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

1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)

2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority.)

3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute.)

4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.

5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.

6. Thus Western man’s picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

This methodology of the West is basic to the success, power, and wealth of Western Civilization. It is reflected in all successful aspects of Western life, from the earliest beginnings to the present. It has been attacked and challenged by all kinds of conflicting methods and outlooks, by all kinds of alternative attitudes based on narrowness and rigidity, but it has reappeared, again and again, as the chief source of strength of that amazing cultural growth of which we are a part.

This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations. The many problems, previously listed, that faced the Church at the time of the Council of Nicaea were settled by this Western method. Throughout Western religious history, in spite of the frequent outbursts by dissident groups insisting that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God’s revelation, Western religious thought has continued to believe that revelation itself is never final, total, complete, or literal, but is a continuous symbolic process that must be interpreted and reinterpreted by discussion.

The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final stage of eternity. In the Christian tradition the stages in this unfolding process for each individual are numerous; they include: (1) man’s intuitive sense of natural law and morality, (2) the Old Testament, (3) the New Testament, (4) the long series of Church councils and ecclesiastical promulgations that will continue indefinitely into the future, (5) for each individual a continued process of knowledge in eternity after death, and, finally, (6) the Beatific Vision. Until this final stage, all versions of the truth, even when their factual content is based on divine revelation, must be understood and interpreted by community discussion in terms of past experiences and traditions.

This version of the religious tradition of the West as an example of the Western outlook as a whole may seem to many to be contradicted by the narrow intolerance, rigid bigotry, and relentless persecutions that have disfigured so much of the religious history of the West. This is true, and is a clear indication that individuals and groups can fall far short of their own traditions, can lose these for long periods, and can even devote their lives to fighting against them. But the traditions of the West, certainly the most remarkable any civilization has had, always seem to come back and march on to other victories. Even in our day, in Vatican Council II we can see what outsiders may regard as surprising efforts to apply Western traditions to an organization which, to most outsiders, and even, perhaps, to most insiders, must appear as one of the most authoritarian organizations ever created. But the tradition is there, however buried or forgotten, and the realization of this has made Vatican Council II a symbol of hope, even to non-Catholics and even to those who realize it will not do half the things that are crying urgently to be done.

Before we leave this subject, concerned with an area (religion) and an organization (the Roman Catholic Church) where we might expect the tradition of the West to be weak or even absent, we might comment on one other issue. The rigidity of Western religious thought that often seems to be unappreciative of the Western tradition (although fundamentally it is not) is often explained by the role divine revelation plays in Western religion. The Word of God may seem to many a rigid and inflexible element repugnant to the flexible and tentative outlook I have identified as the tradition of the West. But, on an early page of the new version of Thomas Aquinas now appearing in English in sixty volumes, we read this typical Western comment on the role of revelation in religious truth: “Revelation is not oracular.…Propositions do not descend on us from heaven ready made, but are … more a draft of work in progress than a final and completed document, for faith itself, though rooted in immutable truth is not crowning knowledge, and its elaboration in teaching, namely theology, is still more bound up with discourses progressively manifesting fresh truths or fresh aspects of the truth to the mind. So the individual Christian and the Christian community grow in understanding; indeed, they must if, like other living organisms, they are to survive by adaptation to a changing environment of history, ideas, and social pressures.” ( The Sunima Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas; Latin Text and English Translation, Vol. I (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1904), p. 102.

To the West, in spite of all its aberrations, the greatest sin, from Lucifer to Hitler, has been pride, especially in the form of intellectual arrogance; and the greatest virtue has been humility, especially in the intellectual form which concedes that opinions are always subject to modification by new experiences, new evidence, and the opinions of our fellow men.

These procedures that I have identified as Western, and have illustrated from the rather unpromising field of religion, are to be found in all aspects of Western life. The most triumphant of these aspects is science, whose method is a perfect example of the Western tradition. The scientist goes eagerly to work each day because he has the humility to know that he does not have any final answers and must work to modify and improve the answers he has. He publishes his opinions and research reports, or exposes these in scientific gatherings, so that they may be subjected to the criticism of his colleagues and thus gradually play a role in formulating the constantly unfolding consensus that is science. That is what science is, “a consensus unfolding in time by a cooperative effort, in which each works diligently seeking the truth and submits his work to the discussion and critique of his fellows to make a new, slightly improved, temporary consensus.”

Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook. That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anticlerical, antimilitarist,. and antistate because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.