Civilization: A New History of the Western World Part 2

CIVILIZATION

A NEW HISTORY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

ROGER OSBORNE

PIMLICO      2007

PART 2

Prologue (cont)

More conventional historians tried to explain the upheavals in Europe by mapping the rise and decline of the world’s civilizations. Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, published in 1918, was followed in 1934 by the first of Arnold Toynbee’s multi-volume A Study of History. Both were inspired by the 19^th century belief that history was guided by universal laws. The historian’s task was to show how those laws applied to all civilizations.

By the early 20^th century a new barbarian force had arrived to confront western civilization – mass culture. In the 1920s and 1930s European intellectuals spoke and wrote despairingly of the end of civilization being brought about by the sheer numbers of the urban masses, and their execrable cultural taste and habits. Civilization could only be preserved by a small elite producing and appreciating works of art that were beyond the reach of the majority. Civilization became, in some eyes, the preserve of the few.

We might have expected that the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Stalinist Terror would have finished, once and for all, any idea of human progress and of the benign effects of civilization. In fact the opposite happened. The horrors of the Nazi era, while they made us ask what it meant to be human, gave a new impetus to the belief that humans could and must find their way to a better world. For a decade or two, desperate to believe in a world of good things and buoyed by the defeat of Nazism, westerners fell back on the old prescriptions.

• In choosing Civilisation as the title for his 1969 television series about European art, Kenneth Clark deliberately pointed attention away from war and genocide, and towards great artists and beautiful objects, as the true products of civilization.
• After the Second World War, when America assumed political leadership of the western world, civilization became a more democratic, less elitist concept.
• The two dominant ideas of civilization, the 19^th century ‘great tradition’, and the Freudian calming of the beast within, with its echoes of Christian theology, have remained with us at the beginning of the new century.

In the last few decades these concepts, and the beliefs that sustain them, have looked increasingly shaky. Our ways of studying the past have radically altered, and traditional ways of learning history, so brilliantly lampooned as long ago as 1930 by Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, have given way to a much more varied and richer approach to the past. We consume history with ever-increasing enthusiasm in books and films and on television and radio. But we do not want to be summarily told that Napoleon was good for France but bad for Europe, or that Stalin was a monster, or that Elizabeth I was a ‘great’ queen. We want to be given information, stories, documents, eye-witness accounts from the past and then make up our own minds. We know that events are never seen with an innocent eye, and that the historian’s preconceptions are the dominant influence on the way that history is told. Historians have responded by abandoning their pretence at objective dispassion; instead of just giving us the results, they are showing us how they work and are sharing their methods, their difficulties, their uncertainties and their enthusiasms. In this atmosphere, Kenneth Clark’s renewal of the tradition of ‘great men’ has lost credibility. What seemed a bold innovation in 1969 now looks like the last gasp of a patrician elite.

The fading of the old belief in the moral and intellectual superiority of Europeans has been given intellectual force by the emergence of what we might call environmental history. The American scientist and historian Jared Diamond has persuasively argued that geography, topography, climate, ocean currents and coastlines affect the development of different societies – not in some vague sense, but in ways that are open to investigation and measurement. In this analysis Europeans simply happened to live in a place that made them likely to develop technologies with which they could conquer the world.

If we distrust Freudian ideas about civilization, then how do we account for the brutality of the 20^th century wars that Freud explained with such apparent success? The theory of the ‘beast within’ gained great credence from the carnage of the First World War, but recent historians have developed a different approach to the psychology of warfare. John Keegan has argued that between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the outbreak of war in 1914, Europe came increasingly to resemble a vast military camp. There was no geopolitical reason for this, since in 1815 Europe looked forward to a long period of relative peace. However, nearly a century later: ‘… on the eve of the First World War, almost every fit European male of military age carried a soldier’s identity card among his personal papers telling him when and whereto report for duty in the event of general mobilization. At the beginning of July 1914 there were some 4 million Europeans actually in uniform; at the end of August there were 20 million, and many tens of thousands had already been killed.’

The military culture, which existed in parallel to civil society, has become ever more powerful and warfare an automatic response to political difficulties. Once the Great Powers went to war in 1914, the availability of millions of men, and the development of new forms of artillery and small arms based on high-quality steel, meant that massive loss of life was certain to follow. Keegan also shows that the ethos of glorious combat, of a noble death in war and the desire to destroy your enemy are elements of a peculiarly western idea of warfare – such murderous conflict would simply not have arisen in other cultures. From the historian’s viewpoint, the world wars were not the reversion of European humanity to a primitive state of barbarism, but were born of a culture that had been deliberately promoted and fostered over the previous century.

• These new ways of looking at history reflect our changed understanding of the world. But not only do they bypass the question ‘What is civilization?’, they make it increasingly difficult to answer.
• We can begin to answer these questions by looking at how we, the present generation, differ from our predecessors, and why our view of the world is so different from theirs.
• In the 1930s and 1940s it was quite clear what western society and western civilization stood for. Civilization was everything that Hitler, Mussolini and imperial Japan were trying to destroy, and the task of civilization was to preserve it.
• The 1960s were, in part, a reaction against the atrophying of society that followed the Second World War.
• The wartime generation was simply relieved to have survived and be given the chance to build a peaceful and prosperous world; their sons and daughters, then approaching adulthood, wanted something else.
• The previous sense of fighting to preserve civilization was transformed into a new belief that it was precisely the existing society with its hierarchies, its rigidity, its deference to authority, its ‘doctor-knows-best’ mentality that had been to blame for Europe’s slide into conflict.
• From now on, no one was to give and no one obey orders. Europe was ridding itself of the militarism that had haunted the continent for more than 150 years.

It is difficult in retrospect to appreciate the utter faith that most people had in the pillars of society in the immediate post-war period, and the palpable sense of personal and collective shock as one institution after another was exposed as hypocritical, self-serving and corrupt. In Britain the Suez crisis, Profumo, Poulson, Thalidomide, the demand for Catholic civil rights in Ulster and a series of miscarriages of justice ended our illusions and dealt immense blows to our previously rose-coloured view of the established order.

• In America the disillusionment was just as profound and potentially more disturbing. The Vietnam war projected the futile brutality of the government into every living room, while the civil rights movement exposed America’s dirty secret – legalized segregation and dehumanization of its black population – to the world.
• My Lai, the murder of Martin Luther King, the shooting dead of peaceful demonstrators at Kent State University, the sight of white cops beating black protestors in Alabama; all this and more repelled the generation that came to adulthood as it was all unfolding.
• In France, Germany and Italy the effects were the same, while the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 destroyed any vestiges of admiration for the Soviet alternative to western society.
• While members of the post-war generation were disgusted by the sight of the old order trying to hold the world still, the previous generation must have been dismayed at the antics of its children.
• This social revolution happened at the same time as a sudden increase in affluence, particularly in western Europe (the United States had felt the effects in the 1950s).
• The disdain for authority and the desire for instant gratification were spurred on by the sheer amount of new, cheap stuff that was suddenly available to almost everyone – records, cars, clothes, transistor radios, cameras, telephones, colour magazine, tabloid newspapers and, above all, television.
• In the 1960s, technology not only offered a better, more colourful, more interesting set of experiences, it also offered an escape from a communal, conforming, collaborative society.
• The communality of family life was abandoned in the pursuit of individual gratification and the novelties of remote shared experiences.
• More technology fostered more production and more spending power, which made new stuff ever cheaper and more disposable.
• By the mid-sixties the excited enthusiasm for making and spending money began to pall among some members of the newly liberated young.
• The counterculture that formed in opposition to the Vietnam war began to turn its back on consumerism and individualism in the search for a new kind of communality and spirituality.
• As it turned out, the counterculture stood little chance against the battalions of the commercial world and the more immediate joys of buying and having.
• We chose to shop and have done so ever since.
• The combination of consumerism, material prosperity and distrust of established authority has given us a troubling relationship with out past.
• The genocide of native Quebecois Indians, the funding of the British Industrial Revolution by the slave trade, the torture of Algerian prisoners by the French army, abuse of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison; every week seems to bring a new revelation to add to what we already know and to confirm our worst suspicions.
• There are individual stories of goodness and salvation in our past but these only emphasize the moral bleakness of the world in which they are set.
• What may have the greatest influence on our changing view of civilization is our growing disillusionment with the most powerful of all western beliefs, the idea of progress.

While our lives are technically more comfortable and convenient, we are beginning to understand some of the illusory nature of our gains. The degradation of the natural environment, the destruction of family and community networks, the emergence of new diseases such as AIDS, growing obesity and mental illness among the young, the intractable increase in serious drug abuse, the growth in disparity between rich and poor, both within the west and between the west and the rest, the uncertainties brought on by a globalized economy; all are stark reminders that talk of progress must be heavily qualified. But there are more insidious aspects of economic prosperity that affect our daily lives. The last few decades have seen economics and business management applied to every part of life. Not only are governments, schools, colleges, public housing and hospitals subjected to a kind of techno-managerialism (with its accompanying meaningless jargon), we are constantly told to think of our lives as an individual long-term investment. We must put money and effort into our education in order to earn more later (and contribute more to our national economy), and while working we must continually think of saving for our old age. It has taken decades of economic prosperity for us to realize the costs of ever-greater efficiency. We see a life of unremitting work stretching ahead of our children, without the compensations of community life and connection with the natural world that we ourselves enjoyed.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 and their aftermath have put new strains on the comfortable idea that, for western citizens, life could just go on getting better. The danger of more attacks, immediate restrictions on civil liberties, arguments for the use of torture, the immense military power of one nation over all others, the contemplation of the use of battlefield nuclear weapons and the rift between and within western nations over issues like ‘pre-emptive war’ have provoked concern at the apparent fragility of the institutions that are supposed to uphold western values. Those who know their history recall how easily democratic values disintegrated in the 1920s and 30s in all but a few nations. We are beginning to wonder whether the peace and prosperity of the six decades since 1945 have resulted from the determined application of liberal values, or whether these are an indulgence that only continuous prosperity allows. Is the fading of memory of the Second World War allowing the re-emergence of war as an instrument of policy?

• And where, in this shifting view of the world, do we place art, the jewel in the crown of our civilization?
• So we have some difficult problems to resolve before we can say that we understand what our civilization really means to us.

Civilization is the word that stands for what we most value about our society. We cannot simply dismiss it as being so full of contradictions as to be meaningless so we must make some attempt to understand it. This, I suggest, can only be done by looking at the whole of western history in the spirit of the present: seeing how values and events are connected, investigating the context in which ideas that we take for granted arose, bringing cultural, philosophical, social and political history together, and viewing received wisdom and venerable authority with healthy skepticism. Before we embark on that history, I want first to say something about the ways in which we look at the past….

Chapter 1: In the beginning: Prehistory and Illiterate Societies