The Imperfections of the Competition

As intimated in the first entry to this triple-feature, mankind has many, many metaphors to describe civilization. Coming up with one is a common part of promulgating a theory of history. Today, we’ll consider four instances of such metaphors, seeing where they break. They are, in order, spatial, mechanical, organic, and chronological metaphors.

Spatial

The most famous spatial metaphor is seen in the title of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Rise and fall, height and decline, advance and regress, all of these are spatial metaphors which consider a civilization in terms of geometric or geographic motion. Schlossberg states their first problem quite well: “Spatial analogies lead us to expect that what goes up must come down; they imply a trajectory that can be plotted and an apex that is determined by… numerical factors” (6).

Spatial metaphors tempt us to view a civilization’s growth and destruction as parts of a single, quantifiable process, like a progress bar or climbing up and down a ladder. Just as what goes up must come down, we think, so too a civilization must reach its peak and then descend. Where that peak is, we will disagree on, but it is there. The problem with this model is the complexity of the life of a civilization. Civilizations can be assessed on a thousand metrics: religiosity, social cohesion, internal loyalty, governmental stability, artistic fecundity, and more. The various peaks of a civilization in these metrics very often don’t coincide with each other; Rome’s artistic greatness and its governmental stability and its territorial expanse and its social cohesion can be given all sorts of peaks.

More, the trajectory is not the sort of relatively smooth (bumpy, but steady) trajectory which spatial metaphors tend to suggest. Rome did not become a different civilization when it became an empire, by most measures (including its own, given the gradual nature of the transition under Octavian, and its changes under Diocletian, Constantine, Romulus Augustulus, and Justinian were all civilizational shifts which speak of decline-and-revival repeated and repeated.

At the root of all this, though, we find the problem that will characterize all four categories of critiqued metaphors: making civilization a merely natural affair. Civilizations are not mechanical, amoral existences. A civilization is created by billions of choices coming together; it is shaped by those choices, both particularly and in aggregate. To make a civilization into an inevitable process of rise and fall does not correspond to their reality as a series of choices. Civilizations fall not because it is the nature of a civilization to end but because man sins.[1]

Mechanical

I spoke of societies as ‘breaking down’ in part one, and that was a sort of mechanical metaphor. In truth, viewing a society in mechanical terms is far from the worst metaphor, so long we keep a few caveats in mind. First, the metaphor is limited; cause and effect are integral to a society, but we cannot presume to understand the cause and effect of the human heart without recognizing its spiritual, God-turned nature. Second, the metaphor is also limited in having little consideration for beginning or end. It can speak of a society running well or breaking down, but the metaphor much easier serves as a vehicle to convey the idea of a society’s dysfunction, not a medium for explaining or understanding that dysfunction. It’s a distant metaphor, not a close one, in that it is not likely to produce unintended insights. Third, it too can fall into the trap outlined above, that of making the civilization’s existence a natural-scientific rather than a moral-personal phenomenon.

Organic

The organic metaphor for civilization speaks of societies as young or old, healthy or sick. These have some truth. A freshly founded civilization is young, though no civilization has lacked centuries of history since the first (for all civilizations grow from previous civilizations, with transitions subjective and difficult to pin down; even when a transition date is chosen, the old is not gone by that date and the new not full formed). Further, ‘health’ and ‘sickness’ are fitting expressions of the spiritual state of a society, given that sickness is part of the physical effect of sin (Rom. 8:22).

The problems of this metaphor-class are still great. Like the previous metaphors, it is prone to making civilization a natural phenomenon, not a work of human agency. Further, like spatial metaphors, it contains in it, for us, the idea of dying. Civilizations do not have a set lifespan. They grow into being; they dip into sin; they reform; they undergo downfall in a moment, revealing the rot within. Does this take a hundred years? Three hundred? Two thousand?

These civilizations did not ‘age.’ If we attach ‘youth’ to some traits in a society- vigor, cohesion, rashness- and ‘old age’ to others- contemplation, dispassion, disintegration-, we will find that many civilizations seem to fluctuate, being younger then older then younger, fluctuating across not only time but geography. The metaphor is not hopeless; the resemblance does exist. Its limits, however, must be carefully observed. That is the case with all of these, actually: they are based on some truth (it gives them plausibility) and even have some use, but men must be careful to attend to the limits of their proper use, lest they fall into the cowardliness Chesterton observed in Nietzsche. Unfortunately, many are not so cautious, particularly in how they communicate to others.

Chronological

By ‘chronological’ metaphors, I refer specifically to Spengler’s likening of society to a season-cycle. He saw a cyclic aspect to history, a cycle in which each civilization formed a revolution (running concurrently and unsynchronized, I presume).[2] A society, he said, develops in a spring, vital and unconcerned with the past but not contemptuous; it transitions to summer, where it develops a relationship with the land and through the land with the past; it enters autumn, where it separates from the land and analyzes the past; it comes to winter, where it becomes cosmopolitan entirely and alienates itself from the past, from history, resulting in what he called the fellahin, men who live amidst history’s ruins without care or concept for them, a moment-to-moment existence.

This chronological metaphor has that same quality of reducing civilization to an inevitability, a natural process. It adds a cyclicity to the calculation, too, in contravention of Scripture’s distinctly linear concept of time. Spengler’s societies begin and end at the same point; Christian civilizations start from sin and produce two polarized results: the righteous with all their works of beauty and virtue; and the wicked with all the filth of sin. The righteous man enters into eternity, remembering his history as a hymn to God (Ps. 136), bearing all the beauties of that civilization to His throne (Is. 45:14). The wicked man enters into judgement and damnation, far lower than his first estate of suspension (for man on earth has the mercy of a chance to be righteous, the curse of a chance to sin; he is suspended above hell while refusing heaven).

Next Week

Next week, I’ll present what I believe to be the best (though not a perfect) metaphor for a civilization, culture, or society.

God bless.

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[1] Civilization in itself is not a being; we must, as Schlossberg put it, “[distinguish[ history from nature… [distinguish] man from nature.” Man has moral agency, and therefore his societies as essentially moral (as last week established).

[2] My source here is Islander #4, which is no longer available to purchase, given its limited print run. I respect it, though I’m not sure I recommend it. The articles were good but not amazing (with the exception of one I’ll probably write a critique of eventually).