A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

The Unity of Civilization by Various

V >> Various >> The Unity of Civilization




The process of gaining a greater unity among the leading nations of the
world, like all the aspects of human evolution, must be regarded from
two points of view, distinct in theory, inextricable in life. What does
the nature of man itself demand? How has this nature expressed itself,
and been affected in history by the external conditions, the geography,
climate, conflict and commingling of races, which the theatre of its
appearance has imposed?

Looked at in itself, so far as we can isolate it from its surroundings,
man's nature is distinguished from that of lower animals by two
features, both of them essentially social and tending to unity. He is
more deeply and permanently attached to members of his own species, by
affection, sympathy, veneration, tradition, than any other creature. And
he is a reasoning being, reason itself requiring the contact and
agreement of various minds. The incomparably greater force which he has
acquired in the world, over all other species and over nature itself, is
due to the working of these two factors. At starting he was physically
less strong than many other creatures, and if he fought with others of
his own kind, other animal species did the same. He was ahead of them by
his reason, and reason acted, and must act, through the concert of
thinking beings. This concert is not merely, or even mainly, an
attachment among those living at the same time to co-operate for some
common end; it is with man a conscious sequence of one generation on
another. Sometimes the movement of adaptation is slower, sometimes
quicker, but in every case the living are carrying on the work of the
dead, and their co-operation in time as well as space is due to the
working of the same qualities of attachment and reason, the social
factors, by which at any moment a community of men is bound together.

Still looking at the matter _a priori_, it is clear that the vast
community of mankind, though it has come more closely in contact in
recent years over all the planet, yet acts, and must act, habitually and
momentarily, through many smaller aggregates. Of these the leading types
are the family and the country or nation. The former is not directly
relevant to our inquiry, the latter plays a leading part in it. The
former is less dependent on external conditions of land-formation and
the like, and is in consequence more universal, more purely human. The
latter has been shaped by geographical conditions, by racial qualities,
by the apparent accidents of history. Its relation to the larger units
of human society raises the most difficult, fundamental and unavoidable
questions. To curb aggressive nationalism is the root-problem of the
present war. To reconcile permanently nationalism with humanity would be
to establish the everlasting peace.

Western society, indeed the whole community of mankind, is built up of
these smaller units, the family and the nation, with their various
intermediate groupings, but the historical process has by no means
conformed at all exactly to this logical order. Society has not been
made in orderly fashion by forming families and then combining families
to make hundreds, and hundreds to make counties, and counties nations,
and so on to the whole. A German god might have done this, but the way
of nature and history was less perfect. The minor forms of human
association have been taking shape, being altered and on the whole
improved, throughout the process. At one point, of high importance for
our argument, a larger form of association was achieved before the
necessary constituent elements were articulated. This was the
Greco-Roman world encircling the Mediterranean and completed in the
Roman Empire of the second century A.D. It was the nucleus from which
the Western world of modern civilization has been developed; yet it was
there, settled in its main outlines, before the national units which it
required for internal harmony and cohesion had taken any definite shape.
It is to the difficulties of their growth and mutual adjustment that we
owe most of the conflicts of modern history.

We shall in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of
pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight
and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization
would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a
culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a
similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely
severed by distance and climatic conditions. The raw material of the
human product in science, art, and invention was alike in texture
although often exuberant in detail and imagination. But it had not yet
the unity of an organic whole, knit by a common purpose and conscious of
itself.

To gain the cohesion of large numbers of men by whom wealth could be
created and sufficient leisure and independence secured for an
intellectual life, not dictated by the necessities of existence, a
special concurrence of favourable physical conditions was required. The
rich and secluded river-basins of many parts of the world provided this,
and in consequence we find similar large communities arising at the end
of the Stone Age in such places as China, Peru, Mexico, and above all in
Mesopotamia and Egypt. The last named derived their special importance
for the sequel from their proximity to the Mediterranean, which was to
act as the great meeting-place and training-school for adventurous
spirits and inquiring minds. From the busy intercourse of these
land-locked waters arose the civilization called Minoan, or Aegean,
centring in Crete, itself to be surpassed by the trading activity of the
Phoenicians and the art and science of the Greeks.

It is with the advent of the Greek that the seal is placed upon the
claim of the Mediterranean to be the birthplace of the highest type of
human civilization, the centre from which a unity of the spirit was to
spread, until, by material force as well as by the conquering mind, the
European or Western man was recognized as in the forefront of the race.
The supremacy of the Greek lay in his achievement in three directions,
as a thinker, as an artist, and as the builder of the city-state. For
our present purpose the first and the last are the most important and
the first the most important of all.

The city-state was important as the first example of a free,
self-governing community in which the individual realized his powers by
living--and dying--with and for his fellows. This new type of human
community was of the highest moment in the sequel. In many points it was
a model to the Romans, and thus became a fulcrum for the upward movement
of the Western world. In the works, too, of the Greek philosophers,
especially of Plato and Aristotle, it inspired the earliest and some of
the deepest reflections on the nature of social life and government. But
it never acquired the permanence of the political units needed to build
up the European Commonwealth. For this nations were required, and the
Greeks were a race and not a nation. The [Greek: polis] lacked the
size, the variety of elements, and the territorial basis on which a
modern nation rests.

It is rather in their achievements as thinkers and as artists, above all
in their science and philosophy, that we find the most fundamental and
lasting contribution of the Greeks to the unity and progress of mankind.
When these became allied to the tenacity, the organizing and legal
genius of the Romans, a firm centre of civilized life was established,
which has survived the shocks of two thousand years of growth and
conflict and will survive the upheaval of the present. The Greek
unification was in the world of thought and art; the Roman attempted a
corresponding work of organization in the human world which lay nearest
to him in the countries round the Mediterranean Sea. Both efforts were
of priceless value and continuing effect, but both were, from the
conditions of the problem, imperfect solutions, the brilliant but
precocious sketches of adolescent genius. The Greek, working at first on
the material accumulated by generations of Chaldean and Egyptian
priests, discovered from their crude, unorganized, and inexact
observations of geometry and astronomy the elements of unity in
diversity which constitute science. Inquiring for causes, comparing and
correcting individual facts, he arrived at the first equations in
mathematics, the first laws of nature. His work in this sphere and in
that of medicine went on continuously until after the Roman occupation
of the Mediterranean world was complete. It died out gradually in the
theological atmosphere of Alexandria, and on the purely human side ended
in Stoicism with an amalgam of universal philosophy and Roman law. The
Stoic Empire of the second century A.D. was the high-water mark of the
joint efforts of Greeks and Romans to attain unity and humanism in
thought and practice. Its brilliance while it lasted the nobility of
its leading men, the persistence of the main lines of its structure, are
the measure of our debt to the builders of the Greco-Roman world.

The Roman contribution to the result which in the end so perfectly
combined both movements was, in its origin and nature, singularly unlike
the Greek. The Roman did not analyse his conceptions. He accepted what
came to him, either from his ancestors or from other peoples, without
scrutiny, except so far as to see that new matter could be worked into
old forms without a dislocation in practice. He was the pragmatist, the
Greek the idealist. This instinct of adaptation and sequence made the
Roman the pioneer in law as the Greek was the pioneer in science. It
rendered possible the holding together in one political system of the
multifarious territories and peoples from the Tigris to the Solway Firth
for long enough to enable the greater part of that area to be
permanently civilized on Roman lines. But, like the artist's sketch of
his picture, the whole was outlined before the parts were worked out in
their final form; and the sketch itself was seriously imperfect in more
than one point. The set-back which Augustus received on the eastern side
of the Rhine was never made good, and the Germanic tribes therefore
remained un-Romanized until the Church in the seventh and eighth
centuries resumed the work on other lines. This defeat of Varus and the
legend of Hermann became to the German a symbol of national greatness in
a sense which none of the other national conflicts with Rome ever
assumed. To us Boadicea is a barbarian, and we trace with gratitude and
pleasure the signs of civilization left by the Roman occupation. To us
the Roman was for centuries a defence against barbarism, and we regret
that we had to do over again many of the things which he had once taught
us. But the Roman Empire, when the German accepted it, was no longer the
Empire which had founded the unity of Europe. It was a German Empire,
and though the ancient world fired his imagination, he always saw it
through German eyes.

The next stage in unity was the mediaeval Church, which inherited the
framework of the Roman Empire and extended the area of moral and
civilized life which Rome had initiated.

In this Germany was included, and she played a distinguished part. Roman
missionaries, some by way of England and Ireland, went further than the
Roman legions had attempted, and the sword of Charlemagne did the rest.
Germany in the later Middle Ages was perhaps the most valued of all the
Pope's domains, and her prince-bishops his greatest lieutenants. The
moral and religious effect of the Catholic discipline, appealing to
sides of human nature which Greece and Rome had left untouched, was
nowhere more deeply felt than by the Germans. Spiritually they were thus
lifted at least to the level of the rest of Western Europe, but
politically they remained unincorporated, the most feudal and military
nation of the West.

The growth of nations was, on the political side, the main achievement
of the Middle Ages. Rome had given the framework of a great system, and
into this had poured barbarians from North and East, Goths, Franks,
Huns, Moors, Lombards, tribes at the level of the Homeric Greeks when
they swept down to the Aegean. They came as migrant hordes, and in the
area civilized by Rome and the Catholic Church they settled down as
nations, mingling with the earlier population and divided up by the
geographical configurations of the Continent. Among them France and
England had the advantage. They gained their unity as nations earlier
than any other countries of the West--England in a form which has lasted
substantially unaltered for six hundred years. Spain, which had been
torn asunder by the Moors, was not consolidated fully till the end of
the fifteenth century, in time to send the last of the crusaders under
Columbus in quest of fresh worlds to conquer across the Atlantic. But
Italy and Germany--and especially the latter--remained disintegrated
until our own time. Both gained their union about the same time, fifty
years ago, but by different methods and in a different spirit. Italy,
naturally a compact geographical unit, was welded by a democratic
enthusiasm, of which Cavour and Mazzini were the soul and Garibaldi the
right arm. Germany, vast in power and numbers, lay strongly entrenched
in the central area of the Continent, but failed to kindle into national
life at the same democratic moment. She was fashioned into political
existence by a Thor's hammer, which, as it rose and fell, dealt
shattering blows on friends as well as foes, in Austria as well as
France, on Danes and Poles, on Liberals and Socialists, on little kings
and great ecclesiastics. And now this Frankenstein creation among states
offers the most serious problem in adjusting national claims with
European unity. We have to check and to assimilate--if the world is to
live as one--the one Power which has hitherto developed most
persistently and successfully its own resources, but least in
subordination to the interests of the whole.

There are those who would regard all national barriers and organization
as somewhat of an obstruction, who would prefer a simple
internationalism to the world as we know it, with its pent-up passions
and attachments, its constant liability to explosion, its slow progress
by tortuous channels towards the larger view and the surer hold. Many
reformers, from Plato downwards, have taken up a similar attitude in
regard to the smaller institution, the family, which is often found to
be an obstruction in the way of short cuts to social utopias at home.
Kant's ideal of a cosmopolitan constitution as the goal of all human
effort rather leans to this side of the balance. But a due balance must
be kept and the full value both of family and nation maintained against
theories or tendencies which would roll us all out into cosmopolitan
items. A glance at other elements which go to make up the unity of
European society will tend to correct the perspective.

The unity of the Roman Empire was mainly political and military. It
lasted for between four and five hundred years. The unity which
supervened in the Catholic Church was religious and moral and endured
for a thousand. Less binding on one side, it was more searching and
pervasive on others, and though now broken, it still remains in full
force over many millions of minds, while the Roman political and legal
structure has to be sought for in formal institutions which have
absorbed its spirit and transformed its letter. But beyond the actual
fabric of the Church itself we have the multitude of cognate and
derivative institutions which have served the cause of unity in the
moral and intellectual sphere. We shall speak later of the more perfect
and lasting unity of science. The universities in the Middle Ages and
the Renascence tended to the same end, using a material in philosophy
and theology which was bound to wear out with the spread of knowledge
and the flux of time. But in their prime they succeeded in producing a
more complete community of scholars than has perhaps been ever witnessed
in Europe before or since. Then as always the realm of the genuine love
of truth, or even of honest disputation, was independent of differences
of race or political boundaries, and the scholar went from Oxford to
Paris, or from Rotterdam to Bologna, solely to widen his mind or to sit
at the feet of some world-famous teacher.

And the wandering scholar was by no means the only social link. Many of
the trade-routes surprise us by the length and adventurousness of their
course. Amber from the Baltic found its way to the south of Italy and
Spain, while small boats from Ireland were brought into the mouths of
the Loire and the Garonne when the coasts of the Channel were impassable
through barbarians from the North.

Mediaeval Europe was, in fact, much more of a unity than the modern
traveller would expect, and this was mainly due to the influence of the
Church. The spiritual unity went deep on one side of man's nature, and
when a man like Erasmus surveyed the prospect at the beginning of the
sixteenth century we can well understand his horror, and his determined
abstention from any step which would precipitate the break-up of the one
organized body which represents the old united culture of Christendom
and might check the new forces which were threatening selfishness and
disorder in ever-widening circles on the globe. For it must be noted
that new forces of expansion were making themselves felt, as the unity
of the Church was being threatened from within. Explorers were
extending, East and West, the sphere in which the European was to impose
his influence for good and evil on other peoples, and the sixteenth
century thus becomes one, perhaps the most critical, of all the
turning-points in the history of the West. Danger was mixed with hope,
disorder with new knowledge and fresh power, and the crisis has not yet
been surmounted. But we have gained by now some insight into the nature
of the new forces and see that they should, and one day will, work more
fully in the direction of unity in the civilized world, of healthy
independence in the parts and a growing harmony in the whole. Little of
this could have been seen by the observer at the outbreak of the
Reformation.

Nationalism, democracy, colonial expansion, religious change, the
growth of knowledge and its application to industry and social reform,
these are the salient features which distinguish our modern from the
mediaeval world, and we have to consider how far they make for the unity
of mankind.

The sixteenth century saw both the strengthening of national governments
and the beginning of European colonization. England, France, Spain,
Portugal, Holland, all settled down under a central government stronger
and more independent than they had previously enjoyed, and pegged out
estates for themselves beyond the seas. In each case wars have been
entailed in the process, and, as we know, the backwardness of Germany at
this period has been visited upon the rest of Europe tenfold in recent
times. National expansion thus appears to be an eminent provocation of
international strife. It is with no intention either of ignoring facts
or minimizing dangers that one turns here to the other side of the
account. Where was the spark actually fired which led to the present
conflagration? In that part of Europe where the national units were
least stable and developed, where the conditions of government and
social order are most remote from our own. Who can doubt that if in the
Balkans the Turks had been able to establish even the sort of government
we maintain in India, or if, still better, the Balkan States, apart from
the Turks, had gained their own independence in a federation like the
Swiss, the aggression of the Central Powers would have been checked? The
compact, well-established national unit is not in itself a danger, but
there is a danger in weak, oppressed, or disjointed nationalities, who
have not found safety and offer a bait to their expansive neighbours.

Thus strong and independent nations, as Kant postulates in his
_Perpetual Peace_, are guarantees of peace, stones in the Temple of
Humanity. Another consideration not generally recognized, strengthens
this conclusion. In recent years all leading and progressive nations
have been devoting their first thought to social reform. This has been
conspicuously the case with ourselves, with the French, with the United
States, with the smaller, more advanced countries in Europe. Germany,
too, though her first energies have been given to organizing war, has
had in this matter two distinct souls. Her social democrats and part of
her governing class have been consistent and successful in working for
the amelioration of the condition of the people, and have often
anticipated other nations in her process. It is self-evident, first,
that a strong national government is needed to carry out wide social
reform, second, that in proportion as governments devote themselves
whole-heartedly to this, their energies are less likely to be devoted to
molesting their neighbours. Germany, unfortunately for herself and the
world, had no government which could speak for the whole people and be
responsible to it. A truly national government in Germany, or anywhere
else, would not have willed this war.

The colonial expansion which was connected with the outburst of national
sentiment in the sixteenth century, and has led to frequent conflicts
between European nations ever since, also appears in a different light
if we study it in view of facts not dreamt of in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The Americas, which appeared to the early
navigators as rich estates to be cultivated for the benefit of
proprietors at home, have developed into powerful and independent
countries, eminently pacific (except for internal brawls), looking
forward to producing new types of life and government, hoping perhaps to
hold the balance in a long-drawn contest of the Old World Powers. The
circle, therefore, of the Mediterranean world which was enlarged by the
discoveries of the sixteenth century, finds its completion to-day in
new states across the Atlantic, which are on the whole enormously
preponderant on the side of peace, and wish to hold their own in Western
civilization by force of wealth and industry, and not by arms. To us,
too, it is clear, and will be one day to the Germanic Powers, that the
British Empire, the largest political aggregate on the globe, is
essentially a league of free peoples, under no compulsion from the
centre, but responsive to attack upon their power or liberty by any
third party, strong from their general contentment with the conditions
and institutions of their life, and not through any systematic
regulations imposed from above. Even India and other protected states
and dominions, though not yet self-governing, are moving steadily in the
direction of responsibility and of willing association with the British
Empire or Commonwealth as a whole.

Such is the much vaster community of nations which has succeeded to the
Western Europe of the sixteenth century; and no mention has been made of
the place of Russia or the countries still further east. The picture
does not suggest a welter of conflicting passions and ambition
throughout the world. On the whole a mass of men and women labouring
with fair contentment at their daily task, not concerned that their
state or nation should extend its boundaries, least of all that it
should provoke attack; little conscious of the historic debt of nations
to one another, but wishing well to others except when they cross the
path of a personal desire; gaining rapidly more sense of actual
community among living men, but hardly realizing yet how man's power has
been built up in the past and how infinitely it might be advanced and
the world improved by harmony and steadily directed efforts in the
future. That the sense of brotherhood has gained ground in the world,
especially since the middle of the eighteenth century, is certain.
Voices of protest reach us even from Germany through the storm of
hatred. But the vague sympathy, the desire for peace and shrinking from
the horrors of war need to be enlightened, to have a reasoned basis in
the belief that all nations, and especially those of the vanguard, are
partners in a common work and essential one to another, above all,
perhaps, to have institutions which tend to co-operation and make a
sudden and disastrous breach as difficult as possible. Many of these
instruments of peace were being forged when the war broke out. Many of
the most profound ties between nations are not understood or are kept in
the background by nationalist teachers or a nationalist press.

Of all the modern steps towards international unity, the most
indisputable, the most firmly based and furthest-reaching, is science,
and the various applications of science, both in promoting intercourse
between different parts of the world and in alleviating suffering and
strengthening and illuminating human life. The more prominence,
therefore, that we can secure for the growth of science in the teaching
of history, the larger place humanity, or the united mind of mankind,
will take in the moving picture which every one of us has, more or less
full and distinct, of the progress of the world. For some hundreds of
years, culminating in the three or four centuries A.D., the dominant
feature in the picture was of a triumphant city-state, Rome, gradually
subduing and embracing the world. Then for some thousand years the
picture was of a religious organization leading the civilized world, and
nationalities were only emerging as somewhat dim and ill-defined
figures. Then, with the rupture in the Church and the upspringing of
other religious bodies and forms of thought, national figures become
predominant in the scene, and attract nearly all the attention, which is
given, except by a few curious persons, to the study of history.
Nationalism, once in defect in Western Europe, has been for some time
in excess. The remedy is not directly to attack it, except in the case
in which it gave us no choice, but to supply the limiting and
controlling ideas. Of all these, science fits the case most exactly,
because, as science, it can know no distinction between French or
German, English or Russian. There is no French physics or German
chemistry, and if we are told that the Prussians have their own theory
of anthropology, based on the predominance of a particular type of skull
which other anthropologists dispute, we are quite sure that in that case
science has not yet said her last word.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Various - "The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863"

Myra Kelly - "New Faces"

James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw - "A Narrative Of The Most Remarkable Particulars In The Life Of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As Related By Himself"

Walter H. Rich - "Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine"