James Blish - Cities in Flight

That was unknowable. But the unknowable was what he wanted. He brought his hand down again.

There was no reason to delay. Retma had already pronounced the epitaph for Man: We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.

“So be it,” Amalfi said. He touched the button over his heart.

Creation began.

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]