The New Republic/Volume 1/Number 1/The War and the Future of Civilization
The War and the Future of Civilization
THE defense alleged by all the nations at present involved in the European war hinges upon the necessity of their continued existence to insure the future of civilization. Nor can we claim with a shadow of truth that the insistence upon this point is more vigorous at Berlin that it is in London or in Paris. We shall surely be lacking in fairness if we question the sincerity with which all these European nations tenaciously cling to the notion that they are indispensable to the happiness of future generations. We shall, however, be quite as lacking in candor and intelligence if we fail to see that each of these nations assumes a knowledge of the ultimate end and aim of civilization, coupled to a clear insight into the process by which that ultimate aim must be attained, to an ability to see the chain of connection binding the present to this dim and ultimate future, and, of course, to an analysis of the present situation so complete and accurate as to distinguish the elements necessary to insure the future.
We find it personally a little difficult to concede to any of the nations the gift of prophecy and an ability to read the writing in the stars. Can we be absolutely positive that the future of the human race, let us say, depends upon the ruling of Asia, Africa, or South America by any European nation? In the face of the fact that every religious creed which has shown any strength in history has come out of Asia, can we believe that upon the direction of the occidental nations depends the spiritual progress of the human race? We find in Europe at present two different notions of administration; one called parliamentary government, and the other bureaucratic government. The one works admirably in England, and rather badly elsewhere; the other is astonishingly efficient in Germany, and less conspicuously useful in other countries. Shall we not really need the powers of a seventh son to tell which of these is more essential to the world at large? We find in England a notion of individual liberty which, on the whole, allows the individual to do pretty much anything he wants to until some other individual sues him in court. The government is to arbitrate between the two, but is to direct neither. In Germany the government promulgates sets of rules regarding the conduct of individuals toward each other, and compels individuals to observe them. The citizens of both nations claim that the results are as nearly ideal as anything is likely to be in this imperfect world.
If we look into the past, we shall find it difficult to concede to any generation the ability to tell in advance what will benefit or will injure civilization. The downfall of political Greece, which seemed to many contemporaries certain to destroy Greek culture forever, was in fact the instrumentality by which Greek culture was spread throughout the civilized world and made almost universal. Scarcely a Roman citizen could have been found in the fourth century, A. D., who would not have bewailed the invasions of the "barbarous" Germans as the death of civilization. Indeed, educated men were pretty positive for nearly a thousand years that the Barbarians had destroyed civilization. Of this the Renaissance had no doubt in whatever, and named the centuries subsequent to the fall of Rome and previous to their own time as the dark ages, when the light of civilization had been quenched. It is an astonishingly different notion of the Barbarian invasions which we find in the pages of ardent Teutonists like Lamprecht or Chamberlain. They are quire convinced that those centuries saw the dawn of civilization. In 1630 Gustavus Adolphus arrived in Germany for the purpose of saving civilization, which he identified with Protestantism, yet he succeeded (as most authorities now agreed) in wrecking and desolating Germany, and he was certainly one of the chief authors of her poverty and weakness in the two succeeding centuries. Nor do we see at present eye to eye with the savior of civilization in 1815. Louis XVIII and the Duke of Wellington now occupy quite unenviable positions as blind reactionaries in the path of progress, while for those masters of foreign politics, George Canning and Metternich, whose policies and speeches impressed their contemporaries as utterances divinely inspired, we have scarcely a respectful word. Yet in 1815 there was probably no individual whom his contemporaries would have considered sane who did not breathe fervent prayers of thanks in the belief that the future of civilization was now assured, having passed into the hands of its saviors.
Do we not also learn from the history of the past that it is almost impossible for contemporaries to judge correctly in deciding whether resistance to aggression is really a safeguard for the future or merely an attempt of the obsolete and outworn to retard progress? Few men would now shed tears upon the remains of political Athens; still fewer bemoan the sowing of salt upon the ruins of Carthage. A cold and unsympathetic reception awaits the advocate of the usefulness of imperial Rome of the fourth century A.D. There can be absolutely no doubt that the monasteries rendered indispensable service to the cause of civilization in the early middle ages, not only by the preservation of art and letters, but by the preservation of technical skill in many mechanical trades. But in the sixteenth century the monastic orders had no friends sufficiently ardent and powerful to ward off destruction, and there are not many students to-day who are inclined to question the general gain for civilization by the breaking of their power.
Surely if in the whole range of history we come upon a country which believed its own efforts indispensable for the progress of the race, it was Renaissance Italy, and it was more nearly right than contemporaries usually have been; but the political power of Italy was then, and remained until the nineteenth century, a shadow. Few countries in the whole history of the race have achieved such wholehearted and unanimous admiration as France possessed in the eighteenth century. Its very name was synonymous with what was to contemporaries civilization itself; its loss or destruction would have seemed irreparable. Yet in 1815 practically the whole civilized world congratulated itself upon the downfall, nay, upon the practical destruction of France, and upon the consequent saving of civilization.
If there is anything in the tenet of the relativity of truth, we have not now and are not likely to have any notion of what is really indispensable to the future of civilization, because we have not and cannot have a definite notion of what the future of civilization is. It ought to be sufficient for us to remember that northwestern Europe, which we now look upon as the seat of civilization, was, at the birth of Christ, scarcely known to be upon the globe, and was in all honesty believed by scientists to be the place where the world came to an end and space began. And in the history of the race and of the world two thousand years are but a moment. In reality we are dealing to-day with essentially different notions of civilization, of its object, of the methods necessary to attain it, of the hands which will perform the work. It is the difference of opinion about the future which lies at the root of the present difficulty, and in that opinion we shall find, as in a looking-glass, the images of the nations as they successively step forward. They differ in their national character, their ideas of morality, their ideas of the future because of their past. Their national aims and ambitions are the result of the history of Europe, the result of their deep hatreds, antagonisms, and rivalries during the fifteen hundred years since their ancestors poured down from the forests of the North upon the provinces of decadent Rome. From such a long and tangled past have come deep-rooted ideas, intense passions, strong beliefs, determinations to prevail. It is with these we have to deal.
Somehow, in some way of which we know nothing, the future civilization will emerge, as in the past, from the clash of these ideals and ambitions. The past makes it clear that civilization will be safeguarded, whatever happens. The future no more depends upon a single race or a single nation than a nation depends upon a single individual. When we talk of worlds, of aeons of time, of the human race itself and the future of its civilization, nations, like individuals, become pygmies and almost disappear from sight. We cannot tell in advance what the future is going to be, we cannot tell in advance which of us will render the service which will be seen a thousand years hence to have been important; but surely we can all be pardoned for believing that we have some part to play in it. The real problem with which we have to deal is not that of providing for civilization's future, but that of providing for civilization's future, but that of providing for the immediate future of those of us who are now alive.