The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Certainly, I have no idea what is going to happen, but as the ineffable Ross Perot likes to say, it won’t be pretty.

  I have now lived through more than two-thirds of the twentieth century, as well as through at least one-third of the life of the American Republic. I can’t say that I am any wiser now than I was when I first began to look about me at the way things are, or rather at the way that things are made to look to be, but I am beginning to detect an odd sort of progression in world affairs. And I have noticed lately that I am not alone.

  Recently, the literary critic Harold Bloom, in the somewhat quixotic course of establishing a Western literary canon, divided human history into phases that cyclically repeat. First, there is a theocratic age, next an aristocratic age, followed by a democratic age, which degenerates into chaos and out of which some new idea of divinity will emerge to unite us all in a brand-new theocratic age, and the cycle begins again. Bloom rather dreads the coming theocratic age but as he—and I—will never see it, we can settle comfortably into the current chaos where the meaning of meaning is an endlessly cozy subject, and Heisenberg’s principle is undisputed law of the land, at least from where each of us is situated.

  I shall not discuss Bloom’s literary canon, which, like literature itself, is rapidly responding if not to chaos to entropy. But I do have some thoughts on the cyclic nature of the way human society evolves as originally posited by Plato in the eighth book of the Republic and further developed by Giovanni Battista Vico in his Scienza Nuova.

  Professor Bloom skips Plato and goes straight to Vico, an early-eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar who became interested in the origins of Roman law. The deeper Vico got into the subject, the further back in time he was obliged to go, specifically to Greece. Then he got interested in how it was that the human race was able to create an image of itself for itself. At the beginning there appears to have been an animistic belief in the magic of places and in the personification of the elements as gods. To Vico, these legends, rooted in prehistory, were innate wisdom. Plainly, he was something of a Jungian before that cloudy Swiss fact. But then the age of the gods was challenged by the rise of individual men. Suddenly, kings and heroes are on the scene. They in turn give birth to oligarchies, to an aristocratic society where patricians battle for the first place in the state. In time, the always exciting game of who will be king of the castle creates a tyranny that will inspire the people at large to rebel against the tyrants and establish republics that, thanks to man’s nature, tend to imperial acquisitiveness and so, in due course, these empire-republics meet their natural terminus in, let us say, the jungles of Vietnam.

  What happens next? Vico calls the next stage Chaos, to be followed by a new Theocratic Age. This process is, of course, pure Hinduism, which was never to stop leaking into Greek thought from Pythagoras to the neo-Platonists and even now into the alert mind of my friend Allen Ginsberg and of numerous California surfers and ceramists. Birth, death, chaos, then rebirth, and so—on and on and on.

  But though Vico’s mind was brilliant and intuitive, the history that he had to deal with necessarily left out science—as we know it and he did not—and we must now ponder how chaos may yet organize itself with the use of computers and faxes and the means to control all the people all the time. Will the next god be a computer? In which case, a tyrant god for those of us who dwell in computer-challenged darkness.

  A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open for those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. In the case of the United States, the acquisition of new citizens from everywhere has always been thought to be a very good thing. But now with so many billions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy.

  So, what is going to happen? Well, Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 or 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species. So even those of us usually to be found on the liberal end of the political spectrum are quite aware that the tribes must stay put and be helped to improve wherever it is that they were placed by nature or by our dissolving empires, to which all sorts of odd chickens are presently coming home to roost.

  Now, as world climate changes and populations increase, the tribes are on the move, and the racial composition of Europe, say, has changed. As an American, I think that this is not such a bad thing, but there does come a moment when there are simply too many people on the move and not enough space or resources to accommodate them in the old established societies.

  As we start the third millennium of what we in our Western section of the globe are amused to call the Christian era, we should be aware, of course, that most of the world’s tribes are, happily for them, not Christian at all. Also, most of us who are classified as Christians and live in nations where this form of monotheism was once all-powerful now live in a secular world. So chaos does have its pleasures. But then as Christian presuppositions do not mean anything to others (recently Buddhists sternly reminded the pope of this in Sri Lanka), so, too, finally, Plato and his perennially interesting worldview don’t make much sense when applied to societies such as ours. I like his conceit of the political progression of societies, and a case can be made for it, as Vico did. But Plato, as political thinker, must be taken with Attic salt, which John Jay Chapman brilliantly supplies in an essay recently discovered in his archives; he died in 1933. Although he was America’s greatest essayist after Emerson he is almost as little known in his native land as elsewhere. This is a pity, but then these are pitiful times, are they not?

  Watch as Chapman plays around with the notion of chaos—and of order, too. First, he is not well pleased with what passes for democracy in the great republic. No Anglophile, he does have a nice word or two for the British, in an essay that begins: “All good writing is the result of an acquaintance with the best books.” Chapman often feels obliged to invent the wheel each time he addresses his readers. He goes on: “But the mere reading of books will not suffice. Behind the books must lie the habit of unpremeditated, headlong conversation. We find that the great writers have been great talkers in every age.” He cites Shakespeare, as reported by Ben Jonson, Lord Byron, and our own Mark Twain. He then generalizes about other tribes, something now forbidden in the free world. He writes:

  The English have never stopped talking since Chaucer’s time. And the other Europeans are ready-tongued, vocal, imaginative people, whose very folklore and early dialects have been preserved by the ceaseless stream of talk on castled terraces and on village greens since Gothic times.

  But our democracy terrifies the individual, and our industrialism seals his lips. The punishment is very effective. It is simply this: “If you say such things as that, I won’t play with you.” Thus the average American goes about in quite a different humor from the average European, who is protected and fortified by his caste and clique, by his group and traditions, by manners and customs which are old and change slowly. The uniformity of the popular ideals and ambitions in America is at the bottom of most of our troubles. Industrialism has all but killed the English language among us, because every man is afraid to make a joke—unless it be a stock joke. We are all as careful as diplomats not to show our claws. We wear white cotton gloves like waiters—for fear of leaving a thumb mark on the subject. Emerson’s advice about this problem is covered by his apothegm “If you are afraid to do any thing, do it!”

  Chapman on Plato:

  Plato somewhere compares philosophy to a raft on which a shipwrecked sailor may perhaps reach home. Never was a simile more apt. Every man has his raft, which is generally large enough only for one. It is made up of things snatched from his cabin—a life preserver or two of psalm, proverb or fable; some planks held together by the oddest rope-ends of experience; and
the whole shaky craft requires constant attention. How absurd, then, is it to think that any formal philosophy is possible—when the rag or old curtain that serves one man for a waistcoat is the next man’s prayer-mat! To try to make a raft for one’s neighbor, or try to get on to someone else’s raft, these seem to be the besetting sins of philosophy and religion.

  The raft itself is an illusion. We do not either make or possess our raft. We are not able to seize it or explain it, cannot summon it at will. It comes and goes like a phantom.

  As for Plato:

  He was primarily an entertainer, a great impresario and setter of scenes, and stager of romances great and small where fact and fiction, religion and fancy, custom and myth are blended by imaginative treatment into—no one knows exactly what the mixture should be called.

  The aim of his most elaborate work, the Republic, is identical with the aim of the Book of Job, of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and indeed of half the great poems, plays and novels of the world, namely to justify the moral instinct.

  But Chapman is a literary critic as well as a moralist. He wrote:

  As a work of art, the Republic is atrocious, but as a garretful of antiquity it is thrilling. It is so cracked and rambling that Plato himself hardly knows what is in it. While clearing out a bureau drawer one day, he finds a clever little harangue denouncing sumptuary laws as both useless and foolish . . . “There’s a glint of genius in that,” says he and throws the manuscript into a big Sarcophagus labeled Republic.

  Which is where, Chapman notes, it plainly does not belong, since Plato’s entire work is based on the necessity of sumptuary laws.

  We see then what sort of a creature this Plato was—with his poetic gift, his inextinguishable moral enthusiasm, his enormous curiosity, his miscellaneous information, his pride of intellect and, as his greatest merit, his perception that spiritual truth must be conveyed indirectly and by allusions. In spite of certain clumsy dogmatisms to be found here and there in him, Plato knows that the assault upon truth cannot be carried by a frontal attack. It is the skirmishing of Plato which makes his thought carry; and all the labours of his expounders to reduce his ideas to a plain statement have failed. If the expounders could reduce Plato’s meaning to a statement, Plato would be dead. He has had wit enough and vision enough to elude them all. His work is a province of romantic fiction, and his legitimate influence has been upon the romantic fiction and poetry of the world. Plato used Philosophy as a puppet on his stage and made her convey thoughts which she is powerless to tell upon her own platform. He saw that philosophy could live in the sea of moving fiction, but died on the dry land of formal statement. He was sustained in his art by the surrounding atmosphere of that Hellenic skepticism which adored elusiveness and hated affirmations. His age handed him his vehicle—to wit, imaginary conversation. Is there anything in the world that evaporates more quickly and naturally than conversation? But imaginary conversation! Certainly Plato has protected himself from cross-examination as well as ever man did. The cleverest pundits have been trying to edge him into the witness stand during sixty generations, but no one has ever cornered him. The street is his corner.

  Of Plato, as a voice from somewhere at the far edge of a democratic age, Chapman notes, with quiet pleasure, that:

  It has thus become impossible for anyone to read Plato’s dialogues or any other creation of the Greek brain with real sympathy; for those creations speak from a wonderful, cruel, remote, witty age, and represent the amusements of a wonderful, cruel, remote, witty people, who lived for amusement, and for this reason perished. Let us enjoy the playthings of this clever man but let us, so far as in us lies, forbear to cloy them with our explanations.

  Vico saw fit to systematize, if not to cloy, Plato in order to give us a useful overview of the evolution of human society, as glimpsed in the dark shadow of the cross of his day. It should be noted that Vico made far more of Plato’s ideal theory than Plato did. But then, alas, Vico, like us, is serious and schematic.

  Plato and Vico, Montesquieu and Jefferson, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—the urge to devise model states is a constant and if chaos does not absolutely disintegrate us, we might yet endure as a race—if it is not a form of racism to suggest that human beings differ in any significant way from the mineral and the vegetable, two realms that we constantly victimize and are rude to.

  Apropos of human political arrangements, I have been listening, lately, to a pair of voices from the century before ours; two voices often in harmony, more often in gentle dispute. I refer to Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. Put simply—too simply, I confess—George Sand was a nonromantic socialist while Flaubert was a romantic reactionary. Neither had much illusion about the perfectibility of man or too many notions as to the constitution of an ideal state. They wrote each other during the Franco-Prussian War, the collapse of the Second Empire, the rise of the Commune at Paris, and each wondered, “What next?”

  Flaubert is glum: “Whatever happens, it will be a long time before we move forward again. Perhaps there’s to be a recurrence of racial wars? Within a century we’ll see millions of men kill each other at one go. All the East against all Europe, the old world against the new? Why not?”

  Flaubert then teases George Sand:

  The general reverence for universal suffrage revolts me more than the infallibility of the Pope. Do you think that if France, instead of being governed, in effect, by the mob, were to be ruled by the “Mandarins,” we’d be where we are now? If only instead of wanting to enlighten the lower classes we had bothered to educate the upper classes!

  Sand strikes back:

  In my view, the vile experiment that Paris is undergoing in no way disproves the laws of eternal progress that govern both men and things, and if I have acquired any intellectual principles, good or bad, this business neither undermines nor alters them. A long time ago I accepted the necessity for patience in the same way as one accepts the weather, the long winter, old age, and failure in all its forms.

  Flaubert comes to the point: “I hate democracy (at least as it is understood in France), because it is based on ‘the morality of the Gospels,’ which is immorality itself, whatever anyone may say: that is, the exaltation of Mercy at the expense of Justice, the negation of Right—the very opposite of social order.”

  Sand remains serene: “I’ve never been able to separate the ideal of justice that you speak of from love: for if a natural society is to survive, its first law must be mutual service, as with the ants and the bees. In animals we call this collaboration of all to achieve the same end, instinct. The name doesn’t matter. But in man, instinct is love, and whoever omits love omits truth and justice.

  “Tell me whether the tulip tree suffered from the frost this winter, and whether the peonies are doing well.”

  That tulip tree may symbolize a benign way out of the current chaos. In the interest of shutting holes in the atmosphere, the human race may yet cooperate to survive, though I doubt it. For a new center to hold we must understand why it is that things fall apart the way they do. I have spent my life trying to understand what it was that so many others appear to need that I don’t—specifically, a sense of deity, preferably singular, anthropomorphic, and, to explain the general mess of life that he has made on earth, an inscrutable jealous off-the-wall sort of god. I do not doubt that something new in this line is on its way, but, meanwhile, there is something to be said for creative chaos. Certainly order, imposed from the top down, never holds for very long.

  Like everyone else, as the millennium is now ending, I keep thinking of how it began in Europe. Does a day pass that one does not give at least a fleeting thought to the Emperor Otto III and to Pope Sylvester II? I should highly doubt it. After all, they are an attractive couple; a boy emperor and his old teacher, the intellectual pope. Together, at the start of our millennium, they decided to bring back the Christian empire that two centuries earlier Charlemagne had tried to recreate or—more precisely—to cre
ate among the warring tribes of Western Europe. If Charlemagne was the Jean Monnet of the 800s, Otto III was the Jacques Delors of the 900s. As you will recall, Otto was only fourteen when he became king of Germany. From boyhood, he took very seriously the idea of a united Christendom, a Holy Roman Empire. Like so many overactive, overeducated boys of that period he was a natural general, winning battles left and right in a Germany that rather resembled the China of Confucius’s era—a time known as that of the warring duchies.

  By sixteen, King Otto was crowned emperor of the West. An intellectual snob, he despised what he called “Saxon rusticity” and he favored what he termed Greek or Byzantine “subtlety.” He even dreamed of sailing to Byzantium to bring together all Christendom under his rule, which was, in turn, under that of God. In all of this he was guided by his old tutor, a French scholar named Gerbert.

  As a sign of solidarity—not to mention morbidity—Otto even opened up the tomb of Charlemagne and paid his great predecessor a visit. The dead emperor was seated on a throne. According to an eyewitness, only a bit of his nose had fallen off, but his fingernails had grown through his gloves and so, reverently, Otto pared them and otherwise tidied him up. Can one imagine Delors—or even Helmut Kohl—doing as much for the corpse of Monnet?

  Now we approach the fateful year 999. Otto is nineteen. He is obsessed with Italy, with Rome, with empire. In that year he sees to it that Gerbert is elected pope, taking the name Sylvester. Now emperor and pope move south to the decaying small town of Rome, where Otto builds himself a palace on the Aventine—a bad luck hill, as Cicero could have testified.