gebhardt and Peter J. Opitz the 14 volume paperback series Geschichte des politischen Denkens (History of political thought), Munich. In addition, he published Der Fall Amerika (Munich, 1974) and Der Mythos Amerika (Frankfurt, 2009), books that dealt with European Anti-Americanism and American self-interpretations. He edited Vol.5 of Voegelin’s Collected Works, Modernity without Restraint (2000); Vol. IX of the German translation of Order & History (Ordnung und Geschichte), Das Oekumenische Zeitalter. Weltherrschaft und Philosophie (Munich 2004) and the original German version of Voegelin’s 1964 Munich lectures on Hitler und die Deutschen (2006). In addition, he published 23 articles in the German cultural journal Merkur and articles and reviews in The Review of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, China Review International, and many edited volumes on history, political philosophy and politics.

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