Part III:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

--Rudyard Kipling
  Recessional

At the end of the period, this world is literally in ruins. Except where neighboring or succeeding civilizations have extended their influence, urban life is in retreat. The arts and sciences of civilization are increasingly unavailable outside a dwindling number of ancient centers of culture. Much of the world, in fact, has collapsed into thinly populated barbarism. The imperial government is almost everywhere acknowledged as the only legitimate universal authority, and just as widely ignored. The central government can provide neither police nor military security. Different regions rule themselves, or go ungoverned. The apparatus of the state has largely disappeared beyond the capital and a few strongholds. The imperial office itself, while no longer routinely transferred by assassination and coup, is becoming increasingly ceremonial. Such affairs as the central government can still concern itself with have a ritualistic, even metaphysical cast.

This is the time after the Future, a period when most civilizations begin to seem more and more alike in their decay. Certainly they suffer from uncannily similar misfortunes. Every characteristic task which a civilization might have hoped to achieve was accomplished in previous epochs. In this period, every great civilized society, no matter its pretensions or its hopes, its goodwill or its actual accomplishments, must "join the majority." No matter the level of technology theoretically available, there has always been an appalling consistency to the lives of ordinary people in every settled society. This study of the fate of civilizations is about nothing more than an interruption in this common level of human existence, the passing season of fantasy and hubris which constitute civilization.

None of this lasts. Nothing has changed. The universe is holographic; every point of space subsumes every other point. Past, present and future are always accessible. Heaven and Hell are coincident. How could anything ever be different?

The people of this period, particularly the educated, developed concerns alien to those of their predecessors of even two generations before. Spengler called this the "Second Religiousness," the return of serious interest in the basic questions of existence, accompanied often by an appalling gullibility for religious charlatans and manufactured miracles. As we noted, the first stirrings of this phase of spiritual life began as early as the First Transition, and may even be traced back to latest modernity. However, the glory of the Empire tended to drown out the still, small voice. With the glory faded, the voice becomes more insistent.

This is the period when Buddhism was accepted in China, when Christianity, against the odds, supplanted the ancient ideology of the Roman state, when the cheerful land of Egypt became the grim kingdom of priestly hierarchy and dark wisdom known to later times. Even Islam, transfixed though it was by the fireworks of Western technological supremacy, began to cultivate an adamantine fundamentalism which came to fruition after the end of the universal state.

One historian has called this development the "victory of barbarism and religion," while another referred to it as "the loss of nerve." Other historians have seen in it an awakening by troubled civilized societies to what really matters in life. Because government is unreliable and the arts are increasingly corrupt, because every worldly hope has been seen to fail, people have the opportunity to look beyond the world of the senses, to seek again for the entrance to eternity. Certainly the change in the preoccupations of the thinking classes cannot be put down simply to laziness and fear. The mood began to change at the top, among the best spirits, before it spread to a wider public and produced the carnival of magic and wonderworkers which attends the final stage of every civilization. The intellectual systems created during this period, in fact, are among the most interesting and internally consistent artifacts of the human mind. Neoplatonism and Taoism, fantasticated versions of classical philosophies, should be on the agenda for any student who wishes to understand the full range of philosophic thought.

Still, it is not these highly refined systems which necessarily come to dominate a civilization's life, but a revelation of some sort, a personal link to the numinous which the great philosophies can hope to support but never to prove. The victory of these originally demotic religions is made possible by the new predisposition of the cultured elites to give them a hearing. What sounds like a joke becomes fact in those days: skepticism becomes skeptical even of itself, so that the best educated can again view the world with the uncorrupted innocence of the dawn of their civilization. The triumph of Christianity is the great example of this process, but the half-digested Buddhism of the Latter Han Dynasty is certainly at least analogous. In those societies, where indigenous religion had usually been the complacent servant of the state, the adoption of alien cults was to some extent an expression of popular disgust with the imperial regime. In Egypt and the West, in which priestly hierarchies had traditionally stood alongside of, and to some extent in opposition to, the rulers of this world, the Second Religiousness was in the nature of a great revival, a return to traditional forms of piety. In the ultimate West, indeed, the pope came again to have a veto over the appointment of a nominee to the imperial dignity.

In military and other secular matters, the period of decay is characterized by reliance on personal command and centralization in all fields of life, coupled with a simultaneous collapse of discipline in all spheres in which this strategy is attempted. Why this loss of skill in operating large organizations should occur, and in so many contexts, is not self-evident. Some might argue that modernity and the Future tend to shake men lose from traditional family and other communal ties, leaving them irresponsible enough to try their luck wherever ambition makes success plausible. If this were the case, however, how could it be that the world was growing more peaceful for most of the time since the end of modernity? As for family ties, the politics of this period is relentlessly dynastic, even in civilizations where governments have not normally been organized on the dynastic principle. On the other hand, it may be that the more contemplative nature of the intellectual life of late civilizations has the effect of making people more likely to consult their own conscience than either tradition or authority, and they find that their conscience is a light taskmaster. Whatever the cause, we see everywhere the paradox of the rulers of the age of decline coming to practice a politics no less primitive than that of their barbarian adversaries.

The upshot is that, for much of this age of decay, the forces of the imperium rarely serve the central authority with any degree of reliability. Every successful commander is a potential usurper. The ambitions of these men are often restrained by nothing more than the sad fact that the forces they lead are quite as unreliable as their commanders. As the security forces of the central authority become more and more the instruments of civil war, they necessarily also become less and less effective against external threats. In some cases, they decay into little more than a guard for the capital. Curiously, colonies founded on largely unoccupied territory show a far greater tendency to try to break away from the empire than do ancient civilizations which had long been simply occupied by imperial forces. The latter become little more than prizes for would-be Caesars.