Work in Progress: The Race Against Time
Friday 06 January 2023
Nietzsche once called himself the firstborn of the twentieth century, as though he had already intimated the terror of history to come. Now we are almost a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, and Nietzsche is as relevant as ever — as prophetic as ever, especially in regard to the Last Men. In Thus Spake Zarathustra it is Zarathustra’s attempt to speak to the Last Men of their condition (after first speaking to them of the Übermensch) that is the occasion of Zarathustra’s decision to come down out of the mountains, and, as it were, to re-enter the world of men. Toynbee called this the movement of “departure and return.” Zarathustra had departed from the normies, and then he returned to them. Needless to say, telling the normies that they are Last Men is not going to win you any accolades. The normies laugh and jeer Zarathustra, saying that they prefer the Last Men to the Übermensch, which is precisely what one would expect from Last Men.
Many prophets, fictional and actual, have departed from society in order to isolate themselves, and then, believing themselves to have reached some understanding, attempt to return to society to convey what they have learned. Most famously in Western philosophy, this is the allegory of the cave in Plato. Nietzsche would not have liked to have been compared to Plato, but Zarathustra re-enacts the journey out of the cave and the slow difficult undertaking of accustoming one’s eyes to the light of day, eventually looking upon the light of The Good itself, as bright as the sun, before returning to the cave and being second-guessed by those who remained in chains below and who are rather better at identifying shadows on the wall of the cave than the man who has freed himself.
The hero’s journey also can be understood as departure and return, as the hero must be taken out of his ordinary life, experiences dangers and adventures far from home, perhaps even in another realm, and then returns to the world he left, now a changed man. Tolkien’s variation on this classic theme was to have the Hobbits return to the Shire after having had their adventures in Middle-earth to find the Shire controlled by Saruman (This isn’t in the film, but in the book Saruman survives and takes refuge in the Shire, perverting its rural idyll into what William Blake called “dark Satanic Mills”; this is briefly suggested in the film by an image that appears to Frodo in Galadriel’s mirror.) Thus the returning Hobbits have the additional hero’s task of freeing the Shire and returning it to its prior state of innocence.
One could, then, interpret contemporary history not as the long, slow decline toward the Last Man, but rather as a world laid waste by some hidden evil (as in the Arthurian cycle), waiting for the return of the hero to set matters right. This is the difference between an eschatological conception of history and a soteriological conception of history. But the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. At what point in the development of mundane history does the hero return? The hero has been experiencing adventures in the fairy world while history goes on as usual back home. However, how long it takes him to get home ultimately matters, even if the mundane world is ultimately subordinate to the mythological world (in the mythological imagination). This is also a question that has been extensively debated by American fundamentalists over the past few decades: there is an intense interest in these communities whether Christ returns before or after the Tribulation.
Odysseus eventually escaped Calypso and Ogygia after seven years in a guilded cage, and he returns from the mythological world to the real world and even gets home to Penelope. He must win Penelope back, however, as she is besieged by suitors. (As with the Hobbits, his return home is an occasion for further heroic efforts.) Odysseus returned in time to get his life back. One can imagine a counterfactual Odyssey in which Odysseus lingers too long with Calypso and returns to find Penelope an old woman, or to find her long dead, or to find Ithaca abandoned and empty, or find Ithaca long since reduced to dust. This is another familiar theme of the fairy world: time in the fairy world is dilated, as in relativistic physics, so that a day equals an age. Rip Van Winkle wakes up after twenty years; we get different stories as we extend his sleep by orders of magnitude to 200, 2,000, 20,000 or more years. (This would make a good exercise for a class in fiction writing.)
How a civilization fails makes a difference for what happens next, for what happens after the failure of a civilization; the mode of failure prepares the ground for what follows. And civilizations do not fail and fall alike. The idea of a decline and fall of a civilization (immortalized by Gibbon) is part of an historical taxonomy of the stages in the life of a civilization, in which the fall is to be compared to the other taxa of origins, development, and maturity. But if we look at failures only, not in comparison to the other stages in the life of a civilization, but only in relation to other failures, then we want a different kind of taxonomy — not a stadial taxonomy, but a taxonomy of the modes of failure of civilization. And these are many. Probably the history of human civilization on Earth has not come near to exhausting the possible modes of failure of civilization (nor the possible modes of origins of civilization, for that matter).
Until recently, Western historians lavished their attention on the Roman Empire, which represented an advanced stage of civilization, but which failed so utterly that its monuments and great works of art are still being dug out of the ground two thousand years later. It’s a pretty dramatic story, and that’s what has given it its traction in the Western historical imagination. Of course, the story of Rome is punctuated by many attempted reforms and revivals. Diocletian’s reorganization of the Empire was one of these. Justinian’s reconquest of much of what was the Western Empire is another. Today we see these efforts as failed attempts to address the inevitable decline of Rome. Many have observed that the Byzantines endured for a millennia and so cannot really be called a failed civilization. However, we could conceptualize the stadial taxonomy of Byzantine development as a very brief origin and development, followed by an uncertain maturity, and then a very long decline. This in itself is interesting, as it is an illustration of a distinct mode of failure. How Byzantium failed had existential consequences for Western, Persian, and Ottoman civilization, and not only for these.
I’m not a big fan of Toynbee, but I will invoke him again. Toynbee held that civilizations are faced with challenges. If a challenge is too great, a civilization is static or it fails. If the challenge is “just right” (the Goldilocks zone of challenges to civilization) it inspires a civilization to rally its powers, and this is a source of renewal and revival. However, no civilization can go on meeting challenges indefinitely. A civilization while it is vital meets a number of challenges, but eventually it encounters a challenge that is too great, or the civilization itself has deteriorated to the point that an otherwise surmountable challenge proves fatal to it, and it succumbs. This process Toynbee calls challenge and response.
I prefer to think of this as a race against time. All civilizations are engaged in a race against time to realize their purposes (i.e., to realize their central project) before the clock runs out and history forecloses on the possibility of realization. This immediately suggests a tripartite taxonomy of failure into the following categories: 1) civilizations that fail to before they have realized their central project, perhaps failing in the attempt to realize it, 2) civilizations that fail as they realize their central project, i.e., failure during realization, and 3) civilizations that fully realize their central project and fail after that realization. In the last instance, we could say that the civilization has fully realized itself (the social equivalent of living a long and happy life) and died of old age.
The race against time can transcend the particularisms of a given civilization. When we construct histories of civilization that employ ideas like Western civilization or Chinese civilization, we are invoking a construction that consists of many civilizations bounded in space and time but tied together by a common tradition and culture. In the familiar stadial sequence of classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity as all being constituents of Western civilization, i.e., stages in the development of Western civilization, we are implying, even if we do not say so openly, that there is something in common that is carried forward, that there is a continuous thread of development despite failures of entire civilization. The theme of Western man has been taken up by a multitude of civilizations that have taken up the mantle of Western civilization in turn, and each has developed this theme in their own way.
I considered it a breakthrough in my own thinking about civilization when I realized that each level of civilization — the levels being defined by increasingly more comprehensive constructions of civilization that subsume a greater number of civilizations under them — has its own distinctive central project, but these central projects are not all alike; central projects at distinct levels of analysis are not comparable. As we ascend to greater levels of comprehensivity in our constructions of civilizational identity, we move away from the particularistic conceptions of what I have called basal civilizations — the simplest civilizations that consist of a network of urbanized regions bound by relationships of cooperation, competition, and conflict(on which cf. newsletter 173) — to more abstract and universalistic conceptions of what that civilization is about.
Although the Indus Valley civilization was completely lost to history until discovered by archaeology in the twentieth century, it is more likely than not that folk traditions of this civilization were preserved long after this civilization declined. Again, its failure provided for the conditions of later civilizations in the Indian subcontinent. This was a civilization innocent of the Vedas and the Upanishands, but I would argue that it was the beginning of Indian civilization, as different as it was from Vedic civilization, and as different as it was from modern Indian civilization. We can construct a tradition of Indian civilization that includes the Indus Valley civilization, Vedic civilization, and all that has happened since that time. These individual civilizations each had their distinct central project, which was strongly colored by regional conceptions, and still highly particularistic. Hindu civilization is a larger and more comprehensive construction than any of the individual civilizations that fall under it, and Indian civilization is still more comprehensive.
While the central projects of Western civilization and Indian civilizations are, by definition, less particularistic than the central projects of the less comprehensive civilizations that fall under these larger constructions, neither has achieved universality in the sense that these central projects, even at this level of abstract generalization, remain distinct. Both Western and Indian civilizations are not exhausted and have permutations yet to explore, and more particularistic central projects to realize by civilizations bounded in space and time to a greater degree than the wholes of which they are the constituent parts. One could posit that there is a telos in all this, such that all human civilizations will be eventually unified in a truly universalistic central project, which is the realization of humanity. I do not think this is the case, but I will acknowledge that it can be argued on both sides, and these arguments are inconclusive. Indeed, this argument scarcely exists and remains to be developed.
I often think of space exploration and development as a race against time. Space exploration and development are technically difficult and so expensive that it is realistically in the hands of nation-states — the only entities at the present moment of history large enough to pursue this purpose. Our civilization today is beset by many problems, i.e., it is confronted by many challenges. A challenge need not be too great to simply damage civilization enough that it would no longer be practical to undertake the difficulty and expense of space development. But if we win the race against time, we can establish self-sufficient centers of civilization independent of Earth, so that even if civilization on Earth succumbs to any of its challenges, human civilization elsewhere can continue.
In light of what I have written above, however, it isn’t merely a matter of winning the race against time — which is still up for grabs, because we could easily lose any day. How and when we win the race against time, if indeed we do win the race against time, will matter. Suppose we do establish centers of human civilization independent of Earth, that we have to technical competence and we expend the necessary resources to make this happen. But further suppose that our technological and economic resources crest just high enough that we are able to established self-sufficient centers of human civilization independent of Earth, but that this effort is occurring even as other sectors of society are failing, so that, for all practical purposes, we have projected the Last Man into outer space. What would Last Men make of such an opportunity? Would they even be able to recognize it as an opportunity?
The one saving grace of space development is that, once it reaches the inflection point of self-sufficient centers independent of Earth, these centers can multiply, so that even if some are utterly captive to Last Men, and others are stagnant, some will rediscover the pioneer spirit and go on to homestead the galaxy. But will they multiply? If the first Earth-independent civilization is a civilization of Last Men, they may do little more than wait to die. And if they do multiply, eventually those that rediscover the pioneer spirit and so see themselves as something new in history, with a future ahead of them, they will create a new civilization even as the civilization of Last Men dies off. However, as we have seen, there are larger constructions of civilization of which both of parts of a greater whole.
In these newsletters I have often ridiculed Enlightenment ideology for its unrealistic presuppositions, but I will observe that the race against time to establish a spacefaring civilization is a paradigmatically Enlightenment undertaking. When partisans of the Enlightenment aren’t busy destroying traditions and replacing them with unworkable institutions, they have a vision of the future that belongs to the same world we inhabit in our daily lives, and so cannot but appeal to the naturalistic man of the present in a way that supernaturalistic promises for the future cannot. Yet the belief in the infinite perfectibility of mankind can only be realized through a spacefaring civilization that will facilitate the indefinite progress and improvement of the human mind by making human civilization no longer dependent upon the vagaries of a single, finite planet. There is, then, an intrinsic relationship between the Enlightenment and a spacefaring future.
As the first non-traditional central project of a civilization in human history, the Enlightenment has had a lot riding on it — a lot of expectations, a lot of promises, a lot of aspirations. Needless to say, it cannot fulfill all of these and so must fail in at least some senses of the term “failure.” This first Enlightenment civilization of ours may fail and fall into history, but it has posed the possibility of a radically different kind of civilization. Even if this idea lies fallow for a thousand years, the idea likely cannot be erased from history, and eventually it will be seen as a call to some future generation to fulfill the promise abandoned at some earlier point in history.
