Second Transition:

"Modernism is over. Call the cops."

--Tom Wolfe
  The Painted Word

Rome, 63 B.C.: Birth of Gaius, later the Emperor Augustus, perhaps the most successful man who ever lived.

2065 A.D.
Rome, 62 B.C.: The conspirator Cataline is defeated and killed.

2067 A.D.
Rome, 60 B.C.: Gaius Julius Caesar, the nephew of Marius, is elected consul.

2072 A.D.
China, 228 B.C.: Ch'in conquers Chao.

2073 A.D.
Islam, 1447 A.D.: Murad II of the Ottoman Turks is defeated by Scanderbeg, assuring independence for Afghanistan, India and Persia.

2074 A.D.
Rome, 53 B.C.: Crassus is defeated and killed by the Parthians.

Islam, 1448 A.D.: Murad II of the Ottomans defeats Janos Hunyadi at Kossovo, assuring Muslim control of the Balkans.

Islam, 1448 A.D.: Accession to power of Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Byzantine Emperor.

China, 226 B.C.: Ch'in conquers Wei.

China, 226 B.C.: Ch'in conquers Ch'i.

2075 A.D.
China, 225 B.C.: Ch'in annexes Wei.

2077 A.D.
Rome, 50 B.C.: Caesar finishes conquest of Gaul.

Islam, 1451 A.D.: Accession to power of Mohammed II of the Ottoman Turks.

China, 223 B.C.: The State of Ch'u is destroyed.

2078 A.D.
Rome, 49 B.C.: Caesar crosses the Rubicon, beginning civil war against Pompey.

2079 A.D.
Islam, 1453 A.D.: Mohammed II takes Constantinople, establishing the universal Islamic state.

Egypt, 1468 B.C.: Thut-mose III kills or overthrows his aunt, Queen Hat-shepsut, and begins systematic imperialism in Asia.

Egypt, 1468 B.C.: The Empire period of Egyptian history begins. Thut-mose III wins the Battle of Armageddon.

China, 221 B.C.: King Chien of Ch'i surrenders with his army and the world is united.

China, 221 B.C.: The King of Ch'in assumes the title "First Emperor."

2080 A.D.
Rome, 47 B.C.: Pompey, having fled to Africa, is murdered at the behest of the ministers of Cleopatra's brother Ptolemy Auletes, her rival for the throne of Egypt.

This is the period when the final restraints are removed. The international system has been so damaged, partly by war and partly by the interdigitation of the societies which compose it, that it loses all resistance to consolidation. Domestic politics in all major powers have lost whatever restraint constitutional forms may once have provided. The extraordinary cynicism and viciousness of political life is ultimately debilitating. For a season, however, it provides a reservoir of available energy, of competent people willing to do literally anything which seems to suit their interests, which can be harnessed by the right man. Against this force, properly directed by a single will, there is nothing in the human world that can stand.

The stronger a civilization is in absolute terms, the more terrible these years are. For Egypt, the smallest and weakest of the great civilizations, the beginning of the Empire seems to have involved nothing more than a coup at home and the undertaking of a spectacularly successful raid into Asia. Islam, intrinsically stronger but weaker even than Egypt in comparison to its environment, actually failed to unite its whole culture area when its advance to the east was checked; the failure was never wholly made good thereafter. (It did, however, succeed in securing its barbarian hinterland in southeastern Europe.) The great event that signaled the end of modernity, the capture of the traditional world capital at Constantinople, was not an easy undertaking, but the conflict which accompanied it was not on the scale of a world war. The Byzantine Empire was long-since conquered in detail; the occupation of the capital was a matter of tactics rather than strategy.

At Rome there was a civil war that at least implicated the whole world, since the participants had nations for their clients and supporters. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this conflict was that it constituted final victory for the popular party. Unlike a generation before, however, this victory did not precipitate class war or mass executions. The new dictator, Caesar, was at pains to conciliate the hostile elements of the existing society, rather than to destroy them. The only setbacks to expansion were secondary. The most notable one was in the east, where a Roman invasion of Parthia had been attempted as much for domestic political reasons as for strategic ones. The period also saw the final absorption of the Republic's traditional Celtic enemies to the northwest and the acquisition of territories which would prove vital to the well-being of the future empire.

In China there was waking nightmare. The most ruthless state ruled by the most merciless regime in the civilization's history had followed a policy of aggression and intimidation for over a century. Now it paid off. All traditional morality could be said to have failed, to have been proven wrong, simply because those who attempted to abide by it were seen to have been defeated once and for all in this world. Despite desperate resistance, more than was ever shown by the Hellenistic cities against Rome, the states at the center of the civilized Chinese world fell in quick succession to Ch'in, until finally the last of its traditional Great Power opponents surrendered. The worst that could have happened did happen, in the view of the educated. The victory of evil appeared to be complete.

In the West there was civil war and international war, fanatical resistance and the implosion of ancient non-Western civilizations into civil chaos. Nuclear, chemical and (non-lethal) biographical weapons were used again and again against civilian populations. Strategic ballistic missile defenses worked just well enough to leave the combatants sufficiently intact to conduct conventional warfare in the aftermath. Meanwhile, throughout the developed world, and particularly in America, there grew up a terrible exhilaration with the prospect that, at last, it would all be over. The day had finally come when all the bad people in the world, foreign and domestic, could finally be brought to justice. It was a great age for commissions of inquiry and international tribunals concerned with other people's malefactions.

Like the other great transitions in the life of a civilization, this cusp between modernity and empire is often experienced as a different kind of time. It is as if the eschatological horizon had been met. Throughout history, people say that, if we continue our present course, then in the long-run thus-and-so will happen. This is the era when the end of the long-run is reached. At this time, all ideologies, all theories of society, must perform or be considered refuted. The apparent refutation of traditional ethics and expectations, the apparent breakthrough beyond the system of good and evil, give the whole episode, almost a generation, an uncanny undertone. It is a time of desolating miracles, of dismay and wonder. The elements are seen to revolt, whether in fact or because people are attuned to the unexpected. The light of the sun is a different color, for a few years.

Not the least unsettling thing about this terrible chain of events is that nothing in particular seems to cause it. At the beginning of the period, all know that there is a great deal not right with the world, indeed that there are any number of accidents waiting to happen. The well-informed even know the outline of what the world would have to look like to make it a reasonably safe place to live; they have the sense to tremble at the jury-rigged state of things. Still, the event that turns these chronic worries into an all-engulfing flood is small out of all proportion to the result. A lost election, an assassination in a royal family, the renunciation of a minor treaty, any of these can put every important question in the world at stake, if the time is right.

This is not to say that this transition is a time of random or even meaningless violence. Nothing important can lack substance, and so the people of this time are driven by real hopes and fears. Their fears are produced by the sickening realization that a defeat which they and their ancestors had been fighting off for two and a half centuries, both at home and abroad, can no longer be held at bay. It will happen in their lifetime, to themselves. The mob will finally rule, the infidels will take the holy city, their inhuman enemies will occupy the ancient homelands of the brave and true.

Modernity was about the elimination of borders between societies and those institutions within them which intermediate between the subject and the sovereign. At its end, therefore, there is no place for losers to hide. For these few years, the private and the political have merged, so that one cannot simply withdraw and try to make a personal peace; there is no place of peace, either social or physical, to withdraw to.

This is also a season of hope. There is the fierce joy of the victors in the fact that they now can do all as they would. There is the more modest hope among society's passive but intelligent classes, the people who usually make things work at ground level, that at least rigorous reform will now be possible, that radical solutions can be tried and may even be necessary. Finally, most important for the future, there is the species of hope that can grow only after despair has achieved complete victory. It can have no public voice for decades yet, but it eventually outlives every civilization.

Modernity was in some ways a vast hallucination. For ten generations, it threw up terrifying shapes and aroused strange enthusiasms, all the while making promises of limitless power and knowledge. Then, almost suddenly, it was gone, as transient and inconsequent as a thunderstorm. It is only when the world of time seems to be collapsing, when all philosophy has refuted itself and the philosophers have taken to composing panegyrics for the victors, that the truth behind history can again become visible.