Carroll Quigley's The Evolution of Civilizations is available at no cost from carrollquigley.net
Like
Toynbee, Quigley presents a theory of civilization. As expressed in the
Foreword of Quigley's book, his is an attempt to present "a causal
explanation of the stages of civilization". I find it fascinating.
Perhaps even better than Toynbee.
Today I want to show Quigley working toward his list of the stages of civilization.
Page 129 (126 of 425 in the PDF):
The most popular explanation of the causes of historical change and especially of the rise and fall of civilizations has been by means of some biological analogy in which a people, once young and vigorous, were softened and weakened by rising standards of living, or by a loss of the ideology of hard work and self-sacrifice that had made their rise possible...
I am reminded of something I read recently, a quote from the author G. Michael Hopf:
Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
The
Hopf quote is striking. It's the repetition, I think, that makes it so
effective. But good phrasing is not the same as good argument. In what
sense do they mean "strong" and "weak"? Moral? Physical? Military? I
dunno. Hopf's book is available as a Google Book, but there is "no preview available"
for the relevant page -- I can't see the context. So I cannot
evaluate the quote unless I start by putting some assumptions on it. And
I don't want to start there.
So all I can say that's relevant to the Hopf quote is that "good times" and then "hard times" arise because monetary balances accumulate over time until they become problematic -- that is, until they become imbalances. That's why good times and hard times affect people, the species, human society, and human civilization, but not the wild animals, not in the same way: Monetary balances accumulate.
Maybe you think I'm feeding you some bullshit. But stop for a moment to consider all the things people say about the Federal debt: It's bad, it's good, it's the problem, it's the solution. That's the bullshit. I'm only pointing out that the Federal debt is an accumulated monetary balance. And that's just one example.
My
point is, Carroll Quigley would reject Hopf's statement, quicker and
far more resoundingly than I can manage. He already rejected it in
the quote that I interrupted to present the Hopf quote!
Quigley continues:
In many cases no real explanation of the process of change has been given at all, the theorists in question being satisfied with attaching names to the various stages of historical change. Giovanni Battista Vico, for example, saw the history of each people as a process by which barbarian vigor slowly developed into rationalism, the period of greatest success being merely the middle period when the two qualities of vigor and rationality were in a fruitful, precarious, and temporary balance, while the decline was due to the final triumph of rationalism over energy.
Quigley finds Vico's explanation inadequate. So do I: It is certainly far from an explanation based on economic forces, financial costs, and monetary imbalances.
Quigley prepares before presenting his stages of civilization:
Page 128 (125 of 425 in the PDF):
This process of evolution of civilizations can only be studied in an effective fashion if we divide it into a number of consecutive periods. We might divide it into two periods, such as "rise" and "decline"; we might divide it into three periods, such as "youth," "maturity," and "old age"; or we might divide it into five or fifty periods...
He considers every little thing. Here he reminds me of Toynbee, Somervell's Toynbee:
The illusion of progress as something which proceeds in a straight line is an example of that tendency to over-simplification which the human mind displays in all its activities. In their 'periodizations' our historians dispose of their periods in a single series end to end, like the sections of a bamboo stem between joint and joint or the sections of the patent extensible handle on the end of which an up-to-date modern chimney-sweep pokes his brush up the flue. On the brush-handle which our modern historians have inherited there were originally two joints only -- 'ancient' and 'modern', roughly though not exactly corresponding to the Old Testament and the New Testament and to the dual back-to-back reckoning of dates B.C. and A.D. ...
As time has gone on, our historians have found it convenient to extend their telescopic brush-handle by adding a third section, which they have called 'medieval' because they have inserted it between the other two. ...
Their styles are different, Toynbee and Quigley, but they have many ideas in common.
Quigley's stages of civilization:
Page 145 (142 of 425):
The process that we have described, which we shall call the institutionalization of an instrument of expansion, will help us to understand why civilizations rise and fall. By a close examination of this process, it becomes possible to divide the history of any civilization into successive stages. We have said that these divisions are largely arbitrary and subjective and could be made in any convenient number of stages. We shall divide the process into seven stages, since this permits us to relate our divisions conveniently to the process of rise and fall. These seven stages we shall name as follows:
1. Mixture
2. Gestation
3. Expansion
4. Age of Conflict
5. Universal Empire
6. Decay
7. Invasion
That is the second time Quigley mentions "seven stages" in The Evolution of Civilizations.
He prefaces it by relating the instrument of expansion to the rise and
fall of civilizations, or more precisely the instrument to the rise and
its institutionalization to the fall.
The first time he
mentions his seven stages of civilization, he interrupts himself to
point out the importance of the instrument of expansion, and doesn't
even get around to listing the stages:
Page 132 (129):
The pattern of change in civilizations presented here consists of seven stages resulting from the fact that each civilization has an instrument of expansion that becomes an institution. The civilization rises while this organization is an instrument and declines as this organization becomes an institution.
When I first read page 132, I
wondered if Quigley forgot to proofread the page. He seemed to be going
off-topic. That's not it. Quigley emphasizes the instrument of expansion
at every opportunity, because of its great importance.
Why? Because it is the long period of growth that makes a civilization different from a primitive society. Growth makes the civilization. In addition, the ruin of the instrument of growth by "institutionalization" brings growth to an end and, ultimately, brings the civilization to an end.
Toynbee called it the "breakdown", the termination of the
period of growth. Quigley calls it "the institutionalization of the
instrument of expansion". The growth of civilization is central in both
cases. Quigley puts greater emphasis on it.
When I was in grammar school, around 15 years before the US Bicentennial in 1976, one of my teachers expressed concern because nations "seldom survive more than 200 years." I remember.
As a nation we are something over 200 years now. And we do have our problems.
As a civilization, we're up over 2000 years. Toynbee described three generations of civilization in a 6000-year time frame. On average, 2000 years per generation. And I recall Toynbee quoting Lord Acton: "General history naturally depends on the action of forces which are not national but proceed from wider causes." Maybe our problems are not those of a dying nation, but of a dying civilization. And we do have our problems.
Asimov's Foundation begins when the Galactic Empire is 12,000 years old. The 1984 film Dune begins in the year 10,191. In our world, on average, 2000 years and it's over.
We can do better.
No comments:
Post a Comment