A history of ends

It’s 30 years since an American Professor – he would have to be American, no English person would think like this, there’s way too much history soaked into our bones, and he would have to be a professor, since there's no idiot like a learned idiot - published ‘The end of history’, proposing just that - that History, realizing that America was now perfect and ruled the world, had achieved its aim and had packed up and was just going to stop.

Nonsense  of course, and necessarily so, since history has no aim, arc or whatever, you cannot be on the wrong side of history because history has no sides, history is just one damn thing after another. History will stop only when there is nobody left to make a record. Which despite our best efforts to exterminate ourselves, will likely not be for a very long time.

It's one of history  little jokes that not long after the absurd American professor wrote that, Western civilization started falling apart. The pace seems to accelerate all the time: we are now so far from the world of  2000s that it seems as remote as the Edwardian era must have seemed in 1940.

So I think a good deal nowadays not of ‘the end of history’ but the history of endings, other times when everything seemed to be imploding or exploding (and judging by the subject matter of current films and novels, I'm not alone in this).

Iain Pears flawed but fascinating novel set in three time periods, ‘The dream of Scipio’, imagines a Roman patrician living near Marseille in the late fourth century. The barbarians have broken through into North of Gaul and Northern Italy and the end is all too clearly in sight. On the other hand, the baths and library and law courts still operate, and it's still possible to hold  pleasant dinner parties in one’s villa.

That seems pretty close to our situation. The end of American democracy is on the cards, in which case war with Russia is inevitable, a sort of TV friendly fascism is on the rise in Europe, economic growth is gone forever, and climate-wise,  the frog is  being boiled to death (we doing both the boiling and also being the frog). But parents still worry about which public school to send  their children to, adolescents still plan gap years in South America, people still argue viciously  whether trans women are really women.  

Pear’s hero can look forward to the rise of Christianity. We look forward to nothing.  Our politics are irrelevant and barren of hope.

I also think of Ward-Perkins brilliant little book, ‘The Fall of Rome’ - which by the way is now a politically incorrect idea in academia, the ideological preference now is for continuity, with Rome not so much falling as morphing smoothly from Empire to Church, just a change of government you understand. Ward-Perkins is having enough none of this. He says Rome did fall, and with an almighty clunk. He tells a nice story from an early saints life, of the small frontier town of Batavis,  modern Passau, where despite the harrying of the barbarians,  things did carry on locally - the market open, the tiny garrison is still supplied yearly with its pay from Rome and an annual supply of olive oil is hauled painfully across the Alps. Then one day the bodies of the escort bringing the money for the garrison are washed up in the river,  throats cut. There is no more olive oil. The tiny garrison disperses to their homes. In that town, Rome has fallen, forever. There is nothing to do except to wait for the barbarians.

Our own decline is strikingly different in two ways.  First, very much faster. Depending on how you slice it, Rome was in decline for a century or two.  But the power of the  West, economically, militarily, ideologically and culturally, reached its peak less than a quarter of a century ago, yet here we are now, all hope gone, waiting for the end. The other striking difference is that whereas Rome, and for that matter Byzantium, were overwhelmed  by huge barbarian invasions, we've done it all to ourselves. We’ve fallen into a kind of ecstasy of self-destruction: Brexit, Trump, global warming,  enabling Putin, the economic powering up of Chinese dictatorship, the erosion of liberal democracy and the rule of law from within, our absurd but poisonous culture wars, are all things that we've done, not that others have done to us.

We are surely the cleverest, and also the most stupid, generation in history. Which is what historians will conclude in 200 or 500 or 1,000 years’  time. If there are still historians.