“There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.” – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
These words by Italian novelist Italo Calvino capture one of the most important superstructural elements in geopolitics, a phenomenon whose study was pioneered by Simon Fraser University’s Paul Dutton in his study of Charlemagne’s Empire, the first Holy Roman Empire: consciousness of decline.
Like all the truly great academics with whom I have studied (a small but not insignificant subset of the great intellectuals I have known), Dutton came to a profound knowledge of the whole world by studying one thing therein comprehensively. Dutton argued that while the Carolingian Empire, which lasted for only five generations, between 768 and 889 CE, was always a dodgy prospect from an economic and logistical perspective, a key factor in its decline was essentially immaterial (my fellow Marxists would likely distinguish it as superstructural but let’s not split that hair here).
Dutton’s argument was that Carolingian courtiers and aristocrats, especially after Charlemagne’s coronation as the first Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE, were intellectually shaped by an emergent historiography that sought to explain the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire between 395 and 554 CE. This caused an excessive vigilance in looking for signs of an incipient decline and fall in their present. What might be viewed as a setback or interregnum within a Chinese imperial historiography, which chronicles multiple periods of fragmentation followed by consolidation, was viewed, in the Carolingian world, as a harbinger of the end.
Dutton began his career with a doctoral dissertation on the role of dreams in the Carolingian court. One such dream of ultimate decline was the subject of an early essay of mine on the nature of hope. The apocryphal dream of Charlemagne was a descriptive composition written at the end of the empire and then backdated and retrojected to the year 813. The dream lives on today in literary form, forming the basis of JRR Tolkien’s “four ages” schema which structured Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion.
But this apocryphal dream was one of many dreams, both apocryphal and real, that visited Carolingian courtiers and seemed to forebode the empire’s inevitable decline and fall. The Vision of Charlemagne (the name of the document in question), narrated imperial fragmentation as unidirectional and cherry-picked political events to do so. It depicted only centrifugal forces, when the Carolingian realms were divided, never centripetal ones, when kingdoms were consolidated and division undone.
Consciousness of decline, by conditioning political decisions with a sense of hopelessness and desperation, is not merely able to accelerate and intensify a material decline; it can, in my view, by itself, cause decline in the face of mere setbacks and the anxiety those setbacks produce. And the desperation caused by consciousness of decline is as or more likely to result in a state overplaying its hand, to prevent a temporary loss as it is to produce resignation and apathy. Usually, societies experiencing consciousness of decline will alternate between the two, following acts of grandiose risk-taking with periods of apathy and despair.
One society, so gripped, was the early twentieth century German Empire, a society overlapping and aspiring to the same territorial boundaries as the Carolingian Empire a thousand years before. That society had an eloquent spokesman for this consciousness, the highly influential authoritarian vitalist intellectual, Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s argument was that the Western civilization had reached the stage that the Roman civilization had reached at the beginning of the civil war between Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar that brought about the fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire.
Spengler argued, in the binaristic, catastrophist thinking emblematic of consciousness of decline, that because the West was on the same trajectory of Rome and proceeding down the same path, there was only one thing that could delay or perhaps even arrest its fall: the end of democracy and the rise of a charismatic Caesar-like authoritarian militarist leader who would institute “Caesarism.” Needless to say, Spengler’s beliefs conditioned the Nazi movement, not just indirectly through Mein Kampf, which it helped to inspire; it was a popular book among the intellectuals of German authoritarianism, inside and outside the Nazi Party.
Ultimately, the pessimistic desperation we associate with consciousness of decline, we can see in German society thereafter as both the Communists and Nazis saw the libertinism of the Weimar Republic as the equivalent of the putative “decadence” of the late Roman Republic. That desperation, the need to immediately stop the decline, cauterize the supposed wound did not just affect German election outcomes and street battles; it conditioned Hitler’s military strategy, especially in the later years of the war when periods of desperate brinksmanship were followed by abject despair and resignation, culminating in the wanton destruction of infrastructure and murder of civilian populations and then, finally, the murder-suicides of the Nazi leadership.
Ultimately, two material victors of the Second World War were states that, for all their flaws, lacked this consciousness of decline in the generation following the war. The USSR and USA did not begin to experience consciousness of decline until the 1970s and, whatever its profound flaws, the Reagan presidency was successful in dispelling this consciousness at least for a while.
It was not until the American victory over their Soviet rivals that consciousness of decline began creeping into America’s imperial court on a long-term basis. At the same time as the Third Way began downwardly adjusting the material and social expectations of America’s middle and working classes, a debate erupted between Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington on the pages of the prestigious American conservative imperialist journal, Foreign Policy, published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Following the fall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact in 1991, Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that Pax Americana was now global and permanent, that free market capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy had won the day and constituted the final phase in human evolution. But just as Spengler was no doubt reacting against Georg Hegel, who had made the same argument about the German state, and on whose thinking Fukuyama had based his book, Fukuyama’s claims elicited a neo-Spenglerian response.
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations argued that, contrary to Fukuyama’s theory, the world was about to become more divided and enter a period of multi-polar conflict among fundamentally different and irreconcilable “civilizations” and that America had but a short period of time before it became heir to the long undoing of the enemy sovereigns who had submitted to them.
Soon, Huntington predicted, America would be beset on all sides by civilizations with fundamentally different values, that would grow stronger, demographically and economically and soon outpace America and its vassals. The Chinese, Islamic, Eastern Orthodox, Japanese, Indian: these civilizations could soon become existential threats to America. To survive, Huntington argued, America would need to retrench; it would need to consolidate its military resources in its core territory and vassal states, reinvigorate American industrial and energy production, fight strategic wars at its margins to slow the loss of territory, especially its loss to Muslim civilization. It would also need to retrench socially by reducing liberal pluralism, a key source of its weakness, and rediscover its identity as a Christian civilization.
Huntington included some case studies in his work. Whatever one may think of the man’s values, the predictive power of his model is evident as the histories of Turkey and Ukraine continue to unfold as he predicted three decades ago. But it is not events in Black Sea states that ultimately made Huntington’s thinking hegemonic among American foreign policy thinkers. It was, of course, the events of September 11th, 2001.
Whether it is the Trump movement’s focus on internal reindustrialization and energy extraction or the Democratic Party’s and Bush Administration’s proxy wars and military coups in the imperial periphery, America’s elite decision-makers are all gripped with consciousness of decline, of the neo-Spenglerian vision of Samuel Huntington, alternating between episodes of brinksmanship and shows of power and wallowing in self-indulgent despair and decadence.
Consciousness of decline is something that afflicts an empire, a civilization and its imperial culture. So naturally, this consciousness does not recognize the Great Lakes or forty-ninth parallel as any kind of barrier when it comes to America’s crankiest toady, Canada. The Canada-US border has been no barrier to the spread of this consciousness of decline, but that does not mean Canadian decline consciousness lacks a specifically Canadian inflection.
The long-term alliance between elites in the Liberal Party of Canada and in the Communist Party of China, dating back to Pierre Trudeau’s pilgrimages to the tomb of Norman Bethune means that Canadian decline consciousness is as likely to show up as supplication to Chinese power as it is to bellicosity in Ukraine.
Canada’s elites vacillate between desperately toadying to the rising power of China and the declining power of the US. Our country, which has never existed as anything other than a vassal state to one empire or another, now behaves towards the world’s great powers, be they India, China or the US, like a strapster, one of those small yappy dogs that runs up to you and decides, seemingly at random, to either bite, lick or urinate on you.
Certain that they cannot actually improve the lot of Canadians and that our country is in decline, Canadian political debate has been reduced to a blame game. We are a post-political state whose leaders, rather than trying to solve problems, either insist that the problems do not exist and that the people pointing them out are ungrateful liars or explain that the problem were caused by the other team who must now be punished for screwing things up.
So, although Canada is wealthier, more powerful and has the resources to turn things around, I am exiting North American society because it has become consumed by a consciousness of decline, because societies that believe they are in decline are scary, depressing and unpredictable places to live.
