A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century Read Online Free PDF Page B

Now the mercantile order excites the interest of many peoples. It gains strength, and its values grow clearer.
    While the prophets announce disasters to come in Israel, Pericles, uncontested master of Athens in 444 BCE, turns the Hellenic city into a great military, cultural, and economic power. For twenty years, sculpture, poetry, theater, philosophy, and the democratic ideal flourish there — until, in 431, an absurd war against Sparta leads to a victory in 338 by a western neighbor, Philip, king of Macedon. In 404, Sparta wins its war against Athens.
    Universal lesson: when a superpower is attacked by a rival, it is often a third party that carries the day. Another lesson: the conqueror often makes the culture of the conquered his own. One final lesson: power over the world continues to shift westward, even if most of its wealth remains in the East.
    After Philip takes control of the Peloponnese, his son Alexander, pupil of Aristotle, dreams obsessively of India. He reaches the subcontinent in 327, leaving it two years later to die in the Persian capital. His empire then splits into three parts — Greece, Persia, and Egypt — whose splendor continues to flicker on. But Greece has had its day.
    The wealth remains in the East. In India, countless small Aryan kingdoms blossom. In China, starting in 220 BCE and through eleven years of an astounding reign, the emperor Qing Shi Huang unifies the country by constructing a capital city, Xianyang, standardizingwriting and building the Great Wall. He then has himself buried along with four terra-cotta armies. Closer to our own era a new dynasty, the Han, adopts Confucianism, wars against fresh invaders (known as “Xiongnu”), and opens the Silk Road, the first trading link with the Occident.
    To the West, Rome becomes heir to the Greeks without ever truly fighting them. It builds a new empire, the first whose core is in the West. Rome sees itself as an imitation of Athens on a larger scale, even adopting Athens’s religious pantheon and its political system. Having digested the lessons of Athens’s defeat by the Macedonians, and its own humiliation by Brennus’s Gallic warriors, Rome equips itself with a very powerful land army. Soon the city controls all of western Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, and probes into northern Europe and the Balkans. In 170, Antiochus IV plunders the Temple in Jerusalem. In 125 BCE, southern Gaul becomes Roman. The Pax Romana is at its height when (in 44 BCE) a general named Julius Caesar returns in triumph from northern Gaul, brings the Senate of the Republic to its knees, forces the admission of representatives of the conquered lands, attempts to have himself proclaimed emperor, and hunts his rivals as far afield as Egypt, whence he returns to be assassinated. In 27 BCE, his successor Octavius becomes Caesar Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Anxious to avoid any spark of rebellion at Rome’s frontiers, his successors crush the Egyptian revolt and silence every dissident. Among them are a Jerusalem rabbi named Jesus and other rebellious Jews. Rome finally destroysJerusalem and massacres all its Jews yet again. Christianity is born.
    During a first council in Jerusalem in the year 48, Christianity (at first the ally of Rome against the Jews before being caught up in the universal orgy of Roman hatred) transforms the message of Judaism — all men are united in Jesus Christ — and carries it to the pagans. And since the promised Messiah has arrived, the Jewish people (who had announced His arrival) no longer have a reason for existing and must join Christianity. The church will be the new chosen people. Poverty and non-violence will be the only roads to salvation; love is the condition of eternity; creation of wealth is no longer a blessing; progress is no longer of any interest. The Judeo-Greek ideal finds itself seriously compromised.
    There now emerges a degree of common thinking among Christian, Roman, Greek, and Jewish thought