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

Those who have this outlook are middle class; those who lack it are something else. Thus middle-class status is a matter of outlook and not a matter of occupation or status. There can be middle-class clergy or teachers or scientists. Indeed, in the United States, most of these three groups are middle class, although their theoretical devotion to truth rather than to profit, or to others rather than to self, might seem to imply that they should not be middle class. And, indeed, they should not be; for the urge to seek truth or to help others are not really compatible with the middle-class values. But in our culture the latter have been so influential and pervasive, and the economic power of middle-class leaders has been so great, that many people whose occupations, on the face of it, should make them other than middle class, none the less have adopted major parts of the middle-class outlook and seek material success in religion or teaching or science.

The middle-class outlook, born in the Netherlands and northern Italy and other places in the medieval period, has been passed on by being inculcated to children as the proper attitude for them to emulate. It could pass on from generation to generation, and from century to century, as long as parents continued to believe it themselves and disciplined their children to accept it. The minority of children who did not accept it were “disowned” and fell out of the middle classes. What is even more important, they were, until recently, pitied and rejected by their families. In this way, those who accepted the outlook marched on in the steadily swelling ranks of the triumphant middle classes. Until the twentieth century.

For more than half a century, from before World War I, the middle-class outlook has been under relentless attack, often by its most ardent members, who heedlessly, and unknowingly, have undermined and destroyed many of the basic social customs that preserved it through earlier generations. Many of these changes occurred from changes in childrear-ing practices, and many arose from the very success of the middle-class way of life, which achieved material affluence that tended to weaken the older emphasis on self-discipline, saving, future preference, and the rest of it.

One of the chief changes, fundamental to the survival of the middle-class outlook, was a change in our society’s basic conception of human nature. This had two parts to it. The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training. The “goodness” of human nature was based on the belief that it was a kind of weaker copy of God’s nature, lacking many of God’s qualities (in degree rather than in kind), but none the less perfectible, and perfectible largely by its own efforts with God’s guidance. The Christian view of the universe as a hierarchy of beings, with man about two-thirds of the way up, saw these beings, especially man, as fundamentally free creatures able to move, at their own volition toward God or away from him, and guided or attracted in the correct direction for realization of their potentialities by God’s presence at the top of the Universe, a presence which, like the north magnetic pole, attracted men, as compasses, upward toward fuller realization and knowledge of God who was the fulfillment of all good. Thus the effort came from free men, the guidance came from God’s grace, and ultimately the motive power came from God’s attractiveness.

In this Western point of view, evil and sin were negative qualities; they arose from the absence of good, not from the presence of evil. Thus sin was the failure to do the right thing, not doing the wrong thing (except indirectly and secondarily). In this view the devil, Lucifer, was not the epitome of positive wickedness, but was one of the highest of the angels, close to God in his rational nature, who fell because he failed to keep his perspective and believed that he was as good as God.

In this Christian outlook, the chief task was to train men so that they would use their intrinsic freedom to do the right thing by following God’s guidance.

Opposed to this Western view of the world and the nature of man, there was, from the beginning, another opposed view of both which received its most explicit formulation by the Persian Zoroaster in the seventh century B.C. and came into the Western tradition as a minor, heretical, theme. It came in through the Persian influence on the Hebrews, especially during the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, in the sixth century B.C., and it came in, more fully, through the Greek rationalist tradition from Pythagoras to Plato. This latter tradition encircled the early Christian religion, giving rise to many of the controversies that were settled in the early Church councils and continuing on in the many heresies that extended through history from the Arians, the Manichaeans, Luther, Calvin, and the Jansenists.

The chief avenue by which these ideas, which were constantly rejected by the endless discussions formulating the doctrine of the West, continued to survive was through the influence of St. Augustine. From this dissident minority point of view came seventeenth-century Puritanism. The general distinction of this point of view from Zoroaster to William Golding (in Lord of the Flies ) is that the world and the flesh are positive evils and that man, in at least this physical part of his nature, is essentially evil. As a consequence he must be disciplined totally to prevent him from destroying himself and the world. In this view the devil is a force, or being, of positive malevolence, and man, by himself, is incapable of any good and is, accordingly, not free. He can be saved in eternity by God’s grace alone, and he can get through this temporal world only by being subjected to a regime of total despotism. The direction and nature of the despotism is not regarded as important, since the really important thing is that man’s innate destructiveness be controlled.

Nothing could be more sharply contrasted than these two points of view, the orthodox and the puritanical. The contrasts can be summed up thus:

Orthodox

Puritan

Evil is absence of Good.

Man is basically good.

Man is free.

Man can contribute to his salvation by good works.

Self-discipline is necessary to

guide or direct.

Truth is found from experience and revelation, interpreted by tradition.

Evil is positive entity.

Man is basically evil.

Man is a slave of his nature.

Man can be saved only by God.

Discipline must be external and total.

Truth is found by rational deduction from revelation.

The puritan point of view, which had been struggling to take over Western Civilization for its first thousand years or more, almost did so in the seventeenth century. It was represented to varying degrees in the work and agitations of Luther, Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, Cornelius Jansen (Augustinus, 1640), Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), Blaise Pascal, and others. In general this point of view believed that the truth was to be found by rational deduction from a few basic revealed truths, in the way that Euclid’s geometry and Descartes’s analytical geometry were based on rational deduction from a few self-evident axioms. The result was a largely deterministic human situation, in sharp contrast with the orthodox point of view, still represented in the Anglican and Roman churches, which saw man as largely free in a universe whose rules were to be found most readily by tradition and the general consensus. The Puritan point of view tended to support political despotism and to seek a one-class uniform society, while the older view put much greater emphasis on traditional pluralism and saw society as a unity of diversities. The newer idea led directly to mercantilism, which regarded political-economic life as a struggle to the death in a world where there was not sufficient wealth or space for different groups. To them wealth was limited to a fixed amount in the world as a whole, and one man’s gain was someone else’s loss. That meant that the basic struggles of this world were irreconcilable and must be fought to a finish. This was part of the Puritan belief that nature was evil and that a state of nature was a jungle of violent conflicts.