13. Ten Building Blocks for a New World
14. Moving Toward World Federation
15. Integrating a World Economy
16. Conserving our Natural Environment
17. Re-vamping the Social Life of the Planet
18. Man Could Change Human Nature
19. Man Could Break Out of the Age-Long Prison-House
of Civilization and Enter a New World
PREFACE
LEARNING FROM HISTORY
Human history may be viewed from various angles. The easiest history to
write concerns the doings of a few well known people and their
involvement in some memorable events. History may also concern itself
with inventions and discoveries: the use of fire, of the wheel or
smelting metals. It may center around sources of food, means of shelter,
or the making of records. It may be concerned with the construction and
decoration of cities, kingdoms and empires.
Social history enters the picture with travel, transportation,
communication, trade. Human beings group themselves in families, clans
and tribes, in voluntary associations; they compete, plunder, conquer,
enslave, exploit; they co-operate for construction and destruction.
Political history is but one aspect of man's group contacts and group
projects.
There have been histories of particular civilizations and of
civilization as a field of historical research. With minor exceptions
none of the authors that I have consulted has attempted an analytical
treatment of civilization as a sociological phenemenon.
Scientists start from hunches, examine available data, advance tentative
conclusions, test them in the light of wider observations, and round out
their research by formulating general principles or "laws." This
scientific approach has been used in many fields of observation and
study. I am applying the formula to one aspect of social history: the
appearance, development, maturity, decline and disappearance of the vast
co-ordinations of collective, experimental human effort called
civilizations.
"Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they?" asked Byron. He might
have added: "What were they? How did they come into being? What was the
nature of their experience? Why did they rise from small beginnings,
develop into wide-spread colossal complexes of wealth and power, and
then, after longer or shorter periods of existence, break up and
disappear from the stage of social history?"
Such questions are far removed from the lives of people who are busy
with everyday affairs. In one sense they _are_ remote; in the larger
picture, however, they are of vital concern to anyone and everyone now
living in civilized communities. If Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans
and Carthaginians built extensive empires and massive civilizations that
flourished for a time, then broke up and disappeared, are we to follow
blindly and unthinkingly in their footsteps? Or do we study their
experiences, benefit from their successes and learn from their mistakes?
Can we not take lessons out of their voluminous notebooks, avoid their
blunders and direct our own feet along paths that fulfil our lives at
the same time that they meet the widespread demand for survival and
well-being?
Civilization has been extensively experimental. Several thousand years,
during which civilizations have appeared, disappeared and reappeared,
have been too brief to establish and stabilize a hard and fast social
pattern. As the complexity of civilizations has increased, variations
and deviations have grown in number and intensity. With the advent of
western civilization a culture pattern is being put together which
differs widely from its predecessors.
All civilized peoples seem to have developed from simple beginnings and
experimented with broader and more complicated life styles. In western
civilization the number of experiments has increased and the span of
their deviations seems to have broadened. Under the circumstances an
analysis of civilization must take for granted not only social change
but the development of, human society along lines which link up the
outstanding structural and functional ideas, institutions and practices
of successive civilizations.
I propose in this inquiry to state certain accepted facts from the
history of civilizations and of contemporary experience. I also propose
to analyze the facts and generalize them in such a way that the results
of the study may provide an understanding of the human social past,
together with some guide-lines that will prove useful in the formulation
and implementation of the present-day policy and procedure of civilized
peoples, nations, empires and of the western civilization.
This book is not a popular treatise, nor is it a textbook. Rather. it is
an attempt to summarize an area of critical human concern. Academia may
not use such material: nevertheless it should be available to students
and administrators who must plan and direct the social future of
humankind.
_Civilization and Beyond_ rounds out a series of studies that I began in
1928 with _Where Is Civilization Going_? The series has extended through
_The Twilight of Empire_ (1930), _War_ (1931) and _The Tragedy of
Empire_ (1946). Up to 1914 my field of study was confined largely to the
economics of distribution. The war of 1914-18 pushed me rudely and
decisively into the broader field. I have described the process in my
political autobiography: _Making of a Radical_ (1971).
I hope that this study will provide a useful link in the chain of
material dealing with the structure and function of man's social
environment, leading directly into an action program that will conclude
the preservation and loving economical use of nature's rich gifts and
the dedication of thousands of young aspiring men and women to the good
life here, now and indefinitely, into a bright, productive and creative
future.
As of this date seven publishers have examined the manuscript of this
work and declined to publish it. All felt that it would not find any
considerable reading public. Nevertheless, I feel that the work should
be printed and distributed because it carries a message that may be of
first rate importance to the future of my fellow humans.
Scott Nearing.
Harborside, Maine May 5, 1975
INTRODUCTION
THOUGHTS ABOUT HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION
We may think and talk about civilization as one pattern or level of
culture, one stage through which human life flows and ebbs. In that
sense we may regard it abstractly and historically, as we regard the
most recent ice age or the long and painful record of large-scale
chattel slavery.
From quite another viewpoint we may think of civilization as a
technologically advanced way of life developed by various peoples
through ages of unrecorded experiment and experience, and followed by
millions during the period of written history. It is also the way of
life that the West has been trying to impose upon the entire human
family since European empires launched their crusade to westernize,
modernize and civilize the planet Earth.
A third approach would regard civilization as an evolving life style,
conceived before the earliest days of recorded human history and matured
through the series of experiments marking the development of
civilization as we have known it during the five centuries from 1450 to
1975.
Thinking in terms of this age-old experience, with six or more thousand
years of social history as a background, it is possible to give a fairly
exact meaning to the word "civilization" as it has been lived and is
being lived by the present-day West. It is also possible to understand
the history of previous civilizations in cycle after cycle of their
rise, their development, decline and extinction. At the same time it
will enable the reader to recognize the relationship (and difference)
between the words "culture" and "civilization".
Human culture is the sum total of ideas, relationships, artifacts,
institutions, purposes and ideals currently functioning in any
community. Three elements are present in each human society: man, nature
and the social structure. Human culture at any point in its history is
the social structure: the aggregate of existing culture traits, the
products of man's ingenuity, inventiveness and experimentation, set in
their natural environment.
Civilization is a level of culture built upon foundations laid down
through long periods of pre-civilized living. These foundations consist
of artifacts, implements, customs, habit patterns and institutions
produced and developed in numerous scattered localities by groups of
food-gatherers, migrating herdsmen, cultivators, hand craftsmen and
traders and eventually in urban communities built around centers of
wealth and power: the cities which are the nuclei of every civilization.
Urban centers, housing trade, commerce, fabrication and finance, with
their hinterlands of food-gatherers, herdsmen, cultivators, craftsmen
and transporters, are the nuclei around which and upon which recurring
civilizations are built. Within and around these urban centers there
grows up a complex of associations, activities, institutions and ideas
designed to promote, develop and defend the particular life pattern.
A civilization is a cluster of peoples, nations and empires so related
in time and space that they share certain ideas, practices, institutions
and means of procedure and survival. Among these features of a civilized
community we may list:
(1) means of communication, record-keeping, transportation
and trade. This would include a spoken language, a method
of enumeration, writing in pictographs or symbols; an
alphabet, a written language, inscribed on stone, bone,
wood, parchment, paper; means of preserving the records
of successive generations; paths, roads, bridges; a system
for educating successive generations; meeting places and
trading points; means for barter or exchange;
(2) an interdependent urban-oriented economy based on division
of labor and specialization; on private property in the
essential means of production and in consumer goods and
services; on a competitive survival struggle for wealth,
prestige and power between individuals and social groups;
and on the exploitation of man, society and nature for the
material benefit of the privileged few who occupy the summit
of the social pyramid;
(3) a unified, centralized political apparatus or bureaucracy
that attempts to plan, direct and administer the political,
economic, ideological and sociological structure;
(4) a self-selected and self-perpetuating oligarchy that owns
the wealth, holds the power and pulls the strings;
(5) an adequate labor force for farming, transport, industry,
mining;
(6) large middle-class elements: professionals, technicians,
craftsmen, tradesmen, lesser bureaucrats, and a semi-parasitic
fringe of camp-followers;
(7) a highly professional, well-trained, amply-financed apparatus
for defense and offense;
(8) a complex of institutions and social practices which will
indoctrinate, persuade and when necessary limit deviation
and maintain social conformity;
(9) agreed religious practices and other cultural features.
This description of civilization covers the essential features of
western civilization and the sequence of predecessor civilizations for
which adequate records exist.
Successive civilizations have introduced new culture traits and
abandoned old ones as the pageant of history moved from one stage to the
next, or advanced and retreated through cycles. Using this description
as a working formula, it is possible to understand the development
followed in the past by western civilization, to estimate its current
status and to indicate its probable outcome.
Long-established thought-habits cry aloud in protest against such a
description of civilization. Until quite recently the word
"civilization" has been used in academic circles to symbolize a social
idea or ideal. Professor of History Anson D. Morse of Amherst College
presents such a view in his _Civilization and the World War_ (Boston:
Ginn 1919). For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the
heritage of the child of the twentieth century is better than that of
the child of the Stone Age. As a process it is the perfection of man and
mankind. As an end, it is the realization of the highest ideal which men
are capable of forming.... The goal of civilization ... is human society
so organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the
best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole,
(producing) the perfect organization of humanity." (page 3).
Such thoughts may be noble and inspired; they are not related to
history. We know more or less about a score of civilizations that have
occupied portions of the earth during several thousand years. We know a
great deal about the western civilization which we observe and in which
we participate. Professor Morse's florid words apply to none of the
civilizations known to history. Certainly they are poles away from an
accurate characterization of our own varient of this social pattern.
We are writing this introduction in an effort to make our word pictures
of mankind and its doings correspond with the facts of social history.
With the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, it is high
time for us to exchange the clouds of fancy and the flowers of rhetoric
for the solid ground of historical reality. The word "civilization" must
generalize what has been and what is, as nearly as the past and present
can be embodied in language.
Civilization is a level or phase of culture which has been attained and
lost repeatedly in the course of social history. The epochs of
civilization have not been distributed evenly, either in time or on the
earth's surface. A combination of circumstances, political, economic,
ideological, sociological, resulted in the Egyptian, the Chinese, the
Roman civilizations. One of these was centered in North Africa, the
second in Asia, the third in eastern Europe. All three spilled over into
adjacent continents.
No two civilizations are exactly alike at any stage of their
development. Each civilization is at least a partial experiment, a
process or sequence of causal relationships, altered sequentially in the
course of its life cycle.
These thoughts about culture and civilization should be supplemented by
noting the relationship between civilizations and empires. An empire is
a center of wealth and power associated with its economic and political
dependencies. A civilization is a cluster or a succession of empires
and/or former empires, co-ordinated and directed by one of their number
which has established its leadership in the course of survival struggle.
The total body of historical evidence bearing on human experiments with
civilization is extensive and impressive. It covers a large portion of
the Earth's land surface, includes parts of Asia, Africa and Europe and
extends sketchily to the Americas. In time it covers many thousands of
years.
Experiments with civilization have been conducted in highly selective
surroundings possessing the volume and range of natural resources and
the isolation and remoteness necessary to build and maintain a high
level of culture over substantial periods of time. In these special
areas it was possible to provide for subsistence, produce an economic
surplus large enough to permit experimentation and ensure protection
against human and other predators. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were
surrounded by deserts and high mountains. Crete was an island, extensive
but isolated. Productive river valleys like the Yang-tse, the Ganges and
the Mekong have afforded natural bases for experiments with
civilization. Similar opportunities have been provided by strategic
locations near bodies of water, mineral deposits and the intersections
of trade-routes. Others, less permanent, were located in the high Andes,
on the Mexican Plateau, in the Central American jungles.
Histories of civilizations, some of them ancient or classical, have
been written during the past two centuries. There have been general
histories in many languages. There have been scholarly reports on
particular civilizations. Prof. A.J. Toynbee's massive ten volume _Study
of History_ is a good example. Still more extensive is the thirty volume
history of civilization under the general editorship of C.K. Ogden.
These writings have brought together many facts bearing chiefly on the
lives of spectacular individuals and episodes, with all too little data
on the life of the silent human majority.
At the end of this volume the reader will find a list, selected from the
many books that I have consulted in preparation for writing this study.
Most of these authorities are concerned with the facts of civilization,
with far less emphasis on their political, economic and sociological
aspects.
In this study I have tried to unite theory with practice. On the one
hand I have reviewed briefly and as accurately as possible some
outstanding experiments with civilization, including our own western
variant. (Part I. The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization.) In Part
II I have undertaken a social analysis of civilization as a past and
present life style. In Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I
have tried to check our thinking about civilization with the sweep of
present day historical trends. Part IV, Steps Beyond Civilization, is an
attempt to list some of the alternatives and opportunities presently
available to civilized man.
Any reader who has the interest and persistence to read through the
entire volume and to browse through some of its references will have had
the equivalent of a university extension course dealing with one of the
most critical issues confronting the present generation of humanity.
_Part I_
The Pageant of Experiment With Civilization
CHAPTER ONE
EXPERIMENTS IN EGYPT AND EURASIA
Thousands of years before the city of Rome was ringed with its six miles
of stone wall, other peoples in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa were
building civilizations. New techniques of excavation, identification and
preservation, subsidized by an increasingly affluent human society, and
developed during the past two centuries of archeological research have
provided the needed means and manpower. The result is an imposing number
of long buried building sites with their accompanying artifacts. Still
more important are the records written in long forgotten languages on
stone, clay tablets, metal, wood and paper. These remnants and records,
left by extinguished civilizations, do not tell us all we wish to know,
but they do provide the materials which enable us to reconstruct, at
least in part, the lives of our civilized predecessors.
Extensive in time and massive in the volume of their architecture are
the remains of Egyptian civilization. The earliest of these fragments
date back for more than six thousand years.
The seat of Egyptian civilization was the Nile Valley and its estuary
built out into the Mediterranean Sea from the debris of disintegrating
African mountains. Annual floods left their silt deposits to deepen the
soil along the lower reaches of the river. River water, impounded for
the purpose, provided the means of irrigating an all but rainless desert
countryside. Skillful engineering drained the swamps, adding to the
cultivable area of a narrow valley cut by the river through jagged
barren hills. Deserts on both sides of the Nile protected the valley
against aggressors and migrants. Within this sanctuary the Egyptians
built a civilization that lasted, with a minor break, for some 3,000
years.
Egyptian temples and tombs carry records chiseled and painted on hard
stone, which throw light on the life and times of upper-class Egyptians,
including emperors, provincial governors, courtiers, generals,
merchants, provincial organizers. In a humid, temperate climate these
stone-cut and painted records would have been eroded, overgrown and
obliterated long ago. In the dry desert air of North Africa they have
preserved their identity through the centuries.
Since the Egyptians had a few draft animals, and little if any
power-driven machinery, energy needed to build massive stone temples,
tombs and other public structures must have been supplied by the forced
labor of Egyptians, their serfs and slaves.
Egypt's history dawns on a well-organized society: The Old Kingdom,
based on the productivity of the narrow, lush Nile Valley. The products
of the Valley were sufficient to maintain a large population of
cultivators: some slave, some forced labor, about which we have little
knowledge; a bureaucracy, headed by a supreme ruler whose declared
divinity was one of the chief stabilizing forces of the society. Between
its agricultural base and its ruling monarch, the Old Kingdom had a
substantial middle class which procured the wood, stone, metals and
other materials needed in construction; a corps of engineers,
technicians and skilled workers, and a substantial mass of humanity
which provided the energy needed to erect the temples, monuments and
other remains which testify to the political, economic, and cultural
competence of the ruling elements and the technical skills present in
the Old Kingdom.
Foremost among the factors responsible for the success of the Old
Kingdom was the close partnership between the "lords temporal" and the
"lords spiritual"--the state and the church. The state consisted of a
highly centralized monarchy ruled by a Pharoah who personified temporal
authority. This authority was strengthened because it represented a
consensus of the many gods recognized and worshiped by the Egyptians of
the Old Kingdom. The monarch was also looked upon as an embodiment of
divinity. Some Egyptian pharoahs had been priests who became rulers.
Others had been rulers who became priests. The two aspects of public
life--political and religious--were closely interrelated.
In theory the land of Egypt was the property of the Pharoah. Foreign
trade was a state monopoly. In practice the ownership and use of land
were shared with the temples and with those members of the nobility
closest to the ruling monarch. Hence there were state lands and state
income and temple lands and temple income. The use of state lands was
alloted to favorites. Each temple had land which it used for its own
purposes.
Political power in the Old Kingdom was a tight monopoly held by the
ruling dynasty of the period. During preceding epochs it seems likely
that rival groups or factions had gone through a period of
power-survival struggle which eliminated one rival after another until
economic ownership and political authority were both vested in the same
ruling oligarchs. This struggle for consolidation apparently reached its
climax when Menes, a pharoah who began his rule about 3,400 B.C., in the
south of Egypt, invaded and conquered the Delta and merged the two
kingdoms, South and North, into one nation which preserved its identity
and its sovereignty until the Persian Conquest of 525 B.C.
The unification of the northern kingdom with the South seems to have
been a slow process, interrupted by insurrections and rebellions in the
Delta and in Lybia. Inscriptions report the suppression of these
insurrections and give the number of war-captives brought to the south
as slaves. In one instance the captives numbered 120,000 in addition to
1,420 small cattle and 400,000 large cattle.
Using these war captives to supplement the home supply of forced and
free labor, successive dynasties built temples, palaces and tombs;
constructed new cities; drained and irrigated land; sent expeditions to
the Sinai peninsula to mine copper. Such enterprises indicate a
considerable economic surplus above that required to take care of a
growing population: the high degree of organization required to plan and
assemble such enterprises, and the considerable engineering and
technological capacity necessary for their execution.
Chief among the binding forces holding together the extensive apparatus
known as the Old Kingdom was religion, with its gods, its temples and
their generous endowments. Each locality consolidated into the Old
Kingdom had its gods and their places for worship. In addition to these
local religious centers there was an hierarchy of national deities,
their temples, temple lands and endowments. The ruling monarch, who was
official servitor of the national gods, interpreting their will and
adding to the endowments of the temples, was the embodiment of secular
and of religious authority.
Egyptians of the period believed that death was not an end, but a
transition. They also believed that those who passed through the death
process would have many of the needs and wants associated with life on
the Earth. Furthermore they believed that in the course of their future
existence those who had died would again inhabit the bodies that they
had during their previous existences on Earth. Following out these
beliefs the Egyptians put into their tombs a full assortment of the
food, clothing, implements and instruments which they had used during
their Earth life. They also embalmed the bodies of their dead with the
utmost care and buried them in carefully hidden tombs where they would
be found by their former users and occupied for the Day of Judgment.
Holding such views, preparation for the phase of life subsequent to
death was a chief object of the early Egyptian rulers and their
subjects. One of the preoccupations of each new occupant of the throne
was the selection of his burial place. Early in his reign he began the
construction of suitable quarters for the reception of his embalmed
body. The great pyramids were such tombs. Other monarchs constructed
rock-hewn chambers for the reception of their bodies. In these chambers
in addition to a room for a sarcophagus were associated rooms in which
every imaginable need of the dead was stored: food, clothing, furniture,
jewelry, weapons.
Adjacent to the royal tomb favored nobles received permission to build
their own tombs, similarly equipped but on a smaller, less grandiose
scale than that of the pharaoh. By this means the courtiers who had
attended the pharaoh in his life-time would be at hand to perform
similar services in the after death existence.
Construction and maintenance of temples and tombs absorbed a
considerable part of Egypt's economic surplus. These drains on the
economy grew more extensive as the country became more populous and more
productive. Thanks to the lack of rain in and near the Nile Valley and
despite the depleting activities of persistent vandalism these
constructs have stood for thirty centuries as monuments to one of the
most extensive and elaborate civilizations known to historians. Despite
the absence of detailed records, Egyptian achievements under the Old
Kingdom indicate an abundance of food, wood, metal and other resources
far in excess of survival requirements; a population sufficiently
extensive to produce the necessaries of existence and a surplus which
made it possible for the lords temporal and spiritual to erect such
astonishing and enduring monuments; high levels of technical skills
among woodsmen, quarrymen and building crews; the transport facilities
by land and water required to assemble the materials, equipment and man
power; the foresight, planning, timing and over-all management involved
in such constructs as the pyramids, temples and tombs which have
withstood the wear and tear of thousands of years; the willingness and
capacity of professionals, technicians, skilled workers, and the masses
of free and slave labor to co-exist and co-operate over the long periods
required for the completion of such extensive structural projects; the
utilization of an extensive economic surplus not primarily for personal
mass or middle-class consumption but to enhance the power and glory of a
tiny minority, its handymen and other dependents; and a considerable
middle class of merchants, managers and technicians.
Speaking sociologically, the structure of Egyptian society from sometime
before 3,400 B.C., to 525 B.C., passed through four distinct phases or
stages. During the first phase, the Nile Valley, which had been
separated by tribal and/or geographical boundaries into a large number
of more or less independent units, was consolidated, integrated and
organized into a single kingdom. This working, functioning area (the
land of Egypt) could provide for most of its basic needs from within its
own borders. In a sense it was a self-sufficient, workable, liveable
area. Egypt was populous, rich, well organized, with a surplus of
wealth, productivity and man-power that could be used outside of its own
frontiers. Some of the surplus was used outside--to the south, into
Central Africa, to the west into North Africa, to the north into Eastern
Europe and Western Asia, inaugurating the second phase of Egyptian
development. During this second phase Egyptian wealth, population and
technology, spilling over its frontiers onto foreign lands, established
and maintained relations with foreign territory on a basis that yielded
a yearly "tribute," paid by foreigners into the Egyptian treasury. The
land of Egypt thus surrounded itself with a cluster of dependencies,
converting what had been an independent state or independent states into
a functioning empire.
The land of Egypt was the nucleus of the Egyptian Empire--center of
wealth and power with its associates and its dependencies. The empire
was held together by a legal authority using armed force where necessary
to assert or preserve its identity and unity.
Expansion, the third phase of Egyptian development, involved the export
of culture traits and artifacts beyond national frontiers, extending the
cultural influence of Egypt into non-Egyptian lands inhabited by Egypt's
neighbors. Merchants, tourists, travelers, explorers and military
adventurers carried the name and fame of Egypt into other centers of
civilization and into the hinterland of barbarism that surrounded the
civilizations of that period.
Thus the land of Egypt expanded into the Egyptian Empire and the
culture of Egypt (its language, its ideas, its artifacts, its
institutions) expanded far beyond the boundaries of Egyptian political
authority and established Egyptian civilization in parts of Africa, Asia
and Europe.
The era of Egyptian civilization was divided into two periods by an
invasion of the Hyksos, nomadic leaders who moved into Egypt, ruled it
for a period and later were expelled and replaced by a new Egyptian
dynasty.
The fourth period of Egypt's experiment with civilization was that of
decline. From a position of political supremacy and cultural ascendancy
Egyptian influence weakened politically, economically, ideologically and
culturally until the year of the Persian Conquest, 525 B.C., when Egypt
became a conquered, occupied, provincial and in some ways a colonial
territory.
Egyptian civilization can be summed up in three sentences. It covered
the greatest time span of any civilization known to history. Its
monuments are the most massive. Its records, chiefly in stone, picture
massed humans directed for at least thirty centuries toward providing a
satisfying and rewarding after-life for a tiny favored minority of its
population. To achieve this result, the natural resources of three
adjacent continents were combined and concentrated into the Nile Valley
through an effective imperial apparatus that enabled the Egyptians to
exploit the resources and peoples of adjacent Africa, Asia and Europe
for the enrichment and empowerment of the rulers of Egypt and its
dependencies. The disintegration and collapse of Egyptian civilization
occupied only a small fraction of the time devoted to its upbuilding and
supremacy.
Before, during and after Egyptians played their long and distinguished
parts in the recorded history of civilization, the continent of Asia was
producing a series of civilization in four areas: first at the
crossroads joining Africa and Europe to Asia; then in Western Asia (Asia
Minor); in Central Asia, especially in India and Indonesia and finally
in China and the Far East.
Experiments with civilization during the past six thousand years have
centered in the Eurasian land mass, including the North African littoral
of the Mediterranean Sea. Within this area of potential or actual
civilization, until very recent times, the centers of civilization have
been widely separated geographically and temporally. Occasionally they
have been unified and integrated by some unusual up-thrust like that of
the Egyptian, the Chinese or the Roman civilizations. In the intervals
between these up-thrusts various centers of civilization have maintained
a large degree of autonomy and isolation. Only in the past five
centuries have communication, transportation, trade and tourism created
the basis for an experiment in organizing and coordination of a
planet-wide experiment in civilization.
Nature offered humankind two logical areas for the establishment of
civilizations. One was the cross-roads of migration, trade and travel by
land to and from Asia, Africa and Europe. The other was the
Mediterranean with its possibility of relatively safe and easy
water-migration, trade and travel between the three continents making up
its littoral. Both possibilities were brought together in the Eastern
Mediterranean with its multitude of islands, its broken coastline, and
its many safe harbors.
The Phoenicians developed their far-flung trading activities around the
Mediterranean as a waterway, and the tri-continental crossroads as a
logical center for a civilization built around business enterprise.
Aegean civilization occupied the eastern Mediterranean for approximately
two thousand years. Its nucleus was the island of Crete. Its influence
extended far beyond its island base into southern Europe, western Asia
and North Africa. Experiments with civilization on and near the Indian
sub-continent centered around the Indonesian archipelago and the rich,
semi-tropical and tropical valleys of the Ganges, the Indus, the Gadari,
the Irra-waddy and the Mekong. Although they were contiguous
geographically and extended over a time span of approximately two
thousand years they were aggregates rather than monolithic
civilizations, retaining their localisms and avoiding any strong central
authority.
Beginnings of civilization have been made outside the
Asian-European-African triangle centering around the Mediterranean Sea
and the band of South Asia extending from Mesopotamia through India and
Indonesia to China. They include the high Andes, Mexico and Central
America and parts of black Africa. In no one of these cases did the
beginnings reach the stability and universality that characterized the
Eurasian-African civilizations.
CHAPTER TWO
ROME'S OUTSTANDING EXPERIMENT
Among the many attempts to make the institutions and practices of
civilization promote human welfare, Roman civilization deserves a very
high rating. First, it was located in the eastern Mediterranean area,
the home-site of so many civilizations. Second, it was part and parcel
of a prolonged period of attempts by Egyptians, Assyrians, Hittites,
Babylonians, Mycaenians, Phoenicians and others in the area to set up
successful empires and to play the lead role in building a civilization
that would be more or less permanent. Third, the Romans seemed to have
the hardiness, adaptability, persistence and capacity for
self-discipline necessary to carry such a long term project to a
successful conclusion. Among the widely varied human groups occupying
the eastern Mediterranean area between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D., the
Romans seem to have been well qualified to win the laurel crown.
Western civilization is an incomplete experiment. Its outcome remains
uncertain. Its future still hangs in the insecure balance between
construction and destruction, between life and extinction. It is "our"
civilization in a very real sense. It was developed by our forebears. We
live as part of its complex of ideas, practices, techniques,
institutions. Since we are in it and of it, it is difficult for us
humans to judge it objectively.
Roman civilization, on the contrary, is a completed experiment, one that
came into being, developed over several centuries, attained a zenith of
wealth and power, then sank gradually from sight, until it lived only as
a part of history. A study of Roman civilization has two advantages.
First, its life cycle has been completed. Second, it is close enough to
us in history and its records are so numerous and so well preserved that
we can form a fairly accurate picture of its structure and its
functions. It was written up extensively by the Romans themselves, by
their Greek and other contemporaries and by a host of scholars and
students; since the break-up of Roman civilization as a political,
economic and cultural force in world affairs.
Rome's experiment is sometimes called Graeco-Roman civilization because
Greece and Italy were close geographical neighbors and also because
Greek culture, which reached its zenith by 500 B.C. and was closely
paralleled by the rise of Roman culture, had a profound effect in
determining the total character of Roman civilization. In a very real
sense Graeco-Roman civilization was the parent of western civilization.
Among the many completed civilizations of which we have fairly adequate
records, those concerning Rome are most complete and most available.
The story of Roman civilization begins in the Eastern Mediterranean
Basin in an era when Greek and Phoenician cities, together with segments
and fragments of the Egyptian-Assyrian-Babylonian civilizations were
competing for raw materials, trade and alliances. Egyptians had been
supreme in the area for centuries. The Sumerian, Aegean, Chinese,
Hittite, Assyrian and Indian civilizations had enjoyed periods of
dominance but had never reached the level of supremacy enjoyed by the
Egyptians.
When Rome came on the scene as a first-rate power, circa 300 B.C., the
crucial land bridge joining Africa, Europe and Asia was being passed
from hand to hand, with no power strong enough to succeed Egypt as the
dominant political-economic-cultural force in the region. Historically
speaking it was an interregnum, a period of transition. Egypt had ceased
to dominate the public life of the area. The trading cities of the
Greeks and the Phoenicians were pushing their way of life into the front
ranks among the recognized powers. The kingdoms of Asia-Minor were
still warring for supremacy in a field which none of the local kingdoms
was able to dominate and hold for any considerable period of time.
Public affairs at the African-European-Asian crossroads were being
periodically disturbed and upset by the intrusion of Asian marauders and
nomads who came in successive waves, defeated and drove the native
inhabitants off from the choicest land and settled down in their places,
only to be pushed out in their turn by fresh Asian migrants.
The African-European-Asian triangle was a meeting place and a battle
ground. Phoenician and Greek cities brought to this scene new factors
and new forces: the rudiments of science; trade and commerce, including
a money economy, accounting and cost keeping; the elements of economic
organization; the conduct of public affairs by governments based on law
rather than on the whim and word of a deified potentate; and the
construction of cities and city states built on these foundations.
Rome entered the picture when the forces of political absolutism based
upon an agriculture operated by serfs and slaves had fought themselves
to a standstill and exhausted their historical usefulness. The times
called for new forces capable of adapting themselves to a new culture
pattern extending over a greatly enlarged world. The Romans, with their
Greek associates, were in a position to fill the gap.
Romans lived originally in Latium, a small land area in southern Italy
on the Tiber River far enough inland to be protected against pirates.
They built a city which finally covered seven adjacent hills and
developed a community of working farmers, merchants, craftsmen and
professionals. The farms were small, averaging perhaps eight to fifteen
acres, an area large enough to provide a family with a stable though
meagre livelihood. The farmers were hard working and frugal.
At this period of Roman history and mythology Latium was one of many
communities occupying Italy. Each was self-governing. Each took the
steps necessary for survival and expansion. Like their neighbors, the
inhabitants of Latium were prepared to defend themselves against piracy,
brigandage and ambitious, aggressive rivals. Defense took the form of an
embankment and a water-filled moat which surrounded the early
settlements and provided shelter for herdsman and farmers in case of
emergencies.
At some point in pre-history, presumably when Etruscan princes were in
control of Roman affairs, the protective earth embankment which
surrounded the Roman settlements was strengthened by building a moat 100
feet wide and 30 feet deep. Behind the moat was a stone wall 10 feet
thick and 30 feet or more in height. Parts of this defense were built
and rebuilt at various times. When completed they were about six miles
in length, enclosing an area sufficient to accommodate the chief
buildings of the city and living space for a population of perhaps
200,000 people.
The defenses were designed to prevent interference or intrusion into the
life of the Romans. Behind them the inhabitants constructed temples, a
forum, palaces and other public buildings, bringing in clean mountain
water by an aqueduct that eventually reached a length of 44 miles,
constructing an extensive system of drains and sewers that disposed of
city wastes, building a network of roads that eventually gave the Romans
access first to all parts of Italy and later to the entire Mediterranean
Basin. They also replaced the wooden bridges over the Tiber and other
rivers by stone bridges carried on stone piers and arches.
Early in their building activities the Romans learned to make a cement
so weather-resistant that many of their constructs are still usable two
thousand years after the Romans built them. These and similar building
operations made Rome one of the show places of the Graeco-Roman world.
They also provided for the Romans a level of stability and security far
beyond that of their neighbors in that part of the unstable Italian
peninsula.
At the time Rome was founded, presumably about 700 B.C., the Italian
peninsula was occupied by a large number of principalities, kingdoms and
tribal nomads, newly arrived from eastern Europe and Asia. The struggle
for pasturage and fertile soil, for dwelling sites and trading
opportunities, went on ceaselessly. Romans, like their neighbors and
competitors, were reaching out to provide themselves with food, building
materials, trade opportunities, strategic advantages. They expanded
peacefully if possible, using diplomacy up to a certain point and only
engaging in war as a last resort. But since the entire Italian peninsula
was occupied by more or less independent groups, each of which was
seeking a larger and safer place in the sun, the outcome was ceaseless
diplomatic maneuvering, using war as an instrument of policy in the
struggle for pelf and power. Four centuries of power struggle, in which
Romans played an increasingly prominent role, gave the Roman Republic
and its allies substantial control of the entire Italian peninsula.
Beginning as one among many small independent states in Italy, the
inhabitants of Latium emerged from four centuries of competitive
diplomatic and military struggle as the de facto masters of all Italy.
Power struggles are carried on by contestants who occupy a particular
land area with its resources and other advantages. Latium was small in
extent (some 2,000 square miles) and had very limited natural
advantages. Operating from this restricted base, through four centuries
of diplomacy, intrigue and war, the Romans enlarged their base of
operations to include the whole of Italy. In this crucial era of its
history Rome expanded its geographic-economic base to a point from which
it could use the natural and human resources of all Italy as a nucleus
upon which to build the Roman Empire in Europe, West Asia and North
Africa.
At the beginning of this period the Mediterranean Basin housed a number
of African, Asian and European empires. Each exercised authority over a
part of the Mediterranean littoral. Each empire was built around its
central city or cities. Each empire had its distinctive institutions and
practices. During these centuries all of the empires were defeated,
conquered, occupied and either dismembered or otherwise brought under
Roman control.
Extension of Roman authority, first over the Italian peninsula and
subsequently over parts of Europe, Africa and Asia, was the result of a
policy of expansion that was aggressively, persistently and patiently
followed by Roman leaders and policy makers. Neighboring territories
were amalgamated into the nucleus of the Roman Empire. More remote
territories were associated by treaty as allies of Rome, as dependent or
client dependencies of Rome, and as colonies or provinces of the Roman
Empire. In all cases they were integral parts of an expanding political,
economic and military sphere of influence with Rome, and later Italy, as
the center and nucleus. In the course of this development the expanding
Roman Empire grew to be the wealthiest and most powerful political,
sociological and cultural unit in the Euro-Asian-African area.
The Roman imperial cycle spanned some thirteen centuries. During this
period Roman life was transformed from its small, local seat of
authority in Central Italy into its new stature as the outstanding power
in the Mediterranean area. Economically it extended from peasant
proprietorship and a use economy to a market-money economy; from a
society of working peasant farmers to an economy resting upon war
captives reduced to slavery; from an economy based on production for
trade and profit to an economy based on power-grabbing, special
privilege, speculation and corruption; from an austerity economy based
on primary production to an economy based on affluence, exploitation,
and gluttony.
These revolutionary transformations in the Roman economy were
accompanied, politically, by hardening of the division of Roman society
along class lines with the resulting contradictions, antagonisms, and
class struggles, including open class warfare.
Domestic contradictions, confrontations, civil strife and formal civil
war were present throughout the entire history of Rome. They existed in
embryo in the earliest days of the original settlements on the seven
hills over which the city of Rome eventually spread. As Rome and its
interests became more complex socially and more extensive geographically
the number and variety of contradictions, confrontations, civil and
military conflicts increased correspondingly.
In terms of individual human lives the changes which took place in
Roman society during the six or seven centuries that elapsed between the
early Roman settlements and the reign of their Emperor Augustus were
profound and far-reaching. Many communities of diverse and often
incompatible backgrounds and interests were herded together,
helter-skelter, into the City of Rome, Latium, the Italian nucleus and
the subsequent alliances, federations, conquests, consolidations into
colonies, occupied areas, provinces and spheres of influence. The
greater the number and diversity of these interests and relationships,
the greater the probability of conflict. This empire building process
was not gradual and directed with scrupulous care to preserve the
amenities and niceties of polite social intercourse. The job was done by
and under the direction of military leaders who are traditionally in a
hurry to get results. The subordinates who carried out military
decisions were volunteer-professional soldiers, mercenary adventurers
and conscripts drawn form the four corners of the empire. As the empire
grew in extent and as its troubles multiplied, the military was more
frequently called upon to take over and iron out difficulties.
Domestically, in the city of Rome and its immediate environs, there were
several sharp lines of cleavage; between Roman citizens and
non-citizens; between the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the working
proletariat and the idle proletariat; between the rich and the poor;
between freeman (citizens) and the slaves who grew in numbers as the
wars of conquest and consolidation multiplied war captives; between the
civilian bureaucrats and the members of the military hierarchy.
In the brief period of maximum territorial expansion following the
defeat and destruction of Carthage, the frontiers of the Roman Empire
were pushed out ruthlessly, North, East, West and South. In the
hurly-burly of rapid expansion individual rights were ignored, local
communities and entire regions were overrun, depopulated and resettled
with the tough disregard of individual and local interests that must
characterize any quick, general movement--economic, sociological or
military. If the expansion, expulsion and rehabilitation had produced
greater degrees of stability and security for individuals and social
groups they might have been tolerated and assimilated by the diverse
populations caught up in the maelstrom of drastic expansion. But rapid,
coercive social transformation produces neither stability nor security.
Its normal consequence is chaos, conflict and further change. In the
course of these internal conflicts the Roman Republic was gradually
phased out. In theory it persisted until the establishment of the
military dictatorship of Julius Caesar. Practically, while many of its
forms remained, the conduct of public affairs passed more and more into
the hands of political leaders who were able to command the backing of
the legions.
When the first war against Carthage was launched in 265 B.C., Carthage
was at the height of her power. Situated on the North African Coast
almost directly across the Mediterranean from Italy, the Carthaginians
were in effective control of the western Mediterranean. Carthage was
firmly entrenched in Spain. It was trading extensively with the British
Isles. Fleets of Carthaginian war ships patrolled the Mediterranean
guarding against piracy and economic or political interference by
rivals.
Roman political and business leaders, inexperienced in international
political dealings and the promotion of international trade, found their
further expansion to the west blocked by Carthaginian political,
economic and military installations. The result of the confrontation was
a series of three wars that began in 265 B.C., and ended in 146. During
these 119 years an established power, Carthage, struggled to preserve
its position against aggressive Roman efforts to take control of the
West Mediterranean basin. The Carthaginians, under the able generalship
of Hannibal, mobilized a military force (including elephants), marched
from Spain over the Alpine passes into Italy reaching the gates of Rome.
Romans countered with the slogan: "Carthage must be destroyed!" When the
third Punic war ended in 146 B.C., with the defeat of the Carthaginian
military forces, the city of Carthage was leveled.
The defeat of Carthage gave the Romans control of the western
Mediterranean. During the same period Roman interests were pushing into
East Europe and Western Asia. In 214 B.C., Philip of Macedon had made an
alliance with Hannibal, directed against Rome. Consequently, three wars
between Rome and Macedonia followed, the third ending in 168 B.C., with
the defeat of the Macedonians and their subordination to Roman authority
in the form of a Roman governor.
When opposition to Roman influence developed in Greece in 148 B.C., a
commission of ten was appointed by the Roman Senate to settle affairs in
the Greek peninsula. The city of Corinth was burned to the ground and
its lands were confiscated. Thebes and Chalcis were also destroyed. The
walls of all towns which had shared in the revolt against Rome were
pulled down. All confederations between Greek cities were dissolved.
Disarmament, isolation and Roman taxation were imposed on the Greek
cities and the oversight of affairs was assigned to the Roman governor
of neighboring Macedonia.
Successful wars against Syria and Egypt extended Roman control over
additional territory in West Asia and North Africa. A map of Italy at
the time of the Roman Federation in 268 B.C. shows Rome as the most
powerful among two score minor associates in the federation. A map of
the Roman Empire at the death of Augustus in 14 A.D. shows a Roman
Empire extending from the Atlantic seaboard on the west to Central
Europe on the north, the Black Sea on the east and a generous strip of
Africa on the south.
Within three centuries Rome had expanded from its position as a minor
state in Italy to the effective control of those portions of three
continents which bordered the Mediterranean. Conquests during the
following century further extended the Roman frontiers.
Under the Caesars Rome was a society in the throes of political
transition. Roman Emperors, backed and frequently selected by the
military, were exercising despotic power. They still paid lip service to
the Constitution, an instrument that had relevance during the life of
the defunct Republic. In the era of the Caesars the law slumbered and
might ruled. The turbulent masses were fed and housed by the Roman
Oligarchy to which the Emperors were ultimately responsible. The far
flung territories conquered by military power and held by military
occupation were subject to the authority of the same Roman Oligarchy.
Behind the shams, frauds and tyrannies of a political dictatorship
paying lip service to the corpse of a defunct Republic lay the stark
realities of a bankrupt economy. Throughout the era of the Caesars the
Roman Empire continued to expand geographically. It also came into
contact and conflict with peoples so remote from Italy that for them
Rome was only a name for tyranny, extortion and exploitation. Julius
Caesar and his immediate successors penetrated these remote territories,
subjugating them, levying tribute, appointing governors and other
officials, policing them, pretending to rule over them. To do this
soldiers were marching on foot into regions that lay thousands of miles
from the mother city. To be sure, they marched over Roman roads and
bridges so well constructed that some of them are still being used at
the present day.
But the excellence of Roman engineering could not match up to the
implacable limitations of time and distance. Nor could they overlook the
need for building the physical structure of Roman economy as they
advanced into enemy territory. Equally decisive were the political
consequences of the property confiscation and forced labor required to
establish and maintain Roman power and enrich greedy Roman officials and
their lackeys and overseers.
Rising overhead costs, with no corresponding growth of income, an empty
treasury in Rome, and a persistent policy of fleecing the provinces to
pay for the normal costs of bureaucracy, plus its extravagances and
excesses, could lead to only one possible outcome. Higher taxes and more
ruinous levies in the newly conquered provinces could not fill the
insatiable maw of deficit spending.
Inflation was the immediate result, accompanied and followed by the
debasement of currency and new expropriations of private property.
Government expenses consistently exceeded income. The situation was
aggravated by the growth of parasitic elements which persistently
produced little or nothing and as persistently multiplied their luxuries
and extravagances. The parasites grew richer. The impoverished masses
suffered the normal deprivations of poverty plus the weight of steadily
rising over-head costs. As Roman authority extended farther from its
center, the chasm between its income and its out-go widened.
Slave labor aggravated the situation. There was a time when Roman
farmers and craftsmen did their own work. That time ended with the
enslavement of war captives who swamped the labor market. Like any
parasitic growth, slavery and forced labor destroyed the fabric of a
largely self-contained economy based on peasant proprietorship.
Roman economy was honey-combed with problems created by deficit
spending, currency devaluation and exploitation. At its base was a
foot-loose urban proletariat made up largely of refugees from a
countryside given over increasingly to the employment of military
captives as slave labor. The city masses at the outset were extensively
unemployed. Increasingly they became unemployable, parasitic, restless,
demanding.
At the outset the slave revolts were local and occasional. As the slaves
grew more numerous unrest spread and hardened into organized resistance.
Spartacus, a slave, led a revolt which mobilized armies, defeated the
Roman legions in a series of battles and ended only with the death of
Spartacus and the dispersal of his forces.
Local and provincial affairs under the Roman Empire were administered by
a self-seeking corrupt bureaucracy.
Expansion by means of military conquest increased the influence of the
military at the expense of the civilian administrators. The consequent
burdens of militarism reached from the bottom to the top of Roman
society. Eventually, under the Caesars, the military selected emperors
from among the rivals for the purple of imperial authority, and used the
legions under their command to protect and promote their own political
fortunes, thus maintaining a form of latent and frequently open civil
war.
Colonial unrest and provincial self-seeking were promoted by
conspiracies among Rome's less dependable allies.
Wars of rivalry between Roman candidates for top preferment shifted the
power-balance out of civilian hands into the grip of the military. Step
by step and stage by stage the Roman Empire became a warfare state
maintained at home and abroad by the intervention of the military. Wars
of rivalry at home in Rome were paralleled by wars of rivalry abroad.
During the Era of the Caesars Rome became the Eurasian-African honey
pot. Wealth centered there. Authority was enthroned there. Power was
generated there. Throughout the sphere of Roman political influence, of
trade and travel, the central position of Rome was recognized and
acknowledged. Not only knowledge and authority, but folklore mushroomed,
with Rome as its central theme. Asian nomads, searching for grass, Asian
potentates seeking new worlds to conquer and plunder, heard of Rome and
finally went there. All roads led to Rome. Thousands of miles of stone
roads were built as binding forces to hold the Empire together and
defend it against all possible enemies. It was along these roads that
the legions marched as they pushed back potential invaders and extended
the frontiers. It was these same roads and bridges that made easy and
sure the advance of the Asian hordes that would one day occupy and loot
the home city. Roads and bridges enabled Roman authority to maintain and
extend itself. The same roads and bridges provided a freeway that led
into the citadel of Roman power.
Under the Caesars the Roman Empire achieved its greatest geographical
extent and exercised its widest cultural influence. The city of Rome was
the capital of the western world. There was one state, one law, one
economy, one official language, one military authority.
Despite its apparent massiveness, Roman civilization was not a monolith.
Rather it was a conglomerate, consisting of many parts held together by
connecting social tissues which Rome and Italy alone supplied. In the
first instance there was a division into provinces, colonies and newly
acquired territories. The provinces, under their Roman appointed
governors, enjoyed a large measure of economic and cultural
self-determination within the Roman Empire. Beyond the Roman Empire lay
territories and peoples associated with Rome by treaties, bound to Rome
by trade and travel, in some cases paying tribute to Rome, but enjoying
sufficient autonomy as peoples, nations and empires maneuvering for
position and advantage, frequently allying themselves with non-Roman
areas and occasionally conspiring to by-pass Roman authority and even to
challenge Roman supremacy.
This political diversity along the defense perimeter of the Roman Empire
existed in a chaos ranging from questioned authority to open defiance
and military challenges to Rome and the threat of Romanization. Along
this defense perimeter were stationed the legions that guarded the
frontiers. Across it moved trade, travel, incursions, invasions and
periodic reprisals as a result of which the more turbulent neighbors
were brought within the sphere of Rome's influence or, in cases of
extreme dissidence and resistance, were depopulated, colonized and added
to the Roman conglomerate.
It goes without saying that the influence of Roman culture extended far
beyond the Roman defense perimeter, reaching peoples, nations and
empires to which Rome was little more than a name. The no-man's land
between what-was and what-was-not Rome not only existed in a state of
perpetual uncertainty, but provided a battle field for the smuggling,
brigandage, the periodic border clashes, the migrations, incursions,
invasions and punitive expeditions that are the characteristic features
of every ill-defined political boundary.
Roman civilization under the Caesars was a centralized absolutism with a
large measure of peripheral deviation and autonomy. It was directed by a
central oligarchy and patrolled, defended and extended by a military
force unified in theory but in practice grouped around the outstanding
personalities and subjected to the vagaries and upsets always associated
with power politics in the hands of military backed political despots.
Roman civilization, like all social organisms, came into being, moved
toward maturity, reached a plateau of fulfillment from which it
declined, broke up and eventually disappeared into the interregnum known
as the Dark Ages. The entire episode occupied a dozen centuries. Its
beginnings were unimpressively local. At the height of its wealth, power
and cultural influence it bestrode the Eurasian-African triangle. Its
decline and disappearance were no less spectacular than its meteoric
rise to fame and fortune.
I would like to summarize the Roman experiment and some of its lessons
by listing and commenting briefly on the forces that built up Roman
civilization and those forces which resulted in its decline and
dissolution.
Primary up-building forces in the Roman experiment:
1. Establishing the city of Rome as a stable, defensible center
of merchandising and commerce, transport, finance, population,
wealth and power with a hinterland of associates
and dependencies. As it turns out, the city of Rome has
outlived both the Roman Empire and Roman Civilization.
2. Steadfast dedication to Roman interests first, by all necessary
means and despite costs which at the time seemed to
be excessive.
3. A recognition of that which is possible, especially in political
relationships. The acceptance with good grace of a
half-loaf where no more was available.
4. Consistent, persistent aggression and expansion where such
policies were beneficial to Rome, with little or no regard
for their effects on Roman associates, allies, friends or
enemies. Studied ruthlessness.
5. Rewarding Rome's friends, allies and associates with economic,
political and cultural advantages. Implacably punishing
and where necessary exterminating Rome's persistent
enemies.
6. Wide tolerance of local cultural variation in matters that
did not conflict with the major principles and practices of
Rome's central authority.
7. Taking defeats in their stride, paying the price, and recovering
lost momentum. Again advancing along avenues
which led to Roman success and aggrandizement.
8. Indomitable persistence in the pursuit of major objectives.
9. After the reigns of Julius Caesar and Augustus, concentrating
power in a single person and his chosen brain trust,
using that power to further aggrandize the Roman Empire
and Roman Civilization.
This category is not complete. It aims to answer the basic question: In
a situation where a thousand contestants entered the knock-down and
drag-out struggle, first for survival and then for supremacy, what
qualities or qualifications enabled Romans to win the laurel crown of
victory?
Paralleling the up-building forces that established Roman supremacy were
counter-forces which undermined and eventually destroyed the Roman
Empire and Roman civilization:
1. The growth of city life at the expense of rural existence.
At the outset of its life cycle, Rome was essentially rural.
At the end of the cycle Roman culture was turning its
back upon ruralism and moving into a culture that was
to be chiefly urban during an entire millennium. In that
millennium Rome, her associates and dependencies, experimented
with a culture that was essentially urban, but
encircled, dependent and eventually replaced by a culture
that was essentially rural.
2. During the millennium between 600 B.C. and 500 A.D.
the Romans and their associates succeeded in bringing
large parts of Europe, Asia and Africa under their control,
but the control was so rigid and temporary that tribalism
and local nationalisms broke loose from the fetters of central
authority and coercive integration, shattering the
structure of Roman civilization and its structural core--the
Roman Empire. Instead of resulting in closer cooperation,
the strategy and tactics of the Roman builders and
organizers led to contradictions, bitter feuds, civil strife,
independence movements which combined with expansionist
diplomacy and periodic wars to discourage, frustrate
and eventually to eliminate peace, order and planned
progress.
2. The spread of chattel slavery had a profound effect upon
the texture of Roman life. At the outset Roman family
farms housed the bulk of the population. During the cycle
of Roman civilization unnumbered millions of captives
were seized in the course of military operations and reduced
to slavery. By the end of the Roman cycle the
work-load of agriculture, commerce, industry, mining,
transport, and the domestic life of the well-to-do was
carried by slaves. Basically, therefore, the Roman world
was divided first into Romans and non-Romans and second
into masters and slaves, with a third category which consisted
of an immense bureaucracy (including the military),
a professional and technological group and a heavy burden
of persistent parasitism.
4. Growth of the abyss that separated wealth and the
wealthy from mass poverty in the cities and the countryside.
The abyss was widened and deepened by the presence
of slavery. More extensive and more frequent foreign
conquests added to the volume of slave labor in a market
already glutted and reduced the price of slaves. Against
this super-abundant cheap slave labor, free labor could
compete only by reducing its standard of living and thus
deepening the abyss of poverty. At the other end of the
social arc, the rich were able to surround themselves with
multitudes of slaves who provided the energy needed to
carry on the complex life of Roman civilization. As the
Roman world expanded, the abyss widened, deepened
and became all but impassable. It was from such lower
depths that Spartacus and other leaders of rebellious slaves
drew sufficient manpower to challenge and for a time
even defeat the full military power of Rome.
5. Built into the structure of Roman civilization was the
potential of civil war. The contradictions of mass slavery
and poverty side by side with boundless leisure and
abundance was only one side of the picture. Each of the
more distant provinces became a possible base from which
ambitious governors or generals could wage wars of independent
conquest at the expense of Roman authority. Each
newly subjugated people, smarting under defeat and the
heavy hand which Rome laid on its dissidents and opponents,
became a potential center for disaffection, conspiracy
and rebellion against Roman authority.
6. Conflicts over power succession, in the provinces, and
more significantly in the mother city, added another
aspect to the many sided pressures. As there was no legal
means of determining the succession, the end of each
imperial reign offered the probability of military intervention.
7. Deification of emperors, during the era of the Caesars,
led to the denigration and degradation of the common
man. The fact that the common men of Rome were more
and more likely to be poor slaves furthered the process
and deepened the abyss between the haves and have-nots.
8. Among the forces of disintegration operating in Rome
none was more potent and more decisive than the numerical
growth of the military and the increasing probability
that any one of the growing contradictions and conflicts
would lead to intervention by the military. Roman emperors
were dictators and their retention of authority
was increasingly decided by the legions which were
willing and able to fight for the perpetuation and extension
of their authority.
9. The extensive, complicated, elaborate structure of Roman
civilization involved a persistent and implacable rise of
overhead costs of food and raw materials, of production,
of transportation, of the bureaucracy, including the military.
The area of Roman civilization increased arithmetically.
Overhead costs rose geometrically. They were
expressed in an empty treasury, rising taxes, inflation,
expropriation, the degradation of the currency.
10. Side by side with the rise in overhead costs went the
increase of parasitism among the rich and among the poor.
Something-for-nothing was the order of the day. Speculation
was rampant. Gambling was universal. Instead of
living by production of goods and services, Romans let
the slaves do their work and lived by their wits.
11. From top to bottom of Roman society negative forces
replaced positive forces. Self directed labor gave place to
slavery; participation in productive activity yielded to
parasitism; productivity was subordinated to destructivity;
the spirit of independence was replaced by the acceptance
of increasing arbitrary individual authority.
12. Roman society constantly faced and consistently failed
to solve the contradiction between centralism and local
interests and local rights. This contradiction increased
with increasing size, diversity and complexity.
13. Psychological forces played a part in the breakdown and
break-up of Roman civilization. People lost faith and hope.
They became disillusioned and cynical. They forgot the
common good and devoted themselves to the gratification
of body hungers. They turned from proud service of
fatherland to the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake.
Romans lost freshness and vigor. Creativeness had never
been as highly regarded among the Romans as it was
among the Greeks. Life was lived closer to the surface. It
was confined more and more to the present. Growth in
the volume of Roman life sapped its vitality so that there
was less surplus for experiment and innovation as more
and more of the social income was devoted to meeting
overhead costs.
Moralists have insisted that the decline and dissolution of Roman
civilization resulted from the abandonment of moral standards.
Undoubtedly this was true. The upstanding womanhood and manhood of early
Rome was replaced by a wealth-seeking, pleasure-loving, parasitically
inclined population. But these features of Roman life under the empire
and during the period of Roman decline were the outcome of political,
economic and social forces that have characterized one civilization
after another. Instead of insisting that Rome declined and fell because
it was immoral, it would be far more accurate to insist that Rome
declined and fell because the objectives which it sought, the means it
employed and the civilized institutions which it developed contained
within themselves oppositions and contradictions which led to decline
and dissolution. Rome declined and fell because the ideas, institutions
and practices upon which it depended--the ideas, institutions and
practices of civilization--could lead to no other outcome.
CHAPTER THREE
THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS
An experiment with civilization presently spans the planet Earth. It is
called "modern," "contemporary" or "western civilization." Its
artifacts, institutions and practices predominate in Europe, North
America and Australasia. They play a prominent role in the lives of
Asians, South Americans and Africans.
Two thousand years ago a long established Egyptian civilization was
passing into the shadows. Civilizations in China and India were
developing. Roman civilization was approaching the zenith of its
ascendancy.
A thousand years ago Roman civilization, like that of Egypt, was a
memory; Chinese and Indian civilizations were holding their own, while
the followers of Islam were reaching out into Central Asia, North Africa
and Eastern Europe.
In east central Europe and around the Mediterranean the beginnings of
western civilization had made their appearance and were expanding their
control along the Eurasian trade routes and beginning to penetrate
western and northern Europe. The Crusades had introduced Asian culture
traits into the European backwoods. Hardy European and Asian mariners
were penetrating the Americas. Dark ages of ignorance and superstition
which had held sway in Europe for centuries were coming to an end.
Western civilization was beginning to draw the breath of a new life.
The vast structure of Roman civilization had split West from East. The
Eastern Empire retained its form and continued its culture for centuries
after its break with the West. Meanwhile the West fragmented into
smaller and smaller units, increasingly self-contained and increasingly
isolated. Cities raised and manned their own walls. The countryside
broke up into smaller and smaller divisions over which the Holy Roman
Empire exercised little more than a shadowy authority. Each landed
estate had its stronghold or castle. Each locality looked after its own
interests. The massive Roman Universal State, stretching for centuries
across parts of three continents, had broken up into a multitude of tiny
semi-sovereign, semi-independent fragments. Some of the fragments as
leagues, alliances and coalitions were reaching nationhood.
New dawn was illuminating the Dark Ages. Western man was sorting and
re-assembling some of the scattered fragments of the defunct and
dismembered Roman civilization. The task was colossal. Rome's "one
authority, one law, one language" hegemony had been replaced by an all
pervading diversity. The closely knit Greco-Roman Empire had been
superseded in Europe by a sparsely inhabited, roadless wilderness,
largely bereft of trade, using waterways as the easiest means of
communication and transport. The economy was built around wood cutting,
charcoal burning, backward animal husbandry, hand-tool agriculture,
hand-craft industry, the rudiments of commerce and finance centered in
trading cities. The great houses of the aristocracy and the gentry,
scattered villages, towns and walled cities were preoccupied and
disrupted by endless feuding and between-seasons warfare.
Adding to the chaos of this dismembered society were the controversies
over dynastic succession. Intermittent incursions of migrating hordes
from central Asia pushed their way into central and southern Europe.
Covert and open conflicts between ecclesiastical and secular authority
added to the general lethargy, confusion and chaos.
Europe struggled for centuries to free itself from Asian invasion and
occupation. At the same time Europe was improving its agriculture,
restoring its trade and expanding its hand-craft industries and its
commerce. Towns grew in population and productivity. Life-standards rose
in the cities. Cities based on trade and commerce extended their
authority and became city-states. Commercial cities joined their forces
to form trading leagues.
Lords spiritual and temporal, who had ruled Europe for centuries, were
joined by lords commercial, enriched by the growth of trade, transport
and developing industry.
Generations passed into centuries--the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth
and seventeenth. From small local beginnings the nations of western
Europe emerged: Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, France, Britain,
Italy, Austria and eventually Russia. Each was a consolidation of local
principalities, earldoms, dukedoms, kingdoms. Each was passing through
the rural-urban transformation. Each was outgrowing feudalism and
producing a larger and larger group of businessmen, professionals,
tradesmen, craftsmen and maturing a middle class and a proletariat.
After the fifteenth century each state was spilling over its own
frontiers, annexing or losing neighboring territory, spreading beyond
the boundaries of Europe into the teeming markets of Asia and the newly
discovered treasure-house of the Americas.
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 partitioned 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, superstition,
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 quantity it was loaned at rates of
interest by merchants and bankers who owned it and used it for their
purposes. Accumulating 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 class 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 partition Africa among themselves. Their only
potential rivals were the lumbering, isolationist United States of North
America and the newly awakened Island Kingdom of Japan. 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 classes 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 competition 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 competitive. 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 Japan were spreading their imperial wings.
With the explosive advances made by science, technology, productivity,
income and wealth accumulation, 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 associate
itself with the adventure. The "Allies" in Vietnam were the U.S.A. and
two or three vassal 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
class 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 class 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 passing.
During several centuries, ending in 1900, western civilization passed
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 competitive 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.
Having failed to co-ordinate and establish a planet-wide authority
during the critical years following 1870, western civilization accepted
the antithesis of co-ordination and entered a period of fragmentation:
1. During the century and a half from 1815 to the present
day, as facilities for co-ordination were multiplied by discovery
and invention, Europe remained stubbornly fragmented
into more than a score of sovereign states. Minor
changes were made in boundary lines and in internal relationships
of property and privilege, but the European maps
of the period present a record of persistent fragmentation
of the continent into strongly frontiered sovereign segments.
2. Break-up of the European empires after two general wars
led to the fragmentation of each empire into self-determining
sovereign units.
3. The "third world," consisting chiefly of European empire
fragments, has not consolidated, but after the Bandung
Conference of 1955 has consisted of a fragmented Africa
and Asia torn by domestic and inter-state conflicts and
harried by the persistent intervention of the western powers.
4. Rivalry in the Pacific and in Asia has been heightened by
the meteoric rise of Japan as a world power, the dismemberment
of the Japanese Empire after 1945 and the fierce
subsequent economic competition between Japan and her
planetary competitors, chiefly the United States.
5. United States efforts to coordinate Latin America as a
source of raw materials and a market for manufactures and
investment capital have not produced a United Latin
American front against a common Yankee menace, but a
sturdy refusal even of the tiniest Latin American Republic
to surrender or limit its sovereignty has pushed a thorn
into the vulnerable side of Washington's Monroe Doctrine
control of the western hemisphere.
6. The high point in divisiveness was the decision of the
United States spokesmen to inaugurate the American Century
by establishing control over the Pacific Ocean, making
itself the chief power in Asia and installing U.S.A. authority
in the power vacuum left by the expulsion of Britain,
France, Holland and Japan from the territories composing
their former empires. Local wars begun in Korea (1950)
and extending across Southeast Asia have strengthened the
determination of the local peoples to defend themselves at
all costs against imperialist invaders from Europe and North
America.
7. The United States has been rich enough since 1945 to build
and maintain a navy that can patrol the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea and maintain large military
forces in various European and Asian waters. This
policy has been justified by the Truman-Johnson-Nixon
Doctrine of determined opposition to the extension of
socialism-communism and the consequent perpetuation of
the cold war.
8. In theory the socialist world is unitary. In practice it is so
fragmented by national boundary lines and ideological differences
that its members have not been able (during recent
years) to get together and discuss their major common
problems.
United States wealth and military equipment have been sufficiently
over-whelming to support the program of an American Century during which
one nation might establish a universal state exercising planet-wide
authority along the lines of the Universal State established by the
Romans at the zenith of their power. In practice the program has not
worked out. On the contrary, opposition to the United States as _the_
world power or even as _the_ power in Asia has grown steadily and
quickly into a widespread "Anti-Americanism" or "anti-Yankeeism."
Conceivably a universal anti-American movement might develop a hot war
similar to the anti-Hitler coalition of the 1930's. If that precedent is
followed, however, the defeat of the United States would be followed by
a period of fragmentation similar to or even more intense than the
fragmentation of the 1950's and 1960's.
Present efforts to shore up the insolvent U.S.A. economy and the
resulting opposition of America's leading European trading partners is
not reassuring. If western civilization has passed the zenith of its
development and entered a period of decline and fragmentation even a
figure of Napoleonic capacities would be sorely pressed to breathe new
life into its disintegrating social structure. At the moment, to the
best of our knowledge, no such genius is in sight.
Western civilization is in some ways unique. In the main, however, the
development of its life cycle has been typical. May we take it for
granted that western civilization has turned its corner or may we assume
that it is still replete with the possibilities of further maneuver,
development and expansion? Perhaps the best way to approach the problem
would be to ask three questions: What contribution has western
civilization made to human nature, to human society and to mother
nature, and what further contribution can it make in the foreseeable
future?
Individuals, born or reared in any form of society are adjusted, shaped
and conditioned by the social pattern of which they are a part. Each
society attempts to stamp the individuals with its own image and
likeness. The success or failure of this effort to assure individual
adjustment to the social norm and conformity to its practices varies
with the prosilitizing enthusiasm of the society and with the ration of
adaptability and self-consciousness of its individual members.
Western civilization has produced a bourgeois human being intensively
conscious of his capacities and anxious to try himself out in the
rough-and-tumble of the market place and on the battlefield; to
initiate, undertake, direct, administer. In the main, these are
characteristics of the human male, though the female often possesses
them in a greater or lesser degree.
Western civilization has opened the doors wide to aspirants eager to win
out in the game of grab-and-keep. It has been equally kind to their
chief executives, organizers and managers who rank second or third in
the chain of command. These individuals come from widely different
backgrounds. The social mobility of a bourgeois society gives them
opportunity to climb high on the ladder of preferment.
Many of those who fall into line, adapt themselves to the civilizing
process, accept with alacrity the chances that come their way, but do
not reach the top of the success ladder. They have the health, energy
and assertiveness necessary to keep climbing. They accept their
assignments and carry them out with modest success. They are the lesser
executives who work themselves out by the time they are fifty and find
some sinecure or safe position near the top of the social pyramid.
Below the high command posts there is a wide range of handymen and
specialists who fill particular positions and place their time, energy,
experience and expertise at the disposal of the high command. Among them
are scientists, engineers, technicians. Equally important are their
spokesmen, advisers and apologists: lawyers, preachers, teachers,
writers, speakers, publicists, carefully chosen for their ability to
apologize, passify, justify and reassure. On the political side are the
diplomats and politicians. Protection for their persons and property is
provided by the police and the armed forces, composed of highly paid,
well-trained, well-armed destroyers and killers.
Social stability and mass support come from an extensive middle class
composed of public servants and body servants, small tradesmen,
self-employed craftsmen, rentiers and retired persons who are assured
body comforts, social recognition and preferment for themselves, their
relatives and dependants. Members of this middle class are recognized on
occasion, pampered, amused, diverted, bored, frustrated and eventually
corrupted by the soft living which their middle class status makes
possible.
Close to the middle class come the white collar workers and the better
paid blue collar workers. Their lives are cluttered with gadgets and
fringe benefits. Their homes are paid for or bought on credit.
Below these more or less regularly employed workers on salaries and
wages come the semi-employed, racial or class underlings living in
poverty at or near the subsistence level.
Associated with this range of bourgeois occupations and often closely
identified with it are owners of family farms, tenants and hired hands.
Outside of the employment range, but dependent upon the economy are the
defectives and delinquents, the parasites who live on cake and the
parasites who live out of garbage cans.
Beyond these categories, in the American Empire, there are the colonial
compradors and handymen who enjoy standards of living comparable to
their opposite members in the North America nucleus. Below them are the
colonial masses who live their entire lives under conditions of
uncertainty and insecurity.
Millions of young people across the planet, born into the complicated
and bewildering social network of western civilization after war's end
in 1945 and graduated from school after the onset of the Vietnam War in
1965, find themselves in a complex, frustrating jungle. Should they fit
in or drop out? Those who are more conventional and adaptable fit in as
best they can, although the recent high unemployment rate among the
youth indicates that the adjustment is often difficult. Millions of the
less adaptable drop out.
Such a situation could have been foreseen by the initiated. Preparations
could have been made in advance to deal with it when it arose. In the
absence of adequate preparation the result is the chaos incident to
every downturn of the private enterprise business cycle, magnified in
this case by the regressive forces released during the disintegration of
the entire social fabric.
Two other areas require a word of comment. Among human faculties are
ambition, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity. Human
beings are, to a greater or lesser degree, cosmically aware. In the
physical field western civilization handsomely rewards initiative. In
the social field it has been far less generous. Imagination and cosmic
consciousness have been quite generally listed among the undesirable
endowments of mankind.
Western civilization, in the early years of the present century,
produced a generation of insecure, unsettled, anxious, worried, harried
people. This is generally true of young, middle aged and old, of rich
and poor. Rapid social transition from expansion and advance to
contraction and retreat is a traumatic, hectic experience for any human
being.
Western civilization in the early years of its decline has not brought
out the more generous aspects of human nature. In the best of times a
materialistically oriented society appeals to the more material and less
spiritual aspects of human beings. A period of social decline leads away
from principled conduct toward unashamed opportunism.
The current generation, born and reared in a disintegrating civilization
has been sorely tested and tried. From such tests the strong and
purposeful are likely to emerge stronger and more determined. For the
weak and vacillating the consequences are likely to prove disastrous.
The individual born into western society during its current "time of
troubles" has not had an easy row to hoe.
What has western civilization done to human society as such?