This ambitious project is premised on a long-unfashionable view that history follows philosophically significant patterns. Glyn-Jones bases her account on the work of the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian emigre professor at Harvard University, who in the years before World War II developed a grand thesis about historys stages.
His aim was to understand how civilisations rise, flourish, and fail, and he started from massive empirical research on the social content of the arts in different periods, asking of each such questions as whether its subject matter was religious or secular, whether it portrayed nudity aesthetically or erotically, and whether it promoted values of duty or luxury.
From this Sorokin built a theory of historys stages. First there is the ideational stage marked by belief in unseen powers which demand adherence to a strict morality. Reality lies in their unseen world, not in that of the senses, which foster illusion and sin. In the next, idealist stage the unseen powers are regarded as benign, and the material world as their gift to man, to be enjoyed. The final sensate stage is characterised by belief that the only reality, and therefore the only value, is material.
Societies move from the ideational to the sensate stages, Sorokin argue;, and when they reach the latter, the substitution of material gratification for transcendent morality causes their downfall.
Glyn-Joness aim is to illustrate this thesis by what is in effect a cultural history of the west from classical antiquity to the present. Where Sorokin used painting as a basis for his study. Glyn-Jones uses theatre, the mirror, to nature in Shakespeares phrase, which she takes as corroborating Sorokins views.
A great weakness with Sorokins and Glyn-Joness view is that history in all its pullulating variety cannot be compartmentalised into a few characteristic types. Glyn-Jones half acknowledges this by saying that all three types are present in any epoch. But why should one accept their threefold classification? Why should it apply to whole epochs rather than say, tribes, or countries, or social classes? And even if one grants it, how can one be sure which of the three is driving historical change in its time?
There are few constraints on any generalised typing of an historical period, because there is always evidence to support whatever view you like. Think up a pattern, and history will do its best to fit it, if you are selective enough. Take an example: Sorokin classified paintings of nudes as aesthetic or erotic. No doubt there are some which are more clearly one than the other. But are not many perhaps most both? And is not the degree to which a nude is erotic dependent in large measure on the viewer?
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And again, it is highly disputable that people who think material reality is the only reality are less likely to have clear ideas about right and wrong. Sorokin slides from talk of right and wrong to talk of belief in God, as though there were a natural connection. But there is not; atheists have to think about their moral principles, whereas devotees get theirs off the shelf; and in most religions there is no morality, only casuistry that is, a theory about how to scrape by without violating divine diktat. Glyn-Jones makes the common mistake of equating materialist as one who believes there is only material reality with materialist as one who loves money and pleasure.
Glyn-Jones writes exceedingly well, with happy turns of phrase. Her book is very third hand, based wholly on quotations from others and the British press, but because her writerly skill she has ably stitched together much interesting matter. But, as the book wanders structurelessly through the centuries, the argument lets it down. There is no conclusion, so the nub of the message has to be gleaned as one goes. And the book ends on a thumping contradiction. Glyn-Jones culls the recent press for stories of murder, rape and sordidness as evidence of the decline induced by materialism; and then she reports that ours is an age in which religion is flourishing, especially in fundamentalist versions.
Maybe someone could venture an explanation of this connection, if it is true, for it directly controverts the thesis Glyn-Jones has taken over 600 pages to present.