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

The social costs of the contemporary economic system are staggering. On the whole, they have been widely discussed and are generally recognized. As economic enterprises have become larger and more tightly integrated into one another, the freedom, individualism, and initiative traditionally associated with the modern economy (in contrast with the medieval rural economy) have had to be sacrificed. The self-reliant individual has gradually changed into the conformist “organization man.” Routine has displaced risk, and subordination to abstractions has replaced the struggle with diverse concrete problems. The constantly narrowing range of possibilities for self-expression has given rise to deep frustrations with their concomitant growth of irrational compensating customs, such as the obsession with speed; vicarious combativeness, especially in sports; the use of alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and sex as stimulants, diversions, and sedatives; and the rapid appearance and disappearance of fads in dress, social customs, and leisure activities.

Most crucial have been the demands of the modern industrial and business system, because of advancing technology, for more highly trained manpower. Such training requires a degree of ambition, self-discipline, and future-preference that many persons lack or refuse to provide, with the result that a growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the Lumpenproletariat ) has reappeared. This group of rejects from our bourgeois industrial society provide one of our most intractable future problems, because they are gathered in urban slums, have political influence, and are socially dangerous.

In the United States, where these people congregate’ in the largest cities and are often Negroes or Latin Americans, they are regarded as a racial or economic problem, but they are really an educational and social problem for which economic or racial solutions would help little. This group is most numerous in the more advanced industrial areas and now forms more than twenty percent of the American population. Since they are a self-perpetuating group and have many children, they are increasing in numbers faster than the rest of the population. Their self-perpetuating characteristic as a group is not based on biological differences but on sociological factors, chiefly on the fact that disorganized, undisciplined, present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social conditions are most unlikely to train their children in the organized, disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic system requires in its workers, so that the children, like their parents, grow up as unemployables. This is not a condition that can be cured by providing more jobs, even if the jobs are in the proper areas, because the jobs require characteristics these victims of anomie do not possess and are unlikely to acquire.

All this leads to one of the most significant of current changes, the changes in attitudes and outlooks. At this point we shall not discuss the middle-class outlook and its challenges, which are the central aspect of this subject in the United States, but shall restrict ourselves to an equally large subject, the changes in the outlook of Western society as a whole, especially in Europe.

The intellectual and religious aspects of any society, including all those things I call “pattern of outlook,” change at least as rapidly as the more material aspects of the society, and are generally less noticed. Among these the most significant, and the least noticed, are the categories into which any society divides its experiences in order to think about them or to talk about them and the values the society, often in unconscious consensus, places upon these categories. In every society there are certain groups, perhaps an intellectual elite, who think new thoughts, new at least in comparison with what went just before. In time, some of these thoughts spread and become familiar, until it may seem that everybody is thinking them. Of course, everybody is not, because in every society there are three other groups: the large group who do not think at all, the substantial group who are not aware of anything new and who retain the same outlook for years and even generations, and the small group who are always opposed to the consensus simply because opposition has become an end in itself.

In spite of these complexities, we can still look at the past and see a sequence of prevalent outlooks, often with rather confused periods of transition in between. Over the past two centuries, there have been five such stages: the Enlightenment in 1730-1790, the Romantic Movement in 1790-1850, the Age of Scientific Materialism in 1850-1895, the Period of Irrational Activism of 1895-1945, and our new Age of Inclusive Diversity since 1945.

These changing patterns of outlooks arise because men are complicated creatures trying to operate in a complex universe. Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of space, the fourth of time, and this fifth dimension of abstraction. This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person, is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos of emotional experiences and feelings.

In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his own nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational. The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man’s three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.

In the most general terms, we might say that primitive man emphasized an empirical approach to these problems with use of man’s sensual equipment and chief emphasis on specific concrete situations; archaic man (say from 5000 b.c. to about 500 b.c. in Eurasia) emphasized man’s emotional and intuitive equipment with emphasis on symbols, ritual, myth, and magical actions; Classical man (say from 500 b.c. to a.d. 500) emphasized man’s rational equipment and regarded man’s concepts as the major portion of reality. But Western man, since a.d. 500, has sought to find some combination of all three parts of his equipment that will provide satisfactory explanation and successful operation in terms both of man’s nature and of the universe. The combinations he has tried provide the changing sequence of intellectual history.