Verzamelde werken. Deel 7. Geschiedwetenschap. Hedendaagsche cultuur

Verzameld werk VII

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Conditions for a recovery of civilization^*

In the Spring of 1935 I tried to make up a brief account of the general situation and the outlook for Western civilization¹. I called it a diagnosis, because it seemed to me undeniable that we were confronted with a serious distemper of social life. Misgivings about the solidity of our civilization had then less generally spread than they have now. Warning signs of possible downfall or decay were less conspicuous than they have become since. The political order, as it had been established after the great war, though far from reassuring, was on the whole still undisturbed. Italy had not yet started her campaign in Abyssinia, the fire in Spain was still smouldering, the Rhineland had not yet been remilitarized, Central Europe was chaffing but outwardly quiet, and Russia seemed on the way to regain her place in the European system. But for anybody looking beyond the outward appearance of political conditions all the symptoms of cultural deterioration and threatening decay were as easily recognizable as they are now. Leaving aside economical and social problems and considering only the mental situation of our Western world, the outlook seemed by no means cheerful. First of all, a survey of intellectual conditions could not fail to leave the impression of a general weakening of the average power of judgment in the individual and in the masses. The age of technical achievement and universal education, instead of effecting the high degree of mental progress once expected of it, had brought the rather disquieting result of a decline of the critical spirit which once had made possible a society based on scientific knowledge. Shallowness of thought and dissipation of mental energy seemed to have invaded all classes everywhere.

Moreover, the intellectual principle itself, as one of the main directives of life, had in many parts been forsaken for systems of philosophy extolling life in its crude state above thinking. Moral standards had been deliberately dropped in ever wider circles, either by conviction or by fashion, without being replaced by any new principle in life.

If now, after five years, we ask ourselves, whether the prospect for civilization has brightened, a negative answer will seem almost inevitable. The ailments have not been cured and could not have been.

* The Fortnightly, Vol. CXLVII (new series), April 1940, p. 390-400.

1 In the Shadow of To-morrow, English edition, Heinemann, London 1936. [Verz. Werken VII, p 313 vg.]

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Their effects, in the shape of follies, inhumanities, waste of energy and the like, have grown ten times worse than they were, manifesting themselves in a succession of acts of violence and perfidy that has culminated in the outbreak of the new war. If for the moment cultural preoccupations worry us less than they did before, it is simply because now the all-important political issue crowds out concerns of a more theoretical kind and absorbs all our faculties. Perhaps it is not exclusively the state of war which is responsible for this absorption of our mind by political questions. This evergrowing concentration on the political is itself to be regarded as a symptom of our cultural disease. Society at large and the human individual personally have less and less time and attention to spare for pursuits of life outside the political and economical sphere. The importance of the political seems so overwhelming that we are apt to forget that politics and economics together only form part of that nether domain of human activity which the Greek called the acquisitive art. Now if we still agree that the acquisitive life does not mean civilization, at least not the whole of it, there is no need for pointing out that the absorption of mental faculties by the political and economic purposes of society raises grave fears as to the healthy state of our civilization. In a paper which should have been read in 1938 before an audience in Vienna, if Vienna had remained Austrian¹, I ventured to call this process the sliding-down of civilization into the political, das Abgleiten der Kultur in das Politische. Politics, however important and unavoidable, are always a secondary function of human life. They can never be either the essence or the ultimate pursuit of a civilization. Their aims are limited, their views restricted, their results provisional, their means clumsy and inefficient, and their preponderance merely a ‘cursed plight’.

If it be granted that for the recovery of civilization we want something more than the adjustment of international disputes, we can now proceed to ask ourselves, whether there are any signs of a coming betterment to be detected. Let us suppose a general peace concluded on the best terms we can imagine for the near future. This would mean: Law and order restored, as far as that goes, safety against aggression more or less guaranteed, for the smaller units of political society as well as for the large ones, a regular practice of diplomatic communication in terms of decent behaviour taken up again, the possi-

1 Der Mensch und die Kultur, Schriftenreihe ‘Ausblicke’, Bermann-Fischer Verlag, Stockholm 1938. [Verz. Werken VII, p. 442 vg.]

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bility of world trade reopened, the danger of a submersion of human culture by despotism and the systematic enslaving of fellow-creatures dispelled. If these conditions were fulfilled, would then the road be free for civilization to resume its upward course? Five years ago doubts about the future of civilization were still so rare that the possibility of its down-fall rather than of survival was in question. To-day it is the possibility of redress which seems doubtful. In the present article we can hardly do more than to point out some grave obstacles standing in the way of recovery of a healthy state of civilization. We might call these obstacles Idola, after Bacon's fashion, sources of error in judgment and action, impeding a favourable development of human faculties. But before we come to these general obstacles we have first to allude to some extremely unpleasant facts which await us in the near future as a legacy of the present war. Part of the world will be mentally rotten to the core as the result of the systematic heaping-up ofnonsense and falsehood which sticks to civilization like a crust of decomposition not to be removed either by reason or education. Whole generations will have been spoilt by the teaching of absurd and malicious doctrines and the training in sterile occupations. When the dismal work of goalers, spies, denouncers and slave-drivers comes to an end, a host of these elements will still remain, a burden to the social life and civilization of their native communities, a pest to their surroundings and a lasting hindrance to the revaluation of culture. Nobody can as yet foresee how the very urgent task of clearing the ground of these poisonous weeds will be handled. But it seems safe to say that only those nations and groups which have escaped the extremes of mental infection can furnish a starting-point for the process of recovery and renascence.

Among the general obstacles referred to above surely the most essential is a deep-lying habit common to the whole of modern mankind, viz., the glorification of size and quantity. Ever since the human mind began to lose hold of the old Aristotelian system of measuring the world by quality the opposite tendency set in of over-estimating the importance of quantity. Modern science was built up on quantitative analysis. It revealed dimensions and distances in the universe challenging our imagination of infinity. Technology learnt to accumulate masses of energy unthinkable before. Politics through the boundless extension of the means and methods of exercising power became the victim of its own limitless possibilities of destructive action. It was forgotten in the meantime that the lasting values of civilization have

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always sprung up in very restricted circumstances of power and output, and that the big State as such never added a single one to them. The idol of bigness once set up continues to devour us. This over-emphasis on size and quantity pervades our social thinking of to-day to such a degree that by this alone the way back to real civilization seems badly blocked.

The next obstacle to be mentioned here is of a subtler character. I am inclined to call it modern man's inaccessibility to persuasion. Perhaps former ages were not much better than ours in this respect. All the same, as a feature of social life it is very striking just now. On the face of it it is in contradiction to what we should be allowed to expect. Man is supposed to be a reasonable being. If he really were, his mind when holding some opinion should yield to such arguments as proved its untenableness. But in actual fact it seldom shows itself willing or capable to do so, even on scientific matters, not to speak of political or confessional opinions. It is quite probable that in some of the earlier periods in history the power of the logical argument to convince a man of being wrong was much greater than it is now. The Greeks attached a great importance to the art of persuading other men. We all have heard about Persuasion sitting on the lips of Pericles. Persuasion was the Sophist's professional art. The whole Platonic dialogue would lose its sense without a certain amount of susceptibility to persuasion by argument. The same holds good of later epochs of a markedly intellectualist type, e.g., those of the wars of religion, and of rationalism. Conversions between the Catholic and the Protestant side were always frequent. They presuppose a susceptibility to conviction which to-day would seem almost entirely lost. Has there ever been a Fascist or a Communist who allowed himself to be cured by having it expounded to him that his premises were wrong?

This imperviousness of modern man to reason is the more surprising because universal education ought to have moulded him into a flexible thinking and doubting being. In a talk about the increasing rigidity of mind among the younger generations M. Paul Valéry put in the remark: ‘Mais Monsieur, le doute se perd’.

Instead of that pale but venerable goddess called Peitho, Persuasion, we have now Propaganda. Propaganda is the art of making other people believe what you do not believe yourself. Opinions are prescribed, prepared and administered to the masses like medicine in a giant clinic. It is questionable whether the mental attitude of the masses still

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deserves the name of an opinion and whether it would not be better described as a simple reflex. Anyhow its inflexibility and perversion will constitute a very serious hindrance to the restoration of a free and living mode of civilization.

It will seem contradictory, if, after having indicated inaccessibility to reason and argument as a dangerous state of modern man, causing excessive and persistent distortions of opinion, we now go on to call our next item on the list of obstacles by the name of shallowness and feebleness of convictions and opinions. The one seems to exclude the other. The fanatical clinging to parties and programmes and catchwords and rallying cries all over the world, the grim consistency in carrying-out tenets of the most inhuman kind, would seem to speak of passionate strength in holding to the opinions once adopted. Two historical instances from the recent past will suffice to show this expectation to be unfounded. The history of Europe knows two epochs rightly called age of the martyrs, in which men and women willingly died for ideas they believed in, because they represented for them perfect and eternal truth. One is the age of early Christianity, the other that of the splitting of the Latin Church in the sixteenth century. We moderns, whatever vindication the future may have in store again for the Christian faith, mostly prefer to speak of ideologies rather than of confessions. An ideology is a more or less consistent system of some often rather crude and simplistic ideas serving as a spiritual basis in the strife for personal or public welfare and power. Such an ideology is supposed to be held with all the strength of conviction of which the man or the group is capable, even to the point of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. In actual fact the ideologies most fervently adhered to have a very weak persuasive power and are easily surrendered. The world is very forgetful. Only twenty-five years ago it saw one of the mightiest ideologies crashing down in ruins. Socialism had grown and grown ever more imposingly. During more than half a century it had preached universal brotherhood of the workers all over the world. The worker has no country, Marx taught. Proletarians of all countries, unite. Socialists took pride in being scornfully called Vaterlandslose Gesellen, and remained decidedly anti-nationalistic to the last, that is to say to August 1, 1914, when Socialism suddenly fell flat and its followers rushed to arms for the different countries at war. It was not the cause that had proved empty, but the ideology.

The second instance of the shallowness of modern ideologies is so

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fresh in our memory that it is hardly necessary to recall it. Two powerful States and nations stand facing and opposing one another as the champions of two fiercely proclaimed doctrinal systems of policy and economy, two Weltanschauungen. One of them especially aspires to world-wide ideals of earthly bliss and perfection. Suddenly the two join hands, forgetting not only the purport of their conflicting ideologies but also the heaps of invective and abuse they had until the last moment been slinging at each other. The one keeps true to its monstrous theory of national domination, the other, hitherto the champion of a universal cause and of a creed of humanity and peace, shamelessly reveals itself as a conquering power of the most vulgar type. The amazing and ominous thing about this is not the fact that such political reversals happen but that the nations involved suffer the doctrines, for years preached to them as a gospel, and the mutual hate and contempt, artificially infused in to them, suddenly to be forsaken and wiped out. The wholesale renunciations of all that authority had always held up as the highest truth demanding fanatical adherence, must be hard to swallow for individuals of some degree of culture. It is a paradoxical state of affairs. On the one hand these so-called ideologies are inflated with passion and delusion. They would seem to fill the mind to the bursting-point. On the other hand they can be pricked by the simplest practical circumstance of the moment and fall down. Evidently these ideologies are not the sort of thing the early Christian or the Protestant and Catholic martyrs of the sixteenth century died for.

But, it will be asked, do not people die for these ideologies in thousands? No doubt, but it would be rash to infer that the nations are dying for the several ideologies professed by their leaders. It is their country they are dying for. Here is the awful tragedy of modern war. Leviathan State, having fettered and paralysed civilization, is swallowing up all it can get hold of: the minds, the hearts, the lives of men, no matter what conception of cosmos or society may stand behind the furious combat of the parties.

There is still another grave obstacle which is liable to prevent cultural resurrection, the growing heterogeneity of the cultural ideal and of culture itself within the range of Western civilization. A really uniform Western civilization never existed, and could not exist. Horizontally according to national and geographical lines, and vertically according to classes and groups, our hemisphere has always presented that rich and fine pattern of as many cultural units as there were

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countries and nations. For many centuries the general type of Western civilization was conditioned by the Christian religion. After its hold on the minds as the dominating factor of social life slackened, there still remained for some time, say from about 1700 to 1850, a common aspiration towards an ideal of universal civilization based on freedom, peace, tolerance, prosperity, humanity and education. The force which challenged the universalism of liberal ideals was Socialism. It shattered the liberal illusion by proclaiming the victory of the working man's cause the only way to the fulfilment of the promised bliss. But in so doing it not only maintained but even exalted the ideal of a uniform, or at least homogeneous world-civilization. Up to 1914 nobody could suspect that, instead of the day of reckoning coming near, an opposite current would set in, leading to the splitting of the ideal of homogeneous culture itself.

After 1918 the world was supposed to be safe for democracy, except for the danger of bolshevism. Meanwhile hyper-nationalism had begun to spread. It appeared first in a form that appealed to the sound instincts of those pursuing an efficacious policy, viz., Italian fascism, then in that of German national-socialism, deeply tinged with the rancour of the lost war and rendered unsound from the beginning by the agelong inferiority-complex of the German nation. Both these forms soon developed a tendency to hem in national culture within the borderlines of the State. They imposed culture in a special, regularized form, and by coercive measures. They extolled primeval national self-glorification and vainglory and they were able to impose themselves on their peoples only because it was the half-educated masses who were the masters now. One powerful nation after another set up an ideal of a self-sufficient and separate civilization, renouncing and often abusing others who wished to maintain the older values, and virtually isolating themselves form the domain of a world-community. Standards of opinion and conduct, strange, unbelievable and sometimes disgusting to the world at large, became officially approved and prescribed doctrines at the other side of some European frontier. Even the measure of sanity is no longer identical in all countries.

It is clear that the mutual decrying of standpoints, systems and doctrines must lead to a helpless confusion of ethical and rational concepts in the common man's brain. His ethical equipment nowadays is poor enough, as it is. It is all very well to do away with ethics on philosophical grounds. It is easy enough to deny morality as a force or goodness

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and veracity as universal values. Unfortunately it is not so easy to deny immorality, lying and fraud because their presence is too manifest. Nobody does, as a matter of fact. Is it not curious that just those sectarians of a moral system based on class interest and nothing else show the largest command of moral indignation and appropriate invective against their enemies? Has the history of religions already taken notice of the following fact? - Repentance is perhaps the most highly spiritual of all Christian virtues. It has always been so strictly linked up with the Christian faith, that the looser Christendom of the newer ages had almost forgotten it. Who rediscovered it? Who invented the new type of public repentance exhibited ad nauseam in their big political trials of recent years? Soviet-repentance, the newest article in our spiritual treasury!

The case for civilization would seem to stand rather badly. Large parts of the world and numbers of individuals do not yet present signs of the wholesale contagion, which does not mean they are immune from it. Can we detect signs that dispel the alarming visions of impending decay? Is it possible to describe a probable basis for regeneration and restoration of our civilization? We premised before that peace, law and order by themselves will not be enough. Peace, law and order will not work, unless they rest on the basis of a renewed sense of human culture. The most indispensable, though still only preliminary condition for such a renewal will be the restoration of political good faith. It is a platitude to repeat it, yet all the same it remains an all-important truth. No orderly intercourse between states and nations will ever be possible without a certain minimum of reliability universally acknowledged and generally practised. Even the ordinary minimum commonly exhibited in trade would be an enormous gain. Everybody admits that in trade you cannot do without some form of mutual credit. Credit has become so worn in our common speech that we hardly ever realize that it states most explicitly one of the highest ethical values of human life. Literally credit means: he trusts, he has faith in some other person. It expresses confidence, good faith, i.e., a certain sacrifice, a surrender of your own absolute safety. Thus one of the most primitive forms of commerce, the so-called Silent trade, reposes on a sort of balance between confidence and distrust. Is it not strange that in the political field there are many who not only reject the necessity of keeping faith, but also firmly believe that politics should be possible and even better without it?

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Diplomacy, the inevitable instrument of politics, is often regarded as a play, and rightly so. We are used to expect from it tricks and devices and secrecies and dissimulations, all common in playing too. Still, we expect one thing more from our partner than skill alone: fair play, which means keeping to the rules. Now fair play again presupposes and includes mutual trust, good faith. If these latter are the essential and indispensable conditions of playing, how much more indispensable even must they be to this painfully bad performance called the life of nations!

So let us return to world-wide international good faith, once for all! Who begins? - Here we meet once more with an obstacle of the gravest kind. Mutual confidence between two parties requires first of all a common ground for them to stand upon. Each should be convinced, if not of his reasons for keeping faith, then at least of his duty to do so, Does such a common ground between the states and the nations exist in the present world? It is doubtful, or more than that. The ultimate ground for a mutual conviction of moral obligation can only reside in the metaphysical order of things. Unfortunately our machines and all that have made us so extremely stupid that most of us are likely to forget how we are linked up with the metaphysical at every step we take, at every thought we form. In face of the metaphysical, even if you should have no other word for it than simply death, all political concerns dwindle into nothingness. A serious and active restoration of Christianity or of another of the universal high forms of religion would be able to create the common ground and to effect the state of mind indispensable to real culture. Anybody may answer for himself, whether such a restoration seems near at hand.

If it is not, where are the regenerative forces to be looked for which may save civilization? Are there any signs of the acquisitive life loosening its grip on human collectivities or individuals? Or may we count as a healing factor the impending general reduction of consumption, which Professor Carr sees as an inevitable result of the crisis through which we are passing¹? However healthy it may prove, it will not be enough as long as it only affects material life. There must be a reduction of cultural output and consumption as well. In my book, In the Shadow of Tomorrow, I suggested the urgent need of a certain restriction of culture, a voluntary renunciation by the human mind of all the superfluous, useless, trivial and insipid things that weigh down on pre-

1 E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 305.

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sent day civilization. Civilization always tends to grow luxurious, and thereby to decay. Ours has certainly become exuberant in nearly every respect. Honour, valour, firmness, resignation and many other good things that we stand in need of, have always been the product of some state of civilization in which sobriety and simplicity reigned throughout, as they did in the best days of Arab, Japanese or Roman culture.

If a civilized world cannot subsist without retrieving some of these values it is difficult to see other resources or promises of recovery but in our will to regain them. Whether we shall succeed will depend on the number of peoples and of persons all over the earth who remain anxious to select their own culture, and wish to keep together in some sort of mental aristocracy, of whatever kind it may be. Probably the greater part of the world is not willing to pass from democracy to demonocracy, bad pun and worse Greek though this may be. Let it be excused, because most truly the choice now seems to lie between pandemonium and pandemium, if this latter substantive may be excused too. It might serve to denote a world-wide society in which all peoples or nations, while keeping their previous individuality and particularity, would be able to live together held by a common bond of mutual and universal obligation, firm enough to preclude war and loose enough to guarantee freedom.