XII
LAW, FREEDOM, AND HUMAN ACTION
The understanding of history, like other forms of human evaluation, has its fashions. They range all the way from the view that men are creatures of environment and circumstance to the view that everything is possible to them. Neither of these views can be sustained by evidence. In fact, they are usually so formulated that it is hard to know what would constitute evidence for them. Nonetheless, they have important bearings on the way in which specific problems are approached.
The attitude that man’s future is already determined, that the shape of things to come is now settled and cannot be escaped, makes for a slighting of the concrete problems of choice that face us at every turn. On the other hand, the attitude that man can storm the heavens at any historic occasion, that all he needs is a good will or a strong one, leads to a disregard of the limiting conditions of intelligent action. To-day the first of these general attitudes is very much in evidence among the opinion makers of the Western world. The wave of the future is described as a kind of predetermined fatality that not only will transform our economy but will destroy the last refuges of democratic culture.[1] The drift toward totalitarian political controls is accepted or bemoaned as a natural consequence of the development of our economy and as an inescapable consequence of total war. Those who scoffed at economic determinism during the heyday of capitalism are now become converts to its chief dogma, namely, that the character of a given economic system can determine one, and only one, political and cultural pattern. Although they were able to conceive of capitalism and many political variants, socialism to them seems simply to be what Hitter and Stalin have made of it.
Widespread attitudes and beliefs of this kind have their
- ↑ “Like a log on the brink of Niagara Falls we are impelled by unforeseen and irresistible socio-cultural currents, helplessly drifting from one crisis and catastrophe to another.” Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age, p. 130, New York, 1941. See also Cultural and Social Dynamics, vol. 4, p. 768. A similar mystical view of social fatality is presented in the more influential works of Spengler and Toynbee.
