Cities in Flight

AFTERWORD: Richard D. Mullen

OSWALD SPENGLER’S The Decline of the West has been acknowledged by James Blish as one of the sources of CITIES IN FLIGHT. He has said, “My own ‘Okie’ stories were … founded in Spengler.”

Spengler is a difficult thinker—or at least a difficult writer—as anyone will discover who attempts to make a table similar to the one that appears with this Afterword. Part of the difficulty stems from our tendency to equate cultures with empires and other political units, a delusion from which Toynbee should have freed us even if Spengler did not. A related difficulty lies in the title: “the decline of the West” inevitably suggests “the decline and fall of the Roman Empire,” and one is likely to assume that Spengler is predicting the military conquest of the West rather than merely arguing that the West is in a certain kind of decline. Still another lies in the fact that Spengler uses the words culture and civilization sometimes in such a way that they appear to be synonymous with society, and sometimes as technical terms with opposed meanings. Whatever may be true of things, two words synonymous with a third are not necessarily equal to each other, and we should understand from the beginning that for Spengler, culture and civilization are opposed states in the spiritual history of a society:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. … It dies when this soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul …. The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes civilization, the thing which we feel and understand in the words Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such it may, like the worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust its decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fulness. … [I, 106]

The West has reached full civilization, and its culture is dead, but its civilization, and its empire, may endure for centuries or millennia.

Now, the explicit Spenglerianism of CITIES IN FLIGHT is highly dubious in some of its details (see below, #2), and rather absurd overall. The overall absurdity lies in the basic idea of the “cultural morphologist”:

Chris recognized the term, from his force-feeding in Spengler. It denoted a scholar who could look at any culture at any stage in its development, relate it to all other cultures at similar stages, and come up with specific predictions of how these people would react to a given proposal or event. …

Spengler never uses the term “cultural morphologist,” and he would surely never have imagined that his work could be put to any such narrow uses. If a culture is an organism, you can make for a culture predictions of the kind that can be made for any organism: e.g., that a baby boy will become a man, not a woman or a horse, and that, barring accidents, the man will pass through middle age to old age and death. To be sure, the more information you have, the more particular you can be in your predictions, but obviously there are limits beyond which you cannot go. Indeed, that there are such limits in anything and everything is perhaps the most fundamental idea of Spengler. As a matter of fact, the cultural morphologists of CITIES IN FLIGHT never actually practice their trade: the various “cultures” with which the heroes deal are never presented with enough fullness to allow for any kind of Spenglerian assessment; the various stories turn on coincidence or on individual psychology and would not be essentially different if explicit references to cultural morphology were entirely eliminated—which could be done by deleting a handful of sentences.

Although some of the inconsistencies in CITIES IN FLIGHT surely result from authorial forgetfulness, they are too numerous and too prominent to be regarded as anything other than an essential feature of the overall story. Since point of view is rigidly controlled throughout the work, every statement can be attributed to one or another of the various characters. Given this fact, we can make sense of the tetralogy by regarding it, not as a fiction in which a universe has been created by an omniscient, omnipotent author, but as historical narrative with a large admixture of myth; that is, by assuming that behind the sometimes accurate, sometimes erroneous, sometimes mythical narrative there is an actual history.

Thus, the first volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT gives us an intelligently Spenglerian view of the near future, and the other three, albeit very sketchily, the life story of a Spenglerian culture. In comparison with most science-fiction novels and series, CITIES IN FLIGHT is a very rich work indeed.

1. Blish’s Twenty-First Century: The Coming of Caesarism

In the first volume, although the term is not used there, MacHinery is a successful practitioner of what Spengler describes as Caesarism [II, 431-35]. Dr. Corsi’s reasons for believing that “scientific method doesn’t work any more”, although not expressed in Spenglerian terms, are thoroughly consistent with Spengler’s discussion of “conclusive” scientific thought [I, 417-28]. The volume also devotes some space to an adventist religious movement, the Believers, which seems to be a product of that “second religiousness” among the masses which Spengler considers an inevitable concomitant of Caesarism [II, 310-11, 435]. Finally, although Helmuth is wrong about the pyramids, he is correctly Spenglerian in regarding giganticism as evidence that a culture is dead [I, 291-95], and his remark on the Martian canali is certainly, on the part of Mr. Blish, a brilliant Spenglerian touch . All in all, then, the first volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT is a thoroughly Spenglerian work.

2. Blish’s Twenty-First Century: Two Cultures or One?

In Blish’s universe “historians generally agree that the fall of the West must be dated no later than the year 2105”. They also agree in regarding the great conflict of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, that between the “West” and the communist alliance (later called the Bureaucratic State), as a conflict between “rival cultures”.

It is true that Spengler distinguished between the Russian soul and the Western:

The death-impulse … for the West is the passion of drive all-ways into infinite space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self till “it” in the man becomes identical with the boundless plain itself …. The idea of a Russian’s being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all, he sees only the horizon. Instead of the vault he sees the down-hang of the heavens—something that somewhere combines with the plain to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system … is spiritually contemptible. [II, 295n]

We find a similar passage in The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits:

Space flight had been a natural, if late, outcome of Western thought patterns, which had always been ambitious for the infinite. The Soviets, however, were opposed so bitterly to the idea that they would not even allow their fiction writers to mention it. Where the West had soared from the rock of earth like a sequoia, the Soviets spread like lichens over the planet, tightening their grip, satisfied to be at the bases of the pillars of sunlight the West had sought to ascend.

If we assume that the time stream of Blish’s universe separates from our own sometime around 1950, we will have no occasion to speak of sputnik. Even so, the question still remains whether the Soviets, or the Bureaucratic State, can be said to belong to a Spenglerian culture distinct from that of the West. In the first place, to say so is to reject Spengler’s view that Peter the Great succeeded in his Westernizing efforts, that Russia is therefore a part of the Western Civilization, and that communism is merely a continuance of Western influence [II, 192-96]. To be sure, Spengler believed that a new culture would be born in Russia in the near future (“to Dostoyevski’s Christianity [as opposed to Tolstoi’s] the next thousand years will belong” [II, 196]), but the Bureaucratic State can hardly be considered an expression of either Dostoyevski’s Christianity in particular or of springtime culture in general. In the second place, Spengler would surely reject the only reason offered by our future historians for considering the cultures distinct: that Russia differs from the West in not having “traditional libertarian political institutions”, for such institutions are neither universal in nor peculiar to the West but are instead the products, in every Spenglerian culture, of the fifth political epoch, Revolution and Napoleonism (see the table that appears with this essay). In predicting that the West will reach Caesarism by 2000, Spengler is predicting the end of such institutions in the West utterly without regard to any external conflict. All this being so, it follows that the great conflict between the “West” and the Soviets is simply a struggle between rival power blocs and that we must therefore regard the victory of the Bureaucratic State as establishing the Final Political Form of the Western Culture.

3. The Life Story of the Earthmanist Culture

The life of the Spenglerian culture begins with the birth of a “myth of the great style” [1, 339]. The new myth develops under two kinds of emphasis: that given it by the nobles and that given it by the priests. In the Western Culture, with its early rivalry between emperor and pope, the opposition between the emphases was very strong. For the Classical Culture the equally strong opposition has been largely obscured by the fact that only the military myth has survived in detail (e.g., in Homer). In the Arabian Culture, where the ruler was ordinarily both emperor and pope, the opposition was of little importance. In the Earthmanist Culture, where again only the military myth—the Vegan War—has survived in any detail, the opposition seems to be of even less importance in that the myth seems to have been overwhelmingly military rather than priestly. Even so, its purpose would seem to be primarily religious in that it has evidently developed as a means of relieving the Earthmen of a great burden of guilt.

The myth makes it appear that a small number of Earthmen were unaccountably able to prevail over a vast and enormously powerful “tyranny” which deserved to be completely destroyed. The fact must surely be that the Vegan Civilization was in the last stages of its Final Political Form with the concomitant “enfeeblement … of the imperial machinery against young peoples eager for spoil, or alien conquerors” [Spengler, I, Table iii; cf. the table with this essay]. Though outnumbered a million to one in total population, the Earthmen may well have been able to muster nearly as many fighting men as the Vegans at any given place and time, and they must have come into interstellar space with superior weapons or tactics or both—and with ferocity such as the Vegans had perhaps never experienced but for which there are precedents aplenty in the history of Earth, itself, the most cogent being perhaps the destruction wrought in Persia and Mesopotamia by the Mongols of Hulagu. And it was not only Vega II that felt the ferocity of the Earthmen, nor only the Vegans: “In 2394 one of the cities … was responsible for the sacking of the new Earth colony on Thor V; this act of ferocity earned for them the nickname of ‘the Mad Dogs,’ but it gradually became a model for dealing with Vegan planets”. In sum, at the close of the Vegan War the Earthmen had to choose whether they would be proud or ashamed of what they had done. Their shame brought about the trial of Admiral Hrunta—the great figure of the hundred-year war, its Agamemnon, its Charlemagne, its Arthur—for genocide; their determination to be proud resulted not only in the establishment of the Hruntan Empire but also in the birth of the Earthmanist Culture.

The attempts of the Bureaucratic State to bring Hrunta to justice culminate in the Battle of BD 40° 4048’, which is said to have been “indecisive”, but which is quite decisive in that it proves the State incapable of controlling more than a very limited volume of space. Since Hrunta’s empire is only “the first of many such gimcrack “empires’ … to spawn on the fringes of Earth’s jurisdiction”, we can put down the year of the Battle, 2464, as marking the beginning of the feudal order. Up to this time such Earthmen as have not been under the direct control of the Bureaucratic State have presumably been organized simply as tribes or war bands, each man acknowledging his military superiors only as temporary leaders and feeling loyalty only to the abstract concept of Earth; but now the temporary becomes apparently permanent, and loyalty finds concrete object in this or that leader or “emperor.”

In 2522 the Bureaucratic State collapses, the new Earth government proclaims a general amnesty, and the “Empty Years” begin; the Earthmanist Culture is thus free to develop in its own way. Admiral Hrunta is poisoned in 3089, and his death is followed by the “rapid Balkanization of the Hruntan Empire, which was never even at its best highly cohesive”; in 3111 Arpad Hrunta is installed as “Emperor of Space.” Here we seem to have the Interregnum which, according to Spengler, occurs in every culture and “forms the boundary between the feudal union and the class state” [II, 375]. Since Hruntanism is a religion as well as a dynastic principle, and since periods of religious reformation coincide with the transition from feudalism to the aristocratic state [II, 386], we are perhaps justified in listing Arpad Hrunta in our table as a religious reformer.

In an aristocratic state the king’s authority depends for its existence on the power of one or another of the aristocratic factions. The “absolute” state emerges when the king allies himself with the bourgeoisie and thus finds strength enough to suppress aristocratic disorder. In Earthmanist society as a whole, Earth is king, the various empires, duchies, and republics are the aristocracy, and the Okie cities are the bourgeoisie. Here the development into absolutism seems to culminate in 3602 with the “reduction” of the Duchy of Gort, the death of Arpad Hrunta, and the “dissolution of the Empire,” all brought about by the “recrudescent Earth police”, for we now have a galactic society in which the Earth police keep the spacelanes clear for Okie commerce. Since the Duchy of Gort represents an extreme form of Hruntanism, and since puritanism is a concomitant of the effort to preserve the aristocratic state [Spengler, II, 386n, 424], we can perhaps list the Duchy as an instance of puritanism.

When aristocratic factionalism has been suppressed, the king and the aristocracy become allies against the rising power of the bourgeoisie, who soon become ripe for revolution, as do the Okies after the “collapse of the germanium standard” in 3900. The gathering of the mayors aboard Buda-Pesht and the March on Earth that follows, even though it results in apparent defeat in the Battle of Earth, can be regarded as the 1789, and the passage of the anti-Okie bill in 3976 as the 1815, of Earthman history.

At this point, so far as the galaxy proper is concerned, the story of the Earthmanist Culture comes to a sudden end, for the Earthman domains are invaded and conquered by a non-human “culture,” the Web of Hercules. Since this is so, we are unable to test our evaluation of the 3900-3976 period against later events. Even so, and even though Mayor Amalfi, the principal hero and leading cultural morphologist of CITIES IN FLIGHT, believes that the Okies have been completely defeated, I can see no reason to believe that the restoration of the Ancien Regime in 3976 would have been any more permanent than it was in 1815.

4. The Triumph of Time over Space

Following the Battle of Earth, New York moves from the galaxy proper to the Greater Magellanic Cloud. The military and political events that ensue upon its arrival there are perhaps, and the philosophy of Stochasticism is certainly, consistent with the beginning of the Period of Contending States. Here the beginning is all that we can know anything about, for once again history is cut short—this time by the “totally universal physical cataclysm” of the year 4004.

The fourth volume of CITIES IN FLIGHT in its U.S. edition bears the title The Triumph of Time. Since the principal theme here is not especially Spenglerian, my purpose is simply to note that this title, and indeed the story itself, could have been inspired, whether or not it was, by a passage on Spengler’s final page:

Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man—a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes. [II, 507]