The myth of unstoppable momentum

‘Life is just one damned thing after another!’
Lilian Bell (1909) The Concentrations of Bee, L. C. Page, p. 241.

This session explores how ancient Roman concepts of historical momentum went through a significant change after Julius Caesar, and how his crossing of the Rubicon created a template for history subject to punctuation and transformation at points of no return. From a Roman perspective, however, this was not in conflict with a teleological model. For ancient Romans, identity was deeply entangled with a sense of fated or inevitable connection to their particular environment. Their fortunes were in some sense inextricably linked. Just as the animating force of the goddess Natura pursued a course beyond human understanding, it was for Romans to enjoy their special relationship with the environment that this made possible, and to delight in the best of all possible territories, Italy, in which they had their home. Italy was theirs by prophetic decree. What could change such a destiny? (well, a rapacious approach to natural materials, for example... deforestation! Think about how Rome's empire is always recounted as a story of over-expansion, too much, luxury, excess — leading to an inevitable 'fall' — Edward Gibbon is at least partly responsible for ensuring this trope in the contemporary anglophone imagination; you can start read vol.1 of his massive work here, if you want to follow up!).

Sometimes, it seems as if one thing just happens after another; change is the only constant. Everything is subject to the flow of time, an unstoppable and irreversible momentum narrativized in the writing and study of history, organizationally recollected as a story. From one moment to the next the sum of (history + now) produces meaning for the murky complexity that connects the deep, to recent pasts, the now, and an expected future. Rarely does anyone find and take by the scruff of their necks events understood in that instant as turning points. How would one know? Would the knowledge crush those who understood its implications? The inevitable force of paradigmatic choices only emerges when somebody tells the story, and from the mess and chaos of events in the ‘now’, finds a trope and shapes a story.

And yet, and yet—to deny temporal succession, to deny the ego, to deny the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret assuagements. Our destiny…is not horrible because of its unreality; it is horrible because it is irreversible and iron bound. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges.
Borges, Jose Luis. 1944-1946. ‘A New Refutation of Time’. In On Mysticism, ed. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 75. Translation of ‘Nueva Refutación de Tiempo’ reprinted from Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions, trans. by Suzanne Levine and Eliot Weinberger.

Trying to find ways of knowing and grasping turning points before they become fixed is, of course, one of the aims of students and theorists of history (historiographers), and one way to do this is to write and study history as a learning resource from which society can draw examples and understand how to do better (see Historic recurrenceLinks to an external site.). A powerful way of learning is to draw on paradigms; equipped in this way, whatever the situation one faces, a template to compare and adapt springs to mind. This was an approach familiar to ancient historians in Greece and Rome, and in their understanding of the past as a treasury of examples they built the foundations of western historical understanding – for ancient Romans in particular, each new year’s acknowledgement of the two-faced god Janus was accompanied by a process of looking backwards in order to move forwards. This rationale is one compelling reason why historical events are worked into stories rather than only presented as lists of data.

History, in this model, has a plot (beginning, middle, end), characters, subordinate contradictions, and internal arcs and tropes.

Our choice of fictional trope – Caesar at the River Rubicon, Rome’s river of no return – leans on the metaphorical resonances of rivers in philosophy, geology, geography. Rivers do not flow uphill, they seek sea-level equilibrium, but they are ambiguous entities.

My girl says she’d rather marry no one but me,
not if Jupiter himself were to ask her.
She says: but what a girl says to her eager lover,
should be written on the wind and in running water.
Catullus, Poem 70 [https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Catullus.phpLinks to an external site.]

They have a course (the riverbed), but it does not necessarily remain the same. They are water, in motion toward sea level, but susceptible to diversions and detours (including pauses as lakes). Their waters remain the same neither qualitatively nor quantitatively, and sometimes they even change name (temporarily or permanently) as they move through and interact with the landscape. They emerge from underground, and their relationship with atmospheric conditions is existential. In their intimate association with the species of their banks and hinterlands they are clear bellwethers for changing patterns in human and natural behaviours.

In this model, the disturbances visualized at the Rubicon are significant as a trope specifically because Romans were experiencing rapid change (social, territorial, military), and they needed to make sense of it – the environment, where Roman identity was rooted, offered a tempting metaphorical language. The world which emerged from the civil wars of the first century BCE and in which ‘the Rubicon’ became important as a way of understanding exceptional change, was one in which the political power of the traditional governing classes (Patricians or ‘First Fathers’) was diminished. It was their marginalization that made an audience for historical tropes in which human agency was subject to linear time and to cosmic chronological patterns.

[Socrates] Heracleitus says, you know, that all things move and nothing remains still, and he likens the universe to the current of a river, saying that you cannot step twice into the same stream.
Plato, Cratylus 402a [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0059.tlg005.perseus-eng1:402aLinks to an external site.]

The flow towards the sea, each river always the same and different, and ever-renewing, implies a certain environmental continuity through change. When mapped onto the Rubicon, it could help to order a newly chaotic and fracturing environmental understanding.

A very different metaphor, if this was the Caesar/Rubicon (an elderly man, in a toga, stepping tentatively across a shallow, calm stream) that history had to work with! ‘Julius Caesar is crossing the Rubicon’, Alexandre Yakovlev, line drawing. First published in: (1911) Всеобщая исторiя, обработанная ‚Сатирикономъ‘ [The General History Edited by Satyricon], Saint Petersburg: Изданiе М.Г. Корнфельда

Potentially the Rubicon trope opens up metaphorical possibilities for each individual to roll the dice, to roll the dice again, each time different and the same; to define their own turning points, to take centre stage in a drama of their own making, but also to relate their decisive acts to wider forces within which they (and we) do have some power to participate. Each of these moments can be done over, but no do-over ever returns the participants to the same starting (or finishing) position. Each Rubicon, each environmental feature, each ecosystem is the same and different each time. There is neither a reason to seek a return to any particular earlier state of perfection, nor to give up in despair, nor to look solely to human ingenuity to future-proof against imagined rivers of no return.

So where do we go from here? Maybe humans won’t escape a massive catastrophe such as a pandemic, a planet/meteorite crash, or more super volcanoes, even things that we can only imagine ...

Or maybe we will take the proper steps to slow down climate change (The fastest wat to slow climate change nowLinks to an external site.) and control human populations. Whether we as humans transform the river or not, nature will always find its way. So, we better join it.

C & EC Part 3 Reading

Borges, Jose Luis. ‘Arte Poética’ (The Art of Poetry’)

Lucan, Bellum Civile 1.67-97; 1.183-227

Harper, Kyle. 2016. ‘The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire’. Daedalus 145 (2): 101–11. https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00380Links to an external site..
Hughes, J. Donald. 2004. ‘Social Structure and Environmental Impact in the Roman Empire’. Capitalism Nature Socialism 15 (3): 29–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/1045575042000247220Links to an external site..
McCormick, Michael, Ulf Büntgen, Mark A. Cane, Edward R. Cook, Kyle Harper, Peter Huybers, Thomas Litt, et al. 2012. ‘Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence’. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43 (2): 169–220. https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_a_00379Links to an external site..
Marx, Werner, Robin Haunschild, and Lutz Bornmann. 2018. ‘Climate and the Decline and Fall of the Western Roman Empire: A Bibliometric View on an Interdisciplinary Approach to Answer a Most Classic Historical Question’. Climate 6 (4): 90. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli6040090Links to an external site..
Van Hoorn, Sjoerd. 2021. ‘Everything Flows, or Does It? Heraclitus on Everything’. Antigone Journal. https://antigonejournal.com/2021/11/heraclitus-everything-flows/Links to an external site.

What other options are there? Think about e.g.

Degrowth

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-xLinks to an external site.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/what-is-degrowth-economics-climate-change/Links to an external site.
https://ehne.fr/en/node/12253Links to an external site.
https://degrowth.info/en/degrowthLinks to an external site.

Links to an external site.