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

Cultural Diffusion in Western Civilization

We have said that the culture of a civilization is created in its core area originally and moves outward into peripheral areas which thus become part of the civilization. This movement of cultural elements is called “diffusion” by students of the subject. It is noteworthy that material elements of a culture, such as tools, weapons, vehicles, and such, diffuse more readily and thus more rapidly than do the nonmaterial elements such as ideas, art forms, religious outlook, or patterns of social behavior. For this reason the peripheral portions of a civilization (such as Assyria in Mesopotamian Civilization, Rome or Spain in Classical Civilization, and the United States or Australia in Western Civilization) tend to have a somewhat cruder and more material culture than the core area of the same civilization.

Material elements of a culture also diffuse beyond the boundaries of a civilization into other societies, and do so much more readily than the nonmaterial elements of the culture. For this reason the nonmaterial and spiritual elements of a culture are what give it its distinctive character rather than its tools and weapons which can be so easily exported to entirely different societies. Thus, the distinctive character of Western Civilization rests on its Christian heritage, its scientific outlook, its humanitarian elements, and its distinctive point of view in regard to the rights of the individual and respect for women rather than in such material things as firearms, tractors, plumbing fixtures, or skyscrapers, all of which are exportable commodities.

The export of material elements in a culture, across its peripheral areas and beyond, to the peoples of totally different societies has strange results. As elements of material culture move from core to periphery inside a civilization, they tend, in the long run, to strengthen the periphery at the expense of the core because the core is more hampered in the use of material innovations by the strength of past vested interests and because the core devotes a much greater part of its wealth and energy to nonmaterial culture. Thus, such aspects of the Industrial Revolution as automobiles and radios are European rather than American inventions, but have been developed and utilized to a far greater extent in America because this area was not hampered in their use by surviving elements of feudalism, of church domination, of rigid class distinctions (for example, in education), or by widespread attention to music, poetry, art, or religion such as we find in Europe. A similar contrast can be seen in Classical Civilization between Greek and Roman or in Mesopotamian Civilization between Sumerian and Assyrian or in Mayan Civilization between Mayan and Aztec.

The diffusion of culture elements beyond the boundaries of one society into the culture of another society presents quite a different case. The boundaries between societies present relatively little hindrance to the diffusion of material elements, and relatively greater hindrance to the diffusion of nonmaterial elements. Indeed, it is this fact which determines the boundary of the society, for, if the nonmaterial elements also diffused, the new area into which they flowed would be a peripheral portion of the old society rather than a part of a quite different society.

The diffusion of material elements from one society to another has a complex effect on the importing society. In the short run it is usually benefited by the importation, but in the long run it is frequently disorganized and weakened. When white men first came to North America, material elements from Western Civilization spread rapidly among the different Indian tribes. The Plains Indians, for example, were weak and impoverished before 1543, but in that year the horse began to diffuse northward from the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century the Plains Indians were raised to a much higher standard of living (because of ability to hunt buffalo from horseback) and were immensely strengthened in their ability to resist Americans coming westward across the continent. In the meantime, the trans-Appalachian Indians who had been very powerful in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries began to receive firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually whiskey from the French and later the English by way of the St. Lawrence. These greatly weakened the woods Indians of the trans-Appalachian area and ultimately weakened the Plains Indians of the trans-Mississippi area, because measles and whiskey were devastating and demoralizing and because the use of traps and guns by certain tribes made them dependent on whites for supplies at the same time that they allowed them to put great physical pressure on the more remote tribes which had not yet received guns or traps. Any united front of reds against whites was impossible, and the Indians were disrupted, demoralized, and destroyed. In general, importation of an element of material culture from one society to another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it is (a) productive, (b) can be made within the society itself, and (c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing society without demoralizing it. The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon so many other societies rests on its ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability to destroy them in a material sense with firearms.

When one society is destroyed by the impact of another society, the people are left in a debris of cultural elements derived from their own shattered culture as well as from the invading culture. These elements generally provide the instruments for fulfilling the material needs of these people, but they cannot be organized into a functioning society because of the lack of an ideology and spiritual cohesive. Such people either perish or are incorporated as individuals and small groups into some other culture, whose ideology they adopt for themselves and, above all, for their children. In some cases, however, the people left with the debris of a shattered culture are able to reintegrate the cultural elements into a new society and a new culture. They are able to do this because they obtain a new nonmaterial culture and thus a new ideology and morale which serve as a cohesive for the scattered elements of past culture they have at hand. Such a new ideology may be imported or may be indigenous, but in either case it becomes sufficiently integrated with the necessary elements of material culture to form a functioning whole and thus a new society. It is by some such process as this that all new societies, and thus all new civilizations, have been born. In this way, Classical Civilization was born from the wreckage of Cretan Civilization in the period 1150 B.C.—900 B.C., and Western Civilization was born from the wreckage of Classical Civilization in the period A.D. 350—700. It is possible that new civilizations may be born in the debris from the civilizations wrecked by Western Civilization on the fringes of Asia. In this wreckage is debris from Islamic, Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese civilizations. It would appear at the present time that new civilizations may be in the throes of birth in Japan, possibly in China, less likely in India, and dubiously in Turkey or Indonesia. The birth of a powerful civilization at any or several of these points would be of primary significance in world history, since it would serve as a counterbalance to the expansion of Soviet Civilization on the land mass of Eurasia.

Turning from a hypothetical future to a historical past, we can trace the diffusion of cultural elements within Western Civilization from its core area across peripheral areas and outward to other societies. Some of these elements are sufficiently important to command a more detailed examination.