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

A similar situation exists in regard to foreign exchange. Alternately our compassion is stirred and our anger aroused by American reformers and Latin agitators at the iniquities of the colonial character of Latin America’s position in the world economy. This simply means that Latin America exports raw materials, minerals, and agricultural products (generally unprocessed goods), and imports processed, manufactured goods. Since the prices of unprocessed goods are generally more competitive, and therefore more fluctuating, than those of manufactured goods, the so-called “terms of trade” tend to run either favorably for or very unfavorably against Latin America. In the latter case, which has been generally prevalent for the last few years, the prices Latin America has to pay on the world’s markets have tended to rise, while the prices that it gets for its own goods have tended to fall. As European economists would say, “The blades of the scissors have opened.” American farmers who speak of the “terms of parity,” have been suffering the same way in the American domestic market.

Now, this is perfectly true. The Latin American economy is largely a colonial one (like Australia, New Zealand, West Africa, or Montana). In fact, in Latin America, in recent years, at least half the value of American aid has been wiped away by the worsening of Latin America’s terms of trade, which made it necessary for it to pay more and more foreign moneys for its imports at the same time that it got less and less foreign moneys for its exports. But the fact remains that this reduction in the supply of foreign exchange available for Latin America’s purchases of advanced equipment overseas has been made much worse by the fact that wealthy Latin Americans buy up much of the available supply of such foreign exchange for self-indulgent and nonconstructive spending abroad or simply to hoard their incomes in politically safer areas in New York, London, or Switzerland. Estimates of the total of such Latin American hoards abroad range between one billion and two billion dollars.

The solution to this problem must be found in more responsible, more public-spirited, and more constructive patterns of outlook, of money flows, and of political and social security.

A similar solution must be found for some of the social deficiencies of Latin America, such as inadequate education, housing, and social stability. Widespread tax evasion by the rich; bribery and corruption in public life; and brutality and selfishness in social life can be reduced and largely eliminated in Latin America by changing patterns in Latin American life and utilization of resources without much need for funds, sermons, or demonstrations from foreigners (least of all Americans).

This is not an argument for a reduction in American aid or in American concern for Latin America. It is a plea for recognition, by all concerned, that the problems of Latin America, and the possible solutions to these problems, rest on questions of structure and sequence and not on questions of resources, wealth, or even know-how.

The connection of that last word “know-how” to the whole problem may not be sufficiently clear. We Americans have such pride in our technological achievements that we often seem to feel that we “know how” to do almost everything, but this know-how really exists on two levels. One level is concerned with general attitudes such as objectivity, rationality, recognition of the value of social consensus, and such, while the other level is concerned with technological achievement in any specific situation. The former level has a great deal to contribute to the Latin American situation, while the latter level (the engineering level, so to speak) has much less to contribute to Latin America than most people believe. For example, American agricultural techniques, which are so fantastically successful in the temperate seasonal climate and well-watered and alluvial soils of North America, are frequently quite unadapted to the tropical, less seasonal climate, and semiarid, leached soils of South America. The solution to the Latin American problem of food production is not necessarily to apply North American techniques to the problem, but to discover techniques, different from our own, that will work under Latin American conditions. This situation, applied here to agriculture, is even more true of social and ideological problems.

The problem of finding constructive patterns for Latin America is much more difficult than the problem of finding constructive priorities. One reason for this is that the unconstructive patterns that now prevail in Latin America are deeply entrenched as a result of centuries and even millennia of persistent background. In fact, the Latin American patterns that must be changed because today they are leading to social and cultural disruption are not really Latin American in origin, or even Iberian for that matter, but are Near Eastern, and go back, for some of their aspects, for two thousand or more years. As a general statement, we might say that the Latin American cultural pattern (including personality patterns and general outlook) is Arabic, while its social pattern is that of Asiatic despotism. The pattern as a whole is so prevalent today, not only in Latin America, but in Spain, Sicily, southern Italy, the Near East, and in various other areas of the Mediterranean world (such as Egypt), that we might well call it the “Pakistani-Peruvian axis.” For convenience of analysis we shall divide it into “Asiatic despotism” and the “Arabic outlook.”

We have already indicated the nature of Asiatic despotism in connection with traditional China, the old Ottoman Empire, and czarist Russia. It goes back to the archaic Bronze Age empires, which first appeared in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and northern China before 1000 b.c. Basically such an Asiatic despotism is a two-class society in which a lower class, consisting of at least nine-tenths of the population, supports an upper, ruling class consisting of several interlocking groups. These ruling groups are a governing bureaucracy of scribes and priests associated with army leaders, landlords, and moneylenders. Such an upper class accumulated great quantities of wealth as taxes, rents, interest on loans, fees for services, or simply as financial extortions. The social consequences were either progressive or reactionary, depending on whether this accumulated wealth in the possession of the ruling class was invested in more productive utilization of resources or was simply hoarded and wasted. The essential character of such an Asiatic despotism rests on the fact that the ruling class has legal claims on the working masses, and possesses the power (from its control of arms and the political structure) to enforce these claims. A modified Asiatic despotism is one aspect of the social structures all along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis.

The other aspect of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis rests on its Arabic outlook. The Arabs, like other Semites who emerged from the Arabian desert at various times to infiltrate the neighboring Asiatic despotic cultures of urban civilizations, were, originally, nomadic, tribal peoples. Their political structure was practically identical with their social structure and was based on blood relationships and not on territorial jurisdiction. They were warlike, patriarchal, extremist, violent, intolerant, and xenophobic. Like most tribal peoples, their political structure was totalitarian in the sense that all values, all needs, and all meaningful human experience was contained within the tribe. Persons outside the tribal structure had no value or significance, and there were no obligations or meaning associated in contacts with them. In fact, they ‘were hardly regarded as human beings at all. Moreover, within the tribe, social significance became more intense as blood relationships became closer, moving inward from the tribes through clans to the patriarchal extended family. The sharp contrast between such a point of view and that associated with Christian society as we know it can be seen in the fact that such Semitic tribalism was endogamous, while the rule of Christian marriage is exogamous. The rules, in fact, were directly antithetical, since Arabic marriage favors unions of first cousins, while Christian marriage has consistently opposed marriage of first (or even second) cousins. In traditional Arabic society any girl was bound to marry her father’s brother’s son if he and his father wanted her, and she was usually not free to marry someone else until he had rejected her (sometimes after years of waiting).