[This is a republication. The original publication drew only a fraction of the comments of Part 1, so my conclusion can only be that either the material is much less interesting, or that I posted it at an inopportune time. Since commenters in Part 1 were eager to see Part 2, I think it worthwhile to republish on a weekend morning and give people a better chance to see this. Hopefully you will find the ideas it contains are worth the length of the diary.]
In this series, I ask why some eras of history are profoundly rationalistic, ideological, and pragmatic, while others are mystical, personal, and obsessed with obscurantism. How, in other words, the 20th century managed to be both the best and worst of all human history, while the thousand-year Middle Ages cultivated the beginnings of modern empathetic morality despite producing no significant political or technological revolutions. In Part 1, we examined the psychological basis of this dichotomy, and also delved into the historical manifestations of the former category: Cerebral epochs. In this part, we examine the other half, Intuiting epochs. In Part 3, the finale, I argue conclusively that we are entering an Intuitive epoch and will attempt to predict the implications of this conclusion.
III. Odin, One-eyed Wanderer - Intuiting Epochs
Eventually the successes of Cerebral eras always become their own worst enemy, and the environment becomes too complex to fit within people's conceptions of it. Ideologies are discredited; distinctions are blurred rather than invented; it becomes harder to know how to proceed, in the absence of an overriding sociopolitical framework; and people take to wandering either by choice or necessity, pushing into new geography and remixing both the culture and gene pools. Expertise in existing knowledge is emphasized in intellectual circles over innovation, and abstract, obscure, or mystical concerns take daily mindshare away from the practical and logistical. This may occur as radical social, economic, and political specialization in an increasingly stifling social environment, or the opposite - radical simplification, decentralization, and anarchy. I address these two conditions in turn:
1. Diamonds in Dim Light: The Once and Future City
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
--William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium
First, we must address the likely misconception that what is being referred to here are Dark Ages: Although all such periods are Intuiting - as they lack the social fabric for regular inquiry, crystallization of ideology, or advances in productivity - not all Intuiting epochs are Dark Ages. They can be highly literate, educated, sophisticated, relatively peaceful, and urbane, but this will usually occur in societies that have achieved an enormous level of social cohesion through traditions and rituals. On the whole, these societies will not give rise to, tolerate, or respond substantively to disruptive intellectual challenges: People with inconvenient questions and unusual ideas would at best be regarded as entertainers rather than educators or revolutionaries, if they are accepted at all.
It is not because people no longer think or question, but because their society has evolved to a point they no longer bother trying to understand or control it, except in desperate personal need - and by that point, their only recourse may be blind lashing-out. Either arcane knowledge or profound wealth is needed to be influential under those conditions, and most people will not find it worthwhile, available, or practical to obtain either. The Once and Future City (OFC) as I call it is densely-populated, economically diverse, socially stratified, politically complex (but non-ideological), and largely beyond the comprehension of those who inhabit it. It may function on any combination of traditions, trade guilds, aristocracies, religious practices, and other social forms, but its politics are not intellectual in any way - there are no worthwhile arguments to be had, just social advantage to be won.
Usually such states are authoritarian or tyrannical (e.g., imperial Peking, Constantinople, etc.) but this is not necessary. The citizens of some medieval cities were more or less free agents not constrained to the rule of any Lord, but for reasons that will become obvious, political rights are never explicitly articulated in an Intuiting age: A list of rights and obligations would neither be valued by its beneficiaries, since their views of both are vague and relativist, nor respected by authorities that operate entirely on holistic political calculus rather than ideology. As a result, power is constantly fluctuating, but the output of each fluctuation is nearly identical across large tracts of time: The same forms assert themselves on a continuous basis.
Revolutions may occur in OFCs, but they are nearly always the result of a critical mass of personal interests being unserved rather than any specific ideas about how to serve them. People do not ask themselves such questions in an Intuitive epoch - they simply react based on an unexamined sense of their situation. If someone were to ask them explicitly what they want done - i.e., request specific policy recommendations - they'd be unable to offer any, because substantive dialog is not how the blind tensions of Intuitive politics work: Dialog of any kind is either pure amoral advantage-seeking, or obscurantist sophistry to profit academic/clerical elites with new complexities to expound.
But cities of this kind are very limited cases, and not far beyond them you would get a different picture - mass migrations, nomads, traders, mercenaries, small communities with either egalitarian or tyrannical politics, bandits, barbarians, and here and there, medium-sized cities. But again, we should not fall into the trap of imagining this as something one would see exclusively in a Dark Age: All of these roles can occur in a reasonably advanced, high-tech society when people have simply been dislocated by economics. I deal more with this aspect of Intuitive eras in the second subsection of this diary.
We can say that more or less all of history prior to Classical Athens consisted of an Intuitive epoch, for the reason that explicit politics didn't exist. People ruled because they ruled, there was no "why" to it - and definitely no exploration of "could," "should," or "would," as such inquiries would be interpreted as direct challenges to authority. Things just happened as they happened and people responded according to what seemed best, without really looking at what was going on. Hunter-gatherers migrated with herds, then settled by rivers, then developed into relatively wealthy, mystically-oriented societies like Egypt or the Indus where they worshipped eternal cycles and changed slowly. And at no point in the process was change a matter of conscious forethought, reflection, or skepticism, but a slow and random accumulation of useful practices that took on the force of pious rituals.
In Part 1, I described how the era of the pyramid-builders in Egypt identifies a brief Cerebral epoch due to the highly rational, evolutionary, and technocratic way in which the pyramids were logistically organized, experimented with, and perfected in form. Once that era had passed, the Kingdom returned to a process of slow, unguided development based on themes that will soon become familiar: Dynastic intrigues, religious authority, and a general failure to learn from changes in the outside world. The entire political and social energy of the civilization focused on the capital, Memphis (the capital became Thebes in the Middle and New Kingdoms); the city itself was utterly focused on the divine person of the King; and the King's mind was always directed toward preparing for his coming ascent into the heavens at death.
In other words, we can say that for thousands of years, the energies of the world's wealthiest, most advanced, and most powerful civilization were concerned entirely with the mystical properties surrounding the death of one man1. The obedience of the people was originally based only on avoiding the worldly wrath of the gods for disobeying one of their children on Earth - the King was immortal, the people were not, and that was that: They would serve him in order to secure a prosperous future for their children, not because they expected to have an afterlife themselves. But the allure of immortality is irresistible, and the usefulness of extending it as an additional promise of obedience proved far too great to deny.
Now, here an important distinction must be made: As cynical as this sounds, this gradual extension of immortality privileges beyond the royal court did not occur as a deliberate bribe: It would have been entirely too Cerebral to use divine power as currency. Rather, it was a case in point of how the mystical side of the Intuiting psyche evolves, with sublimated motivations gradually eroding socially-based distinctions into a spiritual continuum - something which has the ironic long-term effect of promoting (relatively) democratic sensibilities in later eras. The distinction between King and subject began as an absolute, binary property of the cosmos - he is eternal, and you are not - and became ever-so-slowly a matter of degree.
Ultimately, what is claimed by one must be granted to all, or it would become suspect: People are only willing to believe in an afterlife because they themselves fear death, and once Egyptian society was relatively physically secure, the desire for a more absolute form of security would have grown. Servants and relatives of the King knew him to be a person, however divine his metaphysical nature, and would see hope for themselves in his ascent to heaven. What may have begun as the personal, emotional unwillingness of Egyptian Kings to let go of their more beloved household servants (the closest thing to friends an absolute monarch can have) would have gradually become an expectation that loyal service merited immortality.
From the household, it easily extended out into the government, bureaucracy, military, and economy, then eventually fused with the entire identity of Egypt: To be Egyptian was to know the path to immortality and make the correct preparations for it. All other considerations were merely prologue to planning for the afterlife, and for those with the surplus time and wealth to spare, their life's work would often be constructing for themselves the best and most opulent possible tomb. Unfortunately, the precise means of securing immortality depended heavily on the visions, omens, and closely-held secrets of the priesthood caste, so they were soon monopolizing their civilization's most cherished resource.
This too was not as cynical as it sounds. They did not begin with the intention of using the afterlife as a political lever, and probably believed they were acting sincerely even as they did so - sincerity being a prominent feature of Intuiting epochs, despite the equally stunning treacheries that accompany it. But people's decisions in an Intuiting frame are governed by unconscious motivations and prejudices, so the priest whose interpretations served the priesthood would have found more success within it, more power in the Kingdom, and thus - by the standards of Egyptians - the unambiguous approval of the gods.
Such circular reasoning is another feature of the Intuiting frame: It does not concern itself with cause and effect, but with intrinsic nature, so that is the lens through which power is perceived - not a conditional state, but an identity. That which exists is self-justifying. That which does not yet exist, is ipso facto invalid. The result is that change cannot occur rationally, because divine will needs no justification, and contraventions of divine will are unjustifiable by definition. So, anything that does occur was destined, and anything that has never happened before will never happen - a civilization for whom past, present, and future are the same. In Egypt's case it was because the cycles of the Nile could be relied upon for thousands of years, so there were not a lot of dynamic pressures, but it is typical in general of OFC Intuitive societies.
People in this condition only think in order to avoid change, and progress which does occur only happens by subconscious influence. In an Intuiting epoch, social evolution is most potent where people are least paying attention, because their minds are committed to remaining dormant and unchallenged - the reverse of what occurs in a Cerebral era, when both good and evil are premeditated. However, this is not meant to deprecate the progress made by the former - as we will see, much of what Intuiting eras accomplish would be difficult to manage with the objectifying mentality of Cerebral thinking.
Sooner or later the growing power and likely corruption of the priesthood would have provoked a reaction, and it seems a particular coincidence that the pharaoh2 Akhenaten appears when he did - an ideological insurgent whose reign was characterized by a sudden eruption of Cerebral religious and artistic reformation. He worshipped Aten (the Sun), built an entirely new capital in the middle of nowhere (Amarna) dedicated to the new order, and brought about shockingly expressionistic styles of art that completely abandoned the older, formal modes. Amarna seems to have been something of a utopian experiment, with wide open, sunny, welcoming architecture in sharp contrast to the gloomy, mysterious buildings of Memphis and Thebes.
Akhenaten ruled in virtual equality with his queen, the famous Nefertiti, and promoted warm, heartfelt depictions of family life in official inscriptions - something unthinkable both before and since, with families that were often little more than political arrangements, royal children who had minimal contact with their parents until they became a boon (i.e., a daughter to marry off) or a threat (i.e., a son to worry about). The Amarna period inscriptions instead show family life as modernity would recognize it: Parents playing with their children in the Sun.
But it soon turned dark, and that too highlights his reign as a Cerebral aberration in the long Egyptian dream: A devastating series of personal tragedies seems to have turned Akhenaten's mind to purity and oppression, and he began suppressing worship of other gods in ways that may have become ruthless. Even with the dark turn, the sudden changes in Egypt might have led somewhere, but within a generation of his death, Akhenaten's city, name, images, and temples were obliterated from memory (except for the relative few which survive to tell us about him, of course). The Kingdom returned to form, the priesthood recovered, and the long Nile Dream resumed - the original Once and Future City continued to flow down the river of time until rudely (and finally) interrupted by the armies of Alexander.
Athens had, by this point, completely wasted itself in pointless wars of greed, and was now a shadow of its former glory. But the legacy of the Athenian Golden Age continued in the form of Aristotle (student of Plato, student of Socrates) serving as tutor to both Alexander and Ptolemy, giving them both a respect for Greek civilization and a desire to avenge past invasions of Greece by the Persian Empire.
The results of Aristotle's teachings are apparent - the energy, learning, and political complexity of the Greeks was spread as far East as Northern India, and most durably South into Egypt where the city of Alexandria was founded. It was a new Once and Future City within a day's ride of the original, now decrepit Memphis, only this time built by a people with radically different values to those of Egypt. These were people with relatively inquisitive, querulous minds, even as the reflected light of freedom in the teachings of Socrates faded from view. The restless, violent hearts of the Macedonian horsemen were drawn to the Nile Dream and its relatively peaceful cosmos, and found a contentment their homelands had never allowed them.
Are you still to learn that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?
--Attributed to Alexander by Plutarch, Lives
Still, their minds were active, and quested after knowledge...of a kind. But with each cycle of years, the Nile Dream lulled them further from the central inquiries of their ancestors and toward increasing obscurity, irrelevance, solipsism, and mysticism. They compiled the greatest archive of knowledge of the ancient world, their eponymous Library, and complacent in having such knowledge, mostly neglected to build on it substantively or use it for anything other than reverence of what was already known. It was still a worthy accomplishment, of course - reverence of learning, however passively it's expressed, is never something to sneeze at.
Despite an early flowering of philosophical exploration (e.g., the pioneering geometer Euclid was a contemporary of Ptolemy I), the subjects of inquiry become increasingly inbred and divorced from the broad concerns of mankind. Where Athenian philosophers peered into mathematics, astronomy, politics, and numerous other fields without fear (though in the case of Socrates, fear might have been appropriate), their Alexandrian heirs became tainted with the mysticism and theological contagion of the adopted homeland. They became very fascinated by the nature of the gods (when Christianity arrived, God), and what principles of being or action animated them.
Pseudo-intellectual cults abounded, and an academic culture that had been contemptuous (but wisely silent) on religious matters became actively polluted with enthusiasm - the sort of thinking that would, today, appear in a "History"3 Channel program about UFOs or the theory of Atlantis. In other words, not a rational inquiry so much as an indulgence in deliberately uncritical speculation for the sake of entertainment. Such gibberish occurs in Cerebral epochs as well, but it occurs in a very different way (people want to know its potential applications), and is usually just a sideshow or prelude to serious advances. In an Intuitive epoch, these things come to dominate the intellectual discussion.
Now, there is another side to the coin, and one that has proven tremendously helpful to humanity: Aside from being preoccupied with abstract mystical questions, Intuiting minds are strongly attracted to ideals of spiritual unity among diverse peoples, syncretism, equivalence of beliefs across cultures, and universality of the human being. Enlightened people of a Cerebral age may have similar thoughts, but they impose a rational, political framework on them while those of an Intuitive era pursue spiritual inquiries independent of practical policy.
In the case of Alexandria, they sought out metaphysical parallels that identified any given god as the equivalent of another in a different land. True to form, most of the connections later identified by students of the gods were already established by the wanderings, economic trade, and social intermixing (including warfare) of ordinary people - another process that occurs in high volume in an Intuiting age, and which I describe in the second part of this diary. But the minds of the age articulated the viewpoint that the diversity of gods were merely local attributes of the same divine agents, and further - both ominous and auspicious - that these agents were themselves just manifestations of a single overriding order.
From this and other examples that follow, we see that one of the most profound motivations of these periods is the desire to achieve spiritual unity - something approached at the high moral end through an emphasis on education of the elite and equivalency of gods among peoples; and at the low moral end by suppression of religious dissent, forcible adoption of a given belief, and demonization (often literally) of those who resist or remain outside its social influence.
There is a temptation to attribute the latter, darker impulses to ideology in the same sense as the behavior of, for instance, Bolsheviks or Nazis, but there are fundamental differences between the ideological fanaticisms of a Cerebral epoch and Intuiting-era religious dominionism. In fact, they are almost opposite processes despite having similar results: An ideology attempts to make sense of the world by imposing verbal distinctions that may not even be relevant, and may resort to eliminationism in order to preserve those distinctions.
Religious dominionism, however, reacts violently to the existence of the distinction itself because it provides material for cerebral evaluation, thereby "polluting" the smooth, seamless unity they seek. This is why an ideological radical can never be satisfied - they will pursue distinctions to an infinite degree - while a religious radical can very easily be satisfied (although still at enormous human cost). It is true that both models of radicalism occur in both epochs - you can always find individual exceptions to any general observation about history - but the large-scale social process occurring in each is very different.
For most of its history, until the rise of Christianity, Alexandria was overwhelmingly an example of higher-minded impulses on religious topics. If we ignore the irrelevance of the subject to real knowledge or practical improvement, this particular OFC was quite lively, active, and intellectually rich - the problem was simply that what they were talking about was nonsense. But that openness and ferment didn't long survive contact with newly-empowered Christians intent on annihilating not only Greco-Roman paganism, but the philosophies now associated with it by default. Despite occasional flare-ups (such as the execution of Socrates) philosophy and religion had achieved a workable coexistence for centuries, so now faced with increasingly violent attempts to suppress both by an upstart religion, they became confused in both the minds of the Christians and the minds of their own respective adherents.
However, plenty of philosophic minds saw the writing on the wall and converted, becoming some of the nobler saints and early ecumenists of the Church. And these conversions were not all deliberate acts of survival - remember, to the Intuitive mentality, the social dominance of an idea is tantamount to confirmation of its legitimacy. This is in some ways an unconscious survival mechanism - the need to believe what society will not allow you to disbelieve, rather than carrying the burden of secret dissent.
The impulse is far more intense in an Intuitive epoch than in a Cerebral one - the individual feels enormous psychic pressure to blend in with their perception of the Whole rather than remaining distinct - which is why theocracies and monarchies have historically been able to maintain obedience through measures relatively mild compared to a secular totalitarian state. It also tends to make people very timid or even servile in addressing themselves to politics, even if they are ostensibly free to be assertive. Over time, this leads to a high degree of etiquette, polished manners, and intricate social forms in order to avoid giving offense, further diverting the economy and intellectual mindshare of a society into navigating through irrelevant details.
At its most extreme, this conformity-driven etiquette impulse leads to the resources of an entire civilization being directed toward the ritual pomp of the court. The Byzantine Empire and the court of Imperial China both infamously attained these depths of subjugation, to a point where the tribute of entire nations would be frittered away in an afternoon's circus for the entertainment of one man. The people of an Intuitive era are slavishly polite to social superiors, and compensate by being contemptuous if not abusive of inferiors - equals are so rare a thing to come upon in these societies that they are regarded with suspicion, since everyone is continuously seeking advantage.
As an example of the suffocating ritual one may find in a Once and Future City, being in the presence of a Byzantine Emperor required three repetitions of prostration - not merely lying on the floor, but having to make a theatrical show of collapsing in a swoon of awe at his presence. These were not the rigid displays of submissive station imposed on subjects of Cerebral monarchies, but a voluptuous and degradingly melodramatic scene unto itself. Among members of the Byzantine state expected to know better, if the performance was not infused with utmost emotion, it could be interpreted as a direct insult to the Emperor - a potentially capital offense, although measures short of death would be equally within the ruler's prerogative. Blinding, castration, exile, demotion, fine, or merely having to make an unusually elaborate (probably comical, from our perspective) display of repentance and obsequiousness could result.
Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrgennetos ("purple-born" / "royal-born") compiled a multi-thousand-page tome of 10th-century Byzantine courtly rituals in Περί τῆς Βασιλείου Τάξεως ("On the Imperial Order") - better known by its Latin title De Ceremoniis aulae byzantinae. Excerpts from the coronation ceremony, amounting to a tiny fraction of the observances for that one occasion (Skip to the end of the quote if you get bored, it's simply for illustration of the heinous obsequiousness of Byzantine life):
Then they process down as far as the great Konsistorion, and within the Konsistorion are standing the consuls and the rest of the senators, and the sovereigns stand in the kiborion, and all the senators together with the patricians prostrate themselves. As they rise, the sovereigns give a sign to the praipositos, and the silentarios intones “At your command,” and they [the senators and patricians] acclaim “For many and good years.”
...
And they bow low to the ground before the sceptres and other insignia together with the banners, placed to the right and left on one side and the other, all of the senate and the demes standing on the right-hand side of the ambo to the east. And the chanters intone “Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth,” which the people repeat thrice. The chanters: “Good will to Christian folk”, which the people repeat thrice. The chanters: “May God have mercy on his people.” The people repeat this three times. The chanters: “Today is the great day of the Lord.” The people repeat this three times. The chanters: “This is the day of the life of the Romans4.” The people repeat this three times.
The chanters: “This [day] is the grace and glory of the world.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “On which [day] the crown of the empire.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Is placed worthily on your head.” The people repeat this three times. The chanters: “Glory to God, the Lord of all.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Glory to God for the crowning of your head.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Glory to God for appointing you emperor.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Glory to God for honouring you thusly.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Glory to God for such benevolence.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “But you have been crowned, [so-an-so: insert name] emperor, by his own hand.” The people repeat this.
The chanters: “Wo let him guard you for many years in the purple.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Together with the empresses and the purple-born children.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “For the glory and elevation of the Romans.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Hearken, O God, to your people.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Many, many, many.” The people: “Many years upon many.” The chanters: “Many years for you, [so-and-so] emperor and [so-and-so] emperors of the Romans.” The people: “Many years to you.” The chanters: “Many years to you, attendants of the Lord.” The people: “Many years to you.” The chanters: “Many years to [so-an-so] and [so-and-so] empresses of the Romans.” The people: “Many years to you.”
The chanters: “Many years to you, the good fortune of the sceptres.” The people: “Many years to you.” The chanters: “Many years to you [so-and-so] emperor of the Romans.” The people: “Many years to you.” The chanters: “Many years to you, God-crowned [so-and-so].” The people: “Many years to you.” The chanters: “Many years to you, masters, together with the empresses and purple-born children.” The people: “Many years to you.” The chanters: “May the Creator and Master of all.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “who crowned you with his own hand.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “Make full your years together with the empresses and the purple-born children.” The people repeat this. The chanters: “For the perfect guardianship of the Roman people."
...
Unfortunately, the advantages usually being sought by the subjects/citizens of an OFC are not the kind that come from or produce healthy competition - people do not compete to paint the best painting, produce the highest-yield of crops, or succeed in other meritocratic ways. Rather, they seek advantage of position - to be the favored painter of a higher official than their peers; to have the royal monopoly on some staple; to marry into a richer or otherwise more advantageous family than their own, etc. All relationships are reduced to ones of power, and all of politics is reduced to moment-by-moment advantage seeking by all against all - no more complex idea than that enters into it.
Little if any mundane restraint is exercised upon the secular elite by the ecclesiastical authority, because the latter depend on the former for enforcement of their prerogatives while offering in return something difficult to withhold: Divine imprimatur for power that already exists. The result is that even in an oppressively religious society, the elite are under virtually no moral restraint - they simply cannot be held accountable under most circumstances without compromising the secular defenses of religious authority. If a monarch finds a priest troublesome, he can most easily just get a new priest to give the required blessing - a fact most profoundly demonstrated by the multitude of anti-popes unilaterally given papal status by interests dissatisfied with the actual Pope.
Contemporary with Alexandria's relevance, the Cerebral-era Romans had built an empire throughout the Mediterranean based on their "progressive" views of military logistics, civil engineering, law, and government - one that eventually encompassed Egypt itself. However, even as the Romans degenerated, and their city became known as "The Eternal City" throughout the Mediterranean due to nostalgia and superstitious awe, in itself it remained fundamentally unstable and incapable of achieving the crystalline complexities of a Once and Future City as defined here.
Rome was geographically indefensible, although the regard in which it was held proved a surprisingly reliable deterrent. It could not feed itself - at the height of its population and imperial grandeur, it depended completely on the surplus of Egypt, the "breadbasket of the Mediterranean." And its people never quite got used to the idea of being slaves to the Emperor: Over and over, for a thousand years, in the darkest of times, some opportunistic general or other coalition of interests would call up the spirit of Republic in staging a revolt, and then either be slaughtered, betray their promises upon succeeding, or find Republic unworkable in an environment of corrupt and selfish countrymen.
For all of these reasons, and the various drawbacks of other Italian cities used as temporary headquarters from time to time, the Imperial capital was moved to Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul) in the 4th century and renamed "Nova Roma" - a name which failed to stick, leading then to being called Constantinople (City of Constantine). It was chosen specifically for all of the ways in which it could and would become a Once and Future City: Impregnable geography, maritime defensibility and access, control of access to the Black Sea, proximity to agriculturally rich territories, and central location between the Eastern and Western provinces. A fragment of the vast, virtually impenetrable walls that guarded the city:
Constantinople would crystallize over centuries into a highly intricate, faceted, wealthy, and beautiful city whose people were abject slaves interested only in money, obtaining meaningless and increasingly obscure honors from their master, and political conflicts with no rational basis or objective. As the light dimmed, the heat increased, and the city was occasionally disturbed - a few times, burned to the ground - by the street-fighting of two groups of chariot fans, the Blues and the Greens, who were about as different in political outlook as modern street gangs. The degenerate tyrant-Emperors who ruled could stop their people from doing anything productive, but could not root out pervasive corruption and pointless disorder.
With each cycle of disruption, the chaotic energies of the people dissipated and their society crystallized further into an ever-darker, but ever-more-ornamented museum state. The Greek language that dominated the region, with its centuries of Alexandrian intellectual lily-gilding, overtook Latin as the language of the city and court, and the former's implicit obsessions with mystical subjects were carried forward and accelerated to new depths. People lost interest in (and then even knowledge of) pragmatic Italian attitudes, and their conniving ceased to be a means to an end. The conspiracies became so thick, intricate, and pervasive that it was impossible to actually do anything with the advantages thus gained, and a state of utter, eternal futility and bottomless, gradual societal decline proceeded for 1,123 years.
Edward Gibbon observes the attitude of the Greeks toward their Roman masters - a perspective that would color and determine the fate of the Byzantine world:
The situation of the Greeks was very different from that of the barbarians. The former had been long since civilized and corrupted. They had too much taste to relinquish their language, and too much vanity to adopt any foreign institutions. Still preserving the prejudices, after they had lost the virtues, of their ancestors, they affected to despise the unpolished manners of the Roman conquerors, whilst they were compelled to respect their superior wisdom and power.
--The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Completed 1789), Chapter 2
The result was that every aspect of society in Constantinople became impenetrably elaborate, obscure, and dominated by its own secretive caste of professional thieves. Laws were seemingly infinite in diversity, scope, abstruseness, and contradiction, and gave legal practitioners an endless theatrical set-piece through which to lead clients and bilk them dry. The wealthy did what they wanted and hired lawyers to come up with legal excuses after the fact, and every word and petty oral command of the Emperor added to the body of "law" that could be cited in defense of corruption and depravity. Soldiers actively colluded with enemies, extorted the state, and avoided risking themselves in defense of an ungrateful and unworthy society. And vast layers of powerful, opulent eunuchs separated the functional organs of society from the dictates of the Emperor - people who interpreted his commands as they saw fit, and blamed enemies they wished to see disposed of if the Emperor found out his commands were being subverted.
Gibbon further muses on the martial character of the Byzantines:
In the various states of society, armies are recruited from very different motives. Barbarians are urged by the love of war; the citizens of a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty; the subjects, or at least the nobles, of a monarchy, are animated by a sentiment of honor; but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be allured into the service by the hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread of punishment.
--ibid, Chapter 17
These idle disputants overlooked the invariable laws of nature, which have connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valour.
--ibid, Chapter 30
What we see, looking at both the OFC model and the movements of barbarian, warrior peoples, is that a separation of collectively masculine and feminine qualities has occurred: The City becomes highly feminine, inward-focused, and oriented toward maintenance and elaboration of internal relationships to a highly complex degree, as opposed to the outward-looking, martial spirit of a growing power. Meanwhile, the tribal world beyond its immediate influence becomes a meat-grinder exhibiting radically masculine qualities, and leaving behind whatever holistic/matriarchal cultural elements they may have had in earlier and more stable times. The individual act of bravery, rather than what it specifically brings, is celebrated among these latter peoples. But the Byzantine armies were basically selfish, cowardly rich people doing the bare minimum to avoid losing station; mercenaries fighting for money; or slaves fighting because they have to; while the barbarian warriors fought to win honor and reputation. Nowhere in any of this opaque, bejeweled mélange is patriotism.
But an epoch can be known as much for how it treats its exceptions as for what is commonplace, and on rare occasions an individual would appear who showed merit far above his peers and his time. Belisarius (AD 500-565) was a general whose energy, strategic acumen, and undeserved loyalty to his Emperor restored much of the lost Western territory of the Empire in Italy and Africa. When besieging the Ostrogoth capital of Ravenna, the Goths offered to make him the Western Roman Emperor, and he pretended to accept only to gain entry to the city and capture it. For this remarkable act of loyalty and discipline, Belisarius was recalled to Constantinople and publicly humiliated to gratify the wounded vanity, jealousy, and paranoia of Emperor Justinian.
From that point onward, the general would be sent out on campaigns with deliberately insufficient supply or numbers of troops - not enough to be slaughtered and endanger the empire, but enough that he would stop succeeding so brilliantly. It was not simply to avoid the danger of a wildly popular general - Belisarius had proven his loyalty absolute, and would not have been allowed to live if there had been any lingering doubt - but simply to assuage the jealousy of a ruler who could do nothing to deserve the praise he extorted on pain of death. In later years, merits such as his would not even be tolerated that far, but meet with quick suppression: An intolerable threat to the vanity of power, the stability of public servitude, and the obsequious humility demanded by religion.
All the ancient works of philosophy that would later enlighten the Islamic revolutions in the East and spark the Renaissance in Italy were present in Constantinople, but it was never even seen fit to suppress them: There was no need. If anyone had an awareness of them, it was the idle curiosity of aristocrats for exotic baubles of history - they were seemingly impervious to the substance of the ideas. Such "profane" philosophy was seen as the tragic folly of a pagan people yet to be "enlightened" by the delusional and increasingly obscure preoccupations of Christian theology. The meaning of Trinity was deemed far more relevant than the process of governance or the facts of nature. The various ranks and classes of people vied with one another for the prize of absolute uselessness and solipsism.
But wisdom, knowledge, inquiry, and enlightenment were preserved, even though the society that had grown around them was no longer in contact with them. All the petty machinations, horrors, and mindless greed of their lives was simply a time capsule transmitting the Athenian glory and Roman grandeur to future generations of younger, more energetic cultures.
Still, the time was not entirely a waste: The intense desire for spiritual unity and universalism had given people with empathetic personalities a strong social platform for the first time in history outside of India, and through the efforts of churches, monasteries, and convents funded with donations from the secular powers, European civilization achieved its first comprehensive social services programs. For the first time, being an orphan or an abandoned child was not necessarily a death sentence - people were taught, however crassly ("You'll go to hell! Boogedy boogedy!") and imperfectly, to see themselves as having moral obligations to strangers and defenseless people not of their blood.
Monks wrote histories and commentaries, and copied ancient works for preservation into deep time. Some commoners who would otherwise have been illiterate their whole lives were taught to read and write Latin. People were told to share, the wealthy to be charitable and humble, and the violent to be merciful. The fact that this rarely stopped anyone from being greedy, domineering, and murderous when it suited them doesn't change how unusual it was that these qualities were being condemned, at least in the abstract. Slowly - so slowly - it did begin to have some effect, although not in the benighted remains of Byzantium. Night had fallen in the East, even as a new day was dawning in the West.
In case you're curious for a sense of what Constantinople looked like, imagine the following image - a photo of the Hagia Sophia that I've altered to remove the minarets (they were added later by the Ottomans) - and mentally remove the garden in front and add high stone walls around the coasts on the order of the wall fragment shown above:
The first rays of sunlight in this "new day," however fleeting, ironically occurred among the Muslims that had overrun North Africa, invaded Spain, and repeatedly put Constantinople under siege. Much of the transmitted Greek and Roman learning absorbed into the Islamic world through the conquest of Alexandria and other ancient capitals found eager, energized students and enthusiastic leaders willing to reflect philosophy in their policies. For over a century, Baghdad of all places was the dominant center of learning and intellectual ferment in the world, giving new energy and attention to far older works.
Art and science both flourished, and newly Islamicized societies made fleeting missions of exploration to Northern Europe, Southern Africa, and India, a few of which remain known to history. Armies of the Caliphate used long lines of hilltop Sun-mirrors to communicate at lightspeed across vast distances - a highly innovative technology that would help explain both their rapid progress across North Africa and Spain, as well as their ultimate failure to expand into Northern Europe. However, the Islamic world was soon reabsorbed into the ancient conservative cultures of the societies it had conquered, returned to a state of blind Intuitive politics, and ceased to make additional progress.
Nonetheless, their brief period of flourishing kept alive the literature and learning of the Romans and Greeks, and eventually passed them on to the Italian maritime republics who would give birth to the Renaissance. Meanwhile, in Northern Europe, the brief artistic and governmental blossom known as the Carolingian Empire gave a tantalizing premonition of the High Middle Ages many centuries later. Charlemagne, an illiterate but otherwise sophisticated Germanic king, created the initial basis for civil organization and political unification in what is now France, Germany, and Northern Italy. It is worthy of note that he spoke multiple languages, including Arabic, which he learned as a child having visited Caliphate Spain.
In the court at Aachen, the intellectual influences of Rome and Greece mixed with the still-potent social energies of a Germanic warrior society, Christian theology, and the artistic ferment of the Muslim world. As noted in Part 1, it was the official position of the kingdom that witchcraft did not exist, and that anyone who executed people on the basis of such accusations was guilty of murder. How effective a feudal government could have been in implementing such a policy is unknown, but it is noteworthy. But perhaps images can sometimes be more informative: This church, the Palatine Chapel of Aachen, was commissioned by Charlemagne for his palace circa 792 (the chandelier in the first image was a later addition):
Apart from being exquisitely beautiful, it shows a level of balance uncommon for the age - and a level of stylistic fusion quite common, but at an unprecedented degree of quality. When people begin building things like this, it is clear something good is happening in their minds, and that invariably both reflects and reinforces changes taking place in the wider society. It is still very much a product of an Intuitive-era culture - the thinking displayed in the Aachen chapel reflects a new synthesis, but is not a new direction - and shows us the beginning sparks of what human triumphs are possible even in the darkest days.
Still, Charlemagne could not escape the blind forces of the milieu in which he operated, and could not prevent the dissolution of his achievements: Germanic culture required the equal division of property among sons at death, so the Carolingian Empire was divided into separate kingdoms - a division that would give birth to Germany (until the 19th century, just a vague description of multiple petty kingdoms) and France. Northern Europe went back to sleep and returned to its Warrior Dream, although increasingly complicated, and its fury limited (or at least redirected), by the influences of the Church.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, we begin seeing the emergence of a relatively stable European society, with a high-level identity revolving around "Christendom" rather than blood relations or political states. They were still mind-numbingly parochial by the standards of a rational nation-state, and also by the standards of the free-flowing social milieu in the late Roman world, but a more universal consciousness had arisen and was flourishing. Christian pilgrims - which, in truth, often amounted to little more than tourists out to see the sights - were able to circulate in relative safety between England, France, Spain, and Italy, and at least felt safe enough (though often deludedly) to travel further. The reason they could do so was that people helped them - locals gave them food and shelter, sometimes for free, gave them directions, warned them about dangers, told them stories, etc.
If this sounds familiar, it's because this kind of experience was the narrative framework of several well-known works of late medieval literature, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Although the stories told therein were often inspired or directly stolen from other works, they occur within the context of pilgrims stopping at an inn and entertaining, educating, or ridiculing each other through storytelling. The setting, at least, had been a fixture of Christendom for generations by the time of Chaucer.
With the coming of the "High Middle Ages", we see a blossoming of art, architecture, literature, religious tourism, and music. Troubadours sang of love, chivalric duty, and wryly humorous stories rather than the songs of iron and merciless conquest sung by their barbarian ancestors. The now unchallenged conception of marriage as a reflection of love began in this period, although it took many centuries to displace the prevailing view of marriage as a material bargain and political alliance.
Broad coalitions were formed (e.g., Crusades) for the purposes of forcibly expanding Christendom into new territories and recapturing old ones, while the Church became ever more adept at missionary persuasion of remaining pagan peoples. The Crusades, while abominable and hypocritical, reflected a newly unified consciousness that would not have been possible earlier - prior religious conquests had depended on the individual initiative of Christian princes, and had not occurred under any broad, programmatic umbrella. Fortunately, being an Intuitive age, the society was unsuited to large-scale organization, so the Crusades were unified only in very broad terms - they were comprised of significant numbers acting in parallel rather than as part of a logistically and strategically unified army.
Here we see one of the few upsides to the compromises of Intuitive eras: Although institutions erode and day-to-day security is a problem, it is much more difficult for tyrants or fanatics to organize campaigns of mass-slaughter. They can still whip people up to it, but the results are undoubtedly less horrific than if such policies were being carried out by a rational military machine. When the Gothic cathedral appeared, I can only imagine people must have felt this compromise utterly justified, and believed that God had come home to them - the joy, wonder, and exaltation are unmistakable:
But success is often the mother of failure: Christendom had gone as far as it could on the Intuitive paradigm, and there was nothing left for it to do but fall apart. Had the Black Death not swooped in, it could just as easily have been a social revolution that wracked the continent - and that is probably exactly what would have happened, given the increasing population and economic complexities.
Here we come to the end of the previous Intuiting epoch, but this is only part of the story of that era - outside the marble and stone walls, beyond the cultivated fields, out in the unvisited wastes, whole unbathed nations wandered in darkness and fought for unnumbered generations. Pressed into the narrowing geography of European peninsulas in successive waves, their endless Warrior Dream (/Nightmare) powered the Forge of Civilizations.
1: This is, appropriately, also true of Christianity.
2: I used the term King for the rulers of Egypt prior to this point, but now use pharoah, because the latter term came into historical use during the New Kingdom in the 18th Dynasty.
3: The History Channel is to history what Cheez Whiz is to food. It wasn't always so - they used to make genuine educational programming. Now they would be more aptly named The WW2 Porn & Paranormal Fantasy Channel.
4: Byzantines officially called themselves Romans throughout their history, although unofficially they just thought of themselves as Greeks or citizens of Constantinople. This fact is the reason for the modern country called "Romania," and may have something to do with the Romany (Gypsy) ethnic group.
*
2. The Forge of Civilizations
It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.
--Attributed to Julius Caesar by Plutarch, Lives
Hunter-gatherer tribes are not typically warlike - in fact, far from it: Once they achieve equilibrium with their environment, violence, although it still occurs, merely regulates the migrations of neighbors and the ambitions of young men within the tribe. Different peoples would give each other a wide berth, but come together peacefully now and then to trade, intermarry, and settle disputes. Women wield a comparatively strong amount of social influence, and may be highly respected - possibly even worshipped through cults of a Mother Goddess1.
But the development of civilization causes evolutionary changes in tribes that come in contact with it. First, those disposed to be peaceful will be easily conquered or exploited by the armies of the city, and are eventually assimilated - possibly as slaves whose children will be born knowing only the culture of their captors. As early civilizations tended to have an increased demand for slaves, other, more aggressive tribes would find it profitable to sell each other's people to traders. Naturally, people do not wish to be slaves, so both the martial actions of the city itself and the internecine conflict of tribes induced to prey on each other create a Darwinian meat-grinder environment that selects for warrior attributes in the survivors.
As the city grows in might, and its military power extends its range, only the fiercest and most determined tribes are able to continue benefiting from prime territory - others are forced further out, where food is less bountiful. Those on the furthest margins experience an even more extreme Darwinian struggle, and either weaken until conquered or draw strength and cunning from desperation. In the latter case, they may surge back toward the city, driving more comfortable tribes in flight before them and spreading the terror of their name. The city might find itself suddenly besieged out of nowhere by a tribe that had fled from another tribe, which in turn had fled from another tribe, that was fleeing this newly resurgent one.
The army could triumph against the immediate enemy, only to be confronted by yet another hard on their heels, and this one more desperate and more determined. And again. And again. And again. The city itself could be utterly destroyed, its treasures and heirlooms pillaged, its structures smashed and burned, and its people enslaved for sale to another city, or else scattered to the four winds in flight. Or the original tribe that started the cascade might have been satisfied by the plunder of its own immediate enemies and retire. It might also be bribed to go away (temporarily), or even invited into an alliance and partnership with the city - an arrangement to be the enforcer of the city's interests among the nearby tribes. If it is defeated in battle, it will retreat and find easier prey, but the entire process has had its effect.
Namely, the successive transformation of relatively peaceful, stable, and socially balanced hunter-gatherer tribes into Warrior cultures. Over time, it breeds a society that does not see warfare as an occasional necessity to allow free living, but as the purpose of free living - as its purest and most worthwhile expression. It is the evolution of the predator in human terms: People honed by their environment into soulless killing machines whose social position depends on racking up a body count. They become a blind conduit of the violence they encounter, and that too is utterly Intuitive - the powerlessness to stop, and lack of desire to try stopping, cycles of destruction that ultimately obliterate them if they fail to evolve past it.
[...]that they had promised 50,000 armed men; and that the Nervii, who are reckoned the most warlike among them, and are situated at a very great distance, [had promised] as many;
[...]
Upon their territories bordered the Nervii, concerning whose character and customs when Caesar inquired he received the following information: That there was no access for merchants to them; that they suffered no wine and other things tending to luxury to be imported; because, they thought that by their use the mind is enervated and the courage impaired: That they were a savage people and of great bravery: That they upbraided and condemned the rest of the Belgae who had surrendered themselves to the Roman people and thrown aside their national courage: That they openly declared they would neither send embassadors, nor accept any condition of peace.
[...]
This battle being ended, and the nation and name of the Nervii being almost reduced to annihilation, their old men, whom together with the boys and women we have stated to have been collected together in the fenny places and marshes [...] sent embassadors to Caesar by the consent of all who remained, and surrendered themselves to him...
--Julius Caesar, De Bello Gallico
We can see, and their civilized contemporaries could see, that these tribes would do far better to unite and pursue common cause, but such ideas would rarely occur to an illiterate, Intuiting people. Even if they did occur - as sometimes a truly exceptional leader will appear out of nowhere - the benefits would only be known in his lifetime before passing back into the Warrior Dream. So the cycles continue across unknown time, with tribes being absorbed into the growth of this or that civilization, others settling down into their own civilized states, and still others wandering blindly in search of better fortune, following rivers, coastlines, and mountain ranges until they're directed by the geography to success or to extinction.
Those who become civilized would usually do so through a sequence of changes - instead of opportunistic predation, they become a horde and extort money from cities: I.e., going from predator to parasite. From there, they may gradually come to common interest with those cities because they depend on tribute from them, and may be willing to defend them against other enemies: From parasite to symbiote. And after that, because their sources of revenue are so tied up in specific locations, they themselves will ultimately take land and settle down, merging with the general milieu to oversee their possessions. Such is how a tribe of Norse came to be known as the Normans, created the best-managed kingdom in Europe on the Northern coast of France (Normandy), and from there took over England.
However, a far more interesting Darwinian process occurs with those who strike out in new directions, following geography beyond the memories of their people: These tribes function as vehicles for spreading genes, remixing the human gene pool, spreading advantages to other bloodlines, promoting hybrid vigor both in themselves and in others, as well as spreading contact with their culture and "motivating" (i.e., terrorizing) others out of complacency. Also - and this is where it gets interesting - they may have the skills and hardiness to make a go of environments previously impenetrable to humanity, or just migrate by accident into totally empty but fertile territories. This is how Asiatic tribes came to survive in the Siberian Arctic, and from there to enter the uninhabited, prodigious lands of North and South America. In other words - and this is important to Part 3 of this series - how they managed to cross a bitter waste to find a new garden.
Like everything achieved in an Intuitive era, exploration and discovery happen blindly and without explicit intention. The tribes that crossed the Bering Strait into North America had no notion of there being something worth finding on the other side of it - they simply followed prey herds as usual, had children as usual, fissioned into new tribes as usual, and some of those branches gradually migrated Southward into the two continents and beyond the memory of their brethren. It was not discovery as a later age would understand it - the peoples had no knowledge of their having entered a separate continent; had no incling that they were the vanguard of humanity in heretofore unsettled land; and spread into it too slowly to develop any kind of general sense about its geography. They were discovering it in the Intuitive sense - knowing it personally and specifically by living in it.
Ironically, it would be another people of the ice who would blindly stumble into North America next, only thousands of years later and by a much more circuitous route. The Norse had settled the Scandinavian peninsula, occasionally plundered Britain and Ireland, and established settlements in Iceland when put under pressure by civil war and dwindling resources in Norway. From there, new settlements were established on the Southern coast of Greenland, and then later - entirely by accident - Icelandic mariners ended up in North America, and fleeting attempts at settlement there were made. But they too had no knowledge it was an entirely separate continent; and no knowledge that not a single person in any civilization theirs had ever before come in contact with knew anything about it.
This time, it wasn't a discovery, blind or otherwise - there were already people living there, and they understandably resented the murderous instincts of Vikings. This people were probably not living in the Warrior Dream - they were more likely in the earlier, more peaceful hunter-gatherer mode, and had weapons largely for hunting and defense rather than active conquest. This fact, and the likelihood that the native weapons were more primitive, could easily have deluded the Norse into thinking they were weak. But the Norse were melee fighters accustomed to storming off of ships directly into battle. The native people by contrast, whose weapons were largely those used to hunt, were distance-fighters with bows and arrows, and both their numerical and logistical advantages (being on home ground) allowed them to overwhelm the interlopers.
History might have been different had the Norse settlements in North America endured, but I think not by much - it was, after all, largely English and Scotsmen who ultimately settled the land anyway. But perhaps one continent was more than enough for the Vikings to plunder and smear with blood for the ensuing few centuries. Still, it illustrates for us one of the more useful evolutionary functions of the barbarian (all barbarians being Intuiting peoples by default) in expanding the diversity of human environments and genetics.
Even those who stay behind and engage ever more closely with cities play a role: Contact with them energizes civilizations that may have become decrepit, reintroduces them to individual will and strength, and repossesses the wealth of societies that have become too cowardly to defend it, too lazy to reproduce it, and too ignorant to replace it with something better. This might be done through direct conquest, tribute empires, mercenary expeditions, or even assimilation into the military of a city as auxiliaries. The Late Romans, their legions corrupt and accustomed to comfort, were increasingly forced to rely on barbarian Foederati - tribes armed, trained, and given money for the defense of Roman territory.
A more extreme example was the Varangian Guard - Russian mercenaries hired as the personal guard and elite shock troops of the Byzantine Emperor in the Middle Ages. They were so implacable in battle, and so honorable about keeping their word (an instance of the Warrior Ethic), that the Emperor trusted his safety more to foreigners than to any of his conniving countrymen. They ultimately blended into the general state of Byzantine society, but even their energy was not enough to pull it up from a thousand years of degeneracy.
Meanwhile, entirely new civilizations were being founded by the relatively peaceful but still highly enterprising descendents of violent barbarian invaders: The Magyars founded Hungary; the Rus settled into Russia, Kiev, and the Baltic; the Norse created the kingdoms of Sweden, Denmark, Normandy, and a multitude of other states, as well as revitalizing a number of existing ones (e.g., England, Sicily, Ireland). Of course, this "revitalization" basically just meant being more efficient oppressors of the current population than their native masters, but over time they merged and became one people. Although barbarians rape, pillage, and murder, there is no point judging them - they knew no other life, understood no higher principle, and perceived no greater purpose to their actions than pursuing grim and inexorable fate: Something Achilles would have understood as well as Beowulf.
But despite their suffering and brutality in turn, new life emerges. Out of their darkness, light. Out of their wandering, new homes are discovered and old ones refurbished for the future. And some of the societies they found come to be the innovators and empires of a new era, when the old are mere museums of their former selves or lost to memory entirely. Among the wanderings and violence of a blind and unremembering people, civilizations are forged and humanity renewed. This is not to say their condition or their impact on others is a good thing, but that good is inevitably extracted from it in the progress of human destiny.
1: This fact draws remarkable parallels, although possibly coincidental, to the obsession with the Virgin Mary seen in medieval Christianity. Mysticization of maternity may be a common feature of the Intuiting frame, due to the high degree of emotion surrounding it.
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Preview of Part 3:
IV. Children of The Sun -- Modern Transition to the Once and Future World
Seemingly out of nowhere, the Cerebral epoch born in medieval Venice began to evaporate simultaneously worldwide. Cultural and political boundaries dissolved in abstractions of consumer capitalism or unleashed wholly unexpected, anachronistic religious passions in the midst of otherwise rational societies. Racism took on the Intuiting character of xenophobia rather than the narcissistic Cerebral ideology of a people convinced of their own intrinsic genetic supremacy. Contrarily, the rejection of racism became a rejection of race period, choosing to view human genetics and culture as a continuum of traits - essentially what it is.
At the same time, capitalism - a heretofore rational set of qualified principles - became a vague and superstitious religion with a messianic impulse to cover the Earth in a single, unregulated market. People now deprived of identity or moral context by the dissolution of politics could only turn to consumerism, religion, or working to serve a newly unified sense of humanity.
Note: None of the above images are mine. Click for attribution.