IN earlier parts of this Study we have tried to gain some insight into the causes of the breakdowns of civilizations and into the process of their disintegrations by surveys of the relevant historical facts; and in studying the breakdowns we found that the cause was, in every case, some failure of self-determination. A broken-down society would prove to have forfeited a salutary freedom of choice through having fallen under the bondage of some idol of its own making. Midway through the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western society was manifestly given over to the worship of a number of idols; but, among these, one stood out above the rest, namely the worship of the parochial state. This feature of Post-Modern Western life was a terrifying portent on two accounts: first, because this idolization was the true, though unavowed, religion of the great majority of the inhabitants of the Westernizing world, and secondly, because this false religion had been the death of no less than fourteen, and perhaps of sixteen, of the twenty-one civilizations on record.
Fratricidal warfare of ever-increasing violence had been by far the commonest cause of mortality among civilizations of all three generations. In the first generation it had certainly been the destruction of the Sumeric and the Andean, and probably of the Minoan as well. In the second generation it had destroyed the Babylonic, the Indic, the Syriac, the Hellenic, the Sinic, the Mexic, and the Yucatec. In the third generation it had destroyed the Orthodox Christian, both in its main body and in its Russian offshoot, the Far Eastern in its Japanese offshoot, the Hindu, and the Iranic. Of the five remaining civilizations, other than the Western, we may suspect that the Hittite had likewise brought itself to ruin by fratricidal warfare at home before it had run full tilt against a petrified Egyptiac world, and had subsequently succumbed to a barbarian Volkerwanderung. The Mayan civilization had, so far, yielded no evidence of fratricidal warfare. The Egyptiac and the Far Eastern civilization in China seem to have sacrificed their lives to a different idol, namely an œcumenical polity with an increasingly parasitic bureaucracy. The only remaining specimen is the Arabic society, which may have been destroyed by the incubus of a parasitic Nomad institution in a non-Nomad world—the slave-ascendancy of the Egyptian Mamlūks—unless this society affords a solitary case of destruction by an alien assailant.
Moreover, in the Post-Modern chapter of Western history, the devastating effects of the idolization of parochial sovereign states had been enhanced by a demonic drive. The restraining influence of a universal church had been removed. The impact of democracy in the form of nationalism, coupled in many cases with some new-fangled ideology, had made the warfare more bitter, and the impetus given by industrialism and technology had provided the combatants with increasingly destructive weapons.
The Industrial Revolution that had begun to affect the Western world in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era was an unmistakable counterpart of the economic revolution that had overtaken the Hellenic world in the sixth century B.C. In both cases, communities that had previously made their living more or less in isolation, by subsistence farming, had now gone into economic partnership with each other to increase their output and their income by learning to produce and exchange specialized commodities. In so doing they had ceased to be autarkic, and they could no longer resume their autarky even if they had so wished. The effect in both cases had been to give the society a new structure on the economic plane that was incongruous with its structure on the political plane; and the fatal result of this ‘faulting’ in the social fabric of the Hellenic society has already come to our notice more than once.
One discouraging symptom in Modern Western history had been the emergence, first in Prussia and then in Germany at large, of a militarism that had been deadly in the histories of other civilizations. This militarism had first made its appearance in the reigns of the Prussian kings Frederick William I and Frederick the Great (A.D. 1713–86), at a time when, of all ages of latter-day Western history, the conduct of war had been most formal and its destructiveness at a minimum. In its final phase, up to the time of writing, the mad-dog militarism of a National Socialist Germany could be compared only with the furor Assyriacus after its temperature had been raised to the third degree by Tiglath-Pileser III (reigned 746–727 B.C. ). Whether the unprecedentedly drastic destruction of the National Socialist war machine had destroyed the will to militarism in all parts of a Westernizing world seemed, at the time of writing, much more doubtful.
To set against these bad omens there were also some more favourable symptoms. There was one ancient institution, no less evil than war, which the Western civilization had got rid of. A society which had succeeded in abolishing slavery might surely take heart from this unprecedented victory of a Christian ideal as it addressed itself to the task of abolishing the coeval institution of war. War and slavery had been twin cancers of civilization ever since this species of society had first emerged. The conquest of one of them was a good omen for the prospects of the campaign against the other.
Moreover, a Western society that was still being worsted by war could take heart from its record on other spiritual battlefields. In its response to the challenge presented by the impact of industrialism on the institution of private property, the Western society had already in many countries made some headway in forcing a passage between the Scylla of unrestricted economic individualism and the Charybdis of totalitarian control of economic activities by the state. There had also been some measure of success in coping with the impact of democracy on education. In throwing open to all an intellectual treasure-house which had been a small minority’s jealously guarded and oppressively exploited preserve since the dawn of civilization, the Modern Western spirit of democracy had given mankind a new hope at the cost of exposing it to a new danger. The danger lay in the opening which a rudimentary universal education gave for propaganda, and in the skill and unscrupulousness with which this opportunity had been seized by advertising salesmen, news agencies, pressure groups, political parties, and totalitarian governments. The hope lay in the possibility that these exploiters of a semi-educated public would prove unable to ‘condition’ their victims so thoroughly as to prevent them from continuing their education to a point at which they would become immune against such exploitation.
But the plane on which the decisive spiritual battle was likely to be fought was neither the military nor the social nor the economic nor the intellectual; for in A.D. 1955 the crucial questions confronting Western Man were all religious.
Had the fanatically positive Judaic religions been discredited beyond repair by the incriminating record of intolerance that had given the lie to their professions? Was there any virtue in the religious toleration into which a disillusioned Western world had subsided toward the close of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era? How long would Western souls find it bearable to go on living without religion? And, now that the discomfort of a spiritual vacuum had tempted them to open the door to such devils as nationalism and fascism and communism, how long was their latter-day belief in toleration likely to stand the test? Toleration had been easy in a lukewarm age in which the varieties of Western Christianity had lost their hold on Western hearts and minds, while these had not yet found alternative objects for their frustrated devotion. Now that they had gone a whoring after other gods, would an eighteenth-century toleration hold its own against a twentieth-century fanaticism?
Wanderers in a Western wilderness, astray from the One True God of their forefathers, who had been taught by a disillusioning experience that parochial states, like sectarian churches, were idols whose worship brought not peace but a sword, might be tempted to seize upon a Collective Humanity as an alternative object of idolization. A ‘religion of Humanity’ that had missed fire in the frigid mould of a Comtian Positivism had set the World ablaze when it had been fired from the cannon’s mouth of Marxian Communism. Would a life-and-death struggle for the salvation of souls, which Christianity had waged and won in its youth against an Hellenic worship of a Collective Humanity embodied in the cults of Dea Roma and Divus Caesar, have to be fought out again, two thousand years later, against some latter-day embodiment of the worship of the same Leviathan? The Hellenic precedent raised the question without revealing the answer.
If we now pass on from the symptoms of breakdown in the Western world to the symptoms of disintegration, we shall recall that, in our analysis of ‘Schism in the Body Social’, we found unmistakable traces, in a latter-day Western world, of the appearance of the characteristic threefold division into a dominant minority, an internal proletariat, and an external proletariat.
The Western world’s external proletariat need hardly detain us, for the former barbarians were being eliminated, not by extermination, but by being transferred to the ranks of a Western internal proletariat which had come to embrace a great majority of the living generation of Mankind. The thus forcibly domesticated barbarians were actually one of the smallest contingents of which this vast twentieth-century internal proletariat of the Western society was composed. A far larger quota had been contributed by children of non-Western civilizations who had been caught in a World-encompassing Western net. A third contingent, the most unhappy and therefore the most actively dissident of the three, consisted of déracinés of diverse origins, Western as well as non-Western, who had suffered divers degrees of coercion. There were the descendants of African negro slaves who had been forcibly transplanted across the Atlantic; there were the descendants of Indian and Chinese indentured labourers whose emigration overseas had often in effect been just as involuntary as that of African slaves. Then there were others who had been uprooted without crossing any seas. The most flagrant examples of proletarianization were the ‘Poor Whites’ in the ‘Old South’ of the United States and in the Union of South Africa, who had sunk to the social level of their more successful fellow colonists’ imported or indigenous African helots. But, over and above all these outstanding unfortunate groups, it could be said that, wherever there were masses of people, rural or urban, who felt that the Western social system was not giving them what they were entitled to have, there was an internal proletariat; for our definition of ‘proletariat’ has, throughout this Study, been psychological, and we have consistently used it to denote those who felt that they no longer ‘belonged’ spiritually to the society within which they found themselves included physically.
The proletarian reaction against a dominant minority had found violent expression at various times and in various places, from medieval Peasant Wars to the Jacobinism of the French Revolution. In the middle of the twentieth century of the Christian Era it was expressing itself more powerfully than ever before, and this along two channels. Where the grievances were mainly economic, the channel was Communism; where they were political or racial, the channel was a nationalistic revolt against Colonialism.
In A.D. 1955 the threat to Western civilization from the Russo-Chinese Communist bloc was obvious and menacing. At the same time there were a number of less sensational, but not necessarily less substantial, entries on the other side of the account.
The first point that might come to tell in a menaced Western civilization’s favour was the alloy of Russian nationalism in an œcumenical Communism that professed, with a show of Pauline fervour, to have risen superior to all invidious distinctions between Jew and Greek. This vein of insincerity was a flaw in Communism’s moral armour. At a moment when, in Eastern Asia, the Western cause was suffering grievous adversity, a Western telepathist who could have looked into the hearts of the close-lipped statesmen in the Kremlin might have learnt that they were watching the spectacular successes of their Chinese allies with mixed feelings. The future of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Sinkiang was, after all, of vastly greater importance for China and for Russia alike than the future of Indo-China, Hong-Kong, and Formosa. It was conceivable that Malenkov or his successor Khrushchev or Khrushchev’s possible successor, at present still below the horizon, might become another Tito, and that, after Germany and Japan had been rearmed by the West, and China by the Soviet Union, a frightened West might hail a frightened Russia as ‘the White Man’s Hope’. The long-since-discredited Kaiser Wilhelm II had called attention to the Yellow Peril and had been thought a fool for his pains; yet some writers still persisted in holding the view that he was not only a well-meaning but also a very clever man; and, significantly, even Hitler had commended the Kaiser’s judgement on this one point.
This at first sight unconvincing prognostication had a solid basis in two indisputable facts. Russia was the only major province of the patrimony of the White Race in which the population was increasing in the twentieth century at the rate at which it had increased in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America; and Russia was also the province of the White Race’s patrimony which marched with the Continental frontiers of China and India. If either or both of these sub-continents, each of which housed nearly a quarter of the human race, were to succeed in carrying the process of Westernization on the technological and organizational planes to a point at which Chinese o- Indian manpower would begin to count in the World’s military and political balance-sheet in proportion to its mere numbers, it was to be expected that such an invigorated Samson would insist on a drastic revision of the World’s hitherto grossly inequitable distribution of territory and natural resources. In such an event, Russia, struggling to preserve her own existence, might find herself involuntarily performing, for a Western world snugly sheltering under her lee, the unrewarding service of acting as a buffer that the main body of Orthodox Christendom had once performed for the same Western world when the explosive quarter had been, not India or China, but a South-West Asia united under a dynamic Primitive Muslim Arab leadership.
These were highly speculative forecasts relating to a future not yet in sight. There was perhaps more solid ground for encouragement in the fact that a Western community which had come into headlong collision with the Chinese in Korea and had been desperately embroiled in Indo-China had managed to come to terms with the Indonesians on the morrow of their liberation from the Japanese, and had voluntarily abdicated its dominion over the Filipinos, Ceylonese, Burmans, Indians, and Pakistanis. The reconciliation between an Asia represented by various communities formerly subject to the British Rāj and a Western society represented by British protagonists in the drama of Late Modern Western Imperialism opened up a prospect that some part, at least, of the vast Asian contingent in a world-wide Western internal proletariat, which had been heading towards secession from a Western dominant minority, might change its course and make for the alternative goal of partnership on terms of equality with its former Western masters.
A similar issue might be hoped for in the Asian and North African provinces of the Islamic world, and also in most of Africa south of the Sahara. A more intractable problem was presented by those areas in which climatic conditions had tempted the Western European not only to establish his rule but also to make his home; and the same problem arose in a less menacing form in regions where non-White populations had been imported to do the more disagreeable and elementary chores of the White Man’s work for him. The difference in the degree of menace, as seen from the White standpoint, expressed itself in the statistics of the racial composition of the local population. Where the non-White was indigenous, as for example in South Africa, he usually far outnumbered the dominant White race. Where he had been forcibly imported, as in the United States, the proportions were in the reverse.
In the United States, at the time of writing, the tendency of a ‘colour-bar’ to harden into a caste distinction on Indian lines was being resisted by the counter-operation of the spirit of Christianity; and, though it was impossible to tell as yet whether this Christian counter-attack was a forlorn hope or ‘the wave of the Future’, it was a good omen that, in the United States as in India, the redeeming spirit had been at work on both sides. In the hearts of the dominant White majority a Christian conscience that had insisted on abolishing Negro slavery had come to realize that a merely juridical emancipation was not enough, and on the other side a Coloured proletarian minority had shown signs of responding in the same spirit.
The alienation of the internal proletariat is, as we found in an earlier part of this Study, the most conspicuous symptom of the disintegration of a civilization; and, with that in mind, we have been considering what evidence there might be, both of alienation and of reconciliation, within the Western society as it stood in the middle of the twentieth century of the Christian Era. So far, we have been considering those elements of the proletariat which were themselves non-Western in origin but which had been brought within the frontiers of the Western society by the West’s worldwide expansion. There remained, needless to say, all that part of the proletariat which was racially indistinguishable from its dominant minority; that vast majority of Western men and women whom ‘superior persons’ born into a nineteenth-century Western privileged minority referred to under such various names as ‘the working classes’, ‘the lower classes’, ‘the populace’, ‘the masses’, and even (in a contemptuously quizzical vein) ‘the great unwashed’. Here the immensity of the theme is daunting. It must suffice to say that in practically all Western countries, and more particularly in the most highly industrialized and most thoroughly modernized Western countries, there had been, in the past half-century, an immense practical advance towards social justice in every department of life. The political revolution through which India had obtained her emancipation from the British Rāj had not been more remarkable than the social revolution in Great Britain through which a Western country in which power, wealth, and opportunity had been still, within living memory, the close preserve of an odiously small and scandalously over-privileged minority, had transformed itself, with remarkably little ill-feeling on either side, into a community in which a large measure of social justice had been secured at the cost of a minimal sacrifice of individual liberty.
The foregoing survey of facts telling against, as well as facts telling in favour of, the likelihood of the Western civilization’s coming to grief through a secession of an internal proletariat suggests two tentative conclusions. In the first place, the forces of reconciliation appeared to be stronger than any corresponding forces at work in the Hellenic society at a corresponding stage in its history. Secondly, this difference in the Western world’s favour appeared to be mainly due to the continuing operation of a spirit of Christianity that had not lost its hold over the hearts of Western men and women, even though their minds might have rejected the creed in which the abiding truths of Christianity had been translated into the ephemeral language of a pagan Hellenic philosophy.
This persistent vitality of a higher religion which had once provided a larval Western society with its chrysalis was an element that had been conspicuously lacking in an otherwise comparable Hellenic situation; and it might be conjectured that there was some relation between this apparent invincibility of Christianity’s spiritual essence and the paucity and jejunity of the new crop of religions that could be descried raising their heads here and there in a Westernizing world at this time.
We may therefore conclude that the evidence from non-Western precedents bearing on the future of the Western civilization was not decisive.
So far we have been examining elements in the post-Modern Western situation which are comparable with elements in the histories of the other civilizations, but there are also elements in it to which the histories of the other civilizations present no parallels. Two of these unparalleled features leap to the eye. The first is the extent of the mastery that Western Man had acquired over non-human Nature; the second is the accelerating rapidity of the social change that this mastery was bringing about.
Ever since Man’s passage from the Lower to the Upper Palaeolithic stage of technological progress, the Human Race had been Lords of Creation on Earth in the sense that, from that time onwards, it had no longer been possible either for inanimate Nature or for any other non-human creature either to exterminate Mankind or even to interrupt human progress. Thenceforth, nothing on Earth, with one exception, could stand in Man’s way or bring Man to ruin; but that exception was a formidable one —namely, Man himself. As we have seen, Man had already brought himself to grief in the misconduct of some fourteen or fifteen civilizations. Eventually, in A.D. 1945, the detonation of the atomic bomb had made it clear that Man had now acquired a degree of control over non-human Nature which made it impossible for him to avoid any longer the challenge of the two evils which he had brought on the World in the very act of providing himself with a new species of Society in the shape of societies in process of civilization. These twin evils were two different manifestations of the single evil of war, though it might be convenient to distinguish them by giving them different names—war as ordinarily understood, and class-war: horizontal war and vertical war, in other words.
This was a situation with which the Human Race was very ill-prepared to cope. In considering its prospects, we may manage to simplify our task by giving separate consideration, first to Technology, War, and Government, and then to Technology, Class-conflict, and Employment.