FULL VERSION

East Is West

THERE IS little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive or too transitory. Generally men are judged by their ability to produce--except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich. Then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

The struggle of socialism against capitalism is part of the historical rhythm in the concentration and dispersal of wealth. The capitalist, of course, has fulfilled a creative function in history: he has gathered the savings of the people into productive capital by the promise of dividends or interest; he has financed the mechanization of industry and agriculture, and the result has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history has never seen before.

He has argued that businessmen left relatively free from regulation can give the public a greater abundance of food, homes, comfort and leisure than has ever come from industries managed by politicians.

There is much truth in such claims today, but they do not explain why history so resounds with protests and revolts against the abuses of industrial mastery, price manipulation, business chicanery and irresponsible wealth. These abuses must be hoary with age, for there have been socialistic experiments in a dozen countries and centuries.

The longest-lasting regime of socialism known to history was set up by the Incas in what we now call Peru, at some time in the 13th century. Basing their power largely on popular belief that the earthly sovereign was the delegate of the Sun God, the Incas organized and directed all agriculture, labor and trade. A government census kept account of materials, individuals and income; professional "runners," using a remarkable system of roads, maintained the network of communication indispensable to such detailed rule over so large a territory. Every person was an employe of the state, and seems to have accepted this condition cheerfully as a promise of security and food. This system endured till the conquest of Peru by Pizarro in 1533. Why did modern socialism come first in a Russia, where capitalism was in its infancy and there were no large corporations to ease the transition to state control? Probably the Russian Revolution of 1917 succeeded because the Czarist government had been defeated and disgraced by war and bad management. The Russian economy had collapsed in chaos, the peasants were returning from the front carrying arms, and Lenin had been given safe conduct and bon voyage by the German government.

The Revolution took a communistic form because the new state was challenged by internal disorder and external attack; the people reacted as any nation will react under siege--it put aside all individual freedom until order and security could be restored. Perhaps communism survives through continued fear of war; given a generation of peace it would presumably be eroded by the nature of man.

Socialism in Russia is now restoring individualistic motives to give its system greater productive stimulus, and to allow its people more physical and intellectual liberty. Meanwhile, capitalism undergoes a process of limiting individualistic acquisition by semi-socialistic legislation and the redistribution of wealth through the "welfare state."

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

The Minority Rules

ALEXANDER POPE thought that only a fool would dispute over forms of government. History has a good word to say for all of them.

If we were to judge forms of government from their prevalence and duration in history, we should have to give the palm to monarchy. But monarchy has had a middling record. Its wars brought mankind as much evil as its continuity or "legitimacy" brought good.

The complexity of most contemporary states seems to break down any single mind that tries to master it. Hence, most governments have been oligarchies--ruled by a minority. It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for it can be seldom organized for united, specific action. If the majority of abilities is contained in a minority of men, minority government is as inevitable as the concentration of wealth. The majority can do no more than periodically throw out one minority and set up another.

Does history justify revolutions? In most instances the effects achieved by revolution would apparently have come about through the gradual compulsion of economic developments. The French Revolution replaced the landowning aristocracy with the business class as the ruling power, but a similar result occurred in 19th-century England without bloodshed or disturbing the public peace. To break sharply with the past is to court the madness that may follow the shock of sudden blows or mutilations. As the sanity of the individual lies in the continuity of his memories, so the sanity of the group lies in the continuity of its traditions.

Violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of land, but the natural inequality of men soon recreates an inequality of possessions and privileges. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character. The only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. But democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. Under its stimulus Athens and Rome became the most creative cities in history, and America in two centuries has provided abundance for an unprecedently large proportion of its population.

Democracy has now dedicated itself resolutely to the spread of education, and to the maintenance of public health. If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal.
Today in England and the United States, in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, in Switzerland and Canada, democracy is sounder than ever before. But if war continues to absorb it, if race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all. And a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.

The General Debates the Philosopher

IN THE last 3433 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war. We have acknowledged war as at present the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species. One war can now destroy the labor of centuries in building cities, creating art and developing habits of civilization. In apologetic consolation, war promotes science and technology, whose deadly inventions may later enlarge the material achievements of peace.

In every century the generals and the rulers (with rare exceptions) have smiled at the philosophers' timid dislike of war. In the military interpretation of history, war is the final arbiter, and is accepted as necessary by all but cowards and simpletons. What would have happened to our classical heritage if it had not been protected by arms against Mongol and Tartar invasions?

It is pitiful, says the general, that so many young men die in battle, but more of them die in automobile accidents than in war. Many of them riot and rot for lack of discipline; they need an outlet for their adventurousness. If they must die sooner or later, why not let them die for their country in the aura of glory?

Even a philosopher if he knows history will admit that a long peace may fatally weaken the martial muscles of a nation. In the present inadequacy of international law, a nation must be ready to defend itself at any moment. The Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.

It is clear (argues the general) that the United States must assume today the task that Great Britain performed so well in the 19th century--the protection of Western civilization from external danger. Communist governments have repeatedly proclaimed their resolve to destroy the independence of non-communist states. Is it not wiser to resist at once, to carry the war to the enemy, to fight on foreign soil, to sacrifice, if need be, a hundred thousand American lives and perhaps a million non-combatants, but to leave America free to live its own life in security and freedom? Is not such a farsighted policy full in accord with the lessons of history? The philosopher answers: Yes--and the devastating results will be in accord with history, except that thay will be multiplied in proportion to the unparalleled destructiveness of the weapons used. There is something greater than history. Somewhere, sometime, in the name of humanity, we must dare to apply the Golden Rule to nations.

The general smiles. "You have forgotten all the lessons of history," he says. "You have told us that man is a competitive animal, that his states must be like himself, and that natural selection now operates on an international plane. States will unite in basic cooperation only when they are in common attacked from without. Perhaps we are now restlessly moving toward that higher plateau of competition. We may make contact with ambitious species on other stars; soon thereafter there will be interplanetary war. Then, and only then, will we of this earth be one."

Will the Future Repeat the Past?

WHY IS IT that history is littered with the ruins of civilizations? Are there any regularities, in this process of growth and decay, which may enable us to predict from the course of past civilizations the future of our own?

Certain imaginative spirits have thought so, even to predicting the future in detail. Virgil announced that the whole universe will fall into a condition precisely the same as in some forgotten antiquity, and will then repeat, in every particular, all the events that had followed before. Nietzsche went insane with this vision of "eternal recurrence." There is nothing so foolish but what it can be found in philosophers.

History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may reasonably expect that in the future, new states will rise, old states subside, that new discoveries and errors will agitate the intellectual currents, that new generations will rebel against the old and pass from rebellion to conformity and reaction. But there is no certainty that the future will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure.

When a civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenge of change. But do civilizations die? Not quite.

Greek civilization is not really dead; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however long, could absorb it all. Homer's works are more widely known now than in his own day. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college. At this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the "dear delight' of philosophy. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities.

Nations die. Old regions grow arid, or suffer from change. Resilient man picks up his tools and his arts, and moves on, taking his memories with him. If education has deepened those memories, civilization migrates with him, and builds somewhere another home. Rome imported Greek civilization and transmitted it to Western Europe. America profited from European civilization and prepares to pass it on.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As life overrides death with reproduction, so an aging culture hands its patrimony down to its heirs across the years and the seas. Even as these lines are being written, commerce and print, wires and waves and invisible Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind.

The Richer Heritage

AGAINST this panorama of nations, morals, and religious rising and falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Since we have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends--the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars.

But if we take a long-range view and compare our modern existence, precarious, chaotic and murderous as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, violence and disease of primitive peoples, we do not come off quite forlorn. The lowliest strata in civilized states may still differ only slightly from the barbarians, but above them millions have reached mental and moral levels rarely found among primitive men.

If the prolongation of life indicates better control of the environment, then the tables of mortality proclaim the advance of man, for longevity in European and American whites has doubled in the last two centuries. Some time ago a convention of morticians discussed the danger threatening their industry from the increasing tardiness of men in keeping their rendezvous with death. If undertakers are miserable, progress is real.

In the debate between ancients and moderns it is not at all clear that the ancients carry off the prize. Shall we count it a trivial achievement that famine has been eliminated in modern states, and that one country can now grow enough food to overfeed itself and yet send hundreds of millions of bushels of wheat to nations in need? Are we ready to scuttle the science that has so diminished superstition and religious intolerance, or the technology that has spread food, home ownership, comfort, education and leisure beyond any precedent?

Some precious achievements have survived all the vicissitudes of rising and falling states: the making of fire and light, of the wheel and other basic tools; language, writing, art and song; agriculture, the family; social organization, morality and charity; and the use of teaching to transmit the lore of the family and race. These are the elements of civilization, and they are the connective tissue of human history.

If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing. Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew. If the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. So our finest contemporary achievement is our unprecedented expenditure of wealth and toil in the provision of higher education for all. We have raised the level and average of knowledge beyond any age in history.

None but a child will complain that our teachers have not yet eradicated the errors and superstitions of 10,000 years. The great experiment has just begun. The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo's, for it includes the Italian renaissance; richer than Voltaire's, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment. If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, but because we were born to a richer heritage.

History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors. It becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.

The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it. Let it be our pride that we may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.(#)

(last)@Copyright 1968 by W. & A. Durant

EPILOGUE

The essential fact is that man's major problems are not at all in the natural sciences but in such areas as race relations, labor relations, the control of organized power for social purposes, the establishment of the philosophical bases of life, the modernization of social and political structure, the coordination of efficiency with democracy--all the problems raised in man's adjustment to the scientific, social dynamic world in which he lives. Public health, for example, is not primarily a problem of learning more about disease in the strictly biological sense--it is primarily a problem in social science, a problem of putting effectively to work in the lives of men what is already known about medicine. At the technological level there is probably already enough known to give everybody a job with a full dinner pail. What is needed is not more physical science but better social organization. What is necessary is to force some of the medieval superstition out of social and political customs, and there is no sign that this will be done in the laboratories of physics and chemistry. Mere advance in these and similar sciences without concomitant solution of more important social, emotional, and intellectual problems can lead only to more misunderstanding, more social unrest, and consequently more war and revolution.
-- Dr Mortimer Graves/An unpublished memorandum