We have reached a period in man’s history rather less than five thousand
years after the life of Newton. In this chapter we must cover about one
hundred and fifteen thousand years, and in the next chapter another ten
million years. That will bring us to a point as remotely future from the
First World State as the earliest anthropoids were remotely past. During
the first tenth of the first million years after the fall of the World
State, during a hundred thousand years, man remained in complete
eclipse. Not till the close of this span, which we will call the First
Dark Age, did he struggle once more from savagery through barbarism into
civilization. And then his renaissance was relatively brief. From its
earliest beginnings to its end, it covered only fifteen thousand years;
and in its final agony the planet was so seriously damaged that mind lay
henceforth in deep slumber for ten more millions of years. This was the
Second Dark Age. Such is the field which we must observe in this and the
following chapter.
It might have been expected that, after the downfall of the First World
State, recovery would have occurred within a few generations. Historians
have, indeed, often puzzled over the cause of this surprisingly complete
and lasting degradation. Innate human nature was roughly the same
immediately after as immediately before the crisis; yet minds that had
easily maintained a world-civilization in being, proved quite incapable
of building a new order on the ruins of the old. Far from recovering,
man’s estate rapidly deteriorated till it had sunk into abject savagery.
Many causes contributed to this result, some relatively superficial and
temporary, some profound and lasting. It is as though Fate, directing
events toward an allotted end, had availed herself of many diverse
instruments, none of which would have sufficed alone, though all worked
together irresistibly in the same sense. The immediate cause of the
helplessness of the race during the actual crisis of the World State was
of course the vast epidemic of insanity and still more widespread
deterioration of intelligence, which resulted from the use of microbes.
This momentary seizure made it impossible for man to check his downfall
during its earliest and least unmanageable stage. Later, when the
epidemic was spent, even though civilization was already in ruins, a
concerted effort of devotion might yet have rebuilt it on a more modest
plan. But among the First Men only a minority had ever been capable of
wholehearted devotion. The great majority were by nature too much
obsessed by private impulses. And in this black period, such was the
depth of disillusion and fatigue that even normal resolution was
impossible. Not only man’s social structure but the structure of the
universe itself, it seemed, had failed. The only reaction was supine
despair. Four thousand years of routine had deprived human nature of all
its suppleness. To expect these beings to refashion their whole
behaviour, were scarcely less unreasonable than to expect ants, when
their nest was flooded, to assume the habits of water beetles.
But a far more profound and lasting cause doomed the First Men to lie
prone for a long while, once they had fallen. A subtle physiological
change, which it is tempting to call ‘general senescence of the
species’, was undermining the human body and mind. The chemical
equilibrium of each individual was becoming more unstable, so that,
little by little, man’s unique gift of prolonged youth was being lost.
Far more rapidly than of old, his tissues failed to compensate for the
wear and tear of living. This disaster was by no means inevitable; but
it was brought on by influences peculiar to the make-up of the species,
and aggravated artificially. For during some thousands of years man had
been living at too high a pressure in a biologically unnatural
environment, and had found no means of compensating his nature for the
strain thus put upon it.
Conceive, then, that after the fall of the First World State, the
generations slid rapidly through dusk into night. To inhabit those
centuries was to live in the conviction of universal decay, and under
the legend of a mighty past. The population was derived almost wholly
from the agriculturists of the old order, and since agriculture had been
considered a sluggish and base occupation, fit only for sluggish
natures, the planet was now peopled with yokels. Deprived of power,
machinery, and chemical fertilizers, these bumpkins were hard put to it
to keep themselves alive. And indeed only a tenth of their number
survived the great disaster. The second generation knew civilization
only as a legend. Their days were filled with ceaseless tillage, and in
banding together to fight marauders. Women became once more sexual and
domestic chattels. The family, or tribe of families, became the largest
social whole. Endless brawls and feuds sprang up between valley and
valley, and between the tillers and the brigand swarms. Small military
tyrants rose and fell; but no permanent unity of control could be
maintained over a wide region. There was no surplus wealth to spend on
such luxuries as governments and trained armies.
Thus without appreciable change the millennia dragged on in squalid
drudgery. For these latter-day barbarians were hampered by living in a
used planet. Not only were coal and oil no more, but almost no mineral
wealth of any kind remained within reach of their feeble instruments and
wits. In particular the minor metals, needed for so many of the
multifarious activities of developed material civilization, had long ago
disappeared from the more accessible depths of the earth’s crust.
Tillage moreover was hampered by the fact that iron itself, which was no
longer to be had without mechanical mining, was now inaccessible. Men
had been forced to resort once more to stone implements, as their first
human ancestors had done. But they lacked both the skill and the
persistence of the ancients. Not for them the delicate flaking of the
Paleoliths nor the smooth symmetry of the Neoliths. Their tools were but
broken pebbles, chipped improvements upon natural stones. On almost
every one they engraved the same pathetic symbol, the Swastika or cross,
which had been used by the First Men as a sacred emblem throughout their
existence, though with varying significance. In this instance it had
originally been the figure of an aeroplane diving to destruction, and
had been used by the rebels to symbolize the downfall of Gordelpus and
the State. But subsequent generations reinterpreted the emblem as the
sign manual of a divine ancestor, and as a memento of the golden age
from which they were destined to decline for ever, or until the gods
should intervene. Almost one might say that in its persistent use of
this symbol the first human species unwittingly epitomized its own dual
and self-thwarting nature.
The idea of irresistible decay obsessed the race at this time. The
generation which brought about the downfall of the World State oppressed
its juniors with stories of past amenities and marvels, and hugged to
itself the knowledge that the young men had not the wit to rebuild such
complexity. Generation by generation, as the circumstances of actual
life became more squalid, the legend of past glory became more
extravagant. The whole mass of scientific knowledge was rapidly lost,
save for a few shreds which were of practical service even in savage
life. Fragments of the old culture were indeed preserved in the tangle
of folk lore that meshed the globe, but they were distorted beyond
recognition. Thus there was a widespread belief that the world had begun
as fire, and that life had evolved out of the fire. After the apes had
appeared, evolution ceased (so it was said), until divine spirits came
down and possessed the female apes, thereby generating human beings.
Thus had arisen the golden age of the divine ancestors. But
unfortunately after a while the beast in man had triumphed over the god,
so that progress had given place to age-long decay. And indeed decay was
now unavoidable, until such time as the gods should see fit to come down
to cohabit with women and fire the race once more. This faith in the
second coming of the gods persisted here and there throughout the First
Dark Age, and consoled men for their vague conviction of degeneracy.
Even at the close of the First Dark Age the ruins of the ancient
residential pylons still characterized every landscape, often with an
effect of senile domination over the hovels of latter-day savages. For
the living races dwelt beneath these relics like puny grandchildren
playing around the feet of their fathers’ once mightier fathers. So well
had the past built, and with such durable materials, that even after a
hundred millennia the ruins were still recognizably artifacts. Though
for the most part they were of course by now little more than pyramids
of debris overgrown with grass and brushwood, most of them retained some
stretch of standing wall, and here and there a favoured specimen still
reared from its rubble-encumbered base a hundred foot or so of cliff,
punctured with windows. Fantastic legends now clustered round these
relics. In one myth the men of old had made for themselves huge palaces
which could fly. For a thousand years (an aeon to these savages) men had
dwelt in unity, and in reverence of the gods; but at last they had
become puffed up with their own glory, and had undertaken to fly to the
sun and moon and the field of stars, to oust the gods from their bright
home. But the gods sowed discord among them, so that they fell
a-fighting one another in the upper air, and their swift palaces crashed
down to the earth in thousands, to be monuments of man’s folly for ever
after. In yet another saga it was the men themselves who were winged.
They inhabited dovecots of masonry, with summits overtopping the stars
and outraging the gods; who therefore destroyed them. Thus in one form
or another, this theme of the downfall of the mighty fliers of old
tyrannized over these abject peoples. Their crude tillage, their
hunting, their defence against the reviving carnivora, were hampered at
every turn by fear of offending the gods by any innovation.