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

The more recent form of this attack on future preference has appeared in the existentialist novel and the theater of the absurd. Existentialism, by its belief that reality and life consist only of the specific, concrete personal experience of a given place and moment, ignores the context of each event and thus isolates it. But an event without context has no cause, meaning, or consequence; it is absurd, as anything is which has no relationship to any context. And such an event, with neither past nor future, can have no connection with tradition or with future preference. This point of view came to saturate twentieth-century literature so that the original rejection of future preference was expanded into total rejection of time, which was portrayed as simply a mechanism for enslaving man and depriving him of the opportunity to experience life. The writings of Thomas Wolfe and, on a higher level, of the early Dos Passos, were devoted to this theme. The bourgeois time clock became a tomb or prison that alienated man from life and left him a cipher, like the appropriately named Mr. Zero in Elmer Rice’s play The Adding Machine (1923).

A similar attack was made on self-discipline. The philosophic basis for this attack was found in an oversimplified Freudianism that regarded all suppression of human impulse as leading to frustration and psychic distortions that made subsequent life unattainable. Thus novel after novel or play after play portrayed the wickedness of the suppression of good, healthy, natural impulse and the salutary consequences of self-indulgence, especially in sex. Adultery and other manifestations of undisciplined sexuality were described in increasingly clinical detail and were generally associated with excessive drinking or other evasions of personal responsibility, as in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises or in John Steinbeck’s love affair with personal irresponsibility in Cannery Row or Tortilla Flat. The total rejection of middle-class values, including time, self-discipline, and material achievement, in favor of a cult of personal violence was to be found in a multitude of literary works from James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler to the more recent antics of James Bond. The result has been a total reversal of middle-class values by presenting as interesting or admirable simple negation of these values by aimless, shiftless, and totally irresponsible people.

A similar reversal of values has flooded the market with novels filled with pointless clinical descriptions, presented in obscene language and in fictional form, of swamps of perversions ranging from homosexuality, incest, sadism, and masochism, to cannibalism, necrophilia, and coprophagia. These performances, as the critic Edmund Fuller has said, represent not so much a loss of values as a loss of any conception of the nature of man. Instead of seeing man the way the tradition of the Greeks and of the West regarded him, as a creature midway between animal and God, “a little lower than the angels,” and thus capable of an infinite variety of experience, these twentieth-century writers have completed the revolt against the middle classes by moving downward from the late nineteenth century’s view of man as simply a higher animal to their own view of man as lower than any animal would naturally descend. From this has emerged the Puritan view of man (but without the Puritan view of God) as a creature of total depravity in a deterministic universe without hope of any redemption.

This point of view, which, in the period 1550-1650, justified despotism in a Puritan context, now may be used, with petty-bourgeois support, to justify a new despotism to preserve, by force instead of conviction, petty-bourgeois values in a system of compulsory conformity. George Orwell’s 1984 has given us the picture of this system as Hitler’s Germany showed us its practical operation. But in view of the present upsurge of nonbourgeois social groups and social pressures, this possibility becomes decreasingly likely, and Barry Goldwater’s defeat in the presidential election of 1964 moved the possibility so far into the future that the steady change in social conditions makes it remote indeed.

The destruction of the middle classes by the destruction of the middle-class outlook was brought about to a much greater degree by internal than by external forces. And the most significant of these influences have been operating within the middle-class family. One of the most obvious of these has been the growing affluence of American society, which removed the pressure of want from the childbearing process. The child who grows up in affluence is more difficult to instill with the frustrations and drives that were so basic in the middle-class outlook. For generations, even in fairly rich families, this indoctrination had continued because of continued emphasis on thrift and restraints on consumption. By 1937 the world depression showed that the basic economic problems were not saving and investment, but distribution and consumption. Thus there appeared a growing readiness to consume, spurred on by new sales techniques, installment selling, and the extension of credit from the productive side to the consumption side of the economic process. As a result, an entirely new phenomenon appeared in middle-class families, the practice of living up to, or even beyond, their incomes—an unthinkable scandal in any nineteenth-century bourgeois family. One incentive in this direction was the increased emphasis, within the middle-class ideology, upon the elements of status and ostentatious display of wealth as status symbols rather than on the elements of frugality and prudence. Thus affluence weakened both future preference and self-denying self-discipline training.

Somewhat related to this was the influence of the depression of 1929-1933. The generation that was entering manhood at that time (having been born in the period 1905-1915) felt that their efforts to fulfill their middle-class ambitions had involved them in intensive hardships and suffering, such as working while going to college, doing without leisure, cultural expansion, and travel, and by the 1950’s these were determined that their children must never have it as hard as they had had it. They rarely saw that their efforts to make things easy for their children in the 1950’s as a reaction against the hardships they had suffered themselves in the 1930’s were removing from their children’s training process the difficulties that had helped to make them achieving men and successful middle-class persons and that their efforts to do this were weakening the moral fiber of their children.

Another element in this process was a change in the educational philosophy of America and a somewhat similar change in the country’s ideas on the whole process of child training. Early generations had continued to cling to the vestiges of the Puritan outlook to the degree that they insisted that children must be trained under strict discipline, including corporal punishment. This seventeenth-century idea, by 1920, was being replaced in American family ideology by an idea of the nineteenth century that child maturation is an innate process not subject to modification by outside training. In educational theory this erroneous idea went back to the Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), which idealized the state of nature as equivalent to the Garden of Eden, and believed that education must consist in leaving a youth completely free so that his innate goodness could emerge and reveal itself. This idea was developed, intensified, and given a pseudoscientific foundation by advances in biology and genetics in the late nineteenth century. By 1910 or so, childrearing and educational theories had accepted the idea that man was a biological organism, like any animal, that his personality was a consequence of hereditary traits, and that each child had within him a rigid assortment of inherited talents and a natural rate of maturation in the development of these talents. These ideas were incorporated in a series of slogans of which two were: “Every child is different,” and “He’ll do it when he’s ready.”