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Section Two:
The Duty to Work (2376-2447)
"If we would set against the Roman "panem et circenses" [bread and circuses] (the final life-symbol of Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also) some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and Egypt) it would be the 'Right to Work.' This was the basis of Fichte's thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate in the Duty to Work."
--Oswald Spengler
The Decline of the West
Readout
2377 A.D.
Egypt, 1170 B.C.: Workers on state enterprises increasingly go unpaid. Unpaid
foreign mercenaries begin to afflict the countryside.
2383 A.D.
Egypt, 1164 B.C.: Ramses III killed in a harem conspiracy
2384 A.D.
Rome, 257 A.D.: Visigoths and Ostrogoths invade the Black Sea area.
Rome, 257 A.D.: Franks invade
Spain, Alemanni and Suevi invade Upper Italy.
2387 A.D.
Egypt, 1160 B.C.: Egypt gradually withdraws from Asia, finally leaving the
Palestinian mines unworked.
Egypt, 1160 B.C.: A long period
of serious inflation sets in.
2390 A.D.
Egypt, 1157 B.C.: The Empire comes to an end for Egypt. The government is
thereafter concerned wholly with defense of the homeland.
2394 A.D.
Egypt, 1153 B.C.: The Pharaoh is depicted on the same scale as the priestly
oligarchy. The office loses executive power.
2395 A.D.
Rome, 268 A.D.: Goths sack Athens.
2397 A.D.
Rome, 270 A.D.: The Emperor Aurelian restores the borders and suppresses
rebellion.
2410 A.D.
Islam, 1784 A.D.: The Crimea is ceded to Russia.
2411 A.D.
Rome, 284 A.D.: Diocletian carries out a thorough civil and military reform of
the empire. Vigorous persecution of Christians by this superstitious man.
2415 A.D.
Islam, 1789: The Austrians take Belgrade.
2416 A.D.
Islam, 1790 A.D.: The Sultan attempts systematic westernizing reforms. This
theme dominates the rest of the Empire's history.
2424 A.D.
Islam, 1798 A.D.: Napoleon conquers Egypt but abandons it soon after.
2431 A.D.
Islam, 1805 A.D.: Mehemet Ali makes Egypt effectively independent of the
Empire. He transforms the economy with a vast system of forced labor and state
enterprise.
2433 A.D.
Islam, 1807 A.D.: Sultan Selim III is deposed and succeeded by Mustafa.
Islam, 1807 A.D.: The Greeks
declare independence; the Turks attempt to suppress the rebellion.
2442 A.D.
Egypt, 1105 B.C.: Major temples are sacked in popular uprisings and the
southern army commander revolts.
2447 A.D.
Rome, 320 A.D.: Constantine the Great moves the capital to Constantinople and
legalizes Christianity.
2447 A.D.
Egypt, 1100 B.C.: Revolt against the High Priest of Amon, Amen-hotep, who had
long dominated the government.
Commentary
This age defines a lifetime in which the conservative authoritarians of the world finally come into their own. The necessity for a return to ancient discipline seems the foremost need of the time, and the world does not lack for disciplinarian taskmasters to provide it. This is not a time of overweening ambition, like the tyranny that ended modernity, nor an era in which the rulers of the world indulge their nostalgia for a romantic past, as was the case in the Third Transition. If this is an age of reactionaries, the "reaction" here is a matter of hard necessity, of ruthless enforcement of order and rigid standards, not to implement the self-expression of some great individual's will, but because there no longer exists the room for maneuver which is necessary if individual rights and local peculiarities are to be respected. Justice the imperial government can still provide, at least on occasion. Mercy is increasingly beyond its capacity.
The last phase of discipline
comes in response to the calamitous external environment. In this period, Egypt
loses its foreign empire entirely, first from indigenous revolt, and finally
because of the rise of terrible new empires in Mesopotamia. Rome suffers an
explosion of invasions by various barbarian peoples who spread havoc to regions
of the empire that had known peace almost from the days of the Republic. In the
Empire of the West, the Martian colonies, vastly overextended but chronically
underfunded, are effectively abandoned by the terrestrial authorities to
whatever fate they can negotiate with their increasingly bizarre environment.
Meanwhile, military adventurers from Afghanistan and southern Africa began
insurrections which brought them in sight of the twin North Atlantic capitals.
In Islam, the empire in Europe loses ground to the Austrians and the Russians
in a series of wars which seem destined to end in the loss of Istanbul itself.
Throughout the world, ordinary
life is endangered by casual violence from the ungoverned powerful and ruthless
bands of the desperate poor. Almost everywhere, normal arrangements for the
production and distribution of goods cease to function. There is no more basis
for long-term economic growth. Science has long since ceased to produce
exploitable ideas. Within the limits of natural knowledge, engineering has
exhausted the fund of possible innovations. Occasionally, new systems and
skills can be developed for special purposes, but there is no more flow of
world-renewing invention, even in the Empire of the West. The maximum possible
extension of business enterprises, both in terms of geography and productivity,
had long ago been reached. It is clear to all that the return from new
endeavors is almost invariably negative. The life of mankind has again become a
zero-sum game, where the increase of one person's slice of the pie reduces the
slices of the rest. Further, the pie is shrinking.
The economies of all
civilizations in this phase are "premodern," no matter the
technological foundations on which they rest. They do not naturally expand, and
nothing new, not even the repairs needed after war or natural disaster, is done
unless someone in authority orders it. In China, where the government
consciously tried to avoid the Legalist economic policy of the Former Han
period, the orders were often not given. The laissez faire economic strategy of
the Latter Han, with its Taoist faith in the ability of society to find its own
proper level, was in its way as counterintuitive to Chinese rulers as
centralized planning was to rulers of most other civilizations. The pattern
that characterizes this period, in fact, may simply be that it reverses the
economic outlook which prevailed in the early empire. Thus, civilizations with
the habit of free enterprise often abandon it in this phase of their history.
Certainly in Rome, and even more in the West, there were men who were prepared
to issue the necessary orders for the whole world, down to the last nut and
bolt and brick
Diocletian reformed the
administrative system of the empire from top to bottom. To a large extent, it
was restructured along military lines: certainly it was intended to serve
military purposes. His most famous reform was the division of the empire into
four regions, each under the command of an emperor of greater or lesser
seniority. This division ultimately split the empire into an eastern and a
western half, the former becoming the cradle of Magian (or Islamic)
civilization, the latter a hunting ground for barbarians. In this period,
however, Diocletian's most pronounced effect on everyday life came from his attempt
to control the economy, particularly the terrifying price increases at the
retail level. Later historians have been appalled at the crudity with which
this was done: the imperial edicts on price control do not trouble to
distinguish between wholesale and retail. Workers and their descendants were
fixed in their trades by law. The demand of the government for tax monies was
insatiable, and the ferocity of the tax farmers who were subcontracted to
collect these sums tended to drive such business as there was underground. It
discouraged all enterprises which were not actually imperially licensed
monopolies.
In the Empire of the later
West, which had a subtle knowledge of the uses and limits of command economics
and far greater ability to monitor economic activity generally, things were
far, far worse. Money, in fact if not in law, was abolished and replaced by a
cybernetic rationing system. Every conceivable occupation was either licensed
or prohibited, and everyone was answerable to an imperial inspector. Even
retirees were technically "low recall priority reserve workers," and
still had to fill out time-use forms at the end of every week. This system did
manage to keep staple foods and basic utilities available in most urban areas.
For certain sections of the administrative classes and the emperor's corps of
occultic "New Philosophers," it provided luxuries that were literally
priceless. What it did not provide, despite the increasingly draconian
penalties for failure to implement government directives, was the possibility
of self-sustaining economic growth, or even an honest chance of maintaining the
current system.
The imperial government did not
simply recapitulate the errors of command-economy totalitarian states of the
twentieth century; it developed far more advanced ones, made possible by the
availability of information processing technology and a generally higher level
of engineering expertise. The imperial government, for instance, tried to
design cyclical fluctuations into the operation of the world economy when it
became apparent that the secular trend was a slow, irregular slide. It even
attempted to reproduce the beneficent effects of technological innovation by
periodically introducing and then withdrawing a range of existing technologies.
Despite the warnings of history, the empire tried to replace dying regional
industrial networks with gigantic, vertically integrated, single-facility
production units. These "terminal factories," each the size of a
small mountain, were often placed in delicate, historically significant but
long de-industrialized landscapes, such as central Honshu or the southern shore
of Lake Michigan. They eventually became empty, ominous hulks, the objects of
superstitious awe to later cultures, to which they represented the power and
the downfall of the West.
For Islam, this was the
beginning of the sad attempt by the Sultan's government to import just enough
Western armament and mechanical expertise to give the empire's armies a
fighting chance. The process was long delayed by the inability of the
theoretically omnipotent autocrat to reform or abolish the Janissaries. This
slave army, at one time recruited with the child-tax on Eastern European
Christians, was so loyal to the Sultan and the empire as to seem to exempt him
from the need to practice mere human politics when dealing with his subjects.
In this epoch, their loyalty, and that of the mullahs who formed the other
great pillar of the Sultanate, did not preclude the assassination of any
imperial incumbent who seemed to be trying to tinker with their immemorial
privileges. Thus, for some years, the reform process had to proceed piecemeal,
with many reverses and half-hearted measures. The true analogue of Diocletian
in the Islamic world of this epoch was the Sultan's nominal vassal, the Khedive
Mehemet Ali of Egypt. He imported European industries wholesale and trained a
respectable modern army with European advisers, paying for it all with the
forced labor of the peasants of the Nile Delta and with slaves from the south.
Ancient Egypt was never quite
the "hydraulic despotism" of sociological fantasy (that is, a society
where the government maintains absolute control because of the need to build
and repair an extensive irrigation system). On the other hand, it had always
been a fairly dirigiste society. Large projects were almost invariably
government sponsored. The economic decay of this period, therefore, was largely
expressed by the government doing less well what it had always done before. The
land became shabbier than it had been in former ages, workers went on strike
when asked to work for nothing (which was all that their government supervisors
had to give), the loyalty of the army became problematical. Clerical authority
became more and more absolute as the priesthood of Amon came close to
swallowing the civil government. Though this was an age of growing interest in
magic and of the practice of piety at all levels of society, the hierarchy was
not well-placed to benefit from the fact. Their favorite cult, that of Amon,
the Hidden God, had never been popular, though in a way he had been the
necessary lynchpin to the Egyptian pantheon. It was the accessible old gods,
Isis and Osiris and Horus, in whom the people hoped. That the servants of the
Hidden God should gain control of the state was a further cause of alienation
of the rulers from the ruled.
Like the highly Neoplatonized
"astral piety" which Diocletian hoped to make the universal religion
as he strove to stamp out Christianity, the hegemony of Amon and his priests
was a feature of a time of unsustainable reaction. The reaction here, of
course, was not to some supposed force of universal progress, but simply to the
natural process of dying. The collapse of the reaction also triggered a
rejection of the reactionaries' theology. At the end of the era, the gods
changed, or the old gods came back.