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

To be sure, even the most vigorous defenders of bourgeois America did not pretend that all Americans were middle class: only the more important ones were. But they did see the country as organized in middle-class terms, and they looked forward to a not remote future in which everyone would be middle class, except for a small, shiftless minority of no importance. To these defenders, and probably also to the shiftless minority, American society was regarded as a ladder of opportunity up which anyone could work his way, on rungs of increased affluence, to the supreme positions of wealth and power near the top. Wealth, power, prestige, and respect were all obtained by the same standard, based on money. This in turn was based on a pervasive emotional insecurity that sought relief in the ownership and control of material possessions. The basis for this may be seen most clearly in the origins of this bourgeois middle class.

A thousand years ago, Europe had a two-class society in which a small upper class of nobles and upper clergy were supported by a great mass of peasants. The nobles defended this world, and the clergy opened the way to the next world, while the peasants provided the food and other material needs for the whole society. All three had security in their social relationships in that they occupied positions of social status that satisfied their psychic needs for companionship, economic security, a forseeable future, and purpose of their efforts. Members of both classes had little anxiety about loss of these things by any likely outcome of events, and all thus had emotional security.

In the course of the medieval period, chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this simple two-class society was modified by the intruison of a small, but distinctly different, new class between them. Because this new class was between, we call it middle class, just as we call it “bourgeois” (after bourg meaning town) from the fact that it resided in towns, a new kind of social aggregate. The two older, established, classes were almost completely rural and intimately associated with the land, economically, socially, and spiritually. The permanence of the land and the intimate connection of the land with the most basic of human needs, especially food, amplified the emotional security associated with the older classes.

The new middle class of bourgeoisie who grew up between the two older classes had none of these things. They were commercial peoples concerned with exchange of goods, mostly luxury goods, in a society where all their prospective customers already had the basic necessities of life provided by their status. The new middle class had no status in a society based on status; they had no security or permanence in a society that placed the highest value on these qualities. They had no law (since medieval law was largely past customs, and their activities were not customary ones) in a society that highly valued law. The flow of the necessities of life, notably food, to the new town dwellers was precarious, so that some of their earliest and most emphatic actions were taken to ensure the flow of such goods from the surrounding country to the town. All the things the bourgeois did were new things; all were precarious, and insecure; and their whole lives were lived without the status, permanence, and security the society of the day most highly valued. The risks (and rewards) of commercial enterprise, well reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of figures such as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice , were extreme. A single venture could ruin a merchant or make him rich. This insecurity was increased by the fact that the prevalent religion of the day disapproved of what he was doing, seeking profits or taking interest, and could see no way of providing religious services to town dwellers because of the intimate association of the ecclesiastical system with the existing arrangement of rural landholding.

For these and other reasons psychic insecurity became the keynote of the new middle-class outlook. It still is. The only remedy for this insecurity of the middle class seemed to it to be the accumulation of more possessions that could be a demonstration to the world of the individual’s importance and power. In this way, for the middle class, the general goal of medieval man to seek future salvation in the hereafter was secularized to an effort to seek future security in this world by acquisition of wealth and its accompanying power and social prestige. But the social prestige from wealth was most available among fellow bourgeoisie, rather than among nobles or peasants. Thus the opinions of one’s fellow bourgeoisie, by wealth and by conformity to bourgeois values, became the motivating drives of the middle classes, creating what has been called the “acquisitive society.”

In that society prudence, discretion, conformity, moderation (except in acquisition), decorum, frugality, became the marks of a sound man. Credit became more important than intrinsic personal qualities, and credit was based on the appearances of things, especially the appearances of the external material accessories of life. The facts of a man’s personal qualities—such as kindness, affection, thoughtfulness, generosity, personal insight, and such, were increasingly irrelevant or even adverse to the middle-class evaluation of a man. Instead, the middle-class evaluation rested rather on nonpersonal attributes and on external accessories. Where personal qualities were admired, they were those that contributed to acquisition (often qualities opposed to the established values of the Christian outlook, such as love, charity, generosity, gentleness, or unselfishness). These middle-class qualities included decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy, and insatiable ambition.

As the middle classes and their commercialization of all human relationships spread through Western society in the centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth, they largely modified and, to some extent, reversed the values of Western society earlier. In some cases, the old values, such as future preference or self-discipline, remained, but were redirected. Future preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim, and became secularized. Self-discipline ceased to seek spirituality by restraining sensuality, and instead sought material acquisition. In general, the new middle-class outlook had a considerable religious basis, but it was the religion of the medieval heresies and of puritanism rather than the religion of Roman Christianity.

This complex outlook that we call middle class or bourgeois is, of course, the chief basis of our world today. Western society is the richest and most powerful society that has ever existed largely because it has been impelled forward along these lines, beyond the rational degree necessary to satisfy human needs, by the irrational drive for achievement in terms of material ambitions. To be sure, Western society always had other kinds of people, and the majority of the people in Western society probably had other outlooks and values, but it was middle-class urgency that pushed modern developments in the direction they took. There were always in our society dreamers and truth-seekers and tinkerers. They, as poets, scientists, and engineers, thought up innovations which the middle classes adopted and exploited if they seemed likely to be profit-producing. Middle-class self-discipline and future preference provided the savings and investment without which any innovation—no matter how appealing in theory—would be set aside and neglected. But the innovations that could attract middle-class approval (and exploitation) were the ones that made our world today so different from the world of our grandparents and ancestors.

This middle-class character was imposed most strongly on the United States. In order to identify it and to discuss a very complex pattern of outlooks and values, we shall try to summarize it. At its basis is psychic insecurity founded on lack of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable material acquisition. From this flowed a large number of attributes of which we shall list only five: future preference, self-discipline, social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and a general emphasis on externalized, impersonal values.