Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 27

In addition to formal schooling and apprenticeship we have a vast network for the distribution of information and the formation of public opinion. The printing press, the camera and other means of communication determine the levels of information and the willingness of the public to keep abreast of the shifting social scene.

A social structure resembles every other human meeting place--it tends to acc.u.mulate dead wood. There are two answers to this problem: periodic housecleaning, without fear or favor, together with careful scrutiny of the apprentices and other newcomers in the field.

Every social group has its quota of defectives and delinquents--biological and social, physical, mental, emotional. Here the critical problem is where to draw the line. Perhaps the best general answer is to measure productiveness, including those who make a net contribution, including those whose presence is desirable and excluding undesirables. Again this involves periodic housecleanings.

Throughout the past two centuries mankind has been confronted by an epoch-making, many sided development--the great revolution of 1750-1970. As I write, the great revolution is modifying the structure and functioning of human society and, consequently, the forces which condition, shape and, in large measure, determine the directions and channels in which humanity lives, moves and has its being.

The great revolution is changing man's relation to nature, to the structure and function of human society and the ways in which men think, feel, act and live. The great revolution has shifted the human living place from rural to urban, replaced a large measure of self-employment by wagery, lifted large segments of mankind out of scarcity into abundance, led to widespread migrations across Europe and from continent to continent, expanded nations and built empires. In the course of these developments Europe became the center of world economic, political and cultural affairs, held the position briefly and lost it in the course of two general, suicidal wars.

Speaking broadly, such a period in the life of any society may be described as a revolutionary situation--one in which changes are made frequently, rapidly and with far reaching consequences. In a word, the existing social pattern is in process of being turned over, turned upside down, transformed by forces which seem to operate according to their own principles and often quite independently of human intention or intervention.

Our society--western civilization--is undergoing a revolution. People born into a rapidly changing society are often tempted and sometimes compelled to play significant roles in the revolutionary process.

Unconsciously or consciously, unwilling and unwitting or deliberately and purposefully they are revolutionaries.

Among the partic.i.p.ants in the revolutionary process, the far-seeing, imaginative, perceptive and mature develop into purposive revolutionaries. In the course of a series of political, economic and cultural revolutions like those which played so fateful a part in China between 1899 and 1969, an entire generation is born, grows up and, in larger part, retires from active life or dies off.

Long continued cultural changes play a part in local history. They have an equally important role in the lives of neighboring nations and peoples. With present means of communication, transportation and travel, the influence of revolutionary events such as those in China from 1899 to the present day may be profound.

The bourgeois revolution from 1750 to 1840 centered largely in West Europe and the Americas. In scope it was economic, political, cultural.

The Chinese and other revolutions of the present period, beginning with the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Chinese Revolution of 1911, are once more transforming the economic, political and cultural life of mankind.

UNESCO's _History of Mankind_ (Harper and Row), particularly its Volume 6 t.i.tled _The Twentieth Century_, presents voluminous comments from a wide range of qualified scientists and commentators on the changes a.s.sociated with the great revolution of 1750-1970.

The economic, political and cultural life of the majority of human beings has been modified by the events comprising the great revolution.

Its influence has been, and continues to be, planet-wide. Consciously or unconsciously, human beings have been brought into contact with influences that are transforming them as they revolutionize human society.

Western man and his way of life have been primarily responsible for this great revolution. The changes brought about in the human life pattern in the course of the great revolution have created a new world--in structure, in function, in outlook, in stepped-up capacity for even more spectacular changes in the future.

Instead of regarding human beings and human society as unchangeable and sacred we must regard both as a part of our social problem: taking the steps necessary to reach and occupy the highest possible levels of social and individual health and effectiveness. We can and should make every effort to improve human society. We should be equally concerned to improve man and his nature.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

MAN COULD BREAK OUT OF THE AGE-LONG PRISON HOUSE OF CIVILIZATION AND ENTER A NEW WORLD

We humans have been living for ages with various lifestyles--as hunters and fishermen, as herdsmen, as cultivators of the soil, as craftsmen, as traders and merchants, as professionals, as exploiters, as parasites, wreckers and plunderers. On the whole, our energies have been spent in relatively small, self-sufficient groups, staying close to nature, as a part of nature.

Occasionally we have turned from this "natural" way of life, to build towns and cities, experimenting with large scale ma.s.s enterprises and expanded aggregates of population, wealth and centralized authority to which we have given the name of civilizations.

These civilizations, in their turn, have pa.s.sed through a recognizable life cycle--the cycle of growing, developing, maturing, aging, breaking up and disappearing. One aspect of their civilized life was the keeping of records. Another aspect was building with baked clay and stone. Baked clay, some metals and stone, have withstood the wear and tear of time, sheltered in the temples and tombs which we are uncovering, deciphering, translating.

While engaged in these scholarly pursuits, our variant of the pattern--western civilization--has been pa.s.sing through the customary life cycle. If we read the signs correctly, western civilization reached the high point in its cycle toward the end of the last century. Since then, for seventy-five years, it has been on the decline.

If we accept the cycle of civilization as one of the facts or sequences presented to us by history, we may continue to pa.s.s submissively through the successive stages of decline until western civilization is liquidated by the same forces that wiped out preceding civilizations.

This would be the normal course of a cycle of civilization as it appears in recorded history.

Need we follow this course? Must we follow it?

History answers "yes" and also "no."

History answers "yes"--the record to date reads that way.

But the record of history also shows that men have repeatedly interfered and intervened in the historical process by discovery and invention. The historical record is subject to change. Man is not entirely free.

Neither is he helplessly bound on the wheel of necessity, presently known as civilization.

In Chapter 10 we listed a number of discoveries and inventions which have greatly increased man's control over his own destiny. As these innovations are embodied in the life styles of planet-wide human society, there is every likelihood that men can deal with the future almost as comprehensibly as they now deal with the past. Those who take this position argue that humanity has reached a point at which it may break out of the present cycle of civilization and begin a new cycle which will correspond with the possibilities brought to mankind during the great revolution of 1750-1970.

The idea is not new. It has appeared repeatedly in various forms: individual withdrawal from the world and its troubles to live solitary, perfected, sin-free existences; the formulation of plans for utopian or ideal communities; the establishment of such communities--apart from the workday world; revolutionary ma.s.s movements away from the current time of social troubles into a more workable, more acceptable, more basically productive and fundamentally creative life style.

Hermits and reclusive monastic life need not concern us here. They are to be found in many parts of the existing society. They live their lives apart from the main currents of human life. We may make the same comment, with slight modifications, on intentional communities organized within the bounds of surrounding civilizations. They meet the needs of exceptional individuals who find the existing order intolerable and who wish to move at once into a more congenial community life.

Intentional communities founded to demonstrate particular social or economic theories usually are short-lived, covering, at best, one or two generations.

Intentional communities organized around ethical or social principles are more enduring, lasting through generations and sometimes through centuries. During their existence they may have considerable influence on the communities of which they are a part. At best they parallel the life of the civilization against which they protest, while they share its problems. Religiously oriented intentional communities may be found today in many of the countries composing western civilization.

What concerns us here is the split of western civilization into two broadly divergent groups: capitalism and socialism-communism.

Capitalism, in its present monopoly form, is the outcome of a thousand years of development. Throughout its existence it has been politically and economically compet.i.tive. The vehicle of political compet.i.tion began as the nation, then continued as the empire. Economically, the vehicle of compet.i.tion has become the profit-seeking business corporation, backed politically and often subsidized economically by the nation or empire.

As western civilization has developed, nations and empires have tended to form more or less permanent alliances. Business corporations likewise have tended to establish conglomerates which include widely divergent businesses, some limited to one nation or empire, some international.

Historically, the present-day business community developed out of a segmented European feudal society as a protest against political restrictions. Its early key-note was laissez-faire--freedom of businessmen to make economic policy and acc.u.mulate profits. The practical outcome of laissez-faire economy has been monopoly or finance capitalism functioning through the sovereign state or empire.

Marxian socialism-communism, organized and developed largely since 1848, has grown up as a rebellion against monopoly capitalism. At it matured, after revolutions in Mexico, China, Tsarist Russia and East Europe, it became an alternative and even a compet.i.tive life style. Marxism has been, at least in theory, cooperative rather than compet.i.tive. Its objective has been not private profit but a higher standard of economic and social life for exploited ma.s.ses of the business community and of the Third World. Capitalism has had as its slogan "Every man for himself". The slogan of Marxism is "Serve the whole people".

Until 1917 Marxism was a body of social theory and a program of specific political demands. In the period from 1848 to 1917 Marxism operated through minority political parties organized in each nation, but linked together internationally in loose federations, except during the brief existence of the Communist International from 1919 to 1943.

Beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917, Marxism became a basic state doctrine, first in the Soviet Union and subsequently in more than a dozen other nations of East Europe and Asia. The area of Marxist influence, as expressed in socialist construction, spread slowly from 1917 to 1943 and rapidly during and immediately after the war of 1936-1945.

Today about a billion human beings live in countries of East Europe and Asia calling themselves socialist-communist. A second billion human beings live chiefly in West Europe, the Americas and Australasia calling themselves capitalist. A third billion, the remaining segment of mankind, living chiefly in Africa, Asia and Latin America make up the "Third World," most of which consists of former colonies and dependencies of the 19th century empires.

At the beginning of the great revolution in 1750 the planet was occupied by the European empires, their colonies and dependencies, with a segment under the control of the crumbling Chinese and Turkish empires. The ensuing two centuries witnessed a political, economic and social transformation that reached across every continent.

The revolutionary process is far from complete in 1975. Capitalism and Marxism are still pitted against each other--ideologically, politically, culturally. The Marxians form a revolutionary front. Capitalists retort with counter-revolution. Nation by nation the third world is taking sides.

The capitalist world is suffering from the rise and fall of the business cycle, from inflation and unemployment, from the scourge of militarism; from the exhaustion of two general wars in one generation; from absence of any positive common program or commonly accepted means of administering public affairs; from its failure to provide its young people with a satisfactory reason for existence, and from the fatal malady of fragmentation which is the logical counterpart of every major effort at coordination, consolidation and unification. Western civilization, despite repeated efforts, was never able to establish the kind of superficial unity that marked the high point in the Egyptian and Roman civilizations. The stresses and strains of the current great revolution have introduced into western civilization new disintegrative forces of which the capitalist-Marxist confrontation is the most extensive, divisive and decisive.

The Marxist world, in its spectacular rise during less than a century, offers the only workable alternative to declining and disintegrating western civilization. It presents an alternative theoretical program for dealing with the transition from the built-in compet.i.tiveness of western civilization to the built-in cooperativeness of a planned, coordinated, federated socialist-communist world order.

The Soviet Union and its East European socialist neighbors have survived the wars of 1914 and 1936; have survived the capitalist conspiracy to strangle infant Marxism in its cradle. In a remarkably brief period the Soviet Union has moved from a position of cultural backwardness to become the number two nation in productivity and perhaps even number one in fire power.

Today Asia's active development of several variants of Marxism is defended against any repet.i.tion of Hitler's 1941 drive to the East by the ma.s.sive land barrier of the Soviet Union and its East European Marxist a.s.sociates.

On the west, Asia is protected by the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean against the determined efforts of the Washington government to check the spread of Marxism. Washington's current effort to become _The_ Pacific power and also _The_ Asian power have been blocked and perhaps thwarted by the defeat of General MacArthur and his international forces in the Korean War of 1950-53, and by the unantic.i.p.ated and unbelievable resistance mounted by the peoples of South East Asia against the repeated efforts made by Washington to replace the French imperial presence there after its overwhelming defeat in 1954.

The decisive political developments in South and East Asia following war's end in 1945 were first, the expulsion of the British, French and Dutch from their military strongholds in the area; second, the spectacular unification of China and its rapid advance from inferiority and political inconsequence to a place among the three major world powers; third, the meteoric comeback of j.a.pan after its unconditional surrender in 1945; and fourth, the failure of the costly effort mounted by Washington after 1954 to establish itself in a position from which it could dominate the Pacific Ocean and East Asia.