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

One great danger in regard to the second of these basic foundations (availability of information necessary for decision-making) is the impact upon it of the expansion of rationalization. While this has led to automatic and mechanical storage and retrieval of information, it has also led to efforts to establish automatic electronic decision-making on the basis of the growing volume and complexity of such information. This renunciation of the basic feature of being human—judgment and decision-making—is very dangerous and is a renunciation of the very faculty which gave man his success in the evolutionary struggle with other living creatures. If this whole process of human evolution is now to be abandoned in favor of some other, unconscious and mechanical, method of decision-making, in which the individual’s flexibility and awareness are to be subordinated to a rigid group process, then man must yield to those forms of life, such as the social insects, which have already carried this method to a high degree of perfection.

This whole process has been made the central focus of a recent novel, Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The reduction of men to automatons in a complicated nexus of expensive machines is well shown in that book. To its picture must be added two points: (1) It does not require a blown condenser, as in the book, to unleash the full dangers of the situation; it is a situation which is dangerous in itself even if it functions perfectly; and (2) the avoidance of the ultimate total catastrophe in the book, because a few men, at and near the top, were able to resume the human functions of decision, self-sacrifice, love of their fellowmen, and hope for the future, should not conceal the fact that the whole world in that story came within minutes of handing its resources over to the insects.

Regardless of the outcome of the situation, it is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the economic system even as he will replace the democratic voter in control of the political system. This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez faire in the relationships between the two systems. This planning may not be single or unified, but it will be planning , in which the main framework and operational forces of the system will be established and limited by the experts on the governmental side; then the experts within the big units on the economic side will do their planning within these established limitations. Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another. But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.

Eventually, in two or three generations, as the ordinary individual who is not an expert or a skilled professional soldier or a prominent industrial executive becomes of less personal concern to the government, his contacts with the government will become less direct and will take place increasingly through intermediaries. Some movement in this direction may be seen already in those cases where taxpayers whose incomes are entirely from wages or salaries find that their whole tax is already paid by their employer or in the decreasing need for the military draftee to be called to serve by a letter from the President. The development of such a situation, a kind of neofeudalism, in which the relationships of ordinary people to government cease to be direct and are increasingly through intermediaries (who are private rather than public authorities), is a long way in the future.

One consequence of the nuclear rivalry has been the almost total destruction of international law and the international community as they existed from the middle of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth. That old international law was based on a number of sharp rational distinctions which no longer exist; these include the distinction between war and peace, the rights of neutrals, the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, the nature of the state, and the distinction between public and private authority. These are now either destroyed or in great confusion. We have already seen the obliteration of the distinctions between combatants and noncombatants and between neutrals and belligerents brought on by British actions in World War I. These began with the blockade of neutrals, like the Netherlands, and the use of floating mines in navigational waters. The Germans retaliated with acts against Belgian civilians and with indiscriminate submarine warfare. These kinds of actions continued in World War II with the British night-bombing effort aimed at destroying civilian morale by the destruction of workers’ housing (Lord Cherwell’s favorite tactic) and the American fire raids against Tokyo. It is generally stated in American accounts of the use of the first atom bomb that target planning was based on selection of military targets, and it is not generally known even today that the official orders from Cabinet level on this matter specifically said “military objectives surrounded by workers’ housing.” The postwar balance of terror reached its peak of total disregard both of noncombatants and of neutrals in the policies of John Foster Dulles, who combined sanctimonious religion with “massive retaliation wherever and whenever we judge fit” to the complete destruction of any non-combatant or neutral status.

Most other aspects of traditional international law have also been destroyed. The Cold War has left little to the old distinction between war and peace in which wars had to be formally declared and formally concluded. Hitler’s attacks without warning; the Korean War, which was not a “war” in international law or in American constitutional law (since it was not “declared” by Congress); and the fact that no peace treaty has been signed with Germany to end World War II, while we are already engaged in all kinds of undeclared warlike activities against the Soviet Union, have combined to wipe out many of the distinctions between war and peace which were so painfully established in the five hundred years before Grotius died (in 1645).

Most of these losses are obvious but there are others, equally significant but not yet widely recognized. The growth of international law in the late medieval and Renaissance periods not only sought to make the distinctions we have indicated, as a reaction against “feudal disorder”; it also sought to make a sharp distinction between public and private authority (in order to get rid of the feudal doctrine of dominia ) and to set up sharp criteria of public authority involving the new doctrine of sovereignty. One of the chief criteria of such sovereignty was ability to maintain the peace and to enforce both law and order over a definite territory; one of its greatest achievements was the elimination of arbitrary nonsovereign private powers such as robber barons on land or piracy on the sea. Under this conception, ability to maintain law and order became the chief evidence of sovereignty, and the possession of sovereignty became the sole mark of public authority and the existence of a state. All this has now been destroyed. The Stimson Doctrine of 1931, now carried to its extreme conclusion in the American refusal to recognize Red China, shifted recognition from the objective criterion of ability to maintain order to the subjective criterion of approval of the form of government or liking of a government’s domestic behavior.