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

British General Election of October 1964 was fought with new leaders on both sides.

A few weeks after the shift of government in London, a more significant change of government took place in Rome as part of a long-term shift to the Left in the Italian political balance. Essentially the dominant Christian-Democratic group broke free, to some extent, from its reactionary Right wing and from the need to seek support on the Right by detaching the Left-wing Socialists from their long and uncomfortable alliance with the Communists by bringing this group into the government and leaving the Communists almost completely isolated on the Left. Aldo Moro, political secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, became premier of the new arrangement in December 1963, with Pietro Nenni, of the Left-wing Socialists, as deputy premier. In theory the coalition rested on an agreement to seek to extend the benefits of the Italian prosperity boom to the less affluent workers’ groups who had been relatively neglected in the hysterical pursuit of profits by more affluent entrepreneurs under the preceding governments.

The Italian Cabinet shift was still in process when President Kennedy was assassinated by an unstable political fanatic in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. This, in view of the power and influence of the American Presidency, was the most significant governmental change for many years. After an unprecedented display of worldwide mourning, the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, of Texas, took control of the American Presidency’s global responsibilities and national obligations with only eleven months in which to establish his position as a candidate in the presidential election of 1964.

As a consequence of these changes, the removal from office of Khrushchev in October 1964, and the death that year of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been prime minister of India from the achievement of independence in 1947, the governments of all major countries except France and Red China underwent significant shifts of personnel in a period of about fifteen months. This gave rise to a “pause” in world history for almost all of 1963-1964, during which each country placed increased emphasis on its domestic problems, especially on the demands of its citizens for increased prosperity, civil rights, and social security. Since the same tendency became evident also in France and Red China where the previous leaders continued in power, the last two years covered by this book were years of hesitation, decreased world tension, and confused plans for future courses.

Conclusion

Tragedy and Hope? The tragedy of the period covered by this book is obvious, but the hope may seem dubious to many. Only the passage of time will show if the hope I seem to see in the future is actually there or is the result of misobservation and self-deception.

The historian has difficulty distinguishing the features of the present, and generally prefers to restrict his studies to the past, where the evidence is more freely available and where perspective helps him to interpret the evidence. Thus the historian speaks with decreasing assurance about the nature and significance of events as they approach his own day. The time covered by this book seems to this historian to fall into three periods: the nineteenth century from about 1814 to about 1895; the twentieth century, which did not begin until after World War II, perhaps as late as 1950; and a long period of transition from 1895 to 1950. The nature of our experiences in the first two of these periods is clear enough, while the character of the third, in which we have been for only half a generation, is much less clear.

A few things do seem evident, notably that the twentieth century now forming is utterly different from the nineteenth century and that the age of transition between the two was one of the most awful periods in all human history. Some, looking back on the nineteenth century across the horrors of the age of transition, may regard it with nostalgia or even envy. But the nineteenth century was, however hopeful in its general processes, a period of materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices. It was the working of these underlying evils that eventually destroyed the century’s hopeful qualities and emerged in all their nakedness to become dominant in 1914. Nothing is more revealing of the nature of the nineteenth century than the misguided complacency and optimism of 1913 and early 1914 and the misconceptions with which the world’s leaders went to war in August of 1914.

The events of the following thirty years, from 1914 to 1945, showed the real nature of the preceding generation, its ignorance, complacency, and false values. Two terrible wars sandwiching a world economic depression revealed man’s real inability to control his life by the nineteenth century’s techniques of laissez faire, materialism, competition, selfishness, nationalism, violence, and imperialism. These characteristics of late nineteenth-century life culminated in World War II in which more than 50 million persons, 23 million of them in uniform, the rest civilians, were killed, most of them by horrible deaths.

The hope of the twentieth century rests on its recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned and going back to other characteristics that our Western society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline. We now know fairly well how to control the increase in population, how to produce wealth and reduce poverty or disease; we may, in the near future, know how to postpone senility and death; it certainly should be clear to those who have their eyes open that violence, extermination, and despotism do not solve problems for anyone and that victory and conquest are delusions as long as they are merely physical and materialistic. Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.