revolution

I’m currently reading a book called “The Evolution of Civilizations” by Carroll Quigley, a very famous historian who was a consultant for many U.S. government institutions. I’m nowhere near finished yet, and will not be for a little while. I’m not in school so there’s no need for marathon reading, I want to digest every piece. This book is not so much a chronology of civilizations but a book on historical method. What I’ve read so far struck me as so pertinent and succinct that I decided I had to blog about it before I was finished.

Quigley begins with the idea that history can and should be a discipline which uses scientific method. He laments that too often sociological fields are ruled by prejudice and ideology and thus are not considered sciences. He writes this in 1961, however, it is still true today. No one looks at history as a science, yet somehow whatever the history books say become truth. The scientific method is very simple. You make observations. You make a hypothesis and you test the hypothesis. Why can’t historians use this method as well? Some historians, of course, do–but unfortunately, the ones who write most history books do not. We are bombarded by assumptions on all sides. Quigley stresses that all hypotheses stay hypotheses because they will constantly be under the scrutiny of our growing knowledge. If only historians kept this in mind rather than jumping to conclusions because of cultural assumptions.

Connected to this treatment of history as a science is the function of culture. Human culture is the cushion between people and their natural environment. It is obviously made up of interactions between people, their material objects, and their environment. The reason history can be so difficult to pin down is because the facts regarding culture are numerous, yet we can’t really run a controlled experiment. However, this very subjective nature of history and culture is exactly what makes it so influential. Economies and wars are based on these subjective cultural elements and that’s why it’s so important to study the various causes and effects, however complicated they may be.

I leave you with a quote, “The human brain alone, as a kind of central switchboard, has millions of neural connections…The way in which these are connected up, or even the fact that they come to be connected up at all, depends on what happens to the child, how he is trained, and how he grows…Indeed, we might assume that everyone, at birth…has the potentiality for being aggressive or submissive, selfish or generous, cowardly or brave, masculine or feminine…and so forth, and that which of these potential qualities becomes actual…depends, very largely, on the way in which each person is trained or on the experiences he encounters growing up. The fact that there are societies or tribes in which almost everyone is aggressive…and that there are other closely related tribes in which almost everyone is submissive…and the fact that infants, taken from one such tribe and reared in the other, grow up to have in full measure the typical characteristics of their adopted tribe would seem to indicate both that all such people are potentially about the same at conception and that their personalities are largely a consequence of the way in which they are reared. If this is so, it is clear that the way in which people are brought up is very important….Thus there appear in any society certain patterns of action, of belief, and of thought that are passed on from generation to generation…” (pp 50-51) 

Of course, when Quigley wrote this, many discoveries regarding the influence of human genes had not yet been made. However, even genes do not change the fact that human society is extraordinarily influential on the human personality. We definitely cannot forget this element as we collect facts and observations.

George Orwell–born in 1904 and author of such famous books as 1984 and Animal Farm–despite being an imperial workhorse in Burma for some years still remained fairly clear-headed. His book Why I Write makes some surprisingly accurate predications on the future stance of British government and social policy. I was struck by how accurate when I read a little blurb in The Wallstreet Journal this morning about an Oxford University study which found that there is no longer a ‘culture elite’. That is to say that they found that most people, in the UK and a few other countries, consume only popular culture regardless of social status. However, they did find that based on people’s education, some still had more omnivorous cultural tastes and might actually go to an opera every once in awhile. Of course, some people do go to operas to make themselves feel cultured, and then go home quickly to catch the last Survivor episode. Orwell observed this cultural normalization earlier in the 20th century, “To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes.” (p. 43) Orwell described this cultural change as a natural byproduct of capitalism and democracy. Of course, he did not look at this capitalism as necessarily good. In fact, he describes capitalism as a weak system, too weak to combat the totalitarianism of communism and Hitler. Even as he wrote certain passages in his book he complained of the bombs from the Luftwaffe. The beating of Hitler was of tantamount importance in this book, written at a time when the winning of the war was very far from certain.  Orwell feels that Britain must inevitably progress to a different level of politics if the war is to be won and fascism vanquished. He ridicules both leftists and rich capitalists, while advocating for a sort of hybrid between socialism and capitalism. 

Orwell’s future England: “It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horse-hair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship. It will group itself round the Old Labour Party and its mass following will be in the trade unions, but it will draw into it most of the middle class and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie. Most of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate class of skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word. Political parties with different names will still exist, revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers and making as little impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time to time will refer to England as ‘a Christian country’…It will show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened.” (p. 83-84)   

When I read this passage I was struck by what an accurate prediction of modern England this really is. Orwell also points out that if WWII did not break Britain in the end it would be the catalyst for this revolution-less revolution. He aptly points out that “war is the greatest of all agents of change.” (p.71)  

It makes me wonder who Orwell really was. Who were his friends? What sort of information was he privy to? Maybe I’m over-suspicious. After all, he did work in British administration, albeit in lowly positions, any thinking person could have seen the trends in political and social thinking. The tendencies and qualities of bureaucrats speak mountains about the system they work for. 

Which, additionally, makes me wonder about America and what it will be like after the next war–which we are at the beginning of–is over. North American Union? New currency? Of course, we don’t have the same traditional cultural ideals that Britain had. Americans have always been more open to change and the only cultural trait that Americans have in common is the pursuit of money. Somehow I don’t think this bodes well for the future revolution-less revolution of the U.S.A.