AT THE END OF AN AGE

JOHN LUKACS

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS        2002

PART 1

 

Chapter 1: At the End of an Age

 

“A civilization disappears with the kind of man, the type of humanity, that has issued from it.”

Georges Bernanos

Convictions: A personal envoi

For a long time I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago. This is a prejudice, in the literal sense of that word: a prejudice, rather than a preoccupation – which is why I must sum up, in the briefest possible manner, is evolution.

I knew, at a very early age, that “the West” was better than “the East” – especially better than Russia and Communism. I had read Spengler: but I believed that the Anglo-American victory over the Third Reich (and over Japan) was, at least in some ways, a refutation of the categorical German proposition of the inevitable and imminent Decline of the West. However – Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s victory had to be shared with Stalin. The result, after 1945, was my early decision to flee from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the United States, at the age of twenty-two. And twenty-odd years later, at the age of forty-five, I was convinced that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast. The result was a short book entitled The Passing of the Modern Age, published in 1970. During the following thirty years statements about the end of an age appeared in many of the dozen volumes and other essays and articles I was writing, on very different topics. Something drove me to make such statements. I now realize that they almost always appeared in paragraphs at or very near the end of my various books.

• During the ten years that followed I wrote more books; and since the collapse of Communism (I had seen that coming decades before) I have had the unexpected experience of seeing book after book of mine translated and published and bought by many readers in my native country.
• During these past ten years my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, were passing but that we are living through – if not already beyond – its very end.

 

The evolution of “modern”

I am writing about the so-called Modern Age, a familiar term which is nonetheless rather inaccurate. For one thing, the Ancient-Medieval-Modern chronological division is not applicable to countries and civilizations beyond the Western world. It was inaccurate when it first arose in the consciousness and in the usage of our ancestors, and it has become ever less accurate since.

• There came a shift of consciousness – indeed of thinking. This was the sense that this modern age might last for a very long time – indeed, perhaps for ever.
• For the Greeks “barbarians” were, by and large, people who were not Greeks – that is outside and beyond their civilization.
• Our usage of “barbarian” or “barbarism” is also – if not mostly – directed to people and behavior and acts in our midst, to people who are “uncivilized”.
• After 1600 the word “civilization” had become the antonym of barbarism and of primitivism.
• During the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a new meaning of “culture” appeared. Being “civilized” and “cultured” began to overlap and become sometimes confused.
• Darwin was not a very original thinker; rather, a man of his time.
• One of the outcomes of his theory was the stretching of the origin of mankind back into a “pre-historic” era, according to a view stretching forward to a perennial, perhaps everlasting, future of mankind; indirectly to a perennial, perhaps everlasting, Modern Age.
• By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the number of thinkers who, directly or indirectly, began to question this kind of progressive optimism increased.
• Now there were different writers, such as Nietzsche or Valéry or Spengler, who, in their different ways, tried to remind their readers of the symptoms of decline and of the ultimate fallibility of Western civilization – in the history of which the Modern Age has of course been a part.
• Toward the end of the century the word “post-modern” appeared, mostly in the abstract realms of literary and art criticism.
• Near the end of the Roman Empire or during the waning of the Middle Ages people knew that some unusual things were happening to them; many of them knew and understood the often worrisome difference of their condition when compared with the lives of their parents or other ancestors; but they seldom thought in terms of the end of an entire age.
• Ordinary people, with little knowledge of history, instantly understand when someone, referring to a particular evidence of moral rottenness, says, “It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire.”
• Every such kind of general historical recognition ought to be sharpened by the understanding of the ending of a very particular age, the one that began about five hundred years ago.

 

Main features of the Modern Age

First of all, it was the European Age. There are three sets of reasons for this: geographical, etymological, historical. Until about five hundred years ago the main theater of history was the Mediterranean, and the principal actors were the people along or near its shores, with few important exceptions. With the discovery of the Americas, of the East Indies, of the shape of the globe itself, all this changed. The European age of world history began.

• There were very few Christians living outside Europe, and there were few peoples of the white race beyond it, while there were few non-white inhabitants of Europe.

After 1492 “Europe” expanded in several ways. Entire newly discovered continents (the Americas, Australia), as well as the southern tip of Africa, became settled by whites, and Christianized. The lands conquered or colonized by the settlers soon became parts of the empires of their mother countries; the posts and colonies of the European Powers appeared across the world. Finally, European institutions, customs, industries, laws, inventions buildings spread over most of the world, involving also peoples who were not conquered by Europeans. But after the two world wars of the twentieth century, during which the peoples of Europe grievously wounded each other and themselves, almost all of this came to an end. There were no more new settlements of Europeans (and of whites) on other continents. (One exception is the state of Israel.) To the contrary: the Europeans gave up their colonial empires, and their colonists left their Asian or African homelands. (As late as 1914 the entire continent of Africa, save for two states, Liberia and Abyssinia, belonged to or was governed by a European colonial empire. Eighty years later there was not a single European – or white-ruled – state on the entire continent.) Yet the Christian churches in Africa, Asia, Oceania seem to have survived the reflux of whites, at least in many places. What also survived – indeed, it spread athwart the globe – was the emulation and the adaptation of institutions, industries, customs, forms of art and of expression, laws that were originally European. But the European Age was over.

• It was over, at latest by 1945 (if not already by 1917), when the two Superpowers of the world (meeting in the middle of conquered Europe) were the United States and Russia.
• There remained no European Power comparable to them, not even Britain.
• And the United States, too, is affected by the crumbling of the institutions and the ideas of the Modern Age that had produced it at its beginning.
• The composition of the American people has been changing rapidly and drastically, whence it is foreseeable that sooner or later whites in America may be a minority.
• Even more important is the condition that the United States of America was a product of the Modern Age, born in the middle of it – indeed, at its high point – with its ideas and institutions having been largely (though not completely) the results of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

 

Contradictory dualities

To list the evidences of the ending of the Modern Age would fill an enormous book. Here I must try to sum up – or better, to suggest – some of them.