Myths of History

On empires and impossible returns to past golden ages.

Spinning Illusions for the Despairing Masses

In times of great instability caused by rapid social and economic change, demagogues may emerge to mislead followers with false promises that stroke their prejudices. These prejudices are dressed up as “common sense” so that they may defy questioning and critical reasoning. Leaders who are demagogues thus provide aid and comfort to the bewildered, and gain their support, thereby extracting power from the masses. Some of the leaders promising “common sense solutions” are in fact spinning such fantastic illusions, that their rhetorical work ought to be counted in the domains of superstition and mythology. This is particularly true of revanchist approaches to historical change, of revenge-driven campaigns to restore and regain lost status. Hyperbole is the norm here: the past is idealized and romanticized, while the present is cast in the terms of the most pathetic victimology. One is handed an unstable compound, which at present is an explosive mix of America the Exceptional (greatness) and America the Innocent (victimhood).

What underlies restorationist programs are absolutely false notions of history. The problem is not that such revanchist programs would fail a history test in school. This is not an academic exercise. The problem is when you try to do the impossible guided by ideas that are irrational in pursuit of goals that are unreachable—the result can only be disaster. Far from “knowing where you’re from, to know where you’re going,” this is a downward spiral of endless frustration. It is now about not knowing how to get back to a place from which you in fact never came in the first place.

To manipulate and misdirect people into following such programs, one may rely on four primary myths of history. These can be so powerful, that even those appearing to lead the misdirection, are themselves prisoners of this mythological thinking:

1. That continuity defines history.

2. That change can be stopped.

3. That history is reversible.

4. That the eternal is achievable.

To address these myths we can consider what we would have already learned as students of history, anthropology, and philosophy. Then we will see how this applies to the subject of US imperial decline, and why it will remain in decline until it either reaches a plateau, or breaks apart completely.

1. That Continuity Defines History

It was a great surprise for me to learn that for many students in my experience, “history” meant “things continuing through time”. It may be that they were misled by understandings of history as being “one thing after another”; or ideas of biblical derivation, such as “there is nothing new under the sun”; or French post-revolutionary sayings to the effect that the more things change, the more they stay the same (“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”). Their notions are understandable, but what they understand is not history.

Change is not only normal, change is what defines history.

“You can never step in the same river twice,” is what a professor of anthropology told me when I was a young graduate student in a course on ethnohistory. The saying is attributed to Heraclitus of Ephesus (circa 535–475 BCE). “Everything flows,” Heraclitus argued in his philosophical argument on change and flux. One of the surviving fragments of his work, recorded by Plato and Plutarch, features these words: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”.

That change is the defining feature of history is an idea that accords with several influential thinkers in history and sociology, who emphasized change as a fundamental feature of the development of human societies.

Fernand Braudel, the 20^th-century French historian who was a leader in the Annales School, is known for explaining that history is a dynamic process shaped by long-term changes (la longue durée), medium-term shifts (conjonctures), and short-term events (événements). Karl Marx’s historical materialism perceived history as a series of changes driven by shifts in modes or production and class struggle—history certainly never meant stasis for Marx. Transformative processes are the essence of historical development in Marxist approaches. In sociology, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber also saw change as intrinsic to social history, whether it was the transition from “mechanical” to “organic” solidarity, or the development of modern institutions.

The late Immanuel Wallerstein, a former teacher of mine, argued that the French Revolution had a decisive impact on modern historiography, and the historiography of the modern world. From that point onward, change was understood as normal, not an aberration.

2. That Change can be Stopped

Sure, change can happen, but it can also be stopped—is what some conservatives might think, or wish. Change is not just automatic, we can agree with that much. Change can also be impeded, or modified—but then that itself becomes a change, because one is now acting today in a manner that one was not acting yesterday, i.e., different man, different river. Many anthropologists have held the view that the pace of change—specifically cultural change—can occur at a glacial pace. They would also agree that in times of crisis, cultural change can be extremely rapid. With the exception of maybe certain structural anthropologists, change is the norm, and any attempt to stop change itself produces more change.

3. That History is Reversible

While it may be popular to say “history repeats itself” (it never actually does that), nobody will be able to demonstrate a case where history has been reversed. The circular notion of time, as being a return to origins, has not prevailed at least since the Bible was written.

Among historians and philosophers, what became more prevalent was a progressivist notion of history. It was correct for understanding historical events to be irreversible, but its claims to history being unidirectional are very much discredited. Hegel viewed history as something that constantly unfolds towards a rational purpose, and that it cannot be undone or reversed—he can be thanked for the various “end of history” theses that have been produced for over a century now.

In What Is History? (1961), Edward H. Carr saw change driven by causes and their effects, and he also held that such changes were not reversible.

(Historical time is not reversible, but not for that does it follow that it must always tend toward the better, the more perfect, a higher plane of human existence. The world’s first university-based anthropologist, Sir Daniel Wilson in Canada, held that evolution to a higher level could well be followed by degradation, well out of line with the progressivist notions of history that dominated at his time.)

Some might be encouraged to think that time can be reversed, the same way that legal judgments can be overturned—and that is a false parallel. A legal judgment, such as Roe v. Wade in the US, can indeed be overturned, but it did not and cannot reverse the movement toward greater abortion rights. The overturning of that legal judgment did not, as we all know, cause the claim for abortion rights to vanish, let alone did it stop abortions.

4. That The Eternal is Achievable

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~ “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818).

Shelley, in his sonnet above, reflected on the impermanence of human achievements through the image of a ruin in the desert, a broken-down statue that was a monument to a powerful king. This line in particular is striking: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains”. This is a warning, or a reminder to the powerful, those who enjoy dominance today, that the time of their dissolution will come. If change is normal, then any human-made creation coming to an end is also a feature of history.

“Eternity” is not to be found in history. Eternity is the subject of myth. The empire on which the sun was to never set, is no more.

In anthropology, it is arguable that it was mostly the French structural anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, who held that there was some permanence to the very structures of human thought. But even in his case, the idea of timeless repetition is not a matter of fact, but a product of myth.

Understanding that eternity is the subject of myth, not history, finds agreement in the work of Mircea Eliade, specifically in his 1949 book, translated into English as, The Myth of the Eternal Return. Eliade explained that the subject matter of myths are timeless, archetypal truths. The “sacred” is always eternal. History, on the other hand, is “profane,” and follows real-world events and developments on the ground.

Understanding the above four myths and what makes history historical, can be applied to the present—in particular, the revival of the US empire and the return to the golden age. Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” program is a revanchist one, by definition: it is explicitly about restoration plus primacy. The very MAGA slogan itself is enveloped in myth, it is not grounded in history. That means it will be quite literally impossible to achieve.

Empires Never get an Encore

When it comes to modern empires—empires formed after the late 1400s and the “Age of Exploration”—there has not been one single instance of an empire declining, and then reversing course and regaining preeminence. Some might argue that the Russian Empire of the czars was revived by the USSR, but those are two fundamentally different structures, with different ideologies, technologies, and modes of governing relations between centre and periphery. Others might make the error of comparing the US empire to pre-modern empires, such as the Roman Empire. In fact, this error is popular among US writers and political thinkers, and is deeply embedded in US political culture, which styles the US as a reincarnation of Rome and/or ancient Greece. Think of the architectural style of older public buildings and monuments, and the plethora of place names copied from ancient Greece and Rome (particularly in upstate New York). The US empire, if comparable, is more comparable to the modern Spanish empire than it is to Rome: overstretched, internally divided, inefficient, and deeply indebted to its very competitors. Back to the original point here: the differences between pre-modern and modern empires are fundamental, and no modern empire has experienced a return to dominance.

Immanuel Wallerstein, who founded World-Systems Analysis, provided a framework that explained the rise and fall of hegemonic powers (or what we call imperial powers) within the modern capitalist world-system. Following Braudel very closely, his work emphasized the cyclical nature of global economic and political dominance, where certain basic patterns appeared to repeat (but never identically), and there were linear or secular trends that were irreversible. Changes are rooted in historical patterns of competition, accumulation, and structural shifts in the world economy. It was in Wallerstein’s work, and his teaching in class, that he expounded on the life-cycle of modern hegemonic states: typically, from rise to fall, the time-span lasted 100-150 years. At most, an empire might last 250 years. Examine the histories of the Spanish, Dutch, French, British, and then the US empires, and you will see that this framework corresponds closely with historical reality.

The Spanish empire was dominant from 1492 to the early 1600s. Of course it continued to exist well into the late 1800s—but we are talking about dominance, not persistence, let alone persistence just in name. The Dutch achieved hegemony from the 1620s until about the 1670s. The French empire became paramount from the late 1600s until the early 1800s. The British empire eclipsed France starting from roughly 1815 and lasting until 1914, almost completely dissolving after 1945. US ascendance began in the early 1800s, and achieved its zenith just after 1945.

The economic domain matters first and foremost in world-systems analysis. Military might plays a supportive role, which reinforces economic power. Dominance is achieved by attaining productive efficiency, commercial primacy, and leadership in global finance. A state achieves dominance by besting rivals in production, trade, and finance. Dominance finds its highest expression in a period of relatively short-lived hegemony: this is the peak of dominance. As Wallerstein explained in person, “hegemony is a way of forestalling inevitable decline”. Pax Britannica and Pax Americana were both realizations of hegemony, and they were both relatively short-lived.

Decline is inevitable: competitors catch up. In the case of the US, it outsourced production to what became its key competitors. The Product Life-Cycle is one that has spanned the globe for several decades now, such that the mainstay of industrialization passed into the hands of “underdeveloped” nations, while more innovative manufacturing remains (for a while) in core countries. In addition to competitors catching up, military expenditures rise and prove to be an increasing drain. Wars abroad become intolerably expensive, and politically costly—too much to maintain let alone expand. Internal divisions deepen and multiply.

Hegemony is inevitably temporary (lasting from 20 to 50 years at most), as Wallerstein argued, because the very advantages that enabled a nation to rise to core status, become diffused to competitors. Competitors also do not incur the same costs of maintaining “global order”. The US is already post-hegemonic.

In no case does the mere act of imposing tariffs on nations with cheaper labour costs, and withdrawing from multilateral institutions, reverse decline. If it were that simple, then all of the other modern empires would have become eternal empires, especially the mercantilist Spanish, French, and British empires. Tariffs are not some secret, magical weapon. One can impose tariffs, but that simply increases production costs within, thus making the problem of cheaper competition abroad worse. One can cease to engage in “forever wars,” but that happens only once they have already transpired, and the accumulated debt remains. One can resume the production of “t-shirts, towels, and running shoes,” but these are low-cost items in the product life-cycle that went to the periphery for that reason. Toasters “Made in America” will not “Make America Great Again”. To reassert itself, and regain hegemony, the US would have to completely knock China and a host of Asian industrial giants out of the world economy altogether, and there is no realistic chance of that happening, and not a chance of it happening and allowing the US to survive the process.

This does not mean that the US is certain to be relegated to becoming a Honduras among world powers. Nothing is assured, and nothing is certain, except that time cannot be reversed. The US will likely remain a major power, unless it so mismanages its decline that a decline becomes a hard crash landing and splinters the US itself into many rival pieces.

Make America Realistic

No modern empire has risen back to hegemonic status once the process of decline has been well underway. There are basic structural reasons for that, everything from a shifting global division of labour, to increased competition, financial crises, and war fatigue. A power that has declined may retain some influence, and achieve some stability at a lower level—but only if led by realists rather than demagogues who replace history with myth.

Donald Trump’s original rise to prominence in US politics is largely as a product of the mass media, specifically the entertainment media. He is a showman, or, to put it another way, a story teller. The stories he tells, because they are stories that sell, are myths. Realism is not his business, illusion is. Among those illusions are that the US will be made “great again,” that it will achieve a “second golden age,” and that once again the US will have unrivaled global dominance. If he persists in trying to turn illusion into reality, by using some sort of alchemy that pretends to convert myth into history, his path will be that of war and destruction, at home for sure, and likely abroad too.

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