The End of History?

In what follows, I reproduce a review of the next big book I intend to read some day (which could be any time in the next decade). This book was suggested by Pastor Ralph of the Pasadena Foursquare Church over a breakfast conversation. Conversations can sometimes ramble on in unexpected directions, and this one took us into history, beginning 13,000 years ago. That was the starting epoch in UCLA Prof. Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Diamond explains how societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate less advanced cultures. I see the book as a major advance in history, chronicling the way that the modern world came to be. It even inspired me to start my own timeline of human history in order to make sense of history's broadest patterns. The time since the last major collision between the Old and New World (roughly AD 1500) is the story of this next historical undertaking.

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From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (1500 to the
Present). By Jacques Barzun. HarperCollins. 877 pp. $36.

Reviewed by John J. Reilly

From Dawn to Decadence is one of those wonderful books that cannot be
categorized. Some reviewers have compared it to The Education of Henry Adams,
the great intellectual auto­ biography that seemed to sum up the last fin–de–siècle.
The comparison does no injustice to either work. Jacques Barzun was born in
1907, and so has lived through a not insignificant slice of the period he covers,
but even he did not know Descartes personally. And yet in some ways From
Dawn to Decadence reads less like a history than it does like a personal
memoir of the last half–millennium, with people and topics selected chiefly
because the author is interested in them. The effect is delightful, though sometimes
a little disorienting. Perhaps the one thing you can say for sure about From
Dawn to Decadence is that it provides the most cheerful explanation you
are ever likely to get for why Western culture is ending.

Jacques Barzun really needs no introduction. Anyone interested in William James,
the great Romantic composers, the role of race in historical writing, or a dozen
other subjects has already encountered him somewhere. (A book he coauthored
with Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher, sticks in my mind after twenty–five
years as a philosophy of historiography disguised as a reference guide.) In
From Dawn to Decadence, he manages to touch on just about all his lifelong
interests, and without turning the book into a mere anthology.

The format is loosely chronological, with the great era of the post–medieval,
“modern” West divided into several lesser ages. The whole text is broken up
into digestible chunks of commentary and biography. We get assessments, sometimes
quite idiosyncratic ones, of almost all the great names of the modern era, but
many of the biographies are of persons the author deems worthy–but–obscure.
Some of these subjects really are virtually forgotten, such as the ingenious
eighteenth–century polymath, Dr. Georg Lichtenberg. Others are just a bit neglected,
such as the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes. (Barzun manages to praise this physician
and essayist while barely mentioning his jurist son.) A particularly entertaining
feature of the book is the brief, apt quotations set into the margins. Had it
not been for From Dawn to Decadence, I would never have known that Thursday
was bear–baiting day at the court of Elizabeth I.

From Dawn to Decadence has only a minimal amount of political and military
narrative, which is something of a drawback since the author routinely makes
unexplained allusions to people and events that may no longer be common knowledge.
(Do undergraduates today know what Stanley said to Livingston? I’m afraid to
ask.) And then there are the fact–checking lapses inevitable in a work of this
scope. These will allow readers to entertain themselves by looking for mistakes.
More than one reviewer has noted that modern calculus does not use Newton’s
notation, as Barzun says, but that of Leibniz. However, this review may be the
only place you will read that those long–range shells the Germans fired at Paris
(and Barzun) during the First World War did not come from Big Berthas, but from
Krupp’s Pariskanone.

Parlor games aside, the author corrects errors that are far more important
than the ones he makes. He points out, for instance, that, no, M. Jourdain did
not speak prose, and that Molière knew this as well as anyone. It is anachronistic,
he reminds us, to suppose that Galileo was tried because the Inquisition believed
the Copernican model threatened man’s place in the universe. Rousseau’s works
cannot be made to say, he observes with a note of exasperation, that Rousseau
was a revolutionary who wished mankind to return to a state of nature. Intellectual
superstitions of this sort are probably immortal, but it is a good idea to try
to correct them at least once every five hundred years.

While a book as genial as this one can hardly be accused of promoting anything
as crudely Germanic as a theory of history, it does present a sketch of the
last half–millennium. According to Barzun, the West has been working out a cultural
impulse that it received in the Renaissance, an impulse that had become exhausted
by the end of the twentieth century. This impulse was not an ideology or an
agenda but an expandable list of desires, particular forms of which can be detected
throughout all the cultural and political controversies of the great era. The
names of these desires are helpfully capitalized wherever they are mentioned,
so that Emancipation is graphically shown to play a role in every major controversy
from the Reformation to the women’s suffrage movement. Another example is Primitivism,
the perennial impulse to return to the original text, to the early constitution,
to the uncluttered state of the beginning. Other trends of the modern era have
been informed by the desires for Abstraction, Reductivism, and Self–consciousness.
Ideas like these can hardly be said to have been the motor of Western history,
but looking for their various incarnations over the centuries does make it much
easier to view the era as a whole.

Barzun laconically informs us that late medieval Europe was a “decadent” society.
I myself had thought that Richard Gilman had permanently retired that word with
his study Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet, but Barzun may persuade
readers that “decadence” is neither a moral category nor a bit of implicit vitalism.
Rather, Barzun says, the term “decadent” may properly be used of any social
situation that is blocked, where people entertain goals for which they will
not tolerate the means. Decadent societies tend to become labyrinthine in
both their cultures and their styles of government, as people create small accommodations
within a larger unsatisfactory context. Decadent periods can be sweet, as Talleyrand
remarked of pre–Revolutionary France, but partly because they are obviously
ephemeral.

Decadence may end in the explosion of a revolution, by which Barzun means the
violent transfer of power and property in the name of an idea. Revolutions are
great simplifiers that pave over the labyrinths and open up possibilities that
were unimaginable just a few years previously. There have been four of these
revolutions during the modern era, each more or less defining an age. There
was the religious revolution of the Reformation, which first stated themes that
would recur through the rest of the era. There was the monarch’s revolution
of the seventeenth century, in which the aristocracy was tamed and large, centralized
states began to appear. The monarchs, of course, got their comeuppance in the
liberal revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Most recently, every
throne, power, and dominion was shaken by the social revolution at the beginning
of the twentieth.

Barzun seems to believe that the twentieth century was so traumatized by the
First World War that it was never able to fully exploit the positive possibilities
in what he calls the “Cubist Decade” that preceded the war’s outbreak. Rather,
the Age of Modernism (not to be confused with the modern era) largely confined
itself to analysis and destruction. Thanks to the First World War, the more
distant past became unusable: the sense of living in a completely new age left
the past with nothing to say. No restraints remained on the expression of the
desires that had characterized the whole modern era. The result was that, by
century’s end, the chief remaining impulses in Western culture had developed
to a theoretical maximum. So ends an age.

This conclusion would be depressing, were it not so reminiscent of similar
conclusions in earlier eras. Barzun notes that at the end of the fifteenth century,
some people held that the sixth millennium of the world was about to end—and
history along with it. As is often the case with this kind of sentiment, the
people who shared it were on to something, if the end of history is taken to
mean the end of history as they knew it. Barzun ends the book on a note of hopeful
speculation. He looks back from a more distant time on our immediate future,
which he supposes will be an age when history will wholly disappear from even
the minds of the educated. Indeed, so completely will the modern age be forgotten
that its rediscovery will have an impact quite as revolutionary as the impact
that classical culture had on the late medieval world. The result, Barzun hopes,
will be another renaissance, when the young and talented will again exclaim
what joy it is to be alive.

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John J. Reilly is the author of Apocalypse & Future: Notes on the Cultural
History of the 21st Century.

(c) 2000 First Things
107 (November 2000): 43-44.