Whither mankind : a panorama of modern civilization

Front matter

Gift of

Mrs. Alfred La Bine

'Panorama of ^Modern Civilization

Preface

THIS volume is a challenge, not a summary of fragile dubiosities. No mystery hangs over it. Underlying it is the assumption that science and the machine are two invincible facts with which all must reckon who write, teach, preach, lead, or practice the arts in our time. Those who refuse to face them are condemned in advance to sterility and defeat. While recognizing the evils brought by these modern engines — evils which weigh heavily in the minds of the authors — the volume as a whole rejects the pessimistic views of writers like Chesterton, Belloc, and Spengler. For visions of despair, it substitutes a more cheerful outlook upon the future of modern civilization, without at the same time resorting to the optimism of the real -estate agent.

A simple method has controlled the preparation of the volume. With the aid of friendly advice from many quarters, authorities of outstanding competence, possessing also the ability to present their ideas with clearness and vigor, were chosen to deal with the several phases of modern civilization. No limitations, save those of space, were laid upon them. Each writer was given a free hand. None of them was asked to assume any responsibility for the opinions of the others. The editor has not altered their copy, smoothed out contradictions, or taken on the duty of defending everything that appears in these pages. If the principle of liberty had not commanded this, the distinction of the co-operating authors would have made it imperative.

The editor’s debt to Mr. Frank Ernest Hill, of Longmans, Green and Co. for editorial assistance passes all calculation.

Charles A. Beard

New Milford, Conn.

August, 1928

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Introduction: Charles A. Beard . i

I. The Civilizations of the East and the West:

II

This inquisitive wondering about civilization is no fitful fever of a day, likely to pass soon, to be followed by the calm satisfaction of an Indian summer. On the contrary, its emotional sources lie deep in the nature of things. While the doubts and pessimism raised by the World War might pass with the flow of time if the "normalcy” craved by the late President Harding could really be recovered, the prospects for "healing and serenity” are not good and the situation in which the world finds itself is not encourag¬ ing to advocates of seraphic peace and benevolence. Although the League of Nations and the inevitabilities of Locarno give promise of a respite, the restlessness of Italy, whose swelling pop¬ ulation overflows her narrow borders, the hundred sources of un¬ ending friction in the Balkans, the discontent of Germany with a treaty that makes her a guilty criminal and tears from her side six or eight million German citizens, the turmoil of the Orient, and the constant menace of Russia to the imperialist powers of Europe, all tend to keep alive the interest of mankind in the fu¬ ture of modern civilization.

To these are added even more potent irritants, disturbing hu¬ manity with threats of destiny. It is not to be supposed that the revolutions in Russia and Italy, flouting as they do the whole bourgeois scheme of things, will pass, if they pass, without leaving scars in the mind of the race. Nor will the antagonism between socialism and capitalism struggling for the possession of the helm of state disappear soon in a wave of brotherly affection. Each school regards the other as the foe of civilization and continually stirs the stream of speculation. Spengler, as he admits in his in¬ troduction to "Prussianism and Socialism,” derived from that collision the emotions which flowered, through sophistication, into the enormous philosophic pile, "The Decline of the West.” And while socialism and capitalism stand face to face, the issue of civilization will abide.

Interwoven with this economic conflict, is the perennial strug¬ gle between Catholics and Protestants, the former idealizing the middle ages of papal supremacy — the age of feudalism, agriculture, handicrafts, miracles, and clericalism — and thus assailing capital¬ ism, even where forced to yield to its economic exigencies. Con¬ forming in many respects with the same substantial patterns, is the much discussed conflict between Latin and Nordic cultures — Italy, Spain, and France against Gexmany, England, and the United States — civilizations essentially agricultural against civiliza¬ tions essentially industrial, Catholicism against Protestantism, mys¬ tery against science, adding thus racial antipathies to national, economic, geographical, and climatic contrasts.

Even if Europe could resolve her conflicts and let the war of the books over civilization die away there in peace and prosperity, the rise of the United States would perhaps keep the old question still open to debate. Tbe passage of America from a provincial, agricultural status to the position of the premier capitalist power in international politics, with a navy hardly second to that of Eng¬ land, is itself an inescapable fact for those who speculate on cul¬ tural destinies. American civilization, the full flower of the machine apotheosized, with few traces of feudalism in its make-up, even more than Russia challenges the contemporary regime of Europe, particularly the Latin countries. If once the peasants, farmers, and laborers of the Old World should get it into their heads that more material goods would flow from machinery, sci¬ ence, efficiency, and capitalism triumphant, the result would be the abandonment of whole provinces of the ancient heritage, even in remote districts.

Beyond America lies Asia, presenting a sharp antithesis and challenge to the West. If it were possible to subdue the United States to the sublimated feudo-clerical civilization of Europe through education, cultural transference, and the intermarriage of aristocratic and capitalistic families, Asia would still remain — inscrutable to those who never visited the continent. This does not mean that there is in fact an Oriental civilization to be sharply contrasted with that of the Occident, or that the so-called color antagonism is likely to be a factor in the future of Western civilization; far from it. It just so happens, however, that the Orient is a scene of operation for four western empires, English, Russian, French, and American — the seat of an imperialist collision which will of necessity burn around the world if the friction reaches the point of combustion. Furthermore, the Orient is the home of one first-class power on the Western model, Japan, the only non-Caucasian people that has been able to use steel and gunpowder efficiently in self-defense and is rapidly transforming its feudal civilization into an industrial order. Chinese national¬ ism cannot find its goal and Japanese economic necessity attain its fruition without disturbing violently one or more of the West¬ ern imperial adventurers contending for mastery in the East. These two forces, rather than Gandhi’s vain longing for a return to the hand loom and spinning wheel — in defiance of science and machinery — will serve to keep alive indefinitely the interest of the world in the contrast, real and imaginary, between the East and the West.

To these springs of emotion that feed the present concern about the problems of civilization, nationalism rampant adds another. The passion for self-determination, for democracy, which flamed so high during the World War, served to accentuate rather than smooth away the differences between cultures. For many a year, each of the nationalities composing the world’s complex of self-governing communities is likely to continue to look upon its own institutions as indicating a certain moral superiority in the pos¬ sessor. The spirit is very old.

Long ago, a Wahhabee preacher, while praising the people of Riad, to whom he belonged, remarked that the followers of Mo¬ hammed were to be divided into seventy-three sects — seventy-two being destined to hell-fire and only one to heaven, and then added in solemn measure: “And that, by the mercy of God, are we the people of Riad.” In a tone less theological but with an assurance equally firm, the historian Macaulay informed mankind in 1835 that the English "have become the greatest and most highly civ¬ ilised people that ever the world saw, . . . have produced a lit¬ erature which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, have spec¬ ulated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the human mind, have become the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement.”

Reverting to the religious strain of the Wahhabee, William II, a grandson of Queen Victoria, came to the conclusion that pre¬ eminence lay elsewhere. “God would never have taken such great pains with our German Fatherland and its people,” said William in 1905, “if He had not been preparing us for something still greater. We are the salt of the earth.”

Across the Rhine in France, of course, this gospel was not ac¬ cepted. On the contrary, innumerable patriotic French writers have contended, with kindred emotions, that France was really the mother of modern civilization, the home of liberty, soulful¬ ness, and artistic sensibilities. “Une cuisine et une politesse!

Nor do high American authorities give their assent to the creed of William II. Quite recently, the committee on citizenship formed by the American Bar Association put into its credo for the salvation of America an article as follows: "I believe that we Americans have the best government that has ever been created — the freest and the most just for all people; . . . that as an American citizen the Constitution of the United States ought to be as actual a part of my life and my religion as the Sermon on the Mount.”

If each nationalistic variant on modern civilization is vaunted as the best, then how can the students of destiny hope to find any rest from unceasing labors?

in

Anxiety about the values and future of civilization is real. It has crept out of the cloister and appears in the forum and market place. It will not pass; it will endure and increase. Forces as potent as the struggle for existence — economic, racial, and nation¬ alistic — will continue to feed it. But while the controversy be¬ comes more intense, the very diversity of the collisions that keep it alive lends confusion to all discussions bearing on the nature and destiny of civilization. So while our library shelves sink under the weight of books on the subject, ambiguity rather than clarity and frankness mark the trend of their arguments. Civilization, like politics, makes strange bedfellows.

In various places in Europe, for example, we find Marxian com¬ munists, Roman Catholics, and violent Chauvinists united in con¬ demning the megalopolitan civilization of modern capitalism, all for different reasons, and certain to divide savagely on the na¬ ture and work of the order which they would substitute for it. In Germany, the Nationalists turn against science, machine, and industrialism all the sentiments, religious, patriotic, and class, that spring from their practical situation. In England and Amer¬ ica, a school of anti-imperialists, disgusted with the slums and sooty towns of the machine, imagine that the kingdom of heaven must be in the Orient and, under the guise of Oriental wisdom, assail the eAdls of capitalism at home.

This psychology, of course, is not new. The account of Ger¬ many which Tacitus gave to the Romans nearly two thousand years ago may have been designed to hold up the mirror to Roman vices rather than to present a true picture of the tribes beyond the Rhine. The war which Rousseau waged on the civil¬ ization of science and reason was conducted in the name of nature, the noble savage, and agriculture. When all the metaphysics and verbiage of Spengler’s "Decline of the West” are put aside and the heart of the matter is revealed, it becomes evident that the author is really aiming to glorify an agricultural, as contrasted with a metropolitan, civilization. What really gives him distress and causes him to think that the West is declining is the fact that the city is overcoming the country. "In place of a people true to type,” he says, "springing from the soil and reared on it, there now appears a new kind of nomad, loosely co-operating with instable and changing masses, the parasitical city-dweller, without traditions, without religion, concerned only with matters of fact; clever, sterile, and profoundly contemptuous of the coun¬ tryman, in particular that highest type of agriculturalist, the country gentleman.” Stripped of rhetorical paint, this merely reflects the grudge of the Prussian landed-proprietor against the Berlin or Hamburg banker, merchant, and manufacturer.

Nor is the confusion that exists among the contestants over the merits of particular "cultures” cleared up by those who speak either glibly or profoundly about the downfall of civilizations. Just what happened when Rome "fell” is nowhere clearly set forth in the immortal pages of Gibbon. It is true, he shows us the unitary state (if a state ever beset by social war deserves the name) dissolving and great artists in letters giving place to soph¬ ists and stylists; but whether Roman civilization perished or merely passed over into the next period he leaves for the scholars to debate; whether the masses of the Roman empire, even those upstanding Roman citizens who lived like rabbits in the slums of the Eternal City and were sustained by bread and circuses, were happier, stronger, wiser, and nobler than the people of the so-called "dark-ages” which followed the blaze of Augustan days is nowhere made plain by the philosopher of London and Lausanne.

And it must be confessed that the case presented by Spengler is not much better on the side of explications. He does, no doubt, speak of the coming "transition from constitutional systems to the informal sway of individuals,” of "wars of annihilation,” of "imperialism,” and of "primitive human conditions thrusting themselves upward into high civilized modes of living”; but just how this represents a "decline” and why it presents features more alarming than those of the ages past cannot be discerned from the text of his argument.

IV

Given the liveliness of the present discussion about civilization and the confusion that reigns among those engaged in inquiries respecting the subject, it seems worth while and pertinent to the thinking of our age to take stock, to clarify our notions by defi¬ nitions and specifications, to invite those who talk with facility about it to deliver a bill of particulars. Such is the purpose of this book.

At the outset, certain questions seem relevant. What is meant intrinsically by the contrast between Western and Oriental civ¬ ilizations? By the contrast between the modern, mediaeval, and classical civilizations? What is "the West” that is threatened with a decline? What does a decline imply in terms of population, economy, art, government, literature, and life in general? Is the assumption supported by data or is it a mere hypothesis born of temperament and certain psychological situations induced by outward events such as defeats, disappointments, and adversities in general? If the decline is really imminent, can anything be done about it? If not, must philosophy despair and assume that the universe is meaningless, that the force which carries nations to high pinnacles will shortly become bankrupt itself?

Conceivably a master mind, a modern Aristotle, equipped with io WHITHER MANKIND

all the sciences of the time, could attempt the solution of this rid¬ dle, but the intense specialization of our age, the enormous mass of accumulated knowledge precludes any such unitary treat¬ ment. Hence the concurrence of many minds is necessary if any progress is to be made.

Beyond yielding the fruits of co-operation, such concurrence itself may be a contribution of some consequence to civilization. "The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age,” remarks Walter Pater, "move for the most part from different starting points and by unconnected roads. . . . There come, however, from time to time, eras of more favorable conditions, in which the thoughts of men draw nearer together than is their wont and the many interests of the in¬ tellectual world combine in one complete type of culture. The fifteenth century in Italy is one of these happier eras, and what is sometimes said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo: it is an age productive in personalities, many-sided, centralized, complete. Here artists and philosophers and those whom the ac¬ tion of the world has elevated and made keen do not live in iso¬ lation but breathe a common air and catch light and heat from each other’s thought. There is a spirit of general elevation and en¬ lightenment in which all alike communicate.”

If Pater’s thesis is sound, and it seems to be, then a search for the essence of civilization ought to advance all the arts of the good life, reduce the social friction based upon misconceptions, illuminate the roads before us, and serve humanity in its struggle to get possession of the helm. A symposium on civilization, therefore, appears to be timely and it might possibly be a con¬ tribution of something to itself, if that is not an incredible para¬ dox.

But a symposium may readily end in confusion rather than clarification, darkness rather than light, especially if no target is set up to give a general direction to the work of the participants. There is truth in the saying of the poet that everything written is in the nature of a confession. Nothing is more futile than a pretense to a kind of divine omniscience that leads readers by secret passages to predetermined ends.

INTRODUCTION n

The purpose of this book is, therefore, publicly admitted. It is not designed to bolster up the arguments of any economic, racial, religious, or nationalist school. It attempts to set forth clearly indubitable facts relevant to the consideration of the sub¬ ject in hand. It proceeds from the conviction that history reveals no golden age in the past and the additional belief that the achieve¬ ments of the past three hundred years, good and bad, are not the deeds of willful men and women who have perverted the perfec¬ tion offered by the middle ages. While laying a firm emphasis on certain aspects of the problems before us, the book is not domi¬ nated by any facile optimism. It frankly concedes the force of numerous items in the bill of indictment lodged by critics against modern civilization — its darker and more dangerous features— without condemning it wholesale as a terrible error made through the neglect of the superlative wisdom of other times and places. At any rate, destiny seems to point to the future — not to the past.

v

With these preliminary admissions duly made, let us begin the discussion by recalling that a standard dictionary defines civiliza¬ tion as "the state of being reclaimed from the rudeness of savage life and advanced in the arts and learning.” In origin, it derives immediately from the Latin word civitas, meaning in its concrete usage the rights and privileges of a Roman citizen, and figuratively a body of citizens, the state, commonwealth, or city. Now the rights and privileges of Roman citizens, as over against slaves and subject peoples, were realistic and economic, and it is of more than passing interest to note that in its deeper roots civitas comes from quies, repose from labor, perhaps that leisure enjoyed by ruling orders. Aside from all philological subtleties, civilization in its strict modern sense includes all these implements, devices, and practices by which men and women lift themselves above sav¬ ages — the whole economic order, the system of leisure built upon it, the employment of that leisure, and all manifestations of reli¬ gion, beauty, and appreciation.

Since the substructure of any civilization is the material fabric that frees mankind from the status of the savage, it follows that every civilization must depend in a large measure upon its geo¬ graphical environment — rivers, mountains, seas, and natural re¬ sources — the state of its tools and industries, the occupations of the people, and the organization of society for the direction of in¬ dustry. Civilization, therefore, is not a garment that can be put on or off by intellectuals at pleasure, transferred from a French¬ man or an Englishman to a Matabele or Zulu over night. Except for some of the minor decorative arts, a civilization cannot be borrowed without reproducing the accompanying economic or¬ der. And economic orders are not arrangements which nations can take on or discard at will without reference to their geographical situation or the competition of their neighbors. Japan, for ex¬ ample, if she is to survive, has no choice but the extensive adop¬ tion of the machinery and science employed by her rivals, and with that adoption go its social and artistic habiliments.

If this pattern of thought conforms with the facts, then the classification of civilizations by mere reference to longitude or to chronology is hardly short of absurd. The cultural status of a people is not determined by the element of time or by its posi¬ tion east or west of Greenwich. Many primitive societies have remained in substantially the same condition for thousands of years; where the modes of acquiring a living remain practically static, civilization preserves the same social designs. In the back¬ ward places of Europe are to be found numerous village com¬ munities which have carried forward into the twentieth century the whole cultural outfit of the middle ages. Hence the distinc¬ tion between modern and mediaeval civilizations, considered as the simple products of time, is intrinsically without meaning.

Nor is the geographical case much better — making astronomy rather than time the basis of calculation. In origin, the terms East and West are mere references to the dawning sun and its dusky resting place. Realistically considered, China and Japan, when compared with Europe of the fourteenth or fifteenth cen¬ tury, reveal more similarities than contrasts. Indeed early Chris¬ tian missionaries in the Orient were so struck by the resemblance between Buddhist religious ceremonies and their own that they ascribed the former to the devices of the Devil. No doubt a meticulous scholar can discover many fine points of distinction between the feudalism of Japan and that of mediaeval Europe, but for practical purposes the substance of the two orders was the same; the fighting men held the same supremacy in both geographical areas. There were differences between the lines and colors of the castle at Osaka and the castle at Warwick but they were both built of stone, their purposes were fundamen¬ tally the same, and the mode of life of their inhabitants strangely alike.

Proceeding from the definition given above and the argument thus sketched, it seems to follow that civilizations, apart from tribal and nomadic orders, when considered intrinsically, fall into three general types:

Agricultural — slave, feudal, peasant, or freehold.

Pre-machine urban — handicraft, mercantile, and political capitals.

Mechanical and scientific.

If it be urged that this is merely an economic classification which leaves out of account arts, religion, and learning, the reply is that these things are themselves bent to the order in which they thrive and have meaning and vitality only in relation to their economic substructure. Traces of previous orders no doubt survive or thrust themselves upward into new orders, but they thrive only in so far as they carry with them the soil that originally nourished them. Certainly there are more fundamental resemblances between the culture of a peasant in a remote village in Spain and that of a peasant in a remote village of Japan than between the culture of a Christian priest of the upper Pyrenees and that of a Baptist clergyman in a thriving manufacturing town in Illinois. A Bud¬ dhist monk from Horiugi would feel perfectly at home with a Catholic monk from Ravenna; but neither of them would en¬ joy the hospitality or approve the religion of a Methodist parson in Zenith.