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

The Age of Enlightenment, following on the successes of the Age of Newton (which had discovered a rational and mechanical explanation of the material universe), tried to apply the same techniques to man and society, and came up with a static, mechanical, and rationalist conception of both. The inadequacy of this view of man, already rejected by poets and literary figures in the mid-eighteenth century, led to its general rejection as inadequate because of the excesses of the French Revolution. The following Romantic period, accordingly, adopted a much more irrational picture of man, of society, and of the universe. As a consequence, emphasis shifted from the earlier rational, mechanical, and static views to irrational and dynamic views of man and society.

This period of Romanticism (about 1790-1850) was marked by poets of “storm and stress,” the Gothic revival, and a growing emphasis on history as the correct key to understanding man and society. The period, associated with Hegel, Hugo, and Heine, culminated in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), which found the key to man’s social position in past struggles.

The third generation of the nineteenth century (1850-1895) was in an age of science and rationalism whose typical figures were Darwin and Bismarck. While emphasizing the empirical and rational aspects of science, it tried to apply these to biology and to history in terms of a scientific materialism that could explain biology and change as Newton’s science had explained mechanics. By the end of the century, man was frustrated and disillusioned with scientific method and materialism and with emphasis on the nonhuman world and was turning once again to the problems of man and society with a conviction that these problems could be handled only by nonrational methods and by the clash of contending forces, since the problems themselves were too complex, too dynamic, too irrational to be settled by science or even by human thought.

The result was a new period, the Age of Irrational Activism. It began with men, like Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the nonrational nature of the universe and of man, quickly shifted Darwin’s doctrines of struggle and survival from nonhuman nature to human society, and rejected rationalism as slow, superficial, and an inhibition on both action and survival. As Bergson said in his Creative Evolution (1907): “The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life.”

This period felt that man, and nature, and human society were all basically irrational. Reason, regarded as a late and rather superficial accretion in the process of human evolution, was considered inadequate to plumb the real nature of man’s problems, and was regarded as an inhibitor on the full intensity of his actions, an obstacle to the survival of himself as an individual and of his group (the nation). Any effort to apply reason or science, based on rational analysis and evaluation, would be a slow and frustrating effort: slow because the process of human rationality is always slow, frustrating because it cannot plumb into the real depths and nature of man’s experience, and because it can always turn up as many and as good reasons for any course of action as it can for the opposite course of action. The effort to do this was dangerous, because as the thinker poised in indecision, the man of action struck, eliminated the thinker from the scene, and survived to determine the future on the basis of continued action. To the theorist of these views, the thinker would always be divided, hesitant, and weak, while the man of action would be unified, decisive, and strong.

This point of view, nourished on Marx and Heinrich von Treitschke, justified class conflicts and national warfare, and formed the background for the cult of violence that was reflected in the political assassinations of 1898-1914 and the imperialist aggressions that began with Japan, Italy, and Britain in China, Ethiopia, and South Africa in 1894-1899. The explicit justification of this view could be found in Georges Sorel Reéflexions sur la Violence (1908) or in the political events of the summer of 1914. From that fateful summer, for more than forty years, higher levels of violence became the solution of all problems, whether it was the question of winning a war, Stalin’s efforts to industrialize Russia, Hitler’s efforts to settle the “Jewish problem,” Rupert Brooke’s effort to find meaning in life, Japan’s desire to find a solution to economic depression,

the English-speaking nations’ search for security, Italy’s search for glory, or Franco’s desire to preserve the status quo in Spain. The culmination of the process in total irrationalism and total violence was Nazism, “The Revolution of Nihilism.”

Expressed explicitly this cult of Irrational Activism was based on the belief that the universe was dynamic and largely nonrational. As such, any effort to deal with it by rational means will be futile and superficial. Moreover, rationalism, by paralyzing man’s ability to act decisively, will expose him to destruction in a world whose chief features include struggle and conflict. Men came to believe that only violence had survival value. The resulting cult of violence permeated all human life. By mid-century, the popular press, literature, the cinema, sports, and all major human concerns had embraced this cult of violence. The books of Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler sold millions to satisfy this need. Humphrey Bogart became the most popular film hero because he courted women with a blow to the jaw.

On a somewhat more profound level, the Nazi Party mobilized popular support with a program of “Blood and Soil” ( Blut and Boden ), while the Fascists in Italy covered every wall with their slogan, “Believe! Obey! Fight!” In neither was there any expectation that men should think or analyze.

On the highest philosophic levels, the new attitude was justified. Bergson appealed to intuition, and Hitler used it. Other philosophers vied with one another to demonstrate that the old mechanism of abstract, rational thought must be rejected as irrelevant, superficial, or meaningless. The semanticists rejected logic by rejecting the idea of general categories or even of definition of terms. According to them, because everything is constantly changing, no term can remain fixed without at once becoming irrelevant. The meaning of any word depended on the context in which it was used; since this was different every time it was used, the meaning, consisting of a series of connotations based on all previous uses of the term, is different at each use. Every individual who uses a term is simply the culmination of all his past experiences that make him what he is; since experience never stops, he is a different person every time he uses a term, and it has a different meaning for him. On this basis the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) wrote a series of works to show the constantly changing nature of personality, which is also a reflection of the context in which it operates, so that each person who meets someone knows him as a different personality.

The most widely read of twentieth-century philosophers, the existentialists, reflected this same attitude, although they could agree on almost nothing. In general they were skeptical of any general principles about reality, but recognized that reality did exist for each individual as the concrete instant of time, place, and context in which he acted. Thus he must act. In order to act he must make a decision, a commitment, to something that would give him a basis from which to act. By acting he experiences reality, and to that extent knows and demonstrates, at least to himself, that there is a reality.

All these ideas, reflecting the disjointed malaise of the century, permeated the outlook of the period and left it hungry for meaning, for identity, for some structure or purpose in human experience. Insanity, neurosis, suicide, and all kinds of irrational obsessions and reactions filled increasing roles in human life. Most of these were not even recognized as being irrational or obsessive. Speed, alcohol, sex, coffee, and tobacco screened man off from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to observe, or to enjoy life, without his realizing that these were the shields he adopted to conceal from himself the fact that he was no longer really capable of living, because he no longer knew what life was and could see no meaning or purpose in it. As his capacity to live or to experience life dwindled, he sought to reach it by seeking more vigorous experiences that might penetrate the barriers surrounding him. The result was mounting sensationalism. In time, nothing made much impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion, or distortion.