CHAPTER FOUR
THE LIFE CYCLE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Like its predecessors, western civilization from its inception was essentially competitive. As it developed, the commercially, technically and politically supreme Spanish, Dutch, French and British Empires battled individually, or in rival alliances, for plunder, colonies, markets and raw materials.
From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, to the Victorian Jubilee in 1897, Great Britain became and remained top dog economically, politically and to a large extent culturally. Britain was the workshop. British shipping was omnipresent. The pound sterling was the chief medium of foreign exchange. The British Navy patrolled the seas. English was replacing French as the language of commerce and diplomacy.
During this British Century, from 1815 to 1897, Great Britain was dominant among the European great powers, but it was never supreme. Always there were countervailing forces. For centuries France had been a major factor in the control and direction of European affairs. Defeat at Waterloo reduced but did not destroy French influence. After 1870 Bismark's Germany began playing a major role. Russia, Austria, Holland, Italy and Spain were also European powers. Overseas, the United States of America and Japan were spreading their imperial wings.
With the explosive advances made by science, technology, productivity, income and wealth accumulation, other countries were moving to the fore. Even though Britain maintained her actual levels of economic output and potential diplomatic presence she was one among several relatively equal European states and world empires. At the same time her natural resources were being depleted and with the growing importance of cotton, rubber and petroleum, all of which Britain must import, her economic ascendancy was progressively undermined. During the wars of 1914-18 and 1936-45 Britain entered an era of decreasing relative importance. Her empire was largely intact, but her economic and political strength was stretched to the breaking point.
Throughout its history, until the wars of 1914-45, western civilization had its headquarters in central and west Europe, with branch offices elsewhere on the planet. At no time after 1870 did any one European power occupy a position of easy superiority over its rivals. If Great Britain was top dog, France, the long established continental power was snapping at her heels. Germany was an expanding power of major consequence. To the North and East lay Russia, with its vast territories and its persistent pressures into East Europe and Far Asia. By any standard of political measurement Europe was in no sense a universal state. Literally it was a potential battle field. War fortunes and misfortunes revolutionized the Europe of 1870-1910. They also realigned the planetary power structure. Heavy war losses down-graded all of the erstwhile European powers. Central and West Europe ceased to be the planetary hub. At the same time America and Asia shouldered their way toward the center of the world stage. From London, Paris, Berlin and other European vantage points the 1870-1945 era could be described as a period of world revolution.
For half a century United States money and arms were used to stabilize capitalism. For many years Washington through its control of all Latin American states (except Cuba after 1960) had been able to dominate United Nations policy, exclude socialist nations, notably China, and hem in socialism. Through this period Washington subsidized and armed counter revolution. Its anti-socialist-communist doctrine had been accepted and largely followed by the West.
Washington's drive to cripple and stamp out socialism-communism was accepted and followed particularly by the states with fascist leanings. Since many western states had large and influential socialist minorities and since several of them had been governed by coalitions in which socialists-communists played a substantial role, acceptance of Washington's anti-socialist program never won wholehearted support in Europe. Atlantic alliance countries voted against the admission of People's China to the United Nations during the Dulles Era. The stalemated outcome of the Korean War (1950-3) called Washington anti-socialist policies into serious question. The stupidities, mendacities and wanton cruelties of the United States' undeclared Vietnam War, even before the advent of Johnson and Nixon, had so weakened Washington leadership that no major power would associate itself with the adventure. The "Allies" in Vietnam were the U.S.A. and two or three vassal Asian states.
Half a century of cold war and co-existence punctuated by military invasions and hot wars, fought between groups from both sides in the class struggle, faced mankind with several undeniable facts:
1. Planet-wide economic, political and social changes had been made during the previous half-century.
2. Capitalism was no longer supreme as it had been before 1900. On the contrary, since 1950 the planet has been divided along class lines—capitalism versus socialism.
3. Socialism-communism is one of the most obvious facts of present-day planetary life.
4. Capitalism is losing ground, especially in Europe.
5. Socialism is gaining ground, especially in Eurasia.
Co-existence presupposes recognition of these five propositions and a willingness to abide by the outcome of the evolutionary-revolutionary process, through which the western world is passing.
During several centuries, ending in 1900, western civilization passed through an era of consolidation and integration that brought its sovereign segments into increasing stable relationships. The most advanced of these relationships took political shape in the half-dozen European empires which controlled the planet in 1900. Side by side with the consolidation of the planet into nations and empires there was another process, world-wide in scope, which made the facts and products of science and technology and their duplication the common property of mankind, creating a cultural synthesis far more universal than the political synthesis in nations, empires, the League of Nations or the United Nations.
Any social synthesis includes positive and negative aspects which function side by side. One builds up. The other wears down. For centuries the building forces in western civilization were in the ascendant. Since the turn of the century a shift of forces has been under way. The wearing down forces presently are in the ascendant. Had it been less competitive and more cooperative and co-ordinated, western civilization might have taken another step in advance by extending cultural unification into the political arena. The League of Nations and the United Nations were efforts in this direction. Neither succeeded in breaking down sovereignty far enough to permit planet-wide political federation.
Having failed to co-ordinate and establish a planet-wide authority during the critical years following 1870, western civilization accepted the antithesis of co-ordination and entered a period of fragmentation:
1. During the century and a half from 1815 to the present day, as facilities for co-ordination were multiplied by discovery and invention, Europe remained stubbornly fragmented into more than a score of sovereign states. Minor changes were made in boundary lines and in internal relationships of property and privilege, but the European maps of the period present a record of persistent fragmentation of the continent into strongly frontiered sovereign segments.
2. Break-up of the European empires after two general wars led to the fragmentation of each empire into self-determining sovereign units.
3. The "third world," consisting chiefly of European empire fragments, has not consolidated, but after the Bandung Conference of 1955 has consisted of a fragmented Africa and Asia torn by domestic and inter-state conflicts and harried by the persistent intervention of the western powers.
4. Rivalry in the Pacific and in Asia has been heightened by the meteoric rise of Japan as a world power, the dismemberment of the Japanese Empire after 1945 and the fierce subsequent economic competition between Japan and her planetary competitors, chiefly the United States.
5. United States efforts to coordinate Latin America as a source of raw materials and a market for manufactures and investment capital have not produced a United Latin American front against a common Yankee menace, but a sturdy refusal even of the tiniest Latin American Republic to surrender or limit its sovereignty has pushed a thorn into the vulnerable side of Washington's Monroe Doctrine control of the western hemisphere.
6. The high point in divisiveness was the decision of the United States spokesmen to inaugurate the American Century by establishing control over the Pacific Ocean, making itself the chief power in Asia and installing U.S.A. authority in the power vacuum left by the expulsion of Britain, France, Holland and Japan from the territories composing their former empires. Local wars begun in Korea (1950) and extending across Southeast Asia have strengthened the determination of the local peoples to defend themselves at all costs against imperialist invaders from Europe and North America.
7. The United States has been rich enough since 1945 to build and maintain a navy that can patrol the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea and maintain large military forces in various European and Asian waters. This policy has been justified by the Truman-Johnson-Nixon Doctrine of determined opposition to the extension of socialism-communism and the consequent perpetuation of the cold war.
8. In theory the socialist world is unitary. In practice it is so fragmented by national boundary lines and ideological differences that its members have not been able (during recent years) to get together and discuss their major common problems.
United States wealth and military equipment have been sufficiently over-whelming to support the program of an American Century during which one nation might establish a universal state exercising planet-wide authority along the lines of the Universal State established by the Romans at the zenith of their power. In practice the program has not worked out. On the contrary, opposition to the United States as the world power or even as the power in Asia has grown steadily and quickly into a widespread "Anti-Americanism" or "anti-Yankeeism."
Conceivably a universal anti-American movement might develop a hot war similar to the anti-Hitler coalition of the 1930's. If that precedent is followed, however, the defeat of the United States would be followed by a period of fragmentation similar to or even more intense than the fragmentation of the 1950's and 1960's.
Present efforts to shore up the insolvent U.S.A. economy and the resulting opposition of America's leading European trading partners is not reassuring. If western civilization has passed the zenith of its development and entered a period of decline and fragmentation even a figure of Napoleonic capacities would be sorely pressed to breathe new life into its disintegrating social structure. At the moment, to the best of our knowledge, no such genius is in sight.
Western civilization is in some ways unique. In the main, however, the development of its life cycle has been typical. May we take it for granted that western civilization has turned its corner or may we assume that it is still replete with the possibilities of further maneuver, development and expansion? Perhaps the best way to approach the problem would be to ask three questions: What contribution has western civilization made to human nature, to human society and to mother nature, and what further contribution can it make in the foreseeable future?
Individuals, born or reared in any form of society are adjusted, shaped and conditioned by the social pattern of which they are a part. Each society attempts to stamp the individuals with its own image and likeness. The success or failure of this effort to assure individual adjustment to the social norm and conformity to its practices varies with the prosilitizing enthusiasm of the society and with the ration of adaptability and self-consciousness of its individual members.
Western civilization has produced a bourgeois human being intensively conscious of his capacities and anxious to try himself out in the rough-and-tumble of the market place and on the battlefield; to initiate, undertake, direct, administer. In the main, these are characteristics of the human male, though the female often possesses them in a greater or lesser degree.
Western civilization has opened the doors wide to aspirants eager to win out in the game of grab-and-keep. It has been equally kind to their chief executives, organizers and managers who rank second or third in the chain of command. These individuals come from widely different backgrounds. The social mobility of a bourgeois society gives them opportunity to climb high on the ladder of preferment.
Many of those who fall into line, adapt themselves to the civilizing process, accept with alacrity the chances that come their way, but do not reach the top of the success ladder. They have the health, energy and assertiveness necessary to keep climbing. They accept their assignments and carry them out with modest success. They are the lesser executives who work themselves out by the time they are fifty and find some sinecure or safe position near the top of the social pyramid.
Below the high command posts there is a wide range of handymen and specialists who fill particular positions and place their time, energy, experience and expertise at the disposal of the high command. Among them are scientists, engineers, technicians. Equally important are their spokesmen, advisers and apologists: lawyers, preachers, teachers, writers, speakers, publicists, carefully chosen for their ability to apologize, passify, justify and reassure. On the political side are the diplomats and politicians. Protection for their persons and property is provided by the police and the armed forces, composed of highly paid, well-trained, well-armed destroyers and killers.
Social stability and mass support come from an extensive middle class composed of public servants and body servants, small tradesmen, self-employed craftsmen, rentiers and retired persons who are assured body comforts, social recognition and preferment for themselves, their relatives and dependants. Members of this middle class are recognized on occasion, pampered, amused, diverted, bored, frustrated and eventually corrupted by the soft living which their middle class status makes possible.
Close to the middle class come the white collar workers and the better paid blue collar workers. Their lives are cluttered with gadgets and fringe benefits. Their homes are paid for or bought on credit.
Below these more or less regularly employed workers on salaries and wages come the semi-employed, racial or class underlings living in poverty at or near the subsistence level.
Associated with this range of bourgeois occupations and often closely identified with it are owners of family farms, tenants and hired hands.
Outside of the employment range, but dependent upon the economy are the defectives and delinquents, the parasites who live on cake and the parasites who live out of garbage cans.
Beyond these categories, in the American Empire, there are the colonial compradors and handymen who enjoy standards of living comparable to their opposite members in the North America nucleus. Below them are the colonial masses who live their entire lives under conditions of uncertainty and insecurity.
Millions of young people across the planet, born into the complicated and bewildering social network of western civilization after war's end in 1945 and graduated from school after the onset of the Vietnam War in 1965, find themselves in a complex, frustrating jungle. Should they fit in or drop out? Those who are more conventional and adaptable fit in as best they can, although the recent high unemployment rate among the youth indicates that the adjustment is often difficult. Millions of the less adaptable drop out.
Such a situation could have been foreseen by the initiated. Preparations could have been made in advance to deal with it when it arose. In the absence of adequate preparation the result is the chaos incident to every downturn of the private enterprise business cycle, magnified in this case by the regressive forces released during the disintegration of the entire social fabric.
Two other areas require a word of comment. Among human faculties are ambition, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity. Human beings are, to a greater or lesser degree, cosmically aware. In the physical field western civilization handsomely rewards initiative. In the social field it has been far less generous. Imagination and cosmic consciousness have been quite generally listed among the undesirable endowments of mankind.
Western civilization, in the early years of the present century, produced a generation of insecure, unsettled, anxious, worried, harried people. This is generally true of young, middle aged and old, of rich and poor. Rapid social transition from expansion and advance to contraction and retreat is a traumatic, hectic experience for any human being.
Western civilization in the early years of its decline has not brought out the more generous aspects of human nature. In the best of times a materialistically oriented society appeals to the more material and less spiritual aspects of human beings. A period of social decline leads away from principled conduct toward unashamed opportunism.
The current generation, born and reared in a disintegrating civilization has been sorely tested and tried. From such tests the strong and purposeful are likely to emerge stronger and more determined. For the weak and vacillating the consequences are likely to prove disastrous. The individual born into western society during its current "time of troubles" has not had an easy row to hoe.
What has western civilization done to human society as such?
Western civilization has urbanized its society. Until recently in Europe and until very recently in North America, the majority of people were living outside of cities, in villages or on the land. From their flocks and herds or from their cultivated land they fed themselves and the cities. Mechanization reduced the demand for labor power in the countryside. At the same time the growth of industry, trade, commerce and "services" increased the demand for labor power in the cities. Relatively the countryside was poor while the cities were rich. The high prizes were in the cities, bright lights, crowds and the seductive excitements of seething mass life. Incessant human contacts were part and parcel of city life. City landlords collected high rents, city merchants found many customers. City manufacturers could pick and choose their wage and salary underlings among throngs of young and not so young jobseekers.
Western civilization grew in and around its cities. Both in form and function it was urban rather than rural.
Western civilization specialized its society, mechanized it and later computerized it, making social relationships depend less and less on personality and more on the position of the individual in a working team or on an assembly line. Human beings ceased to have names. Instead they acquired numbers on the payroll, on their homes, on their identity cards.
Specialization and division of labor, plus power-driven machines increase productivity, income, surplus. In the countryside goods and services often are scarce. In the city they are likely to be super-abundant.
Growth of wealth and income provide support for an increase in population. Hence the population explosions in cities and in centers of developing industry, trade and commerce. Countries passing through the industrial revolution expanded their populations. Recently, the population of some countries has doubled each twenty-five years.
Western civilization has been militarized as it was mechanized. Every tool is a potential weapon. The truck becomes a tank, the airplane a bomber. War making, like other aspects of western civilization, was mechanized. Formerly war had pitted man against man. Mechanized war pitted machines and their attendants against other machines and their human attachments. The same mechanical forces that built cities, factories and ships converted these agencies of production into instruments of destruction. Each country in the civilized West fortified its frontiers, trained officers in special schools, mobilized young men and women for military service, stockpiled weapons, multiplied fire-power, making western civilization an armed camp, with guns pointing in every direction.
Regimentation of city life, of industry and commerce, of war, of education and public health followed one after another as the individual human became more and more a cog in a vast social mechanism. This regimentation dulled imagination at the same time that it deified greed, with "gimme, gimme;" "more, more;" as its watch words.
At certain points in its development western civilization has lifted itself temporarily above the material forces that hemmed in the life of primitive man. The Renaissance was one such period. The Enlightenment was another. A third was the scientific breakthrough from Darwin and Marx to the research and experiments which split the atom and inaugurated the space age. These gains were offset by the growing planet-wide chasm between wealth and poverty, the plunder and pollution of man's natural and social environment and the terrifying growth of destructive power revealed during two prolonged general wars in one generation.
Mechanized war demonstrated its destructivity, physically, socially, psychologically. Prolonged war accustomed an entire generation of mankind to unnecessary suffering and the deliberate twisting, maiming and destroying which are characteristic features of the war-waging civilized state.
Exposure of an entire generation to wholesale destruction and mass murder as a way of life had two quite divergent effects. It converted sensitive introverts into pacifists. It produced millions of trained destroyers and killers, experienced in the science and art of mechanized warfare. Pacifists opposed, denounced and resisted the warfare state and its progeny. Masses of trained destroyers and killers, the "new barbarians," gained experience and improved their qualifications by taking part in conventional warfare and in the innumerable guerrilla adventures and operations that accompanied and followed conventional wars.
Previous civilizations have been harried, hectored and undermined by migrating "barbarians" who had heard of accumulated wealth and had come to share or perhaps to take over the "honey-pot" and lick up the honey. Western civilization has faced the problem of migration, intensified by population explosion. But the "barbarians" who are tearing the social body of western civilization limb from limb are not outsiders, invading a civilization in order to plunder and sack it, but the offspring of well-to-do civilized affluent communities who have repudiated the acquisition and accumulation of material goods and services, turning, instead to the satiation of body hungers and the freedom of social irresponsibility.
Western man has spent ten centuries in building a civilization aimed at economic stability and social security for the privileged. The "new barbarian" progeny have rejected this civilization of affluence and are busily engaged in fragmenting the social apparatus that has made affluence possible. In a word, western civilization has organized and coordinated, but in the process it has sowed the seeds of disorganization and chaos.
One last word about the effect of western civilization on human society. The West has littered and cluttered the planet with an immense variety and with enormous quantities of gimmicks and gadgets from tin cans to airplanes that fly faster than sound, and rockets that carry their occupants to the moon. Western productivity has multiplied greatly. Too often it has by-passed utility, ignored quality and outraged beauty. More often than not its goods, services, institutions, practices and ideas have remained at the surface without reaching down to life's essentials.
If life can be fragmented into "physical," "mental," "emotional," "energetic," "spiritual," and "creative" it must be evident that the western way has smothered life's more significant aspects under a blanket of trivialities, non-essentials and inconsequentials.
Western civilization has stressed competition, aimed at the acquisition and accumulation of material goods and services. The competitive struggle, in its civilian and military aspects, has played fast and loose with the contents of nature's storehouse.
Through uncounted ages Mother Nature has set up a knife-edge balance among the multitude of aspects and differentiated forms that have existed and still exist on the planet. Humanity has increasingly upset this balance of nature, ignorantly and often stupidly, without pausing to determine the resultant changes. Nowhere is this upset more in evidence than the changes in climate and animal life and their possibilities of survival brought about by the erosion of topsoil. Paul Sears, in his Deserts on the March, has told the story. It can be summed up in four words: deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, drifting sands.
Another aspect of man's aggressions against nature is the wanton destruction of wildlife—like the American bison and the wood pigeon.
Still another example is the extraction from the earth's crust of minerals and metals accumulated through ages and used to turn out frivolous gadgets or, more disastrously, the materials and machines of civilized warfare. Instead of conserving natural wealth, rationing it and thus extending its use to succeeding generations, western man has burnt it up in the firestorms deliberately kindled during the seven disaster years from 1939 to 1945.
In the course of its existence western civilization has replaced food gatherers, cultivators and artisans by hucksters and professional destroyers of mankind and ravagers of the living space afforded by the earth's land mass.
Western civilization has done its most far-reaching disservice to mankind by separating and estranging man from nature. For ages man lived with nature as one aspect of an evolving ecological balance. Civilization's basic unit—the city—as it sprawls, cuts off man from more and more contacts with the earth and its multitudinous life forms; with fresh air, sunshine, starshine; with nature's sequences—day and night, the procession of the seasons; with the birth, growth, death animating so many of nature's aspects. The city is man-made. Well planned, properly built and organized, it might have become an ornament beautifying and exalting nature. Page the cities of the West one by one—they are monotonous, ungainly, ugly slums and rookeries set off by an occasional bit of creative architecture.
Western civilization has differed in certain respects from the long line of its predecessors, stretching back through the centuries. In one sense it has matured, ripened, taking its ideas and practices from its nearest of kin. In the course of its life cycle it has already made distinctive contributions:
1. It has become more nearly planet-wide than any of its known forerunners.
2. It has developed unique approaches and controls through its science and its technology, inaugurating the power age by making riotous use of nature's energy sources.
3. It has extended man's conquest of the planet and begun his adventures into space.
4. It has enlarged the field of human creativity by increasing the number and proportion of men and women trained and experienced in productive and creative enterprises.
5. It has opened the door to study and experimentation in extrasensory perception—man's "sixth" sense.
6. It has made possible an unprecedented increase in the
human population of the planet.
7. It has raised its potential for destruction far above and beyond its potential for production and construction.
8. It has brought together, classified and indexed the ideas, materials, techniques and generalizations which made possible this study of civilization, its appearances, disappearances and reappearances.
9. Europeans have carried the burdens of western civilization and inherited its disintegrative consequences for so long a period that the fate of western civilization and the fate of present day Europe are closely interwoven. Western civilization seems to have reached and passed the zenith of its lifecycle without achieving the political integration, the stability or the unified authority attained by the Romans and the Egyptians at the high points in their lifecycles.