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

We shall speak later of these essential features of the nineteenth-century point of view, because their disappearance in the twentieth century, associated as it is with the crisis of the middle classes, is an essential part of the crisis of the twentieth century, where it is to be seen most clearly in the English-speaking and Scandinavian countries. We shall call these features, as a single bundle, “future preference,” and understand that it includes the gospel of saving, of work, and of postponed enjoyment, consumption, and leisure. Closely related to it is a somewhat different idea, based on a constant and irremedial dissatisfaction with one’s present position and present possessions. This is associated with the nineteenth century’s emphasis on acquisitive behavior, on achievement, and on infinitely expansible demand, and is equally associated with the middle-class outlook. Both of these together (future preference and expansible material demands) were basic features in nineteenth-century middle-class society, and indispensable foundations for its great material achievements. They are inevitably lacking in backward, tribal, underdeveloped peasant societies and groups, not only in Africa and Asia but also in many peripheral areas and groups of Western Civilization, including much of the Mediterranean, Latin America, central France, or in the Mennonite communities of southern Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The lack of future preference and expansible material demands in other areas, and the weakening of them in middle-class Western Civilization, are essential features of the twentieth-century crisis.

Though this crisis, which has appeared as a breakdown, disruption, and rejection of the nineteenth century’s way of doing things, was fully evident by the year 1900, it was brought to an acute stage by the two world wars and the world depression. If we may be permitted to oversimplify, two antithetical ways of dealing with this crisis appeared. One way, going back to men like Georges Sorel ( Reflections on Violence, 1908 ), sought a solution of this crisis in irrationalism, in action for its own sake, in submergence of the individual into the mass of his tribe, community, or nation, in simple, intense concrete feelings and acts. The other tendency, based on nineteenth century’s science, sought a solution of the crisis in rationalization, science, universality, cosmopolitanism, and the continued pursuit of eternal—if rapidly retreating—truth. While the great mass of people in Western Civilization either ignored the problem and the antithetical character of the two proffered solutions, drifting unconsciously toward the one or struggling confusedly toward the other, two smaller groups were quite aware of the antithesis and rivalry of the two. From the crisis itself and the myriad individual events which led through it, came World War II. Although few were consciously aware of it, this war became a struggle between the forces of irrationality, represented by Fascism, and the forces of Western science and rationalization, represented by the Allied nations.

The Allied nations won this fearful struggle because they represented the forces of the ancient traditions of the West which had made Western Civilization the most powerful and most prosperous civilization that had ever existed in the past six thousand years of experience of this form of human organization. This ability to use the Western tradition appeared in a capacity to use rationalization, science, diversity, freedom, and voluntary cooperation—all long-existent attributes of Western Civilization.

Rationalization and Science

The application of rationalization and science to World War II is one of the basic reasons (although not necessarily the most important reason) for the victory of the West in the war. As a consequence of that victory, these two methods survived the challenge from reactionary, totalitarian, authoritarian Fascism, and expanded from the limited areas of human experience where they had previously operated to become dominant factors in the twentieth-century world. The two are obviously not identical; and neither is equivalent to rationalism (although both use rationalism as a prominent element in their operations). Rationalism, strictly speaking, is a rather unconvincing ideology. It assumes that reality is rational and logical, and accordingly, is comprehensible to man’s conscious mental processes, and can be grasped by human reason and logic alone. It assumes that what is rational and logical is real, that what is not rational and logical is dubious, unknowable, and unimportant, and that the observations of the human senses are unreliable or even illusory.

Rationalization and science differ from rationalism in two chief ways: (1) they are more empirical, in that they are willing to use sense observations, and (2) they are more practical, in that they are more concerned with getting things done in the temporal world than they are with discovering the nature of ultimate truth. They do not necessarily deny the existence of such an ultimate truth, but they agree that any conclusions reached about its nature, using their methods, are proximate rather than ultimate. Both methods, thus, are analytical, tentative, proximate, modest, and relatively practical. The chief difference between them is that science is a somewhat narrower subdivision of rationalization, because it has a more rigid and self-conscious methodology.

Taken together, these two have played significant roles in Western Civilization for centuries, but have always remained somewhat peripheral to the experience of ordinary men. One of the chief consequences of World War II is that they are no longer peripheral. Of course, it must be recognized that rationalization and science are not yet, by any means, central to the experience of ordinary men, or even to the majority of men. But now they almost certainly must become matters of firsthand experience for the majority of men if Western Civilization is to survive. As the novelist of these matters, Sir Charles P. Snow, has said, scientists increasingly play a vital role in those crucial, secret decisions “which determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die.”

Before World War II, science was recognized by all to be a significant element in life, but few had firsthand contact with it, and very few had any real appreciation of its nature and achievements. It was reserved largely for academic people, and for a small minority of these, and it touched the lives of most men only indirectly, by its influence on technology, especially on medical practice, transportation, and communications. There was very clearly, before 1939, what Sir Charles Snow has called “Two Societies” in our one civilization. This meant that most men lived in an ignorance of science almost as great as that of a Hottentot and almost equally great among highly educated professors of literature at Harvard, Oxford, and Princeton. It also meant that scientists were quite out of touch with the major realities of the world in which they lived, and were smitten by the impacts of war, repression, and political disturbances under conditions of ignorance, naiveté, and general bafflement at least as great as that of the uneducated ordinary man. World War II brought science into government, and especially into war, and brought politics, economics, and social responsibility into science in a way which must be beneficial to both but which was almost unimaginably shocking to both. Reading, for example, the interchange of questions and answers which go on between scientists and politicians before congressional committees concerned with outer space, atomic energy, or medical research is a revelation of the almost total lack of communication which takes place behind that prolific interchange of words.

The impact of rationalization is almost as great, although much less recognized. It had always existed in an incidental and minor way in men’s experiences, but hardly justified a special name until it became a conscious and deliberate technique. It is a method of dealing with problems and processes in an established sequence of steps, thus: (1) isolate the problem; (2) separate it into its most obvious stages or areas; (3) enumerate the factors which determine the outcome desired in each stage or area; (4) vary the factors in a conscious, systematic, and (if possible) quantitative way to maximize the outcome desired in the stage or area concerned; and (5) reassemble the stages or areas and check to see if the whole problem or process has been acceptably improved in the direction desired.