I’m back to piling on Francis Fukuyama (see below), who totally disses not only “Western Civilization” but the Ancient Middle East as well in order to glorify the role of China in his recent book The Origins of Political Order. For Fukuyama, channeling Max Weber, “civilization” really means “an impersonal bureaucracy possessing a monopoly on the legal exercise of violence.” He doesn’t mean art and poetry, which is pretty much sissy stuff for him, which I guess is OK, but what about Hammurabi’s code, which dates to 1,700 BC, predating Duke Xiao and the Quin Dynasty by about 1,500 years?
And what about art, huh? In my last post, I pumped the Great Pyramid of Giza (circa 2005 BC) as the product of the kind of regime that Fukuyama admires, but Kenneth Clark had a kinder, gentler take on Egyptian civilization. Clark was once famous, back in the day (circa 1969), as the host of a 14-part BBC series “Civilization,”1 which Fukuyama probably doesn’t much care for, because it’s all about the West, with nothing at all about Duke Xiao. Clark omits the Middle East in “Civilization,” but he came back to it in “In the Beginning,” a documentary that sadly seems to be unavailable anywhere. However, there’s a review of it online by David Bernstein, who describes Clark’s thesis thusly:
In Clark’s provocative view civilization came “with the suddenness of sunlight” between 3000 and 2800 BC, between the political order established by Narmer and the building of Sakkara, when Egyptian art achieved the sense of beauty, the dignity of man, the order, clarity, and inspiration that he defines as “civilization.” Specifically, Clark places the cradle of civilization at Sakkara with its famous necropolis and step pyramid of Djoser, the earliest stone building in the world. Sakkara represents refinement, sophistication, and grandeur; the early elements of Egyptian art and design can be seen here.
I haven’t seen “In the Beginning,” but I do recall a passage from one of Clark’s books, describing an ancient Egyptian frieze showing the Pharaoh ’s army carrying booty across a river. The booty included cattle, who made the ford themselves, of course, but the artist also depicted a soldier carrying a calf on his back. The calf was shown lowing for its mother, and mother was shown lifting her head in response to her baby’s distress. An artist who could recognize, and emphasize with, this brief drama, and who had both the will and the ability to capture it in a natural and effective manner—this was a civilized man.
Fukuyama would, I think, find it fitting that the first great work of art was a “necropolis,” for a great deal of what he talks about in his book is the paradox that while states are largely constructed by princes to perpetuate their name (or rather their will) beyond the natural span of human life, these efforts are constantly undermined by the efforts of lesser men to turn the resources of the state to their own purposes—to perpetuate their own families’ power and riches, rather than that of their prince. So why not cut to the root of the matter? This is where the eunuchs come in.
In the West we have used eunuchs almost entirely for art—in the form of the castrati, who had a brief run from the mid-16th century to the late 18th—but in the Middle East and Asia they’ve been far more important. As Fukuyama points out, the “real” eunuchs of the West have been the Catholic priesthood. Up until the papacy of the fiery Hildebrand (Gregory VII, d. 1083), celibacy meant “not being married” (and, thus, not having any legitimate children) and in fact there were plenty of married priests. Hildebrand saw the Church as the ruler of all society, and to prevent it from being absorbed into society, all priests had to be made eunuchs for Christ, with no bride, no offspring, and no beloved other than the Church itself.
Princes have tricks other than castration, of course, notably finding trusted servants of low, or no, social rank who cannot hope to stand on their own. Jews were used in this manner in both the West and the Ottoman Empire—most recently perhaps by Franklin Roosevelt, whose handicap made him unusually suspicious of rivals, and Margaret Thatcher, bound by her sex rather than a wheelchair.
