SUCH evidences as we have collected of Man’s ability to control his own affairs, either by circumventing laws of Nature or by harnessing them to his service, raises the question whether there may not be some circumstances in which human affairs are not amenable to laws of Nature at all. We may begin our exploration of this possibility by inquiring into the rate of social change. If the tempo proves to be variable, this will be evidence, as far as it goes, that human affairs are recalcitrant to laws of Nature in the time-dimension at least.
If the tempo of History should indeed prove to be constant in all circumstances, in the sense that the passage of each decade or century could be shown to generate a definite and uniform quantum of psychological and social change, it would follow that, if we knew the value of either the quantum in the psycho-social series or the time-span in the time series, we should be able to calculate the magnitude of the corresponding unknown quantity in the other series. This assumption had been made by at least one distinguished student of Egyptiac history who had rejected a chronological date presented by astronomy on the ground that to accept it would mean accepting the, to him, inadmissible proposition that the tempo of social change in the Egyptiac world must have been notably quicker during one period of two hundred years’ length than it had been during an immediately preceding period of the same length. Yet a host of familiar examples could be cited to show that the proposition at which this eminent Egyptologist shied is in fact an historical truism.
For example: We know that the Parthenon at Athens was built in the fifth century B.C. , Hadrian’s Olympieum in the second century A.D., and the Church of Saint Sophia at Constantinople in the sixth century A.D. On the principle on which our Egyptologist took his stand, there should be a much shorter interval between the first and the second of these buildings, which are in approximately the same style, than between the second and the third, which are in totally different styles; but here the incontestably certain dates show that, in this case, the shorter of the two intervals was that between the two buildings whose styles were dissimilar.
We should be similarly misled if we were to put our trust in the same a priori principle in trying to estimate the relative time-intervals between the equipment of a Roman soldier in the last days of the Empire in the West, of a Saxon soldier of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, and of a Norman knight depicted on the Bayeux tapestry. Considering that the round shields and the gladiator’s square-rimmed crested helmets with which Otto’s soldiers are equipped are mere variants on the equipment of the late Roman Emperor Majorian’s soldiers, whereas William the Conqueror’s soldiers are equipped with Sarmatian conical helmets and coats of scale armour, with kite-shaped shields, the hypothesis of invariability in the tempo of change would lead us, here also, to fly in the face of the facts by guessing that the interval between Otto I (reigned A.D. 936–73) and William the Conqueror (ruled in Normandy A.D. 1035–87) must have been much longer than the interval between Majorian (reigned A.D. 457–61) and Otto.
Again, anyone who takes a synoptic view of the standard civilian Western male dress as worn in A.D. 1700 and A.D. 1950 will see at a glance that the coat, waistcoat, trousers, and umbrella of A.D. 1950 are merely variations on the coat, waistcoat, breeches, and sword of A.D. 1700, and that both are utterly different from the doublet and trunk-hose of A.D. 1600. In this case, which is the converse of the two preceding, an earlier and shorter period shows far more change than a later and longer one. These cautionary tales are a warning against the danger of confiding in an hypothesis of invariability in the tempo of change as a basis for trying to estimate the lapse of time that it must have taken for successive strata of the debris of human occupation to accumulate on some site whose history has to be reconstructed solely from the material evidence disinterred by the archaeologist’s spade, in default of chronological data furnished by written records.
We may perhaps follow up our opening attack on this hypothesis that the rate of cultural change is invariable by citing a few examples, first of acceleration, then of retardation, and, finally, of an alternating rate.
A familiar example of acceleration is the phenomenon of revolution; for this, as we found in a previous context in this Study, is a social movement generated by an encounter between two communities, one of which happens to have got ahead of the other in one or other of the different fields of human activity. The French Revolution of A.D. 1789, for example, was, in its first phase, a spasmodic effort to catch up with a constitutional progress which a neighbouring Britain had been slowly achieving during the two preceding centuries. Indeed, the Continental Western ‘Liberalism’ which inspired so many, mostly abortive, revolutions in the nineteenth century had been given the name of Anglomania by some Continental historians.
A common type of acceleration is to be found in the behaviour of marchmen just within the fringe of a civilization, or of barbarians just beyond its pale, who are suddenly inspired to catch up with their more advanced neighbours. The writer of this Study vividly remembers the impression made on him by a visit to the Nordiska Museet at Stockholm in 1910. After passing through a series of rooms displaying samples of Scandinavian palaeolithic, neolithic, bronze-age, and pre-Christian iron-age cultures, he was startled to find himself in a room displaying Scandinavian artifacts in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Wondering how he could have failed to notice the products of the Medieval period, he retraced his steps; and there, sure enough, was a Medieval room; but its contents were insignificant. He then began to realize that Scandinavia had passed in a flash out of a Late Iron Age, in which she had been beginning to create a distinctive civilization of her own, into an Early Modern Age in which she had become an undistinguished participant in a standardized Italianate Western Christian culture. Part of the price of this feat of acceleration had been the cultural impoverishment to which the Nordiska Museet bore witness.
As with Scandinavia in the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, so with the whole of the non-Western but precipitately Westernizing world of the writer’s own day. It is a commonplace to remark that the African peoples, for example, were trying to achieve in a generation or two a political, social, and cultural progress that had occupied the West European peoples, whom the Africans were simultaneously imitating and resisting, for a thousand years or more. These peoples tended to exaggerate—and the Western onlooker, perhaps, to underrate—the amount of real acceleration that Africa had achieved.
If revolutions are a dramatic manifestation of acceleration, the phenomenon of retardation is to be seen in a straggler’s refusal to keep pace with the movement of the main body. An example may be found in the obstinate retention of the institution of slavery by the Southern States of the North American Union a whole generation after it had been abolished in the neighbouring West Indian islands of the British Empire. Other examples were furnished by groups of colonists who had migrated to ‘new’ countries and had maintained there the standards prevalent in their homelands at the time when they had left home, long after their cousins in the ‘old’ country had abandoned those standards and had moved forward. The case was a familiar one, and it was sufficient to mention Quebec, the Appalachian highlands, and the Transvaal in the twentieth century of the Christian Era as compared with France, Ulster, and the Netherlands at the same date. The previous pages of this Study present many examples of both acceleration and retardation which the reader can recall for himself. It is obvious, for example, that what we have called Herodianism is akin to acceleration and that what we have called Zealotism is akin to retardation. It is also obvious that, since change can be for the worse as well as for the better, acceleration is not necessarily good nor retardation necessarily bad.
A concatenation of alternating changes of speed which runs, not to two, but certainly to three, and possibly to four, terms is to be found in the Modern Western history of the arts of shipbuilding and navigation. The story begins with a sudden acceleration which revolutionized both these arts during the fifty years A.D. 1440–90. This spurt was followed by a retardation which persisted through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, but which was followed in its turn, after that long pause, by another sudden acceleration during the fifty years A.D. 1840–90. In A.D. 1952 the next phase was enigmatical because it was still in progress, but to a layman’s eye it looked as if the further technological advances then in progress, notable though these were, might nevertheless prove to fall short of the revolutionary achievements of the Victorian half-century.
‘In the fifteenth century … there was a swift and momentous change in the building of ships. … In the space of fifty years the sea-going sailing-ship developed from a single-master into a three-master carrying five or six sails.’ 1
And this technological revolution not only gave its authors access to all quarters of the Globe; it also gave them an ascendancy over all non-Western mariners whom they might encounter. The new ship’s distinctive virtue, in which it surpassed its successors as conspicuously as its predecessors, was its power to keep the sea for an almost unlimited length of time on end without having to call at a port. ‘The ship’, as it came, during its floruit , to be called par excellence , was the offspring of a happy marriage between diverse traditional builds and rigs, each of which had peculiar excellences but also consequent limitations. The Western ship that was brought to birth between A.D. 1440 and A.D. 1490 harmonized the strong points of an age-old Mediterranean oar-propelled ‘long ship’, alias galley, with those of no less than three distinct types of sailing-ship: a coeval square-rigged Mediterranean ‘round ship’, alias carrack; a lateen-rigged Indian-Ocean ‘caravel’ whose fore-runner is depicted in the visual records of an Egyptian maritime expedition to the East African land of Punt in the reign of the Empress Hatshepsut (1486–68 B.C. ); and a massively built Atlantic-faring sailing-ship which caught Caesar’s eye in 56 B.C. when he occupied the peninsula afterwards called Brittany. The new design, which combined the best points of these four types, was complete by the end of the fifteenth century, and the best ships then afloat did not differ in essentials from those of Nelson’s day.
Then, after three and a half centuries of retardation, the Western art of shipbuilding found itself on the eve of another outburst of acceleration; and, this time, the work of creation at high speed was to go forward on two parallel lines. On the one hand the steam-engine was to be substituted for sail; and contemporaneously the art of building sailing-ships was to awake from its long sleep and carry the old type forward to a new and hitherto-undreamed-of perfection at which, for some purposes, the sailing-ship was to hold its own in competition with the steamship throughout the creative half-century A.D. 1840–90.
If we now look for an explanation of these accelerations and retardations, which are such striking departures from the uniformity of movement that we should expect in societies wholly subject to the laws of Nature, we shall find our explanation in the formula of Challenge and Response, which we examined and illustrated at length in an earlier part of this Study. Let us take the last case cited, namely the two great accelerations, with a long period of retardation between them, in the history of Western shipbuilding and navigation.
The challenge that evoked the creation of the Modern Western ship within the half-century A.D. 1440–90 was a political one. Towards the close of the Middle Ages, Western Christendom found itself not only foiled in its attempt to break out south-eastwards into Dār-al-Islām (i.e. in ‘The Crusades’), but seriously threatened by the counter-attack of the Turks up the Danube and along the Mediterranean. The danger of the West’s position at this date was accentuated by the fact that the Western Christian society happened to occupy the tip of one of the peninsulas of the Eurasian continent; and a society so precariously situated must sooner or later be pushed into the sea by the pressure of mightier forces thrusting outwards from the heart of the Old World if this besieged society did not forestall disaster by breaking out of its cul-de-sac into wider lands elsewhere. Otherwise it might expect to suffer at the hands of Islam a fate which it had already itself inflicted, many centuries before, on the abortive Far Western Christendom of ‘the Celtic Fringe’. In the Crusades the Latin Christians, choosing the Mediterranean as their war-path and traversing it in vessels of the traditional Mediterranean builds, had been moved by a longing to possess the cradle of their Christian faith. They had failed; and the menacing subsequent advance of Islam had put Islam’s foiled Western antagonists between the Devil and the Deep Sea. They chose the Deep Sea and devised the new ship—with consequences surpassing the wildest dreams of the most optimistic of the disciples of the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator.
The overwhelming success of the fifteenth-century Western shipwrights’ response to the challenge of Islam accounts for the long spell of retardation which followed in the Western shipwright’s trade. The second spell of acceleration in this field was due to a very different cause, namely the new economic revolution which began to affect parts of Western Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. The two outstanding features of this revolution were a sudden increase of population at an accelerating rate and a rise of commerce and manufacturing industry to a preponderance over agriculture. We need not enter here upon the complicated but familiar story of nineteenth-century Western industrial expansion and of the contemporary growth of population, which not only multiplied, to various degrees, the number of inhabitants of the sundry motherlands in the West’s West European ‘Old World’, but also rapidly began to fill the great open spaces in new lands acquired by Western pioneers overseas. It is obvious that oceanic transport would have proved a positively throttling ‘bottle-neck’ obstructing these developments if the shipbuilders had not responded to the challenge as heartily and as effectively as they had responded four hundred years before.
We have chosen our illustration from the material field of human affairs: a couple of successive technological responses in a particular craft to a couple of challenges, the first political and military, the second economic and social. But the principle of Challenge and Response is the same all the way up and down the scale, whether it be the challenge of empty bellies craving for bread or the challenge of hungry souls craving for God. Whatever it be, the Challenge is always God’s offer of Freedom of choice to human souls.
1 Bassett-Lowke, J. W., and Holland, G.: Ships and Men (London 1946, Harrap), p. 46.