Chapter 3. Europe's Shift to the Twentieth Century

While Europe's traits were diffusing outward to the non-European world, Europe was also undergoing profound changes and facing difficult choices at home. These choices were associated with drastic changes, in some cases we might say reversals, of Europe's point of view. These changes may be examined under eight headings. The nineteenth century was marked by (2) belief in the innate goodness of man; (2) secularism; (3) belief in progress; (4) liberalism; (5) capitalism; (6) faith in science; (7) democracy; (8) nationalism. In general, these eight factors went along together in the nineteenth century. They were generally regarded as being compatible with one another; the friends of one were generally the friends of the others; and the enemies of one were generally the enemies of the rest. Metternich and De Maistre were generally opposed to all eight; Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill were generally in favor of all eight.

The belief in the innate goodness of man had its roots in the eighteenth century when it appeared to many that man was born good and free but was everywhere distorted, corrupted, and enslaved by bad institutions and conventions. As Rousseau said, "Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains." Thus arose the belief in the "noble savage," the romantic nostalgia for nature and for the simple nobility and honesty of the inhabitants of a faraway land. If only man could be freed, they felt, freed from the corruption of society and its artificial conventions, freed from the burden of property, of the state, of the clergy, and of the rules of matrimony, then man, it seemed clear, could rise to heights undreamed of before—could, indeed, become a kind of superman, practically a god. It was this spirit which set loose the French Revolution. It was this spirit which prompted the outburst of self-reliance and optimism so characteristic of the whole period from 1770 to 1914.

Obviously, if man is innately good and needs but to be freed from social restrictions, he is capable of tremendous achievements in this world of time, and does not need to postpone his hopes of personal salvation into eternity. Obviously, if man is a god-like creature whose ungod-like actions are due only to the frustrations of social conventions, there is no need to worry about service to God or devotion to any other worldly end. Man can accomplish most by service to himself and devotion to the goals of this world. Thus came the triumph of secularism.

Closely related to these nineteenth century beliefs that human nature is good, that society is bad, and that optimism and secularism were reasonable attitudes were certain theories about the nature of evil.

To the nineteenth century mind evil, or sin, was a negative conception. It merely indicated a lack or, at most, a distortion of good. Any idea of sin or evil as a malignant positive force opposed to good, and capable of existing by its own nature, was completely lacking in the typical nineteenth-century mind. To such a mind the only evil was frustration and the only sin, repression.

Just as the negative idea of the nature of evil flowed from the belief that human nature was good, so the idea of liberalism flowed from the belief that society was bad. For, if society was bad, the state, which was the organized coercive power of society, was doubly bad, and if man was good, he should be freed, above all, from the coercive power of the state. Liberalism was the crop which emerged from this soil. In its broadest aspect liberalism believed that men should be freed from coercive power as completely as possible. In its narrowest aspect liberalism believed that the economic activities of man should be freed completely from "state interference." This latter belief, summed up in the battle-cry "No government in business," was commonly called "laissez-faire." Liberalism, which included laissez-faire, was a wider term because it would have freed men from the coercive power of any church, army, or other institution, and would have left to society little power beyond that required to prevent the strong from physically oppressing the weak.

From either aspect liberalism was based on an almost universally accepted nineteenth-century superstition known as the "community of interests." This strange, and unexamined, belief held that there really existed, in the long run, a community of interests between the members of a society. It maintained that, in the long run, what was good for one member of society was good for all and that what was bad for one was had for all. But it went much further than this. The theory of the "community of interests" believed that there did exist a possible social pattern in which each member of society would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved by a process of adjustment so that each person could fall into that place in the pattern to which his innate abilities entitled him. This implied two corollaries which the nineteenth century was prepared to accept: (1) that human abilities are innate and can only be distorted or suppressed by social discipline and (2) that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest. All these together form the doctrine of the "community of interests," a doctrine which maintained that if each individual does what seems best for himself the result, in the long run, will be best for society as a whole.

Closely related to the idea of the "community of interests" were two other beliefs of the nineteenth century: the belief in progress and in democracy. The average man of 1880 was convinced that he was the culmination of a long process of inevitable progress which had been going on for untold millennia and which would continue indefinitely into the future. This belief in progress was so fixed that it tended to regard progress as both inevitable and automatic. Out of the struggles and conflicts of the universe better things were constantly emerging, and the wishes or plans of the objects themselves had little to do with the process.

The idea of democracy was also accepted as inevitable, although not always as desirable, for the nineteenth century could not completely submerge a lingering feeling that rule by the best or rule by the strong would be better than rule by the majority. But the facts of political development made rule by the majority unavoidable, and it came to he accepted, at least in western Europe, especially since it was compatible with liberalism and with the community of interests.

Liberalism, community of interests, and the belief in progress led almost inevitably to the practice and theory of capitalism. Capitalism was an economic system in which the motivating force was the desire for private profit as determined in a price system. Such a system, it was felt, by seeking the aggrandization of profits for each individual, would give unprecedented economic progress under liberalism and in accord with the community of interests. In the nineteenth century this system, in association with the unprecedented advance of natural science, had given rise to industrialism (that is, power production) and urbanism (that is, city life), both of which were regarded as inevitable concomitants of progress by most people, but with the greatest suspicion by a persistent and vocal minority.

The nineteenth century was also an age of science. By this term we mean the belief that the universe obeyed rational laws which could be found by observation and could be used to control it. This belief was closely connected with the optimism of the period, with its belief in inevitable progress, and with secularism. The latter appeared as a tendency toward materialism. This could be defined as the belief that all reality is ultimately explicable in terms of the physical and chemical laws which apply to temporal matter.

The last attribute of the nineteenth century is by no means the least: nationalism. It was the great age of nationalism, a movement which has been discussed in many lengthy and inconclusive books but which can be defined for our purposes as "a movement for political unity with those with whom we believe we are akin." As such, nationalism in the nineteenth century had a dynamic force which worked in two directions. On the one side, it served to bind persons of the same nationality together into a tight, emotionally satisfying, unit. On the other side, it served to divide persons of different nationality into antagonistic groups, often to the injury of their real mutual political, economic, or cultural advantages. Thus, in the period to which we refer, nationalism sometimes acted as a cohesive force, creating a united Germany and a united Italy out of a medley of distinct political units. But sometimes, on the other hand, nationalism acted as a disruptive force within such dynastic states as the Habsburg Empire or the Ottoman Empire, splitting these great states into a number of distinctive political units.

These characteristics of the nineteenth century have been so largely modified in the twentieth century that it might appear, at first glance, as if the latter were nothing more than the opposite of the former. This is not completely accurate, but there can be no doubt that most of these characteristics have been drastically modified in the twentieth century. This change has arisen from a series of shattering experiences which have profoundly disturbed patterns of behavior and of belief, of social organizations and human hopes. Of these shattering experiences the chief were the trauma of the First World War, the long-drawn-out agony of the world depression, and the unprecedented violence of destruction of the Second World War. Of these three, the First World War was undoubtedly the most important. To a people who believed in the innate goodness of man, in inevitable progress, in the community of interests, and in evil as merely the absence of good, the First World War, with its millions of persons dead and its billions of dollars wasted, was a blow so terrible as to be beyond human ability to comprehend. As a matter of fact, no real success was achieved in comprehending it. The people of the day regarded it as a temporary and inexplicable aberration to be ended as soon as possible and forgotten as soon as ended. Accordingly, men were almost unanimous, in 1919, in their determination to restore the world of 1913. This effort was a failure. After ten years of effort to conceal the new reality of social life by a facade painted to look like 1913, the facts burst through the pretense, and men were forced, willingly or not, to face the grim reality of the twentieth century. The events which destroyed the pretty dream world of 1919-1929 were the stock-market crash, the world depression, the world financial crisis, and ultimately the martial clamor of rearmament and aggression. Thus depression and war forced men to realize that the old world of the nineteenth century had passed forever, and made them seek to create a new world in accordance with the facts of present-day conditions. This new world, the child of the period of 1914-1945, assumed its recognizable form only as the first half of the century drew to a close.

In contrast with the nineteenth-century belief that human nature is innately good and that society is corrupting, the twentieth century came to believe that human nature is, if not innately bad, at least capable of being very evil. Left to himself, it seems today, man falls very easily to the level of the jungle or even lower, and this result can be prevented only by training and the coercive power of society. Thus, man is capable of great evil, but society can prevent this. Along with this change from good men and bad society to bad men and good society has appeared a reaction from optimism to pessimism and from secularism to religion. At the same time the view that evil is merely the absence of good has been replaced with the idea that evil is a very positive force which must 'ne resisted and overcome. The horrors of Hitler's concentration camps and of Stalin's slave-labor units are chiefly responsible for this change.

Associated with these changes are a number of others. The belief that human abilities are innate and should be left free from social duress in order to display themselves has been replaced by the idea that human abilities are the result of social training and must be directed to socially acceptable ends. Thus liberalism and laissez-faire are to be replaced, apparently, by social discipline and planning. The community of interests which would appear if men were merely left to pursue their own desires has been replaced by the idea of the welfare community, which must be created by conscious organizing action. The belief in progress has been replaced by the fear of social retrogression or even human annihilation. The old march of democracy now yields to the insidious advance of authoritarianism, and the individual capitalism of the profit motive seems about to be replaced by the state capitalism of the welfare economy. Science, on all sides, is challenged by mysticisms, some of which march under the banner of science itself; urbanism has passed its peak and is replaced by suburbanism or even "flight to the country"; and nationalism finds its patriotic appeal challenged by appeals to much wider groups of class, ideological, or continental scope.

We have already given some attention to the fashion in which a number of western-European innovations, such as industrialism and the demographic explosion, diffused outward to the peripheral non-European world at such different rates of speed that they arrived in Asia in quite a different order from that in which they had left western Europe. The same phenomenon can be seen within Western Civilization in regard to the nineteenth-century characteristics of Europe which we have enumerated. For example, nationalism was already evident in England at the time of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; it raged through France in the period after 1789; it reached Germany and Italy only after 1815, became a potent force in Russia and the Balkans toward the end of the nineteenth century, and was noticeable in China, India, and Indonesia, and even Negro Africa, only in the twentieth century. Somewhat similar patterns of diffusion can be found in regard to the spread of democracy, of parliamentary government, of liberalism, and of secularism. The rule, however, is not so general or so simple as it appears at first glance. The exceptions and the complications appear more numerous as we approach the twentieth century. Even earlier it was evident that the arrival of the sovereign state did not follow this pattern, enlightened despotism and the growth of supreme public authority appearing in Germany, and even in Italy, before it appeared in France. Universal free education also appeared in central Europe before it appeared in a western country like England. Socialism also is a product of central Europe rather than of western Europe, and moved from the former to the latter only in the fifth decade of the twentieth century. These exceptions to the general rule about the eastward movement of modern historical developments have various explanations. Some of these are obvious, but others are very complicated. As an example of such a complication we might mention that in Western Europe nationalism, industrialism, liberalism, and democracy were generally reached in this order. But in Germany they all appeared about the same time. To the Germans it appeared that they could achieve nationalism and industrialism (both of which they wanted) more rapidly and more successfully if they sacrificed liberalism and democracy. Thus, in Germany nationalism was achieved in an undemocratic way, by "blood and iron," as Bismarck put it, while industrialism was achieved under state auspices rather than through liberalism. This selection of elements and the resulting playing off of elements against one another was possible in more peripheral areas only because these areas had the earlier experience of western Europe to study, copy, avoid, or modify. Sometimes they had to modify these traits as they developed. This can be seen from the following considerations. When the Industrial Revolution began in England and France, these countries were able to raise the necessary capital for new factories because they already had the Agricultural Revolution and because, as the earliest producers of industrial goods, they made excessive profits which could he used to provide capital. But in Germany and in Russia, capital was much more difficult to find, because they obtained the Industrial Revolution later, when they had to compete with England and France, and could not earn such large profits and also because they did not already have an established Agricultural Revolution on which to build their Industrial Revolution. Accordingly, while western Europe, with plenty of capital and cheap, democratic weapons, could finance its industrialization with liberalism and democracy, central and eastern Europe had difficulty financing industrialism, and there the process was delayed to a period when cheap and simple democratic weapons were being replaced by expensive and complicated weapons. This meant that the capital for railroads and factories had to be raised with government assistance; liberalism waned; rising nationalism encouraged this tendency; and the undemocratic nature of existing weapons made it clear that both liberalism and democracy were living a most precarious existence.

As a consequence of situations such as this, some of the traits which arose in western Europe in the nineteenth century moved outward to more peripheral areas of Europe and Asia with great difficulty and for only a brief period. Among these less sturdy traits of western Europe's great century we might mention liberalism, democracy, the parliamentary system, optimism, and the belief in inevitable progress. These were, we might say, flowers of such delicate nature that they could not survive any extended period of stormy weather. That the twentieth century subjected them to long periods of very stormy weather is clear when we consider that it brought a world economic depression sandwiched between two world wars.