Is civilization a disease?

by Stanton Coit

XVIII. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY AFTER CHRIST

Christianity had to wait for something to happen that would lend force to its Gospel. That something did not occur until the middle of the fifteenth century. Then, as I have already said without specifying what they were, a number of unforeseen events took place which opened the door to the divine bridegroom of humanity.

I have said that in the fifteenth century after Christ a new principle began to work in society; but I did not say that it was then for the first time promulgated. Civilization was the organization of man's mastery over Nature on a basis of self-interest; it was the giving only so much of wealth and power to the many as was compatible with the retention of one's own ascendancy. To be civilized, then, is evidently not to be Christian any more than it is to be Buddhistic or Judaic, socialistic or democratic. Everybody admits that one can be civilized and be none of these things: just as one may be "cultured" without being kind. In other words, it is consistent with being civilized to be highly selfish; one need only be rationalized in one's egoism. Indeed, civilization is the incarnation of self-interest. If self-interest, its basic principle, should give way to social interest; if the monopoly of social power should be broken and the power transferred to the general will of the community; if the community should relegate its administration to representatives, but should prevent these by some social device from ever usurping the power entrusted to them, then something new—something as different from civilization as the airship from the horse-cart—would have begun to establish itself. A new species of social order can be nothing other than an order whose basic principle is totally new; and what greater difference could exist in structuralizing tendencies than that between self-interest and the interest of the community? Whenever the latter gets the upper hand, it will be because Fate, the Cosmos, the Universe, the force within unconscious evolution, has caught up the song of the Magnificat. No such consummation of humanity has taken place, but it is undeniable that in the fifteenth century the Word entered like a seed into the soil of Fact. The Virgin's prophecy began to fulfil itself.

Familiar to everybody, and quickly to be specified, are the wonderful events which turned the vision into reality. One of these events was the invention of gunpowder; another was the mariner's compass; a third was the invention of paper; a fourth, the printing-press; a fifth was the discovery that the earth goes round the sun once a year, and whirls on its own axis once a day; a sixth was that indiscretion of Christopher Columbus, whereby instead of over-populated India he opened up a way to the vast and sparsely denizened Americas.

These events, each and severally and all together, produced in one particular the same sort of effect as the use of fire and of the bow and arrow, of pottery, the domestication of animals, and the smelting of iron: they enhanced incalculably the mastery of man over matter. But in the other particular characteristic of civilization they acted in the very opposite direction from all preceding inventions. Instead of entrenching the master in his monopoly of social power, instead of furthering the differentiation of society into master and man, they all played into the hands of the man. For the first time since the beginning of human evolution, inventions checked the monopolization of control over others. But the initiative that now flowed to the multitude of nobodies was not that puny freedom and narrow scope of self-realization which the talking ape had enjoyed. It was the accumulated foresight and control of the universe outside of man which had been storing itself up more and more for ninety thousand years in the intellects and wills of the favored few. The floodgates were opened for the first time in the fifteenth century, and this godlike energy flowed in among the people at large, so that man, the many, the multitude, were quickened by it into hope on earth, unto life here and now, into liberty, creative originality, and the joy of self-realization.

But it was only the beginning: the effects of the introduction of gunpowder, the compass, the printing-press and paper, and the new ideas about the heavens, and the opening-up of relatively uninhabited lands, were scarcely discernible for two centuries, and then only as a destructive force. Indeed, for still another hundred years the process was one chiefly of disintegration. There was taking place a transference of power from the few to the many; a diffusion of sovereignty, as well as a redistribution of wealth; and the change was accompanied by an awakening of the masses to the meaning of the transformation which they were undergoing. The people began to realize that the invention of gun-powder had raised the peasant as a fighter to the level of the armed knight; that the compass and the opening-up of the Western hemisphere made it possible for the poor to escape from European masters whom they were unable to vanquish; and that the cheapness of books was linking the minds of the masses to the sources of learning and of religious tradition. It cannot but excite our mystic wonder that for nearly one hundred thousand years every new mastery of man over physical Nature was such that it inevitably played into the hands of rulers by strengthening their monopoly of initiative; and that then, at last, and ever since the fifteenth century after Christ, each new mechanical invention or discovery has had the unintended and undesired effect ultimately of scattering among the many the pent-up power of owners and rulers, and of creating in the many fresh psychic energy and a new capacity of invention.

This great process of levelling-up took again an enormous leap forward in the middle of the nineteenth century. The steam-engine advanced it almost as much as all the fifteenth-century inventions and discoveries together. The new facilities of travel brought new experiences, and these, by the psychological law of contrast and novelty, stimulated intelligence many-fold. The new speed in transportation made it possible for thousands to escape from oppression where scarcely one had been able to do so in former generations. The Irish peasants began to pour into America; then followed the Germans; soon Russians and Latins were helped to leave the Old World; sometimes in all came a million-odd in one year. Wealth was multiplied and scattered to a degree that had never been dreamed to be possible. Not only in the United States, but in France, Italy, Scandinavia, the British Empire, and South America, the diffusion of social initiative was taking place. First, power spread from the few to the many severally; but now, for a quarter of a century, the many, without surrendering, have been pooling their new power in the general will of the nation. There, in the unified and unifying purpose of nations like America, and of each of her federate States, the power is being safeguarded for the community and for its members severally by political devices which render public servants incapable of prolonged usurpation.

XIX. CIVILIZATION FACES ITS SUCCESSOR

Still, the new order is far from being in the ascendant. As civilization began with the introduction of the use of fire, but was not triumphant until the invention of written language, so the new order—call it what you will: Christianity, the Meaning of America, the Dream of California, the Wisconsin Idea, Social Democracy, Humanity—this new order has only entered in as yeast which has not yet had a chance to leaven the whole lump. But the fermentation now goes on apace. The World-War is perhaps best understood when it is looked upon as a struggle of civilization against its successor. Alarmed and armed to the teeth, civilization (applied science organized on a basis of reasoned self-interest) is attempting to expand itself over territory which had been preempted and mapped out by social democracy, and was being devoted, in the spirit of the ideal commonwealth foreshadowed in Christian sentiment and Jewish prophecy, to the co-ordination of wealth and power on the principle of deference to the humanity in every man.

But more significant than the World-War of the passing away of the old order and its supersession by a new are the ten or twenty inventions, ideas, discoveries, and new social contacts which marked the first decade of the present century. No doubt even the World-War has been precipitated by the sudden inrush of these unprecedented forces, and the realization of their trend by the self-centred leaders of civilization.