Among the dozens of thinkers from Aristotle to Toynbee who postulated repeating patterns of historical stages and turning points, only one, Ibn Khaldun, embraced a specific chronology. He maintained that historical moments begin with the sudden access to power of a group enthused with a transformative ideology. Throughout the first 40 years of the group’s ascendancy, it carries much of society with it and is able to implement its agenda. During the next 40 years, the ruling order finds its grip slipping as memories of the bygone glory days rapidly fade. The 40-year period that begins after that amounts to a withering on the vine during which the ruling order loses legitimacy and resorts to tyranny awaiting the soon and inevitable rise of an exciting new ideology,
Attempts to map Ibn Khaldun’s model onto real historical chronologies end up, more often than not, with the historian concluding that the “40-year” part of the scheme should be treated metaphorically. Yet Ibn Khaldun insists on it, basing his calculation, for religious reasons, on scripture, to wit, the 40 years Moses and the Israelites spent in the wilderness after escaping slavery in Egypt. God ordained, he argued, that the wanderers could not enter the land of milk and honey until the last of those who remembered their degradation in Egypt had passed away.
Since none of the Muslim ruling elites of Ibn Khaldun’s day demonstrated his predicted/retrodicted pattern from rise to demise, historians have felt comfortable relegating his temporal specificity to a footnote and focusing instead on what he says about the nature of ascendant ideologies. I think this is a mistake, however. If one looks at the very origin of Islam and its leaders’ creation of an unparalleled imperium, the 40-year interval works exceptionally well. Unfortunately, the religious views of Ibn Khaldun’s contemporaries included an unchallengeable belief that God’s hand had guided the rise of Islam, which made it impossible for him to proclaim that it was just a manifestation of a universal and inherently secular law of history.
Instead of pressing further with my interpretation of Ibn Khaldun’s inspiration, I wish to switch now to how his 40-year cycles fit with American history and with our current political dilemmas. I shall argue that the foundation of the republic constituted the accession to power of an elite committed to a charismatic vision. Two generations, Lincoln’s four-score and a bit, passed at the end of which an unbridgeable national schism exploded in civil war.
The war ended with the North taking endless victory laps and the South marinating itself in dreams of the Lost Cause. Eighty-one years separate Fort Sumter from Pearl Harbor. A desperately divided depression-era public was believed by zealots on both left and right to be on the verge of fundamental restructuring, if not revolution.
Engagement in what most Americans came to believe was a life-and-death struggle between Nazism and democracy reset the country’s ideological compass, much the way the Civil War had. Growing up in a family that viewed FDR as the most evil of leaders, I can see a plausible post-1945 comparison with the northern hubris and southern sorrow and dejection during the Reconstruction Era
Eighty years have now elapsed since Pearl Harbor. The bland but confident post-World War II society I grew up in barely exists in mindset of a legion of politically aware Americans who see it only in terms of segregation, McCarthyism, Orientalism, and the abhorrent Feminine Mystique. The opposing legion who thinks the old days weren’t so bad have no intention of backing down.
Many analysts have opined that the country has never been so divided since the Civil War. I’m not so sure. Economics defined the Great Depression in technical terms, but in my opinion the national divisions of that era were no less dire than they were in the pre-Civil War days of the Dred Scott decision and Bloody Kansas. The difference between them came down to the slain warriors of 1860-1865 falling on American soil while those of 1941-1945 lost their lives at places like Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal.
From the perspective afforded by Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history, there is no escaping the demise of a governing and unifying ideology, once charismatically established through bloody struggle. The divisions within our country, whether social, economic, or sectional, haven’t changed all that much since the War of 1812, the last hurrah of the revolutionary era. Once the mythic memory of the Founding Fathers, or the Grand Army of the Republic, or the Greatest Generation fades to nothingness, those divisions will always resurface.
So what are we headed for? Another civil war seems unimaginable. And yet? How about a foreign war? The squandering of blood and treasure in the Middle East has had no lasting effect on the national polity other than replenishing the national reservoir of men and women with weapons training.
The war in Ukraine thus looms as a possible instrument for recharging our national political batteries. Handfuls of Putin-lovers aside, both Red Staters and Blue Staters sympathize with unfairly beleaguered white folk, armed to the teeth, facing a foe that talks about nothing so much as the bygone greatness of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. After all, the USSR lost its mojo after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came 45 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, and collapsed completely in 1993 after 85 years of existence.
Are Russia and the United States looking for the same thing in terms of a charismatic national ideology? I think so. They could go to war with one another and see who survives, of course, but I think it is more likely that the outcome of the Ukraine war, a classic proxy conflict, will tell us whether we can ever get our own mojo back, or whether we will remain on the road to a new Fort Sumter.
Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus in history at Columbia University.
Copyright ©2022 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 13 April 2022
Word Count: 975
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