When Empires Fall: Finding a New Story in Nonviolence
By Michael Nagler
Since I spent the decades of my teaching career dealing with Ancient Greek and other courses about that bygone era, and my orientation is so different now — when I’m more likely to be found reading Sanskrit or Gandhi, if not actually seated with eyes closed in the meditation hall — I like to find remnants of that earlier phase of my life that are actually useful in the later one.
Case in point: I have just finished a fascinating book by Eric H. Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton, 2014), which tells the complex story of the collapse of empires in the eastern Mediterranean and surrounding regions at the end of the Bronze Age. In Classics I studied mainly the great epic poet Homer, whose two surviving epics (and snippets of others) romanticized (Cline’s word) that tumultuous era. In other words, 1177 B.C. shines a brilliant scholarly light on both my field back then and my passion today: what is happening to our world — and what we can do about it.
Cline is well aware of this connection. His impressive study greatly enriched my understanding of then and now. I had been working with a simpler model recently, which I think still holds true and adds a dimension to his work that’s possibly quite important: we are certainly at the end of an era, as he vividly outlines, and hopefully at the beginning of another. But the closing era and its hoped-for replacement are best characterized not so much by material culture — although, since our material culture has gone electronic, that is certainly a spectacular feature — as by what other social theorists have variously named a ‘paradigm’ or ‘story:’ in what framework do the people of a given time understand their physical surroundings and — more importantly — themselves?
In turn, the outgoing and hopefully incoming ‘stories’ can best be characterized by one simple criterion, though there are many others: our declining world is one of violence; the future, if we’re to have one, will feature nonviolence as a defining characteristic.
Most people are at least dimly — and sickeningly — aware that the world order is collapsing; very few are aware that a new one is coming — if we let it. That’s why there is so much fear and its inevitable concomitant: violence. Of course, there are specific reasons why Israel is doing violence to Gaza and Putin’s Russia is wreaking violence on Ukraine, etc.; but underneath these factors is the one underlying tension caused by the perception of impending chaos.
The massacre of protesting students at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 is an example (I almost said a good example, but the word good doesn’t belong here): the Chinese authorities saw chaos in the demonstration, but didn’t see the appeal to democratization as a call for positive change; nor were the students particularly clear about the latter — as who could be in this age when knowledge of nonviolence is so hard to come by.
Nonviolence is the catalyst that could lubricate the transition to the new era. We face an awful lot of fear and violence if — or to the degree that — we don’t develop it.