The Undivided Past (37 page)

The wartime propaganda of the
Austrians and the Germans was no less contradictory. Projecting one familiar collective identity, they insisted they were fighting to defend their “
Kultur,” which was more important and admirable than Anglo-French “civilization”; but they also contended that Anglo-French “civilization” had become decadent and degenerate, in need of being vanquished, to be revived—a bracing and historic dose of Teutonic “barbarism” rather than of “Kultur” was their prescription. (This had earlier been
Nietzsche’s plea and prediction, before he lapsed into madness in the 1890s.)
²⁹
And so both the Entente and the Central Powers saw the latter as the side of “barbarism” during the
First World War. But the identity had diametrically opposed moral and behavioral terms to each: it meant virtue and vigor from a German-speaking perspective, the embodiment of everything vile and violent according to the British, the French, and the Italians. Either way, Gibbon’s confident prediction that barbarism no longer represented an external threat to European civilization had been confounded from within. Instead of being “irruptions” from beyond the continent, the barbarians were now as much inside Europe as outside, though the implications were not immediately recognized. Writing ten years after the Armistice,
Clive Bell noted that “since from August 1914 to November 1918 Great Britain and her allies were fighting for civilization, it cannot, I suppose, be impertinent to inquire precisely what civilization may be.” Yet there was little geographical or historical precision in the pages that followed, and Bell fell back on a familiar and glib appropriation from
The Decline and Fall:
“no characteristic of a barbarous society can possibly be a peculiarity of civilized societies.”
³⁰

These clashing (and contradictory) collective identities were again projected by the opposing sides during the Second World
War. As a young man,
Winston Churchill had read Gibbon, and he regularly used the simple distinction between “civilization” and “barbarism” in his books and speeches, most resonantly in his wartime broadcasts in 1940, when he contrasted the
“Christian civilization,” for which he believed the
British Empire and people stood and would fight, with the “long night” of
Nazi “barbarism” and the new “dark age” with which it threatened not only Europe but also the United States.
³¹
Yet even for Churchill, matters were rarely this clear-cut. He regretted that
Italy had abandoned its historic bonds with
France and Britain as the guardian of European civilization to throw its lot in with Nazi barbarism. “Down the ages and above all other calls,” he had written to
Mussolini shortly after becoming prime minister, “comes the cry that the joint heirs of Latin and Christian civilization must not be ranged against one another in mortal strife.”
³²
It was an appeal to a shared historic collective identity, recently reaffirmed during the First World War, but Il Duce ignored it. Moreover, Churchill would later find himself in alliance with
Stalin’s Russia—an even worse embodiment of Slav barbarism than the tsarist autocracy that had preceded it. He had detested the “foul baboonery” of Bolshevism since the October Revolution, and he would have been neither surprised nor encouraged by the words of
Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the best general in the first Red Army, who boasted that his aim was to “reduce civilization to ruin” and to make Moscow “the centre of the world of the barbarians.”
³³

Like many belligerent Germans before him,
Adolf Hitler took Gibbon’s familiar categories and inverted them. “Yes, we are the barbarians!” he had declared in 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire. “We want to be barbarians! It is an honourable title. We shall rejuvenate the world!” It was, he believed, an “historical necessity” that the Germans invade decadent and effete civilizations to snatch the flame of life f
rom their dying embers.
³⁴
But looking eastward, the “German people” had often seen themselves as the defenders of European civilization against the Slav and
Russian barbarians, and the invasions of Yugoslavia and of the
Soviet Union during the Second
World War were justified by Hitler on precisely that contradictory basis.
³⁵
As for the French, when peace was restored in 1945, their historians of the ancient
world would later write about the fall of Rome in terms that had been influenced by their own experience of defeat in 1940, when the triumphant conquering Germans had seemed neither rejuvenating barbarians nor the harbingers of a civilizing mission. This hostile perspective informed the writing of
André Piagnol, when he noted that “Roman civilization did not pass peacefully away. It was assassinated.” And
Pierre Courcelle was also thinking of 1940 as much as the fifth century CE when he excoriated the earlier German invaders as “barbares,” “hordes,” and “envahisseurs”; their passage through the empire had been marked by “incendies,” “ravages,” “sacs,” and “massacres”; and they had left behind “ruines désertes” and “régions dévastées.”
³⁶

Thus was Gibbon’s distinction between civilization and barbarism perpetuated, though not as he had meant and applied it, for Europe itself had become the scene of these clashes, and since
Freud’s meditation
Civilization and Its Discontents
, that has increasingly become the conventional wisdom.
³⁷
Half a century later,
Eric Hobsbawm wrote an article entitled
“Barbarism: A User’s Guide,” insisting that “civilization receded between the Treaty of
Versailles and the fall of the bomb on Hiroshima,” while “barbarism has been on the increase for most of the twentieth century, and there is no sign that this increase is at an end.”
³⁸
Soon afterward,
Bernard Wasserstein completed “a history of Europe in our own time,” to which he gave the faux-Gibbonian title
Barbarism and Civilization.
“There is,” he began, quoting
Walter Benjamin, “no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism,” and in his concluding paragraph he cited
Friedrich Engels to the same effect: “the more civilization advances, the more it is compelled to cover the evils it necessarily creates.” Thus regarded, civilization and barbarism were to be found not in separate peoples or different places, but within the same individuals and societies. Who, Wasserstein concluded, could contemplate the violence and cruelty, genocide and torture, mass murder and holocaust of recent times “without acknowledging the barbarism deeply implanted in the heart of our civilization?”
³⁹

Yet while Gibbon’s dichotomy has enjoyed an afterlife such as he would never have imagined,
⁴⁰
since the 1980s, historians of “late antiquity” have been rethinking the collective and antagonistic
solidarities allegedly existing during Rome’s “decline and fall,” and they have generally reinforced his qualifications and more nuanced perspectives. They no longer write of “waves” of “barbarians” “confronting,” “invading,” and “flooding” the Roman Empire and “overturning” its “civilization”: instead, they urge that accounts depicting “a violent and antagonistic encounter between sharply contrasting adversaries whose collective identities are clear and easily grasped” are “too theatrical to jibe with the known incidents of Roman-barbarian encounter in the fourth to sixth centuries.” On closer inspection, the “Germanic” tribes loosely labeled “barbarians” were varied and diverse, and lacking any sense of cohesion, unity, or identity; their set-piece battles with the
imperial legions were the exception rather than the rule; “at no time in antiquity, early or late, was there a collective hostility of barbarians toward the empire or a collective purpose to tear it down”; and accommodation and assimilation were generally more in evidence than confrontation and conflict. Thus regarded, the “underlying theme of relations between Rome and the barbarians in the late antiquity was not antagonism and strife but mutual need and co-operation,” and such encounters as did take place were between people “as individuals not collectivities.”
⁴¹

Accordingly, “late antiquity” is now widely regarded as a place where “transformation” and assimilation rather than “confrontation” and cataclysm prevailed, where “Romans” and “barbarians” were in practice often difficult to tell apart, where it was generally believed that “an able
Goth wants to be like a Roman,” and where many works of art expressed these accommodations and conversations in stylistic syntheses negating any such “ancient polarities.”
⁴²
To be sure, some scholars still insist this revisionist version of “late antiquity” presents too static and serene a picture, and they continue to maintain that Roman civilization
did
collapse into a new dark age after a century of crisis, trauma, and confrontation.
⁴³
Nevertheless, it seems generally recognized that “the myth that the fall of the west was a titanic and ideological struggle between two great united forces, Rome and ‘the barbarians,’” is no longer a sustainable view, and the result is that the traditional (and oversimplified) Gibbonian paradigm has largely “vanished” from current scholarly discussion, though not yet from popular
consciousness. And since this polarity of “civilized” and “barbarian”
identities can no longer be convincingly applied to the subject and period for which originally conceived, we should be very circumspect about discerning similar collectivities and antagonisms in other eras and in circumstances that Gibbon never intended or imagined.
⁴⁴

In any case, by the early twentieth century, another way of looking at collective human identities had come into being, no longer constructed around the antagonisms of civilization and barbarism, but around the concept of a
plurality of
civilizations.
One explanation for this new perspective was the growth of such disciplines as archaeology, philology, oriental studies, and sociology, which suggested there had been many other civilizations in addition to “the West” or “Europe,” which no longer seemed to be the high point and the end point toward which all lesser societies might strive to progress. As
Emile Durkheim and
Marcel Mauss put it in 1913, “if there does not exist one human civilization, there have been and there still are diverse civilizations which dominate and develop the collective life of each people.”
⁴⁵
The academic developments their article summarized were reinforced by the First World War, from which one widely drawn conclusion was that European civilization was neither as admirable nor as unified as some had previously thought, and that it might be better (and more humbly) understood as one civilization among the many that had existed across human history and around the globe. But while it seemed more plausible to urge that the essence of human existence and identity might be found among all these “great collective personalities,” and not solely in one of them, such a pluralistic view also raised several questions: how many of these civilizations had there been? How might they be defined and described? What were the relations among them? And what (if any) were their future prospects?
⁴⁶

One scholar who was stimulated by the First
World War to address these issues was a long since forgotten historian named
Frederick J. Teggart, who taught at the University of California at
Berkeley. In April 1918, he published
The Processes of History
, which began by deploring “that inevitable human propensity to classify all those who are in any way unlike ourselves, or who merely lie outside our own group, as “‘fiends,’ ‘aliens,’ and ‘barbarians,’” and also by recognizing that the First World War had lessened “the exclusiveness and self-confidence of the
western European, and has induced in him an awakening appreciation of the manhood and common human quality of out-lying peoples.”
⁴⁷
Traditional narrative history, Teggart argued, was inadequate to the urgent and demanding task of understanding how “civilizations have arisen and decayed, to be followed by other civilizations,” and in order to do justice to these “pluralistic” pasts, he insisted that “the analytical study of history” must be founded upon a comparison of the “particular histories of all human groups,” including those beyond Europe and the Near East such as
India and
China. Teggart also believed these civilizations were not hermetically sealed off from one another, but interacted creatively, and that this borrowing and cross-fertilization was the key to progress: “human advancement,” he wrote, “is the outcome of the co-mingling of ideas through the contact of different groups.” “Civilization,” he concluded, “is everywhere the result of the stimulus evoked by the friction of one group upon another.”
⁴⁸

While Teggart was writing
The Processes of History
, the German historian and philosopher
Oswald Spengler was at work on a much larger scholarly enterprise, published in two volumes between 1918 and 1922; it appeared in English translation as
The Decline of the West.
⁴⁹
Spengler’s thoughts were vague and mystical, and his central, pseudobiological thesis was banal and unconvincing, namely that civilizations were like living organisms, which meant they were born, grew up, and flourished, but also that they were destined to decay and die.
⁵⁰
Like most Germans, Spengler accepted the difference between
“Kultur” and
“Zivilisation,” and also the superiority of the former over the latter, but he offered an ingenious and evolutionary connection between them. As he saw it, the most brilliant, fertile, and creative phase in the development of these large collective groups took place during the first part of their history, and when writing of this period he called them “cultures.” But all such cultural collectivities were doomed
to fall and to fail, and it was to this second, deteriorated, protracted stage that he gave the name “civilization.” “The culture,” he wrote, “suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes civilization.” To Spengler, then, civilizations were not the acme of collective human achievement and
identity; rather, they were “the organic-logical sequel, fulfillment and finale of a culture,” they were “a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion.… They are an end, irrevocable yet by inward necessity reached again and again.”
⁵¹