Literacy and civilization

Axial high culture

Harry Redner is the author of a major series of works on social philosophy and social theory. The scale, scope, and standard of these books stand out. Their themes encompass science and philosophy, capitalism and technology, ethics and literacy, enlightenment and evil, and totalitarianism and modernity. The range and depth of Redner’s works are impressive – as is the focus and discipline that he has applied to the undenary books he has written since 1986. ¹ Most of these, notably, were produced after he retired from Monash University as Reader in 1996. He was an early refugee from the horrors of the post-modern university, with its rampant crass bureaucracies, infantile ideological posturing and decimation of reading. Being repelled by the decline of the universities is a more than fitting beginning-point to understand the larger enveloping decline of Western civilization in the past century. What has happened in the universities is a microcosm of what has occurred on a grander scale to the West. It was assailed by a bulging intrusive administrative state and battered by various totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies and multiple strains of democratic despotism. The result was a serious erosion of its wherewithal. Its capacity did not disappear. Far from it. Nonetheless it has struggled against burgeoning currents of bureaucracy, ideology, and self-serving short-sighted institutional piety.

One of the signs of civilizational fraying has been the decline of high literacy in Western societies in the last century. Few social theorists have paid much attention to the role of elevated literacy in the upkeep of civilization. Harry Redner is a stand-out exception. He takes as his yardstick the ancient Axial Age (Redner, 2013: 49–78). He observes the deep cognitive shift that occurred between 600 BC and 200 AD. It happened not just because things were written down. The Babylonians, the Phoenicians and others had already employed writing for functional purposes. Today statisticians point to the long-run rise in literacy rates across the world. This also is functional literacy. It is akin to the clay tablets of Babylonian merchants 4000 years ago. It is not high literacy. Functional literacy is required to perform everyday tasks. Most of these are mundane. High literacy has a different, less obvious, more profound role. It facilitates abstract thought. It encourages conceptualization, invention, and imagination.

In the Axial Age, in addition to functional literacy, cultures of the book began to appear. This was a watershed in human history. So much so that the books and ideas it gave birth to still flourish today, two thousand years later. The Axial Age was characterized by a common way of thinking that emerged in parallel locations far apart. As Redner observes, the cultural geography of the Axial Era ranged from the Mediterranean and Black Sea littoral to the Ganges Basin and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers (Redner, 2013: 59). These protean places were distantly linked by Indian Ocean and Silk Road trade routes. In a handful of places, powerful, interesting, mobile, and heterodox forms of thought emerged. Their influence subsequently ranged across vast distances.

Karl Jaspers brought the idea of the Axial Age to prominence (Jaspers, 1953 [1949]). Redner, the political scientist, though, disagrees with Jaspers, the philosopher, on what the defining feature of the Axial Era is (Redner, 2013: 51–2). Jaspers (1953 [1949]: 3) called it ‘the coincidence of opposites’. This type of thought marked the major intellectual systems of the Axial Age. It defined Taoism, the Pre-Socratics, the elegant puzzles of Buddhist thinking, the ‘union of opposites’ of Plato’s Republic, the yin-yang of the Warring States-era Zou Yan (whose works are lost), the Han-era’s Dong Zhongshu Confucianism, Heraclitus’ dynamic identity of opposites (‘wet becomes dry’), and the Stoics’ blending of opposites. It included the Pythagorean idea of proportions that transform discord into concord, Aristotelian ratios that equate incommensurable qualities and quantities, the coincidentia oppositorum of Jewish mysticism, and the enigmatic nature of the biblical Jesus – the mortal son of a God whose two natures (human and divine) coalesce in a hypostatic union of one person. ² The distinctive axial way of thinking created what we know as intellectual thought. Each of its contributory systems supposed a complementarity of opposites. Central to each were paradoxical monistic-dichotomies: singular-dualities or enantiodromia. These gave the classic works of civilization their inexhaustible nature.

In contrast to Jaspers, Redner emphasizes ethics, literacy and political empire as the defining characteristics of the Axial Age (Redner, 2013: 52, 67–8). Each of these were important phenomena. Both ethics and empire underlined the way in which politics and society stopped being local and kin-based in nature. In the Mediterranean zone, tribes mutated into cities filled with strangers, and these city-states evolved into federations or empires. The clan became the polis; and the polis, the imperial cosmopolis. In China, local nobilities transformed themselves into kingdoms; and kingdoms developed into large dynastic empires. The key to the large political unit was what Redner calls ethics: behavioural norms not tied to a specific locality. These travel easily across space (Redner, 2013: 51–2, 55–8, 72; 2001: 42–8). Confucianism and Taoism propagated ethical outlooks of this kind in Axial Age China as the Quin (Ch’in) and later Han dynasties established themselves. Ethical philosophies (some religious, others not) were the fruit of the culture of the book.

This culture had many profound implications, one of which was the figure of ‘the author’ (Plato and Aristotle, Lao Tzu and Confucius). The author was the basis of ‘authority’. Authority emerged as a complementarity of power. Philosophers and sages could not command power. Instead authority was a counter-balance to power. It was a restraint on it but also an inducement for it to do better. Inevitably authority had its enemies. Prominent among them in China was Legalism, an administrative-power credo that viewed books as a waste of time and recommended that they be burnt. Authority would often fall foul of power. At the same time, in imperial courts that ranged from the Hellenistic era’s Alexander to the Han Emperor Zhang, power without its opposite (authority) looked tawdry and lacked the kind of constructive dynamism that only the subtle interweaving of contraries could furnish.

While Redner’s matrix (the mix of ethics, empire and literacy) is critical to an understanding of the Axial Age, two other things are also crucial. One is the metaphysical complementarity of opposites. The second is geography. Axial Age societies were concentrated in two places: the Mediterranean and maritime Asia. True enough, as Redner notes, Buddhism began in the Ganges Basin. But it quickly exported itself to maritime South-East Asia and maritime East Asia. What’s notable about this is its continuity across time and space. Buddhism today is concentrated in two regions. One in Thailand, Cambodia, Burma and Laos, and (adjacent to these) South-Western China. The second in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and China’s coastal Fujian and Zhejiang provinces near Taiwan. Taoism’s heartland is the southern Chinese provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, and Guizhou bound by the Pearl (Zhujiang) River system together with Hunan province, which is an appendage of the Yangtze River system. Confucianism is most densely represented in the northern Chinese provinces that surround Bohai Bay and on the nearby Korean peninsula.

The word ‘civilization’ has a variety of meanings. Usually though it suggests a combination of material and spiritual potency. It conjures images of money and buildings but also, together with these, images of things that are graceful, beautiful, numinous and mysterious. ³ Like thought itself, it is a non-dichotomous yin-yang, a synthesis of opposites, material and spiritual simultaneously. This kind of synthesis is rare. Yet it exists and, when it does, it rouses great energies in no small part because of its uncanny nature. The relative rarity of civilization in the strong sense means that it concentrates in specific places while its influence radiates far beyond these locations. Whatever its reach, its core is spatially limited. That is, we do not find ‘civilization’ everywhere. Arnold Toynbee’s 19 world civilizations is an untenable exaggeration (Toynbee, 1934–61). This is because what makes a civilization ‘civilizational’ – namely, its paradoxical nature – is not to be found in Toynbee’s Minoan, Indic, Islamic, Egyptian, Hittite, and Andean societies, or at least only in marginal esoteric forms of these such as Tantric Hinduism or Sufi Islam. The exceptions only prove the rule. Atypical weaving, loom-patterned kinds of Hinduism, such as Kashmir Shaivism, clasp the neat paradox of Bhedābheda, ‘with differentiation and without differentiation’. A Sufi can drolly speculate ‘who knows whether we go to heaven after we die. We can make sure, through our own efforts that we will be in heaven when we are alive’ (Kahn, 2016: 137). In contrast the dominant legalist Sharia Islam admits no such wryness. Quite the contrary.

Redner argues that the defining constituents of modern life – industrial capitalism, the legal-rational state, and technological science along with mega-urbanism – are also not a civilization. They are global in reach. They constitute a world system. There are large numbers of world-system advocates. Employed by transnational institutions, they endlessly lobby for a global administrative legalism. The aim of such advocacy is to embed highly institutionalized, administered forms of capitalism, state action, and technology across the world. At the other end of the spectrum are the many societies that have adopted their own forms of capitalism, industrialism and legal-rationalism in the past two centuries. Some of these states failed, sometimes miserably. Others proved to be proficient. They raised themselves out of absolute misery and poverty, and secured respectable standards of living for their populations. This is a major historical achievement. Yet modernity of this kind still falls significantly short of the bench-mark of civilization.

In modernity, Redner argues, the forces of civilization (high literacy and virtue ethics) have shrunk as modern administrative legalism has spread. Just as China traditionally had the administrative legalism of Han Feizi and his ilk, modernity saw the rise of Max Weber’s iron cage. In the 20th century, administered states, firms, universities, churches, scientific and charitable organizations proliferated. Administrative legalism proved hostile to civilization. Yet worse still was totalitarianism. Where the former was procedurally-rational, the latter was deeply irrational. Its command economics, magical science, and hostility to capitalism proved a disaster. Both legalism and totalitarianism were lethal to book culture. But in different ways. Where legalism leaves books unread, totalitarianism burns books (Redner, 2014: 10). And where legalism disdains books, totalitarianism begins with books. Totalitarianism is the effect of intellectuals on the road to state power. ⁴ Where civilization separates the authority of the author from the power of the state, totalitarianism is the bid by power-obsessed intellectuals to become state leaders. Intellectuals in power are terrible. They think they can shape societies as if they were scribbling a page of a book. The result: millions die because of cruel intellectual fantasies.

The final modern enemy of civilization, Redner argues, is colonialism. By colonialism he does not mean the European settler societies of the New World (North America and Australasia) but rather Europe’s colonization of non-European societies. These, he argues, were left with an unfortunate sense of the unsurpassable superiority of Western civilization (Redner, 2014). So when they became independent, they looked to a kind of modernity that was ‘beyond civilization’. It had little or no place for the high culture of books and ideas. These were dispensed with in favour of a mix of capitalism, state action and technology overlaid with, and often subverted by, client, kin and neo-patrimonial norms that fell far short of the efficacy of Axial Age virtue ethics. A significant number of these states failed. They were swamped by chronic violence and prone to broken-down pseudo-modern social forms.

What this suggests is that the full potential of modernity is realized only when it is set in a civilisational framework. This is the outlook of axiomodernity. ⁵ Japan is a case in point. Its own modernity gathered pace in 1860 with the Meiji Restoration. By 1870 Japan had a quarter of Britain’s GDP per capita, a third by 1920. By 1980 it had surpassed the UK. It did this in the same way that Britain had. It mastered the forces of modernity with culture. This was not the culture of the culture industries (the entertainment industries). Rather it was traditional literate high culture. Redner defines civilization as the culture of canonical books and sometimes also as the culture of newspapers (Redner, 2014: xiii–xv, 143, 149, 312; Redner, 2013: 63–78, 110, 268, 335). Both are fair definitions, insofar as a serious newspaper culture diffuses to the general population elliptical summaries of bookish high culture together with the demanding discipline of reading.

We now have had two centuries over which time the modern amalgam of capitalism, state action, and technology has been adopted by countries around the world. Having done so, which countries have stood out? Overwhelming it has been a handful of states with an axial-style high culture. The most materially-successful societies in the industrial age have been North-Western Europe, the settler societies of North America and Australasia, and maritime East Asia. The great contemporary powerhouses of modern maritime East Asia are underpinned by tacit mixtures of Axial-Era Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism along with more recent imports including Presbyterianism and a still-more generic Calvinism. Their achievements are of an axiomodern type. We have even seen the official take-up in China of Alfred North Whitehead’s enantiodromia-flavoured process theology. The cities, provinces and states of contemporary maritime East Asia are well-known for their industry. But they are also great readers. According to the OCED’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 15-year-olds in Japan, ‘Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Guangdong’, Singapore, and Taiwan are among the world’s best readers (OECD PISA reports, 2000–15). Japan and Singapore have very high rates of daily newspaper readership, among the highest in the world (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2002–4). Taiwan is the number two per capita book publisher in the world after the United Kingdom; Korea is number 14. Japan at number 20 is evidently less interested in books than in newspapers. High literacy expresses itself in different ways.

Renaissance America

What about the West? Western civilization begins in 1054 with the schism of the Christian Church between Rome and Constantinople. This was followed by the gradual ‘renaissance’ of classical high culture in the geographic West. This focused initially on Italy. Dante Alighieri’s Comedìa in the 1300s, Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man in the 1400s are landmarks of this. The Italian Renaissance replicated the old geo-cultural focus of the western Axial Age on the Mediterranean. This, though, was relatively short-lived. For by the end of the 1400s the locus of cultural authority had started to move from the Mediterranean to North-Western Europe where a new kind of paradoxical thought began to emerge. There were secular and religious versions of it. These included the ‘learned ignorance’ of Nicholas of Cusa in the 1400s and John Calvin’s ‘matching of contraries’ and his enigmatic merger of worldly and other-worldly outlooks in the 1500s. ⁶ It finds its deepest resonance in England in the 1500s with the parallel development of English Calvinism alongside the paradoxical tradition in English secular literature epitomized by William Shakespeare’s plays and John Donne’s love poetry.

The result of the Renaissance’s contrarian religion and literature was America. It provided the cultural seedbed for the founding of the Virginia Company in 1606 and the Puritan Mayflower settlement of New England in 1620. Underpinning this was the closely-held assumption that truth is paradoxical. This precept of both the secular and devout Renaissance was captured by Nicholas of Cusa when he said: ‘in Thee, who art Love, the lover is not one thing and the loved another…but they are one and the same’ (De visione Dei, XVII). To put this in contemporary social-theoretical terms: God is paradox. ⁷ The energies that this creates lie at the root of civilization. The culture of paradox – and all of the high literary forms it generates, including comedy, tragedy, mystery, philosophy, irony, sardonicism, humour, wit, and double meanings – energizes society. It invigorates, galvanizes, animates and revitalizes it. Paradox is a social tonic. It emboldens and intensifies human endeavour.

Take the case of the Puritan settlers in New England. Moses Coit Tyler described their priorities in his 1878 study A History of American Literature. New England, he said, was not an agricultural community, a manufacturing community, or a trading community (Tyler, 1949 [1878]). First and foremost, it was an ideas community. Tyler argued that no community had ever revered the instruments of learning as much as the New England Calvinists. But that’s not quite right. What the Calvinists were preoccupied with was not institutionalized learning but rather reading. ⁸ This was based on the theological precept of sola scriptura, read it for yourself. What they valued was that their co-religionists read the Bible for themselves. Sola scriptura has enormous constructive implications. It is a kind of do-it-for-yourself enlightenment. Your neighbour may say X, your teacher may say Y, your priest may say Z, but what do you think? Have you read the text for yourself? Did you form your own conclusions based on your own careful reading of the passage or chapter?

Reading the Bible is an example of high literacy, and an important one. As Redner cannily observes, some books of the Bible predate the Axial Age. These assume a pre-axial identity between the name of something and its bearer (Redner, 2013: 25–6). Then as biblical culture matures, the identity of word and thing is severed in favour of the similitude or likeness of things. God departs the world. There are no longer kings who are (literally) divine. As G.K. Chesterton concluded, the absent God, the transcendental God, is paradox (Murphy, 2016). Understood in Redner’s terms, this transcendent state of paradoxy is mimicked by human beings. From Moses’ encounter with the burning bush that fire fails to consume to Luke’s ‘what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses his very self?’ to the anti-legalism of Paul’s admonition that ‘the letter [of the law] kills, but the Spirit gives life’ – each of these are earthly analogues of the transcendental state of paradoxy. ⁹

Accordingly one explanation of declining book culture is secularization. Religions, Redner comments, maintain elementary standards of high literacy (Redner, 2013: 267). For many people ‘it is their only real contact with books’. When that disappears, it is not necessarily replaced. As Allan Bloom put it: ‘the Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of a potential believer, it will remain unfurnished’ (Bloom, 1987: 60). The Bible demands concentrated reading and thinking because of its paradoxical core. It is unsurprising then that, six years after the Calvinists landed in New England, they began plans for a university college. The institution was named after the businessman John Harvard who donated a library of 400 books to the college in 1638. ¹⁰ As a child, John Calvin’s namesake Calvin Coolidge, America’s 30th president, followed the do-it-yourself reading maxim. Away from home, at the Black River Academy in Ludow, Vermont, the young Coolidge devoted himself to a secularized version of sola scriptura. He read his way through the town’s library (Schlaes, 2013: 26). ¹¹

The virtue of ‘read-it-for-yourself’ distinguishes the greatest of the American presidents. This is especially true of the American Founders who created a remarkable political order. Theirs was a prodigious creative ingenuity fuelled by the vast reading of serious books. Thomas Jefferson had a personal library of 6000 books, John Adams 3000, James Madison 1500 and George Washington 900 (Troy, 2013; Holmquist, 2016). Madison’s library included Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Cicero’s Epistles to Atticus, Bacon’s Essays, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Grotius’ Law of Nature and Nations, Plutarch’s Lives, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws, Locke’s Treatises on Government, Jonathan Edwards’ Nature of True Virtue, and numerous other classics (Holmquist, 2016). A gentleman by the name of Robert Skipwith wrote to Jefferson in 1771 asking for a list of books to start a personal library. Mr. Skipwith probably got more than he bargained for. Jefferson wrote back with a list of 100 recommendations including volumes by Pope, Dryden, Addison, Molière, Smollett, Richardson, Voltaire, Chaucer, Spencer, Swift, Burke, Smith, Johnson, Montesquieu, Locke, Sidney, Steuart, Xenophon, Epictetus, Seneca, Bolingbroke, Hume, Lord Kaim, Blackstone, the Bible, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Caesar, Plutarch, Bayle, as well as histories of France, England, Scotland, and Virginia, and works on electricity, chemistry, gardening, animal husbandry, natural history and surgery (Holmquist, 2015).

Jefferson’s 100 is civilization in a nutshell. Compare it with the recommendations of America’s 44th President, Barack Obama. Obama’s reading focused on novels – some fashionable (Toni Morrison), some modern classics (Melville, Conrad, Steinbeck) – along with presidential biographies (Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR) and contemporary history (Taylor Branch, Evan Osnos) (see e.g. Shepherd, 2017). Obama’s well-read predecessor George W. Bush focused on histories (of the English-speaking peoples, the Mayflower, the Cold War, the 1790s) and biographies (Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Huey Long and LBJ) (Rove, 2008). Two things are shared by Obama and Bush, even though they were diametrically opposed in politics. One is the absence of philosophical works among their reading. Likewise dramaturgical and poetical works are missing. Second, most of the books they read were published in the last half century. ¹²

Between Madison and Obama, the only president who was familiar with philosophical works – in his case the philosophy of limited government (Bastiat, Hazlitt, Friedman, von Mises, and Hayek) – was Ronald Reagan. It is not surprising then that, after the Founders and Lincoln, Reagan is the most important American President. Lincoln, the self-taught president and Calvinist Deist, read ‘hard works’. He absorbed, to remarkable effect, the Old School Presbyterian Bible of his childhood, the poets Burns, Byron, Gray, Pope and Poe, Gibbon’s history, Paine’s Age of Reason, Volney’s allegorical philosophy of history The Ruins, Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy, and Shakespeare. ¹³ Among Lincoln’s favourite lines of verse were from Pope’s Essay on Man: ‘All nature is but art, unknown to thee; / All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; / All discord, harmony not understood…’, a classic statement of Augustan-era complementarity.

Redner concludes, rightly, that today high culture is endangered (Redner, 2013: 50–51, 110; Redner, 2014: xiii, 151). While on average functional literacy world-wide has grown, high literacy on the whole has diminished. This seems to be a sign that contemporary societies are moving stealthily ‘beyond civilization’. The contemporary US presidential preference for ‘soft works’ of narrative – novels, histories and biographies – in preference to ‘hard works’ of philosophy, poetry and dramaturgy is an indicator of a subtle deterioration even amongst the relatively small public of highly-literate readers. Redner’s concerns are borne out by social statistics. In the United States, the most surveyed nation in the world, reading has been declining across the past century (Pew Research Centre, Reading Habits Survey 2011; Kaestle, 1991: Table 6.1, 185–7). In the 1940s, 78 percent of Americans regularly read a newspaper. In 2011 the figure had fallen to 58 percent. Magazine reading has also dropped. In the late 1950s, 65 percent of Americans regularly read magazines. In 2011, it was 48 percent.

On the surface of things book reading has resisted this decline. Twenty-five percent of Americans regularly read books (at least one every month) in the late 1940s. In 2011, 29 percent did. However, that slight increase was not matched in reading hours. In 2003 the average time all Americans 15 years and older spent ‘reading for pleasure’ every day was 0.36 of an hour (21 minutes). ¹⁴ Only one in ten of such readers (2 percent of the adult population) are readers of serious works. Today that principally means works of narrative recollection – histories, biographies and autobiographies. Readers of philosophy, non-historical social science and the major works of literature are scarce. Of the quarter plus of the population that ‘reads for pleasure’, tastes run mainly to genre fiction – thrillers, crime novels, fantasy, science-fiction – and to sports, travel and cook books. This is reading for relaxation and escape. Hardly anyone reads serious works.

Among the 15+ American population in 2003, only 26.5 percent read for pleasure. ¹⁵ This relaxation-literate quarter spent an average of 1.36 hours a day reading. That’s a significant commitment. An hour-and-a-half reading a day is a common-sense way of defining a population with high pleasure-literacy. However, 13 years later, in 2016, the intensive American relaxation-reading cohort had shrunk from a quarter of the population to 19.5 percent. That shrinking fraction though remained dedicated readers. As Americans overall read less, the minority of regular relaxation readers read more, devoting an average of 1.48 hours every day to reading for the joy of reading. ¹⁶ In short, more reading by the few is accompanied by less reading by the many.

Symptomatic is the declining rate of borrowing books from American libraries. From 1856 to 1978, library users borrowed about 15 books per user per year from US public libraries. From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined by about 50 percent (Galbi, 2007). If we compare avocational readers with professional readers, a parallel attrition is noticeable. Take the case of US scientists. Data based on surveys of science faculty at three and later five universities indicates that in the years 1993, 2000–2, and 2005, the numbers of articles read by faculty members in the sciences increased (due to easy electronic access) from 188 to 216 to 280 a year (Tenopir et al., 2009). ¹⁷ Yet the time spent reading those articles fell from 147 hours to 130 hours to 145 hours or 0.4 hours a days. That’s barely a quarter of the reading time that devoted avocational readers spend reading for pleasure. Grave or hard reading is rare.

Does the rarity of high literacy mean a new Dark Ages? No says Redner (2013: 232). It is clear that we are not in a state comparable with late antiquity. In that period monks in thick-walled cloisters and left-over Roman aristocrats in rural villas gathered miscellanies of Rome’s books into private libraries. As they turned inward the faint outline of what were to become the feudal-era monasteries and manors began to take shape. Post-modern attrition is not a ‘decline and fall’. Rather it’s a state of ‘denial and evasion’. It resembles the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ in Hans-Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale. As to those who still read gravely, their labour is not in vain. Far from it. Highly proficient reading and writing are the marks of civilization. Like all aspects of civilization these are gained by hard work. They are not easy to acquire. But having done so they have practical pay-offs. So much so there is a strong correlation between high literacy and social success. Highly-literate persons and groups repeatedly do well economically and socially. A paradox attends this. Their literacy does not derive from their success. Rather their success derives from their literacy.

Take the case of education. In 2000 the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment (PISA) analysed 32 separate factors that might explain the variance, up and down, in student performance (OECD, 2000: Table A2.1). The single largest explanatory factor by far was ‘engagement in reading’. Most of the other big factors were related to reading, including ‘interest in reading’, ‘classical culture in the home’, ‘activities related to classical culture in the home’, and ‘homework’. In some of the countries surveyed ‘parental occupational status’ was also a significant determining factor. Yet it was nowhere near as significant as ‘reading, classical culture and homework’ were. Notably the huge array of institutional factors analysed – including school resources, teaching morale, school autonomy, school selectivity, teacher autonomy, teacher support, teacher shortage and school infrastructure – made little or no difference to learning. Family wealth and home educational resources – like a desk, a quiet study place, dictionaries, and textbooks – also made little difference. Reading combined with ‘classical culture’ (literature, books of poetry and works of art in the home, visiting a museum or art gallery; attending opera, ballet or classical symphony concerts; or watching live theatre) and ‘homework’ explained up to 50 percent of the variance in student performance. All the other factors analysed mostly explained only tiny percentages of the differences in student achievement.

Redner drolly observes how, as the number of years of formal schooling has grown, the quality of public discourse has declined in inverse proportion (Redner, 2013: 335). He cites the historian John Lukacs, who pointed to the paradox that the progress of universal education in America had been accompanied by the decline of culture and literate civilization (Redner, 2014: 146). The reason for this is clear. Class-room education is a poor incentive to read. Yet reading is the most important single reason that explains educational achievement. It is unsurprising then that the size of a family’s home library is as important a predictor of a child’s educational success as is the parent’s level of education (Evans et al., 2010: Table 2). The conclusion of data from surveys across 31 countries is that a family having 500 books at home compared to one book represents a mean gain for a child of 3.2 years of education. That’s the same gain as when parents have 15 years of education compared with 3 years. The effects of all other factors pale by comparison, including a father’s occupation or the GDP of the home country when the child was young. The estimated gain in educational years by having a 500-book home library in 1999 varied internationally from 6.6 years in rural China to 1.6 years in Canada. In the mid-range the gain in Australia was 2.7 years, Sweden 3.6 years, and the Philippines 4.0 (Evans et al., 2010: Table 3). Ten percent of survey respondents in the home library meta-study that this data was drawn from grew up with no books at home. Twenty-three percent had around 10 books, 16 percent about 25 books, and 33 percent around 75 books. Eighteen percent grew up with hundreds of books. The average number was 112 books (Evans et al., 2010: Table 1).

Become your own university

Political life attracts a lot of dull personalities. Amidst all the dreary ones, though, a few sparkle brilliantly. Their achievements tower over their peers. Take two of the most outstanding, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. One from a middle-class family; the other from the aristocracy. Thatcher had a grammar school education she seemed to like; Churchill was sent to boarding schools he hated. Thatcher went to Oxford, Churchill to Sandhurst. Different paths, and yet not so much. For both became accomplished in expressing arresting, sharply contrasting ideas, expressed pithily in parallel form. ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,’ Churchill remarked, ‘the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries’. ‘They’ve got the usual Socialist disease’ Thatcher observed, ‘they’ve run out of other people’s money’. ¹⁸ This style of expression descends from the balanced sentences of English neoclassical culture. Running from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen, this was a key episode of axiomodernity. Its crucible was books. But its droll core spread through epigrams. ‘It is a good thing,’ Churchill argued, ‘for an uneducated man to read books of quotations…The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts.’ ¹⁹ Quips like Thatcher’s ‘pennies don’t fall from heaven, they have to be earned here on earth’ or Churchill’s ‘I see little glory in an Empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers’ are the mark of a civilization because they capture its peculiar wry manner of creating singular high purpose out of the clash of antonyms. ²⁰

Schooling did not develop this talent in the case of Churchill and not, it would seem, in Thatcher’s case either. But both were readers. Thatcher went with her father every week to the local library. ²¹ Churchill developed a serious reading habit during his army posting in India, where he got his mother to send him (among other works) Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Macaulay’s Works, Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, and Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population. ²² Not a bad introduction to the rhythms of civilization. As his son Randolph observed, Churchill ‘became his own university’ (R.S. Churchill, 1966: 334). He also managed to fit his self-education around his regular army duties as well as reporting on a war on the Indian Frontier.

During his time in India Churchill read a remarkable 24,400 pages in 21 months, a rate averaging 38 pages a day. This is vastly more and vastly superior to what most university students today read. The gold standard for US colleges is 22 pages a day (four courses with 40 pages per week required reading). ²³ Yet only a quarter of students enrol in at least one course a semester with that level of reading (Arum and Roksa, 2011: 71). ²⁴ In fact an average university student today would barely read a third of what Churchill did, and in twice the time, and the course reading would be from a single source, a textbook rather than a proper book. ²⁵ In the 1980s Allan Bloom accurately observed that ‘our students have lost the practice of and the taste for reading’, a trend he thought had begun in the 1960s (Bloom, 1987: 62). ²⁶ Redner agrees with Bloom’s dating. America, Redner describes, emerged from the 19th century with very high standards in literature. These were maintained well into the 1960s, after which there was a steady decline. ²⁷ Student dislike of reading is a telling symptom of this (Redner, 2014: 151). By contrast, Churchill in his do-it-yourself university read at a rate comparable to professional readers. Noting that any cohort of self-reporting readers will include fewer non-readers than the general academic population does, a self-reporting survey of 2000 academics in six UK universities found the self-reporters in 2000 reading on average the equivalent of 9 books a month, or around 16 million words on average over 21 months, compared with Churchill’s 10 million words (Tenopir et al., 2012: 130–49). ²⁸

Isn’t it vulgar to speak about word quantity? Why does that matter? Because the sheer volume of reading translates into the kind of intellectual ambidexterity that allows a person to mentally bridge between things that otherwise are set widely apart. This is the speciality of the human imagination. It is why those who are outstandingly successful in business are often big readers. ²⁹ Fred Smith, the founder of the American parcel carrier FedEx, was asked in an interview in 1986 if he were to break it down, what were the components of vision or intuition (Inc., 1986)? He replied that it was mostly ‘the ability to assimilate information from a lot of different disciplines all at once’. This requires a lot of reading. ‘The common trait of people who supposedly have vision’, Smith observed, ‘is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then synthesize it until they come up with an idea.’ Asked how much time each day he spent reading, Smith estimated four hours a day, maybe more.

As to what he read, he replied ‘everything from newspapers to books on management theory and flight theory. I try to keep up with the latest technological developments through journals. And I’m fascinated with the future, whether it be [Alvin] Toffler’s future or [John] Naisbitt’s future.’ And how did this ‘wide-ranging, interdisciplinary reading’ apply to his own company? A good example, he observed, was the logistics problem of tracking at every moment every item the company handled. How could this be done? At first it looked impossible. But he’d been ‘reading some very different types of things about the grocery business and the price performance of computers’ and ‘one thing led to another, and we began to look into using a version of those bar codes that are on the soup cans to give a number in sequence to every package. [Without that idea] it would have been just impossible to take half a billion items every night and deliver them with the reliability that we do.’ That’s where reading will get you.

It is easy enough then to recognize the signs of a deteriorating civilization. It is one whose idea of education focuses not on the essentials of reading and writing but on school resources, school infrastructure, teacher morale, the ability to use computers, teacher-student relations, teacher climate, and so on. The latter are institutional factors, not civilizational ones. Institutionalized school systems think these are important despite clear evidence they are not. Such evidence becomes irrelevant when education is defined in organizational terms and becomes a powerful lobby. Institutional education puts the emphasis on the classroom and its resources and salaries. Meanwhile most of sola scriptura reading is done at home – either for homework or for pleasure. ‘To civilize’ is different from ‘to institutionalize’. Institutionalization brings curricula and instruction and classes along with teacher unions and powerful sector lobbies. But this does not mean more or better reading. Quite the contrary.

The philosopher Agnes Heller once made a distinction between two social spheres. One creates ‘objectivations-for-itself’; the other ‘objectivations in-and-for-itself’ (Heller, 1985: 103–27). The former is the sphere of high culture. It is where philosophy, religion, art and science take place. You can readily identify the persons who create the objects of high culture. They possess what Heller called the ‘rationality of the intellect’. They are good at combining things, synthesizing them, and making a whole out of parts. Such intellects are accomplished at synthetic cognitive acts like paradox, irony, imagination, and wit. Less good at these are the denizens of the other sphere that is made up of legal-rational cultural institutions. Some of these institutions have existed for centuries, like churches and universities. But in the 20th century, along with the ubiquitous managerial society, they grew dramatically (with the exception of the churches). Big science developed along with big universities and big managerial-style arts councils and bodies. The result was toxic for civilization.

The ‘in-and-for-itself’ sphere creates cultural institutions but not serious culture. This is because works of a lasting, deep and interesting nature cannot be generated by institutional procedural-rational means. Cultural institutions focus on allocative procedures and analytic specializations. The more they do, the more bureaucratic and less synthetic they become. Consequently the less imaginative and creative they are. They favour drones who are experts in rules and masters of tiny domains of knowledge. The result is that these institutions do little to encourage the connecting of ideas with ideas. Take one simple example: economics. At its peak in the middle of the 20th century the discipline produced big ideas in big books. John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), and Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960) are good examples. Fifty years later the discipline is dominated by technical papers, some of which are interesting, but none of which provide an illuminating bird-eye’s view of the economic operation of society. The parts do not add up to a whole, and this shows in the lacklustre state of contemporary public policy.

Present-day academia has little interest in the epic scope of human life (or nature) in the way that, say, the American Founders did. The academic claim to expert knowledge is an admission of general ignorance. Contemporary professors know more and more about less and less. And in truth often less and less about less and less. Expertise is used as an excuse not to read widely. The narrowing of the horizon of academics has been accompanied by the proliferation of unlearned academic managers. These are persons who read just enough to scrape together an abject PhD and then advance through the university on basis of their knowledge of the rules of the institution. ³⁰ The management class in universities has ballooned since the 1970s. This mirrors similar developments across government, the public sector and large corporations.

The managerial class sees itself as a ‘knowledge class’ even though it is outstandingly ignorant about the great matters of society, the soul or science. It is boorish in conversation and almost completely devoid of intellectual interests. It is a class of legalists, institutionalists, and procedural devotees who are disdainful of books. Its numerous members are literate in documents and records yet conspicuously illiterate in the classic high culture of the arts and the sciences. It is a class that unconsciously chips away at civilization because it has no clue what it is. Its members publically applaud scholarship and privately despise it. They equate culture with qualifications. What they actually mean by ‘culture’ is status-signalling. Degrees – and the university where a degree is obtained – communicate status. This is a class in love with status. Its members constantly pat each other on the back, confusing office with intellect. The one low-level synthetic capacity that institutional actors have, as Heller pointed out, is the ability to connect one institution with another (Heller, 1985: 121). This is apparent in the obsessive wasteful ‘networking’ typical of managerial organizations, not least transnational ones.

At times Redner suggests that the forces of modernity are responsible for the attrition of civilization (Redner, 2014: 151, 312). It is true that science, capitalism and industrialism have all suffered from the cult of administrative legalism. The managerial class has grown enormously. Yet this is a symptom rather than a cause of civilizational attrition. After all, deep down, science, capitalism and industrialism rely on intellectual paradox and synthetic imagination. Neil Bohr’s ‘principle of complementarity’, Adam Smith’s ‘paradox of value’ and Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ exemplify that. Redner points in this direction when he observes the way that Big Science has pushed aside imagination and intuition, and replaced them with best methods and standard practice (Redner, 2014: 142). Truth has been up-ended by correctness. Redner complains about religious fundamentalism in American life (Redner, 2013: 161, 219, 267). Yet the liberal-progressives who dominate cultural institutions have produced their own fundamentalism. They’ve replaced civilizational imagination with a stifling language of ‘correctness’, ‘appropriateness’ and ‘acceptability’.

Paradoxes have powerful practical effects. For example, modern economies create employment by replacing labour with machines (Murphy, 2017). That’s a paradox, and a potent one, not least for public policy which has to understand and explain the enigma that only by getting rid of labour can we expect a society’s labour force to grow. The readiness to formulate matters in this way has visibly declined in the past century. If legalism is the consequence, what’s the cause? If the paradoxical core of high culture has been run down, the responsibility lies with the mavens of high culture, namely the intellectuals. It’s the intellectuals who mutilated high culture. They did this for several reasons. One was totalitarianism (Redner, 2014: 3–96). Totalitarianism happened because intellectuals, most of them lumpen-intellectuals, wanted to exercise political power. Intellectuals often fantasize about mass social change and the power of the state to effect such change. This turns them into Jacobins. Once in power they end up hounding and killing their opponents mercilessly. Never put intellectuals in power. In contrast, politicians who are not intellectuals but who are well-read tend to be good in politics. Extensive reading encourages them to temper power with authority whereas intellectuals are all-too-ready to use power in depraved ways. Mao Zedong, the author of numerous pitiful philosophical tracts, was responsible for the deaths of some 45 to 60 million people.

Totalitarianism though is not the only culprit that kills culture. Alongside totalitarianism Redner identifies globalization and colonialism as responsible for ‘the destruction of civilization since 1914’ (Redner, 2014: 111–16, 222–8). The role of colonialism in the end seems pretty marginal. Redner draws a sensible distinction between the Roman-style settler colonies that were planted in North America and Australasia and the ideology of imperialism that gripped European powers in the 19th century and had them rushing to assert military and administrative control over large swathes of the African and Eurasian landmasses. It may be true, as Redner suggests, that high culture was unassimilable in these subaltern societies and served more to humiliate than instruct (Redner, 2014). Then again, axial high culture has always been geographically specific. So the imprint of colonialism doesn’t necessarily explain the decline of axiomodernity and the decoupling of axial-style culture from society.

In fact if anything in East Asia, long receptive to axial high culture, the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore actively re-coupled civilizational culture and society. The same, arguably, was also true of the multinational ‘concessions’ in Shanghai. It is true that the contemporary rise of mainland China’s university system is in part a reaction against old national humiliations. But, as Simon Marginson observes, it is also a testament to ‘the commitment to education and scholarship in the Confucian tradition’ (Marginson in Lane, 2017). Even more tellingly China’s contemporary re-rise follows axial patterns. Redner rightly points out that Deng Xiaoping’s unleashing of China’s commercial potential (by creating special economic zones) closely followed the model of the despised 19th-century treaty ports (Redner, 2014: 245). However, both the special economic zones and the earlier treaty ports also closely adhere to a metaphysical geography of coastal and riverine regions where Taoism and Confucianism are concentrated.

Globalization, in the sense that Redner uses it, is the story of the rise of the transnational world-systems class. This class crusades for a form of global legalism through international committees and organizations. Europe’s contribution to this, Redner observes, was to create the European Union (Redner, 2014: 103). The world-systems class plies much the same trade in pedantic procedural rationalism as do the administrative legalists and institutionalists who are influential in national governments, corporations and universities. The cultural style of global elites, a kind of overbearing self-righteous rationalism, is intellectually asphyxiating. Yet the rise of this class is more the result of the erosion of axiomodernity than its ultimate cause. Global legalism was an extension, after the Second World War, of the managerial society that had emerged earlier in the 20th century. Max Weber analysed its procedural rationality in Economy and Society in 1922. The American philosopher James Burnham subsequently described the growing power of the new class of institutionalists in The Managerial Revolution (Burnham, 1941). By the 1960s it was evident that ‘education’ provided this class with legitimacy and status. Yet this did not mean high literacy. Rather it meant university degrees. As time passed, the latter would be achieved with progressively less and less reading or writing.

Progressive versus centripetal America

What Redner does not include along with totalitarianism, colonialism and globalism is progressivism. More than anything, apart from totalitarianism, it is progressivism that has eaten away at high culture in the last century. First emerging in the late 19th century, progressivism is an amalgam of left-leaning liberalism with political romanticism and procedural rationalism. It became the most influential ideology of the American 20th century. Redner has some sympathies for progressivism. He shares for example its romantic animosity towards fossil fuels (Redner, 2013: 147). Yet if there is a single over-riding explanation for the decline of American civilization, it is progressivism. Europe waged war on civilization with its deluge of inter-war totalitarianism. It then continued the process of dispiriting civilization after the Second World War with the creation of a continental-scale world-systems-style globalizing institution, the European Union, run by an aggressive transnational legalist bureaucracy. But in America, it was progressivism above all that drained the blood from American civilization. It did this in two ways. First it abandoned a contrarian culture of axiomodernity for a monoculture. Second it replaced high culture with cultural institutions.

Axial-style culture is antipodal. It readily reduces to epigrams: pithy expressions typified by balanced antitheses. This might be Lao Tzu’s ‘the truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth’, Francis Bacon’s ‘knowledge is power’, or Shakespeare’s ‘sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds’. ³¹ American civilization rose on the basis of brilliant epigrams. These ranged from Jefferson’s ‘were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter’ via Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘there is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact’ to Mark Twain’s ‘he is now fast rising from affluence to poverty’ and William Graham Sumner’s ‘protectionism: the -ism which teaches that waste makes wealth’. ³² Such hard-boiled synopses set the tone for a creedal nation. The American credo did not come from ideologies but rather from pithy, witty, ingenious, aphoristic dicta whose antipodal structure evokes in brief the nature of civilization, a social form that is simultaneously spiritual and material and embodies both change and continuity simultaneously. Such uncanny combinations generate the distinctive energy of a civilization.

The wry aphorisms of an ambidextrous civilization do what Alfred North Whitehead said of creation itself: they transform disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into a concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast (Whitehead, 1985 [1929]: 348). The juxtapositions of permanence and flux, eternity and time, morphology and genesis, continuity and becoming along with those of inside and outside and spirit and matter are combined into dipolar unions. In them ends turn into beginnings and the crime is the same as the punishment. ³³ The power of form and analogy makes, as love does, ‘two not alike, but One’. ³⁴ Love is a paradox as John Donne observed: ‘It cannot bee/Love, till I love her, that loves mee’. ³⁵ A modern commercial republic like the United States is built on a similar paradox. Its business is organized principally by contract rather than allocation. A contractual society is erected on the paradox that ‘I promise the one who promises me’. Civilizational centripetence underwrites this.

Abraham Lincoln was a master of centripetal thought (Wills, 1992: 55, 58). These are oppositions that are so structured as to gravitate towards a centre or axis. Characteristically he dedicated the Civil War battleground of Gettysburg ‘for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live’. He thought that ‘the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget’ what the fallen had done. In such couplings things far apart unite – like the older Chloe and the younger William Cartwright. In his English Renaissance poem, her years ‘backward run, till they meet mine,/ That perfect likeness, which endears/ Things unto things, might us Combine?/ Our ages so in date agree,/ That twins do differ more than we.’ ³⁶ In a parallel manner Lincoln’s contemporary Emerson repurposed the centripetence of Europe’s Renaissance and antiquity’s Axial Age into an American civilizational idiom. ³⁷

Arguing against Karl Jaspers, Harry Redner insists that such metaphysics is a secondary aspect of civilization (Redner, 2013: 52). Literacy, non-tribal ethics and large-scale political units are primary. Europe’s Renaissance crossed the ocean and was reborn as a ‘local’ culture in Redner’s sense – non-homogenized, non-standardized, with a distinctive American lilt. Yet what made that possible was not just that Emerson or his peers were practitioners of Redner’s book culture. But also, just as crucially, this high culture was rooted in the Renaissance and the Axial Age. Its sources included in Emerson’s case the Hindu Bhagavad Gita with its ‘pairs of opposites’. The metaphysics of axial culture is the high-culture version of everyday aphorisms and wit. The commonplace of axial metaphysics is that dualities such as heat and cold or happiness and distress exist yet they are an ‘illusion’ in the sense that these systemic contrasts form nondual complementarities as do jokes and adages. Simply put, they compress oppositions into unions. A similar point was made by William James who was sceptical of cognitive philosophies that severed subject and object or that split consciousness from the objects of consciousness. James argued that human ‘experience’ instead was ‘pure’ or nondual. ³⁸ In the same axial spirit, in a land devoted to the pursuit of happiness, he also thought that ‘we don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh’. ³⁹ Mark Twain might well have agreed.

America developed as an epigrammatic or creedal nation. It did so steadily until the 1920s. Its sense of nationhood was underpinned by an aphoristic, metaphysical, non-dualistic and often comic sense of civilization. Then a shift occurred. The shift was in part pioneered in high culture. Notably so in the philosophical work of John Dewey, who spelled out a progressive view of the world. Civilization has a distinct semantic structure. It generates meaning by amalgamating contrary terms. It does this through the media of form and analogy. The result might be described as a kind of integrated parallelism. The drive of axial civilization is to create symmetrical reciprocities between parallel forces and qualities. ⁴⁰ Dewey’s imprint, notably in his work of the 1920s, was to replace civilizational parallelism with liberal progressivism. His explicit foe in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) was the Greek philosophy of the Axial Age.

Dewey was sensitive to the fact that both world and mind are permeated by oppositions. The precarious, the novel and the irregular are counter-posed to the settled, assured and uniform. However, he dismissed the axial impulse to mediate and unify these. Experience, to his mind, meant completing a course of action rather than integrating polarities. Axial-type civilization seeks to fuse dynamism and permanency via symmetries, proportions, and ratios, and can articulate the tragic, comic, ironic, analogic, metaphoric, and paradoxical relations between ontological oppositions. The progressive personality instead opts for one side against the other. It backs flux and change in preference to permanence and stability. It prefers disequilibrium to equilibrium. It chooses infinity over finality, dissatisfaction before satisfaction, and agitation rather than stillness or restfulness. To know something, Dewey contended, was to induce a change in it. Dewey recanted this in his late work Art as Experience (1934). But by then it was too late. The damage was done.

In practice what did progressivism mean? Primarily the replacement of intellect with institutions. Nowhere is this more graphically illustrated than in Dewey’s promotion of the American classroom. Liberal progressivism had, and has, high-culture advocates. But its main social impact is institutional. ⁴¹ Its worldview is not creedal but rather program-driven. It agitates non-stop for ‘change’, meaning the relentless expansion of state funding of public-sector institutions. How has that worked out? Between 1970 and 2010 real spending on primary and secondary schools in the United States tripled. Student performance in reading, writing, and mathematics remained static over the period. Total US spending per capita on public schools (in constant 2013--14 dollars) was $673 in 1960 and $2137 in 2010. ⁴² The average NAEP 17-year-old reading score in 1971 was 285. ⁴³ In 2008 it was 286. America overspent and under-achieved. The old Yiddish proverb captures the problem: man plans and God laughs. High literacy cannot be attained institutionally. It requires an enormous commitment of student hours spent reading and practising writing. Classrooms eat into this time.

What would a modern society with high literacy look like? The Confucians probably got it right. Set classic (including modern classic) works to read and be examined on. Don’t stint on the works that echo God’s laughter. ⁴⁴ Classrooms might be an adjunct to this but not so as to monopolize student time. ‘Homework’, ‘reading for pleasure at home’ and ‘classic culture at home’ strongly correlate with student achievement. These factors are intellectual. The classroom in contrast is institutional. It is a focus of resource allocation, funding claims, education-sector lobbies, social cooperation and competition, discipline and morale issues, ranking and status, and so on. A century and a half of educational institutionalism, under-scored by educational progressivism, has advanced student performance remarkably little and at an ever-increasing real cost. American civilization in the 20th century proved to be more robust than that of Europe. Yet it still suffered attrition as liberal-progressive legal-rationalism and institutionalism proliferated. As education grew, they grew, and high literacy shrank. A ‘knowledge society’ emerged. Yet this was not a society of book readers or magazine readers or newspaper readers but rather a society of people with degrees. University certification replaced classic high culture. In fact in some cases it was possible to be illiterate and still manage to get a university degree.

The erosion of axial high culture

John Dewey helped set the stage for the decline of axial-style culture with his excoriation of classical Greek philosophy in the 1920s. The next major assault came in the 1970s. It was spear-headed by ‘French theory’, notably the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. French theory crossed the Atlantic and by the 1980s had embedded itself in American campuses. Foucault’s 1966 book The Order of Things sets out a philosophically-flavoured intellectual history. It describes a sequence of knowledge systems, the Renaissance, the Classical era, and the Modern era. The Renaissance is the period in which antipodes are made to resemble each other. The ‘extremity of one’ denotes ‘the beginning of the other’. In the ‘hinge between things a resemblance appears’. Thus things far apart or distant in nature are able to bring to mind each other. That is as good a definition of axial civilization as any. This kind of mimesis, Redner observes, characterized the Axial Age Bible (Redner, 2013: 26). Absent from the world, God was reflected there in similitudes only. The same is repeated in Foucault’s Renaissance where different beings ‘adjust themselves to one another’. The ‘plant communicates with the animal’. The dark-earth is the mirror of the star-sown sky. The world is ‘like’ a chain that holds ‘extremes apart (God and matter)’ and yet brings them together. In a world of similitude, the human face emulates the sky. Through emulation, things can act at a distance. Even across the universe, things are able to imitate each other. The influence of each antipode though is not necessarily evenly matched. Consequently similitude at times can turn into combat. The classic axial answer to antipodal combat was not equality but rather analogy. This was the ‘resemblances of relations’ as when stars stand to the sky as plants to the earth. Equality makes everything the same but analogy mixes sympathy and antipathy, assimilation and distance.

Resemblance is a mix of sameness and difference together. This is what an axial civilization denotes. It is a delicate balance of matter and spirit, large and small, beginning and ending, sky and earth. Foucault describes this well in Chapter 2 of The Order of Things, only then to close the story of the Renaissance and its updated axial culture with the claim that when ‘Classical’ epistemology emerged in the 1600s, similitude became ‘a spent force, outside the realm of knowledge’. That was true for figures like Thomas Hobbes even if they still deployed metaphors (such as the image of the ‘Leviathan’) in their philosophies. Nevertheless, Foucault insisted, by the 17th century the imagination and its drawing of analogies and resemblances had been firmly ‘pushed out to the boundaries of knowledge’. God and matter no longer belonged together, no more than did sunshine and a smiling face. Except that they did. Similitude and analogy may have lost prominence but the larger tradition of coincidentia oppositorum carried on. It did so through Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), Mandeville, Adam Smith, Hegel, Schelling, Coleridge, Emerson, Blake, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Wölfflin, Whitehead, I.A. Richards, Jung, Weil, Eliade, and Koestler. After that though, it more or less stops, or at least an abrupt rupture occurs.

At the end of the 1960s, civilizational complementarity was swamped by a tumultuous wave of political romanticism. This anti-establishment rupture over time turned increasingly in the direction of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘trans-valuation of values’. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche promised that, by hurling the destructive thunder bolt of ‘trans-valuation’, he would ‘send the whole of civilization into convulsions’ (Nietzsche, 1989 [1908]: 324). He was not wrong. Axial-type philosophies suppose that ontological opposites are integrated by form or metaphor. Nietzsche in contrast was obsessed by rank-order. ‘Proportion’, he exclaimed, ‘is foreign to us’ (Nietzsche, 1998 [1886]: 116). Antonyms, he thought, were hierarchically structured. In some cases he wanted to reverse these hierarchies. In particular he wished Christian ‘weakness’ to be overruled by vitalist ‘strength’. As Nietzschean ideas seeped into high culture, the wryness and good humour of axial culture increasingly was replaced by a militant progressivism. It was belligerent not least because it was chasing a phantom. It absorbed Nietzsche’s defective premise that the world was pervasively rank-ordered. Hierarchies were perceived everywhere.

The template for these hierarchies was the master-slave relation. The Nietzschean twist though was that masters were really slaves and slaves were really masters. What followed was a fantasy of turning hierarchies upside down. This evolved far beyond even Nietzsche’s fetid imaginings. ‘Equality’ became a synonym rather than an antonym of ‘hierarchy’. Nietzschean liberalism demanded the reversal of hierarchies. Slaves would become masters. Owners and managers, professors and administrators, men and women, genders and roles, opposite-sexes and same-sexes, coal power and wind power, and on and on, would be up-ended. The result? An illusory ‘equality’ of inverted hallucinatory ‘hierarchies’. This has been pursued with ever-increasing ferocity in direct proportion to its unreality.

Redner observes that Nietzsche’s impact was two-fold (Redner, 2015: 195). He created the self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilism that destroyed Europe in two world wars. Then the revival of Nietzsche in French thought after the Second World War fuelled the cultural putrefaction of post-modern thought. A tragedy unfolded. The new French master philosophers offered works of high culture. These were demanding, often difficult, frequently obtuse. They required from readers intense concentration. So why then did these works represent a rupture? If we accept Redner’s equation of ‘high culture’ and ‘civilization’, the reason for the rupture is opaque. On the other hand if the equation is ‘axial-type high culture’ and ‘civilization’, the reason for the rupture is clear.

Derrida illustrates the matter. Much of his work has a repetitive theme: reversing hierarchical opposites. For him, like Nietzsche, dyadic oppositions are organized in hierarchies. Writing and speaking constitute a hierarchy. Speaking is a high value; writing is a low value. The work of critical theory, and cultural politics more broadly, is to flip the hierarchy, so writing is valued above speaking. This is different from an axial-style high culture that has a multitude of ways of connecting what is far apart, notably form (ratio, proportion, symmetry and balance) and metaphor (similitudes and analogies). This is metaphysics. It is why Nietzsche was hostile to metaphysics (Redner, 2015: 220). It is where the American constitutional balance of powers comes from. As does the symmetrical organization of the three branches of America’s federal government. American civilization is an axial-style civilization. It is not a function of ‘equality and hierarchy’ but of ‘proportionality and poise’. Axial civilization creates a dynamic equilibrium between countervailing powers and qualities. It does not equalize or hierarchize. Rather it offsets things by coupling them.

‘French theory’ thrived in a distinct social context. It paralleled the mass expansion of managerial society after 1970. The preferred media of managers are texts, not books. Bureaucracies forged an opportunistic elective affinity with professors who claimed to have reversed the ‘hierarchy’ of books over texts. Literature, the professors declared, was now simply a ‘text’. It was just like any other committee document (Redner, 2014: 159). This view mirrored the massive post-industrial expansion of state, public-sector, science, arts, religious, and corporate bureaucracies. These ‘organizations’ belonged neither to everyday life nor to high culture. Rather they were something in-between. As Heller put it, these were ambiguous ‘objectivations in-and-for-itself’. ‘In itself’ meant that they operated functionally. They pursued goals, set tasks, organized staff, and economized resources. ‘For itself’ meant that in addition to this functionality they pursued some kind of ‘world view’. Legal-rational bureaucracies and institutions sought legitimacy, and a reason to expand, by signalling their moral superiority. Thus developed myriad organizational ideologies. Universities, corporations, government departments, schools, and hospitals elaborated twee awkward self-serving self-conscious self-images that had them saving the planet, ending poverty, spreading equality, among all manner of self-proclaimed virtues.

Organizational ideologies often borrow words from high culture. This is different from traditional (Chinese) legalism which disdained books. Why then do modern legalist institutions seek intellectual legitimacy? To prove that they are progressive. Their ontology is unidirectional. If we think of civilization as a union of antonyms, then progress is the unidirectional movement towards one polarity and away from the other. Unidirectional motion has a psychological effect. It summons up an overriding sensation of change sweeping the world. A key function of ‘progressive’ loan-words is to elevate the polarities associated with ‘change’ and subordinate polarities associated with ‘persistence’. Nietzschean liberalism added a twist to progressiveness. It translated polarities into hierarchies and promised to invert them. Contemporary ‘progressive’ organizations especially seem to like words that suggest that institutional hierarchies are capable of inverting social hierarchies. The ‘margins’ of society, they fantasize, will rise up above the ‘centre’ of society. This smug egalitarianism is lethal to axial civilization. Civilization in that specific sense is not a hierarchy or an inverted hierarchy (= equality) of antonyms. Rather it is a balance of antonyms. It is not the progress of matter over spirit or spirit over matter or change over continuity or fashionable minorities over unfashionable majorities. Rather it is the dynamic equilibrium of these, produced by ratio and proportion or by analogy and similitude.

Harry Redner is right. Today there is a civilizational problem. High literacy has shrunk in the past century. Adults read less. Students read less. Organizational culture has overtaken high culture. Even the most obscure bits of high culture are liable to be plundered for keywords that in short order become the clichés of organizational ideology. The classics of high culture are inexhaustible. Not so the rhetorical strategies of legalist bureaucrats. But neither the decline in high literacy nor the rise of overbearing organizations and their activist advocates is sufficient in themselves to explain the civilizational impasse that Redner eloquently observes. For civilization is not only a function of high literacy. It is also a semantic structure. That structure is centred on an axial pivot. It operates much like a pendulum. As John Milton put it: ‘There is a Negation, & there is Contrary/The Negation must be destroyed to redeem the Contraries’. William Blake echoed the same sentiment: ‘Negations are not Contraries: Contraries mutually Exist’. The latter do so by virtue of the civilizational arts of ratio and proportion, metaphor and analogy. It is these that permit contraries to mutually exist. But totalitarians and progressives do not. They loath opposition. They prefer negation. For totalitarians, negation is the literal elimination of their opponents. For progressives, negation is the replacement of the intellect with institutions. Civilization in an axial sense negates the negation.