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

Some of these ideas changed, others were retained, and a few were rearranged and modified in the following periods of the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, and scientific materialism. All three of these returned to the older idea that man and nature were essentially good, and to this restored belief in the Garden of Eden they joined a basically optimistic belief in man’s ability to deal with his problems and to guide his own destiny. Society and its conventions came to be regarded as evil, and the guidance of traditions was generally rejected by the late Enlightenment and the early Romantics, although the excesses of the French Revolution drove many of the later Romantics back to rely on history and traditions because of their growing feeling of the inadequacy of human reason. One large change in all three periods was the Community of Interests, which rejected mercantilism’s insistence on limited wealth and the basic incompatibility of interests for the more optimistic belief that all parties could somehow adjust their interests within a community in which all would benefit mutually. The application of Darwinism to human society changed this idea again, toward the end of the nineteenth century, and provided the ideological justification for the wars of extermination of Nazism and Fascism. Only after the middle of the twentieth century did a gradual reappearance of the old Christian ideas of love and charity modify this view, replacing it with the older idea that diverse human interests are basically reconcilable.

All this shifting of ideas, many of them unstated, or even unconscious, assumptions, and the gradual growth of affluence helped to destroy middle-class motivations and values. American society had been largely, but not entirely, middle class. Above the middle class, which dominated the country in the first half of the twentieth century, were a small group of aristocrats. Below were the petty bourgeoisie, who had middle-class aspirations, but were generally more insecure and often bitter because they did not obtain middle-class rewards. Below these two middle classes were two lower classes: the workers and the Lumpenproletariat or socially disorganized, who had very little in common with each other.

Outside this hierarchical structure of five groups in three classes (aristocrat, middle, and lower) were two other groupings that were not really part of the hierarchical structure. On the left were the intellectuals and on the right were the religious. These held in common the idea that the truth, to them, was more important than interests; but they differed greatly from the fact that the religious believed that they knew what the truth was, while the intellectuals were still seeking it.

This whole arrangement was much more like a planetary arrangement of social-economic groupings than it was like the middle-class vision of society as a ladder of opportunity. The ladder really included only the middle classes with the workers below. The planetary view, becoming increasingly widespread, saw the middle classes in the center with the other five surrounding these. Social movement was possible in circular as well as in vertical directions (as the older ladder view of society believed), so that sons of workers could rise into the middle classes or move right into the religious, left into the intelligentsia, or even fall downward into the declassed dregs. So too, in theory, the children (or more likely the grandchildren) of the upper middle class could move upward into the aristocracy, which could also be approached from the intellectuals or the religious.

Strangely enough, the non-middle classes had more characteristics in common with each other than they did with the middle classes in their midst. The chief reason for this was that all other groups had value systems different from the middle classes and, above all, placed no emphasis on display of material affluence as proof of social status. From this came a number of somewhat similar qualities and attitudes that often gave the non-middle-class groups more in common and easier social intercourse than any of them had with the middle classes. For example, all placed much more emphasis on real personal qualities and much less on such things as clothing, residence, academic background, or kind of transportation used (all of which were important in determining middle-class reactions to people). In a sense all were more sincere, personally more secure (not the Lumpenproletariat ), and less hypocritical than the middle class, and accordingly were much more inclined to judge any new acquaintance on his merits. Moreover, the middle classes, in order to provide their children with middle-class advantages, had few children, while the other groups placed little restriction on family size (except for some intellectuals). Thus aristocrats, religious, workers, the declassed, and many intellectuals had large families, while only the uppermost and most securely established middle-class families, as part of the transition to aristocracy, had larger families.

Ideas of morality also tended to set the middle classes off from most of the others. The latter tended to regard morality in terms of honesty and integrity of character, while the middle classes based it on actions, especially sexual actions. Even the religious based sin to some extent on purpose, attitude, and mental context of the act rather than on the act itself, and did not restrict morality as narrowly to sexual behavior as did the middle classes. However, the middle-class influence has been so pervasive in the modern world that many of the other groups fell under its influence to the extent that the word “morality,” by the early twentieth century, came to mean sex. The Jansenist influence in American Roman Catholicism, for example, is so strong that sins concerning sex are widely regarded by Catholics as the worst of sins, in spite of the fact that Catholic doctrine continues to regard pride as the worst sin and sexual sins as much less important (as Dante did). At any rate, sex was generally regarded with greater indulgence by aristocrats, workers, intellectuals, or the declassed than by the middle classes or the more puritanical religious.

In America, as elsewhere, aristocracy represents money and position grown old, and is organized in terms of families rather than of individuals. Traditionally it was made up of those whose families had had money, position, and social prestige for so long that they never had to think about these and, above all, never had to impress any other person with the fact that they had them. They accepted these attributes of family membership as a right and an obligation. Since they had no idea that these could be lost, they had a basic psychological security, similar to that of the religious and workers. Thus like these other two, they were self-assured, natural, but distant. Their manners were gracious but impersonal. Their chief characteristic was the assumption that their family position had obligations. This noblesse oblige led them to participate in school sports (even if they lacked obvious talent), to serve their university (usually a family tradition) in any helpful way (such as fund raising), to serve their church in a similar way, and to offer their services to their local community, their state, and their country as an obligation. They often scandalized their middle-class acquaintances by their unconventionality and social informality, greeting workers, recent immigrants, or even outcasts by their given names, arriving at evening meetings in tweeds, or traveling in cheap, small cars to formal weddings.

The kind of a car a person drove was, until very recently, one of the best guides to middle-class status, since a car to the middle classes was a status symbol, while to the other classes it was a means of getting somewhere. Oversized Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, and Lincoln Continentals are still middle-class cars, but in recent years, with the weakening of the middle-class outlook, almost anyone might be found driving a Volkswagen. Another good evidence of class may be seen in the treatment given to servants (or those who work in one’s home): the lower classes treat these as equals, the middle classes treat them as inferiors, while aristocrats treat them as equals or even superiors.