WE have found by observation that the most stimulating challenge is one of mean degree between an excess of severity and a deficiency of it, since a deficient challenge may fail to stimulate the challenged party at all, while an excessive challenge may break his spirit. But what about the challenge with which he is just capable of coping? On a short view this is the most stimulating challenge imaginable; and, in the concrete instances of the Polynesians and the Eskimos and the Nomads and the ‘Osmanlis and the Spartans, we have observed that such challenges are apt to evoke tours de force. We have also observed, however, that in the next chapter of the story these tours de force exact, from those who have performed them, a fatal penalty in the shape of an arrest in their development. Therefore, on the longer view, we must pronounce that the evocation of the greatest immediate response is not the ultimate test of whether any given challenge is the optimum from the standpoint of evoking the greatest response on the whole and in the end. The real optimum challenge is one which not only stimulates the challenged party to achieve a single successful response but also stimulates him to acquire momentum that carries him a step farther: from achievement to a fresh struggle, from the solution of one problem to the presentation of another, from Yin to Yang again. The single finite movement from a disturbance to a restoration of equilibrium is not enough if genesis is to be followed by growth. And, to convert the movement into a repetitive, recurrent rhythm, there must be an elan vital (to use Bergson’s term) which carries the challenged party through equilibrium into an overbalance which exposes him to a fresh challenge and thereby inspires him to make a fresh response in the form of a further equilibrium ending in a further overbalance, and so on in a progression which is potentially infinite.
This elan, working through a series of overbalances, can be detected in the course of the Hellenic Civilization from its genesis up to its zenith in the fifth century B.C.
The first challenge presented to the new-born Hellenic Civilization was the challenge of chaos and ancient night. The disintegration of the apparented Minoan Society had left a welter of social debris—marooned Minoans and stranded Achaeans and Dorians. Would the sediment of an old civilization be buried under the shingle which the new torrent of barbarism had brought down in spate? Would the rare patches of lowland in the Achaean landscape be dominated by the wilderness of highlands that ringed them round? Would the peaceful cultivators of the plains be at the mercy of the shepherds and brigands of the mountains?
This first challenge was victoriously met; it was decided that Hellas should be a world of cities and not of villages, of agriculture and not of pasturage, of order and not of anarchy. Yet the very success of their response to this first challenge exposed the victors to a second. For the victory which ensured the peaceful pursuit of agriculture in the lowlands gave a momentum to the growth of population, and this momentum did not come to a standstill when the population reached the maximum density which agriculture in the Hellenic homeland could support. Thus the very success of the response to the first challenge exposed the infant Hellenic Society to a second, and it responded to this Malthusian challenge as successfully as to the challenge of chaos.
The Hellenic response to the challenge of over-population took the form of a series of alternative experiments. The easiest and most obvious expedient was adopted first and was applied until it began to bring in diminishing returns. Thereupon a more difficult and less obvious expedient was adopted and applied, in place of the first, until this time a solution of the problem was achieved.
The first method was to employ the techniques and institutions which the lowlanders of Hellas had created in the process of imposing their wills upon their highland neighbours at home in order to conquer new dpmains for Hellenism overseas. With the military instrument of the hoplite phalanx and the political instrument of the city state, a swarm of Hellenic pioneers established a Magna Graecia in the toe of Italy at the expense of barbarian Itali and Chones, a new Peloponnese in Sicily at the expense of barbarian Sikels, a new Hellenic pentapolis in Cyrenaica at the expense of barbarian Libyans, and a Chalcidice on the north coast of the Aegean at the expense of barbarian Thracians. Yet, once again, the very success of the response brought down a new challenge upon the victors. For what they had done was in itself a challenge to the other Mediterranean peoples; and eventually the non-Hellenic peoples were stimulated to bring the expansion of Hellas to a standstill: partly by resisting Hellenic aggression with borrowed Hellenic arts and arms, and partly by co-ordinating their own forces on a greater scale than the Hellenes themselves were able to achieve. Thus the Hellenic expansion, which had begun in the eighth century B.C., was brought to a standstill in the course of the sixth. Yet the Hellenic Society was still confronted by the challenge of over-population.
In this new crisis in Hellenic history the required discovery was made by Athens, who became ‘the education of Hellas’ through learning, and teaching, how to transmute the expansion of the Hellenic Society from an extensive into an intensive process—a significant transmutation of which we shall have more to say later in this chapter. This Athenian response has already been described (see p. 4) and the description need not be repeated here.
This rhythm of growth was apprehended by Walt Whitman when he wrote: ‘It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary’, and in a more pessimistic vein by his Victorian contemporary William Morris when he wrote: ‘I pondered . . . how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out to be not what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’
Civilizations, it would seem, grow through an elan which carries them from challenge through response to further challenge, and this growth has both outward and inward aspects. In the Macrocosm growth reveals itself as a progressive mastery over the external environment; in the Microcosm as a progressive self-determination or self-articulation. In either of these manifestations we have a possible criterion of the progress of the elan itself. Let us examine each manifestation in turn from this standpoint.
In considering first the progressive conquest of the external environment, we shall find it convenient to subdivide the external environment into the human environment, which for any society consists of the other human societies with which it finds itself in contact, and the physical environment constituted by non-human nature. Progressive conquest of the human environment will normally express itself in the form of a geographical extension of the society in question, whereas progressive conquest of the non-human environment will normally express itself in the form of improvements in technique. Let us begin with the former, namely geographical expansion, and see how far this deserves to be considered an adequate criterion of the real growth of a civilization.
Our readers would be unlikely to quarrel with us if we asserted, without more ado and without troubling to marshal any of the voluminous and overwhelming evidence, that geographical expansion, or ‘painting the map red’, is no criterion whatever of the real growth of a civilization. Sometimes we find that a period of geographical expansion coincides in date with, and is a partial manifestation of, qualitative progress—as in the case of the early Hellenic expansion just cited in another connexion. More often geographical expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a ‘time of troubles’ or a universal state—both of them stages of decline and disintegration. The reason is not far to seek. Times of trouble produce militarism, which is a perversion of the human spirit into channels of mutual destruction, and the most successful militarist becomes, as a rule, the founder of a universal state. Geographical expansion is a by-product of this militarism, in interludes when the mighty men of valour turn aside from their assaults upon their rivals within their own society to deliver assaults upon neighbouring societies.
Militarism, as we shall see at a later point in this Study, has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdowns of civilizations during the last four or five millennia which have witnessed the score or so of breakdowns that are on record up to the present date. Militarism breaks a civilization down by causing the local states into which the society is articulated to collide with one another in destructive fratricidal conflicts. In this suicidal process the entire social fabric becomes fuel to feed the devouring flame in the brazen bosom of Moloch. This single art of war makes progress at the expense of the divers arts of peace; and, before this deadly ritual has completed the destruction of all its votaries, they may have become so expert in the use of their implements of slaughter that, if they happen for a moment to pause from their orgy of mutual destruction and to turn their weapons for a season against the breasts of strangers, they are apt to carry all before them.
Indeed a study of Hellenic history might suggest a conclusion exactly the converse of that which we have rejected. We have noticed already that, at one stage in its history, the Hellenic Society met the challenge of over-population by geographical expansion: and that after some two centuries (circa 750-550 B.C.) this expansion was brought to a halt by surrounding non-Hellenic Powers. Thereafter the Hellenic Society was on the defensive, assaulted by the Persians from the east in its homelands and by the Carthaginians from the west in its more recently acquired domains. During this period, as Thucydides saw it, ‘Hellas was repressed from all sides over a long period of time’, and, as Herodotus saw it, ‘was overwhelmed by more troubles than in the twenty preceding generations’. 1 The modern reader finds it difficult to realize that in these melancholy sentences the two greatest Greek historians are describing the age which, in the sight of posterity, stands out in retrospect as the acme of the Hellenic Civilization: the age in which the Hellenic genius performed those great acts of creation, in every field of social life, which have made Hellenism immortal. Herodotus and Thucydides felt as they did about this creative age because it was an age in which, in contrast to its predecessor, the geographical expansion of Hellas was held in check. Yet there can be no disputing that, during this century, the ilan of the growth of the Hellenic Civilization was greater than ever before or after. And, if these historians could have been endowed with superhuman longevity to enable them to watch the sequel, they would have been amazed to observe that the breakdown marked by the Atheno-Peloponnesian War was followed by a fresh outburst of geographical expansion—the expansion of Hellenism overland, inaugurated by Alexander—far surpassing in material scale the earlier maritime expansion of Hellas. During the two centuries that followed Alexander’s passage of the Hellespont, Hellenism expanded in Asia and the Nile Valley at the expense of all the other civilizations that it encountered—the Syriac, the Egyptiac, the Babylonic and the Indie. And for some two centuries after that it continued to expand, under the Roman aegis, in the barbarian hinterlands in Europe and North-West Africa. Yet these were the centuries during which the Hellenic Civilization was palpably in process of disintegration.
The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality. We will select only two.
The Minoan culture attained its widest range of radiation in the phase which our modern archaeologists have labelled ‘Late Minoan III’, and this phase did not begin until after the sack of Cnossos circa 1425 B.C.: that is to say, not until after the catastrophe in which the Minoan universal state, the ‘Thalassocracy of Minos’, had broken up and given place to the interregnum in which the Minoan Society went into liquidation. The hall-mark of decadence is stamped upon all the material products of the Minoan culture dating from this third phase of the Late Minoan period, as conspicuously as these products outrange all previous Minoan products in geographical distribution. It looks almost as if a deterioration in quality of craftsmanship was the price which had to be paid for an expansion of output.
In the history of the Sinic Society, the predecessor of the present Far Eastern Society, it is much the same again. During the age of growth the domain of the Sinic Civilization does not extend beyond the basin of the Yellow River. It is during the Sinic time of troubles—’the Period of Contending States’, as the Chinese call it—that the Sinic World incorporates into itself the Yangtse Basin on the south and the plains beyond the Peiho on the opposite side. Ts’in She Hwang-ti, the founder of the Sinic universal state, carries his political frontiers up to the line still delimited by the Great Wall; the Han dynasty, which enters into the Ts’in emperor’s labours, pushes still farther afield to the south. Thus, in Sinic history, the periods of geographical expansion and social disintegration are contemporaneous.
Finally, if we turn to the unfinished history of our own Western Civilization and consider its early expansions at the expense of the abortive Far Western and Scandinavian civilizations, its expansion from the Rhine to the Vistula at the expense of North European barbarism and from the Alps to the Carpathians at the expense of the Hungarian advance-guard of Eurasian Nomadism, and its subsequent maritime expansion into every corner of the Mediterranean basin from the Straits of Gibraltar to the mouths of the Nile and the Don in the widespread but ephemeral movement of conquest and commerce for which the most convenient short title is ‘the Crusades’, we may agree that all these, like the early maritime expansion of Hellas, are examples of geographical enlargement neither accompanied nor followed by any arrest in the expanding civilization’s true growth. But when we survey the resumed and this time world-wide expansion of recent centuries we can only pause and wonder. The question here, which so closely concerns us, is one to which, in our generation, a prudent man will offer no confident answer.
We will now pass on to the next division of our subject and consider whether the progressive conquest of the physical environment by improvements in technique will provide us with an adequate criterion of the true growth of a civilization. Is there evidence of a positive correlation between an improvement in technique and a progress in social growth?
This correlation is taken for granted in the classification invented by modern archaeologists, in which a supposed series of stages in the improvement of material technique is taken as indicative of a corresponding succession of chapters in the progress of civilization. In this scheme of thought, human progress is represented as a series of ‘Ages’ distinguished by technological labels: the Palaeolithic Age, the Neolithic Age, the Chalcolithic Age, the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, to which may be added the Machine Age in which we ourselves are privileged to live. In spite of the wide currency which this classification enjoys, it will be well to examine critically its claim to represent stages in the progress of civilization; for, without prejudice to the empirical test, we can point out several grounds on which it is suspect even a priori.
It is suspect, in the first place, by reason of its very popularity, for it appeals to the preconceptions of a society which has been fascinated by its own recent technical triumphs. Its popularity is an illustration of the indubitable fact—taken as the starting-point of the first chapter of this Study—that each generation is apt to design its history of the past in accordance with its own ephemeral scheme of thought.
A second reason for regarding the technological classification of social progress with suspicion is because it is a manifest example of the tendency of a student to become the slave of the particular materials for study which chance has placed in his hands. From the scientific standpoint it is a mere accident that the material tools which ‘pre-historic’ man has made for himself should have survived while his psychic artifacts, his institutions and ideas, have perished. Actually, while this mental apparatus is in use, it plays a vastly more important part than any material apparatus can ever play in human lives; yet, because a discarded material apparatus leaves, and a discarded psychic apparatus does not leave, a tangible detritus, and because it is the business of the archaeologist to deal with human detritus in the hope of extracting from it a knowledge of human history, the archaeological mind tends to picture Homo Sapiens only in his subordinate role of Homo Faber. When we turn to the evidence we shall find cases of technique improving while civilizations remain static or go into decline, as well as examples of the converse situation in which technique remains static while civilizations are in movement—either forward or backward as the case may be.
For instance, a high technique has been developed by every one of the arrested civilizations. The Polynesians have excelled as navigators, the Eskimos as fishermen, the Spartans as soldiers, the Nomads as tamers of horses, the ‘Osmanlis as tamers of men. These are all cases in which civilizations have remained static while technique has improved.
An example of technique improving while a civilization declines is afforded by the contrast between the Upper Palaeolithic Age in Europe and the Lower Neolithic, which is its immediate successor in the technological series. The Upper Palaeolithic Society remained content with implements of rough workmanship, but it developed a fine aesthetic sense and did not neglect to discover certain simple means of giving it pictorial expression. The deft and vivid charcoal sketches of animals, which survive on the walls of Palaeolithic Man’s cave-dwellings, excite our admiration. The Lower Neolithic Society took infinite pains to equip itself with finely ground tools, and possibly turned these tools to account in a struggle for existence with Palaeolithic Man, in which Homo Pictor went down and left Homo Faber master of the field. In any case the change, which inaugurates a striking progress in terms of technique, is distinctly a set-back in terms of civilization; for the art of Upper Palaeolithic Man died with him.
Again, the Mayan Civilization never progressed technologically beyond the Stone Age, whereas the affiliated Mexic and Yucatec Civilizations made remarkable progress in the working of various metals during the five hundred years before the Spanish conquest. Yet it cannot be doubted that the Mayan Society achieved a much finer civilization than the two very second-rate societies that were affiliated to it.
Procopius of Caesarea, the last of the great Hellenic historians, prefaces his history of the wars of the Emperor Justinian—wars which actually sounded the death-knell of the Hellenic Society— with a claim that his subject was superior in interest to those chosen by his predecessors because his own contemporaries’ military technique was superior to that employed in any previous wars. In truth, if we were to isolate the history of the technique of war from the other strands of Hellenic history, we should find a continuous progress from first to last, through the period of the growth of that civilization and onward through its decline as well; and we should also find that each step in the progress of this technique had been, stimulated by events that were disastrous for civilization.
To begin with, the invention of the Spartan phalanx, the first signal Hellenic military improvement on record, was an outcome of the Second Sparto-Messenian War, which brought the Hellenic Civilization in Sparta to a premature halt. The next signal improvement was the differentiation of the Hellenic infantryman into two extreme types: the Macedonian phalangite and the Athenian peltast. The Macedonian phalanx, armed with long two-handed pikes in place of short one-handed stabbing-spears, was more formidable in its impact than its Spartan predecessor, but it was also more unwieldy and more vulnerable if it once lost formation. It could not safely go into action unless its flanks were guarded by peltasts, a new type of light infantry who were taken out of the ranks and trained as skirmishers. This second improvement was the outcome of a century of deadly war, from the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War to the Macedonian victory over Thebans and Athenians at Chaeronea (431-338 B.C.), which saw the first breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization. The next signal improvement was made by the Romans when they succeeded in combining the advantages and avoiding the defects of both peltast and phalangite in the tactics and equipment of the legionary. The legionary was armed with a couple of throwing-spears and a stabbing-sword, and went into action in open order in two waves, with a third wave, armed and ordered in the old phalanx style, in reserve. This third improvement was the outcome of a fresh bout of deadly warfare, from the outbreak of the Hannibalic War in 220 B.C. to the end of the Third Romano-Macedonian War in 168 B.C. The fourth and last improvement was the perfection of the legion, a process, begun by Marius and completed by Caesar, which was the outcome of a century of Roman revolutions and civil wars ending in the establishment of the Roman Empire as the Hellenic universal state. Justinian’s cataphract—the armoured rider on an armoured mount whom Procopius presents to his readers as the chef-d’oeuvre of Hellenic military technique—does not represent a further stage in this native Hellenic line of development. The cataphract was an adaptation, by the last decadent generations of the Hellenic Society, of the military instrument of their Iranian contemporaries, neighbours and antagonists, who had first made Rome aware of their prowess when they defeated Crassus at Carrhae in 55 B.C.
Nor is the art of war the only kind of technique that is apt to make its progress in inverse ratio to the general progress of the body social. Let us now take a technique which stands at the farthest remove from the art of war: the technique of agriculture, which is generally regarded as par excellence the sovereign art of peace. If we revert to Hellenic history we shall find that an improvement in the technique of this art has been the accompaniment of a decline in a civilization.
At the outset we seem to be entering on a different story. Whereas the first improvement in the Hellenic art of war was purchased at the price of an arrest in the growth of the particular community that invented it, the first comparable improvement in Hellenic agriculture had a happier sequel. When Attica, on Solon’s initiative, led the Way from a regime of mixed farming to a regime of specialized agriculture for export, this technical advance was followed by an outburst of energy and growth in every sphere of Attic life. The next chapter of the story, however, takes a different and a sinister turn. The next stage of technical advance was an increase in the scale of operations through the organization of mass-production based on slave labour. This step appears to have been taken in the colonial Hellenic communities in Sicily, and perhaps first in Agrigentum; for the Sicilian Greeks found an expanding market for their wine and oil among the neighbouring barbarians. Here the technical advance was offset by a grave social lapse, for the new plantation slavery was a far more serious social evil than the old domestic slavery. It was worse both morally and statistically. It was impersonal and inhuman, and it was on a grand scale. It eventually spread from the Greek communities in Sicily to the great area of Southern Italy which had been left derelict and devastated by the Hannibalic War. Wherever it established itself it notably increased the productivity of the land and the profits of the capitalist, but it reduced the land to social sterility; for wherever slave-plantations spread they displaced and pauperized the peasant yeoman as inexorably as bad money drives out good. The social consequence was the depopulation of the countryside and the creation of a parasitic urban proletariat in the cities, and more particularly in Rome itself. Not all the efforts of successive generations of Roman reformers, from the Gracchi onwards, could avail to rid the Roman World of this social blight which the last advance in agricultural technique had brought upon it. The plantation-slave system persisted until it collapsed spontaneously in consequence of the breakdown of the money economy on which it was dependent for its profits. This financial breakdown was part of the general social debdcle of the third century after Christ; and the debdcle was doubtless the outcome, in part, of the agrarian malady which had been eating away the tissues of the Roman body social during the previous four centuries. Thus this social cancer eventually extinguished itself by causing the death of the society upon which it had fastened.
The development of plantation slavery in the cotton states of the American Union, in consequence of improvements in the technique of the manufacture of cotton goods in England, is another and very familiar example of the same order. The American Civil War cut out the cancer so far as the mere fact of slavery was concerned, but it by no means eradicated the social evils involved in the existence of a race of freedmen of negro stock in the midst of an American society that was otherwise of European origin.
The lack of correlation between progress in technique and progress in civilization is apparent in all these cases in which techniques have improved while civilizations have remained stationary or suffered set-backs. The same thing is apparent in the cases, which we have next to consider, in which techniques have remained stationary while civilizations have been moving either forward or backward.
For example, an immense step forward in human progress was made in Europe between the Lower and the Upper Palaeolithic Age.
‘The Upper Palaeolithic culture is associated with the end of the fourth glacial epoch. In place of the remains of Neanderthal Man we find the remains of several types, none of which show any affinity to Neanderthal Man. On the contrary, they all approximate more or less closely to Modern Man. At one bound we seem, when looking at the fossil remains of this epoch in Europe, to have passed into the modern period as far as human bodily form is concerned.’ 1
This transfiguration of the human type in the middle of the Palaeolithic Age is possibly the most epoch-making event that has ever yet occurred in the course of human history; for at that moment Sub-Man succeeded in turning himself into Man, while Man, in all the time that has elapsed since Sub-Man’s achievement made Man human, has never yet succeeded in attaining a super-human level. This comparison gives us the measure of the psychic advance which was achieved when Homo Neander-thalensis was transcended and Homo Sapiens emerged. Yet this immense psychic revolution was not accompanied by any corresponding revolution in technique; so that, on the technological classification, the sensitive artists who drew the pictures we still admire in the Upper Palaeolithic cave-dwellings have to be confounded with ‘the Missing Link’, while in reality—as measured by wisdom and stature alike and by every trait that is distinctive of humanity—this Homo Palaeolithicus Superior is divided from Homo Palaeolithicus Inferior by just as great a gulf as is our latter-day Homo Mechanicus.
This instance in which a technique has remained stationary while a society has advanced finds its converse in cases in which techniques have remained stationary while societies have declined. For example, the technique of iron-working, which had been originally introduced into the Aegean World at the moment of the great social relapse when the Minoan Society was going into dissolution, remained stationary—neither improving nor declining —at the time of the next great social relapse when the Hellenic Civilization went the way of its Minoan predecessor. Our Western World inherited the technique of iron-working from the Roman World unimpaired, and also the techniques of the Latin Alphabet and of Greek mathematics. Socially there had been a cataclysm. The Hellenic Civilization had gone to pieces and an interregnum had ensued out of which the new Western Civilization eventually emerged. But there was no corresponding break in the continuity of these three techniques.
The history of the development of technique, like the history of geographical expansion, has failed to provide us with a criterion of the growth of civilizations, but it does reveal a principle by which technical progress is governed, which may be described as a law of progressive simplification. The ponderous and bulky steam-engine with its elaborate ‘permanent way’ is replaced by the neat and handy internal-combustion engine which can take to the roads with the speed of a railway train and almost all the freedom of action of a pedestrian. Telegraphy with wires is replaced by telegraphy without wires. The incredibly complicated scripts of the Sinic and Egyptiac societies are replaced by the neat and handy Latin Alphabet. Language itself shows the same tendency to simplify itself by abandoning inflexions in favour of auxiliary words, as may be illustrated by a comparative view of the histories of the languages of the Indo-European family. Sanskrit, the earliest surviving example of this family, displays an amazing wealth of inflexions side by side with a surprising poverty of particles. Modern English, at the other end of the scale, has got rid of nearly all its inflexions but has recouped itself by the development of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. Classical Greek represents a middle term between these two extremes. In the Modern Western World dress has been simplified from the barbaric complexity of Elizabethan costume to the plain modes of to-day. The Copernican astronomy, which has replaced the Ptolemaic system, presents, in far simpler geometrical terms, an equally coherent explanation of a vastly wider range of movement of the heavenly bodies.
Perhaps simplification is not quite an accurate, or at least not altogether an adequate, term for describing these changes. Simplification is a negative word and connotes omission and elimination, whereas what has happened in each of these cases is not a diminution but an enhancement of practical efficiency or of aesthetic satisfaction or of intellectual grasp. The result is not a loss but a gain; and this gain is the outcome of a process of simplification because the process liberates forces that have been imprisoned in a more material medium and thereby sets them free to work in a more etherial medium with a greater potency. It involves not merely a simplification of apparatus but a consequent transfer of energy, or shift of emphasis, from some lower sphere of being or of action to a higher. Perhaps we shall be describing the process in a more illuminating way if we call it, not simplification but etherialization.
In the sphere of human control over physical nature this development has been described with a finely imaginative touch by a modern anthropologist:
‘We are leaving the ground, we are getting out of touch, our tracks grow fainter. Flint lasts for ever, copper for a civilization, iron for generations, steel for a lifetime. Who will be able to map the route of the London-Peking air express when the Age of Movement is over, or to-day to say what is the path through the aether of the messages which are radiated and received? But the frontiers of the petty vanished kingdom of the Iceni still sweep defensively across the southern frontier of East Anglia, from drained marsh to obliterated forest.’ 1
Our illustrations suggest that the criterion of growth, for which we are in search, and which we failed to discover in the conquest of the external environment, either human or physical, lies rather in a progressive change of emphasis and shifting of the scene of action out of this field into another field, in which the action of challenge-and-response may find an alternative arena. In this other field challenges do not impinge from outside but arise from within, and victorious responses do not take the form of surmounting external obstacles or of overcoming an external adversary, but manifest themselves in an inward self-articulation or self-determination. When we watch an individual human being or an individual society making successive responses to a succession of challenges, and when we ask ourselves whether this particular series is to be regarded as a manifestation of growth, we shall arrive at an answer to our question by observing whether, as the series proceeds, the action does or does not tend to shift from the first to the second of the two fields aforesaid.
This truth comes out very clearly in those presentations of history in which the attempt is made to describe processes of growth exclusively in terms of the external field from start to finish. Let us take as examples two outstanding presentations in these terms, which are each the work of a man of genius: M. Edmond Demolins’ Comment la Route cree le Type Social and Mr. H. G. Wells’ book The Outline of History.
The environment thesis is set out by M. Demolins in his preface with uncompromising terseness:
‘There exists on the surface of the globe an infinite variety of populations ; what is the cause which has created this variety? . . . The first and decisive cause of the diversity of races is the route which the peoples have followed. It is the route which creates both the race and the social type.’
When this provocative manifesto fulfils its purpose by stimulating us to read the book in which the author’s thesis is worked out, we find that he manages quite well so long as he is drawing his illustrations from the life of primitive societies. In such cases the character of the society can be explained with approximate completeness in terms of responses to challenges from the external environment only; but this, of course, is not an explanation of growth, since these societies are now static. M. Demolins is equally successful in explaining the state of the arrested societies. But when the author applies his formula to patriarchal village communities, the reader begins to be uneasy. In the chapters on Carthage and Venice, one feels sure that he has left something out, without being quite able to say what the omission is. When he seeks to explain the Pythagorean philosophy in terms of a portage-trade across the toe of Italy, one resists a temptation to smile. But the- chapter entitled ‘La Route des Plateaux—Les Types Albanais et Hellenes’ pulls one up short. Albanian barbarism and Hellenic civilization to be bracketed together, just because their respective exponents happen to have arrived once upon a time at their respective geographical destinations by way of the same terrain! And the great human adventure that we know as Hellenism to be reduced to a kind of epiphenomenal by-product of the Balkan plateaux! In this unlucky chapter the argument of the book confutes itself by a reductio ad absurdum. When a civilization goes as far as the Hellenic Civilization went, an attempt to describe its’ growth exclusively in terms of responses to challenges from the external environment becomes positively ridiculous.
Mr. Wells also seems to lose his sureness of touch when he handles something mature instead of something primitive. He is in his element when he is exercising his imaginative powers in order to reconstruct some dramatic episode in some remote aeon of geological time. His story of how ‘these little theriomorphs, these ancestral mammals’ survived when the overgrown reptiles went under is almost worthy to rank with the Biblical Saga of David and Goliath. When the little theriomorphs turn into Palaeolithic hunters or Eurasian Nomads Mr. Wells, like M. Demolins, still comes up to our expectations. But he comes to grief in the annals of our own Western Society when he has to size up that singularly etherialized theriomorph William Ewart Gladstone. He fails here simply because he has failed to transfer his spiritual treasure, as his narrative proceeds, from the Macrocosm to the Microcosm; and this failure reveals the limitations of the magnificent intellectual achievement which The Outline of History represents.
Mr. Wells’ failure may be measured by Shakespeare’s success in solving the same problem. If we arrange the outstanding characters of the great Shakespearian gallery in an ascending order of etherialization, and if we bear in mind that the playwright’s technique is to reveal characters by displaying personalities in action, we shall observe that, as Shakespeare moves upward from the lower to the higher levels in our character-scale, he constantly shifts the field of action in which he makes the hero of each drama play his part, giving the Microcosm an ever larger share of the stage and pushing the Macrocosm ever farther into the background. We can verify this fact if we follow the series from Henry V through Macbeth to Hamlet. The relatively primitive character of Henry V is revealed almost entirely in his responses to challenges from the human environment around him: in his relations with his boon companions and with his father and in his communication of his own high courage to his comrades-in-arms on the morning of Agincourt and in his impetuous wooing of Princess Kate. When we pass to Macbeth, we find the scene of action shifting; for Macbeth’s relations with Malcolm or Macduff, or even with Lady Macbeth, are equalled in importance by the hero’s relations with himself. Finally, when we come to Hamlet, we see him allowing the Macrocosm almost to fade away, until the hero’s relations with his father’s murderers, with his spent flame Ophelia and with his outgrown mentor Horatio become absorbed into the internal conflict which is working itself out in the hero’s own soul. In Hamlet the field of action has been transferred from the Macrocosm to the Microcosm almost completely; and in this masterpiece of Shakespeare’s art, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus or in Browning’s” dramatic monologues, a single actor virtually monopolizes the stage in order to leave the greater scope for action to the surging spiritual forces which this one personality holds within itself.
This transference of the field of action, which we discern in Shakespeare’s presentation of his heroes when we arrange them in an ascending order of spiritual growth, can also be discerned in the histories of civilizations. Here too, when a series of responses to challenges accumulates into a growth, we shall find, as this growth proceeds, that the field of action is shifting all the time from the external environment into the interior of the society’s own body social.
For example, we have already noticed that, when our Western forefathers succeeded in repelling the Scandinavian onslaught, one of the means by which they achieved this victory over their human environment was by forging the potent military and social instrument of the feudal system. But in the next stage of Western history the social and economic and political differentiation of classes which feudalism entailed set up certain stresses and strains which in their turn produced the next challenge with which the growing society was confronted. Western Christendom had hardly rested from its labours in beating back the Vikings before it found its next task in the problem of replacing the feudal system of relations between classes by a new system of relations between sovereign states and their individual citizens. In this example of two successive challenges, the shift of the scene of action from the exterior to the interior field is plainly apparent.
We can observe the same tendency in other passages of history which we have already examined in different contexts. In Hellenic history, for example, we have seen that the earlier challenges all emanated from the external environment: the challenge of highland barbarism in Hellas itself and the Malthusian challenge, which was met by expansion overseas and involved as its consequence challenges from indigenous barbarians and rival civilizations, the challenges of these latter culminating in the simultaneous counter-attacks of Carthage and Persia in the first quarter of the fifth century B.C. Thereafter, however, this formidable challenge from the human environment was triumphantly surmounted in the four centuries beginning with Alexander’s passage of the Hellespont and continuing with the victories of Rome. Thanks to these triumphs, the Hellenic Society now enjoyed a respite of some five or six centuries during which no serious challenge from the external environment was presented to it. But this did not mean that during those centuries the Hellenic Society was exempt from challenges altogether. On the contrary, as we have already noted, these centuries were a period of decline; that is to say, a period in which Hellenism was confronted by challenges to which it was failing to respond with success. We have seen what these challenges were and, if we now look into them again, we shall see that they were all of them internal challenges resulting from the victorious response to the previous external challenge, as the challenge presented by feudalism to our Western Society resulted from the previous development of feudalism as a means of response to the external pressure of the Vikings.
For example, the military pressure from the Persians and the Carthaginians stimulated the Hellenic Society to forge in self-defence two potent social and military instruments, the Athenian navy and the Syracusan tyrannis. These produced, in the next generation, internal strains and stresses in the Hellenic body social; these resulted in the Atheno-Peloponnesian War and in the reaction against Syracuse of her barbarian subjects and of her Greek allies; and these convulsions produced the first breakdown of the Hellenic Society.
In the following chapters of Hellenic history the arms turned outwards in the conquests of Alexander and the Scipios were soon turned inwards in the civil wars of rival Macedonian diadochi and rival Roman dictators. Similarly the economic rivalry between the Hellenic and Syriac societies for the mastery of the Western Mediterranean reappeared within the bosom of the Hellenic Society, after the Syriac competitor had succumbed, in the still more devastating struggle between the Oriental plantation-slaves and their Siceliot or Roman masters. The cultural conflict between Hellenism and the Oriental civilizations—Syriac and Egyptiac and Babylonic and Indie—likewise reappeared within the bosom of the Hellenic Society as an internal crisis in Hellenic, or Hellenized, souls: the crisis that declared itself in the emergence of Isis-worship and Astrology and Mithraism and Christianity and a host of other syncretistic religions.
They cease not fighting, East and West,
On the marches of my breast.
1
In our own Western history, so far as it has gone up to date, we can detect a corresponding trend. In earlier ages the most conspicuous of the. challenges that it encountered were presented by the human environment, beginning with the challenges of the Arabs in Spain and the Scandinavians, and ending with the challenge of the ‘Osmanlis. Since then our modern Western expansion has been literally world-wide; and for the time being, at any rate, this expansion has relieved us completely from our old preoccupation with challenges from alien human societies. 2
The only semblance of an effective external challenge to our society since the ‘Osmanlis’ second failure to take Vienna has been the challenge of Bolshevism which has confronted the Western World since Lenin and his associates made themselves masters of the Russian Empire in A.D. 1917. Yet Bolshevism has not yet threatened the ascendancy of our Western Civilization very far beyond the borders of the U.S.S.R.; and, even if one day the Communist dispensation were to fulfil the Russian Communists’ hopes by spreading all over the face of the planet, a world-wide triumph of Communism over Capitalism would not mean the triumph of an alien culture, since Communism, unlike Islam, is itself derived from a Western source, being a reaction from and a criticism of the Western Capitalism that it combats. The adoption of this exotic Western doctrine as the revolutionary creed of twentieth-century Russia, so far from signifying that Western culture is in jeopardy, really shows how potent its ascendancy has come to be.
There is a profound ambiguity in the nature of Bolshevism which is manifested in Lenin’s career. Did he come to fulfil or to destroy the work of Peter the Great? In re-transferring the capital of Russia from Peter’s eccentric stronghold to a central position in the interior, Lenin seems to be proclaiming himself the successor of the Arch-Priest Awakum and the Old Believers and the Slavophils. Here, we might feel, is a prophet of Holy Russia, embodying the reaction of the Russian soul against the Western Civilization. Yet, when Lenin casts about for a creed, he borrows from a Westernized German Jew, Karl Marx. It is true that the Marxian creed comes nearer to a total repudiation of the Western order of society than any other creed of Western origin which a twentieth-century Russian prophet could have adopted. It was the negative and not the positive elements in the Marxian creed that made it congenial to a Russian revolutionary mind; and this explains why, in 1917, the still exotic apparatus of Western Capitalism in Russia was overthrown by an equally exotic Western anti-capitalist doctrine. This explanation is borne out by the metamorphosis which this Marxian philosophy appears to be undergoing in the Russian atmosphere, where we see Marxism being converted into an emotional and intellectual substitute for Orthodox Christianity, with Marx for its Moses and Lenin for its Messiah and their collected works for the scriptures of this new atheistic church militant. But the phenomena take on a different aspect when we turn our attention from faith to works and examine what Lenin and his successors have actually been doing to the Russian people.
When we ask ourselves what is the significance of Stalin’s Five Year Plan, we can only answer that it was an effort to mechanize” agriculture as well as industry and transport, to change a nation of peasants into a nation of mechanics, to transform the old Russia into a new America. In other words, it was a latter-day attempt at Westernization so ambitious and radical and ruthless that it puts Peter the Great’s work into the shade. The present rulers of Russia are working with demonic energy to ensure the triumph in Russia of the very civilization that they are denouncing in the world at large. No doubt they dream of creating a new society which will be American in equipment but Russian in soul—though this is a strange dream to be dreamed by statesmen for whom a materialist interpretation of history is an article of faith! On Marxian principles we must expect that, if a Russian peasant is taught to live the life of an American mechanic, he will learn to think as the mechanic thinks, to feel as he feels and to desire what he desires. In this tug of war which we are witnessing in Russia between the ideals of Lenin and the methods of Ford we may look forward to seeing the ascendancy of the Western over the Russian Civilization paradoxically confirmed.
The same ambiguity is revealed in the career of Gandhi, whose involuntary furtherance of the same ubiquitous process of Westernization is still more ironical. The Hindu prophet sets out to sever the threads of cotton which have entangled India in the meshes of the Western World. ‘Spin and weave our Indian cotton with your Indian hands’, he preaches. ‘Do not clothe yourselves with the products of Western power-looms; and do not, I conjure you, seek to drive out these alien products by setting up on Indian soil new Indian power-looms on the Western pattern.’ This message, which is Gandhi’s real message, is not accepted by his countrymen. They revere him as a saint, but they only follow his guidance in so far as he resigns himself to leading them along the path of Westernization. And thus we see Gandhi to-day promoting a political movement with a Western programme—the transformation of India into a sovereign independent parliamentary state—with all the Western political apparatus of conferences, votes, platforms, newspapers and publicity. In this campaign the prophet’s most effective—though not his most obtrusive—supporters are those very Indian industrialists who have done most to defeat the prophet’s real mission, the men who have acclimatized the technique of industrialism in India itself. 1
Corresponding transmutations of external into internal challenges have followed the triumph of the Western Civilization over its material environment. The triumphs of the so-called Industrial Revolution in the technical sphere notoriously created a host of problems in the economic and social spheres, a subject at once so complicated and so familiar that we need not enlarge upon it here, tet us call to our minds the now fast-fading picture of the pre-mechanical road. This antique road is thronged with all kinds of primitive wheeled vehicles: wheel-barrows and rickshaws and ox-carts and dog-carts, with a stage-coach as the chef-d’oeuvre of muscular traction and a foot-propelled bicycle here and there as a portent of things to come. Since the road is already rather crowded, there are a certain number of collisions; but nobody minds, because few are hurt and the traffic is scarcely interrupted. For the fact is, these collisions are not serious. They cannot be serious because the traffic is so slow and the force impelling it so feeble. The ‘traffic problem’ on this road is not the problem of avoiding collisions but the problem of getting the journey accomplished at all, roads being what they were in the old days. Accordingly, there is no sort of traffic regulation: no policeman on point-duty or signal lights.
And now let us turn our eyes to the road of to-day on which a mechanical traffic hums and roars. On this road the problems of speed and haulage have been solved, as is testified by the motor-lorry with its train of trucks that comes lumbering along with more than the momentum of a charging elephant and by the sports-car that goes whizzing past with the swiftness of a bee or a bullet. But, by the same token, the problem of collisions has become the traffic problem par excellence. Hence on this latter-day road the problem is no longer technological but psychological. The old challenge of physical distance has been transmuted into a new challenge of human relations between drivers who, having learned how to annihilate space, have thereby put themselves in constant danger of annihilating one another.
This change in the nature of the traffic problem has, of course, a symbolic as well as a literal significance. It typifies the general change that has occurred over the whole range of our modern Western social life since the emergence of the two dominant social forces of the age: Industrialism and Democracy. Owing to the extraordinary progress which our latter-day inventors have made in harnessing the energies of physical nature and in organizing the concerted actions of millions of human beings, everything that is now done in our society is done, for good or evil, with tremendous ‘drive’; and this has made the material consequences of actions and the moral responsibility of agents far heavier than ever before. It may be that in every age of every society some moral issue is always the challenge that is fateful for the society’s future; but, however that may be, there is no doubt that it is a moral challenge rather than a physical challenge that confronts our own society to-day.
‘In the present-day thinker’s attitude towards what is called mechanical progress, we are conscious of a changed spirit. Admiration is tempered by criticism; complacency has given way to doubt; doubt is passing into alarm. There is a sense of perplexity and frustration, as in one who has gone a long way and finds he has taken the wrong turning. To go back is impossible; how shall he proceed? Where will he find himself if he follows this path or that? An old exponent of applied mechanics may be forgiven if he expresses something of the disillusion with which, now standing aside, he watches the sweeping pageant of discovery and invention in which he used to take unbounded delight. It is impossible not to ask: Whither does this tremendous procession tend? What, after all, is its goal? What is its probable influence upon the future of the human race?’
These moving words propound a question which has been struggling to find expression in all our hearts; and they are words spoken with authority, for they were uttered by the President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in his opening address at the hundred-and-first annual meeting of that historic body. 1 Is the new social driving power of Industrialism and Democracy to be employed in the great constructive task of organizing a Westernized World into an oecumenical society, or are we going to turn our new power to our own destruction?
In a perhaps rather simpler form the same dilemma once presented itself to the rulers of Ancient Egypt. When the Egyptiac pioneers had victoriously responded to their first physical challenge, when the water and soil and vegetation of the Lower Nile Valley had been subjected to the wills of human beings, the question arose how the lord and master of Egypt and the Egyptians would use the marvellous human organization ready to his hand and responsive to his will. It was a moral challenge. Would he employ the material power and the man-power at his command to improve the lot of his subjects? Would he lead them upward and onward to the level of well-being that had been attained already by the king himself and a handful of his peers? Would he play the generous part of Prometheus in Aeschylus’s drama or the tyrannous part of Zeus? We know the answer. He built the Pyramids; and the Pyramids have immortalized these autocrats, not as ever-living gods but as grinders of the faces of the poor. Their evil reputations were handed down in Egyptiac folk-lore till they found their way into the immortal pages of Herodotus. As a nemesis for their misguided choice death laid his icy hand on the life of this growing civilization at the moment when the challenge which was the stimulus of its growth was transferred from the external to the internal field. In the somewhat similar situation of our own world to-day, when the challenge of Industrialism is being transferred from the sphere of technique to the sphere of morals, the outcome is still unknown, since our reaction to the new situation is still undecided.
However, we have reached the terminus of the argument of the present chapter. We conclude that a given series of successful responses to successive challenges is to be interpreted as a manifestation of growth if, as the series proceeds, the action tends to shift from the field of an external environment, physical or human, to the for interieur of the growing personality or civilization. In so far as this grows and continues to grow, it has to reckon less and less with challenges delivered by external forces and demanding responses on an outer battlefield, and more and more with challenges that are presented by itself to itself in an inner arena. Growth means that the growing personality or civilization tends to become its own environment and its own challenger and its own field of action. In other words, the criterion of growth is progress towards self-determination; and progress towards self-determination is a prosaic formula for describing the miracle by which Life enters into its Kingdom.