The Birth of Civilisation

I will loosely divide coverage of the civilisation period into four subjects: The transition into Civilisation at its beginning, the Formation of Napoleonism as its consequence, the Period of Contending States as a transition period, and Caesarism at its finality. In this post we will look at the changing political currents as the Absolute State dissolves.

In the Early period, the Estates rule as Nobility and Priesthood. They are symbolically polar entities. The notion of Rights belongs exclusively to those who are within an estate, particularly the nobility who shape law for the non-estate.

In the Late period, cities have emerged as the foci of historical development. Here the non-estate is appealed to as political capital during the tensions between the Absolute State, embodied usually in some kind of monarch or tyrant, and the Estates, who now form rank as a class, for example the Oligarchies of Greek poleis or the princes of the Fronde Wars.

“Culture” dies, and “Civilisation” is born, when this non-estate acts as an independent force. The non-estate sees all that came before it as oppressive and restrictive. The populations of the cities do not fully appreciate the symbolism of the present traditions. This doesn’t just go for politics, but quickly extends to religion and the arts too, they all have a strict form and discipline premised on symbolism that is abhorred.

It's abhorred because the burghers seek to replace priesthood and nobility with idealistic rationalism and individual interest. The greatest virtue of civilisation is its reason, and in looking at the premise of a King, or a lordship, they see only despots oppressing others for their benefit. The birth of a Civilisation is the greatest act of projection human history can witness.

The consequence of this is that when a political form is subjected to the ensuing revolutions caused by this mindset, the nation loses its place in the world and sinks to the background of history.

“Follow the desperate attempts of the French Government — the handful of capable and farsighted men under the mediocre Louis XVI — to keep their country in “condition” when, after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe”

The non-estate is non-estate specifically because they have no unity of character or inner form of their own. They are the masses, the fourth estate. They can be united if they rationally agree on a common enemy, but when that enemy is defeated, they disassemble again. It’s even seen as a good thing in their minds. Sure, the Jacobins wanted justice and rights for all of man, but that wasn’t why a lot of people took part in the Revolution.

“In the great cities, which alone now spoke the decisive words — the open land can at most accept or reject faits accomplis, as our eighteenth century proves — a mass of rootless fragments of population stands outside all social linkages. These do not feel themselves as attached either to an Estate or to a vocational class, nor even to the real working-class, although they are obliged to work. Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively — uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party.”

Cities will absorb the rejects of the countryside, and this gives it a strength of its own, it gives it an army of people with nothing to lose, people who will commit terror for fun, people who would take revenge, and people who would do it for coin. In the transition from Culture to Civilisation, the city becomes more powerful than the old estates, and is populated with people from a plurality of backgrounds who all agree for a plurality of reasons that the old order needs to be annihilated.

Rationalism becomes popular during this period as the expression of urban reason’s distaste for tradition. It replaces Religion (We are in the Materialism stage now), as the community of waking-consciousness. Their ideas become widespread and begin to inform the political content of society. To consider great men like Wallenstein, Cleisthenes or Cromwell, who made or broke the absolute state, as being guided principally by rational enlightenment would be absurd, but in this period, thought precedes action.

But when the enlightenment left the minds of men and entered the courts of Europe, they were no longer spiritual truths but had to muddy themselves in the world of facts. This is where Big Money comes into the fold as the replacer of nobility.

“If by “democracy” we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the world-improvers’ and freedom-teachers’ desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective.”

This is a big one. With Civilisation, not only do the non-estate operate as an independent force, but so does money-power. There were wealthy figures before, but their aims existed within the context of the state and had its role within it, now, the wealthy can pursue their wealth for themselves and no one else. Such is the consequence of destroying the old estates, it frees the things it held to discipline.

In Rome, Tiberius Gracchus’s reforms were financed by the Equites (the wealthy faction) to disempower the Senate with land-reforms. But when they got what they wanted they pulled their funding and Gracchus shortly after wound up dead. On the surface this was a popular movement with the support of the plebs, but populism alone doesn’t win elections. In the real world you need sponsors and in democracies, the manufacturers of public opinion, the owners of the press, those that pump the liquid cash through the institutions like flowing blood, are the rich, and specifically the rich that possess coin and not just land like the old elites.

In France, money power had to rally against the absolute state, because here Richelieu won the 30 years’ war and the ensuing Fronde Wars asserted the Monarchy over the provincial classes. This was also opposed by an enlightenment faction that took the rights of man and liberty to mean a universal pursuit of freedom for all. In England the story was different. The monarchy lost the civil war and the English absolute state died with it. Instead the state was run by the first estate, which had developed its class form around interest politics. As an island, the English mentality was more individualised relative to the continent. Individual liberty of the English enlightenment meant intellectual and trade freedom. The father of Capitalism was Adam Smith. England became the perfect environment for the third estate to thrive without a toppling revolution. But here also, with the Parliamentary style, money was unhesitatingly used, not to bribe individuals, but to cultivate a “democracy”, matched with a “free” press and election process.

What rose out of both, however, was the idea of Liberal Democracy: a mass of peoples, fractured on every line imaginable, held together by money coursing through their movements like blood through arteries. The cities become a place for intellect to supersede soul, but the intellect’s dreams of justice and good governance are always made or broken by whether or not it has its factual opposite, the money-power, behind it. The goal of this money power becomes to subjugate the ripened State to the interests of wealth accumulation. Wars in the early and late period were succession wars, wars about the balance of power between king, nobles and priesthood, symbols of a healthy and alive culture, but in the civilisation period they become economic wars with business aims. Party disputes fall along class lines, not because the Proletarian gains class-consciousness, the Proles fundamentally cannot have consciousness because they have no boundaries, but because the non-estate looks at the symbolic structures of the old estates and fears it, setting out to vanquish every trace element of it. To this end the third estate are happy to oblige.