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

Along with this, ability to communicate dwindled. The old idea of communication as an exchange of concepts represented by symbols was junked. Instead, symbols had quite different connotations for everyone concerned simply because everyone had a different past experience. A symbol might have meaning for two persons but it did not have the same meaning. Soon it was regarded as proper that words represent only the writer’s meaning and need have no meaning at all for the reader. Thus appeared private poetry, personal prose, and meaningless art in which the symbols used have ceased to be symbols because they do not reflect any common background of experience that could indicate their meaning as shared communication or experience. These productions, the fads of the day, were acclaimed by many as works of genius. Those who questioned them and asked their meaning were airily waved aside as unforgivable philistines; they were told that no one any longer sought “meaning” in literature or art but rather sought “experiences.” Thus to look at a meaningless painting became an experience. These fads followed one another, reflecting the same old pretenses, but under different names. Thus “Dada” following World War I eventually led to the “Absurd” following World War II.

But even as this process continued, twenty years after Hiroshima, deep within the social context of the day, new outlooks were rising that made the views associated with Irrational Activism increasingly irrelevant. One of these we have already mentioned. The victory of rational analysis, operational research, and organized scientific attitudes over irrationality, will, intuition, and violence in World War II reversed the trend. Nothing succeeds like success, and no success is greater than ability to survive and find solutions to critical problems involving existence itself. The West in World War II and in the postwar period, in spite of the hysterical protests of the extremists, showed once again that it was able to overcome aggression, narrow intolerance, hatred, tribalism, totalitarianism, selfishness, arrogance, imposed uniformity, and all the evils the West had recognized as evils throughout its history. It not only won the war: it solved the great economic crisis, prevented the extension of tyranny while still avoiding World War III, and did all this in a typical Western way by fumbling cooperatively down a road paved with good intentions. The final result was a triumph of incalculable magnitude for the Outlook of the West.

The Outlook of the West is that broad middle way about which the fads and foibles of the West oscillate. It is what is implied by what the West says it believes, not at one moment but over the long succession of moments that form the history of the West. From that succession of moments it is clear that the West believes in diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism rather than in monism or dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion, in liberty rather than in authority, in truth rather than in power, in conversion rather than in annihilation, in the individual rather than in the organization, in reconciliation rather than in triumph, in heterogeneity rather than in homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in absolutes, and in approximations rather than in final answers. The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation. In man the West sees body, emotions, and reason as all equally real and necessary, and is prepared to entertain discussion about their relative interrelationships but is not prepared to listen for long to any intolerant insistence that any one of these has a final answer.

The West has no faith in final answers today. It believes that all answers are unfinal because everything is imperfect, although possibly getting better and thus advancing toward a perfection the West is prepared to admit may be present in some remote and almost unattainable future. Similarly in the universe, the West is prepared to recognize that there are material aspects, less material aspects, immaterial aspects, and spiritual aspects, although it is not prepared to admit that anyone yet has a final answer on the relationships of these. Similarly the West is prepared to admit that society and groups are necessary, while the individual is important, but it is not prepared to admit that either can stand alone or be made the ultimate value to the sacrifice of the other.

Where rationalists insist on polarizing the continua of human experience into antithetical pairs of opposing categories, the West has constantly rejected the implied need for rejection of one or the other, by embracing “Both.” This catholic attitude goes back to the earliest days of Western society when its outlook was being created in the religious controversies of the preceding Classical Civilization. Among these controversies were the following: (1) Was Christ Man or God? (2) Was salvation to be secured by God’s grace or by man’s good works? (3) Was the material world real and good or was spirituality real and good? (4) Was the body worthy of salvation or was the soul only to be saved? (5) Was the truth found only by God’s revelation or was it to be found by man’s experience (history)? (6) Should man work to save himself or to save others? (7) Does man owe allegiance to God or to Caesar? (8) Should man’s behavior be guided by reason or by observation? (9) Can man be saved inside the Church or outside it? In each case, with vigorous partisans clamoring on both sides (and in many cases still clamoring), the answer, reached as a consensus built up by long discussion, was Both . In fact a correct definition of the Christian tradition might well be expressed in that one word “Both.” Throughout its long history, controversy over religion in Western society has been based on a disturbance of the arrangement or balance within that “Both.”

From this religious basis established on “Both” as early as the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), the outlook of the West developed and spread with the growth of the new Christian Civilization of the West to replace the dying Classical Civilization. And today, when the Civilization of the West seems as if it too may be dying, we may reassure ourselves by recalling that our civilization has saved itself before by turning back to its tradition of Inclusive Diversity. This apparently is what has been happening since 1940. It was Inclusive Diversity that created the nuclear bomb in World War II, and it may well be Inclusive Diversity that will save the West in the postwar world.

Any outlook or society that finds its truth in Inclusive Diversity or in “Both” obviously faces a problem of relationships. If man finds the truth by using body, emotions, and reason, these diverse talents must be placed in some workable arrangement with one another. So too must service to God and to Caesar or to self and to fellow man.

In an age like ours, in which all these relationships have become disrupted and discordant, such relationships can be reestablished by discussion and testing, but in this process each discussant must rely on his experience. The great body of such experience, however, will not be found among living discussants, whose whole lives have been passed in a culture in which these relationships were discordant, but in the experiences of those whose lives were lived in earlier ages before the relationship in question became discordant. This gives rise to the typical Western solution of relying on experience and, at the same time, helps the society to link up with its traditions (the most therapeutic action in which any society can engage).

From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts: