The Emergence of Postmodernism?

The word ‘postmodernism’ has been so misused, overused, and abused that one hesitates to use it all.

Various circumlocutions which can substitute for that word may be more accurate, less misleading, and less charged. ‘Postmodernism’ has been used both as a term of condemnation and as a term of praise.

The word, or any of its grammatical variants, does not appear even once in Carl Schorske’s book, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, even though segments of the book are arguably about appearance of postmodernism.

Schorske captures one aspect of postmodernism - its privileging of emotion over reason - by contrasting two constructs, the rational man and the psychological man. Schorske’s “rational man” is a placeholder for Lockean and Cartesian understandings of human nature, and how such nature shapes culture, ethics, and social and political structures

Troubling is the hypersubjective and foundationless meanings attached to volatile political vocabulary like ‘justice’ or ‘oppression,’ which in the working’s of Schorske’s “psychological man” become synonyms for ‘comfort’ or ‘discomfort.’ Schorske writes:

Traditional liberal culture had centered upon rational man, whose scientific domination of nature and whose moral control of himself were expected to create the good society. In our century, rational man has had to give place to that richer but more dangerous and mercurial creature, psychological man. This new man is not merely a rational animal, but a creature of feeling and instinct. We tend to make him the measure of all things in our culture. Our intrasubjectivist artists paint him. Our existential philosophers try to make him meaningful. Our social scientists, politicians, and advertising men manipulate him. Even our advanced social critics use him, rather than the criterion of rational right, to judge the worth of a social order. Political and economic oppression itself we assess in terms of psychological frustration.

This postmodern understanding - if Schorske may be here understood as speaking of postmodernism - entails that there can be no case in which justice, in which the morally right thing to do, is painful.

Any apparent counterexamples - voluntarily embraced suffering for a cause - melt under the scrutiny of a Freudian ‘pleasure principle,’ which sees such suffering as overridden by a greater satisfaction from the fulfillment of the purpose for which the suffering was embraced.

Admittedly, there is an insight in noting that the pangs of hunger are gladly endured if one has forgone food in order to give that food to one’s child, or in order to lose a few pounds and thereby be healthier or better-looking.

But to judge a political or economic system based on whether those within the system experience frustration - and here Schorske has rightly described much of postmodern political pandering - is to ignore the reality that frustration and pain are necessarily part of human existence, and to forget that greater purposes are not always fully comprehended or known by those enduring hardship for their sake.

Frugality for the sake of frugality is not pleasant, and one cannot always see the purpose for which one exercises thrift. Yet it will ultimately serve a valuable purpose, and enduring it is a good thing - if not a pleasant thing.

The same is true of diligence.

The dismissiveness with which Schorske’s “psychological man” treats reason will cast both the individual and the collective adrift. Rational discourse about culture, society, or politics becomes impossible.

In the absence of reason, people merely emote, and do so in alternating and competing patterns, which then pass for ‘debate’ among a public which has forgotten what rational argumentation is.

Schorske seems to have accurately captured postmodernism, without even once having used the word!

Ancient and Beyond Ancient

When we read history, our sense of temporal distance can become distorted. Didn’t Julius Caesar have lunch with Hammurabi?

The Greeks and the Romans flourished over a series of centuries. One hinge of classical history is the morphing, around 27 BC, of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. The Greeks started getting attention when Homer wrote his two major works around 750 BC.

Just as we look back 2,000 years to see Roman history, the “ancients” - the Greeks and the Romans themselves - looked back equally far to see civilizations which predated them by the same amount of time.

Between 2334 and 2279 BC, a leader named Sargon united the regions of Akkad and Sumer and thereby founded an empire. The empire later became known as Babylonia, and its capital city was Babylon. In Sargon’s era, these names were probably not yet widely used.

The city of Babylon is mentioned already in the 23rd century BC, but only years later did it rise to prominence. As historians Joachim Marzahn and Klaudia Englund write,

When Athens flourished, Babylon was but a provincial town; the desire of Alexander the Great as ruler of Asia to make the city once more the capital of an empire was thwarted by his untimely death; when the Roman legions conquered Europe, its name was scarcely remembered. The tradition passed on derived for the most part from the Bible and was all but praiseworthy: “The Babylonian Whore”. The city became a symbol of vice and lechery. For a long time Europe only knew this image. Yet Babylon was once a thriving metropolis, situated on the navigable Euphrates, in the midst of abundant fields and palm gardens. It was the center of international trade and of specialized industries, the abode of the god Marduk and his powerful priesthood, as well as the seat of political power of an empire comparable to that of the Romans. Our knowledge of these facts only became available when, in the 19th century, excavations commenced in the Near East.

While Babylon represented a high degree of civilization, it also remained a human and therefore essentially flawed society. While assembling complex legal, economic, and scientific patterns, it also displayed, along with best of human efforts, the baser side of human nature, as John Noble Wilford writes:

A new examination of skulls from the royal cemetery at Ur, discovered in Iraq almost a century ago, appears to support a more grisly interpretation than before of human sacrifices associated with elite burials in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists say.

Thomas Cahill notes:

We do know that human sacrifice was not beyond the Sumerians.

To contextualize this data, however, it’s worth noting that human sacrifice was part of every known civilization at that time.

By the time the city of Rome was founded around 753 BC, Babylon was well over a thousand years old. By the time the Roman Republic was founded around 509 BC, it was almost two thousand years old - or possibly older; the data is unclear. By the time the Roman Empire began, Babylon was an insignificant town.

Alaric Outwits Rome: the Goths Arrive

Could someone live during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and not know it? The large contours of history are always clearer in hindsight.

Perhaps those living in the empire during its last days assumed that they were experiencing merely a temporary setback, and that there was still a chance for the empire to revive itself.

Thus it came to many as a surprise when the Goths, led by Alaric, attacked and sacked the city of Rome in 410 A.D.

Alaric led the Visigoths - the western Goths in contrast to the Ostrogoths - and conquered much of the Italian peninsula. Alaric understood that the key to holding Roman territories would be controlling Africa, and the shipping to and from Africa, because Rome had become dependent on imported food.

Rome’s economy had undermined domestic food production, and Alaric understood how the interplay between military strategy and economic strategy would enable him to consolidate his hold on Rome.

Sadly, Alaric died before he could complete his conquest of Rome.

A generation after Alaric, Theodoric, leader of the Ostrogoths, would see the final fall of the Roman Empire. Wealth and a sense of security weakened the Romans.

The Goths eventually bested the Romans because the Goths were continually innovative, living by their wits, with no historical momentum behind their empire.

Lulled by their tradition of success, the Romans awoke too late to the fact that the Goths were competing with them. Historian Thomas Cahill writes:

Though it is easy for us to perceive the wild instability of the Roman Imperium in its final days, it was not easy for the Romans. Rome, the Eternal City, had been untouched since the Celts of Gaul had sacked it by surprise in 390 B.C. In the ensuing eight centuries Rome built itself into the world’s only superpower, unassailable save for the occasional war on a distant border. The Gauls had long since become civilized Romans, and Rome offered the same Romanization to anyone who wanted it - sometimes, as with the Jews, whether they wanted it or not. Normally, though, everyone was dying to be Roman. As Theodoric, the homely king of the Ostrogoths, was fond of saying: “An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would want to be like a Goth.”

Rome’s continuous centuries of hegemony may have been its undoing. The Goths were more ambitious.

After taking from the Romans their gold, silver, and other treasures, Alaric required them to free their slaves: their “barbarian” slaves. The Romans had derisively called the Germanic tribes “barbarians” - the Goths, and other less famous groups like the Cimbri and Cherusci - but now the Germanic tacticians had outwitted the Romans.

The leaders of the Roman senate, seeing all that they had lost to Alaric, asked him, “What will you leave us?”

Alaric’s historic answer: “Your lives.”

Byzantium Besieged

Centuries before the Crusades (they began around 1095 A.D.) and even decades before the Islamic invasion of Spain (that was in 711 A.D.) the newly-minted Muslim armies were on the march.

Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and even before his death, Islamic invasions were conquering large parts of the ANE (Ancient Near East). After his death, the Muslim military continued to gain new territory.

Due to their superior horsemanship and swordsmanship, the Muslims managed to expand their empire - their ‘caliphate’ - rapidly. They moved westward, conquering large parts of northern Africa. They advanced toward the northeast, defeating Syria and moving into Persia.

Islam next set its eyes on Europe. Historian Rodney Stark writes:

Having defeated the Byzantine armies in Syria and Egypt, and having begun a successful campaign to conquer the entire north coast of Africa from Byzantium, in 672 the caliph Muawiyah decided to strike directly at his enemy. From his new capital in Damascus, the caliph directed his fleet to transport an army through the Dardanelles (the narrow strait linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Sea of Marmara). Numbering about fifty thousand men, the caliph’s troops captured the peninsula of Cyzicus, across the water from Constantinople, and fortified it as their principle base, from where they began a siege of Constantinople.

This siege, from the principal base across the water, was unsuccessful.

After this attack in 672 A.D., the Muslims tried again in 717. Defeated but persevering, they assaulted the city of Constantinople again in 718. In fact, Islam assailed the city repeatedly for several centuries. It finally fell in 1453.

The assaults on Constantinople were part of a three-front strategy. Islam hoped to stretch Europe’s defenses thin by striking from the southwest at Spain, from the south at Italy and Sicily, and from the southeast at Constantinople.

This left Europe with thousands of miles of coastline to defend: a difficult task at best, if not simply impossible.

After enduring decades of attack all along the Mediterranean south, and offering ad hoc defenses, Europe decided to organize a strategic counterattack: to stop the invasions at their source in the Middle East, rather than wait for Islamic armies to arrive yet once again on European shores.

This defensive counterattack would be called ‘The Crusades,’ but that title would not be given to it until centuries after it happened in 1095 A.D.

Reflections on the Middle Ages

Feudalism, which was the political system for most of the Middle Ages, provided advantages over the system which had prevailed in western and southern Europe during the Roman Empire. The imperial system had been centralized; power was distant, difficult to influence, and consolidated in the hands of a few people.

By contrast, feudalism was localized, so that one could meet face-to-face with those who managed the estates. Power was distributed among many estates, so that no one individual had much of it.

Impressively, feudalism created a structure with mutual obligations: the serfs, the common farmers at the bottom of the social structure, owed certain duties to their lords, but the lords also had certain responsibilities toward the serfs.

The economic system which paralleled feudalism was manorialism. Feudalism and manorialism are inseparable. Manorialism contained the economic analogues to feudalism’s political advantages of a decentralized, localized, flexible system in which the greater answered to the weaker as much as the serfs answered to their lords.

This was unlike the old Roman empire, in which those at the bottom owed a great deal to those at the top, but those at the top owed nothing to those beneath them. Historian Irma Simonton Black writes:

Since the distances from castle to castle were so great, each large estate had to be maintained separately, and the people living there relied on each other. Everyone, from the lowliest serf to the lord of the castle, had his own duties. They welcomed exciting diversions, like tournaments.

There was a diversity of Christian churches around the world: Coptic, Syriac, and others. In Europe, until 1054 A.D., “there was only one Christian church.” After that year, eastern Europe and western Europe each had its own type of church.

Almost every small town or village had its own church, and larger towns had several. Aside from churches, monasteries were major institutions for both learning and social services. “Monks, who dedicated their lives to God,” were responsible for copying by hand the manuscripts which preserved the literature and philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Because these monks were extremely familiar with texts by authors like Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, monasteries became the home to mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Monks had detailed discussions of these and other academic topics. During the centuries we call ‘the Middle Ages,’ monks developed more advanced forms of logic, mathematics, astronomy, and physics.

The monks, who “lived in peaceful monasteries,” were also responsible for helping the poor. People who had no food or clothing, and couldn’t otherwise earn any, received these things at monasteries. The monks “tended gardens and went about a wide variety of spiritual and temporal duties.” The monasteries additionally provided employment and a place to live for homeless individuals and families.

Not everyone who lived or worked in a monastery was a monk. Many ordinary people were employed there. They were given houses in which to live and fields in which to grow crops.

It is difficult to mark a precise beginning point or ending point for the Middle Ages. A convenient starting point is the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 A.D.; an endpoint is much less clear.

The end of the Middle Ages is often thought to be the beginning of the Renaissance, but that is equally ambiguous. Some historians mark the end of the Middle Ages as the time when Petrarch’s career reached its height, around 1341. Others see the rise of the printing press, around 1453, or Islam’s destruction of the city of Constantinople at about the same time, as the endpoint of the Middle Ages.

The reason it’s difficult to find exact dates for the Middle Ages is because this “age” is not a real or concrete historical event. It is a “construct” - an idea made up by later generations. Like most types of generalizations, then, it is difficult to pin down, liable to exceptions, and subject to competing interpretations.

Life on the great estates and in the monasteries went on as it had for many centuries, but very gradually a few things began to change. By the end of the Middle Ages, a new and powerful middle class had appeared in the fast-growing towns: one example of the progress made toward modern times during this very important period.

The economic developments of the Middle Ages - the rise of a cash economy to replace bartering and payments “in kind,” the emergence of the middle class, and the organization of skilled craftsmen into guilds - as well as the technological innovations like the printing press arose from the creativity fostered by the spiritual atmosphere of the times. Irma Simonton Black writes:

Inside the abbeys, monasteries and convents of the Roman Catholic Church life was orderly and serene. Many religious establishments dotted the landscape of the Middle Ages, and the churchmen and churchwomen who inhabited them were directly subject to the great Holy Father, or Pope, in Rome. They lived by stringent rules which forbade fighting.

The monasteries brewed beer and made wine, selling some of it to nearby towns. Monks and nuns took vows of poverty, and most of them lived up to those vows. The monasteries, therefore, did not spend much money on luxuries, and could direct funds to create schools, build libraries, and help the poor.

Because most of the monks and nuns were also pacifists, the energy which might have been devoted to war was instead used for artistic and scientific progress. By the mid 800s, one monastic philosopher, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, was already directing doubt toward the old Ptolemaic view of the universe.

The Greek language was also kept alive in Medieval Europe, from Ireland to Saxony, among the monks. Although some historians felt that Greek learning had died out, it was in fact never disrupted: continuously from 476 A.D. onward, the texts of Plato and Aristotle were studied in their original language across Europe.

The Medieval synthesis was, then, a mixture of preserving and analyzing the classical Greco-Roman heritage on the one hand, and on the other hand advancing areas of study like physics and mathematics with new and original scholarship.

Roman learning was preserved in monasteries and abbeys. Monks copied books and kept brief accounts of important happenings. They wrote in Latin, the language of the scholars.

Monks often knew three or more languages: their native language along with Greek and Latin. “The monks also taught” in the schools of the monasteries. They helped “young people to read and write.” Although the schools started in the monasteries, they also soon were planted in larger towns, where they were called ‘cathedral schools’ because they were usually located in the central church of the region.

The word ‘catholic’ means universal: for centuries, there was only one type of church in any region of Europe. This is unlike the modern United States, where you can find many different types of church in each town: Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, etc.

The word “catholic” means general or universal, and the Catholic Church was just that for all the Christians of the Middle Ages, for they all belonged to one church.

Most of Europe was over 90% Christian, or at least more than 90% of the people in the region called themselves ‘Christian.’ The remaining people were Jewish. Relations between Christians and Jews in medieval Europe were varying. In some places and times, the two groups coexisted and even cooperated in a peaceful and friendly manner. In other situations, anti-Jewish hatred arose among those who called themselves Christians.

Islam first appeared in southwestern Europe around 711 A.D., when Muslim armies invaded and laid waste to parts of Spain. Similar incursions and plundering would take place in France and Italy, but Islam would not become a fixed presence in Europe until long after the Middle Ages.

Because Christianity had become legal only after 300 A.D., the Middle Ages was the first time that history had a chance to attempt to organize a society around the teachings of Jesus. There was a tension between the new patterns of life found among the Jesus followers on the one hand, and on the other hand that tendency toward selfishness and violence which had made itself apparent in the five or six thousand years of history leading up to the Middle Ages.

The conduct of the military was shaped by the spiritual outlook of those who were serious followers of Jesus:

The knights, for instance, who were the trained fighters of the day, were taught by the Church to respect God and defend the Christian faith, to protect the poor and weak. It was the Pope who proclaimed the Truce of God, which forbade all fighting on Saturdays and Sundays.

The ideal of protecting the poor and the weak was a medieval innovation. Even if it wasn’t carried out uniformly, it was a new concept in human civilization. The weekend ceasefire likewise was a humane attempt to reduce casualties and offer a chance for a diplomatically negotiated solution.

Most, but not all, knights conducted themselves in attempt to honor the ethic of Jesus - admittedly a difficult thing for a military man to do, given that Jesus was a pacifist who neither engaged in combat nor carried a sword. There was, however, at least the new thought of trying to introduce some humane aspect into the conduct of war: avoid harming civilians, women, and children; protect the weak and the poor.

Although “knights would sometimes disregard the Church’s commands,” this new sense of honor was unique among the world’s cultures. Medieval Europe’s sense of honor was a millennium earlier than Japan’s bushido and peculiarly more humane.

This sense of honor fits more naturally into civilian life than into the military. The feudal lords “recognized the Church as a peaceful influence in their world.” There were occasions, naturally, when it was necessary to correct or reform the Church itself, when it strayed away from the selfless pacifism which Jesus introduced. But, “in general, the nobles were willing to support the Church with money and gifts.”

Medieval Europe was a mixture of economic, political, and spiritual thoughts, trying sincerely but perhaps imperfectly to make a concrete social reality corresponding to its distinctive ethics of selflessness, pacificism, individual liberty, and a respect for human life.

Saving History

Columba Stewart is the executive director of Minnesota’s Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. He’s also been working diligently to preserve papyri, parchments, and other ancient texts in various Islamic nations, where the terrorist group “Islamic State” (ISIS) has destroying artifacts and historical manuscripts.

The “Islamic State” attempts to obliterate large segments of human history, claiming vaguely that it is either blasphemous or idolatrous. Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra and Gordon Govier interviewed Stewart and wrote:

The swift ISIS takeover in Iraq meant there was little time to hide thousands of documents, he said. Many have been destroyed.

Zylstra and Govier also interviewed Major Corine Wegener (U.S. Army), who’s been on the ground in the Middle East, leading efforts to preserve not only manuscripts, but also paintings and sculpture: the objects which ISIS works to destroy.

Terrorists from the “Islamic State” adhere to the Muslim belief that artistic images are idolatrous and should be destroyed. Major Weger works with networks of individuals attempting to preserve humanist treasures:

“I tell people, look to yourself and your family first,” Wegener said. “If you are still a caretaker of your collection and you see the opportunity where it looks like things are bad, you have to make that judgment call.”

Although there have been individual Muslim scholars over the centuries who’ve allowed for the possibility that artistic images are permissible, and there have been Muslim artists who’ve created paintings or sculptures, the mainstream of Islam in the Middle East has studiously avoided images. Accepted Muslim artists have kept to nonrepresentational and abstract forms: calligraphy and architecture.

Muslim artists who create representational art, and their artworks, have been safer in other parts of the world.

Meanwhile, the “Islamic State” has been equally happy to smash classical Greek and Roman sculptures, Buddhist sculptures, or Hindu sculptures. Hellenistic artworks, created in the wake of Alexander the Great, have been destroyed in large numbers.

Major Wegener leads the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, which she coordinates with the Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield and the International Committee of the Blue Shield:

Most stories of saved artifacts won’t come out until the conflict is over, she said. When Islamic extremists were threatening Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012, a local library curator created a system for smuggling more than 275,000 pages of priceless manuscripts by donkey, bicycle, or boat to the south of the country.

Both ordinary private citizens and officers in the U.S. Army work to preserve centuries and millennia of human history from the terrorists of the “Islamic State.”

Your Language, Your Empire

Widespread imperial presence leads to the widespread adoption of the empire’s language for business and political purposes. The peak of an empire’s military and economic influence, however, regularly antedates the peak of the imperial language’s ubiquity.

Greek and Macedonian influence arguably reached its zenith sometime prior to 250 BC, but the Greek language would become most widespread a century or two later.

The Roman Empire arrived at its apogee well before 476 AD, but Latin usage, both written and spoken, continued to expand for several centuries afterward. More texts were composed, and more of them have survived, in Latin after 476 than before.

Visually, this phenomenon could be represented on a Cartesian plane. The horizontal axis shows time, and the vertical axis would represent intensity and geographical spread. Something approximating the familiar bell curve would map an empire’s political, military, and economic significance. A second curve, of similar shape, would mark the spread and use of that empire’s language. This second curve would be offset to the right, such that the peak of an empire’s geopolitical importance would occur temporally prior to the greatest spread and use of its language.

The spatial distribution, and frequency of use, of an empire’s language is still increasing when the empire itself is in decline.

The Spanish, French, and British empires were already in decline while the Spanish, French, and English were becoming increasingly widespread.