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Aidan Campbell
posted 5 May 2006

For Osborne, a science historian and publisher, the West's most civilised period is the one we normally label the 'Dark Ages', between the end of the Roman occupation of England in 410 AD and the Norman Conquest of 1066. That era apparently saw bucolic Saxons drift into England rather than aggressively invade it. Osborne also asks 'What does "civilisation" mean?' He should be commended for asking that question, since not many are prepared to scrutinise a way of life they claim they are prepared to die for.

Osborne himself must have read or seen The Lord of the Rings once too often, however, because his concept of civilisation seems to have been influenced by its image of peace-loving Hobbit communities. More seriously, Osborne's definition is entirely subjective. For him it means how we tell fanciful stories and myths to each other to make ourselves feel better. The Dark Age sagas do that very well, and so that time was the most civilised in his opinion.

Despite his scientific background, Osborne's humble definition of civilisation rests on his critique of rationalism. In his opinion, rationalism's reliance on abstract universals has made the world a whole lot worse off. The ancient Greek debate between myth and reason started all this off. For Osborne, Greek myths 'filled a more important function than simply depicting actual events':

'Gods, demi-gods and heroes were brought into being because, over time, empirical truth gives way to moral truth - actual events become less important than the symbolic value they hold for those who come after.' (p57)

In contrast, the aim of the rationalist historian Thucydides was to give history a purpose. However, Osborne observes, 'removing the gods from the stage did not make the record of the past into a rational series of causes and effects that Thucydides hoped for. The change from an oral to a literate culture simply substituted one kind of interpretation for another'(p65). Osborne's favourite Greek is history's 'laughing philosopher' Democritus. This is because, according to Osborne, Democritus believed that absolutes were illusory. Nonetheless Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle eventually won out over Democritus as their rationalism came to dominate Western culture: 'Plato's seductive message that the power of reason could secure the truth and transform the human condition overcame Democritus' acceptance of the subjectiveness and contingency of human existence' (p85).

Osborne seems to be labouring under a misapprehension about Democritus. The leading encyclopaedias class Democritus as a materialist and determinist. He believed that the universe comprised atoms, nothing and the void. His favourite aphorism - 'Nothing occurs at random, but everything occurs for a reason and by necessity' - inclines in my opinion more towards absolutism and away from subjectivity and contingency. Osborne's insinuation that rationalism is just another interpretation, and a vague and abstract one at that, is based upon a similar misconception. In his history of the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides applied his concept of purposefulness to the definite actions of the actual people involved, not to an overarching intangible concept.

Osborne's stereotyping of rationalism as delusory is cruder than the more precise observation that mankind makes history, though not in circumstances of its own choosing. Osborne builds his case which accuses rationalism of being remote and out-of-touch, arrogantly impractical and know-it-all, while his charmingly symbolic fairy tales about history are endearingly complex, uncertain and contingent. Then Osborne does us the favour of pointing out that, hey, rationalism is just another tall yarn too. Thanks Roger. Actually it is mythology that haughtily encourages people to imagine that they will know everything that there is to know about an issue by trusting in fables. Science, on the other hand, ultra-cautiously conducts endless experiments before it is ready to declare that any of its tentative hypotheses are objective facts. The good scientist Osborne as good as admits this when he later concedes: 'Almost all scientists at this time [in Classical Greece] were, in effect, observers rather than experimenters. Practical intervention in the world in order to get it to give up its secrets had to wait another 17 centuries (p91-92)'.

Osborne is obliged to recognise that rationalism had to wait centuries for its Enlightenment triumph. Yet he still doesn't get it. The human ability to reason emerged out of the primeval slime alongside humanity. Consequently rationalism only grew in stature as mankind civilised itself. Accordingly it carries many of the faults and wounds that humankind also bears, and especially so in its earlier forms. For Osborne, however, rationalism has remained basically the same throughout history. Nowadays Osborne is concerned that it is the rationale behind globalisation that is needlessly provoking the twin irrationalisms of fundamental religion and selfish consumerism, thereby squeezing out his own preference for the equally irrational but victim-friendly multiculturalism. For Osborne, rationalism is also to blame for traditional Western art cutting itself adrift from its authentic source of inspiration - the primitive masses eking out a life in the uniformly ghastly cities of modernity - to sell out to the rich and famous instead. Rather than connect to ordinary people, artists and connoisseurs of fine art betrayed them by making the narrowly rational calculation of procuring a mess of pottage for themselves from their well-heeled patrons.

The late TV historian and eminent art critic Kenneth Clark is often credited with representing this elitist tendency. Clark's notion of civilisation conceded that, while modernity is a nightmare, at least the artistic legacy of the West is still something to celebrate. Not in Osborne's book. For him, Clark's raptures over 'high art' disregard the overriding duty of culture to communicate its myths and stories among the rest of us. For that reason, Osborne prefers rap music and other pop culture to 'pious' gallery art because at least audiences of millions 'get' their messages. Osborne shows here that he values art as a tool of social engineering beyond its aesthetic value. Ever since the Renaissance, Osborne believes the greatest art empathises with modern humanity's unfortunate estrangement from the primitive life. To the same end, he is also critical of the modernist avant-garde for reckoning that their pristine art styles were far too precious to risk contamination by the vulgar masses. The modernists seemingly reasoned that an undiluted abstraction would the best way to preserve their artistic purity by courting an aloof irrelevance to everyday concerns:

'[The modernists created] a distance from the masses, producing art that ordinary people simply would not understand, and which would therefore be safe from their grasp. The negative characteristics of modernist art are its intentional difficulty and its coldness, both springing from a detachment from the culture of European people.' (p436)

There is a more strenuous objection to be made against this elitist theme that outstanding culture helps preserve the integrity of the West than that it disdainfully ignores the plebs. How can art possibly make modern society more civilised when it is fundamentally irrational itself?

Primitive society itself had a good excuse for relying on artistic instrumentalism. It had no other explanation for the existence of humanity and society. In an all-too-brief moment of insight, Osborne himself points out that meaninglessness has always been anathema to human consciousness (p23). Because archaic society has to resort to myths to explain life, every work of primitive art must possess some rationalising aspect. In the case of microcosmic magic, for example, praying to a tribal idol forms an essential preliminary to the success of a hunt. If the hunters still have no luck, the reason is never because praying to a piece of wood was silly of them. It is because the hunters somehow didn't follow the correct ritual in praying to the totem. This line of argument is a demonstration of the all-encompassing absolute certainty of irrational primitive 'reasoning' that we have had occasion to refer to above. Nevertheless, and irrespective of how ridiculous it seems to us, idolatry still evokes the eventual development of far more rational methods towards hunting. That means idolatry itself is embryonically rational. If it wasn't, humanity would still be living in caves today.

Since the onset of Enlightenment and the development of science, modern society no longer has an excuse for sustaining mythology and other primeval irrationalities in any part of public life. Indeed one of the West's many contributions towards human civilisation is that it was the first to liberate art from its social function of visually embellishing religious superstitions. In the West, modern art could finally let rip. The subsequent mushrooming of a whole plethora of aesthetic schools bore witness to the fact that art need have no relationship to reality at all. So while ethnic art necessarily has a penchant towards reason; ironically, in a civilised society, art is free to be utterly irrational.

If is absurd of Osborne to claim that the Dark Ages are the epitome of a civilised life, and if Western fine art usually isn't rational either, what does 'civilisation' mean then? It is relatively easy to conceive intellectually what a civilised world might look like in the future - perhaps it is a free life full of luxury with high technology for all; the conscious control over nature; the limitless expansion of productivity; etc. However, when we look at our world today, where is there just one example of what we would call a civilised society? Is there any country that we can comfortably claim is civilised in our own sense of the word? If so, where is it? And, if not, why not?

Primitivists like Osborne derive huge intellectual sustenance for their pessimistic outlook from this inability of any of the defenders of modernity to point to a single example of an extant civilised society. Defenders of civilisation - like Clark and others - have been forced to qualify their definition of civilisation as a result. They have done this by arguing that - while there may be no existing society we can unequivocally describe as civilised - modern societies all have trends and tendencies within them that we can promote in order to advance closer to our goal. At the same time, there are other aspects of the same societies we want to downplay and even attack since they form definite barriers to realising the potential of modern society. In this nit-picking, selective, reforming fashion we hopefully edge away from reaction and ever closer towards greater and greater civilisation.

There is a major problem with this approach to the problem of civilisation. By focusing on what is good and then on what is bad about existing societies we lose sight of an essential prerequisite of the civilising process itself - the requirement to negate its own coherence in order to develop. By extrapolating what we like about today's society into an imaginary future; and by rescinding back to a dark barbarian past what we don't like about it; we are making not one but two errors. We are erroneously creating an image of a harmonised civilisation in the future, and an entirely reactionary society in the past. This dual problem arises because separating modernity's good qualities from its bad ones emasculates the civilising process. If primitive societies were so ghastly in the past, how could civilisation ever have developed from them? Secondly, if the civilisation of the future is so perfect, why would it need to develop any further? If there's no longer any need for it to develop, individual freedom becomes an irrelevant indulgence which must ultimately wither away. In reality, the condition of perfection is anathema to a dynamic civilisation since it means stasis, and therefore ruin and decay. Rather than separating out the ideal from the primitive to realise civilisation, we should be bringing them together to provoke productive confrontations.

Osborne argues that a highly organised society which is also free is an oxymoron. His low opinion of humanity compels him to paint Hobbit Land as the most advanced level of community a free people can hope to achieve. Against this paean to pagan idiocy, it is futile to assert that strong individuals make for a strong society when they are working together in rational solidarity. There is no historical evidence to sustain this affirmation. What is to be done, then? We have become too complacent in defining civilisation with lists of our ticks and crosses. There is little dispute that members of society must cooperate to achieve social coherence. Rather, the disagreements about civilisation always arise over what roles change, negation and difference play in such an advanced society. Maybe we should rethink our approach towards the negative characteristics of a civilised society rather than always banging on about its unproven positive assets.

Civilisation must retain some negative characteristics - or it cannot change. A society must therefore be nugatory if it is to be regarded as civilised. The issue then becomes, not removing all the negative features of a modern society to make it more civilised; but deciding which of its negative characteristics should be stressed over other ones. In its time, the Enlightenment didn't try to eradicate wicked irrationalism from civilised society. Instead it integrated it by creating a series of private realms such as family life, the arts and sport, where people were free to play out their fantasies to their fullest potential. So what forms would we like negation to take to advance our contemporary civilisation?

Negation has a bad press today. To talk of negation advancing civilisation sounds outlandish. The word is almost always used as a synonym for war, revolution or nihilism. Those who prefer to skate over such awkward bouts of historical violence are labelled 'romantics'. Osborne is critical of Romanticism for its deification of individualism, yet he is often disturbingly romantic himself. In his effort to denigrate the West, he fails to appreciate how eagerly the people of the emerging economies of China, India and the Pacific Basin have come to adopt the rationalism of the Western Enlightenment. His text presents the Orient in the caricature of being eternally passive and mediocre. Asian culture apparently has a long-standing tradition of 'military restraint' compared to the Western cult of bloodthirsty marauders and crusaders (p11, p86). Farewell, then, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and the Mongol Hordes. Your mountainous piles of civilian skulls are to be simply written out of history - or at least this one by Osborne. In relation to the Central American cultures razed by the Spanish conquistadors, however, Osborne cannot avoid mentioning the Aztec custom of human sacrifice. So he refers to the practice in glowingly romantic terms, almost as if the Aztecs were doing their victims a favour:

'[Aztec] Priests and musicians were cut to ribbons by Spanish swords - something that was simply incredible to the Aztecs, whose rules of war and taboos about any violations of the human body were always strictly observed. For them, as for many other cultures, warfare was highly ritualised and even human sacrifice was carried out with great precision and respect for the body.' (p259)

Osborne believes that the mainstream Western version of civilisation has been intimately defined by its panics directed against barbarian 'Other'. In his view, its advocates have to invent stories about alien terror so as to cohere themselves into identifiable communities, nations or regional blocs. If his treatment of Asian militarism or the Aztecs are anything to go by, Osborne seemingly believes that the best way to allay these fears is to either ignore non-Western terror or gloss over it. These patronising efforts just end up belittling non-Westerners, while convincing Westerners that the wool is being pulled over their eyes. There is little doubt that civilisation is not so different from barbarism when it comes to inflicting terror. Indeed, it is probably true that civilisation 'does' terror 'better' than many more backward cultures - both in terms of its quantity and its variety. It also does many other things better than primitive society too, not least economic organisation and art. Nevertheless it is we who are in danger of romantically parodying Osborne's obtuse blindness towards the utter ferociousness of primitive communities if we continue to conceive of our vision of dynamic civilisation as being a quintessence of rational solidarity.

For the vast majority of human history, there was precious little choice in the forms that negation took in society. The ever-present realities of war, civil strife, hunger and death probably fed the myth of the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. However, the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs 60 million years ago also allowed us mammals to conquer the Earth. Likewise, if it hadn't been for the Black Death, it is doubtful whether capitalism would have been able to overthrow the stagnating feudal order so quickly in Europe. There is every chance that such violent negations, or worse, will continue to form the major dynamic fuelling future changes in human civilisation. But thanks to the Enlightenment system of sponsoring the private containment of irrational preferences, different (and milder) forms of negation now exist as possible alternatives to the customary destruction. While not involving the same waste of precious lives and physical resources, they do still have the power to ruffle feathers and re-energise modernity.

Osborne believes that art's instrumental role should be to console grief-stricken humanity for relinquishing its primeval paradise. On the contrary, a dynamic humanity would do well to sample from time to time marginal spheres of culture to have its key assumptions tested, challenged, provoked, negated and transgressed. They will either be invigorated by this experience, or discarded. So my choices for the 'Four Horsemen of the Contemporary Apocalypse' are Tracey Emin, Norman Foster, Damien Hirst and Kate Moss.