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

“The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents’ ambitions or a conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers’ prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn independence, with a vivid imagination and desire to explore fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to read the unrequired books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a rebel, may not conform to their stereotype, and may not get the top grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the highest level in the standard multiple choice admissions tests, which may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind.”

These remarks bring us close to one of the major problems in American culture today. We need a culture that will produce people eager to do things, but we need even more a culture that will make it possible to decide what to do. This is the old division of means and goals. Decisions about goals require values, meaning, context, perspective. They can be set, even tentatively and approximately, only by people who have some inkling of the whole picture. The middle-class culture of our past ignored the whole picture and destroyed our ability to see it by its emphasis on specialization. Just as mass production came to be based on specialization, so human preparation for making decisions about goals also became based on specialization. The free elective system in higher education was associated with choice of a major field of specialization, and all the talk about liberal arts, outside electives, general education, or required distribution were largely futile. They were futile because no general view of the whole picture could be made simply by attaching together a number of specialist views of narrow fields, for the simple reason that each specialist field looks entirely different, presenting different problems and requiring different techniques, when it is placed in the general picture. This simple fact still has not been realized in those circles that talk most about broadening outlooks. This was clearly shown in the influential Harvard Report on General Education (1945). As one reviewer of this document said, “It cost $40,000 to produce and a better answer could have been found by buying one of the books of Sir Richard Livingstone for $2.75.” This remark is equally mistaken on the opposite side, a fact that shows that the solution can be found only by all parties freeing themselves from their preconceptions by getting as familiar as possible with the diverse special areas in a skeptical way.

Means are almost as difficult as ends. In fact, personal responsibility, self-discipline, some sense of time value and future preference, and, above all, an ability to distinguish what is important from what is merely necessary must be found, simply as valuable attributes of human beings as human beings. Neither America nor the world can be saved by a wholesale re-creation of African social realities here in consequence of our rejection of the middle-class outlook that brought us this far. Here we must discriminate. We have an achieving society because we have an achieving outlook in our society. And that achieving outlook has been, over the last few centuries, the middle-class outlook. But there are other achieving outlooks. An achieving society could be constructed on the aristocratic outlook, on the scientific outlook (pursuit of truth), on a religious basis, and probably on a large number of other outlooks. There is no need to go back to the middle-class outlook, which really killed itself by successfully achieving what it set out to do. But parts of it we need, and above all we need an achieving outlook. It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought of the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system would itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us.

We must have an achieving society and an achieving outlook. These will inevitably contain parts of the middle-class outlook, but these parts will unquestionably be fitted together to serve quite different purposes. Future preference and self-discipline were originally necessary in our society so that people would restrict consumption and accumulate savings that could be spent to provide investment in capital equipment. Now we no longer need these qualities for this purpose, since flows of income in our economy provide these on an institutional basis, but we still need these qualities so that young people will be willing to undergo the years of hard work and training that will prepare them to work in our complex technological society. We must get away from the older crass materialism and egocentric selfish individualism, and pick up some of the younger generation’s concern for the community and their fellowmen, The unconventionality of this younger group may make them more able to provide the new outlook and innovation every society requires, but they cannot do this if they lack imagination or perspective.

Above all, we must bring meaning back into human experience. This, like establishing an achieving outlook, can be done by going backward in our Western tradition to the period before we had any bourgeois outlook. For our society had both meaning and purpose long before it had any middle class. Indeed, these are intrinsic elements in our society. In fact, the middle-class outlook obtained its meaning and purpose from the society where it grew up; it did not give meaning and purpose to the society. And capitalism, along with the middle-class outlook, became meaningless and purposeless when it so absorbed men’s time and energies that men lost touch with the meaning and purpose of the society in which capitalism was a brief and partial aspect. But as a consequence of the influence of capitalism and of the middle classes, the tradition was broken, and the link between the meaning and purpose of our society as it was before the middle-class revolution is no longer connected with the search for meaning and purpose by the new post-middle-class generation. This can be seen even in those groups like the Christian clergy who insisted that they were still clinging to the basic Christian tradition of our society. They were doing no such thing, but instead were usually offering us meaningless verbiage or unrealistic abstractions that had little to do with our desire to experience and live in a Christian way here and now.

Unfortunately, very few people, even highly regarded experts on the subject, have any very clear idea of what is the tradition of the West or how it is based on the fundamental need of Western Civilization to reconcile its intellectual outlook with the basic facts of the Christian experience. The reality of the world, time, and the flesh forced, bit by bit, abandonment of the Greek rationalistic dualism (as in Plato) that opposed spirit and matter and made knowledge exclusively a concern of the former, achieved by internal illumination. This point of view that gave final absolute knowledge (and thus justified despotism) was replaced in the period 1100-1350 by the medieval point of view that derived knowledge from the tentative and partial information obtained through sensual experience from which man derived conceptual universal that fitted the real individual cases encountered in human experience only approximately. Aquinas, who said, “Nothing exists in the intelligence which was not first present in the senses,” also said, “We cannot shift from the ideal to the actual.” On this epistemological basis was established the root foundations of both modern science and modern liberalism, with a very considerable boost to both from the Franciscan nominalists of the century following Aquinas.