THE ORIGINS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS

An experiment with civilization presently spans the planet Earth.  It is called “modern,” “contemporary” or “western civilization.”  Its artifacts, institutions and practices predominate in Europe, North America and Australasia.  They play a prominent rôle in the lives of Asians, South Americans and Africans.

Two thousand years ago a long established Egyptian civilization was passing into the shadows.  Civilizations in China and India were developing.  Roman civilization was approaching the zenith of its ascendancy.

A thousand years ago Roman civilization, like that of Egypt, was a memory; Chinese and Indian civilizations were holding their own, while the followers of Islam were reaching out into Central Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

In east central Europe and around the Mediterranean the beginnings of western civilization had made their appearance and were expanding their control along the Eurasian trade routes and beginning to penetrate western and northern Europe.  The Crusades had introduced Asian culture traits into the European backwoods.  Hardy European and Asian mariners were penetrating the Americas.  Dark ages of ignorance and superstition which had held sway in Europe for centuries were coming to an end.  Western civilization was beginning to draw the breath of a new life.

The vast structure of Roman civilization had split West from East.  The Eastern Empire retained its form and continued its culture for centuries after its break with the West.  Meanwhile the West fragmented into smaller and smaller units, increasingly self-contained and increasingly isolated.  Cities raised and manned their own walls.  The countryside broke up into smaller and smaller divisions over which the Holy Roman Empire exercised little more than a shadowy authority.  Each landed estate had its stronghold or castle.  Each locality looked after its own interests.  The massive Roman Universal State, stretching for centuries across parts of three continents, had broken up into a multitude of tiny semi-sovereign, semi-independent fragments.  Some of the fragments as leagues, alliances and coalitions were reaching nationhood.

New dawn was illuminating the Dark Ages.  Western man was sorting and re-assembling some of the scattered fragments of the defunct and dismembered Roman civilization.  The task was colossal.  Rome’s “one authority, one law, one language” hegemony had been replaced by an all pervading diversity.  The closely knit Greco-Roman Empire had been superseded in Europe by a sparsely inhabited, roadless wilderness, largely bereft of trade, using waterways as the easiest means of communication and transport.  The economy was built around wood cutting, charcoal burning, backward animal husbandry, hand-tool agriculture, hand-craft industry, the rudiments of commerce and finance centered in trading cities.  The great houses of the aristocracy and the gentry, scattered villages, towns and walled cities were preoccupied and disrupted by endless feuding and between-seasons warfare.

Adding to the chaos of this dismembered society were the controversies over dynastic succession.  Intermittent incursions of migrating hordes from central Asia pushed their way into central and southern Europe.  Covert and open conflicts between ecclesiastical and secular authority added to the general lethargy, confusion and chaos.

Europe struggled for centuries to free itself from Asian invasion and occupation.  At the same time Europe was improving its agriculture, restoring its trade and expanding its hand-craft industries and its commerce.  Towns grew in population and productivity.  Life-standards rose in the cities.  Cities based on trade and commerce extended their authority and became city-states.  Commercial cities joined their forces to form trading leagues.

Lords spiritual and temporal, who had ruled Europe for centuries, were joined by lords commercial, enriched by the growth of trade, transport and developing industry.

Generations passed into centuries the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth.  From small local beginnings the nations of western Europe emerged:  Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Italy, Austria and eventually Russia.  Each was a consolidation of local principalities, earldoms, dukedoms, kingdoms.  Each was passing through the rural-urban transformation.  Each was outgrowing feudalism and producing a larger and larger group of businessmen, professionals, tradesmen, craftsmen and maturing a middle class and a proletariat.  After the fifteenth century each state was spilling over its own frontiers, annexing or losing neighboring territory, spreading beyond the boundaries of Europe into the teeming markets of Asia and the newly discovered treasure-house of the Americas.

A score of European peoples were engaged in the give-and-take of this struggle for wealth and power for land and its resources in Europe, North Africa and the Near East; for booty, trade and overseas colonies.  As the struggle grew more intense smaller and weaker nations dropped out of the contest or were partitioned and gobbled up piecemeal.

Such was the condition of Europe’s free-for-all in the closing years of the seventeenth century and the opening decades of the eighteenth century, while three developing forces pushed into the forefront of European life:  the enlightenment and science, representative government, and the industrial revolution.

Enlightenment broadened the social basis of knowledge and learning.  During the Dark Ages, knowledge and learning were a monopoly of a tiny privileged minority composed of priests, scholars and a segment of the aristocracy.  Monasteries, great houses and trading cities sheltered this monopoly.  The countryside was a sea of ignorance, superstition, oppression and exploitation.  With the printing press came books.  Books promoted literacy and curiosity.  Literacy and curiosity led to speculation, experiment, discovery and the formulation and spread of ideas.  The product of these forces was science, which had had a long period of gestation in North Africa and Asia.

Dark Ages of localism, with landlords, priests and soldiers directing public affairs led to the concentration of wealth and power in the landed aristocracy and the church.  But traders in the countryside and merchants in the centers of commerce held a talisman that opened before them ever increasing sources of wealth.  Country dwellers harvested one crop a year.  When crops were poor they starved.  At best the margin of profit was thin.  Traders and merchants made a profit every time they found a customer.  The countryside lived on a use economy supplemented by barter.  As money increased in quantity it was loaned at rates of interest by merchants and bankers who owned it and used it for their purposes.  Accumulating wealth and money enabled the traders, merchants, bankers and manufacturers to out-buy and out-point landlords and churchmen.  Politically, these changes reduced the authority of absolute monarchies.  In their places representative governments made their appearance.

The third force that surfaced in Europe after the end of the Dark Ages was the industrial revolution, which led to fundamental changes in the means of production at the same time that advances in natural and social science produced their practical counterpart an explosive expansion of technology.

Science, representative government and the industrial revolution led to a rapid and extensive transformation of western society sometimes referred to as the bourgeois revolution.  As the bourgeois revolution worked its way into the structure and function of European society, the developing class of businessmen and professionals who had begun to challenge the power-monopoly of the “lords spiritual and temporal” ended by establishing a higher power monopoly under the control of business, military, public relations oligarchy.  This revolutionary transformation of modern society took place during the thousand years that elapsed between the crusades and the closing years of the nineteenth century.  The resulting social transformation had its geographical homeland in Europe from which it spread around the planet.  Politically, these forces found expression through the commerce-dominated, profit-seeking, colonizing empires, with the nation-state as nucleus.  Colonizing empires became the dominant force in Europe and in the non-European segments of the planet which were gradually brought under European imperial control.

In the course of voyaging, “discovery” and the establishment of trade, Europeans set up military outposts and maintained increasingly large naval forces.  The avowed object of these military and naval build-ups was to defend and promote Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French and British imperial interests.  Actually military and naval installations were marking out and maintaining the defense perimeters of their respective colonial empires.  One of the widely accepted axioms of the period equated colonies with national prosperity.  The more successful colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries became the strongholds of nineteenth century monopoly capitalism.

Industrial revolution, flowering in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gave the European commercial empires a lead over potential rivals based on Asian wealth-power centres.  As a result of this lead European empire builders were able to establish and maintain their authority in India and Indonesia, dismember the Turkish and Chinese empires and partition Africa among themselves.  Their only potential rivals were the lumbering, isolationist United States of North America and the newly awakened Island Kingdom of Japan.  Both of these non-European nations began playing serious wealth-power roles in the same period from 1895 to 1910.  Up to that point Europe continued to be the homeland of monopoly capitalism.  The chief centers of heavy industry, commerce and finance were in Europe.  European merchant fleets and European navies sailed the seas.  European banks and business houses dominated planetary financing, insuring and investing.

Viewed from outside, the ascendancy of Europe seemed to be complete.  Europe held the strategic strong points:  productivity, wealth, the means of transportation, mobile fire-power.  By the end of the nineteenth century Europe was the monopoly-capitalist motherland.  The rest of the planet was made up of actual or potential dependents under European authority.  From these outsiders living at subsistence levels, Europeans could get their supplies of food and raw materials at low prices and to them Europeans could sell their surplus manufactures, their commercial services, and their investment capital at high prices.  The resulting European prosperity was expected to continue indefinitely into the future.

This planetary structure, with Europe as the center of wealth, power, art, science, free business enterprise and wage slavery, progress and poverty, left the majority of mankind living as dependents and colonials.  The situation embodied several confrontations: 

   1.  The masters of Europe might quarrel among themselves.

   2.  Non-Europeans might set up rival wealth power centers
   and challenge Europe’s world hegemony.

   3.  Colonials and other dependants might demand independence,
   and equal status in the family of nations.

   4.  Rootless middle classes and the wretched of the earth
   might join forces and pull down western civilization’s house
   of cards.

Western civilization, like its predecessors, was accepting and following one central principle:  expand, grab and keep.  The application of this principle took the form of an axiom of public and private life:  might makes right; let him take who has the power; let him keep who can.

Grab and keep, in a period of rapid economic expansion, led each of the burgeoning European empires to the zealous defense of its frontiers as the first principle of imperial policy.  The second principle:  geographical expansion, followed as a matter of course.  Expansion inside Europe, with its tight frontier defenses, meant war with aggressive rivals.  Expansion abroad, especially in Asia and Africa, was less costly and might prove more profitable.  As a consequence, from 1870 onward, British, French, Dutch, Russia and German colonial territory increased; European armaments multiplied.  Each expanding empire prepared for the day which would give it additional square miles of European and foreign real estate.

Grab-and-keep, with its resultant chaotic free-for-all, was the rule of thumb accepted and followed by the West during the decline of Roman power and through the middle ages to modern times.

The “might makes right” formula was in violent conflict with the “love and serve your neighbor” professions of Christian ethics.  Nevertheless, it was the accepted overall principle of private enterprise economy and the ruling ethic of Western statecraft.  The principle was formulated in five propositions or axioms: 

   1.  Make money, honestly if possible, but make money.

   2.  Every businessman for himself and the devil take the laggards.

   3.  We defend and promote our national interests.

   4.  Our national interests come first.

   5.  Our country, right or wrong.

These five propositions were the outcome of a millennium of experience with the Crusades and extending to the present century.  They are the outcome of preoccupation with material incentives that can be stated in two words, profit and power.

Such propositions, applied to everyday affairs, produced an economy and a statecraft which favored the interests of a part before those of the entire community.  Where the whole is favored before any part there is a possibility of co-existence and even of cooperation.  Placing a part before the whole involves competition all the way from the marketplace to the chancelleries where the fate of nations is discussed and decided.

The above five propositions or axioms result from preoccupation with material incentives:  profit and power for managers, disciplined co-ordination for subordinates, affluence, comfort and recognition for the favored few.  They provide the ideological background for twentieth century western civilization.