Part I:

"...[O]ne passes to the realization that our own age is also a 'period,' and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions."

--C.S. Lewis
   Surprised by Joy

At the opposite extreme, there was Egypt, where the whole episode is dismissed with the term "Hyskos Period," a time when that civilization was politically divided and produced no cultural accomplishments to speak of, or at any rate none that can be traced definitively to that time. It was only after its modernity ended that Egypt seems to have had the resources and leisure to produce the sort of anti-traditionalist cultural mutations that are characteristically "modern."

Even when literature and art leave a conspicuous mark, however, modernity everywhere is fundamentally a time when ever more brilliant people seem to produce less and less of substance. As the period progresses, its art grows more and more-self-conscious until it disappears into technique. It is the time of Wagner rather than Bach in the West, of Legalism rather than the Mandate of Heaven in China. It is also the great age of reactionaries of all stripes, of traditionalists rather than tradition. Many modern political systems which are supposed to embody ancient principles are in fact faked antiques.

One of the remarkable aspects of modern times, considering the amount of energy and creativity expended during the period, is how little of its vast cultural output survives. Science survives since it takes up relatively little space (for better or worse: the facts of one civilization often don't stand up to examination by a later one). But the plastic and pictorial arts, the prose that critics come to blows over and the poetry that briefly seemed to change the world, all this is often known to later ages only through secondary sources. The originals may be destroyed or suppressed in the terrible final stages of the modern era. More often, they are simply lost or neglected as taste changes. As a rule, the more early-modern a thing is, the greater its hope of longevity. Works like those of Dickens survived (with occasional slumps and survivals), while almost none of the modernist Western canon was equipped to outlive the critical apparatus which called it into being. This is the era of experiments. In the nature of the case, they usually fail.

This also the secular age, the era when every culture produces its peculiar form of atheism. Take an example from a civilization outside the program. The Buddha, who lived during his culture's early modernity in the Indian scheme of things, as an "atheist," a materialist, one who thought that great world of matter and spirit could be reduced to the play of atoms. In the West, the millenarian antinomianism created by Karl Marx under the name of "dialectical materialism" served many people with the right education as a species of agnostic rationalism to the very end of Western civilization. Sometimes God is not denied but depersonalized, as in China and in esoteric Islam. The goal of each of these strategies is to so define the world that it is possible to "get a handle on it," to make it at least conceptually manageable. While the real powers of men grow during this period (new practical technology flourishes), people are all the more anxious to ensure that their metaphysical liabilities are lessened. In the modern era, the ideal cultured person is answerable to nothing and no one.

This is an era when the merely large scale of a project will commend it to even discerning minds. It is not the first period when this is the case, of course. In the youth of a culture, people were perfectly capable of making pyramids ever wider and cathedrals ever higher from sheer exuberance. However, one of the wonders of those constructions of the Spring is the sustained quality of detailed workmanship throughout. They are monuments with a conscience. They are big because the builders thought they were about something important. In the modern age, bigness becomes a good in itself. While the skyscrapers and amphitheaters of early winter may express the vanity of the magnate or official who commissioned them, these edifices bear no personal imprint from anyone but the designer: workmanship may maintain a high technical level, but it is no longer art. Artisans become workers.

Cities cease to be integrated communities, even in cultures where the city was the basic unit of politics. They grow ever larger, but some are more important than others, even in the Westernized world where communication between populous points became instantaneous within less than a lifetime after Napoleon. In any civilization, only a handful of population centers are world-cities. They are the places where the political and cultural life of the increasingly ecumenical culture is conducted.

One of the things that grow most conspicuously, at least for the first half of modernity, is the size and ferocity of war. In Islam, most of the practical inventiveness characteristic of modern times went to the development of a wonderful military technique. That civilization almost overwhelmed the young West more than once, and its preponderance was not redressed until those techniques became in turn the basis for the drill and organization of later Western armies.

In China, modernity was called the Era of Contending States. During this terrible period, more and more of the human and economic resources of the Chinese world system were devoted either to conquest or defense, as the great powers one by one knocked each other out, guided by the dictates of new, ruthless ideologies. Of course, terrible wars within a civilization are possible at any time, and annihilating invasions from without have been an ever-present possibility since the beginning of settled life. Still, it is only in this epoch that the forms and limits normal to warfare among people of the same culture completely break down. Alliances occur, but the goal of peace through a permanent balance of power, or simply of a world composed of a multitude of permanently and equally sovereign states, is a chimera.

The world becomes divided into armed camps, and one side effectively wins long before the period is over. This, however, is only the beginning of sorrows. Collecting the prize, establishing a durable world hegemony, is sometimes the most dreadful thing that happens in a civilization's life. It is inaccurate to say that one state conquers the world by the end of the period, though in each case (with the possible exception of tiny Egypt), some state or people acts as a center of "nucleation" for the post-national world which follows modernity. Those nucleating states, such as the ancient Chinese kingdom of Ch'in, which interpret their destiny as one of world conquest, do not long survive their victory, as we will see.

In many ways, this is an era of fear, of loss of character. Such is the muddle that politics and statecraft become that, by the very end of the period, simple decisiveness is enough to bring the world into line. Throughout it, people live from one dread to another. They fear proscription by the resurgent patrician party, or social revolution, or disorder in the cosmos from human wickedness, or the Turks, or the greenhouse effect. Modernity might well be called The Age of Fear. When people cease to be afraid, as they eventually do, they cease to be modern.