Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Europe’s Shift to the Twentieth Century

While Europe’s traits were diffusing outward to the non-European world, Europe was also undergoing profound changes and facing difficult choices at home. These choices were associated with drastic changes; in some cases we might say reversals, of Europe’s point of view. These changes may be examined under eight headings. The nineteenth century was marked by (i) belief in the innate goodness of man; (2) secularism; (3) belief in progress; (4) liberalism; (5) capitalism; (6) faith in science; (7) democracy; (8) nationalism. In general, these eight factors went along together in the nineteenth century. They were generally regarded as being compatible with one another; the friends of one were generally the friends of the others; and the enemies of one were generally the enemies of the rest. Metternich and De Maistre were generally opposed to all eight; Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill were generally in favor of all eight.

The belief in the innate goodness of man had its roots in the eighteenth century when it appeared to many that man was born good and free but was everywhere distorted, corrupted, and enslaved by bad institutions and conventions. As Rousseau said, “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.” Thus arose the belief in the “noble savage,” the romantic nostalgia for nature and for the simple nobility and honesty of the inhabitants of a faraway land. If only man could be freed, they felt, freed from the corruption of society and its artificial conventions, freed from the burden of property, of the state, of the clergy, and of the rules of matrimony, then man, it seemed clear, could rise to heights undreamed of before—could, indeed, become a kind of superman, practically a god. It was this spirit which set loose the French Revolution. It was this spirit which prompted the outburst of self-reliance and optimism so characteristic of the whole period from 1770 to 1914.

Obviously, if man is innately good and needs but to be freed from social restrictions, he is capable of tremendous achievements in this world of time, and does not need to postpone his hopes of personal salvation into eternity. Obviously, if man is a godlike creature whose ungodlike actions are due only to the frustrations of social conventions, there is no need to worry about service to God or devotion to any otherworldly end. Alan can accomplish most by service to himself and devotion to the goals of this world. Thus came the triumph of secularism.

Closely related to these nineteenth century beliefs that human nature is good, that society is bad, and that optimism and secularism were reasonable attitudes were certain theories about the nature of evil.

To the nineteenth century mind evil, or sin, was a negative conception. It merely indicated a lack or, at most, a distortion of good. Any idea of sin or evil as a malignant positive force opposed to good, and capable of existing by its own nature, was completely lacking in the typical nineteenth-century mind. To such a mind the only evil was frustration and the only sin, repression.

Just as the negative idea of the nature of evil flowed from the belief that human nature was good, so the idea of liberalism flowed from the belief that society was bad. For, if society was bad, the state, which was the organized coercive power of society, was doubly bad, and if man was good, he should be freed, above all, from the coercive power of the state. Liberalism was the crop which emerged from this soil. In its broadest aspect liberalism believed that men should be freed from coercive power as completely as possible. In its narrowest aspect liberalism believed that the economic activities of man should be freed completely from “state interference.” This latter belief, summed up in the battle-cry “No government in business,” was commonly called “laissez-faire.” Liberalism, which included laissez-faire, was a wider term because it would have freed men from the coercive power of any church, army, or other institution, and would have left to society little power beyond that required to prevent the strong from physically oppressing the weak.

From either aspect liberalism was based on an almost universally accepted nineteenth-century superstition known as the “community of interests.” This strange, and unexamined, belief held that there really existed, in the long run, a community of interests between the members of a society. It maintained that, in the long run, what was good for one member of society was good for all and that what was bad for one was bad for all. But it went much further than this. The theory of the “community of interests” believed that there did exist a possible social pattern in which each member of society would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved by a process of adjustment so that each person could fall into that place in the pattern to which his innate abilities entitled him. This implied two corollaries which the nineteenth century was prepared to accept: (1) that human abilities are innate and can only be distorted or suppressed by social discipline and (2) that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest. All these together form the doctrine of the “community of interests,” a doctrine which maintained that if each individual does what seems best for himself the result, in the long run, will be best for society as a whole.

Closely related to the idea of the “community of interests” were two other beliefs of the nineteenth century: the belief in progress and in democracy. The average man of 1880 was convinced that he was the culmination of a long process of inevitable progress which had been going on for untold millennia and which would continue indefinitely into the future. This belief in progress was so fixed that it tended to regard progress as both inevitable and automatic. Out of the struggles and conflicts of the universe better things were constantly emerging, and the wishes or plans of the objects themselves had little to do with the process.

The idea of democracy was also accepted as inevitable, although not always as desirable, for the nineteenth century could not completely submerge a lingering feeling that rule by the best or rule by the strong would be better than rule by the majority. But the facts of political development made rule by the majority unavoidable, and it came to be accepted, at least in Western Europe, especially since it was compatible with liberalism and with the community of interests.

Liberalism, community of interests, and the belief in progress led almost inevitably to the practice and theory of capitalism. Capitalism was an economic system in which the motivating force was the desire for private profit as determined in a price system. Such a system, it was felt, by seeking the aggrandization of profits for each individual, would give unprecedented economic progress under liberalism and in accord with the community of interests. In the nineteenth century this system, in association with the unprecedented advance of natural science, had given rise to industrialism (that is, power production) and urbanism (that is, city life), both of which were regarded as inevitable concomitants of progress by most people, but with the greatest suspicion by a persistent and vocal minority.

The nineteenth century was also an age of science. By this term we mean the belief that the universe obeyed rational laws which could be found by observation and could be used to control it. This belief was closely connected with the optimism of the period, with its belief in inevitable progress, and with secularism. The latter appeared as a tendency toward materialism. This could be defined as the belief that all reality is ultimately explicable in terms of the physical and chemical laws which apply to temporal matter.