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

Future preference came out of the Christian outlook of the West and especially from the Puritan tradition, which was prepared to accept almost any kind of sacrifice and self-discipline in the temporal world for the sake of future eternal salvation. The process of secularization of Western society since the seventeenth century shifted that future benefit from eternity to this temporal world but did not otherwise disturb the pattern of future preference and self-discipline. In fact, these became the chief psychological attributes of the middle class that made the Industrial Revolution and the great economic expansion of the West. They made people willing to undergo long periods of sacrifice for personal training and to restrict their enjoyment of income for the sake of higher training and for capital accumulation. This made it possible to develop an advanced technology with massive shifting of economic resources from consumption to forming capital equipment. On this basis Quakers, Puritans, and Jews built the early railroad systems, and English Non-Conformists combined with Scottish Presbyterians to build the early iron industry and steam-engine factories. Other advances were based on these.

The mass production of this new industrial system was able to continue and to accelerate to the fantastic rate of the twentieth century because Western man placed no limits on his ambition to create a secularized earthly paradise. Today the average middle-class family of suburbia has a schedule of future material demands which is limitless: a second car is essential, often followed by a third; an elaborate reconstruction of the basement provides a recreation room, which must be followed in short order by an elaborate patio with outdoor cooking equipment and a swimming pool; almost immediately comes the need for an outboard motorboat and trailer to carry it, followed by the need for a summer residence by the water and a larger boat. And so it goes, in an endless expansion of insatiable demands spurred on by skilled advertising, the whole keeping the wheels of industry turning, and the purchasing power of the community racing around in an accelerating cycle.

Without these two psychological assumptions, the Western economy would break down or would never have started. At present, future preference may be breaking down, and infinitely expanding material demand may soon follow it in the weakening process. If so, the American economy will collapse, unless it finds new psychological foundations.

The connection of all this with ex-colonial areas lies in the fact that without these two attitudes it will be very difficult for underdeveloped nations to follow along the Western path of development. This does not mean that no “achieving” society can be constructed without these two attitudes. Not at all. Many different attitudes, in proper arrangement, might be made the basis for an “achieving” society, but it would probably not be along the Western lines of individual initiative and private enterprise. Religious feeling or national pride or many other attitudes could become the basis for achievement and economic expansion, as they were in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt or in medieval Europe, but such other bases for achievement would be unlikely to provide a system using private savings as its method of capital accumulation or personal ambition as its motivation for acquisition of highly developed technological training and skills, as in our economy.

The ordinary African is very remote from either future preference or infinitely expandable material demands. He generally has preference for the present, and his demands are often nonmaterial and even non-economic, such as his desire for leisure or for social approval. The African has a fair recognition of the immediate past, a dominant concern for the present, and little concern for the future. Accordingly, his conception of time is totally different from that of the average Western man. The latter sees the present only as a moving point of no dimension that separates the past from the future. The African sees time as a wide gamut of the present with a moderate dimensioned past and almost no future. This outlook is reflected in the structure of the Bantu languages, which do not emphasize the tense distinctions of past, present, and future, as we do, but instead emphasize categories of condition, including a basic distinction in the verb between completed and incompleted actions that places the present and the future (both concerned with unfinished actions) in the same category. We do this occasionally in English when we use the present tense in a future sense by saying, “He is coming tomorrow,” but this rare use of the present to indicate the future does not blur our conception of the future the way constant use of such a construction does in Bantu.

In addition to his present preference, the Bantu has a list of priorities, in his conception of a higher standard of living, which contains many noneconomic goals. A fairly typical list of such priorities might run thus: food, sex dalliance, joking with one’s friends, a bicycle, music and dancing, a radio, leisure to go fishing. Any list such as this, with its high priority for noneconomic and basically leisure activities, does not provide the constantly expanding material demands that are the motivating force in the West’s economic expansion. Nor is the African’s strongly socialized personality, which shares all its successes and wants with others and constantly yearns for the social approval obtained by sharing income with kinfolk and friends, capable of supporting any economy of private selfishness and individual capital accumulation that became the basis for the industrial expansion of the West.

These remarks about the differences in African outlooks and our own could be applied also to differences in the material bases for economic expansion, as we have already indicated. It is perfectly true that the obstacles we have mentioned do not apply to all Africans or to all parts of Africa, but in general it can be said that most Western methods and organizations do not fit the non-Western context of the newly independent countries and that these differ so greatly from one another, or even in some cases (such as India) within a single nation, that the direct application of Western methods to these new areas is inadvisable. Such Western methods might work if native peoples could acquire some of the more basic attitudes that have been the foundation of Western progress. For example, the victory of the West in World War II was attributed to our capacity for rationalization and for scientific method. These in turn rest on the most basic features of the Western outlook and traditions, on the way in which our cognitive system categorizes the world, and the value system we apply to this structure of categories. But our cognitive system is derived from our past heritage, such as our Hebrew ethical system, the Christian heritage (which strangely enough made us accept the reality and the value of the temporal world at the same time that it placed our final goal, achievable through behavior in the world of the flesh, in the eternal world of the spirit), and the lessons of Greek rationalism with its insistence on dealing with the world in a quite artificial system of two-valued logic based on the principle of identity and the law of contradiction. Non-Western peoples who do not find in their own system of cognition any acceptance of the rules of identity or of contradiction do not see reality in terms of two-valued logic, and must make an almost impossible effort to adopt the West’s natural tendency to rationalize problems. On this basis, they find it difficult either to rationalize their own emotional positions and thus to control or direct them, or to rationalize (which is to isolate and analyze) their problems and thus to seek solutions for them. Africans, for example, unless they have been thoroughly Westernized, do not make the sharp distinctions we do between the living and the dead, between animate and nonanimate objects, between deity and man, and many other distinctions which our long submission to Greek logic have made almost inevitable to us.