Pitirim Sorokin:
Prophet of Spiritual Renewal([1] )
By Fr. James Thornton
Historionomy, a word derived from the Greek (_historia_ = history; _nomos_ = laws), denotes the study of the laws which theoretically underlie and govern the course of human history. To discern the nature of such laws, and to do so with some measure of clarity and precision, has been the quest of many philosophers and scholars since the dawn of civilization. Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, an Orthodox Christian, was one such man and presented his unique and fascinating concept of history in full for the first time in the 1930s.
While the works of Professor Sorokin were renowned and celebrated fifty or sixty years ago, they are now largely banished from academia and stylish intellectual circles. His theories and predictions are, quite frankly, a serious embarrassment to those who wish, at any cost, to push contemporary society towards a "paradise on earth" resembling George Orwell's _1984_ or Aldous Huxley's _Brave New World_. However, people still capable of independent thought must, in the opinion of this writer, resist ongoing attempts by arbiters of so-called intellectual fashion to consign to the proverbial "memory hole" the works of upholders of tradition and decency. Resistance to such forces, and to their perverse desire to censor morally sound ideas, is particularly obligatory for tradition-minded Orthodox Christians, since, if our opponents were to have their way, we and all that we stand for would be placed in that very same "memory hole." Consequently, now that more than a half century has elapsed since the publication of Pitirim Sorokin's most famous book, _Social and Cultural Dynamics_, it behooves us to review his theories, and to consider carefully their implications for ourselves, our Faith, our families, our country, and the society in which we live.([2])
That "history repeats itself" is an axiom founded on the knowledge of human folly and shortsightedness. Hegel comments, in his _Philosophy of History_: "What experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."([3]) It is not coincidental that most of these men who devise systems of history are, above all else, keen observers of basic human nature. Such has been the case with many exceptional men throughout the ages, who observed their fellow human beings as a microcosm, drawing conclusions from this microcosm and applying their findings to the larger picture by constructing systems, or morphologies, of history.
There have been many such men, from Hesiod, Polybius, and Florus in ancient times, through Eusebius and St. Augustine in the early Christian Era, to Danilevsky and Schubart in the modern age. So as better to understand our subject, let us note three men, apart from Pitirim Sorokin, who created systems of history—one ancient, one from approximately three centuries ago, and one a twentieth-century scholar.
Plato & Vico
Plato (427-347 B.C.), as Father Georges Florovsky notes, never consciously set out to create what we would call a "system of history." Strictly speaking, such activity would have been alien to the ancient Greek mind since, as Father Florovsky writes, "[t]he metaphysical understanding of history awoke only in the Christian age."([4]) We shall none the less include Plato in this essay since his descriptions of certain tendencies common to mankind are unquestionably historionomical.
Plato postulates, in Book VIII of his _Republic_, that all societies are subject to decay and, as they decay, invariably pass through a series of stages in their downward journey to oblivion: aristocracy (rule by the best), timocracy (rule by those whose chief motivation is honor), oligarchy (rule by the wealthy), democracy (mob rule), and tyranny (oppressive rule). This process, based on Plato's contemplation of the history of his own people, is presented here only in its bare rudiments.([5]) Whatever his intentions, his efforts mark one of the earliest attempts at formulating a system of historical laws.
Another perceptive witness to the foibles of humankind is the Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Vico sought in his most famous work, _Principles of a New Science about the Common Nature of Nations_ (_Principi di una Scienza Nuova d'intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni_), to explain certain historical laws that he believed were common to all nations and peoples. In his view, every nation passes through a corso made up of three stages, each higher than the preceding stage: the divine, the heroic, and the human. However, he writes, the highest level, the human, is intrinsically unstable. Mass democracy and equality tend to predominate at the end of this last stage and once the public is befuddled by these insidious and heady brews, a nation begins to disintegrate, returning eventually to barbarism, whence a _ricorso_ of the entire process begins anew.([6])
Prophet of Decline
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is one of the great historionomers of this century. His masterwork, _The Decline of the West_ (_Der Untergang des Abendlandes_), appeared at the end of the First World War and struck with the impact of an atomic bomb among the complaisant intelligentsia of that time, who apparently believed that the War to End All Wars had just been concluded.([7]) Spengler saw history not as a system governing the lives of nations, as had Vico, but as the record of numerous great cultures: the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Classical or Græ co-Roman, the Magian or Near Eastern, the Aztec, and the Western. In Spengler's theory, cultures act in the same fashion as organisms, that is, they are born, grow, reach maturity, pass into old age, and then die. The process, he asserts, is inexorable; it is no more reversible with cultures than it is with the individual human life cycle. European culture, like all the others that have preceded it, is doomed, and the truth is that we are now living, in Spengler's theory, in the final century or so of the life cycle of that culture.
"Civilization," according to Spengler's terminology, marks that ultimate stage in which culture becomes artificial and petrified: urbanization and cosmopolitanism take the place of home and family; money replaces moral values; class-struggle is substituted for the love of country; and _panem et circenses_ supersede religion. After that, to use Spengler's own words, "weary, reluctant, cold, [a culture] loses its desire to be, and...wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave."([8])
The most common reactions to Spengler's _The Decline of the West_, and to his other works, _Man and Technics_ (_Der Mensch und die Technik_) and _The Hour of Decision_ (_Die Jahre der Entscheidung_), are, quite naturally, determined by the apparent gloominess of his prognostications. There is, according to his system, nothing we can do to arrest the inevitable and relentless tide of history. At best, we can only struggle to make the last years as decent as possible, to protect our families, to preserve the memory of our people and its achievements, to hold our heads high, and to maintain our own personal honor, integrity, and dignity by refusing to compromise our principles and beliefs. Spengler conveys this notion in an typical passage from _Man and Technics_:
“...[T]here is only one world-outlook that is worthy of us, that which has already been mentioned as the Choice of Achilles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without content. Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.
“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.” ([9])
For readers possessing sufficient perseverance to deal with the enormous complexities found here, Spengler's books are quite rewarding and interesting. They are particularly valuable in that Spengler recognized, long before most others, that the culture of European Christendom (which, of course, includes North America) is decadent and corrupt and that it has come to place excessive emphasis on materialism. It is therefore desperately sick, even to the point of death. Significant too is Spengler's skeptical attitude towards the eidolon of technological "progress":
“The progress-philistine waxed lyrical over every knob that set an apparatus in motion for the—supposed—sparing of human labor. In the place of the honest religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for the ‘achievements of humanity,’ by which nothing more was meant than progress in the technics of labor-saving and amusement-making. Of the soul, not one word.” ([10])
On the other hand, Christians, especially those of a theological bent, will recognize at once that in Spengler's works one is not dealing with a Christian _Weltanschauung_. This is so for at least two reasons. First, Spengler sees Christian European cultures, whether Eastern or Western, as nothing more than further examples or manifestations of the creative genius of man, like the Babylonian, Egyptian, or pagan Græ co-Roman cultures. He does not consider them uniquely meaningful in any spiritual sense. Secondly, the author's philosophy is rigidly deterministic to the point of virtual despair, as is clear from the passage we have just considered about the soldier of Pompeii. True, there is splendid nobility in his call for civilized man to face his end with courage; but it is a forlorn, stoical, pagan courage—more edifying than cravenness, to be sure, but decidedly not Christian. Dr. Russell Kirk, among others, observes that Spengler's philosophy of history is essentially a revival of ancient pagan modes of thought, specifically of the concept of cyclical history.([11])
Whenever Spengler's morphology of history is mentioned, commentators often compare it with that of the British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee. We shall not, however, consider Toynbee's writings in our survey, for the simple reason that they are little more than an obvious and verbose reworking of Spengler's fundamental thesis.([12])
Sorokin
Insofar as the twentieth century is concerned, there is only one other man who, in the judgement of this writer, ranks with or near Spengler in the field of historionomy and who has developed a system of history comparable to that of Spengler: Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889-1968).
Pitirim A. Sorokin was born in northern Russia nearly three decades before the commencement of the Bolshevik Revolution. His education he received primarily at the University of St. Petersburg, from which he graduated in 1922 with a Doctorate in Sociology. During the height of revolutionary outbreaks, and the subsequent civil war, he resisted the communists and engaged in various counter-revolutionary activities. For this he was imprisoned and finally sentenced to death by a Red tribunal.
Sorokin's death sentence was set aside by Lenin, who, some speculate, hoped to make himself appear magnanimous. Lenin actually wrote an article for _Pravda_ extolling himself for saving the young intellectual. However, Sorokin continued his outspoken criticism and was soon banished forever from his homeland. After a short stay in Prague, in late 1923 he journeyed to America, where he was offered a professorship at the University of Minnesota. Becoming an American citizen in 1930, that same year he accepted an invitation to be the first professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He remained there as Professor and (after retirement) Professor _Emeritus_, until his death in 1968.
Sorokin's philosophy of history was set forth for the first time in its complete form in his greatest work, _Social and Cultural Dynamics_, three volumes of which were published in 1937, with the fourth and final volume appearing in 1941. This enormous work represents a labor of ten years and contains nearly 3,000 pages and over a million words. He reiterated his entire worldview in 1941 in a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute, published in book form under the title _The Crisis of Our Age_. In 1957, he revised and abridged _Social and Cultural Dynamics_,reducing it to one volume so that it might gain a larger readership. In that format it has never gone out of print.
Sorokin's historical model is somewhat less somber than Spengler's, and it is Christian in character, which Spengler's, as we have said, is not. Sorokin rejects the notion that cultures pass through an organic life cycle. "My thesis has little in common with the age-old theories of the life cycle of cultures and societies with its stages of childhood, maturity, senility, and decay," he writes. "...We can leave them to the ancient sages and their modern epigoni." ([13])
At the same time, Sorokin, like Spengler, does not accept the ideas of inveterate optimists, who believe that improvement in mankind's living conditions ("progress," in other words) is _guaranteed_ for the immediate and long-term future. Characterizing this view as the "cloud-cukoo land of the after-dinner imagination," he goes on to say that it was "created in its present specific form in the second half of the nineteenth century" and is one of the "fascinating soap bubbles with which contented Victorian Europe liked to amuse itself."[14] For Sorokin, the long-term future is extremely hopeful. The difficulty, for those of us living in the twentieth century, has to do with the short term, as we shall see.