Tragedy and Hope
A History of the World in Our Time
By Carroll Quigley
PART TWENTY
Part Twenty: Tragedy and Hope: the Future in Perspective
In an age of change and competing doubts, there is one thing of which we can be certain: the world is changing and will continue to change. But there is no consensus on the direction of such change. Human beings are basically conservative, in the sense that they expect and wish to continue to jog along in the same old patterns. Accordingly, they tend to regard most changes as regrettable, although one might get the impression, in a bustling and dynamic place like the United States, that men preferred change to stability..
It is perfectly true that Americans now have change built into the pattern of their lives, so that saving and investment and, in general, the flows of claims on wealth (what most of us call "money") now go in directions that make constant change almost inevitable. Summer has hardly arrived before summer dresses have been sold out, autumn clothing is beginning to arrive on the dealers' racks, and extensive plans are already in process to make next summer's clothing (which goes on sale in the southern resorts in winter) quite different. This year's cars are not yet available for sale when the manufacturers are planning changed versions for next year's models. And urban commercial buildings are still new when plans for remodeling, or even total replacement, are already stirring in someone's mind.
In such an age the sensible man can only reconcile himself to the fact: change is inevitable. But few men—average or exceptional—feel any competency in deciding the direction that change will take. Forecasting can he attempted only hy extrapolating recent changes into the future, but this is a risky business, since there is never any certainty that present directions will be maintained.
In attempting this risky procedure, we shall continued to divide society into six aspects, falling into the three major areas of the patterns of power, rewards, and outlooks. The area of power is largely, but not exclusively, concerned with military and political arrangements; the area of rewards is similarly concerned with economic and social arrangements; and the area of outlooks is concerned with patterns that might be termed religious and intellectual. Naturally, all these are different, and even drastically different, from one society to another, and even, to a lesser extent, between countries, and areas within countries. For the sake of simplicity, we shall be concerned, in this chapter, with these patterns in Europe and the United States, although, as usual, we shall not hesitate to make comparisons with other cultures, especially with the Soviet Union.
Chapter 74: The Unfolding of Time
The political conditions of the latter half of the twentieth century will continue to be dominated by the weapons situation, for, while politics consists of much more than weapons, the nature, organization, and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determine what happens in political life. Surely weapons will continue to be expensive and complex. This means that they will increasingly be the tools of professionalized, if not mercenary, forces. All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy. When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and to use, almost any man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society, such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary, industrious, private citizen. This very rare historical condition existed about 1880, but is now only a dim memory, since the weapons obtainable by the state today are far beyond the pocketbook, understanding, or competence of the ordinary citizen.
When weapons are of the "amateur" type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed hy citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an "amateur weapons system" (if other conditions are not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such "specialist" weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will he established.
At the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the specialist weapons of today w ill continue to dominate the military picture into the foreseeable future. If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian rather than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into the same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many areas, such as the United States or England. To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this may seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in this situation may well be considered.
For one, our society, Western Civilization, is almost fifteen hundred years old, and was democratic in political action for less than two hundred of these years (or even half of that, in strict truth).... Of equal significance is the fact that a period with a professionalized army may well be, as it was in the eighteenth century, a period of limited warfare seeking limited political aims, if for no other reason than that professionalized forces are less willing to kill and be killed for remote and total objectives.
The amateur weapons of the late nineteenth century made possible the mass citizen armies that fought the American Civil War and both of this century's world wars. Such mass armies could not be offered financial rewards for risking their lives, but they could be offered idealistic, extreme, and total goals that would inspire them to a willingness to die, and to kill: ending slavery, making a world safe for democracy, ending tyranny, spreading, or at least saving, "the American way of life," offered such goals. But they led to a total warfare, seeking total victory and unconditional surrender. As a result, each combatant country came to feel that its way of life, or at least its regime, was at stake in the conflict, and could hardly be expected to survive defeat. Thus they felt compulsion to fight yet more tenaciously. The result was ruthless wars of extermination such as World War II.
With a continued professionalization of the armed services, caused by the increasing complexity of weapons, we may look forward with some assurance to less and less demand for total wars using total weapons of mass destruction to achieve unconditional surrender and unlimited goals. The rather naive American idea that war aims involve the destruction of the enemy's regime and the imposition on the defeated people of a democratic system with a prosperous economy (such as they have never previously known) will undoubtedly be replaced by the idea that the enemy regime must be maintained, perhaps in a modified form, so that we have some government with whom we can negotiate in order to obtain our more limited aims (which caused the conflict) and thus to lower the level of conflict as rapidly as possible consistent with the achievement of our aims. The nature of such "controlled conflict" will be described in a moment.
The movement toward professionalization of the armed forces and the resulting lowering of the intensity of conflict is part of a much larger process deriving from the nuclear and Superpower stalemate between the Soviet Union and the United States. The danger of nuclear destruction will continue and become, if anything, more horrifying, but will, for this very reason, become a more remote and less likely probability. In the late 1960's the United States will have about 1,700 vehicles (missiles and SAC planes) targeted on the Soviet bloc; but the 1970's this will rise to about 2,400. Moreover, by 1970, 650 of these will be Polaris missiles on our 41 nuclear submarines, which cannot be found and eliminated by any Soviet missile counterstrike, once they are submerged at sea. The great value of the Polaris over its land-based rivals, such as Minuteman, is that the Soviet Union knows where the latter are and can counter-target on them. This means that the MM’s must be fired out of their silos before the Soviet warheads, seeking them out to destroy them, can arrive fifteen minutes after takeoff. Such a precarious position encourages nervous anticipation and possibility of precipitate action, capable of beginning a war no one really wants. Thus, on an enormously greater scale, we have something like the von Schlieffen Plan that made it necessary for Germany to attack France in 1914 when there was no real issue justifying resort to war between them. The Polaris missiles at sea, since they cannot be found and counter-forced, can be delayed, without need to strike first or even to strike second in immediate retaliation, but can be held off for hours, days, and weeks, compelling the Soviet to negotiate even after the original Soviet strike has devastated America's cities. Thus the Soviet Union cannot win in a nuclear exchange, even if they make the first strike.
The reverse is also true. In the mid-1960's the Soviet Union has vehicles able to deliver up to six hundred or seven hundred nuclear warheads on the United States and perhaps seven hundred or eight hundred on our European allies. Their warheads are larger than ours (with up to 100-megaton ICBM's, while our largest are 9 MT). In spite of the fact that their missile sites arc poorly organized, with missiles, fuel, crews, and warheads widely scattered, so that they arc at least twelve hours from takeoff even in their fourtl1 stage of readiness, the inaccuracy of our counter-force missiles is so great that we could not eliminate all their missiles, even if we made a first strike with no warning. It would require only about 200 Soviet warheads to devastate our cities totally, and an American strike at Soviet missile bases delivered without warning would leave almost that number not eliminated; these would be free to make a retaliatory strike at us. Moreover, the Soviets have several dozen Polaris-type submarines that can fire four missiles each from surfaced positions. Many of these would survive an American unannounced first strike.
All this means that we are as much deterred hy the Soviet missile threat as they must be by our much greater threat. Such deterrence has nothing to do with the relative size of the numbers of missiles possessed by two countries. It rests on whether an unannounced first strike would leave surviving enough missiles for a retaliatory strike capable of inflicting unacceptable damage. This is now the situation on both sides, and the existence of Polaris-type missiles makes it impossible to avoid this by striving for greater numbers of missiles, for larger warheads able to obliterate wide areas, or for greater accuracy that would increase the statistical possibility of eliminating enemy missiles on first strike. Thus no one will wish to make such a strike. Possibly for this reason, about a year after the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union ceased to work on new missile bases and accepted its permanent inferiority to the United States. But the mutual veto on the use of missiles, the nuclear stalemate, remained.
This stalemate between the two Superpowers on the use of nuclear weapons also extended to their use of lesser, non-nuclear, weapons, so that the nuclear stalemate became a Superpower stalemate. This meant that much of the power of the Soviet Union and the United States, and not merely their nuclear po\ver, was neutralized to a considerable degree, since each feared to use its non-nuclear powers for fear they might escalate into nuclear conflict. This meant that the use of nuclear tactical weapons and the use even of conventional tactical weapons were inhibited to an undetermined degree by the presence of nuclear strategic weapons no one wanted to see used. The costs of using nuclear tactical weapons are so great that it is very doubtful if they are worth the cost. For example, the Western Powers lack the conventional forces to stop any intrusion of the great masses of Soviet ground forces if these began to drive westward in an attempt to conquer Germany. The West is committed to oppose such an effort. Since it is very doubtful that the NATO forces could oppose this successfully by using only conventional weapons, there would be great pressure to use the nuclear tactical weapons that NATO forces in Europe possess. It has been estimated that the chief targets of such nuclear tactical weapons would be bridges and similar narrow passages, in an effort to close these to Soviet advances. But it seems clear that if these passages were closed and the bridges destroyed, the advance of the Soviet armies (in armored and mechanized divisions) would be held up only a few weeks at most, and up to so million Germans would be killed from the blast and side effects of the use of nuclear weapons. At such a cost, the Germans would probably prefer not to be defended.
In fact, it appears increasingly likely that fewer and fewer advanced people will regard large-scale war as an effective method of getting anything. What could a people obtain through war that they could not obtain with greater certainty and less effort in some other way? Indeed, the very idea of winning a general war is now almost unimaginable. We do not even know what we mean by “win.” Whatever Germany, Japan, and Italy sought from World War II, they would surely not have obtained by winning; yet they obtained the most significant parts of it by losing. Glory, power, and wealth may all be obtained with less effort and greater certainty by non-warlike methods. As science and technology advance, making war more horrible, they also make it possible to achieve any aims at which war might be directed by other, nonviolent, methods.
The relationships between political organizations (to us, states) are chiefly political relations, based on power and concerned with influencing the policies of other such entities. We have tended to see such relationships in dichotomies, especially the sharp contrast between violent and nonviolent methods of war and peace. In fact, however, methods of influencing policy form a spectrum without any significant real discontinuities, and range from all-out nuclear warfare at the upper end, down through tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons, then through various levels of nonviolent political, social, and economic pressures, to levels of peaceful persuasion and reciprocal favors, to economic grants and even gifts.
When Khrushchev renounced the use of both nuclear war and conventional violence, and promised to defeat the West by peaceful competition, he was dividing the spectrum into three levels, but in fact it is a continuous spectrum with 100-megaton bombs at the upper end and Olympic Games, International Geophysical Years, and foreign economic aid at the other end. When Khrushchev made his statement, he was convinced that the Soviet Union could outperform the United States on the level of peaceful competition because it could, in his opinion, overcome the American lead in the race for economic development and that, as a result, the Socialist way of life would become the model for emulation by the uncommitted nations. The failures of Socialist agricultural production in Russia, Cuba, China, and elsewhere, and the great triumphs of ... Socialist ... [and mixed] economies in Japan, Europe, and the United States, soon revealed, even to Khrushchev's supporters, that the Soviet chances of triumphing over the West by peaceful competition were very small. Conceivably this might force the Kremlin to raise its anti-American activities to a higher level of conflict, even to the level of violence, although probably through surrogates and satellites and in third-party areas (such as southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America).
To prevent such a raising of the level of Soviet-American conflict, it might be worth while for the West to consider the possibility of yielding the Kremlin some victories on the lower, nonviolent, levels, especially if this could be achieved at little cost to us. It might also be worth while for us to consider what must be Russia's real goals. Obviously preservation of the Communist regime must have a higher level of desirability to Moscow than Castro's success in Cuba or the Kremlin's control of Budapest. Thus to the Politburo, now as earlier under Stalin, continued control in the Kremlin has a higher priority than world revolution. The West can help Russia's rulers get what they really want (their own domestic power), and at small cost, in return for what they can want only secondarily (the expansion of Communism). Thus, like Stalin, they can be forced back to "Socialism in one country." With rising domestic demand for higher standards of living in Russia, and growing evidence that these are more likely to be obtained under a non-Socialist or mixed economy, they could be forced back to "non-Socialism in one country," if this strengthened their own control in the Kremlin, as it well might do.
[This is a call for appeasement and support for a system of tyranny that has oppressed, enslaved and murdered over 180 million people in the 20th century. The communist system should be eliminated from the earth, not built up as the professor is seeking in the above strategy. The American people and freedom-loving people everywhere should vigorously oppose such policy.]
In fact, some such process is already under way. The Soviet Union has always been more conservative and less extremist in international matters than it appeared or sounded. Much of Khrushchev's truculence, even abroad, was for domestic rather than for foreign consumption. A recent study of 29 crisis situations in foreign affairs involving the Soviet Union in the 1945-1963 period shows that they were aggressive in only four, were cautious in eleven, and were more cautious than aggressive in fourteen. The four aggressive ones were concerned with Berlin, Hungary, the U-2 incident, and Cuba. The study showed that only 8 of the 29 crises were initiated by the Soviet Union, while 11 were initiated by the United States. The general conclusion of the study was that Soviet policy would grow increasingly conservative, since they were primarily concerned with state building and retaining what they have already achieved.
The chief uncertainty of continuing this process arises from the problem of political succession in the Kremlin, a major unpredictable factor. Here the chances are two out of three that the trend would continue in Soviet policy, since the one case of a successor who would reverse the more conservative policy is outbalanced by the two cases of a successor who would retain it or of a disputed succession that would make an active Soviet foreign policy difficult. The fact remains that there are in the Soviet Union no institutional safeguards for any policy, just as there are none for the succession. But it is clear that pressures to continue a more moderate foreign policy will be strong, under any successor, now that the Russians are increasingly convinced that their present achievements are worth keeping, as the pressures for domestic improvements continue, and as their future hopes and expectations along these lines become more clearly envisaged.
In this way the Superpower neutralization (and the included nuclear stalemate) will continue into the future. From this flow three consequences:
1. Movement of Soviet-Western rivalry down to lower, less violent, levels of conflict and competition.
2. Continued disintegration of the two Super-blocs, from the inability of the chief Power in each to bring force against its allies because of the need to accept growing diversity within each bloc in order to retain as much as possible the appearance of unity within the bloc. This process is well illustrated by Moscow's difficulties with China, Albania, and now Romania, or by Washington's troubles with De Gaulle or with its Latin American allies.
3. A growing independence of the neutrals and uncommitted nations because of their ability to act freely in the troubled waters stirred up by the Soviet-American confrontation.
These changes, rooted in weapon developments and technological changes, have less obvious political implications. Policy and politics are concerned with methods of influencing the behavior of others to obtain cooperation, consent or, at least, acquiescence. In our Western world, power has been based to a significant extent on force (that is, weapons), and to a lesser degree on economic rewards and ideological appeal. In other cultures, such as in Africa, politics has been based to a considerable extent on other considerations, such as kinship, social reciprocity, and religion. Changes in weapons within the Western states system have brought about changes in political patterns and organization that threaten to cause profound changes in political life and probably in the Western states system.
For many centuries, from the ninth century to the twentieth, the increasing offensive power of Western weapons systems has made it possible to compel obedience over wider and wider areas and over larger numbers of peoples. Accordingly, political organizations (such as the state) have been able to rule over larger areas, and thus have become larger in size and fewer in numbers in our Western world. In this way, the political development of Europe over the last millennium has seen thousands of feudal areas coalesce into hundreds of principalities, and these into scores of dynastic monarchies, and, finally, into a dozen or more national states. The national state, its size measured in hundreds of miles, was based, to a considerable extent, on the fact that the weapons system of the nineteenth century, founded on citizen soldiers with handguns and moved (or supplied) by railroads and wagons, could apply force over hundreds of miles. This, in many cases, proved to be approximately the same size as the European linguistic and cultural groupings of peoples; and, accordingly, it became easy to base the popular appeal for allegiance to the state structure upon nationalism (that is, upon this common language and cultural tradition). Languages and cultures covering lesser areas than those that could be ruled over by the existing nineteenth-century system of weapons and transport, such as the Welsh, the Bretons, the Proven็als, the Basques, Catalonians, Sicilians, Ukrainians, and others, by failing to become centers for one of these dominant weapons-organized structures, went into political eclipse.
As the technology of weapons, transportation, communications, and propaganda continued to develop, it became possible to compel obedience over areas measured in thousands (rather than hundreds) of miles and thus over distances greater than those occupied by existing linguistic and cultural groups. It thus became necessary to appeal for allegiance to the state on grounds wider than nationalism. This gave rise, in the 1930's and 1940's, to the idea of continental blocs and the ideological state (replacing the national state). Embraced hy Hitler and the Japanese, and (much less consciously) by the United States and Britain, this growing pattern of political organization and appeal to allegiance was smashed in World War II. But during that war technological developments increased the area over which obedience could be compelled and consent obtained. By 1950, Dulles and others talked of a two-Power world, as if consent could be obtained by only two Powers, and as if each were hemispherical in scope. They were not. For, while the area of power organizations had expanded, they had not become hemispherical, and new counterbalancing factors had appeared that threatened to reverse the whole process.
Instead of power in the 1950's being concentrated in two centers, each hemispherical in scope and able to compel obedience over distances of 10,000 miles, the Superpowers could compel obedience over distances in the range of 6,000 to 8,000 miles, leaving a considerable zone between them. In addition the neutralization of their real power in their Superpower confrontation made this zone between more obvious, and weakened their ability to obtain obedience to extreme demands even within 6,000 miles of their power centers (which were situated, let us say, in Omaha and Kuibyshev). In this power gap between the less than hemispherical Superpowers appeared the neutrals of the Buffer Fringe.
But there was more to the situation than this geographical limitation. The nature of power was also changing, although few noticed this. The role of force in politics had been effective to the degree that it was able to influence the minds and wills of men. But the new weapons, in seeking increased range, had become weapons of mass destruction rather than instruments of persuasion. If the victims of such weapons are killed, they can neither obey nor consent. Thus the new weapons have become instruments, not of political power, but of destruction of all power organizations. This explains the growing reluctance by all concerned to use them. Furthermore their range and areas of impact make them most ineffective against individual men and especially against the minds of individual men. And, finally, in an ideological state it is the minds of men that must be the principal targets. Any organization is coordinated both by patterned relationships and by ideology and morale. If the former become increasingly threatened by weapons of destruction, the organization can survive by becoming decentralized, with less emphasis on organizational relationships and more emphasis on morale and outlook. They thus become increasingly amorphous and invulnerable to modern weapons of destruction. The peoples of Africa are, for this reason among others, not susceptible to compulsion by megaton bombs. And Western peoples or Soviet peoples can become less susceptible by becoming Africanized.
This process has not gone very far yet, but it is already observable, especially among the younger generation of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. To the young in all three of these areas there is a growing, if quiet, skepticism of any general abstract appeal to allegiance and loyalty, and a growing concern with concrete, interpersonal relationships with local groups of friends and intimates.
There is still another element in this complex picture. This is also related to weapons. The past history of weapons over thousands of years shows that the reason political units have grown larger in certain periods has been because of the increased power of the offensive in the dominant weapons systems, and that periods in which defensive weapons became dominant have been those in which political units remained small in area or even became smaller. The growing power of castles in the period about 1100 B.C. or about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made power units so small that all power became private power, and the state disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose the so-called "Dark Ages" about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000.
We do not expect any such extreme growth of defensive power in the future, but any increase in defensive weapon power would stop the growth in size of power areas and would, in time, reverse this tendency. There would be thus a proliferation in numbers and a decrease in size of such power units, a tendency already evident, in the past twenty years, in the great increase in the number of United Nations member states. No drastic increase in the defensive power of existing weapons can yet be demonstrated in any conclusive way, but the rising ability of guerrilla forces to maintain their functional autonomy shows definite limits on the offensive power of contemporary weapons. Any drastic increase in the ability of guerrilla forces to function would indicate such an increase in tile defensive power of existing weapons, and this, in turn, would indicate an ability to resist centralized authorities and thus an ability to maintain and defend small-group freedoms.
Such a rise in the strength of defensive weapons, with a consequent decentralization of political power, would require a number of other changes, such as a decentralization of economic production. This probably seems very unlikely to us who live in the frantic economic expansion of the electronic revolution and the space race, but it is at least conceivable. Such a change would require a plentiful, dispersed source of industrial energy and the use of plentiful and widely scattered materials for industrial fabrication. These do not seem to be completely unlikely possibilities. For example, a shift from our present use of fossil fuels as a chief energy source to the use of the sun's energy directly in many small local energy accumulators might provide a plentiful supply of decentralized energy. More remote might be use of the tides, or of differential ocean temperatures, or even of the winds. Possibly some development in the use of nuclear energy, or, above all, some method for cheap separation of the oxygen and hydrogen in ordinary water that could release energy, perhaps through fuel cells, as they recombine.
Such a decentralized energy source, if developed, could be used to build up a decentralized industrial system using cellulose or silicon as raw materials to produce an economy of plastics and glass products (including fiber glass). These two raw materials found in vegetation and sand are among the most common substances in the world. On such a basis, with the proper development of guerrilla weapon tactics, the costs of enforcing centralized orders in local areas might rise so high that a considerable process of political decentralization and local autonomies (including local liberties) could arise, thus reversing the process of political centralization that has continued in the Western tradition for about a thousand years..
In this process, a significant role might be played by the appearance of a major, non-nuclear, deterrence. This already exists, but is not publicly discussed because it presents such a threat to the existing world political structure. It rests in the existence of biological and chemical weapons (BCW) that can be just as devastating as nuclear weapons and do not require a rich or elaborate industrial system for their manufacture or use. Thus they might be more readily available or usable hy the less advanced industrial nations, but are not being researched by such nations to any considerable degree because they might also be more effective as weapons against such backward nations. At the same time, the more advanced nations also hesitate to publicize the existence of such weapons because there is no assurance that they might not, while being readily available to backward nations, still be relatively effective against advanced nations.
Much of the significance of this relationship can be seen in regard to Red China. This ... enemy has already exploded some kind of a nuclear device and will have a nuclear weapon in the next few years, but this offers little potential danger to us since they will have no effective long-range delivery vehicle. On the other hand, their threat with this against our allies, such as Japan or the Philippines, or their ability even now with their mass armies to threaten our interests in India, Southeast Asia, or Korea, is potentially high. Against such a threat, our nuclear missiles are relatively weak, because China is too dispersed and decentralized to offer vital targets. On the other hand, China's vulnerability to the threat of biological warfare is very large. This explains their hysterical attacks on American "germ warfare" during the Korean War. The word puts them into a panic, and rightly so, since they are critically vulnerable to such weapons used by us. The virus for wheat rust and rice blast, in varieties especially virulent on Chinese-type plants, can be produced in large amounts relatively easily at costs well below $40 a pound. Spread on the fields at the proper time in the annual growing cycle, these would destroy up to 75 percent of these crops. And there is no effective defense. In consequence the Chinese food intake would be cut from about 2,200 calories per person a day, not much above the subsistence level, to about 1,300 calories a day. If the Chinese permitted this, they would have few people strong enough to work at the defense effort, either in the combat areas or in industrial plants. If they tried to keep the food intake of more indispensable defenders up by strict rationing, leaving nothing for many children, old people, and women, they would suffer about 50 million deaths from malnutrition within a year. The armed forces, still largely of peasant origin, would not allow a rationing system that doomed their families in the villages, and would turn against the regime, especially if an American offer to feed the Chinese on American surplus food after a Chinese surrender were broadcast to the Chinese people.
The danger of such weapons becoming common, or even becoming commonly known, among the people of the world, including the less developed nations, is very great, opening an opportunity to all kinds of political blackmail or even to merely irresponsible threats. The parallel danger from new weapons of chemical warfare are even more horrifying. One of the nerve gases now currently available in the United States is so potent that a small drop of it on an individual's unbroken skin can cause death in a few seconds. Moreover, many of these BCW weapons are cheap to make, and easier to make than to control. Most can be made in any well-equipped kitchen or ordinary laboratory, witl1 the chief restriction arising from the difficult safety precautions. But if the latter could be handled, and if delivery systems (which in some cases need be no more than men walking by fields or urban reservoirs) could be obtained, the deterrent effect of BCW weapons might be much greater than that of nuclear weapons now is, and would be much less predictable and foreseeable, since they would not be restricted, as the nuclear threat is, to heavily industrialized nations. This might well contribute toward the decentralization of power already mentioned..
Another significant element in this complex picture is the convergence toward parallel paths of the United States and the Soviet Union. This is, of course, something that rabid partisans of either side will refuse to recognize. It arises from three directions: (1) there is an absolute convergence of interests between the two states, as will be indicated in a moment; (2) the structures of the two countries are, to some extent, changing in similar ways; and (3) as the only Superpowers able to inflict or receive instant annihilation, these two countries, to some extent, stand apart from other states and in a class together. The last point is almost obvious, since it must be clear that only these two are prepared to engage in a race to the moon or have an almost insatiable demand for mathematicians or space scientists, or are looked to by impoverished neutrals as obligated to provide economic assistance to the latters' ambitions.
The converging of interests of the two Superpowers arises largely from the other two factors. These common interests include a wide variety of items, such as restricting the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional states, establishing restrictions on the economic demands of neutral nations, especially by refusing to allow one Superpower to be bid against the other; the ending of nuclear testing, the slowing up of the space race, the approaching domination of the United Nations by the growing majority of small and backward countries, the increasing aggressiveness of Red China, the unification of Germany, the acceleration of the population explosion in backward areas, and many others.
Along with this convergence of interests is the growing parallelism of structure: (1) In spite of the great difference in the theories and the appearances of political life in the two countries, each is increasingly reaching its most fundamental decisions, not through party politics or hy decision in a political assembly, but hy the shifting pressures of great lobbying blocs acting upon each other by largely hidden contacts carried on behind the scenes. (2) These pressures are chiefly concerned with the allotment of economic resources, through fiscal and budgetary mechanisms, among three competing sectors of the economy concerned with consumption, governmental expenditures (chiefly defense), and capital investment. (3)Socially, troth societies are undergoing a similar circulation of elites in which education is the chief doorway to social advancement and is crowded with applicants from the lower (but not lowest) stratum of society (equivalent to the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle classes) but is receiving relatively fewer successful applicants from the upper (but not uppermost) group whose parents are already established in the prevalent structure. (4) In both countries trained experts and technicians, as a consequence of this educational process, are replacing political figures or other social groups, especially political specialists. In both, the military leaders, although qualified for supreme influence by their possession of power, are held at secondary levels by personal manipulations. (5) In both countries there is a growing intellectual skepticism toward authority, accepted ideologies, and established slogans, replaced by a rising emphasis upon the need for satisfactory small-group, interpersonal relations.
As a result of all the complex interrelationships of weapons and politics that we have mentioned up to this point, it seems very likely that the international relations of the future will shift from the world we have known, in which war was epidemic and total, to one in which conflict is endemic and controlled. The ending of total warfare means the ending of war for unlimited aims (unconditional surrender, total victory, destruction of the opponent's regime and social system), fought with weapons of total destruction and a total mobilization of resources, including men, to a condition of constant, flexible, controlled conflict with limited, specific, and shifting aims, sought by limited application of diverse pressures applied against any other state whose behavior we wish to influence.
Such controlled conflict would involve a number of changes in our attitudes and behavior:
1. No declarations of war and no breaking off of diplomatic relations with the adversary, but, instead, continuous communication with him, whatever level of intensity the conflict may reach.
2. Acceptance of the idea that conflict with an adversary in respect to some areas, activities, units, or weapons does not necessarily involve conflict with him in other areas, activities, units, or weapons.
3. Military considerations, and the use of force generally, will always be subordinate to political considerations, and will operate as part of policy in the whole policy context.
4. Armed forces must be fully professionalized, trained and psychologically prepared to do any task to the degree and level they are ordered by the established political authorities, without desire or independent effort to carry combat to a level of intensity not in keeping with existing policy and political considerations.
5. There must be full ability at all times to escalate or to de-escalate the level of warfare as seems necessary in terms of the policy context, and to signal the decision to do either to the adversary as a guide to his responses.
6. Ability to de-escalate to the level of termination of violence and warfare must be possible, both in psychological and procedural terms, even with continuance of conflict on lower, non-force, levels such as economic or ideological conflict.
7. There must exist a full panoply of weapons and of economic, political, social, and intellectual pressures that can be used in conflict with any diverse states to secure the specific and limited goals that would become the real aims of international policy in a period of controlled conflict.
8. Among the methods we must be prepared to use in such a period must be diplomatic or tacit agreement with any other state, including the Soviet Union or Red China, to seek parallel or joint aims in the world. This will be possible if all aims are limited to specific goals, which each state will recognize are not fatal to his general position and regime, and by which one specific aim can be traded against another, even tacitly. This will become possible for the double reason that professionalization of the fighting forces and the growing productiveness of the Superpower economies will not require either the total psychological mobilization or the almost total economic mobilization necessary in World War II.
9. All this means a blurring of the distinction between war and peace, with the situation at all times one of closely controlled conflict. In this way endemic conflict is accepted in order to avoid, if possible, epidemic total war. The change will become possible because the ultimate policy of all states will become the preservation of their way of life and existing regime, with the largest possible freedom of action. These aims can be retained under controlled conflict but will be lost by all concerned in total war.
In spite of this shift in the whole pattern of international power relations, the Soviet Union will remain for a long time the chief adversary of the United States, a situation for which there is no real solution until a new, and independent, Superpower rises on the land mass of Eurasia, preferably in a unified Western Europe. The fundamental differences between the United States and the Soviet Union will remain for a long time. They are critical, and include the following: (1) a basic difference in outlook in which the outlook of the West is based on diversity, relativism, pluralism, and social consensus, while the Russian outlook is based on a narrow range of competing opinions and little diversity of knowledge, and is monolithic, intolerant, rigid, unified, absolute, and authoritarian; (2) the difference in stages of economic development, in which they are looking forward, with eager anticipation, to an affluent future, while we have already experienced an affluent society and are increasingly disillusioned with it; (3) the fact that the American economy is unique, because it is the only economy that no longer operates in terms of scarce resources. It may be inside a framework of scarce resources, but this framework is so much wider than the other limiting features of the system (notably its fiscal and financial arrangements) that the system itself does not operate within any limits established by that wider framework.
The third distinction may be seen in the fact that, in other economies, when additional demands are presented to the economy, less resources are available for alternative uses. But in the American system, as it now stands, additional new demands usually lead to increased resources becoming available for alternative purposes, notable consumption. Thus, if the Soviet Union embraced a substantial increase in space activity, the resources available for raising Russian levels of consumption would be reduced, while in America, any increases in the space budget makes levels of consumption also rise. It does this, in the latter case, because increased space expenditures provide purchasing power for consumption that makes available previously unused resources out of the unused American productive capacity.
This unused productive capacity exists in the American economy because the structure of our economic system is such that it channels flows of funds into the production of additional capacity (investment) without any conscious planning process or any real desire by anyone to increase our productive capacity. It does this because certain institutions in our system (such as insurance, retirement funds, social security payments, undistributed corporate profits, and such) and certain individuals who personally profit by the flow of funds not theirs into investment continue to operate to increase investment even when they have no real desire to increase productive capacity (and, indeed, many decry it). In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, resources are allotted to the increase of productive capacity by a conscious planning process and at the cost of reducing the resources available in their system for consumption or for the government (largely defense).
Thus the meaning of the word "costs" and the limitations on ability to mobilize economic resources are entirely different in our system from the Soviet system and most others. In the Soviet economy "costs" are real costs, measurable in terms of the allotment of scarce resources that could have been used otherwise. In the American system "costs" are fiscal or financial limitations that have little connection with the use of scarce resources or even with the use of available (and therefore not scarce) resources. The reason for this is that in the American economy, the fiscal or financial limit is lower than the limit established by real resources and, therefore, since the financial limits act as the restraint on our economic activities, we do not get to the point where our activities encounter the restraints imposed by the limits of real resources (except rarely and briefly in terms of technically trained manpower, which is our most limited resource).
These differences between the Soviet and the American economies are: (1) the latter has built-in, involuntary, institutionalized investment, which the former lacks, and (2) the latter has fiscal restraints at a much lower level of economic activity, which the Soviet system also lacks. Thus greater activity in defense in the USSR entails real costs since it puts pressure on the ceiling established by limited real resources, while greater activity in the American defense or space effort releases money into the system, which presses upward on the artificial financial ceiling, pressing it upward closer to the higher, and remote, ceiling established by the real resources limit of the American economy. This makes available the unused productive capacity that exists in our system between the financial ceiling and the real resources ceiling; it not only makes these unused resources available for the governmental sector of the economy from which the expenditure was directly made but also makes available portions of these released resources for consumption and additional capital investment. For this reason, government expenditures in the United States for things like defense or space may entail no real costs at all in terms of the economy as a w-hole. In fact, if the volume of unused capacity brought into use by expenditure for these things (that is, defense, and so on) is greater than the resources necessary to satisfy the need for which the expenditure was made, the volume of unused resources made available for consumption or investment will be greater than the volume of resources used in the governmental expenditure, and this additional government effort will cost nothing at all in real terms, but will entail negative real costs. (Our wealth will be increased by making the effort.)
The basis for this strange, and virtually unique, situation is to be found in the large amount of unused productive capacity in the United States, even in our most productive years. In the second quarter of 1962, our productive system was running at a very high level of prosperity, yet it was functioning about 12 percent below capacity, which represented a loss of $73 billion annually. In this way, in the whole period from the beginning of 1953 to the middle of 1962, our productive system operated at $387 billion below capacity. Thus, if the system had operated near capacity, our defense effort over the nine years would have cost us almost nothing, in terms of loss of goods or capacity.
This unique character in the American economy rests on the fact that the utilization of resources follows flow lines in the economy that are not everywhere reflected by corresponding flow lines of claims on wealth (that is, money). In general, in our economy the lines of flow of claims on wealth are such that they provide a very large volume of savings and a rather large volume of investment, even when no one really wants new productive capacity; they also provide an inadequate flow of consumer purchasing power, in terms of the flows, or potential flows, of consumers' goods; but they provide very limited, sharply scrutinized, and often misdirected flows of funds for the use of resources to fulfill the needs of the governmental sector of our tri-sectored economy. As a result, we have our economy of distorted resource-utilization patterns, with overinvestment in many areas, overstuffed consumers in one place and impoverished consumers in another place, a drastic under-supply of social services, and widespread social needs for which public funds are lacking. In the Soviet Union, money flows follow fairly well the flows of real goods and resources, but, as a result, pressures are directly on resources. These pressures mean that saving and investment conflict directly with consumption and government services (including defense), putting the government under severe direct strains, as the demands for higher standards of living cannot be satisfied except by curtailing investment, defense, space, or other government expenditures.
Many countries of the world, especially the backward ones, are worse off than the Soviet Union, because their efforts to increase consumers' goods may well require investment based on savings that must be accumulated at the expense of consumption. In many areas, as we have seen in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Latin America, savings are accumulated by structural monetary flows, but there are no institutional flows toward investment, little incentive or motivation for investment, and the economy lags in all three sectors.
As a chief consequence of these conditions, the contrast between the "have" nations and the "have-not" nations will become even wider. This would be of little great importance to the rest of the world w-ere it not that the peoples of the backward areas, riding the "crisis of rising expectations," are increasingly unwilling to be ground down in poverty as their predecessors were. At the same time, the Superpower stalemate increases the abilities of these nations to be neutral, to exercise influence out of all relationship to their actual powers, and to act, sometimes, in an irresponsible fashion. These areas will be the chief sources of real trouble in the future, for clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union (or even Red China) are unlikely to arise from direct conflicts of interests, but may well arise from conflicts over neutrals.
These neutrals and other peoples of backward areas have acute problems. Solutions of these problems do exist, but the underdeveloped nations are unlikely to find them. As we have indicated elsewhere, their ,chief problems are three : (1) ... limited food supplies; (2) problems of political stability, especially the relationship between political aims and quite diverse weapons-control patterns; and ( 3 ) the problem of obtaining constructive rather than destructive patterns of outlook. The United States ... [has an ] ... interest in seeing that these problems find solutions. In general, these underdeveloped nations cannot follow American patterns, and are attracted to the Soviet system despite its heavy costs in loss of personal freedoms. We do not have either the knowledge or influence that would make it possible for us to direct their steps along more desirable routes such as that followed by Japan.
One development in political life during the next generation or so that will be difficult to document is concerned with the very nature of the modern sovereign state. Like so much of our cultural heritage from the seventeenth century, such as international law and puritanism, this may now be in the process of a change so profound as to modify its very nature. As understood in western Europe over the last three centuries, the state was the organization of sovereign power on a territorial basis. "Sovereign" meant that the state (or ruler) had supreme legal authority to do just about anything regarded as public, and this authority impinged directly on the subject (or citizen) without any intermediaries or buffer corporations, and did this in a dualistic power antithesis typical of the Greek two-valued logic that was applied to almost everything in the seventeenth century. As part of this sovereign system, it was assumed that rights of property and of permanent association were not natural or eternal, but flowed from grants of sovereign power. Thus property in land required the state's recognition in the form of a document or deed, and no corporation could exist except at the charter of the sovereign or with his tacit consent. Moreover, all citizens on the territory were subject to the same sovereign power. The latter consisted, as it still largely does in our tradition, of a mixture of force (military), economic rewards, and ideological uniformity. This view of public authority is by no means universal in the world, and shows strong indications that it may be changing in the West. Corporations exist and have the earliest mark of divinity (immortality), and have become, as they were in the nonsovereign Middle Ages, refuges where individuals may function shielded from the reach of the sovereign state. The once almost universal equivalence between residence and citizenship may be weakening. If the ideological state continues to develop its likely characteristics, persons of different ideologies and thus of different allegiances may become intermingled on the same territory. The number of refugees and resident aliens is now increasing in most countries.
Moreover, the incorporation of such a wide variety of peoples with such diverse traditions into the United Nations is also contributing to this process. We have seen that traditional China did not exercise power on the vast majority of its subjects (the peasants) in terms of force, rewards, or even ideology, but did so by social pressures through the intermediary of the family and the gentry. Similarly in Africa, power has been quite different in its character than it was in the traditional European state, and was based rather on kinship, social reciprocity, and religion. When African natives met to settle political disputes in battle, this was not, as in Europe, a clash of military force to settle the issue; rather it was an opportunity for spiritual entities to indicate their decisions in the case. As soon as a few casualties appeared on one side, this was taken as an indication that the spirits concerned had made a decision adverse to that side, and, accordingly, the victims' associates broke and ran, leaving the field to the other side. Like the medieval judicial trial hy battle or by ordeal, this was not an effort to settle a dispute by force, but the attempt to give a spiritual entity an opportunity to reveal its decision.
It may seem farfetched to expect our state to succumb to the introduction of religious, magical, or spiritual influences such as this, but there can be little doubt that social pressures such as used to exercise influence in China will become more influential in our power structures in the future.
It seems likely also that there will be a certain revival of the use of intermediaries in removing or weakening the impact of sovereign power on ordinary individuals. This implies a growth of federalism in the structure of political power. On the whole, the history of federalism has not been a happy one. Even in the United States, the most significant example of a successful federalist structure in modern history, the federalist principle has yielded ground to unitary government for 150 years or so. Moreover, in our own time a number of efforts, chiefly British, to set up federal unions have failed. Thus the Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland broke up after a few years, and the West Indies Federation was even less viable. Recently the Malaysian Federation of the Malay States, Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak has been threatened with destruction by Indonesia, itself once a federal system that has now largely yielded to unitary developments.
Nevertheless, the federal principle seems likely to grow as a method by which certain functions of government are allotted to one structure while other functions go to a narrower or wider structure. This tendency seems likely to arise from a number of influences of which the chief might be: (1) the inability of many of the new, small states to carry on all the functions of government independently and alone, and their consequent efforts to carry out some of them cooperatively; (2) the tendency for these new states to look to the United Nations to perform some of the most significant functions of government, such as defense of frontiers or maintaining public order; for example, Tanganyika recently disbanded its armed forces and entrusted its defense and public order to a Nigerian force under United Nations control; (3) the need for economic cooperation over wider areas than the boundaries of most states in order to obtain the necessary diversity of resources within a single economic system, a need that will continue to encourage the establishment of customs unions and economic blocs, of which the European Common Market is the outstanding example; similar unions are projected for Central America and other areas.
The most interesting example of this process may be seen in the slow growth of some kind of multilevel federal structure covering much of tropical Africa. This arose from the disintegration of the French colonial system in Black Africa in 1956-1960 and was known as the Brazzaville Twelve at first (from December in 1960), but is now much expanded to include non-French areas under the name Union of African and Malagasy States. This Union shows a tendency to become one of the middle layers in a multilevel political hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the top level is held by the United Nations and its associated functional bodies, such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the ILO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice, and others. On the second level are various organizations that have Pan-European or Third Bloc overtones such as the European Common Market or its now stalemated political counterpart, along with Euratom, the European Coal and Iron Community, and some others. The De Gaulle veto on the continued development of these has suspended their growth and also any tendency for them to coalesce with a number of older French Community organizations.
On the third, fourth, and fifth levels is a rather confused mass of organizations of which the third consists of those which are Pan-African in scope, the fourth are those allied with the UAMS, and the fifth are the relatively viable Brazzaville Twelve projects. On the third level are such organizations as the Economic Commission for Africa South of the Sahara, the Technical Cooperation Commission for Africa, the Scientific Council for Africa, two African commissions of the World Conference of Organizations of the Teaching Professions, the African Trade Union Confederation (set up at Dakar in 1962), and a number of others. On the fifth level are a whole series of organizations associated with the Brazzaville Twelve, its semiannual "summit conferences" of heads of state, its Secretary General and Secretariat, its Defense Union, its Organization for Economic Cooperation, and others. On the fourth level are similar organizations, including an Assembly of Heads of States, a Council of Members, and a Secretariat-General set up for the UAMS at Lagos in January 1962. Possibly these third, fourth, and fifth levels will coalesce and eliminate some reduplication as memberships become firmer.
On the sixth level are a number of local unions of states, such as those for local river controls, customs unions, and such. And on the seventh level are the individual states which in theory (like the states of the United States) will continue to hold full sovereignty. But when two-third votes on higher levels can make binding decisions on member states, or when states intend to vote as a bloc in the United Nations, or when states have reduced their military and police forces so that they are dependent on forces from higher levels to defend their territories or to maintain order, or when states fool; to higher levels for funds for investment or to restore their annual foreign-exchange imbalances, the realities of sovereign power become dispersed and some areas of the world begin to look more like the Germanies of the late medieval period than like the nationalist sovereign states of the nineteenth century. How far this process will go we cannot foretell, but the possibility of such developments should not be excluded by us just because they have not been experienced by us in recent generations.
This is more than enough on the power patterns in our near future. we must now turn to a much briefer discussion of the patterns of economic and social life. There we see a most extraordinary contrast. While the economic life of Western society has been increasingly successful in satisfying our material needs, the social aspect has become increasingly frustrating. There was a time, not long ago, when the chief aims of most Western men was for greater material goods and for rising standards of living. This was achieved at great social costs, by the attrition or even destruction of much of social life, including the sense of community fellowship, leisure, and social amenities. Looking backward, we are fully aware of these costs in the original factory towns and urban slums, but looking about us today we are often not aware of the great, often intangible, costs of middle-class living in suburbia or in the dormitory environs that surround European cities: the destruction of social companionship and solidarity, the narrowing influence of exposure to persons from a restricted age group or from a narrow segment of social class, the horrors of commuting, the incessant need for constant driving about to satisfy the ordinary needs of the family for groceries, medical care, entertainment, religion, or social experience, the prohibitive cost and inconvenience of upkeep and repairs and, in general, the whole way of life of the suburban "rat race," including the large-scale need for providing artificial activities for children.
Rebellion against this rat race has already begun, not from the lower middle class who are just entering it and still aspire to it, but from the established middle class who have, as they say, "had it." On the whole, the efforts to find a way out while still retaining a high standard of material living have not been successful, and the real rebellion is coming, as we shall see later, from their children. These have expanded the usual adolescent revolt against parental dominance and authority into a large-scale rejection of parental values. One form that this revolt has taken has been to modify the meaning of the expression "high standard of living" to include a whole series of desires and values that are not material and thus were excluded from the nineteenth-century bourgeois understanding of the expression "standard of living." Among these are two we have already listed as disconcerting elements in the Africans' understanding of standard of living: small group interpersonal relationships and sex play. These changes, as we shall see, have come to represent a challenge to the whole middle-class outlook.
The social costs of the contemporary economic system are staggering. On the whole, they have been widely discussed and are generally recognized. As economic enterprises have become larger and more tightly integrated into one another, the freedom, individualism, and initiative traditionally associated with the modern economy (in contrast with the medieval rural economy) have ... [been] be sacrificed. The self-reliant individual has gradually changed into the conformist "organization man." Routine has displaced risk, and subordination to abstractions has replaced the struggle with diverse concrete problems. The constantly narrowing range of possibilities for self-expression has given rise to deep frustrations with their concomitant growth of irrational compensating customs, such as the obsession with speed; vicarious combativeness, especially in sports; the use of alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and sex as stimulants, diversions, and sedatives; and the rapid appearance and disappearance of fads in dress, social customs, and leisure activities.
Most crucial have been the demands of the modern industrial and business system, because of advancing technology, for more highly trained manpower. Such training requires a degree of ambition, self-discipline, and future-preference that many persons lack or refuse to provide, with the result that a growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the Lumpenproletariat) has reappeared. This group of rejects from our bourgeois industrial society provide one of our most intractable future problems, because they are gathered in urban slums, have political influence, and are socially dangerous.
In the United States, where these people congregate in the largest cities and are often Negroes or Latin Americans, they are regarded as a racial or economic problem, but they are really an educational and social problem for which economic or racial solutions would help little. This group is most numerous in the more advanced industrial areas and now forms more than twenty percent of the American population. Since they are a self-perpetuating group and have many children, they are increasing in numbers faster than the rest of the population. Their self-perpetuating characteristic as a group is not based on biological differences but on sociological factors, chiefly on the fact that disorganized, undisciplined, present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social conditions are most unlikely to train their children in the organized, disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic system requires in its workers, so that the children, like their parents, grow up as unemployables. This is not a condition that can be cured by providing more jobs, even if the jobs are in the proper areas, because the jobs require characteristics these victims of anomie do not possess and are unlikely to acquire.
All this leads to one of the most significant of current changes, the changes in attitudes and outlooks. At this point we shall not discuss the middle-class outlook and its challenges, which are the central aspect of this subject in the United States, but shall restrict ourselves to an equally large subject, the changes in the outlook of Western society as a whole, especially in Europe.
The intellectual and religious aspects of any society, including all those things I call "pattern of outlook," change at least as rapidly as the more material aspects of the society, and are generally less noticed. Among these the most significant, and the least noticed, are the categories into which any society divides its experiences in order to think about them or to talk about them and the values the society, often in unconscious consensus, places upon these categories. In every society there are certain groups, perhaps an intellectual elite, who think new thoughts, new at least in comparison with what went just before. In time, some of these thoughts spread and become familiar, until it may seem that everybody is thinking them. Of course, everybody is not, because in every society there are three other groups: the large group who do not think at all, the substantial group who a;-e not aware of anything new and who retain the same outlook for years and even generations and the small group who are always opposed to the consensus simply because opposition has become an end in itself.
In spite of these complexities, we can still look at the past and see a sequence of prevalent outlooks, often with rather confused periods of transition in between. Over the past two centuries, there have been five such stages: the Enlightenment in 1730-l790, the Romantic Movement in 1790-1850, the Age of Scientific Materialism in 1850-1895:, the Period of Irrational Activism of 1895-1945, and our new Age of Inclusive Diversity since 1945.
These changing patterns of outlooks arise because men are complicated creatures trying to operate in a complex universe. Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of space, the fourth of time, and this fifth dimension of abstraction. This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person, is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos of emotional experiences and feelings.
In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his own nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational. The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man's three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.
In the most general terms, we might say that primitive man emphasized an empirical approach to these problems with use of man's sensual equipment and chief emphasis on specific concrete situations; archaic man (say from 5000 B.C. to about 500 B.C. in Eurasia) emphasized man's emotional and intuitive equipment with emphasis on symbols, ritual, myth, and magical actions; Classical man (say from 500 B.C. to A.D.500) emphasized man's rational equipment and regarded man's concepts as the major portion of reality. But Western man, since A.D. 500, has sought to find some combination of all three parts of his equipment that will provide satisfactory explanation and successful operation in terms both of man's nature and of the universe. The combinations he has tried provide the changing sequence of intellectual history..
The Age of Enlightenment, following on the successes of the Age of Newton (which had discovered a rational and mechanical explanation of the material universe), tried to apply the same techniques to man and society, and came up with a static, mechanical, and rationalist conception of both. The inadequacy of this view of man, already rejected by poets and literary figures in the mid-eighteenth century, led to its general rejection as inadequate because of the excesses of the French Revolution. The following Romantic period, accordingly, adopted a much more irrational picture of man, of society, and of the universe. As a consequence, emphasis shifted from the earlier rational, mechanical, and static views to irrational and dynamic views of man and society.
This period of Romanticism (about 1790-1850) was marked by poets of "storm and stress," the Gothic revival, and a growing emphasis on history as the correct key to understanding man and society. The period, associated with Hegel, Hugo, and Heine, culminated in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848), which found the key to man's social position in past struggles.
The third generation of the nineteenth century (1850-1895) was in an age of science and rationalism whose typical figures were Darwin and Bismarck. While emphasizing the empirical and rational aspects of science, it tried to apply these to biology and to history in terms of a scientific materialism that could explain biology and change as Newton's science had explained mechanics. By the end of the century, man was frustrated and disillusioned with scientific method and materialism and with emphasis on the nonhuman world and was turning once again to the problems of man and society with a conviction that these problems could be handled only by nonrational methods and by the clash of contending forces, since the problems themselves were too complex, too dynamic, too irrational to be settled by science or even by human thought.
The result was a new period, the Age of Irrational Activism. It began with men, like Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the nonrational nature of the universe and of man, quickly shifted Darwin's doctrines of struggle and survival from nonhuman nature to human society, and rejected rationalism as slow, superficial, and an inhibition on both action and survival. As Bergson said in his Creative Evolution (1907): "The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life."
This period felt that man, and nature, and human society were all basically irrational. Reason, regarded as a late and rather superficial accretion in the process of human evolution, was considered inadequate to plumb the real nature of man's problems, and was regarded as an inhibitor on the full intensity of his actions, an obstacle to the survival of himself as an individual and of his group (the nation). Any effort to apply reason or science, based on rational analysis and evaluation, would be a slow and frustrating effort: slow because the process of human rationality is always slow, frustrating because it cannot plumb into the real depths and nature of man's experience, and because it can always turn up as many and as good reasons for any course of action as it can for the opposite course of action. The effort to do this was dangerous, because as the thinker poised in indecision, the man of action struck, eliminated the thinker from the scene, and survived to determine the future on the basis of continued action. To the theorist of these views, the thinker would always be divided, hesitant, and weak, while the man of action would be unified, decisive, and strong.
This point of view, nourished on Marx and Heinrich von Treitschke, justified class conflicts and national warfare, and formed the background for the cult of violence that was reflected in the political assassinations of 1898-1914 and the imperialist aggressions that began with Japan, Italy, and Britain in China, Ethiopia, and South Africa in 1894-1899. The explicit justification of this view could be found in Georges Sorel R้flexions sur la Violence (1908) or in the political events of the summer of 1914. From that fateful summer, for more than forty years, higher levels of violence became the solution of all problems, whether it was the question of winning a war, Stalin's efforts to industrialize Russia, Hitler's efforts to settle the "Jewish problem," Rupert Brooke's effort to find meaning in life, Japan's desire to find a solution to economic depression, the English-speaking nations' search for security, Italy's search for glory, or Franco's desire to preserve the status quo in Spain. The culmination of the process in total irrationalism and total violence was Nazism, "The Revolution of Nihilism."
Expressed explicitly this cult of Irrational Activism was based on the belief that the universe was dynamic and largely nonrational. As such, any effort to deal with it by rational means will be futile and superficial. Moreover, rationalism, by paralyzing man's ability to act decisively, will expose him to destruction in a world whose chief features include struggle and conflict. Men came to believe that only violence had survival value. The resulting cult of violence permeated all human life. By mid-century, the popular press, literature, the cinema, sports, and all major human concerns had embraced this cult of violence. The books of Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler sold millions to satisfy this need. Humphrey Bogart became the most popular film hero because he courted women with a blow to the jaw.
On a somewhat more profound level, the Nazi Party mobilized popular support with a program of "Blood and Soil" (Blut und Boden), while the Fascists in Italy covered every wall with their slogan, "Believe! Obey! Fight!" In neither was there any expectation that men should think or analyze.
On the highest philosophic levels, the new attitude was justified. Bergson appealed to intuition, and Hitler used it. Other philosophers vied with one another to demonstrate that the old mechanism of abstract, rational thought must be rejected as irrelevant, superficial, or meaningless. The semanticists rejected logic by rejecting the idea of general categories or even of definition of terms. According to them, because everything is constantly changing, no term can remain fixed without at once becoming irrelevant. The meaning of any word depended on the context in which it was used; since this was different every time it was used, the meaning, consisting of a series of connotations based on all previous uses of the term, is different at each use. Every individual who uses a term is simply the culmination of all his past experiences that make him what he is; since experience never stops, he is a different person every time he uses a term, and it has a different meaning for him. On this basis the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) wrote a series of works to show the constantly changing nature of personality, which is also a reflection of the context in which it operates, so that each person who meets someone knows him as a different personality.
The most widely read of twentieth-century philosophers, the existentialists, reflected this same attitude, although they could agree on almost nothing. In general they were skeptical of any general principles about reality, but recognized that reality did exist for each individual as the concrete instant of time, place, and context in which he acted. Thus-he must act. In order to act he must make a decision, a commitment, to something that would give him a basis from which to act. By acting he experiences reality, and to that extent knows and demonstrates, at least to himself, that there is a reality.
All these ideas, reflecting the disjointed malaise of the century, permeated the outlook of the period and left it hungry for meaning, for identity, for some structure or purpose in human experience. Insanity, neurosis, suicide, and all kinds of irrational obsessions and reactions filled increasing roles in human life. Most of these were not even recognized as being irrational or obsessive. Speed, alcohol, sex, coffee, and tobacco screened man off from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to observe, or to enjoy life, without his realizing that these were the shields he adopted to conceal from himself the fact that he was no longer really capable of living, because he no longer knew what life was and could see no meaning or purpose in it. As his capacity to live or to experience life dwindled, he sought to reach it by seeking more vigorous experiences that might penetrate the barriers surrounding him. The result was mounting sensationalism. In time, nothing made much impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion, or distortion.
Along with this, ability to communicate dwindled. The old idea of communication as an exchange of concepts represented by symbols was junked. Instead, symbols had quite different connotations for everyone concerned simply because everyone had a different past experience. A symbol might have meaning for two persons but it did not have the same meaning. Soon it was regarded as proper that words represent only the writer's meaning and need have no meaning at all for the reader. Thus appeared private poetry, personal prose, and meaningless art in which the symbols used have ceased to be symbols because they do not reflect any common background of experience that could indicate their meaning as shared communication or experience. These productions, the fads of the day, were acclaimed by many as works of genius. Those who questioned them and asked their meaning were airily waved aside as unforgivable philistines; they were told that no one any longer sought "meaning" in literature or art but rather sought "experiences." Thus to look at a meaningless painting became an experience. These fads followed one another, reflecting the same old pretenses, but under different names. Thus "Dada" following World War I eventually led to the "Absurd" following World War II.
But even as this process continued, twenty years after Hiroshima, deep within the social context of the day, new outlooks were rising that made the views associated with Irrational Activism increasingly irrelevant. One of these we have already mentioned. The victory of rational analysis, operational research, and organized scientific attitudes over irrationality, will, intuition, and violence in World War II reversed the trend. Nothing succeeds like success, and no success is greater than ability to survive and find solutions to critical problems involving existence itself. The West in World War II and in the postwar period, in spite of the hysterical protests of the extremists, showed once again that it was able to overcome aggression, narrow intolerance, hatred, tribalism, totalitarianism, selfishness, arrogance, imposed uniformity, and all the evils the West had recognized as evils throughout its history. It not only won the war: it solved the great economic crisis, prevented the extension of tyranny while still avoiding World War III, and did all this in a typical Western way by fumbling cooperatively down a road paved with good intentions. The final result was a triumph of incalculable magnitude for the Outlook of the West.
The Outlook of the West is that broad middle way about which the fads and foibles of the West oscillate. It is what is implied by what the West says it believes, not at one moment but over the long succession of moments that form the history of the West. From that succession of moments it is clear that the West believes in diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism rather than in monism or dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion, in liberty rather than in authority, in truth rather than in power, in conversion rather than in annihilation, in the individual rather than in the organization, in reconciliation rather than in triumph, in heterogeneity rather than in homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in absolutes, and in approximations rather than in final answers. The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation. In man the West sees body, emotions, and reason as all equally real and necessary, and is prepared to entertain discussion about their relative interrelationships but is not prepared to listen for long to any intolerant insistence that any one of these has a final answer.
The West has no faith in final answers today. It believes that all answers are un-final because everything is imperfect, although possibly getting better and thus advancing toward a perfection the West is prepared to admit may be present in some remote and almost unattainable future. Similarly in the universe, the West is prepared to recognize that there are material aspects, less material aspects, immaterial aspects, and spiritual aspects, although it is not prepared to admit that anyone yet has a final answer on the relationships of these. Similarly the West is prepared to admit that society and groups are necessary, while the individual is important, but it is not prepared to admit that either can stand alone or be made the ultimate value to the sacrifice of the other.
Where rationalists insist on polarizing the continua of human experience into antithetical pairs of opposing categories, the West has constantly rejected the implied need for rejection of one or the other, by embracing "Both." This catholic attitude goes back to the earliest days of Western society when its outlook was being created in the religious controversies of the preceding Classical Civilization. Among these controversies were the following: (1) Was [Jesus] Christ ... [a] Man or [a] God? (2) Was salvation to be secured by God's grace or by man's good works? (3) Was the material world real and good or was spirituality real and good? (4) Was the body worthy of salvation or was the soul only to be saved? (5) Was the truth found only by God's revelation or was it to be found by man's experience (history)? (6) Should man work to save himself or to save others? (7) Does man owe allegiance to God or to Caesar? (8) Should man's behavior be guided by reason or by observation? (9) Can man be saved inside the Church or outside it? In each case, with vigorous partisans clamoring on both sides (and in many cases still clamoring), the answer, reached as a consensus built up by long discussion, was Both. In fact a correct definition of the Christian tradition might well be expressed in that one word "Both." Throughout its long history, controversy over religion in Western society has been based on a disturbance of the arrangement or balance within that "Both."
From this religious basis established on "Both" as early as the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), the outlook of the West developed and spread with the growth of the new Christian Civilization of the West to replace the dying Classical Civilization. And today, when the Civilization of the West seems as if it too may be dying, we may reassure ourselves by recalling that our civilization has saved itself before by turning back to its tradition of Inclusive Diversity. This apparently is what has been happening since 1940. It was Inclusive Diversity that created the nuclear bomb in World War II, and it may well be Inclusive Diversity that will save the West in the postwar world.
Any outlook or society that finds its truth in Inclusive Diversity or in "Both" obviously faces a problem of relationships. If man finds the truth by using body, emotions, and reason, these diverse talents must be placed in some workable arrangement with one another. So too must service to God and to Caesar or to self and to fellow man.
In an age like ours, in which all these relationships have become disrupted and discordant, such relationships can be reestablished by discussion and testing, but in this process each discussant must rely on his experience. The great body of such experience, however, will not be found among living discussants, whose whole lives have been passed in a culture in which these relationships were discordant, but in the experiences of those whose lives were lived in earlier ages before the relationship in question became discordant. This gives rise to the typical Western solution of relying on experience and, at the same time, helps the society to link up with its traditions (the most therapeutic action in which any society can engage)..
From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based....
1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)....
This methodology of the West is basic to the success, power, and wealth of Western Civilization. It is reflected in all successful aspects of Western life, from the earliest beginnings to the present. It has been attacked and challenged by all kinds of conflicting methods and outlooks, by all kinds of alternative attitudes based on narrowness and rigidity, but it has reappeared, again and again, as the chief source of strength of that amazing cultural growth of which we are a part.
This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations. The many problems, previously listed, that faced the Church at the time of the Council of Nicaea were settled by this Western method. Throughout Western religious history ... [various groups have insisted] that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God's revelation....
The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: ... In the Christian tradition the stages in this ... process ... include: (1) man's intuitive sense of natural law and morality, [conscience, a gift of God], (2) the Old Testament, (3) the New Testament....
This version of the religious tradition of the West as an example of the Western outlook as a whole may seem to many to be contradicted by the narrow intolerance, rigid bigotry, and relentless persecutions that have disfigured so much of the religious history of the West. This is true, and is a clear indication that individuals and groups can fall far short of their own traditions, can lose these for long periods, and can even devote their lives to fighting against them. But the traditions of the West, certainly the most remarkable any civilization has had, always seem to come back and march on to other victories. Even in our day, in Vatican Council II we can see what outsiders may regard as surprising efforts to apply Western traditions to an organization which, to most outsiders, and even, perhaps, to most insiders, must appear as one of the most authoritarian organizations ever created. But the tradition is there, however buried or forgotten, and the realization of this has made Vatican Council II a symbol of hope, even to non-Catholics and even to those who realize it will not do half the things that are crying urgently to be done.
... The rigidity of Western religious thought that often seems to be unappreciative of the Western tradition (although fundamentally it is not) is often explained by the role divine revelation plays in Western religion. The Word of God may seem to many a rigid and inflexible element repugnant to the flexible and tentative outlook I have identified as the tradition of the West....
To the West, in spite of all its aberrations, the greatest sin, from Lucifer to Hitler, has been pride, especially in the form of intellectual arrogance; and the greatest virtue has been humility, especially in the intellectual form which concedes that opinions are always subject to modification by new experiences, new evidence, and the opinions of our fellow men.
These procedures that I have identified as Western, and have illustrated from the rather unpromising field of religion, are to be found in all aspects of Western life. The most triumphant of these aspects is science, whose method is a perfect example of the Western tradition. The scientist goes eagerly to work each day because he has the humility to know that he does not have any final answers and must work to modify and improve the answers he has. He publishes his opinions and research reports, or exposes these in scientific gatherings, so that they may be subjected to the criticism of his colleagues and thus gradually play a role in formulating the constantly unfolding consensus that is science. That is what science is, "a consensus unfolding in time by a cooperative effort, in which each works diligently seeking the truth and submits his work to the discussion and critique of his fellows to make a new, slightly improved, temporary consensus."
Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook. That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.
But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves. Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.
In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this. When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate. Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable. Conservatism of this type was, indeed, closer to what I have called liberalism than the liberals of 1880 were, since the conservatives of this type were perfectly willing to use the Church or the army or the state to carry out their moderate and tentative projects, and were prepared to use the state to curtail arbitrary private economic power, which the liberals of the day were unwilling to do (since they embraced a doctrinaire belief in the limitation of state power) .
All this is of significance because it is concerned with the fact that there is an age-old Western tradition, much battered and destroyed in recent generations, that has sent up new, living shoots of vigorous growth since 1945. These new shoots have appeared even in those areas where the orthodox nineteenth-century liberals looked to find only enemies—in the Church and in the armed forces. The operation of what I have called the liberal tradition of the West is evident in all religious thought of recent years, even in that of Roman Catholicism. It is almost equally evident in military life, where the practice of consulting diverse, and even outside, opinion to reach tentative decisions is increasingly obvious. Recently I attended a conference of the United States Navy Special Projects Office where a diverse group tried to reach some consensus about the form of naval weapons systems twelve years in the future. The agenda, as set up for seven weeks, provided for thirty-three successive approximations narrowing in on the desired consensus. This was listed on the agenda as "Final Approximation and Crystallization of Dissent." The recognition that the final goal was still approximate, and the equal role provided for disagreement within this consensus, show clearly how the tradition of the West operates today within the armed forces of the West.
This return to the tradition of the West is evident in many aspects of life beyond those mentioned here. Strangely enough, the return of which we speak is much more evident in the United States than it is in Europe, and, accordingly, some of the most significant examples of it will be mentioned in the following section, which is concerned with the United States.
The reason for this, apparently, is that Europeans, after their very difficult experiences of depression and war, are now overly eager for the mundane benefits made possible by advancing technology and are, as a result, increasingly selfish and materialistic, while Americans, having tasted the fleshpots of affluence, are increasingly unselfish, community-conscious, and nonmaterial in their attitudes. A careful look, however, will show that the movement is present on both sides of the Atlantic, and appears perhaps most obviously in a growing concern with one's fellow men, a kind of practical Christianity, and a spreading evidence of charity and love in the old Christian meaning of these terms. There seems to be, especially among the younger generation, a growing emphasis on fellowship and interpersonal relations and an increasing skepticism toward abstract power, high-blown slogans, old war cries, and authority. There is a reaching out to one another, seeking to understand, to help, to comfort. There is a growing tolerance of differences, an amused attitude of live and let live; and, above all, there is an avid discussion of values and priorities that include more spiritual items than a generation ago. There is an almost universal rejection of authority, of rigid formulas, and of final or total answers. In a word, there is a fumbling effort to rediscover the tradition of the West by a generation that has been largely cut off from that tradition.
We have said that this tradition is one of Inclusive Diversity in which one of the chief problems is how elements that seem discordant, but are recognized as real and necessary, may be fitted together. The solution to this problem, which rests in the tradition itself, is to be found in the idea of hierarchy: diverse elements are discordant only because they are out of place. Once the proper arrangement is found, discord is replaced by concord. Once, long ago, a young person said to me, "Dirt is only misplaced matter"—a typically Western attitude. Today young persons spend increasing time in argument and thought on how diverse things, all of which seem necessary, can be arranged in a hierarchy of importance or priority: military service, preparation for a vocation, love and marriage, personal development, desire to help others—all these compete for energy, time, and attention. In what order should they be arranged? This is quite different from the successful young man of yesteryear who had one clearly perceived goal—to prepare for a career in moneymaking. The road to that career was marked by materialism, selfishness, and pride, all attitudes of low favor in the outlook of the West, not because they are absolutely wrong but because they indicate a failure to see the place of things in the general structure of the universe. Even pride, either in Lucifer or in Soames Forsyte, is a failure to realize one's own position in the whole picture. And today, especially in America, increasing numbers of people are trying to see the whole picture.
Chapter 75: The United States and the Middle-Class Crisis
The character of any society is determined less by what it is actually like than by the picture it has of itself and of what it aspires to be. From this point of view, American society of the 1920's was largely middle class. Its values and aspirations were middle class, and power or influence within it was in the hands of middle-class people. On the whole, this was regarded as proper, except by iconoclastic writers who gained fortune and reputation simply by satirizing or criticizing middle-class customs.
To be sure, even the most vigorous defenders of bourgeois America did not pretend that all Americans were middle class: only the more important ones were. But they did see the country as organized in middle-class terms, and they looked forward to a not remote future in which everyone would be middle class, except for a small, shiftless minority of no importance. To these defenders, and probably also to the shiftless minority, American society was regarded as a ladder of opportunity up which anyone could work his way, on rungs of increased affluence, to the supreme positions of wealth and power near the top. Wealth, power, prestige, and respect were all obtained by the same standard, based on money. This in turn was based on a pervasive emotional insecurity that sought relief in the ownership and control of material possessions. The basis for this may be seen most clearly in the origins of this bourgeois middle class.
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