I am off to investigate the largest island in the Mediterranean, Sicily. I anticipate sleeplessness, crippling injuries to back, knees, neck and psyche. That is, I’m flying coach for ten hours or more. I hope the horrors of the air travel will be offset by excellent food and an immersion in history, art, architecture and archaeology. If I survive, I will report my findings.
The Mediterranean was thought to be the center of the world, or at least the Western World, for millennia, and Sicily was the center of the Mediterranean. Midway East-West between the Levant and Iberia, and North-South between Europe and Africa.
This was not a comfortable position. Waves of immigration and invasion swept over a strategically placed island rich in ore, crops, timber, wine, olives and citrus. Phoenicians, later the Carthaginians, arrived early followed by Greeks, Romans, Muslims out of the East, Normans out of the North, and all left their traces. Our trip will pay attention to that history and those remains.
Any thoughtful citizen of our present wobbly empire must pause before the lessons of Mediterranean history. The British, at the height of their imperial power, regarded themselves as the inheritors of Rome, read their Virgil and Gibbon, and got shivers when their poets warned against hubris. They were not deaf to the cautionary tale whispered by the old stones left behind by their predecessors.
In Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818), a vast colossal statue lies fallen in the desert. On the pedestal of this “King of Kings” is carved the ironic boast “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” In Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), the poet says “the Sea of Faith” was once at high tide, but now he hears only “Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” and faces a world that has
“…neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
In “Recessional” (1897) by Kipling, the so-called poet of empire, he cautions against pride and warns of the need for humility, because
“The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart
….Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”
In two poems written as a rich, but conflicted West riven by ideological strife hurtled toward a second world war, we encounter a similar awareness that empires rise and fall. In “Lapis Lazuli” (1938) by Yeats, he wrote:
“On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilizations put to the sword.
Then they and all their wisdom went to rack…”
And in “You, Andrew Marvell” (1926), the American poet Archibald MacLeish’s title points to the inspiration in these lines from Marvell: “at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.”
He pictures himself sunbathing “upon earth’s noon ward height” and “Feels the always coming on/The always rising of the night.” In his mind’s eye he sees dusk half a world to the east, and hour by hour sweep westward. But the choice of places named points to the historical night that has fallen for one culture after another — Ecbatan, Kermanshah, Baghdad, Palmyra, Lebanon, Crete, Sicily, sails on the sea, then
“Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land,
Nor now the long light on the sea:
And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on…”
Peter Zeihan, in “The Accidental Superpower” argues that “winter is coming,” to quote “Game of Thrones,” and a great shake-out economically and ideologically is inevitable, but he still puts his money on us. Not necessarily because we are pure in spirit or clever, but because we have built-in advantages.
Shakespeare celebrated his sceptered isle in part for its natural advantages. “This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war…This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands…”
Despite the panic of anti-immigrant zealots, we too are set apart and hard to invade. We are also rich in arable land, fresh water, and mineral resources compared to our competitors and rivals. So climate, geography and demography favor us if, as Zeihan forecasts, the world gets more Hobbesian as population rises, resources become scarce or dear, and climate change scrambles the geopolitical game-board.
But even the lucky societies who don’t get killed can commit unintentional suicide. Empires often aid and abet their own decline. Hubris, profligacy, laziness, internal strife make them vulnerable. After the Pax Brittanica, many competed to be next at bat. Instead of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or Soviet Russia, the Pax Americana arrived.
But now China rises, investing heavily abroad, launching neo-colonial drives in Africa and elsewhere to compensate for their arid, overpopulated home. Taking climate change as an opportunity to profit from, not a threat to the status quo to deny. Meanwhile, we begin to seem weak, confused, divided. When Americans go abroad, including our president, they might be wise to look long and hard upon the ruins, rather than only shopping and golfing. It can happen to us.
i am going to look again at the ruins of old civilizations now passed away. And I feel myself to be a ruin, left over from another day. This is the human condition. We are all, as as Benjamin Franklin knew, as transient as mayflies or the morning dew.
I would not be sad that I go soon, if only I thought my name, my thoughts, my language, my family, my town, my land, and the American way of life that I inherited from my ancestors and inhabited for four score and ten would survive. But each day I see more change for the worse, more decline, erosion, forgetfulness, carelessness, apathy, self-centeredness, unreason. I fear the shadow of the night is coming on.
Yet this is a not an uncommon American worry. Madison said that as the Constitution was being signed in Independence Hall, September 17, 1787, Doctor Franklin looked towards the chair in which Washington had presided. On the back of it was depicted a sun, and Franklin said that often he had looked “behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.”
Each generation, in the face of new challenges, has the duty to keep it that way,so that the ruins the tourists visit are not our own. And Yeats’s poem of civilizations destroyed is not a lament for those who cause the ruin, but a paean to those who create. “All things fall and are built again/And those that build them again are gay.”