From Homer to the Unabomber: Declinists Across the Ages

At one level, Arthur Herman's book is a marvelously efficient compendium of dismal predictions or resigned assessments of ongoing, imminent, inevitable, or just possibly avoidable political, social, economic, cultural, or racial declines by hundreds of very famous, less famous, or infamous thinkers, novelists, poets, and artists, starting with Homer and ending with the Unabomber. The efficiency derives from Herman's uncanny ability to compress the views of the likes of de Maistre, Schopenhauer, or Sidney Webb into a short paragraph or two, while disposing of many others in a single sentence, often a quotation.

Thus we find that, faced with the relentless advance of capitalism and its definition of human worth as net worth, the French Romantics Gautier, Stendhal, and Flaubert, like their English counterparts Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Southey ("profit and loss became the rule of conduct; in came calculation, and out went feeling"), became convinced that they were witnessing the moral decline of man, amid the ruination of the land itself by dark, satanic mills. Rousseau and Herder had been pessimistic even before industrialization, reacting to the Enlightenment's cold rationalism and its implied warrant for individual hedonism, which they saw as squeezing out all spontaneous emotion, self-expression, and altruism.

What Herman does for the Romantics he does for all other categories of declinists, from the political variety that goes back to Plato and includes America's own Henry and Brooks Adams (here at chapter length), to the physical degeneration school that starts with Cesare Lombroso (another chapter), the racial devitalization crackpots headed by Arthur de Gobineau (a further chapter), the economic worriers and fretters, and finally -- the largest category of all -- the sociocultural pessimists. The latter include the still highly influential Ferdinand Tonnies and Gustav von Schmoller, whose student W. E. B. Du Bois followed him in seeing communal and spiritual Kultur (including the "Negro soul") under deadly attack by Zivilisation (material advancement). Among their contemporary American exponents Herman lists Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon, Christopher Lasch, Jonathan Kozol, Garry Wills, Joseph Campbell, and at least two dozen others.

That is the sort of thing that makes a wonderful compendium -- distilled summaries, quotations, and lists that amount to a Western Civ. refresher course in one easy read. Moreover, Herman is not only lucid and graceful, but also supplies all the necessary bits of background as he goes along, asking little of the reader. This book is no mere cut-and-paste job of encyclopedia cullings, however. Far from a contrived display of learning, it is replete with throwaway lines that imply a deeper knowledge of many subjects than Herman, a historian at George Mason University, overtly deploys. But the author may find even this high praise unwelcome because, as he must know, the compilation of compendia, breviaries, and florilegia is the surest sign of cultural decline -- by the fifth century virtually nothing else was being written by Romans, as the literate remnant desperately tried to package and preserve dissipating knowledge on sturdy parchment.

THE PERSONAL IS PHILOSOPHICAL

When it comes to explaining the oceans of pessimism surveyed, the book starts very well, only to inspire mounting doubts about what Herman is really telling readers. He writes as if he believed that pessimism is never warranted, and certainly fails to acknowledge the insights of the declinists he reviews so well. Herman begins by noting that projections of the aging process of individuals, from the full powers of maturity to inevitable decay, induce almost every traditional culture to look back longingly to a golden age when things were better ordered, including the human body. As usual, he has an excellent quotation, Ajax hurling a rock with one hand, "which the sturdiest youngster of our generation would have found difficult to lift with both hands," from E. V. Rieu's translation of The Iliad. Typically, Herman puts Homer, Hesiod, the Vedas, Confucian China, the ancient Egyptians, Aztecs, Zoroastrians, Lapps, Native Americans, medieval Icelanders, and Old Irish, as well as Genesis, in this category. The cyclical alternative of both the classical and Hellenistic Greeks, which sees rebirth and renewal following the final stage of decay, is also apt to induce pessimism up until that far prospect is attained. (Plato's ideal state would have trapped its golden age by prohibiting change.)

Herman also provides a great number of failure-revenge explanations, which are at least plausible. De Gobineau, disappointed in his overweening literary ambitions in Balzac's harshly competitive Paris of the 1830s, with nothing much in hand except aristocratic pretensions, blames his personal failure on the degeneration of the Aryan race, devitalized, he says, by a soft civilization and miscegenation with inferior southern races, in his long, crackpot-erudite Essay on the Inequality of the Races (1853). Oswald Spengler likewise had his high academic hopes dashed in 1903 when his University of Berlin thesis was initially rejected, suffered a nervous breakdown, hated his mediocre life of mere high school teaching, and in April 1918 finally published The Decline of the West, which conflated his personal failure with the decay of the entire civilization. Brooks Adams was traumatized by a bank failure that briefly threatened the family fortune ("like other affluent critics of capitalism, they were heavily invested in it") and vented his indignation at plutocrats and city bosses in his Law of Civilization and Decay (1895).