Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 4

A score of European peoples were engaged in the give-and-take of this struggle for wealth and power--for land and its resources in Europe, North Africa and the Near East; for booty, trade and overseas colonies.

As the struggle grew more intense smaller and weaker nations dropped out of the contest or were part.i.tioned and gobbled up piecemeal.

Such was the condition of Europe's free-for-all in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth century, while three developing forces pushed into the forefront of European life: the enlightenment and science, representative government, and the industrial revolution.

Enlightenment broadened the social basis of knowledge and learning.

During the Dark Ages, knowledge and learning were a monopoly of a tiny privileged minority composed of priests, scholars and a segment of the aristocracy. Monasteries, great houses and trading cities sheltered this monopoly. The countryside was a sea of ignorance, superst.i.tion, oppression and exploitation. With the printing press came books. Books promoted literacy and curiosity. Literacy and curiosity led to speculation, experiment, discovery and the formulation and spread of ideas. The product of these forces was science, which had had a long period of gestation in North Africa and Asia.

Dark Ages of localism, with landlords, priests and soldiers directing public affairs led to the concentration of wealth and power in the landed aristocracy and the church. But traders in the countryside and merchants in the centers of commerce held a talisman that opened before them ever increasing sources of wealth. Country dwellers harvested one crop a year. When crops were poor they starved. At best the margin of profit was thin. Traders and merchants made a profit every time they found a customer. The countryside lived on a use economy supplemented by barter. As money increased in quant.i.ty it was loaned at rates of interest by merchants and bankers who owned it and used it for their purposes. Acc.u.mulating wealth and money enabled the traders, merchants, bankers and manufacturers to out-buy and out-point landlords and churchmen. Politically, these changes reduced the authority of absolute monarchies. In their places representative governments made their appearance.

The third force that surfaced in Europe after the end of the Dark Ages was the industrial revolution, which led to fundamental changes in the means of production at the same time that advances in natural and social science produced their practical counterpart--an explosive expansion of technology.

Science, representative government and the industrial revolution led to a rapid and extensive transformation of western society sometimes referred to as the bourgeois revolution. As the bourgeois revolution worked its way into the structure and function of European society, the developing cla.s.s of businessmen and professionals who had begun to challenge the power-monopoly of the "lords spiritual and temporal" ended by establishing a higher power monopoly under the control of business, military, public relations oligarchy. This revolutionary transformation of modern society took place during the thousand years that elapsed between the crusades and the closing years of the nineteenth century.

The resulting social transformation had its geographical homeland in Europe from which it spread around the planet. Politically, these forces found expression through the commerce-dominated, profit-seeking, colonizing empires, with the nation-state as nucleus. Colonizing empires became the dominant force in Europe and in the non-European segments of the planet which were gradually brought under European imperial control.

In the course of voyaging, "discovery" and the establishment of trade, Europeans set up military outposts and maintained increasingly large naval forces. The avowed object of these military and naval build-ups was to defend and promote Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French and British imperial interests. Actually military and naval installations were marking out and maintaining the defense perimeters of their respective colonial empires. One of the widely accepted axioms of the period equated colonies with national prosperity. The more successful colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries became the strongholds of nineteenth century monopoly capitalism.

Industrial revolution, flowering in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gave the European commercial empires a lead over potential rivals based on Asian wealth-power centres. As a result of this lead European empire builders were able to establish and maintain their authority in India and Indonesia, dismember the Turkish and Chinese empires and part.i.tion Africa among themselves. Their only potential rivals were the lumbering, isolationist United States of North America and the newly awakened Island Kingdom of j.a.pan. Both of these non-European nations began playing serious wealth-power roles in the same period from 1895 to 1910. Up to that point Europe continued to be the homeland of monopoly capitalism. The chief centers of heavy industry, commerce and finance were in Europe. European merchant fleets and European navies sailed the seas. European banks and business houses dominated planetary financing, insuring and investing.

Viewed from outside, the ascendancy of Europe seemed to be complete.

Europe held the strategic strong points: productivity, wealth, the means of transportation, mobile fire-power. By the end of the nineteenth century Europe was the monopoly-capitalist motherland. The rest of the planet was made up of actual or potential dependents under European authority. From these outsiders living at subsistence levels, Europeans could get their supplies of food and raw materials at low prices and to them Europeans could sell their surplus manufactures, their commercial services, and their investment capital at high prices. The resulting European prosperity was expected to continue indefinitely into the future.

This planetary structure, with Europe as the center of wealth, power, art, science, free business enterprise and wage slavery, progress and poverty, left the majority of mankind living as dependents and colonials. The situation embodied several confrontations:

1. The masters of Europe might quarrel among themselves.

2. Non-Europeans might set up rival wealth power centers and challenge Europe's world hegemony.

3. Colonials and other dependants might demand independence, and equal status in the family of nations.

4. Rootless middle cla.s.ses and the wretched of the earth might join forces and pull down western civilization's house of cards.

Western civilization, like its predecessors, was accepting and following one central principle: expand, grab and keep. The application of this principle took the form of an axiom of public and private life: might makes right; let him take who has the power; let him keep who can.

Grab and keep, in a period of rapid economic expansion, led each of the burgeoning European empires to the zealous defense of its frontiers as the first principle of imperial policy. The second principle: geographical expansion, followed as a matter of course. Expansion inside Europe, with its tight frontier defenses, meant war with aggressive rivals. Expansion abroad, especially in Asia and Africa, was less costly and might prove more profitable. As a consequence, from 1870 onward, British, French, Dutch, Russia and German colonial territory increased; European armaments multiplied. Each expanding empire prepared for the day which would give it additional square miles of European and foreign real estate.

Grab-and-keep, with its resultant chaotic free-for-all, was the rule of thumb accepted and followed by the West during the decline of Roman power and through the middle ages to modern times.

The "might makes right" formula was in violent conflict with the "love and serve your neighbor" professions of Christian ethics. Nevertheless, it was the accepted overall principle of private enterprise economy and the ruling ethic of Western statecraft. The principle was formulated in five propositions or axioms:

1. Make money, honestly if possible, but make money.

2. Every businessman for himself and the devil take the laggards.

3. We defend and promote our national interests.

4. Our national interests come first.

5. Our country, right or wrong.

These five propositions were the outcome of a millennium of experience with the Crusades and extending to the present century. They are the outcome of preoccupation with material incentives that can be stated in two words, profit and power.

Such propositions, applied to everyday affairs, produced an economy and a statecraft which favored the interests of a part before those of the entire community. Where the whole is favored before any part there is a possibility of co-existence and even of cooperation. Placing a part before the whole involves compet.i.tion all the way from the marketplace to the chancelleries where the fate of nations is discussed and decided.

The above five propositions or axioms result from preoccupation with material incentives: profit and power for managers, disciplined co-ordination for subordinates, affluence, comfort and recognition for the favored few. They provide the ideological background for twentieth century western civilization.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE LIFE CYCLE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Like its predecessors, western civilization from its inception was essentially compet.i.tive. As it developed, the commercially, technically and politically supreme Spanish, Dutch, French and British Empires battled individually, or in rival alliances, for plunder, colonies, markets and raw materials.

From the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, to the Victorian Jubilee in 1897, Great Britain became and remained top dog economically, politically and to a large extent culturally. Britain was the workshop.

British shipping was omnipresent. The pound sterling was the chief medium of foreign exchange. The British Navy patrolled the seas. English was replacing French as the language of commerce and diplomacy.

During this British Century, from 1815 to 1897, Great Britain was dominant among the European great powers, but it was never supreme.

Always there were countervailing forces. For centuries France had been a major factor in the control and direction of European affairs. Defeat at Waterloo reduced but did not destroy French influence. After 1870 Bismark's Germany began playing a major role. Russia, Austria, Holland, Italy and Spain were also European powers. Overseas, the United States of America and j.a.pan were spreading their imperial wings.

With the explosive advances made by science, technology, productivity, income and wealth acc.u.mulation, other countries were moving to the fore.

Even though Britain maintained her actual levels of economic output and potential diplomatic presence she was one among several relatively equal European states and world empires. At the same time her natural resources were being depleted and with the growing importance of cotton, rubber and petroleum, all of which Britain must import, her economic ascendancy was progressively undermined. During the wars of 1914-18 and 1936-45 Britain entered an era of decreasing relative importance. Her empire was largely intact, but her economic and political strength was stretched to the breaking point.

Throughout its history, until the wars of 1914-45, western civilization had its headquarters in central and west Europe, with branch offices elsewhere on the planet. At no time after 1870 did any one European power occupy a position of easy superiority over its rivals. If Great Britain was top dog, France, the long established continental power was snapping at her heels. Germany was an expanding power of major consequence. To the North and East lay Russia, with its vast territories and its persistent pressures into East Europe and Far Asia. By any standard of political measurement Europe was in no sense a universal state. Literally it was a potential battle field. War fortunes and misfortunes revolutionized the Europe of 1870-1910. They also realigned the planetary power structure. Heavy war losses down-graded all of the erstwhile European powers. Central and West Europe ceased to be the planetary hub. At the same time America and Asia shouldered their way toward the center of the world stage. From London, Paris, Berlin and other European vantage points the 1870-1945 era could be described as a period of world revolution.

For half a century United States money and arms were used to stabilize capitalism. For many years Washington through its control of all Latin American states (except Cuba after 1960) had been able to dominate United Nations policy, exclude socialist nations, notably China, and hem in socialism. Through this period Washington subsidized and armed counter revolution. Its anti-socialist-communist doctrine had been accepted and largely followed by the West.

Washington's drive to cripple and stamp out socialism-communism was accepted and followed particularly by the states with fascist leanings.

Since many western states had large and influential socialist minorities and since several of them had been governed by coalitions in which socialists-communists played a substantial role, acceptance of Washington's anti-socialist program never won wholehearted support in Europe. Atlantic alliance countries voted against the admission of People's China to the United Nations during the Dulles Era. The stalemated outcome of the Korean War (1950-3) called Washington anti-socialist policies into serious question. The stupidities, mendacities and wanton cruelties of the United States' undeclared Vietnam War, even before the advent of Johnson and Nixon, had so weakened Washington leadership that no major power would a.s.sociate itself with the adventure. The "Allies" in Vietnam were the U.S.A. and two or three va.s.sal Asian states.

Half a century of cold war and co-existence punctuated by military invasions and hot wars, fought between groups from both sides in the cla.s.s struggle, faced mankind with several undeniable facts:

1. Planet-wide economic, political and social changes had been made during the previous half-century.

2. Capitalism was no longer supreme as it had been before 1900. On the contrary, since 1950 the planet has been divided along cla.s.s lines--capitalism versus socialism.

3. Socialism-communism is one of the most obvious facts of present-day planetary life.

4. Capitalism is losing ground, especially in Europe.

5. Socialism is gaining ground, especially in Eurasia.

Co-existence presupposes recognition of these five propositions and a willingness to abide by the outcome of the evolutionary-revolutionary process, through which the western world is pa.s.sing.

During several centuries, ending in 1900, western civilization pa.s.sed through an era of consolidation and integration that brought its sovereign segments into increasing stable relationships. The most advanced of these relationships took political shape in the half-dozen European empires which controlled the planet in 1900. Side by side with the consolidation of the planet into nations and empires there was another process, world-wide in scope, which made the facts and products of science and technology and their duplication the common property of mankind, creating a cultural synthesis far more universal than the political synthesis in nations, empires, the League of Nations or the United Nations.

Any social synthesis includes positive and negative aspects which function side by side. One builds up. The other wears down. For centuries the building forces in western civilization were in the ascendant. Since the turn of the century a shift of forces has been under way. The wearing down forces presently are in the ascendant. Had it been less compet.i.tive and more cooperative and co-ordinated, western civilization might have taken another step in advance by extending cultural unification into the political arena. The League of Nations and the United Nations were efforts in this direction. Neither succeeded in breaking down sovereignty far enough to permit planet-wide political federation.