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

The Classical world had constantly fallen into intellectual error because it never solved the epistemological problem of the relationship between the theories and concepts in men’s minds and the individual objects of sensual experience. The medieval period made a detailed examination of this problem, but its answer was ignored when post-Renaissance thinkers broke the tradition in philosophy because they felt it necessary to break the tradition in religion. From Descartes onward, this epistemological problem was ignored or considered in a childish way, as if the medieval thinkers had never examined it. Today it remains as the great philosophic problem of our age. Irrational Activism, semanticism, and existentialism nourish because the present century has no answer to the epistemological problem. In fact, most contemporary thinkers do not even recognize that there is a problem. But Bergson’s rejection of intelligence and his advocacy of intuition was based, like the Irrational Activism whence it sprang, on recognition of the fact that the space-time continuum in which man generally operates is nonrational. The whole existential movement was based on the same idea.

Semanticism tried to solve the problem, in a similar fashion, by bringing the infinitely varied and dynamic quality of actuality into the human mind by insisting that the meaning of each word must follow the dynamics of the world by changing every time it is used. All these movements tried to reject logic and rationality from the human thinking process because they are not found in space-time actuality. But the tradition of the West, as clearly established in the Christian religion and in medieval philosophy, was that man must use rationality to the degree it is possible in handling a universe whose ultimate nature is well beyond man’s present rational capability to grasp. This is the conclusion that the success of the West in World War II forces the West and the world to recognize once again. And in recognizing it, we must return to the tradition, so carelessly discarded in the fifteen century, which had shown the relationship between thought and action.

Alfred Korzybski argued (in Science and Sanity ) that mental health depended on successful action and that successful action depended on an adequate relationship between the irrational nature of the objective world and the vision of the world that the actor has subjectively in his head. Korzybski’s solution, like most other thinkers over the last two generations, has been to bring the irrationality of the world into man’s thinking processes. This solution of the problem is now bankrupt, totally destroyed at Hiroshima and Berlin in 1945. The alternative solution lies in the tradition of the West. It must be found, and the link with our past must be restored so that the tradition may resume the process of growth that was interrupted so long ago.

Korzybski, Bergson, and the rest of them are quite correct—most of man’s experience takes place in an irrational actuality of space-time. But we now know that man must deal with his experience through subjective processes that are both rational and logical (using rules of thought explicitly understood by all concerned); and the necessary adjustments between the conclusions reached by thought and the confused irrationalities of experience must be made in the process of shifting from thought to action, and not in the thinking process itself. Only thus will the West achieve successful thought, successful action, and the sanity that is the link between these two.

As a result of this rupture of tradition, the thinkers of today are fumbling in an effort to find a meaning that will satisfy them. This is as true of the contemporary babbling philosophers as it is of the younger generation who fumblingly try to express Christ’s message of love and help without any apparent realization that Christ’s message is available in writing and that generations of thinkers debated its implications centuries ago. The meaning the present generation is seeking can be found in our own past. Part of it, concerned with loving and helping, can be found in Christ by going back to the age before his message was overwhelmed in ritualism and bureaucracy. Part of it can be found in the basic philosophic outlook of the West as seen in medieval philosophy and the scientific method that grew out of it.

The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act. This can be achieved only by a hierarchy that distinguishes what is necessary from what is important, as the medieval outlook did. But any modern explanation based on hierarchy must accept dynamicism as an all-pervasive element in the system, as the medieval hierarchy so signally failed to do. The effort of Teilhard de Chardin to do this has won enormous interest in recent years, but its impact has been much blunted by the fact that his presentation contained, in reciprocal relationship, a deficiency of courage and a surplus of deliberate ambiguity.

However, the real problem does not rest so much in theory as in practice. The real value of any society rests in its ability to develop mature and responsible individuals prepared to stand on their own feet, make decisions, and be prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions and actions without whining or self-justification. This was the ideal that the Christian tradition established long ago, and in consequence of its existence, our Western society, whatever its deficiencies, has done better than any other society that has ever existed. If it has done less well recently than earlier in its career (a disputable point of view), this weakness can be remedied only by some reform in its methods of childrearing that will increase its supply of mature and responsible adults.

Once this process had been established, the adults thus produced can be relied upon to adopt from our Western heritage of the past a modified ideology that will fit the needs of the present as well as the traditions of the past. And if Western culture can do that, either in America or in Europe, it need fear no enemies from within or from without.

European Ambiguities

The problems facing Europe cannot be presented in a simple outline such as we have offered for those of the United States. Europe is too diverse, on a national or even regional basis; its long history has left too many influential survivals as exceptions to any simple analysis; and its class lines are more complicated and much more rigid than in America. Nonetheless, it is probably true to say that America has passed Europe in the evolution of our Western Civilization and that Europeans in general are concerned with problems, notably the problems of material acquisition, which were dominant in the United States almost a generation ago. However, because of the diversity of Europe, any statements we make about this situation would almost certainly have more exceptions than confirming examples, in Europe as a whole.

The general picture we might draw is of a continent deprived, for at least one full generation (1914-1950), of political, economic, social, and psychological security; in consequence, that area came to regard these things as major aims in its personal behavior patterns. So many European families were deprived of even the necessary materials of living that they are today, to varying degrees, obsessed with the desire for these, now that it seems possible to get them. For this reason, the chief impression the visiting American brings back from Europe is one of grasping materialism and exaggerated individualism. This is a spirit akin to America of the 1920’s rather than of the 1950’s. It is found, with a variety of emphasis, among the peasants, the workers, and even the aristocracy, as well as among the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, where we expect it. It is combined with an antagonism between classes and groups that is rare in America (except among the petty bourgeoisie). The middle-class adolescent revolt is rarer and much harsher in Europe, shot through with elements of hatred, where in America it is shot through with elements of indiscriminate loving. And in Europe the selfishness and general bitchiness of middle-class girls is much greater than in the United States, probably because the stronger male-dominant tradition of Europe leaves them less freedom, less self-esteem, and lower personal evaluation. As an example of the diversity of Europe, we should say that this last remark is more true of southern Europe than of northern Europe, and largely untrue of England. In fact, most generalizations about Europe do not apply to England at all.