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

For thousands of years, some men had viewed themselves as creatures a little lower than the angels, or even God, and a little higher than the beasts. Now, in the twentieth century, man has acquired almost divine powers, and it has become increasingly clear that he can no longer regard himself as an animal (as the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century did), but must regard himself as at least a man (if he cannot bring himself to break so completely with his nineteenth-century predecessors as to come to regard himself as obligated to act like an angel or even a god).

The whole trend of the nineteenth century had been to emphasize man’s animal nature, and in doing so, to seek to increase his supply of material necessities, his indulgence in creature comforts, his experiences of food, movement, sex, and emotion. This effort had resulted in the sharp curtailment or almost total neglect of the conventions of man’s earlier history, conventions which had been, on the whole, based on a conception of man as a dualistic creature in which an eternal spiritual soul was encased, temporarily, in an ephemeral, material body. This older conception had been embodied, in the form in which the nineteenth century challenged it, largely in the seventeenth century, and had been reflected in that earlier period in the widespread influence of Puritanism, of Jansenism, and of other, basically pessimistic, inhibiting, masochistic, and self-disciplining ideologies. The eighteenth century had been a long age of struggle to get free of this older, seventeenth-century outlook, and had been so prolonged largely because those who turned away from the seventeenth century could neither envisage, nor agree upon, the newer ideology they wanted to put in the place of the older one they wished to reject.

This newer ideology was found in the nineteenth century, and may be regarded as one which emphasized man’s freedom to indulge his more animal-like aspects: to obtain freedom, for his body, from disease, death, hunger, discomfort, and drudgery. This movement eventually gave us modern surgery and medical science, modern technology, mass production of food and other consumers’ goods, central heating, indoor plumbing, domestic lighting, air conditioning, and the plethora of so-called labor-saving devices. The outlook behind these achievements may be symbolized by Charles Darwin, whose writings came to stand for proof of the animal nature of man, and of Sigmund Freud, whose writings were taken to show that sex was the dominant, if not the sole, human motivation and that inhibitions were the great bane of human life. This latter point of view came to be accepted on the most pervasive level of human experience in the attacks on inhibitions and discipline which we call “progressive” education as represented in the outpourings of such semipopular thinkers as Rousseau in the earliest stage of the movement (in Emile ) or John Dewey in the latest stage.

We who enter the twentieth century must not assume, as earlier ages so often did, that our immediate predecessors were wrong and that we should seek a point of view which appears true largely because it is opposed to them. This mistaken method of human progress has led men in the past to oscillate over the centuries from one extreme point of view to its opposite, and then, a few generations later, back again. Thus, the humanism of the sixteenth century had reacted against the scholasticism of the medieval period and was reacted against in turn by the Puritanism of the seventeenth century, the materialism of the nineteenth century, and the reaction against this latest outlook by the “flight from freedom” and blind mass discipline of reactionary totalitarianism in the Fascist and Nazi aberrations.

It should be evident by now that truth is a remote goal which man approaches by walking, a process in which one foot is always behind the other foot. The true and final goal of man as we know him must be a synthesis of varied elements, because man is so obviously a creature of varied nature. And our imperfect vision, both of man’s nature and of the universe in which he operates, must be a consensus of divergent points of view, since man’s obviously limited vision permits each individual, group, or age to see the truth in a partial fashion only. Any consensus, however temporary, must be a reconciliation of such divergent and partial views to provide a more adequate (but still temporary) total view.

This can be seen most essentially in the fact that the great achievements of the nineteenth century and the great crisis of the twentieth century are both related to the Puritan tradition of the seventeenth century. The Puritan point of view regarded the body and the material world as sinful and dangerous and, as such, something which must be sternly controlled by the individual’s will. God’s grace, it was felt, would give the individual the strength to curb both his body and his feelings, to control their tendencies toward laziness, the distractions of pleasure, and the diversions of enjoyment, and make it possible for the individual, by total application to work, to demonstrate that he was among the chosen recipients of God’s grace.

This Puritan outlook, rejected outwardly in the nineteenth century’s vision of the truth, was, nevertheless, still an influential element in the nineteenth century’s behavior, especially among those who contributed most to the nineteenth century’s achievement of its own goals. The Puritan point of view contributed elements of self-discipline, self-denial, masochism, glorification of work, emphasis on the restrictions of enjoyment of consumption, and subordination both of the present to the future and of oneself to a larger whole. These became significant elements in the bourgeois, middle-class pattern of behavior which dominated the nineteenth century. The middle classes were themselves largely products of the seventeenth century, and had adopted this point of view as one of the features which distinguished them from the more self-indulgent attitudes of the other two social classes—the peasants below them or the aristocracy and nobility above them.

In the nineteenth century the elements of the Puritan point of view were quite detached from the other-worldly goals they had served in the seventeenth century (God and personal salvation) and were attached to individualistic and largely selfish, this-worldly, goals, but they carried over attitudes and patterns of behavior which remained largely detached from the nineteenth century’s stated goals, and these, by a combination of seventeenth-century methods with nineteenth-century goals, produced the immense physical achievements of the nineteenth century.

These methods appeared in a number of essential ways, notably in an emphasis on self-discipline for future benefits, on restricted consumption and on saving, which provided the capital accumulation of the nineteenth century’s industrial development; in a devotion to work, and in a postponement of enjoyment to a future which never arrived. A typical example might be John D. Rockefeller: great saver, great worker, and great postponer of any self-centered action, even death. To such people, and to the prevalent middle-class ideology of the nineteenth century, the most adverse comments which could be made about a “failure,” to distinguish him from a “successful” man, were that he was a “wastrel,” a “loafer,” a “sensualist,” and “self-indulgent.” These terms reflected the value that the middle classes placed on work, saving, self-denial, and social conformity. All these values were carried over from seventeenth-century Puritanism, and were found most frequently among the religious groups rooted in that century, the Quakers, Presbyterians, Nonconformists (so called in England), and Jansenist survivals, and were less evident among religious groups with older orientations, such as Roman Catholics, High Anglicans, or orthodox Christians. These older creeds were more prevalent among the lower and the upper classes and in southern and eastern Europe rather than in northern or western Europe. This explains why the energy, self-discipline, and saving which made the world of 1900 was middle class, Protestant, and northwestern European. As we shall see later, in discussion of the American crisis of the twentieth century, these outlooks, values, and groups are now being superseded by quite different outlooks, values, and groups. In America today, those who wish to preserve them frequently show a tendency to embrace fanatical Right-wing political groups to implement that effort, and often speak among themselves of their efforts to preserve the values of WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants).