LET us start, for the purpose of our inquiry, by assuming that it j is an open question whether ‘laws of Nature’ have or have not any footing in the history of Man in Process of Civilization. We shall have then to examine various departments of human affairs in order to find out whether the question proves, on closer scrutiny, to be rather less open than we are at present assuming it to be. It might be convenient to take our first soundings among the ordinary affairs of private people, a subject to which modern historians had made magnificent contributions under the heading of Social History. Here the difficulty that confronts us in seeking to find laws governing the histories of civilizations is notably absent. The number of recorded civilizations is inconveniently small for purposes of generalization—less than two dozen; and of some of these our knowledge is very fragmentary. Private individuals, on the other hand, are numbered by the million, and their behaviour, under Modern Western conditions, had been subjected to elaborate statistical analysis, on the basis of which practical men made predictions on which they risked not only their reputations but their money. Those who controlled industry and commerce confidently assumed that such and such a market would absorb such and such a supply of goods. They would sometimes be mistaken, but more often they would not, otherwise they would have had to go out of business.
A business activity which most clearly illustrated the applicability of a law of averages to the affairs of individuals was insurance. We must beware, no doubt, of too hastily enlisting all forms of insurance in support of an argument for the applicability of ‘laws of nature’ to human affairs in the sense in which we are using the latter term. Life insurance was concerned with the prospects of the human body, and physiology was clearly within the domain of Science. At the same time it would not be denied that the soul had some say in the matter; for physical life might be prolonged by prudence and be shortened by various forms of imprudence, ranging from heroism through folly to bestiality. Marine insurance of ships and their cargoes similarly involved the study of meteorology, which was also a department of Science, though at present a somewhat unruly one. But when we come to insurance against burglary or fire it would appear that the insurance companies were gambling on laws of averages applied to the distinctively human qualities of criminality and carelessness.
The statistical patterns discernible in the fluctuations of demand and supply in the dealings between caterers and their customers notoriously manifested themselves in a succession of ‘booms’ and ‘slumps’; but the pattern of these business cycles had not yet, at the time of writing, been worked out with sufficient precision to have emboldened the insurance companies to open up a new branch of their business by quoting premiums for insurance against the formidable risks arising from them. Scientific investigators had, however, already learnt a good deal about the subject.
In the intellectual history of an industrial Western society, the phenomenon of trade cycles had been discovered empirically from direct social observation before it was confirmed statistically. The earliest known description of it had been given in A.D. 1837 by a British observer, S. J. Loyd, afterwards Lord Overstone. In a book first published in A.D. 1927 an American student of business cycles, W. C. Mitchell, had declared his belief that ‘the characteristics of business cycles may be expected to change as economic organization develops’. On the basis of’business annals’, compiled by another American scholar, W. L. Thorp, from non-statistical evidence, a third American scholar, F. C. Mills, had calculated that the mean wave-length of a ‘short’ trade cycle was 5–86 years in the early stages of industrialization, 4–09 years in the succeeding age of rapid transition, and 6–39 years in the subsequent age of comparative stability.
Other economists had propounded other cycles, some of which were believed to have much longer wave-lengths. Others had suggested that these ‘waves’ showed a tendency to subside into a state of equilibrium. There was no general agreement among them about these, and the study was, in fact, in its infancy. We need not pursue it further. The point that we are concerned to make is that, within two hundred years of the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, the fathers of a Western economic science were engaged in disentangling, from the mass of data presented to them by economic history, a body of laws governing an economic department of human activity in which Man’s distinctive qualities came into play.
After having found the economists using the results of their researches to explore the working of laws applicable to economic history, we naturally turn to the political sphere of activity to see whether anything of the kind may be feasible there also; and, as a field of operations in this political sphere, we will select the rivalries and wars of the parochial states of the Modern Western world. The Modern period of Western history may be taken to have begun towards the end of the fifteenth century with the Italianization of the state system of Transalpine Europe, so that we have something over four centuries at our disposal for the purposes of our present inquiry.
‘Every schoolboy knows’—Macaulay’s optimistic estimate—that on four occasions, separated from one another by just over one hundred years, the English (or British) people, taking advantage of the comparative immunity afforded by their island fastness, first repelled and then helped to destroy a continental Power which was offering, or threatening, to supply Western Christendom with a universal state, or at any rate was, in traditional language, ‘upsetting the balance of power’. On the first occasion the offender was Spain—Spanish Armada, 1588; on the second occasion, the France of Louis XIV—Blenheim, 1704; on the third occasion, the France of the Revolution and Napoleon—Waterloo, 1815; on the fourth occasion the Germany .of Wilhelm II—Armistice Day, 1918—subsequently recrudescent under Hitler—Normandy, 1944. Here is an unmistakably cyclical pattern, viewed from an insular angle, a set of four ‘great wars’, spaced out with curious regularity, each one larger than its predecessor, both in the intensity of its warfare and in what we will call the area of belligerency. The first of the series is an affair of Atlantic states—Spain, France, the Netherlands, England. The second brings in the Central European states, and even Russia if one regards the Russo-Swedish War as a kind of annexe of the ‘War of the Spanish Succession’. The third (Napoleonic) bout brings in Russia as a leading belligerent, and may be taken to include the United States of America, if one regards ‘the War of 1812’ as an annexe of the Napoleonic War. Into the fourth, America enters as a leading belligerent, and the general character of the struggle was indicated by the fact that its successive bouts had been named the First and Second World Wars.
Each of these four wars for the prevention of the establishment of a Modern Western universal state had been separated from its successor and from its predecessor by a time-span of about a century. If we proceed to examine the three inter-war centuries, we find in each case what might be called a midway or supplementary war or group of wars, in each case a struggle for supremacy not in Western Europe as a whole but in its central area, Germany. Since these wars were predominantly Central European, Great Britain did not engage in any of them up to the hilt, while there were some of them in which she did not interfere at all; and consequently they are not so certainly included in what ‘every schoolboy (meaning, of course, every British schoolboy) knows’. The first of these intermediate wars was the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the second consisted for the most part of the wars of Frederick ‘the Great’ of Prussia (1740–63), and the third is associated with Bismarck, though it includes much else, and should be dated 1848–71.
Finally it might be claimed that this drama in four acts had an overture: that it opens not with Philip II of Spain, but with the Hapsburg-Valois ‘Italian wars’ of two generations earlier. These wars were started by the sensationally futile but ominous invasion of Italy by King Charles VIII of France; and its date, 1494, has often been used by educational authorities as a convenient hard-and-fast line to separate the Late Medieval from the Early Modern period. It is two years later than the Christian conquest of the last remaining Muslim territory in Spain and the first landing of Columbus in the West Indies.
All this can be set out in tabular form; and an examination of the war-and-peace cycles in post-Alexandrine Hellenic history 1 and in post-Confucian Sinic history1 yielded historical ‘patterns’ curiously similar in their structure and in their time-spans to those here descried in the course of Modern Western history.
If we look back for a moment at our cyclic pattern of the wars of the Modern Western society, we may be struck by the fact that this is not simply a case of a wheel revolving four times in vacuo and coming round each time to the position in which it had started. It is also a case of a wheel moving forward along a road in a particularly ominous direction. On the one hand, here are four cases of states banding together to defend themselves against an over-mighty and presumptuous neighbour and eventually showing him that his pride has led him to a fall. On the other hand, there is a point which the cyclic pattern does not bring out, but which a very elementary knowledge of history does reveal: each of these four bouts of warfare was more extensive, more violent, more destructive, materially and morally, than its predecessor. In the histories of other societies, such as the Hellenic and the Sinic, such bouts of warfare have ended in all the contending pieces being swept off the board except one, which then establishes a universal state.
Successive Occurrences of the War-and-Peace Cycle in Modern and post-Modern Western History
This self-amortization of a cyclic rhythm, which proves to be the dominant tendency in struggles for existence between parochial states, has previously come to our notice in our study of the disintegrations of civilizations; and it is not surprising that there should be this affinity between the rhythms of two processes that are manifestly bound up with each other. Our study of the breakdowns in which the disintegrations originate has shown us that a frequent occasion, symptom, or even cause of breakdown has been the outbreak of an exceptionally violent war between the parochial states of which the society has been composed. The replacement of the contending states by an œcumenical empire is apt to be followed, not by the entire cessation of outbreaks of violence, but their reappearance in new forms, as civil wars or social upheavals; and so the process of disintegration, though temporarily arrested, continues.
We have observed also that disintegrations, like the wars of parochial states, have run their course in a series of rhythmic fluctuations, and we have ascertained, from the examination of a number of examples, that the cyclic rhythm of Rout-and-Rally, in which the dominant tendency towards disintegration has fought out its long battle with a resistance movement, has been apt to take a run of three and a half beats—rout, rally, relapse, rally, relapse, rally, relapse—in accomplishing the historical journey from the breakdown of a civilization to its final dissolution. The first rout throws the broken-down society into a Time of Troubles, which is relieved by the first rally, only to be followed by a second and more violent paroxysm. This relapse is followed by a more durable second rally, manifesting itself in the establishment of a universal state. This, in its turn, experiences a relapse and a recovery, and this last recovery is followed by the final dissolution.
It will be seen that the drama of Social Disintegration has—to judge from performances up to date—a more precise and regular plot than the drama of the Balance of Power, and if we study our table of universal states we shall find that—in cases in which the course of events is not disturbed by the impact of alien bodies social—a span of some four hundred years is apt to be occupied by the movement of rout, rally, relapse, and more effective rally, running from the initial breakdown to the establishment of the universal state; and a further period of about the same length by the ensuing movement of recurrent relapse, last rally and final relapse, running from the establishment of the universal state to its dissolution. But a universal state is apt to, die hard, and a Roman Empire which went to pieces in the socially backward western provinces on the morrow of the catastrophe at Adrianople in A.D. 378 (just on four hundred years after its establishment by Augustus) did not go the same way in the central and eastern provinces till after the death of Justinian in A.D. 565. Similarly a Han Empire, which met with its second stroke in A.D. 184 and which broke up thereafter into the Three Kingdoms, managed to reconstitute itself for a moment in the Empire of the United Ts’in (A.D. 280–317) before going into its final dissolution.
When we turn our attention from Social Disintegration to Social Growth, we shall recollect our finding, in a previous stage of this Study, that Growth, like Disintegration, exhibits a cyclically rhythmic movement. Growth takes place whenever a challenge evokes a successful response that, in turn, evokes a further and different challenge. We have not found any intrinsic reason why this process should not repeat itself indefinitely, even though a majority of the civilizations that had come to birth down to the time of writing might have failed, as a matter of historical fact, to maintain their growth by failing to make, for more than a small number of times in succession, a response that had been both an effective answer to the challenge that had called it forth and at the same time a fruitful mother of a new challenge requiring a different response.
We have seen, for example, that, in the history of the Hellenic civilization, the initial challenge of anarchic barbarism evoked an effective response in the shape of a new political institution, the city-state; and we have noticed that the success of this response evoked a new challenge, this time on the economic plane, in the shape of a rising pressure of population. This second challenge evoked a number of alternative responses of unequal efficacy. There was the disastrous Spartan response of annexing by force the food-bearing lands of Sparta’s Hellenic neighbours; there was the temporarily effective Corinthian and Chalcidian response of colonization, the winning for Hellenes of new fields to plough overseas in lands wrested from the more backward peoples of the western basin of the Mediterranean; and there was the permanently effective Athenian response of increasing the aggregate productivity of this enlarged Hellenic world, after its geographical expansion had been brought to a halt by the resistance of Phoenician and Tyrrhenian competitors, through an economic revolution in which subsistence farming was replaced by cash-crop farming and by industrial production for export in exchange for imports of staple foods and raw materials.
This successful response to an economic challenge evoked, as we have seen, a further challenge on the political plane; for the now economically interdependent Hellenic world required a political regime of law and order on an œcumenical scale. The existing regime of parochial city-state dispensations, which had fostered the rise of an autarkic agricultural economy in each isolated patch of plain, no longer provided an adequate political structure for an Hellenic society whose economic structure had now come to be unitary. This third challenge was not met in time to save the growth of the Hellenic civilization from being cut short by a breakdown.
In the growth of the Western civilization we can also descry a series of successive challenges evoking successful responses, and this series is longer than the Hellenic in that the third challenge met with a successful response as well as the first and the second.
The initial challenge was the same anarchic barbarism of an interregnum that had confronted the Hellenes, but the response was a different one, namely the creation of an œcumenical ecclesiastical institution in the shape of the Hildebrandine Papacy; and this provoked a second challenge; for a growing Western Christendom which had achieved ecclesiastical unity then found itself in need of a politically and economically efficient parochial state system. The challenge was met by a resuscitation of the Hellenic institution of the city-state in Italy and Flanders. This solution, however, which served well enough in certain areas, failed to meet the requirements of the territorially extensive feudal monarchies. Could the solution of the problem of creating efficient parochial organs of Western political and economic life, which had been attained in Italy and Flanders through the city-state system, be made available for the rest of the Western world by translating this Italian and Flemish efficiency into nation-wide terms?
This problem, as we have seen, was solved in England, first on the political plane by injecting efficiency into the medieval Transalpine institution of Parliament, and afterwards on the economic plane through the Industrial Revolution. This Western Industrial Revolution, however, like the Athenian economic revolution in Hellenic history, had the effect of replacing a parochial economic autarky by an œcumenical economic interdependence. Thus the Western civilization found itself confronted, as a result of its successful response to a third challenge, with the same new challenge that had faced the Hellenic civilization after its successful response to its second challenge. At the time of writing, midway through the twentieth century, this political challenge had not yet been successfully met by Western Man, but he had come to be acutely conscious of its menace.
These brief glances at the growths of two civilizations suffice to show that there is no uniformity between their histories in respect of the number of the links in the concatenation of interlocking rounds of challenge-and-response through which social growth had been achieved; and an examination of the histories of all other sufficiently well-documented civilizations would confirm that conclusion. The upshot of our present inquiry therefore seems to be that the operation of ‘laws of Nature’ is as inconspicuous in the histories of the growths of civilizations as it is conspicuous in the histories of their disintegrations. In a later chapter we shall find that this is no accident, but is inherent in an intrinsic difference between the growth-process and the disintegration-process.
In studying the operation of ‘laws of Nature’ in the histories 6f civilizations, we have found that the rhythm in which these laws reveal themselves is apt to be generated by a struggle between two tendencies of unequal strength. There is a dominant tendency which prevails, in the long run, against repeated counteracting moves in which the recalcitrant opposing tendency asserts itself. The struggle sets the pattern. The persistence of the weaker tendency in refusing to resign itself to defeat accounts for the repetitions of the encounter in a series of successive cycles; the dominance of the stronger tendency makes itself felt by bringing the series to a close sooner or later.
On these lines we have watched struggles for existence between parochial states following—through three or four cycles of wars fought on one side for the overthrow, and on the other side for the maintenance, of a balance of power—a course that in each case ends in the overthrow of the balance. We have likewise watched the struggle between a broken-down society’s tendency to disintegrate and a counter effort to restore it to a lost state of health—a course that, in each case, ends in dissolution. In studying the operation of ‘laws of Nature’ in the economic affairs of an industrial Western society, we have found expert investigators of trade cycles surmising that these repetitive movements might prove to be waves rippling on the surface of waters that were, all the time, flowing in a current whose headway would eventually bring these rhythmic fluctuations to an end. In the same connexion we may remind ourselves of our finding that, when and where a conflict between a disintegrating civilization and bands of recalcitrant barbarians beyond its pale had passed over from the war of movement into a stationary warfare along the limes of a universal state, the passage of time had usually militated against the defenders of the limes and to the advantage of its barbarian assailants, until in the end the dam had burst and the flood of barbarism had swept the pre-existing social structure off the map.
These are all illustrations of our more general finding that cyclical movements in human history, like the physical revolutions of a cartwheel, have a way of forwarding, through their own monotonously repetitive circular motion, another movement with a longer rhythm which, by contrast, can be seen to be a cumulative progress in one direction, which ultimately reaches its goal and, in reaching it, brings the series to an end. There is, however, no warrant for interpreting these victories of one tendency over another as illustrations of ‘laws of Nature’. Empirically observed matters of fact are not necessarily the outcomes of inexorable fate. The burden of proof here lies with the determinist, not with the agnostic—a consideration that Spengler, with his dogmatic and undocumented determinism, failed to take into account.
However, without prejudice to the still open issue between Law and Freedom in History, we propose, before attempting to carry our argument farther, to take note of several other episodes in which some tendency has reasserted itself against successive rebellions against it. In such resolutions of conflicting forces Spengler would see the hand of ‘Fate’, but, whether his dogma of inevitability was right or wrong, he hardly attempts to prove it. We will begin with the situation created by the establishment, through military prowess, of an Hellenic ascendancy in South-West Asia.
Though this Hellenic ascendancy was little less than a thousand years old when, in the seventh century of the Christian Era, it was overthrown by the Arab Muslim war-bands, Hellenism had never succeeded, south of the Taurus, in becoming anything more than an exotic alien culture, feebly radiating its influence into an incorrigibly Syriac or Egyptiac country-side from its outposts in a few Hellenic or Hellenized cities. Hellenism’s capacity to achieve mass-conversions had been put to the test by the Seleucid Hellenizer Antiochus Epiphanes (reigned 175–163 B.C. ) when he set out to make Jerusalem as Hellenic as Antioch; and the resounding defeat of this cultural military enterprise had portended the ultimate total disappearance of the intrusive culture. Its always sickly existence was prolonged for centuries by reason of the fact that the Romans took over control from the weakening Seleucidae and Ptolemies.
The Hellenic ascendancy over the Syriac and Egyptiac societies had been imposed and maintained by force of arms; and, so long as the subjugated societies had reacted by replying in kind, they had been courting defeat. In the next chapter of the story, the mass-conversion of the population of the Oriental provinces to Christianity, in the third century of the Christian Era, might have seemed to have done for Hellenism incidentally what Antiochus had tried to do and failed; for in these provinces the Catholic Christian Church had captivated a subject native peasantry and an urban Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ alike; and, since Christianity had been making its triumphal progress in an Hellenic dress, it looked as if the Orientals had now at last inadvertently received, in association with Christianity, a culture which they had rejected so vehemently when it had been offered to them unadulterated and undisguised. But that would have been a mistaken estimate. Having accepted a Hellenized Christianity, the Orientals set themselves to de-Hellenize their religion by adopting successive heresies, of which Nestorianism was the first. In thus resuming the Oriental resistance movement against Hellenism in the non-military form of theological controversy, the Orientals had hit upon a new technique of cultural warfare in which they eventually prevailed.
This anti-Hellenic cultural offensive presented itself over several centuries in the cyclic pattern with which we are already familiar. The Nestorian wave rose and fell, to be followed by the Mono-physite wave, and this in turn by the Muslim wave, which carried all before it. It might be said that the Muslim victory was a reversion to the crude method of military conquest. It is true, no doubt, that the Muslim Arab war-bands can hardly be regarded as anticipators of the non-violent non-resistance doctrines of Tolstoy and Gandhi. They ‘conquered’ Syria, Palestine, and Egypt during the years A.D. 637–40, but it was a conquest of much the same order as that achieved by Garibaldi in A.D. 1860, when he ‘conquered’ Sicily and Naples with a force of 1,000 volunteers in red shirts, supported by two little guns which were taken round for show, without being provided with any ammunition. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was conquered by the martial missionary of Italia Una because it wanted to be conquered, and the feelings of the populations of the Oriental provinces of the Roman Empire towards the Arab war-bands were not altogether unlike those of the Sicilians toward Garibaldi.
In the example just given we see a succession of heretical protests against an undesired uniformity, of which the third succeeded. The history of France since the twelfth century of the Christian Era presents the same pattern in a different context. Since that century the Roman Catholic Church in France had been engaged in a never more than temporarily successful struggle to establish the ecclesiastical unity of France as a Catholic country against an impulse towards secession which had kept on reasserting itself in some new form after each previous manifestation had been suppressed. A revolt against Catholic Christianity which had taken the form of Catharism at its first outbreak in Southern France in the twelfth century was stamped out there in the thirteenth century, only to re-emerge in the same region in the sixteenth century as Calvinism. Proscribed as Calvinism, it promptly reappeared as Jansenism, which was the nearest approach to Calvinism possible within the Catholic fold. Proscribed as Jansenism, it reappeared as Deism, Rationalism, Agnosticism, and Atheism.
In other contexts we have noted the fate of a Judaic monotheism to be perpetually beset by a repeatedly resurgent polytheism, and also the fate of the kindred Judaic conception of the One True God’s transcendence to be no less repeatedly beset by yearnings for a God Incarnate. Monotheism put down the worship of Baal and Ashtoreth, only to find a jealous Yahweh’s proscribed rivals slily creeping back into the fold of Jewish orthodoxy in the guise of personifications of the Lord’s ‘Word’, ‘Wisdom’, and ‘Angel’, and afterwards establishing themselves within the fold of Christian orthodoxy in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and in the cults of God’s Body and Blood, God’s Mother, and the Saints. These re-encroachments of polytheism evoked a whole-hearted reassertion of monotheism in Islam, and a less thoroughgoing reassertion of it in Protestantism, and these two puritan movements, in their turn, had been plagued by the soul’s irrepressible appetite for a plurality of gods, to reflect the apparent plurality of natural forces in the Universe.
If the repetitions and uniformities which we have discerned in the course of this Study are accepted as real, there would seem to be two possible explanations of them. The laws governing them may be either laws current in Man’s non-human environment imposing themselves on the course of History from the outside, or they may be laws inherent in the psychic structure and working of Human Nature itself. We will begin by looking into the former hypothesis.
The day-and-night cycle, for example, manifestly affects the everyday life of ordinary people, but we can dismiss it from our consideration in the present context. The farther that Man advances from the primitive state, the more capable he becomes of ‘turning night into day’ as and when he requires. Another astronomical cycle to which Man had once been a slave was the annual cycle of the seasons. Lent became a season of Christian abstinence because, countless ages before Christianity dawned on the World, the tail-end of winter was regularly a season when Man had to go short, whether this might be spiritually good for him or not. But, here again, Western and Westernizing Man had emancipated himself from Nature’s law. By means of cold storage and of rapid transport over the technologically unified surface of the planet, any meat, vegetable, fruit, or flower could now be purchased at any season of the year in any part of the World, by anyone who had the money to pay for it.
The familiar annual round was possibly not the only astronomical cycle to which the Earth’s flora was subject and to which Man was therefore indirectly enslaved in so far as he was dependent on agriculture for subsistence. Modern meteorologists had brought to light indications of weather cycles with a much longer time-span. In an investigation of the irruptions of the Nomads out of ‘the Desert’ into ‘the Sown’ we found some indirect evidence of a weather cycle with a time-span of six hundred years, each of these cycles consisting of alternating bouts of aridity and humidity. This hypothetical cycle seemed, at the time of writing, to be less well-established than certain other cycles of the same class, with wave-lengths running only into double or perhaps single figures, which appeared to govern fluctuations in the yield of crops artificially sown and harvested under modern conditions. It had been suggested that there was a correspondence between these weather-and-harvest cycles and the economic industrial cycles plotted by certain economists. But the preponderance of recent expert opinion was against this view. The brilliant suggestion of Stanley Jevons, a Victorian pioneer in this field of inquiry, that trade cycles might be the effects of fluctuations in the radioactivity of the Sun, as advertised by the appearance and disappearance of sun-spots, had quite gone out of favour. Jevons himself, in later years, agreed that ‘periodic collapses [of trade] are really mental in their nature, depending on variations of despondency, hopefulness, excitement, disappointment, and panic’. 1
A. C. Pigou, a Cambridge economist, had expressed, in A.D. 1929, the view that the importance, whatever this might be, of harvest variations as a factor determining fluctuations in industrial activity, was substantially less at the time when he was writing than it had been fifty or a hundred years earlier. G. Haberler, writing twelve years later than Pigou, had taken the same view, and is quoted here as a sample of orthodox economic opinion at the time of writing.
‘The waning, like the waxing, of prosperity … must be due, not to the influence of ”disturbing causes” from outside, but to processes that run regularly within the world of business itself.
‘The mysterious thing about [these fluctuations] is that they cannot be accounted for by such ”external” causes as bad harvests due to weather conditions, diseases, general strikes, lock-outs, earthquakes, the sudden obstruction of international trade channels, and the like. Severe decreases in the volume of production, real income, or level of employment as a result of crop failures, wars, earthquakes, and similar physical disturbances of the productive processes rarely affect the economic system as a whole, and certainly do not constitute depressions in the technical sense of business-cycle theory. By depressions in the technical sense we mean those long and conspicuous falls in the volume of production, real income, and employment which can only be explained by the operation of factors originating within the economic system itself, and in the first instance by an insufficiency of monetary demand and the absence of a sufficient margin between price and cost.
‘For various reasons it seems desirable, in the explanation of the business cycle, to attach as little importance as possible to the influence of external disturbances…. The responses of the business system seem prima facie more important in shaping the business cycle than external shocks. Secondly, historical experience seems to demonstrate that the cyclical movement has a strong tendency to persist, even where there are no outstanding extraneous influences at work which can plausibly be held responsible. This suggests that there is an inherent instability in our economic system, a tendency to move in one direction or the other.’ 1
There is another and very different natural cycle which cannot be overlooked, namely the human generation cycle of birth, growth, procreation, senescence, and death. Its significance in a particular field of history was vividly illustrated for the writer of this Study by a conversation which came his way in A.D. 1932 at a public luncheon in the city of Troy, New York State. Finding himself seated next to the local Director of Public Education, he asked him what, among his manifold professional duties, was the job that he was finding most interesting. ‘Organizing English lessons for grandparents’ was his prompt reply. ‘And how, in an English-speaking country, does anyone manage to arrive at being a grandparent without having mastered English?’, the British visitor thoughtlessly went on to ask. ‘Well, you see,’ said the Director, ‘Troy is the principal centre of the linen collar manufacturing industry in the United States, and, before the Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924, most of the labour-force here was recruited from foreign immigrants and their families. Now the immigrants who came from each of the principal emigrant-exporting countries had a way of cleaving as close as they could to their own familiar past by continuing to consort with other birds of the same feather. Immigrants of the same national origin were not only apt to work side by side in the same factories; they were apt to live next door to one another in the same blocks of tenements; and so, when the time came for them to retire, most of them knew little more English than they had known when they had first landed on American shores. They did not have to know any more up to this point in the American chapter of their life, because they commanded the services of home-bred interpreters. Their children had arrived in America young enough to go to the public school before entering the factory in their turn, and the combination of an American education with, let us say, an Italian infancy had made them thoroughly bilingual; they talked English in the factory, street, and store, and Italian in their parents’ homes, almost without noticing that they were constantly switching back and forth from one language to the other; and their effortless and ungrudging bilingualism was highly convenient for their old parents. Indeed, it abetted their parents’ inclination, after their retirement, to forget even the smattering of English that they had once picked up during their working life in the factory. However, this is not the end of the story; for in due course the retired immigrants’ children married and had children of their own; and, for these representatives of a third generation, English was the language of the home as well as the school. Since their own parents had married after having been educated in the United States, one of them would be of non-Italian origin as often as not, and then English would be the lingua franca in which the father and mother would communicate with one another. So the American-born children of bilingual parents would not know their grandparents’ Italian mother tongue, and, moreover, would have no use for it. Why should they put themselves out in order to learn a foreign lingo that would convict them of an un-American origin which they were eager to slough off and consign to oblivion? So the grandparents found that their grandchildren could not be induced to communicate with them in the only language in which the grandparents were able to talk with any ease; and they were thus confronted suddenly, in their old age, with the appalling prospect of being unable to establish any human contact with their own living descendants. For Italians and other non-English-speaking Continental Europeans with a strong sense of family solidarity, this prospect was intolerable. For the first time in their lives, they now had an incentive for mastering the hitherto unattractive language of their adopted country, and last year they thought of applying to me for help. Of course I was eager to arrange special classes for them; and, though it is notorious that the enterprise of learning a foreign language becomes more difficult progressively as one grows older, I can assure you that these English lessons for grandparents have been one of the most successful and rewarding pieces of work that we have ever taken in hand in our department.’
This tale of Troy shows how a series of three generations can achieve, through the cumulative effect of two successive caesuras, a social metamorphosis which could never have been achieved by representatives of a single generation within the span of a single lifetime. The process by which an Italian family transformed itself into an American family could not be analysed or described intelligibly in terms of a single life. An interaction between three generations was required to bring it about. And, when we turn from changes of nationality to consider changes of religion and of class, we find that here, too, the family, and not the individual, is the intelligible unit.
In a class-conscious Modern England which in A.D. 1952 was fast dissolving under the writer’s eyes, it had usually taken three generations to make ‘gentlefolk’ out of a family of working-class or lower-middle-class antecedents; and in the field of religion the standard wave-length seems to have been the same. In the history of the eradication of paganism in the Roman world, the intolerantly devout Christian-born Emperor Theodosius I followed the expagan convert Constantine I, not in the next generation, but in the next but one; and, in the history of the eradication of Protestantism in seventeenth-century France, there was the same interval between the intolerantly devout Catholic-born Louis XIV and his ex-Calvinist grandfather Henry IV. In France at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it took the same number of generations to breed genuinely devout Catholics among the grandchildren of officially converted bourgeois agnostics or atheists who had re-embraced Catholicism because the Church had acquired a new value for them as a traditional institution which might serve as a barrier against a rising tide of socialism and other ideologies which threatened to abolish the economic inequality between the bourgeoisie and the working class. In the Syriac world, again, under the Umayyad Caliphate, it took three generations to breed genuinely devout Muslims among the descendants of ex-Christian or ex-Zoroastrian grandparents who had embraced Islam in order to make themselves acceptable to the Primitive Muslim Arab ruling class. The duration of the Umayyad régime, which stood for the conqueror’s ascendancy, was determined by the three-generation period that had to elapse in order to bring the original converts’ Muslim-born grandchildren on to the stage of History. The Umayyad agents of an Arab ascendancy were supplanted by the ‘Abbasid exponents of the equality of all Muslims when, in the name of Islamic religious principles, the genuinely devout Muslim grandchildren of cynical converts tried conclusions with the Laodicean Muslim grandchildren of Laodicean Muslim Arab conquerors.
If a concatenation of three generations thus proves to be the regular psychic vehicle of social change in the three fields of religion, class, and nationality, it would not be surprising to find a concatenation of four generations playing a similar part in the field of international politics. We have already found that, in the field of encounters between civilizations, the time-interval between the creation of an intelligentsia and its revolt against its makers has had an average length of about 137 years in a set of three or four examples; and it is not difficult to see how a concatenation of four generations might also determine the wave-length of a war-and-peace cycle, if we may assume that the agony of a general war makes a deeper impression on the Psyche than is made on it by a comparatively mild round of supplementary wars. If, however, we apply this consideration to the war-and-peace cycles in Modern Western Europe, we shall run up against a stumbling-block in finding that one of the ‘supplementary’ wars, i.e. the Thirty Years War, though confined in its geographical incidence to Central Europe, was probably more, and not less, devastating, within its narrower geographical range, than the ‘general wars’ which preceded and followed it.
This war-and-peace cycle is neither the last nor the longest of the apparently genuine, though not exact, regularities and recurrences for which we have to seek an explanation. Each of these cycles of a hundred years or so is only a term in a series which as a whole constitutes what we have called a Time of Troubles following the breakdown of a civilization; and this in its turn runs on, in Hellenic and in Sinic history, for example, into a universal state, which also exhibits the rhythms that we have already noticed. The whole process, from start to finish, occupies, in general terms, something between eight hundred and a thousand years. Will a psychological explanation of regularities in human affairs, which has served us well enough so far, avail us here? Our answer would have been bound to be in the negative if, in our eyes, the intellectual and volitional surface of the Psyche had been the whole of the Psyche.
In the Western world in the writer’s generation a Western science of Psychology was still in its infancy; yet the pioneers had already carried their reconnaissances far enough to enable C. G. Jung to report that the subconscious abyss on whose surface each individual human personality’s conscious intellect and will were afloat was not an undifferentiated chaos but was an articulated universe in which one layer of psychic activity could be discerned below another. The nearest layer to the surface appeared to be a Personal Subconscious deposited by a personality’s individual experiences in the course of his or her own life up to date; the deepest layer to which the explorers had so far penetrated appeared to be a Racial Subconscious that was not peculiar to any individual but was common to all human beings, inasmuch as the Primordial Images latent there reflected the common experiences of Mankind, deposited during the infancy of the Human Race, if not at a stage before Man had yet become completely human. On this showing, it was perhaps not unreasonable to surmise that, in between the uppermost and the lowermost of the layers of the Subconscious that Western scientists had so far succeeded in bringing within their ken, there might be intermediate layers deposited neither by racial experience nor by personal experience, but by corporate experience of a supra-personal but infra-racial range. There might be layers of experience common to a family, common to a community, or common to a society; and, if, at the next level above the Primordial Images common to the whole Human Race, there should indeed prove to be images expressing the peculiar ethos of a particular society, the impress of these on the Psyche might account for the length of the periods which certain social processes seemed to require in order to work themselves out.
For example, one such social image that was manifestly apt to imprint itself deeply on the subconscious psychic life of the children of a civilization in process of growth was the idol of the parochial sovereign state; and it can readily be imagined that, even after this idol had begun to exact from its devotees human sacrifices as grim as any that the Carthaginians ever paid to Baal Hammon or the Bengalis to Juggernaut, the victims of a demon which these victims themselves had conjured up might well need the poignant experience, not just of a single life-time and not just of one concatenation of three-generation cycles, but of a span of not less than four hundred years, in order to bring themselves to the point of plucking this baneful idolatry out of their hearts and casting it from them. It can also readily be imagined that they might need, not just four hundred years, but eight hundred years or a thousand, to dissociate themselves from the whole apparatus of the civilization whose breakdown and disintegration a Time of Troubles had made manifest, and to open their hearts to receive the impress of some other society of the same species or of the different species represented by the higher religions. For the image of a civilization presumably makes a still more potent appeal to the Subconscious Psyche than the image of any of the parochial states into which civilizations are apt to be articulated on the political plane unless and until they eventually enter into a universal state. From the same angle of mental vision we can likewise understand how a universal state, once established, should sometimes succeed, in its turn, in retaining its hold over its ex-subjects’, or even over its actual destroyers’, hearts for generations, or perhaps even for centuries, after it has lost its usefulness as well as its power and has become almost as grievously heavy an incubus as the antecedent parochial states that it had been created to liquidate.
‘The relation between the external anxieties felt by the representatives of an adult generation—anxieties that are directly conditioned by the social position of the people who feel them—and the inward, automatically operating, anxieties of these people’s children in the rising generation is unquestionably a phenomenon of importance over a wide field…. The stamp that is set by the procession of successive generations on both the psychic development of the individual and the course of historical change is something that we shall only begin to understand more adequately than we do at present when we have become more capable than we are to-day of taking our observations, and doing our historical thinking, in terms of long chains of generations.’ 1
If the social laws current in the histories of civilizations are indeed reflections of psychological laws governing some infra-personal layer of the Subconscious Psyche, this would also explain why these social laws should be, as we have found them to be, so much more clearly pronounced and more exactly regular in the disintegration-phase of a broken-down civilization’s history than in its foregoing growth-phase.
Though the growth-phase, as well as the disintegration-phase, can be analysed into a series of bouts of Challenge-and-Response, we have found it impossible to discern any standard wave-length common to the successive bouts through which social growth takes place, whether we measure the intervals between successive presentations of challenges or the intervals between successive deliveries of effective responses; and we have also seen that, in the growth-phase, these successive challenges and successive responses are infinitely various. By contrast, we have found that the successive stages of the disintegration-phase are marked by repeated presentations of an identical challenge which continues to recur because the disintegrating society continues to fail to meet it; and we have also found that, in all past cases of social disintegration that we have mustered, the same successive stages invariably occur in the same order, each stage taking approximately the same period of time, so that the disintegration-phase, as a whole, presents the picture of a uniform process with a uniform duration in each case. Indeed, as soon as a social breakdown has occurred, the tendency towards variety and differentiation that is characteristic of the growth-phase is replaced by a tendency towards uniformity that shows its power by triumphing sooner or later over interference from outside as well as over recalcitrance from within.
We have observed, for example, how, when first a Syriac and then an Indic universal state was cut short by an intrusive Hellenic civilization prematurely, before it had completed a universal state’s standard life-span, the smitten and submerged society could not or would not pass away until, in spite of the disturbing influence of an alien body social, it had duly completed the regular course of a broken-down society’s disintegration by eventually re-entering into the interrupted phase and abiding in a re-integrated universal state until the tale of its normal duration was completed.
This striking contrast between the regularity and uniformity of the phenomena of social disintegration and the irregularity and diversity of the phenomena of social growth has been frequently noted in this Study as a matter of historical fact, without any attempt, so far, to account for it. In the present part, which is concerned with the relation between Law and Freedom in human affairs, it is incumbent on us to grapple with this problem; and a key to its solution may be found in the difference between the respective natures of the conscious personality on the surface of the Psyche and the subconscious levels of psychic life underlying it.
The distinctive power conferred in the gift of consciousness is a freedom to make choices; and, considering that a relative freedom is one of the characteristics of the growth-phase, it is only to be expected that, in so far as human beings are free in these circumstances to determine their own future, the course which they follow should be in truth, as it appears to be, a wayward one in the sense of being recalcitrant to the rule of ‘laws of Nature’. The reign of Freedom, which thus keeps ‘laws of Nature’ at bay, is, however, precarious inasmuch as it depends on the fulfilment of two exacting conditions. The first condition is that the conscious personality must keep the subconscious underworld of the Psyche under the will’s and reason’s control. The second condition is that it must also contrive to ‘dwell together in unity’ with the other conscious personalities with which it has to dwell together on some terms or other in the mortal life of a Homo Sapiens who was a social animal before he was a human being, and a sexual organism before he was a social animal. These two necessary conditions for the exercise of Freedom are actually inseparable from one another; for, if it is true that ‘when knaves fall out honest men come by their own’, it is no less true that, when persons fall out, the Subconscious Psyche escapes from the control of each and all of them.
Thus the gift of consciousness, whose mission is to liberate the human spirit from the ‘laws of Nature’ ruling over the subconscious abyss of the Psyche, is apt to defeat itself by misusing, as a weapon of fratricidal conflict between one personality and another, the freedom that is its raison d’être ; and the structure and working of the Human Psyche account for this tragic aberration without any need for recourse to Bossuet’s impious hypothesis of special interventions on the part of an omnipotent but jealous God to make sure that human wills shall reduce each other to impotence by cancelling each other out.
If our foregoing survey has convinced us that human affairs are amenable to laws of Nature, and that the currency of these laws in this realm is also explicable, at least to some extent, we may now go on to inquire whether laws of Nature current in human history are inexorable or controllable. If we here abide by our previous procedure of considering laws of non-Human Nature first before we bring laws of Human Nature into the picture, we shall find that, as far as laws of non-Human Nature are concerned, we have virtually answered the question in the previous chapter.
The short answer is that, though Man is powerless to modify the terms of any law of non-Human Nature or to suspend its operation, he can affect the incidence of these laws by steering his course on lines on which these laws will minister to his own purposes. That is what the ‘poet’, already quoted, meant when he wrote
When Men of Science find out something more,
We shall be happier than we were before.
Western Man’s success in modifying the incidence of laws of non-Human Nature on his affairs had been registered in reductions in the rates of insurance premiums. Improvements in charts, followed by the installation of wireless and radar on ships, had diminished the risk of shipwreck; the smudge-pots of Southern California and the gauze-screens of the Connecticut Valley had diminished the risk of frost damage to crops; the devices of inoculation, spraying, and baptism in pest-killing liquids had diminished the danger of pest damage to crops, trees, and flocks; and, for human beings too, by various methods, the incidence of disease had been diminished and the expectation of life lengthened.
When we pass to the realm of laws of Human Nature, we find the same tale being told in rather more faltering accents. The risk of accidents of various kinds had been reduced by improvements in education and discipline. The risk of burglaries had been found to vary inversely with the conditions of the social milieu in which burglars were bred and therefore to be amenable to measures of social betterment.
When we come to consider those alternating flows and ebbs of Western economic activity that had come to be called trade cycles, we find the professional students of them drawing a distinction between controllable and uncontrollable factors, one school going so far as to maintain that these cycles were due to the deliberate action of bankers. The majority, however, held that the rational action of the bankers counted for less than the uncontrolled play of imagination and feeling welling up from the subconscious lower levels of the Psyche. Not cherchez la banque but the more familiar cherchez la femme would seem to indicate the direction in which the minds of some of the highest authorities in this field were turning:
‘One reason why spending money is a backward art in comparison with making money [is that] the family continues to be the dominant unit of organization for spending money, whereas, for making money, the family has been largely superseded by a more highly organised unit. The Housewife, who does a large fraction of the World’s shopping, is not selected for her efficiency as a manager, is not dismissed for her inefficiency, and has small chance of extending her sway over other households if she prove capable. … It is not surprising that what the World has learned in the art of consumption has been due less to the initiative of consumers than to the initiative of producers striving to win a market for their wares.’ 1
These considerations suggested that the fluctuations in the volume of business activity might continue to escape control so long as the units of consumption continued to be households and the units of production freely competing individuals, firms, or states whose conflicting wills left the economic arena open for the play of subconscious psychic forces. At the same time there seemed no reason why the Hebrew Patriarch Joseph’s legendary success, as economic intendant of an Egyptiac world during the last days of the Hyksos régime, in making provision during years of abundance against coming years of scarcity should not be emulated on a global scale in a latter-day economically Westernized world that had become co-extensive with the whole surface of the planet. There seemed no reason why some historic American or Russian Joseph should not one day bring the sum total of Man’s economic life under a central control which, whether benevolent or malevolent, would assuredly outrange in its effectiveness the wildest flights of either Mosaic or Marxian fancy.
When we pass from business cycles of a few years’ duration to the generation cycle with a wave-length of something between a quarter and a third of a century, we can see that the wastage, to which any cultural heritage was prone, was being reduced on the physical plane by printing, photostating, and other techniques, and on the spiritual plane by the spread of education.
So far, the results of our present inquiry seem to be encouraging; but, when we pass on to social processes of a vastly longer wavelength, such as ‘the sorrowful wheel’ revolving through eight or ten centuries of breakdown and disintegration, we encounter a question that had been insistently presenting itself to an increasing number of minds in the Western world on the morrow of what had been the second World War within a single generation. When a civilization had broken down, was it doomed already to follow the wrong turning to the bitter end? Or could it retrace its steps? Perhaps the strongest practical motive for. the interest that was undoubtedly being taken by the writer’s Western contemporaries in a synoptic study of the history of Man in Process of Civilization was an eagerness to take their historical bearings at a moment in the history of their own civilization which they felt to be a turning-point. In this crisis the Western peoples, and the American people perhaps above all, were conscious of a load of responsibility; and, in looking to past experience for light to guide them, they were turning to the only human source of wisdom that had ever been at the disposal of Mankind. But they could not turn to History for light on how they ought to act without first putting the preliminary question: Did History give them any assurance that they were really free agents? The lesson of History, after all, might turn out to be, not that one choice would be better than another, but that their sense of being free to choose was an illusion; that the time, if there had ever been such a time, when choices would have proved effective was now over; and that their generation had passed out of an H. A. L. Fisher phase in which anything might be followed by anything into an Omar Khayyám phase where
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
If we try to answer the question in the light of the evidence presented by the histories of civilizations up to date, we shall have to report that, out of fourteen clear cases of breakdown, we cannot point to one in which the malady of fratricidal warfare had been got rid of by any means less drastic than the elimination of all but one of the war-making states themselves. But in accepting this formidable finding we must not allow ourselves to be discouraged by it; for the inductive method of reasoning is notoriously an imperfect instrument for proving a negative proposition; and, the smaller the number of instances under review, the weaker it is. The experience of some fourteen civilizations over a period of a mere 6,000 years had established no very strong presumption against the possibility that, in response to the challenge by which these pioneering civilizations had been worsted, some other representative of this relatively novel form of society might succeed some day in opening up some hitherto unknown avenue for an unprecedented spiritual advance, by finding some less prohibitively costly device than the forcible imposition of a universal state for curing the social disease of fratricidal war.
If, with this possibility in mind, we now glance back, once again, at the histories of those civilizations which had trodden the whole length of the via dolorosa from breakdown to final dissolution, we shall observe that at least some of them had caught sight of a saving alternative solution, even though none of them had succeeded in achieving it.
In the Hellenic world, for example, the vision of a Homonoia or Concord that might do what force could never do had unquestionably been caught by certain rare Hellenic souls under the spiritual stress of a Time of Troubles that had set in with the outbreak of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431–404 B.C. In a post-Modern Western world the same ideal had been embodied in the League of Nations after the War of A.D. 1914–18 and in the United Nations Organization after the War of A.D. 1939–45. In Sinic history during the Sinic society’s first rally after its breakdown, Confucius’s pious zeal for the revival of the traditional code of conduct and ritual, and Lao-Tse’s quietist belief in leaving a free field for the spontaneous operation of the subconscious forces of Wu Wei, had both been inspired by a yearning to touch springs of feeling that might release a saving power of spiritual harmony, and more than one attempt had been made to embody these ideals in working institutions.
The objective on the political plane was to find a middle way between two deadly extremes: the desolating strife of parochial states and the desolating peace imposed through the delivery of the knock-out blow. The reward of success in running the gauntlet of these adamantine Symplegades, whose clashing jaws had crushed every vessel that had attempted to navigate them up to date, might be the Argonauts’ legendary experience of bursting out into an open sea hitherto unnavigated by Mankind. It was obvious, however, that this issue could not be ensured by any talismanic blueprint of a federal constitution. The most adroit political engineering applied to the structure of the body social would never serve as a substitute for the spiritual redemption of souls. The proximate causes of breakdown in the warfare of states or in the strife between classes were no more than symptoms of spiritual disease. A wealth of experience had long since demonstrated that institutions were of no avail to save froward souls from bringing themselves and each other to grief. If the prospects of Man in Process of Civilization, on his arduous climb up a precipitous cliff-face towards an unattained and invisible ledge above, evidently depended on his ability to recover a lost control of this pitch, it was no less evident that this issue was going to be decided by the course of Man’s relations, not just with his fellow men and with himself, but above all with God his Saviour.
1 For these the reader must consult A Study of History in its unabridged form, vol. ix.
1 Jevons, W. Stanley: Investigations in Currency and Finance , 2nd ed. (London, 1909, Macmillan), p. 184.
1 Haberler, G.: Prosperity and Depression (Geneva 1941, League of Nations), p. 10.
1 Elias, N.: Vber den Prozess der Civilisation , vol. ii: Wandlungen der Gesell-schaft: Entwurf zu einer Theorie der Civilisation (Basel 1939, Haus zum Falken), P. 45I.
1 Mitchell, W. C: Business Cycles: the Problem and its Setting (New York 1927, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.), pp. 165–6.