Table of Contents

Tragedy and Hope

A History of the World in Our Time

By Carroll Quigley

PART TWENTY







Part Twenty: Tragedy and Hope: the Future in Perspective

     In an age of change and competing doubts, there is one thing of which we can be certain: the world is changing and will continue to change. But there is no consensus on the direction of such change. Human beings are basically conservative, in the sense that they expect and wish to continue to jog along in the same old patterns. Accordingly, they tend to regard most changes as regrettable, although one might get the impression, in a bustling and dynamic place like the United States, that men preferred change to stability..

     It is perfectly true that Americans now have change built into the pattern of their lives, so that saving and investment and, in general, the flows of claims on wealth (what most of us call "money") now go in directions that make constant change almost inevitable. Summer has hardly arrived before summer dresses have been sold out, autumn clothing is beginning to arrive on the dealers' racks, and extensive plans are already in process to make next summer's clothing (which goes on sale in the southern resorts in winter) quite different. This year's cars are not yet available for sale when the manufacturers are planning changed versions for next year's models. And urban commercial buildings are still new when plans for remodeling, or even total replacement, are already stirring in someone's mind.

     In such an age the sensible man can only reconcile himself to the fact: change is inevitable. But few men—average or exceptional—feel any competency in deciding the direction that change will take. Forecasting can he attempted only hy extrapolating recent changes into the future, but this is a risky business, since there is never any certainty that present directions will be maintained.

     In attempting this risky procedure, we shall continued to divide society into six aspects, falling into the three major areas of the patterns of power, rewards, and outlooks. The area of power is largely, but not exclusively, concerned with military and political arrangements; the area of rewards is similarly concerned with economic and social arrangements; and the area of outlooks is concerned with patterns that might be termed religious and intellectual. Naturally, all these are different, and even drastically different, from one society to another, and even, to a lesser extent, between countries, and areas within countries. For the sake of simplicity, we shall be concerned, in this chapter, with these patterns in Europe and the United States, although, as usual, we shall not hesitate to make comparisons with other cultures, especially with the Soviet Union.

Chapter 74: The Unfolding of Time

     The political conditions of the latter half of the twentieth century will continue to be dominated by the weapons situation, for, while politics consists of much more than weapons, the nature, organization, and control of weapons is the most significant of the numerous factors that determine what happens in political life. Surely weapons will continue to be expensive and complex. This means that they will increasingly be the tools of professionalized, if not mercenary, forces. All of past history shows that the shift from a mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy. When weapons are cheap and easy to obtain and to use, almost any man may obtain them, and the organized structure of the society, such as the state, can obtain no better weapons than the ordinary, industrious, private citizen. This very rare historical condition existed about 1880, but is now only a dim memory, since the weapons obtainable by the state today are far beyond the pocketbook, understanding, or competence of the ordinary citizen.

     When weapons are of the "amateur" type of 1880, as they were in Greece in the fifth century B.C., they are widely possessed hy citizens, power is similarly dispersed, and no minority can compel the majority to yield to its will. With such an "amateur weapons system" (if other conditions are not totally unfavorable), we are likely to find majority rule and a relatively democratic political system. But, on the contrary, when a period can be dominated by complex and expensive weapons that only a few persons can afford to possess or can learn to use, we have a situation where the minority who control such "specialist" weapons can dominate the majority who lack them. In such a society, sooner or later, an authoritarian political system that reflects the inequality in control of weapons will he established.

     At the present time, there seems to be little reason to doubt that the specialist weapons of today w ill continue to dominate the military picture into the foreseeable future. If so, there is little reason to doubt that authoritarian rather than democratic political regimes will dominate the world into the same foreseeable future. To be sure, traditions and other factors may keep democratic systems, or at least democratic forms, in many areas, such as the United States or England. To us, brought up as we were on a democratic ideology, this may seem very tragic, but a number of perhaps redeeming features in this situation may well be considered.

     For one, our society, Western Civilization, is almost fifteen hundred years old, and was democratic in political action for less than two hundred of these years (or even half of that, in strict truth).... Of equal significance is the fact that a period with a professionalized army may well be, as it was in the eighteenth century, a period of limited warfare seeking limited political aims, if for no other reason than that professionalized forces are less willing to kill and be killed for remote and total objectives.

     The amateur weapons of the late nineteenth century made possible the mass citizen armies that fought the American Civil War and both of this century's world wars. Such mass armies could not be offered financial rewards for risking their lives, but they could be offered idealistic, extreme, and total goals that would inspire them to a willingness to die, and to kill: ending slavery, making a world safe for democracy, ending tyranny, spreading, or at least saving, "the American way of life," offered such goals. But they led to a total warfare, seeking total victory and unconditional surrender. As a result, each combatant country came to feel that its way of life, or at least its regime, was at stake in the conflict, and could hardly be expected to survive defeat. Thus they felt compulsion to fight yet more tenaciously. The result was ruthless wars of extermination such as World War II.

     With a continued professionalization of the armed services, caused by the increasing complexity of weapons, we may look forward with some assurance to less and less demand for total wars using total weapons of mass destruction to achieve unconditional surrender and unlimited goals. The rather naive American idea that war aims involve the destruction of the enemy's regime and the imposition on the defeated people of a democratic system with a prosperous economy (such as they have never previously known) will undoubtedly be replaced by the idea that the enemy regime must be maintained, perhaps in a modified form, so that we have some government with whom we can negotiate in order to obtain our more limited aims (which caused the conflict) and thus to lower the level of conflict as rapidly as possible consistent with the achievement of our aims. The nature of such "controlled conflict" will be described in a moment.

     The movement toward professionalization of the armed forces and the resulting lowering of the intensity of conflict is part of a much larger process deriving from the nuclear and Superpower stalemate between the Soviet Union and the United States. The danger of nuclear destruction will continue and become, if anything, more horrifying, but will, for this very reason, become a more remote and less likely probability. In the late 1960's the United States will have about 1,700 vehicles (missiles and SAC planes) targeted on the Soviet bloc; but the 1970's this will rise to about 2,400. Moreover, by 1970, 650 of these will be Polaris missiles on our 41 nuclear submarines, which cannot be found and eliminated by any Soviet missile counterstrike, once they are submerged at sea. The great value of the Polaris over its land-based rivals, such as Minuteman, is that the Soviet Union knows where the latter are and can counter-target on them. This means that the MM’s must be fired out of their silos before the Soviet warheads, seeking them out to destroy them, can arrive fifteen minutes after takeoff. Such a precarious position encourages nervous anticipation and possibility of precipitate action, capable of beginning a war no one really wants. Thus, on an enormously greater scale, we have something like the von Schlieffen Plan that made it necessary for Germany to attack France in 1914 when there was no real issue justifying resort to war between them. The Polaris missiles at sea, since they cannot be found and counter-forced, can be delayed, without need to strike first or even to strike second in immediate retaliation, but can be held off for hours, days, and weeks, compelling the Soviet to negotiate even after the original Soviet strike has devastated America's cities. Thus the Soviet Union cannot win in a nuclear exchange, even if they make the first strike.

     The reverse is also true. In the mid-1960's the Soviet Union has vehicles able to deliver up to six hundred or seven hundred nuclear warheads on the United States and perhaps seven hundred or eight hundred on our European allies. Their warheads are larger than ours (with up to 100-megaton ICBM's, while our largest are 9 MT). In spite of the fact that their missile sites arc poorly organized, with missiles, fuel, crews, and warheads widely scattered, so that they arc at least twelve hours from takeoff even in their fourtl1 stage of readiness, the inaccuracy of our counter-force missiles is so great that we could not eliminate all their missiles, even if we made a first strike with no warning. It would require only about 200 Soviet warheads to devastate our cities totally, and an American strike at Soviet missile bases delivered without warning would leave almost that number not eliminated; these would be free to make a retaliatory strike at us. Moreover, the Soviets have several dozen Polaris-type submarines that can fire four missiles each from surfaced positions. Many of these would survive an American unannounced first strike.

     All this means that we are as much deterred hy the Soviet missile threat as they must be by our much greater threat. Such deterrence has nothing to do with the relative size of the numbers of missiles possessed by two countries. It rests on whether an unannounced first strike would leave surviving enough missiles for a retaliatory strike capable of inflicting unacceptable damage. This is now the situation on both sides, and the existence of Polaris-type missiles makes it impossible to avoid this by striving for greater numbers of missiles, for larger warheads able to obliterate wide areas, or for greater accuracy that would increase the statistical possibility of eliminating enemy missiles on first strike. Thus no one will wish to make such a strike. Possibly for this reason, about a year after the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union ceased to work on new missile bases and accepted its permanent inferiority to the United States. But the mutual veto on the use of missiles, the nuclear stalemate, remained.

     This stalemate between the two Superpowers on the use of nuclear weapons also extended to their use of lesser, non-nuclear, weapons, so that the nuclear stalemate became a Superpower stalemate. This meant that much of the power of the Soviet Union and the United States, and not merely their nuclear po\ver, was neutralized to a considerable degree, since each feared to use its non-nuclear powers for fear they might escalate into nuclear conflict. This meant that the use of nuclear tactical weapons and the use even of conventional tactical weapons were inhibited to an undetermined degree by the presence of nuclear strategic weapons no one wanted to see used. The costs of using nuclear tactical weapons are so great that it is very doubtful if they are worth the cost. For example, the Western Powers lack the conventional forces to stop any intrusion of the great masses of Soviet ground forces if these began to drive westward in an attempt to conquer Germany. The West is committed to oppose such an effort. Since it is very doubtful that the NATO forces could oppose this successfully by using only conventional weapons, there would be great pressure to use the nuclear tactical weapons that NATO forces in Europe possess. It has been estimated that the chief targets of such nuclear tactical weapons would be bridges and similar narrow passages, in an effort to close these to Soviet advances. But it seems clear that if these passages were closed and the bridges destroyed, the advance of the Soviet armies (in armored and mechanized divisions) would be held up only a few weeks at most, and up to so million Germans would be killed from the blast and side effects of the use of nuclear weapons. At such a cost, the Germans would probably prefer not to be defended.

     In fact, it appears increasingly likely that fewer and fewer advanced people will regard large-scale war as an effective method of getting anything. What could a people obtain through war that they could not obtain with greater certainty and less effort in some other way? Indeed, the very idea of winning a general war is now almost unimaginable. We do not even know what we mean by “win.” Whatever Germany, Japan, and Italy sought from World War II, they would surely not have obtained by winning; yet they obtained the most significant parts of it by losing. Glory, power, and wealth may all be obtained with less effort and greater certainty by non-warlike methods. As science and technology advance, making war more horrible, they also make it possible to achieve any aims at which war might be directed by other, nonviolent, methods.

     The relationships between political organizations (to us, states) are chiefly political relations, based on power and concerned with influencing the policies of other such entities. We have tended to see such relationships in dichotomies, especially the sharp contrast between violent and nonviolent methods of war and peace. In fact, however, methods of influencing policy form a spectrum without any significant real discontinuities, and range from all-out nuclear warfare at the upper end, down through tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons, then through various levels of nonviolent political, social, and economic pressures, to levels of peaceful persuasion and reciprocal favors, to economic grants and even gifts.

     When Khrushchev renounced the use of both nuclear war and conventional violence, and promised to defeat the West by peaceful competition, he was dividing the spectrum into three levels, but in fact it is a continuous spectrum with 100-megaton bombs at the upper end and Olympic Games, International Geophysical Years, and foreign economic aid at the other end. When Khrushchev made his statement, he was convinced that the Soviet Union could outperform the United States on the level of peaceful competition because it could, in his opinion, overcome the American lead in the race for economic development and that, as a result, the Socialist way of life would become the model for emulation by the uncommitted nations. The failures of Socialist agricultural production in Russia, Cuba, China, and elsewhere, and the great triumphs of ... Socialist ... [and mixed] economies in Japan, Europe, and the United States, soon revealed, even to Khrushchev's supporters, that the Soviet chances of triumphing over the West by peaceful competition were very small. Conceivably this might force the Kremlin to raise its anti-American activities to a higher level of conflict, even to the level of violence, although probably through surrogates and satellites and in third-party areas (such as southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America).

     To prevent such a raising of the level of Soviet-American conflict, it might be worth while for the West to consider the possibility of yielding the Kremlin some victories on the lower, nonviolent, levels, especially if this could be achieved at little cost to us. It might also be worth while for us to consider what must be Russia's real goals. Obviously preservation of the Communist regime must have a higher level of desirability to Moscow than Castro's success in Cuba or the Kremlin's control of Budapest. Thus to the Politburo, now as earlier under Stalin, continued control in the Kremlin has a higher priority than world revolution. The West can help Russia's rulers get what they really want (their own domestic power), and at small cost, in return for what they can want only secondarily (the expansion of Communism). Thus, like Stalin, they can be forced back to "Socialism in one country." With rising domestic demand for higher standards of living in Russia, and growing evidence that these are more likely to be obtained under a non-Socialist or mixed economy, they could be forced back to "non-Socialism in one country," if this strengthened their own control in the Kremlin, as it well might do.

     [This is a call for appeasement and support for a system of tyranny that has oppressed, enslaved and murdered over 180 million people in the 20th century. The communist system should be eliminated from the earth, not built up as the professor is seeking in the above strategy. The American people and freedom-loving people everywhere should vigorously oppose such policy.]

     In fact, some such process is already under way. The Soviet Union has always been more conservative and less extremist in international matters than it appeared or sounded. Much of Khrushchev's truculence, even abroad, was for domestic rather than for foreign consumption. A recent study of 29 crisis situations in foreign affairs involving the Soviet Union in the 1945-1963 period shows that they were aggressive in only four, were cautious in eleven, and were more cautious than aggressive in fourteen. The four aggressive ones were concerned with Berlin, Hungary, the U-2 incident, and Cuba. The study showed that only 8 of the 29 crises were initiated by the Soviet Union, while 11 were initiated by the United States. The general conclusion of the study was that Soviet policy would grow increasingly conservative, since they were primarily concerned with state building and retaining what they have already achieved.

     The chief uncertainty of continuing this process arises from the problem of political succession in the Kremlin, a major unpredictable factor. Here the chances are two out of three that the trend would continue in Soviet policy, since the one case of a successor who would reverse the more conservative policy is outbalanced by the two cases of a successor who would retain it or of a disputed succession that would make an active Soviet foreign policy difficult. The fact remains that there are in the Soviet Union no institutional safeguards for any policy, just as there are none for the succession. But it is clear that pressures to continue a more moderate foreign policy will be strong, under any successor, now that the Russians are increasingly convinced that their present achievements are worth keeping, as the pressures for domestic improvements continue, and as their future hopes and expectations along these lines become more clearly envisaged.

     In this way the Superpower neutralization (and the included nuclear stalemate) will continue into the future. From this flow three consequences:

     1. Movement of Soviet-Western rivalry down to lower, less violent, levels of conflict and competition.

     2. Continued disintegration of the two Super-blocs, from the inability of the chief Power in each to bring force against its allies because of the need to accept growing diversity within each bloc in order to retain as much as possible the appearance of unity within the bloc. This process is well illustrated by Moscow's difficulties with China, Albania, and now Romania, or by Washington's troubles with De Gaulle or with its Latin American allies.

     3. A growing independence of the neutrals and uncommitted nations because of their ability to act freely in the troubled waters stirred up by the Soviet-American confrontation.

     These changes, rooted in weapon developments and technological changes, have less obvious political implications. Policy and politics are concerned with methods of influencing the behavior of others to obtain cooperation, consent or, at least, acquiescence. In our Western world, power has been based to a significant extent on force (that is, weapons), and to a lesser degree on economic rewards and ideological appeal. In other cultures, such as in Africa, politics has been based to a considerable extent on other considerations, such as kinship, social reciprocity, and religion. Changes in weapons within the Western states system have brought about changes in political patterns and organization that threaten to cause profound changes in political life and probably in the Western states system.

     For many centuries, from the ninth century to the twentieth, the increasing offensive power of Western weapons systems has made it possible to compel obedience over wider and wider areas and over larger numbers of peoples. Accordingly, political organizations (such as the state) have been able to rule over larger areas, and thus have become larger in size and fewer in numbers in our Western world. In this way, the political development of Europe over the last millennium has seen thousands of feudal areas coalesce into hundreds of principalities, and these into scores of dynastic monarchies, and, finally, into a dozen or more national states. The national state, its size measured in hundreds of miles, was based, to a considerable extent, on the fact that the weapons system of the nineteenth century, founded on citizen soldiers with handguns and moved (or supplied) by railroads and wagons, could apply force over hundreds of miles. This, in many cases, proved to be approximately the same size as the European linguistic and cultural groupings of peoples; and, accordingly, it became easy to base the popular appeal for allegiance to the state structure upon nationalism (that is, upon this common language and cultural tradition). Languages and cultures covering lesser areas than those that could be ruled over by the existing nineteenth-century system of weapons and transport, such as the Welsh, the Bretons, the Proven็als, the Basques, Catalonians, Sicilians, Ukrainians, and others, by failing to become centers for one of these dominant weapons-organized structures, went into political eclipse.

     As the technology of weapons, transportation, communications, and propaganda continued to develop, it became possible to compel obedience over areas measured in thousands (rather than hundreds) of miles and thus over distances greater than those occupied by existing linguistic and cultural groups. It thus became necessary to appeal for allegiance to the state on grounds wider than nationalism. This gave rise, in the 1930's and 1940's, to the idea of continental blocs and the ideological state (replacing the national state). Embraced hy Hitler and the Japanese, and (much less consciously) by the United States and Britain, this growing pattern of political organization and appeal to allegiance was smashed in World War II. But during that war technological developments increased the area over which obedience could be compelled and consent obtained. By 1950, Dulles and others talked of a two-Power world, as if consent could be obtained by only two Powers, and as if each were hemispherical in scope. They were not. For, while the area of power organizations had expanded, they had not become hemispherical, and new counterbalancing factors had appeared that threatened to reverse the whole process.

     Instead of power in the 1950's being concentrated in two centers, each hemispherical in scope and able to compel obedience over distances of 10,000 miles, the Superpowers could compel obedience over distances in the range of 6,000 to 8,000 miles, leaving a considerable zone between them. In addition the neutralization of their real power in their Superpower confrontation made this zone between more obvious, and weakened their ability to obtain obedience to extreme demands even within 6,000 miles of their power centers (which were situated, let us say, in Omaha and Kuibyshev). In this power gap between the less than hemispherical Superpowers appeared the neutrals of the Buffer Fringe.

     But there was more to the situation than this geographical limitation. The nature of power was also changing, although few noticed this. The role of force in politics had been effective to the degree that it was able to influence the minds and wills of men. But the new weapons, in seeking increased range, had become weapons of mass destruction rather than instruments of persuasion. If the victims of such weapons are killed, they can neither obey nor consent. Thus the new weapons have become instruments, not of political power, but of destruction of all power organizations. This explains the growing reluctance by all concerned to use them. Furthermore their range and areas of impact make them most ineffective against individual men and especially against the minds of individual men. And, finally, in an ideological state it is the minds of men that must be the principal targets. Any organization is coordinated both by patterned relationships and by ideology and morale. If the former become increasingly threatened by weapons of destruction, the organization can survive by becoming decentralized, with less emphasis on organizational relationships and more emphasis on morale and outlook. They thus become increasingly amorphous and invulnerable to modern weapons of destruction. The peoples of Africa are, for this reason among others, not susceptible to compulsion by megaton bombs. And Western peoples or Soviet peoples can become less susceptible by becoming Africanized.

     This process has not gone very far yet, but it is already observable, especially among the younger generation of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. To the young in all three of these areas there is a growing, if quiet, skepticism of any general abstract appeal to allegiance and loyalty, and a growing concern with concrete, interpersonal relationships with local groups of friends and intimates.

     There is still another element in this complex picture. This is also related to weapons. The past history of weapons over thousands of years shows that the reason political units have grown larger in certain periods has been because of the increased power of the offensive in the dominant weapons systems, and that periods in which defensive weapons became dominant have been those in which political units remained small in area or even became smaller. The growing power of castles in the period about 1100 B.C. or about A.D. 900 made political power so decentralized and made power units so small that all power became private power, and the state disappeared as a common form of political organization. Thus arose the so-called "Dark Ages" about 1000 B.C. or A.D. 1000.

     We do not expect any such extreme growth of defensive power in the future, but any increase in defensive weapon power would stop the growth in size of power areas and would, in time, reverse this tendency. There would be thus a proliferation in numbers and a decrease in size of such power units, a tendency already evident, in the past twenty years, in the great increase in the number of United Nations member states. No drastic increase in the defensive power of existing weapons can yet be demonstrated in any conclusive way, but the rising ability of guerrilla forces to maintain their functional autonomy shows definite limits on the offensive power of contemporary weapons. Any drastic increase in the ability of guerrilla forces to function would indicate such an increase in tile defensive power of existing weapons, and this, in turn, would indicate an ability to resist centralized authorities and thus an ability to maintain and defend small-group freedoms.

     Such a rise in the strength of defensive weapons, with a consequent decentralization of political power, would require a number of other changes, such as a decentralization of economic production. This probably seems very unlikely to us who live in the frantic economic expansion of the electronic revolution and the space race, but it is at least conceivable. Such a change would require a plentiful, dispersed source of industrial energy and the use of plentiful and widely scattered materials for industrial fabrication. These do not seem to be completely unlikely possibilities. For example, a shift from our present use of fossil fuels as a chief energy source to the use of the sun's energy directly in many small local energy accumulators might provide a plentiful supply of decentralized energy. More remote might be use of the tides, or of differential ocean temperatures, or even of the winds. Possibly some development in the use of nuclear energy, or, above all, some method for cheap separation of the oxygen and hydrogen in ordinary water that could release energy, perhaps through fuel cells, as they recombine.

     Such a decentralized energy source, if developed, could be used to build up a decentralized industrial system using cellulose or silicon as raw materials to produce an economy of plastics and glass products (including fiber glass). These two raw materials found in vegetation and sand are among the most common substances in the world. On such a basis, with the proper development of guerrilla weapon tactics, the costs of enforcing centralized orders in local areas might rise so high that a considerable process of political decentralization and local autonomies (including local liberties) could arise, thus reversing the process of political centralization that has continued in the Western tradition for about a thousand years..

     In this process, a significant role might be played by the appearance of a major, non-nuclear, deterrence. This already exists, but is not publicly discussed because it presents such a threat to the existing world political structure. It rests in the existence of biological and chemical weapons (BCW) that can be just as devastating as nuclear weapons and do not require a rich or elaborate industrial system for their manufacture or use. Thus they might be more readily available or usable hy the less advanced industrial nations, but are not being researched by such nations to any considerable degree because they might also be more effective as weapons against such backward nations. At the same time, the more advanced nations also hesitate to publicize the existence of such weapons because there is no assurance that they might not, while being readily available to backward nations, still be relatively effective against advanced nations.

     Much of the significance of this relationship can be seen in regard to Red China. This ... enemy has already exploded some kind of a nuclear device and will have a nuclear weapon in the next few years, but this offers little potential danger to us since they will have no effective long-range delivery vehicle. On the other hand, their threat with this against our allies, such as Japan or the Philippines, or their ability even now with their mass armies to threaten our interests in India, Southeast Asia, or Korea, is potentially high. Against such a threat, our nuclear missiles are relatively weak, because China is too dispersed and decentralized to offer vital targets. On the other hand, China's vulnerability to the threat of biological warfare is very large. This explains their hysterical attacks on American "germ warfare" during the Korean War. The word puts them into a panic, and rightly so, since they are critically vulnerable to such weapons used by us. The virus for wheat rust and rice blast, in varieties especially virulent on Chinese-type plants, can be produced in large amounts relatively easily at costs well below $40 a pound. Spread on the fields at the proper time in the annual growing cycle, these would destroy up to 75 percent of these crops. And there is no effective defense. In consequence the Chinese food intake would be cut from about 2,200 calories per person a day, not much above the subsistence level, to about 1,300 calories a day. If the Chinese permitted this, they would have few people strong enough to work at the defense effort, either in the combat areas or in industrial plants. If they tried to keep the food intake of more indispensable defenders up by strict rationing, leaving nothing for many children, old people, and women, they would suffer about 50 million deaths from malnutrition within a year. The armed forces, still largely of peasant origin, would not allow a rationing system that doomed their families in the villages, and would turn against the regime, especially if an American offer to feed the Chinese on American surplus food after a Chinese surrender were broadcast to the Chinese people.

     The danger of such weapons becoming common, or even becoming commonly known, among the people of the world, including the less developed nations, is very great, opening an opportunity to all kinds of political blackmail or even to merely irresponsible threats. The parallel danger from new weapons of chemical warfare are even more horrifying. One of the nerve gases now currently available in the United States is so potent that a small drop of it on an individual's unbroken skin can cause death in a few seconds. Moreover, many of these BCW weapons are cheap to make, and easier to make than to control. Most can be made in any well-equipped kitchen or ordinary laboratory, witl1 the chief restriction arising from the difficult safety precautions. But if the latter could be handled, and if delivery systems (which in some cases need be no more than men walking by fields or urban reservoirs) could be obtained, the deterrent effect of BCW weapons might be much greater than that of nuclear weapons now is, and would be much less predictable and foreseeable, since they would not be restricted, as the nuclear threat is, to heavily industrialized nations. This might well contribute toward the decentralization of power already mentioned..

     Another significant element in this complex picture is the convergence toward parallel paths of the United States and the Soviet Union. This is, of course, something that rabid partisans of either side will refuse to recognize. It arises from three directions: (1) there is an absolute convergence of interests between the two states, as will be indicated in a moment; (2) the structures of the two countries are, to some extent, changing in similar ways; and (3) as the only Superpowers able to inflict or receive instant annihilation, these two countries, to some extent, stand apart from other states and in a class together. The last point is almost obvious, since it must be clear that only these two are prepared to engage in a race to the moon or have an almost insatiable demand for mathematicians or space scientists, or are looked to by impoverished neutrals as obligated to provide economic assistance to the latters' ambitions.

     The converging of interests of the two Superpowers arises largely from the other two factors. These common interests include a wide variety of items, such as restricting the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional states, establishing restrictions on the economic demands of neutral nations, especially by refusing to allow one Superpower to be bid against the other; the ending of nuclear testing, the slowing up of the space race, the approaching domination of the United Nations by the growing majority of small and backward countries, the increasing aggressiveness of Red China, the unification of Germany, the acceleration of the population explosion in backward areas, and many others.

     Along with this convergence of interests is the growing parallelism of structure: (1) In spite of the great difference in the theories and the appearances of political life in the two countries, each is increasingly reaching its most fundamental decisions, not through party politics or hy decision in a political assembly, but hy the shifting pressures of great lobbying blocs acting upon each other by largely hidden contacts carried on behind the scenes. (2) These pressures are chiefly concerned with the allotment of economic resources, through fiscal and budgetary mechanisms, among three competing sectors of the economy concerned with consumption, governmental expenditures (chiefly defense), and capital investment. (3)Socially, troth societies are undergoing a similar circulation of elites in which education is the chief doorway to social advancement and is crowded with applicants from the lower (but not lowest) stratum of society (equivalent to the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle classes) but is receiving relatively fewer successful applicants from the upper (but not uppermost) group whose parents are already established in the prevalent structure. (4) In both countries trained experts and technicians, as a consequence of this educational process, are replacing political figures or other social groups, especially political specialists. In both, the military leaders, although qualified for supreme influence by their possession of power, are held at secondary levels by personal manipulations. (5) In both countries there is a growing intellectual skepticism toward authority, accepted ideologies, and established slogans, replaced by a rising emphasis upon the need for satisfactory small-group, interpersonal relations.

     As a result of all the complex interrelationships of weapons and politics that we have mentioned up to this point, it seems very likely that the international relations of the future will shift from the world we have known, in which war was epidemic and total, to one in which conflict is endemic and controlled. The ending of total warfare means the ending of war for unlimited aims (unconditional surrender, total victory, destruction of the opponent's regime and social system), fought with weapons of total destruction and a total mobilization of resources, including men, to a condition of constant, flexible, controlled conflict with limited, specific, and shifting aims, sought by limited application of diverse pressures applied against any other state whose behavior we wish to influence.

     Such controlled conflict would involve a number of changes in our attitudes and behavior:

     1. No declarations of war and no breaking off of diplomatic relations with the adversary, but, instead, continuous communication with him, whatever level of intensity the conflict may reach.

     2. Acceptance of the idea that conflict with an adversary in respect to some areas, activities, units, or weapons does not necessarily involve conflict with him in other areas, activities, units, or weapons.

     3. Military considerations, and the use of force generally, will always be subordinate to political considerations, and will operate as part of policy in the whole policy context.

     4. Armed forces must be fully professionalized, trained and psychologically prepared to do any task to the degree and level they are ordered by the established political authorities, without desire or independent effort to carry combat to a level of intensity not in keeping with existing policy and political considerations.

     5. There must be full ability at all times to escalate or to de-escalate the level of warfare as seems necessary in terms of the policy context, and to signal the decision to do either to the adversary as a guide to his responses.

     6. Ability to de-escalate to the level of termination of violence and warfare must be possible, both in psychological and procedural terms, even with continuance of conflict on lower, non-force, levels such as economic or ideological conflict.

     7. There must exist a full panoply of weapons and of economic, political, social, and intellectual pressures that can be used in conflict with any diverse states to secure the specific and limited goals that would become the real aims of international policy in a period of controlled conflict.

     8. Among the methods we must be prepared to use in such a period must be diplomatic or tacit agreement with any other state, including the Soviet Union or Red China, to seek parallel or joint aims in the world. This will be possible if all aims are limited to specific goals, which each state will recognize are not fatal to his general position and regime, and by which one specific aim can be traded against another, even tacitly. This will become possible for the double reason that professionalization of the fighting forces and the growing productiveness of the Superpower economies will not require either the total psychological mobilization or the almost total economic mobilization necessary in World War II.

     9. All this means a blurring of the distinction between war and peace, with the situation at all times one of closely controlled conflict. In this way endemic conflict is accepted in order to avoid, if possible, epidemic total war. The change will become possible because the ultimate policy of all states will become the preservation of their way of life and existing regime, with the largest possible freedom of action. These aims can be retained under controlled conflict but will be lost by all concerned in total war.

     In spite of this shift in the whole pattern of international power relations, the Soviet Union will remain for a long time the chief adversary of the United States, a situation for which there is no real solution until a new, and independent, Superpower rises on the land mass of Eurasia, preferably in a unified Western Europe. The fundamental differences between the United States and the Soviet Union will remain for a long time. They are critical, and include the following: (1) a basic difference in outlook in which the outlook of the West is based on diversity, relativism, pluralism, and social consensus, while the Russian outlook is based on a narrow range of competing opinions and little diversity of knowledge, and is monolithic, intolerant, rigid, unified, absolute, and authoritarian; (2) the difference in stages of economic development, in which they are looking forward, with eager anticipation, to an affluent future, while we have already experienced an affluent society and are increasingly disillusioned with it; (3) the fact that the American economy is unique, because it is the only economy that no longer operates in terms of scarce resources. It may be inside a framework of scarce resources, but this framework is so much wider than the other limiting features of the system (notably its fiscal and financial arrangements) that the system itself does not operate within any limits established by that wider framework.

     The third distinction may be seen in the fact that, in other economies, when additional demands are presented to the economy, less resources are available for alternative uses. But in the American system, as it now stands, additional new demands usually lead to increased resources becoming available for alternative purposes, notable consumption. Thus, if the Soviet Union embraced a substantial increase in space activity, the resources available for raising Russian levels of consumption would be reduced, while in America, any increases in the space budget makes levels of consumption also rise. It does this, in the latter case, because increased space expenditures provide purchasing power for consumption that makes available previously unused resources out of the unused American productive capacity.

     This unused productive capacity exists in the American economy because the structure of our economic system is such that it channels flows of funds into the production of additional capacity (investment) without any conscious planning process or any real desire by anyone to increase our productive capacity. It does this because certain institutions in our system (such as insurance, retirement funds, social security payments, undistributed corporate profits, and such) and certain individuals who personally profit by the flow of funds not theirs into investment continue to operate to increase investment even when they have no real desire to increase productive capacity (and, indeed, many decry it). In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, resources are allotted to the increase of productive capacity by a conscious planning process and at the cost of reducing the resources available in their system for consumption or for the government (largely defense).

     Thus the meaning of the word "costs" and the limitations on ability to mobilize economic resources are entirely different in our system from the Soviet system and most others. In the Soviet economy "costs" are real costs, measurable in terms of the allotment of scarce resources that could have been used otherwise. In the American system "costs" are fiscal or financial limitations that have little connection with the use of scarce resources or even with the use of available (and therefore not scarce) resources. The reason for this is that in the American economy, the fiscal or financial limit is lower than the limit established by real resources and, therefore, since the financial limits act as the restraint on our economic activities, we do not get to the point where our activities encounter the restraints imposed by the limits of real resources (except rarely and briefly in terms of technically trained manpower, which is our most limited resource).

     These differences between the Soviet and the American economies are: (1) the latter has built-in, involuntary, institutionalized investment, which the former lacks, and (2) the latter has fiscal restraints at a much lower level of economic activity, which the Soviet system also lacks. Thus greater activity in defense in the USSR entails real costs since it puts pressure on the ceiling established by limited real resources, while greater activity in the American defense or space effort releases money into the system, which presses upward on the artificial financial ceiling, pressing it upward closer to the higher, and remote, ceiling established by the real resources limit of the American economy. This makes available the unused productive capacity that exists in our system between the financial ceiling and the real resources ceiling; it not only makes these unused resources available for the governmental sector of the economy from which the expenditure was directly made but also makes available portions of these released resources for consumption and additional capital investment. For this reason, government expenditures in the United States for things like defense or space may entail no real costs at all in terms of the economy as a w-hole. In fact, if the volume of unused capacity brought into use by expenditure for these things (that is, defense, and so on) is greater than the resources necessary to satisfy the need for which the expenditure was made, the volume of unused resources made available for consumption or investment will be greater than the volume of resources used in the governmental expenditure, and this additional government effort will cost nothing at all in real terms, but will entail negative real costs. (Our wealth will be increased by making the effort.)

     The basis for this strange, and virtually unique, situation is to be found in the large amount of unused productive capacity in the United States, even in our most productive years. In the second quarter of 1962, our productive system was running at a very high level of prosperity, yet it was functioning about 12 percent below capacity, which represented a loss of $73 billion annually. In this way, in the whole period from the beginning of 1953 to the middle of 1962, our productive system operated at $387 billion below capacity. Thus, if the system had operated near capacity, our defense effort over the nine years would have cost us almost nothing, in terms of loss of goods or capacity.

     This unique character in the American economy rests on the fact that the utilization of resources follows flow lines in the economy that are not everywhere reflected by corresponding flow lines of claims on wealth (that is, money). In general, in our economy the lines of flow of claims on wealth are such that they provide a very large volume of savings and a rather large volume of investment, even when no one really wants new productive capacity; they also provide an inadequate flow of consumer purchasing power, in terms of the flows, or potential flows, of consumers' goods; but they provide very limited, sharply scrutinized, and often misdirected flows of funds for the use of resources to fulfill the needs of the governmental sector of our tri-sectored economy. As a result, we have our economy of distorted resource-utilization patterns, with overinvestment in many areas, overstuffed consumers in one place and impoverished consumers in another place, a drastic under-supply of social services, and widespread social needs for which public funds are lacking. In the Soviet Union, money flows follow fairly well the flows of real goods and resources, but, as a result, pressures are directly on resources. These pressures mean that saving and investment conflict directly with consumption and government services (including defense), putting the government under severe direct strains, as the demands for higher standards of living cannot be satisfied except by curtailing investment, defense, space, or other government expenditures.

     Many countries of the world, especially the backward ones, are worse off than the Soviet Union, because their efforts to increase consumers' goods may well require investment based on savings that must be accumulated at the expense of consumption. In many areas, as we have seen in Asia, the Mediterranean, and Latin America, savings are accumulated by structural monetary flows, but there are no institutional flows toward investment, little incentive or motivation for investment, and the economy lags in all three sectors.

     As a chief consequence of these conditions, the contrast between the "have" nations and the "have-not" nations will become even wider. This would be of little great importance to the rest of the world w-ere it not that the peoples of the backward areas, riding the "crisis of rising expectations," are increasingly unwilling to be ground down in poverty as their predecessors were. At the same time, the Superpower stalemate increases the abilities of these nations to be neutral, to exercise influence out of all relationship to their actual powers, and to act, sometimes, in an irresponsible fashion. These areas will be the chief sources of real trouble in the future, for clashes between the United States and the Soviet Union (or even Red China) are unlikely to arise from direct conflicts of interests, but may well arise from conflicts over neutrals.

     These neutrals and other peoples of backward areas have acute problems. Solutions of these problems do exist, but the underdeveloped nations are unlikely to find them. As we have indicated elsewhere, their ,chief problems are three : (1) ... limited food supplies; (2) problems of political stability, especially the relationship between political aims and quite diverse weapons-control patterns; and ( 3 ) the problem of obtaining constructive rather than destructive patterns of outlook. The United States ... [has an ] ... interest in seeing that these problems find solutions. In general, these underdeveloped nations cannot follow American patterns, and are attracted to the Soviet system despite its heavy costs in loss of personal freedoms. We do not have either the knowledge or influence that would make it possible for us to direct their steps along more desirable routes such as that followed by Japan.

     One development in political life during the next generation or so that will be difficult to document is concerned with the very nature of the modern sovereign state. Like so much of our cultural heritage from the seventeenth century, such as international law and puritanism, this may now be in the process of a change so profound as to modify its very nature. As understood in western Europe over the last three centuries, the state was the organization of sovereign power on a territorial basis. "Sovereign" meant that the state (or ruler) had supreme legal authority to do just about anything regarded as public, and this authority impinged directly on the subject (or citizen) without any intermediaries or buffer corporations, and did this in a dualistic power antithesis typical of the Greek two-valued logic that was applied to almost everything in the seventeenth century. As part of this sovereign system, it was assumed that rights of property and of permanent association were not natural or eternal, but flowed from grants of sovereign power. Thus property in land required the state's recognition in the form of a document or deed, and no corporation could exist except at the charter of the sovereign or with his tacit consent. Moreover, all citizens on the territory were subject to the same sovereign power. The latter consisted, as it still largely does in our tradition, of a mixture of force (military), economic rewards, and ideological uniformity. This view of public authority is by no means universal in the world, and shows strong indications that it may be changing in the West. Corporations exist and have the earliest mark of divinity (immortality), and have become, as they were in the nonsovereign Middle Ages, refuges where individuals may function shielded from the reach of the sovereign state. The once almost universal equivalence between residence and citizenship may be weakening. If the ideological state continues to develop its likely characteristics, persons of different ideologies and thus of different allegiances may become intermingled on the same territory. The number of refugees and resident aliens is now increasing in most countries.

     Moreover, the incorporation of such a wide variety of peoples with such diverse traditions into the United Nations is also contributing to this process. We have seen that traditional China did not exercise power on the vast majority of its subjects (the peasants) in terms of force, rewards, or even ideology, but did so by social pressures through the intermediary of the family and the gentry. Similarly in Africa, power has been quite different in its character than it was in the traditional European state, and was based rather on kinship, social reciprocity, and religion. When African natives met to settle political disputes in battle, this was not, as in Europe, a clash of military force to settle the issue; rather it was an opportunity for spiritual entities to indicate their decisions in the case. As soon as a few casualties appeared on one side, this was taken as an indication that the spirits concerned had made a decision adverse to that side, and, accordingly, the victims' associates broke and ran, leaving the field to the other side. Like the medieval judicial trial hy battle or by ordeal, this was not an effort to settle a dispute by force, but the attempt to give a spiritual entity an opportunity to reveal its decision.

     It may seem farfetched to expect our state to succumb to the introduction of religious, magical, or spiritual influences such as this, but there can be little doubt that social pressures such as used to exercise influence in China will become more influential in our power structures in the future.

     It seems likely also that there will be a certain revival of the use of intermediaries in removing or weakening the impact of sovereign power on ordinary individuals. This implies a growth of federalism in the structure of political power. On the whole, the history of federalism has not been a happy one. Even in the United States, the most significant example of a successful federalist structure in modern history, the federalist principle has yielded ground to unitary government for 150 years or so. Moreover, in our own time a number of efforts, chiefly British, to set up federal unions have failed. Thus the Central African Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland broke up after a few years, and the West Indies Federation was even less viable. Recently the Malaysian Federation of the Malay States, Singapore, North Borneo, and Sarawak has been threatened with destruction by Indonesia, itself once a federal system that has now largely yielded to unitary developments.

     Nevertheless, the federal principle seems likely to grow as a method by which certain functions of government are allotted to one structure while other functions go to a narrower or wider structure. This tendency seems likely to arise from a number of influences of which the chief might be: (1) the inability of many of the new, small states to carry on all the functions of government independently and alone, and their consequent efforts to carry out some of them cooperatively; (2) the tendency for these new states to look to the United Nations to perform some of the most significant functions of government, such as defense of frontiers or maintaining public order; for example, Tanganyika recently disbanded its armed forces and entrusted its defense and public order to a Nigerian force under United Nations control; (3) the need for economic cooperation over wider areas than the boundaries of most states in order to obtain the necessary diversity of resources within a single economic system, a need that will continue to encourage the establishment of customs unions and economic blocs, of which the European Common Market is the outstanding example; similar unions are projected for Central America and other areas.

     The most interesting example of this process may be seen in the slow growth of some kind of multilevel federal structure covering much of tropical Africa. This arose from the disintegration of the French colonial system in Black Africa in 1956-1960 and was known as the Brazzaville Twelve at first (from December in 1960), but is now much expanded to include non-French areas under the name Union of African and Malagasy States. This Union shows a tendency to become one of the middle layers in a multilevel political hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the top level is held by the United Nations and its associated functional bodies, such as the World Health Organization, UNESCO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the ILO, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Court of Justice, and others. On the second level are various organizations that have Pan-European or Third Bloc overtones such as the European Common Market or its now stalemated political counterpart, along with Euratom, the European Coal and Iron Community, and some others. The De Gaulle veto on the continued development of these has suspended their growth and also any tendency for them to coalesce with a number of older French Community organizations.

     On the third, fourth, and fifth levels is a rather confused mass of organizations of which the third consists of those which are Pan-African in scope, the fourth are those allied with the UAMS, and the fifth are the relatively viable Brazzaville Twelve projects. On the third level are such organizations as the Economic Commission for Africa South of the Sahara, the Technical Cooperation Commission for Africa, the Scientific Council for Africa, two African commissions of the World Conference of Organizations of the Teaching Professions, the African Trade Union Confederation (set up at Dakar in 1962), and a number of others. On the fifth level are a whole series of organizations associated with the Brazzaville Twelve, its semiannual "summit conferences" of heads of state, its Secretary General and Secretariat, its Defense Union, its Organization for Economic Cooperation, and others. On the fourth level are similar organizations, including an Assembly of Heads of States, a Council of Members, and a Secretariat-General set up for the UAMS at Lagos in January 1962. Possibly these third, fourth, and fifth levels will coalesce and eliminate some reduplication as memberships become firmer.

     On the sixth level are a number of local unions of states, such as those for local river controls, customs unions, and such. And on the seventh level are the individual states which in theory (like the states of the United States) will continue to hold full sovereignty. But when two-third votes on higher levels can make binding decisions on member states, or when states intend to vote as a bloc in the United Nations, or when states have reduced their military and police forces so that they are dependent on forces from higher levels to defend their territories or to maintain order, or when states fool; to higher levels for funds for investment or to restore their annual foreign-exchange imbalances, the realities of sovereign power become dispersed and some areas of the world begin to look more like the Germanies of the late medieval period than like the nationalist sovereign states of the nineteenth century. How far this process will go we cannot foretell, but the possibility of such developments should not be excluded by us just because they have not been experienced by us in recent generations.

     This is more than enough on the power patterns in our near future. we must now turn to a much briefer discussion of the patterns of economic and social life. There we see a most extraordinary contrast. While the economic life of Western society has been increasingly successful in satisfying our material needs, the social aspect has become increasingly frustrating. There was a time, not long ago, when the chief aims of most Western men was for greater material goods and for rising standards of living. This was achieved at great social costs, by the attrition or even destruction of much of social life, including the sense of community fellowship, leisure, and social amenities. Looking backward, we are fully aware of these costs in the original factory towns and urban slums, but looking about us today we are often not aware of the great, often intangible, costs of middle-class living in suburbia or in the dormitory environs that surround European cities: the destruction of social companionship and solidarity, the narrowing influence of exposure to persons from a restricted age group or from a narrow segment of social class, the horrors of commuting, the incessant need for constant driving about to satisfy the ordinary needs of the family for groceries, medical care, entertainment, religion, or social experience, the prohibitive cost and inconvenience of upkeep and repairs and, in general, the whole way of life of the suburban "rat race," including the large-scale need for providing artificial activities for children.

     Rebellion against this rat race has already begun, not from the lower middle class who are just entering it and still aspire to it, but from the established middle class who have, as they say, "had it." On the whole, the efforts to find a way out while still retaining a high standard of material living have not been successful, and the real rebellion is coming, as we shall see later, from their children. These have expanded the usual adolescent revolt against parental dominance and authority into a large-scale rejection of parental values. One form that this revolt has taken has been to modify the meaning of the expression "high standard of living" to include a whole series of desires and values that are not material and thus were excluded from the nineteenth-century bourgeois understanding of the expression "standard of living." Among these are two we have already listed as disconcerting elements in the Africans' understanding of standard of living: small group interpersonal relationships and sex play. These changes, as we shall see, have come to represent a challenge to the whole middle-class outlook.

     The social costs of the contemporary economic system are staggering. On the whole, they have been widely discussed and are generally recognized. As economic enterprises have become larger and more tightly integrated into one another, the freedom, individualism, and initiative traditionally associated with the modern economy (in contrast with the medieval rural economy) have ... [been] be sacrificed. The self-reliant individual has gradually changed into the conformist "organization man." Routine has displaced risk, and subordination to abstractions has replaced the struggle with diverse concrete problems. The constantly narrowing range of possibilities for self-expression has given rise to deep frustrations with their concomitant growth of irrational compensating customs, such as the obsession with speed; vicarious combativeness, especially in sports; the use of alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and sex as stimulants, diversions, and sedatives; and the rapid appearance and disappearance of fads in dress, social customs, and leisure activities.

     Most crucial have been the demands of the modern industrial and business system, because of advancing technology, for more highly trained manpower. Such training requires a degree of ambition, self-discipline, and future-preference that many persons lack or refuse to provide, with the result that a growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the Lumpenproletariat) has reappeared. This group of rejects from our bourgeois industrial society provide one of our most intractable future problems, because they are gathered in urban slums, have political influence, and are socially dangerous.

     In the United States, where these people congregate in the largest cities and are often Negroes or Latin Americans, they are regarded as a racial or economic problem, but they are really an educational and social problem for which economic or racial solutions would help little. This group is most numerous in the more advanced industrial areas and now forms more than twenty percent of the American population. Since they are a self-perpetuating group and have many children, they are increasing in numbers faster than the rest of the population. Their self-perpetuating characteristic as a group is not based on biological differences but on sociological factors, chiefly on the fact that disorganized, undisciplined, present-preference parents living under chaotic economic and social conditions are most unlikely to train their children in the organized, disciplined, future-preference and orderly habits the modern economic system requires in its workers, so that the children, like their parents, grow up as unemployables. This is not a condition that can be cured by providing more jobs, even if the jobs are in the proper areas, because the jobs require characteristics these victims of anomie do not possess and are unlikely to acquire.

     All this leads to one of the most significant of current changes, the changes in attitudes and outlooks. At this point we shall not discuss the middle-class outlook and its challenges, which are the central aspect of this subject in the United States, but shall restrict ourselves to an equally large subject, the changes in the outlook of Western society as a whole, especially in Europe.

     The intellectual and religious aspects of any society, including all those things I call "pattern of outlook," change at least as rapidly as the more material aspects of the society, and are generally less noticed. Among these the most significant, and the least noticed, are the categories into which any society divides its experiences in order to think about them or to talk about them and the values the society, often in unconscious consensus, places upon these categories. In every society there are certain groups, perhaps an intellectual elite, who think new thoughts, new at least in comparison with what went just before. In time, some of these thoughts spread and become familiar, until it may seem that everybody is thinking them. Of course, everybody is not, because in every society there are three other groups: the large group who do not think at all, the substantial group who a;-e not aware of anything new and who retain the same outlook for years and even generations and the small group who are always opposed to the consensus simply because opposition has become an end in itself.

     In spite of these complexities, we can still look at the past and see a sequence of prevalent outlooks, often with rather confused periods of transition in between. Over the past two centuries, there have been five such stages: the Enlightenment in 1730-l790, the Romantic Movement in 1790-1850, the Age of Scientific Materialism in 1850-1895:, the Period of Irrational Activism of 1895-1945, and our new Age of Inclusive Diversity since 1945.

     These changing patterns of outlooks arise because men are complicated creatures trying to operate in a complex universe. Both man and universe are dynamic, or changeable in time, and the chief additional complexity is that both are changing in a continuum of abstraction, as well as in the more familiar continuum of space-time. The continuum of abstraction simply means that the reality in which man and the universe function exists in five dimensions; of these the dimension of abstraction covers a range from the most concrete and material end of reality to, at the opposite extreme, the most abstract and spiritual end of reality, with every possible gradation between these two ends along the intervening dimensions that determine reality, including the three dimensions of space, the fourth of time, and this fifth dimension of abstraction. This means that man is concrete and material at one end of his person, is abstract and spiritual at the other end, and covers all the gradations between, with a large central zone concerned with his chaos of emotional experiences and feelings.

     In order to think about himself or the universe with the more abstract and rational end of his being, man has to categorize and to conceptualize both his own nature and the nature of reality, while, in order to act and to feel on the less abstract end of his being, he must function more directly, outside the limits of categories, without the buffer of concepts. Thus man might look at his own being as divided into three levels of body, emotions, and reason. The body, functioning directly in space-time-abstraction, is much concerned with concrete situations, individual and unique events, at a specific time and place. The middle levels of his being are concerned with himself and his reactions to reality in terms of feelings and emotions as determined by endocrine and neurological reactions. The upper levels of his being are concerned with his neurological analysis and manipulation of conceptualized abstractions. The three corresponding operations of his being are sensual, emotional or intuitive, and rational. The sequence of intellectual history is concerned with the sequence of styles or fads that have been prevalent, one after another, as to what emphasis or combinations of man's three levels of operations would be used in his efforts to experience life and to cope with the universe.

     In the most general terms, we might say that primitive man emphasized an empirical approach to these problems with use of man's sensual equipment and chief emphasis on specific concrete situations; archaic man (say from 5000 B.C. to about 500 B.C. in Eurasia) emphasized man's emotional and intuitive equipment with emphasis on symbols, ritual, myth, and magical actions; Classical man (say from 500 B.C. to A.D.500) emphasized man's rational equipment and regarded man's concepts as the major portion of reality. But Western man, since A.D. 500, has sought to find some combination of all three parts of his equipment that will provide satisfactory explanation and successful operation in terms both of man's nature and of the universe. The combinations he has tried provide the changing sequence of intellectual history..

     The Age of Enlightenment, following on the successes of the Age of Newton (which had discovered a rational and mechanical explanation of the material universe), tried to apply the same techniques to man and society, and came up with a static, mechanical, and rationalist conception of both. The inadequacy of this view of man, already rejected by poets and literary figures in the mid-eighteenth century, led to its general rejection as inadequate because of the excesses of the French Revolution. The following Romantic period, accordingly, adopted a much more irrational picture of man, of society, and of the universe. As a consequence, emphasis shifted from the earlier rational, mechanical, and static views to irrational and dynamic views of man and society.

     This period of Romanticism (about 1790-1850) was marked by poets of "storm and stress," the Gothic revival, and a growing emphasis on history as the correct key to understanding man and society. The period, associated with Hegel, Hugo, and Heine, culminated in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848), which found the key to man's social position in past struggles.

     The third generation of the nineteenth century (1850-1895) was in an age of science and rationalism whose typical figures were Darwin and Bismarck. While emphasizing the empirical and rational aspects of science, it tried to apply these to biology and to history in terms of a scientific materialism that could explain biology and change as Newton's science had explained mechanics. By the end of the century, man was frustrated and disillusioned with scientific method and materialism and with emphasis on the nonhuman world and was turning once again to the problems of man and society with a conviction that these problems could be handled only by nonrational methods and by the clash of contending forces, since the problems themselves were too complex, too dynamic, too irrational to be settled by science or even by human thought.

     The result was a new period, the Age of Irrational Activism. It began with men, like Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, who emphasized the nonrational nature of the universe and of man, quickly shifted Darwin's doctrines of struggle and survival from nonhuman nature to human society, and rejected rationalism as slow, superficial, and an inhibition on both action and survival. As Bergson said in his Creative Evolution (1907): "The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the contrary, is molded on the very form of life."

     This period felt that man, and nature, and human society were all basically irrational. Reason, regarded as a late and rather superficial accretion in the process of human evolution, was considered inadequate to plumb the real nature of man's problems, and was regarded as an inhibitor on the full intensity of his actions, an obstacle to the survival of himself as an individual and of his group (the nation). Any effort to apply reason or science, based on rational analysis and evaluation, would be a slow and frustrating effort: slow because the process of human rationality is always slow, frustrating because it cannot plumb into the real depths and nature of man's experience, and because it can always turn up as many and as good reasons for any course of action as it can for the opposite course of action. The effort to do this was dangerous, because as the thinker poised in indecision, the man of action struck, eliminated the thinker from the scene, and survived to determine the future on the basis of continued action. To the theorist of these views, the thinker would always be divided, hesitant, and weak, while the man of action would be unified, decisive, and strong.

     This point of view, nourished on Marx and Heinrich von Treitschke, justified class conflicts and national warfare, and formed the background for the cult of violence that was reflected in the political assassinations of 1898-1914 and the imperialist aggressions that began with Japan, Italy, and Britain in China, Ethiopia, and South Africa in 1894-1899. The explicit justification of this view could be found in Georges Sorel R้flexions sur la Violence (1908) or in the political events of the summer of 1914. From that fateful summer, for more than forty years, higher levels of violence became the solution of all problems, whether it was the question of winning a war, Stalin's efforts to industrialize Russia, Hitler's efforts to settle the "Jewish problem," Rupert Brooke's effort to find meaning in life, Japan's desire to find a solution to economic depression, the English-speaking nations' search for security, Italy's search for glory, or Franco's desire to preserve the status quo in Spain. The culmination of the process in total irrationalism and total violence was Nazism, "The Revolution of Nihilism."

     Expressed explicitly this cult of Irrational Activism was based on the belief that the universe was dynamic and largely nonrational. As such, any effort to deal with it by rational means will be futile and superficial. Moreover, rationalism, by paralyzing man's ability to act decisively, will expose him to destruction in a world whose chief features include struggle and conflict. Men came to believe that only violence had survival value. The resulting cult of violence permeated all human life. By mid-century, the popular press, literature, the cinema, sports, and all major human concerns had embraced this cult of violence. The books of Mickey Spillane or Raymond Chandler sold millions to satisfy this need. Humphrey Bogart became the most popular film hero because he courted women with a blow to the jaw.

     On a somewhat more profound level, the Nazi Party mobilized popular support with a program of "Blood and Soil" (Blut und Boden), while the Fascists in Italy covered every wall with their slogan, "Believe! Obey! Fight!" In neither was there any expectation that men should think or analyze.

     On the highest philosophic levels, the new attitude was justified. Bergson appealed to intuition, and Hitler used it. Other philosophers vied with one another to demonstrate that the old mechanism of abstract, rational thought must be rejected as irrelevant, superficial, or meaningless. The semanticists rejected logic by rejecting the idea of general categories or even of definition of terms. According to them, because everything is constantly changing, no term can remain fixed without at once becoming irrelevant. The meaning of any word depended on the context in which it was used; since this was different every time it was used, the meaning, consisting of a series of connotations based on all previous uses of the term, is different at each use. Every individual who uses a term is simply the culmination of all his past experiences that make him what he is; since experience never stops, he is a different person every time he uses a term, and it has a different meaning for him. On this basis the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) wrote a series of works to show the constantly changing nature of personality, which is also a reflection of the context in which it operates, so that each person who meets someone knows him as a different personality.

     The most widely read of twentieth-century philosophers, the existentialists, reflected this same attitude, although they could agree on almost nothing. In general they were skeptical of any general principles about reality, but recognized that reality did exist for each individual as the concrete instant of time, place, and context in which he acted. Thus-he must act. In order to act he must make a decision, a commitment, to something that would give him a basis from which to act. By acting he experiences reality, and to that extent knows and demonstrates, at least to himself, that there is a reality.

     All these ideas, reflecting the disjointed malaise of the century, permeated the outlook of the period and left it hungry for meaning, for identity, for some structure or purpose in human experience. Insanity, neurosis, suicide, and all kinds of irrational obsessions and reactions filled increasing roles in human life. Most of these were not even recognized as being irrational or obsessive. Speed, alcohol, sex, coffee, and tobacco screened man off from living, injuring his health, stultifying his capacity to think, to observe, or to enjoy life, without his realizing that these were the shields he adopted to conceal from himself the fact that he was no longer really capable of living, because he no longer knew what life was and could see no meaning or purpose in it. As his capacity to live or to experience life dwindled, he sought to reach it by seeking more vigorous experiences that might penetrate the barriers surrounding him. The result was mounting sensationalism. In time, nothing made much impression unless it was concerned with shocking violence, perversion, or distortion.

     Along with this, ability to communicate dwindled. The old idea of communication as an exchange of concepts represented by symbols was junked. Instead, symbols had quite different connotations for everyone concerned simply because everyone had a different past experience. A symbol might have meaning for two persons but it did not have the same meaning. Soon it was regarded as proper that words represent only the writer's meaning and need have no meaning at all for the reader. Thus appeared private poetry, personal prose, and meaningless art in which the symbols used have ceased to be symbols because they do not reflect any common background of experience that could indicate their meaning as shared communication or experience. These productions, the fads of the day, were acclaimed by many as works of genius. Those who questioned them and asked their meaning were airily waved aside as unforgivable philistines; they were told that no one any longer sought "meaning" in literature or art but rather sought "experiences." Thus to look at a meaningless painting became an experience. These fads followed one another, reflecting the same old pretenses, but under different names. Thus "Dada" following World War I eventually led to the "Absurd" following World War II.

     But even as this process continued, twenty years after Hiroshima, deep within the social context of the day, new outlooks were rising that made the views associated with Irrational Activism increasingly irrelevant. One of these we have already mentioned. The victory of rational analysis, operational research, and organized scientific attitudes over irrationality, will, intuition, and violence in World War II reversed the trend. Nothing succeeds like success, and no success is greater than ability to survive and find solutions to critical problems involving existence itself. The West in World War II and in the postwar period, in spite of the hysterical protests of the extremists, showed once again that it was able to overcome aggression, narrow intolerance, hatred, tribalism, totalitarianism, selfishness, arrogance, imposed uniformity, and all the evils the West had recognized as evils throughout its history. It not only won the war: it solved the great economic crisis, prevented the extension of tyranny while still avoiding World War III, and did all this in a typical Western way by fumbling cooperatively down a road paved with good intentions. The final result was a triumph of incalculable magnitude for the Outlook of the West.

     The Outlook of the West is that broad middle way about which the fads and foibles of the West oscillate. It is what is implied by what the West says it believes, not at one moment but over the long succession of moments that form the history of the West. From that succession of moments it is clear that the West believes in diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism rather than in monism or dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion, in liberty rather than in authority, in truth rather than in power, in conversion rather than in annihilation, in the individual rather than in the organization, in reconciliation rather than in triumph, in heterogeneity rather than in homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in absolutes, and in approximations rather than in final answers. The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation. In man the West sees body, emotions, and reason as all equally real and necessary, and is prepared to entertain discussion about their relative interrelationships but is not prepared to listen for long to any intolerant insistence that any one of these has a final answer.

     The West has no faith in final answers today. It believes that all answers are un-final because everything is imperfect, although possibly getting better and thus advancing toward a perfection the West is prepared to admit may be present in some remote and almost unattainable future. Similarly in the universe, the West is prepared to recognize that there are material aspects, less material aspects, immaterial aspects, and spiritual aspects, although it is not prepared to admit that anyone yet has a final answer on the relationships of these. Similarly the West is prepared to admit that society and groups are necessary, while the individual is important, but it is not prepared to admit that either can stand alone or be made the ultimate value to the sacrifice of the other.

     Where rationalists insist on polarizing the continua of human experience into antithetical pairs of opposing categories, the West has constantly rejected the implied need for rejection of one or the other, by embracing "Both." This catholic attitude goes back to the earliest days of Western society when its outlook was being created in the religious controversies of the preceding Classical Civilization. Among these controversies were the following: (1) Was [Jesus] Christ ... [a] Man or [a] God? (2) Was salvation to be secured by God's grace or by man's good works? (3) Was the material world real and good or was spirituality real and good? (4) Was the body worthy of salvation or was the soul only to be saved? (5) Was the truth found only by God's revelation or was it to be found by man's experience (history)? (6) Should man work to save himself or to save others? (7) Does man owe allegiance to God or to Caesar? (8) Should man's behavior be guided by reason or by observation? (9) Can man be saved inside the Church or outside it? In each case, with vigorous partisans clamoring on both sides (and in many cases still clamoring), the answer, reached as a consensus built up by long discussion, was Both. In fact a correct definition of the Christian tradition might well be expressed in that one word "Both." Throughout its long history, controversy over religion in Western society has been based on a disturbance of the arrangement or balance within that "Both."

     From this religious basis established on "Both" as early as the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), the outlook of the West developed and spread with the growth of the new Christian Civilization of the West to replace the dying Classical Civilization. And today, when the Civilization of the West seems as if it too may be dying, we may reassure ourselves by recalling that our civilization has saved itself before by turning back to its tradition of Inclusive Diversity. This apparently is what has been happening since 1940. It was Inclusive Diversity that created the nuclear bomb in World War II, and it may well be Inclusive Diversity that will save the West in the postwar world.

     Any outlook or society that finds its truth in Inclusive Diversity or in "Both" obviously faces a problem of relationships. If man finds the truth by using body, emotions, and reason, these diverse talents must be placed in some workable arrangement with one another. So too must service to God and to Caesar or to self and to fellow man.

     In an age like ours, in which all these relationships have become disrupted and discordant, such relationships can be reestablished by discussion and testing, but in this process each discussant must rely on his experience. The great body of such experience, however, will not be found among living discussants, whose whole lives have been passed in a culture in which these relationships were discordant, but in the experiences of those whose lives were lived in earlier ages before the relationship in question became discordant. This gives rise to the typical Western solution of relying on experience and, at the same time, helps the society to link up with its traditions (the most therapeutic action in which any society can engage)..

     From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based....

     1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)....

     This methodology of the West is basic to the success, power, and wealth of Western Civilization. It is reflected in all successful aspects of Western life, from the earliest beginnings to the present. It has been attacked and challenged by all kinds of conflicting methods and outlooks, by all kinds of alternative attitudes based on narrowness and rigidity, but it has reappeared, again and again, as the chief source of strength of that amazing cultural growth of which we are a part.

     This method has basically been the method of operation in Western religious history, despite the many lapses of Western religion into authoritarian, absolute, rigid, and partial affirmations. The many problems, previously listed, that faced the Church at the time of the Council of Nicaea were settled by this Western method. Throughout Western religious history ... [various groups have insisted] that the truth was available—total, explicit, final, and authoritative—in God's revelation....

     The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: ... In the Christian tradition the stages in this ... process ... include: (1) man's intuitive sense of natural law and morality, [conscience, a gift of God], (2) the Old Testament, (3) the New Testament....

     This version of the religious tradition of the West as an example of the Western outlook as a whole may seem to many to be contradicted by the narrow intolerance, rigid bigotry, and relentless persecutions that have disfigured so much of the religious history of the West. This is true, and is a clear indication that individuals and groups can fall far short of their own traditions, can lose these for long periods, and can even devote their lives to fighting against them. But the traditions of the West, certainly the most remarkable any civilization has had, always seem to come back and march on to other victories. Even in our day, in Vatican Council II we can see what outsiders may regard as surprising efforts to apply Western traditions to an organization which, to most outsiders, and even, perhaps, to most insiders, must appear as one of the most authoritarian organizations ever created. But the tradition is there, however buried or forgotten, and the realization of this has made Vatican Council II a symbol of hope, even to non-Catholics and even to those who realize it will not do half the things that are crying urgently to be done.

     ... The rigidity of Western religious thought that often seems to be unappreciative of the Western tradition (although fundamentally it is not) is often explained by the role divine revelation plays in Western religion. The Word of God may seem to many a rigid and inflexible element repugnant to the flexible and tentative outlook I have identified as the tradition of the West....

     To the West, in spite of all its aberrations, the greatest sin, from Lucifer to Hitler, has been pride, especially in the form of intellectual arrogance; and the greatest virtue has been humility, especially in the intellectual form which concedes that opinions are always subject to modification by new experiences, new evidence, and the opinions of our fellow men.

     These procedures that I have identified as Western, and have illustrated from the rather unpromising field of religion, are to be found in all aspects of Western life. The most triumphant of these aspects is science, whose method is a perfect example of the Western tradition. The scientist goes eagerly to work each day because he has the humility to know that he does not have any final answers and must work to modify and improve the answers he has. He publishes his opinions and research reports, or exposes these in scientific gatherings, so that they may be subjected to the criticism of his colleagues and thus gradually play a role in formulating the constantly unfolding consensus that is science. That is what science is, "a consensus unfolding in time by a cooperative effort, in which each works diligently seeking the truth and submits his work to the discussion and critique of his fellows to make a new, slightly improved, temporary consensus."

     Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook. That organizational manifestation is now largely dead, killed as much by twentieth-century liberals as by conservatives or reactionaries. It was killed because liberals took applications of that manifestation of the Western outlook and made these applications rigid, ultimate, and inflexible goals. The liberal of 1880 was anti-clerical, anti-militarist, and anti-state because these were, to his immediate experience, authoritarian forces that sought to prevent the operation of the Western way. The same liberal was for freedom of assembly, of speech, and of the press because these were necessary to form the consensus that is so much a part of the Western process of operation.

     But by 1900 or so, these dislikes and likes became ends in themselves. The liberal was prepared to force people to associate with those they could not bear, in the name of freedom of assembly, or he was, in the name of freedom of speech, prepared to force people to listen. His anti-clericalism became an effort to prevent people from getting religion, and his anti-militarism took the form of opposing funds for legitimate defense. Most amazing, his earlier opposition to the use of private economic power to restrict individual freedoms took the form of an effort to increase the authority of the state against private economic power and wealth in themselves. Thus the liberal of 1880 and the liberal of 1940 had reversed themselves on the role and power of the state, the earlier seeking to curtail it, the latter seeking to increase it. In the process, the upholder of the former liberal idea that the power of the state should be curtailed came to be called a conservative. This simply added to the intellectual confusion of the mid-twentieth century, which arose from the Irrational Activist reluctance to define any terms, a disinclination that has now penetrated deeply into all intellectual and academic life.

     In this connection we might say that the whole recent controversy between conservatism and liberalism is utterly wrongheaded and ignorant. Since the true role of conservatism must be to conserve the tradition of our society, and since that tradition is a liberal tradition, the two should be closely allied in their aim at common goals. So long as liberals and conservatives have as their primary goals to defend interests and to belabor each other for partisan reasons, they cannot do this. When they decide to look at the realities beneath the controversies, they might begin with a little book that appeared many years ago (1902) from the hand of a member of the chief family in the English Conservative Party over the past century. The book is Conservatism by Lord Hugh Cecil. This volume defines conservatism very much as I have defined liberalism and the Outlook of the West as tentative, flexible, undogmatic, communal, and moderate. Its fundamental assumption is that men are imperfect creatures, will probably get further by working together than by blind opposition, and that, since undoubtedly each is wrong to some extent, any extreme or drastic action is inadvisable. Conservatism of this type was, indeed, closer to what I have called liberalism than the liberals of 1880 were, since the conservatives of this type were perfectly willing to use the Church or the army or the state to carry out their moderate and tentative projects, and were prepared to use the state to curtail arbitrary private economic power, which the liberals of the day were unwilling to do (since they embraced a doctrinaire belief in the limitation of state power) .

     All this is of significance because it is concerned with the fact that there is an age-old Western tradition, much battered and destroyed in recent generations, that has sent up new, living shoots of vigorous growth since 1945. These new shoots have appeared even in those areas where the orthodox nineteenth-century liberals looked to find only enemies—in the Church and in the armed forces. The operation of what I have called the liberal tradition of the West is evident in all religious thought of recent years, even in that of Roman Catholicism. It is almost equally evident in military life, where the practice of consulting diverse, and even outside, opinion to reach tentative decisions is increasingly obvious. Recently I attended a conference of the United States Navy Special Projects Office where a diverse group tried to reach some consensus about the form of naval weapons systems twelve years in the future. The agenda, as set up for seven weeks, provided for thirty-three successive approximations narrowing in on the desired consensus. This was listed on the agenda as "Final Approximation and Crystallization of Dissent." The recognition that the final goal was still approximate, and the equal role provided for disagreement within this consensus, show clearly how the tradition of the West operates today within the armed forces of the West.

     This return to the tradition of the West is evident in many aspects of life beyond those mentioned here. Strangely enough, the return of which we speak is much more evident in the United States than it is in Europe, and, accordingly, some of the most significant examples of it will be mentioned in the following section, which is concerned with the United States.

     The reason for this, apparently, is that Europeans, after their very difficult experiences of depression and war, are now overly eager for the mundane benefits made possible by advancing technology and are, as a result, increasingly selfish and materialistic, while Americans, having tasted the fleshpots of affluence, are increasingly unselfish, community-conscious, and nonmaterial in their attitudes. A careful look, however, will show that the movement is present on both sides of the Atlantic, and appears perhaps most obviously in a growing concern with one's fellow men, a kind of practical Christianity, and a spreading evidence of charity and love in the old Christian meaning of these terms. There seems to be, especially among the younger generation, a growing emphasis on fellowship and interpersonal relations and an increasing skepticism toward abstract power, high-blown slogans, old war cries, and authority. There is a reaching out to one another, seeking to understand, to help, to comfort. There is a growing tolerance of differences, an amused attitude of live and let live; and, above all, there is an avid discussion of values and priorities that include more spiritual items than a generation ago. There is an almost universal rejection of authority, of rigid formulas, and of final or total answers. In a word, there is a fumbling effort to rediscover the tradition of the West by a generation that has been largely cut off from that tradition.

     We have said that this tradition is one of Inclusive Diversity in which one of the chief problems is how elements that seem discordant, but are recognized as real and necessary, may be fitted together. The solution to this problem, which rests in the tradition itself, is to be found in the idea of hierarchy: diverse elements are discordant only because they are out of place. Once the proper arrangement is found, discord is replaced by concord. Once, long ago, a young person said to me, "Dirt is only misplaced matter"—a typically Western attitude. Today young persons spend increasing time in argument and thought on how diverse things, all of which seem necessary, can be arranged in a hierarchy of importance or priority: military service, preparation for a vocation, love and marriage, personal development, desire to help others—all these compete for energy, time, and attention. In what order should they be arranged? This is quite different from the successful young man of yesteryear who had one clearly perceived goal—to prepare for a career in moneymaking. The road to that career was marked by materialism, selfishness, and pride, all attitudes of low favor in the outlook of the West, not because they are absolutely wrong but because they indicate a failure to see the place of things in the general structure of the universe. Even pride, either in Lucifer or in Soames Forsyte, is a failure to realize one's own position in the whole picture. And today, especially in America, increasing numbers of people are trying to see the whole picture.

Chapter 75: The United States and the Middle-Class Crisis

     The character of any society is determined less by what it is actually like than by the picture it has of itself and of what it aspires to be. From this point of view, American society of the 1920's was largely middle class. Its values and aspirations were middle class, and power or influence within it was in the hands of middle-class people. On the whole, this was regarded as proper, except by iconoclastic writers who gained fortune and reputation simply by satirizing or criticizing middle-class customs.

     To be sure, even the most vigorous defenders of bourgeois America did not pretend that all Americans were middle class: only the more important ones were. But they did see the country as organized in middle-class terms, and they looked forward to a not remote future in which everyone would be middle class, except for a small, shiftless minority of no importance. To these defenders, and probably also to the shiftless minority, American society was regarded as a ladder of opportunity up which anyone could work his way, on rungs of increased affluence, to the supreme positions of wealth and power near the top. Wealth, power, prestige, and respect were all obtained by the same standard, based on money. This in turn was based on a pervasive emotional insecurity that sought relief in the ownership and control of material possessions. The basis for this may be seen most clearly in the origins of this bourgeois middle class.

     A thousand years ago, Europe had a two-class society in which a smal1 upper class of nobles and upper clergy were supported by a great mass of peasants. The nobles defended this world, and the clergy opened the way to the next world, while the peasants provided the food and other material needs for the whole society. All three had security in their social relationships in that they occupied positions of social status that satisfied their psychic needs for companionship, economic security, a foreseeable future, and purpose of their efforts. Members of both classes had little anxiety about loss of these things by any likely outcome of events, and all thus had emotional security.

     In the course of the medieval period, chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this simple two-class society was modified by the intrusion of a small, but distinctly different, new class between them. Because this new class was between, we call it middle class, just as we call it "bourgeois" (after bourg meaning town) from the fact that it resided in towns, a new kind of social aggregate. The two older, established, classes were almost completely rural and intimately associated with the land, economically, socially, and spiritually. The permanence of the land and the intimate connection of the land with the most basic of human needs, especially food, amplified the emotional security associated with the older classes..

     The new middle class of bourgeoisie who grew up between the two older classes had none of these things. They were commercial peoples concerned with exchange of goods, mostly luxury goods, in a society where all their prospective customers already had the basic necessities of life provided by their status. The new middle class had no status in a society based on status; they had no security or permanence in a society that placed the highest value on these qualities. They had no law (since medieval law was largely past customs, and their activities were not customary ones) in a society that highly valued law. The flow of the necessities of life, notably food, to the new town dwellers was precarious, so that some of their earliest and most emphatic actions were taken to ensure the flow of such goods from the surrounding country to the town. All the things the bourgeois did were new things; all were precarious, and insecure; and their whole lives were lived without the status, permanence, and security the society of the day most highly valued. The risks (and rewards) of commercial enterprise, well reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of figures such as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, were extreme. A single venture could ruin a merchant or make him rich. This insecurity was increased by the fact that the prevalent religion of the day disapproved of what he was doing, seeking profits or taking interest, and could see no way of providing religious services to town dwellers because of the intimate association of the ecclesiastical system with the existing arrangement of rural landholding.

     For these and other reasons psychic insecurity became the keynote of the new middle-class outlook. It still is. I he only remedy for this insecurity of the middle class seemed to it to be the accumulation of more possessions that could be a demonstration to the world of the individual's importance and power. In this way, for the middle class, the general goal of medieval man to seek future salvation in the hereafter was secularized to an effort to seek future security in this world by acquisition of wealth and its accompanying power and social prestige. But the social prestige from wealth was most available among fellow bourgeoisie, rather than among nobles or peasants. Thus the opinions of one's fellow bourgeoisie, by wealth and by conformity to bourgeois values, became the motivating drives of the middle classes, creating what has been called the "acquisitive society."

     In that society prudence, discretion, conformity, moderation (except in acquisition), decorum, frugality, became the marks of a sound man. Credit became more important than intrinsic personal qualities, and credit was based on the appearances of things, especially the appearances of the external material accessories of life. The facts of a man's personal qualities—such as kindness, affection, thoughtfulness, generosity, personal insight, and such, were increasingly irrelevant or even adverse to the middle-class evaluation of a man. Instead, the middle-class evaluation rested rather on nonpersonal attributes and on external accessories. Where personal qualities were admired, they were those that contributed to acquisition (often qualities opposed to the established values of the Christian outlook, such as love, charity, generosity, gentleness, or unselfishness). These middle-class qualities included decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy, and insatiable ambition.

     As the middle classes and their commercialization of all human relationships spread through Western society in the centuries from the twelfth to the twentieth, they largely modified and, to some extent, reversed the values of Western society earlier. In some cases, the old values, such as future preference or self-discipline, remained, but were redirected. Future preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim, and became secularized. Self-discipline ceased to seek spirituality by restraining sensuality, and instead sought material acquisition. In general, the new middle-class outlook had a considerable religious basis, but it was the religion of the medieval heresies and of puritanism rather than the religion of Roman Christianity.

     This complex outlook that we call middle class or bourgeois is, of course, the chief basis of our world today. Western society is the richest and most powerful society that has ever existed largely because it has been impelled forward along these lines, beyond the rational degree necessary to satisfy human needs, by the irrational drive for achievement in terms of material ambitions. To be sure, Western society always had other kinds of people, and the majority of the people in Western society probably had other outlooks and values, but it was middle-class urgency that pushed modern developments in the direction they took. There were always in our society dreamers and truth-seekers and tinkerers. They, as poets, scientists, and engineers, thought up innovations which the middle classes adopted and exploited if they seemed likely to be profit-producing. Middle-class self-discipline and future preference provided the savings and investment without which any innovation—no matter how appealing in theory—would be set aside and neglected. But the innovations that could attract middle-class approval (and exploitation) were the ones that made our world today so different from the world of our grandparents and ancestors.

     This middle-class character was imposed most strongly on the United States. In order to identify it and to discuss a very complex pattern of outlooks and values, we shall try to summarize it. At its basis is psychic insecurity founded on lack of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became insatiable material acquisition. From this flowed a large number of attributes of which we shall list only five: future preference, self-discipline, social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and a general emphasis on externalized, impersonal values.

     Those who have this outlook are middle class; those who lack it are something else. Thus middle-class status is a matter of outlook and not a matter of occupation or status. There can be middle-class clergy or teachers or scientists. Indeed, in the United States, most of these three groups are middle class, although their theoretical devotion to truth rather than to profit, or to others rather than to self, might seem to imply that they should not be middle class. And, indeed, they should not be; for the urge to seek truth or to help others are not really compatible with the middle-class values. But in our culture the latter have been so influential and pervasive, and the economic power of middle-class leaders has been so great, that many people whose occupations, on the face of it, should make them other than middle class, none the less have adopted major parts of the middle-class outlook and seek material success in religion or teaching or science.

     The middle-class outlook, born in the Netherlands and northern Italy and other places in the medieval period, has been passed on by being inculcated to children as the proper attitude for them to emulate. It could pass on from generation to generation, and from century to century, as long as parents continued to believe it themselves and disciplined their children to accept it. The minority of children who did not accept it were "disowned" and fell out of the middle classes. What is even more important, they were, until recently, pitied and rejected by their families. In this way, those who accepted the outlook marched on in the steadily swelling ranks of the triumphant middle classes. Until the twentieth century..

     For more than half a century, from before World War I, the middle class outlook has been under relentless attack, often by its most ardent members, who heedlessly, and unknowingly, have undermined and destroyed many of the basic social customs that preserved it through earlier generations. Many of these changes occurred from changes in child-rearing practices, and many arose from the very success of the middle-class way of life, which achieved material affluence that tended to weaken the older emphasis on self-discipline, saving, future preference, and the rest of it.

     One of the chief changes, fundamental to the survival of the middle-class outlook, was a change in our society's basic conception of human nature. This had two parts to it. The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training. The "goodness" of human nature was based on the belief that it was a kind of weaker copy of God's nature, lacking many of God's qualities (in degree rather than in kind), but none the less perfectible, and perfectible largely by its own efforts with God's guidance. The Christian view of the universe as a hierarchy of beings, with man about two-thirds of the way up, saw these beings, especially man, as fundamentally free creatures able to move, at their own volition toward God or away from him, and guided or attracted in the correct direction for realization of their potentialities by God's presence at the top of the Universe, a presence which, like the north magnetic pole, attracted men, as compasses, upward toward fuller realization and knowledge of God who was the fulfillment of all good. Thus the effort came from free men, the guidance came from God's grace, and ultimately the motive power came from God's attractiveness....

     In this view the devil, Lucifer, was ... the epitome of positive wickedness, ... was one of the highest of the angels, close to God ... who fell because he failed to keep his perspective and believed that he was as good as God.

     In this Christian outlook, the chief task was to train men so that they would use their intrinsic freedom to do the right thing by following God's guidance.

     Opposed to this Western view of the world and the nature of man, there was, from the beginning, another opposed view of both which received its most explicit formulation by the Persian Zoroaster in the seventh century B.C. and came into the Western tradition as a minor, heretical, theme. It came in through the Persian influence on the Hebrews, especially during the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, in the sixth century B.C., and it came in, more fully, through the Greek rationalist tradition from Pythagoras to Plato. This latter tradition encircled the early Christian religion, giving rise to many of the controversies that were settled in the early Church councils and continuing on in the many heresies that extended through history from the Arians, the Manichaeans, Luther, Calvin, and the Jansenists.

     The chief avenue by which these ideas, which were constantly rejected by the endless discussions formulating the doctrine of the West, continued to survive was through the influence of St. Augustine. From this dissident minority point of view came seventeenth-century Puritanism. The general distinction of this point of view from Zoroaster to William Golding (in Lord of the Flies) is that the world and the flesh are positive evils and that man, in at least this physical part of his nature, is essentially evil. As a consequence he must be disciplined totally to prevent him from destroying himself and the world. In this view the devil is a force, or being, of positive malevolence, and man, by himself, is incapable of any good and is, accordingly, not free. He can be saved in eternity by God's grace alone, and he can get through this temporal world only by being subjected to a regime of total despotism. The direction and nature of the despotism is not regarded as important, since the really important thing is that man's innate destructiveness be controlled.

     Nothing could be more sharply contrasted than these two points of view, the orthodox and the puritanical. The contrasts can be summed up thus:

Orthodox

               Evil is absence of Good.

               Man is basically good.

               Man is free.

               Man can contribute to his salvation by good works.

               Self-discipline is necessary to guide or direct.

               Truth is found from experience and revelation, interpreted by tradition.

Puritan

               Evil is positive entity.

               Man is basically evil.

               Man is a slave of his nature.

               Man can be saved only by God.

               Discipline must be external and total.

               Truth is found by rational deduction from revelation.

     The puritan point of view, which had been struggling to take over Western Civilization for its first thousand years or more, almost did so in the seventeenth century. It was represented to varying degrees in the work and agitations of Luther, Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, Cornelius Jansen (Augustinus, 1640), Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), Blaise Pascal, and others. In general this point of view believed that the truth was to be found by rational deduction from a few basic revealed truths, in the way that Euclid's geometry and Descartes's analytical geometry were based on rational deduction from a few self-evident axioms. The result was a largely deterministic human situation, in sharp contrast with the orthodox point of view, still represented in the Anglican and Roman churches, which saw man as largely free in a universe whose rules were to be found most readily by tradition and the general consensus. The Puritan point of view tended to support political despotism and to seek a one-class uniform society, while the older view put much greater emphasis on traditional pluralism and saw society as a unity of diversities. The newer idea led directly to mercantilism, which regarded political-economic life as a struggle to the death in a world where there was not sufficient wealth or space for different groups. To them wealth was limited to a fixed amount in the world as a whole, and one man's gain was someone else's loss. That meant that the basic struggles of this world were irreconcilable and must be fought to a finish. This was part of the Puritan belief that nature was evil and that a state of nature was a jungle of violent conflicts.

     Some of these ideas changed, others were retained, and a few were rearranged and modified in the following periods of the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, and scientific materialism. All three of these returned to the older idea that man and nature were essentially good, and to this restored belief in the Garden of Eden they joined a basically optimistic belief in man's ability to deal with his problems and to guide his own destiny. Society and its conventions came to be regarded as evil, and the guidance of traditions was generally rejected by the late Enlightenment and the early Romantics, although the excesses of the French Revolution drove many of the later Romantics back to rely on history and traditions because of their growing feeling of the inadequacy of human reason. One large change in all three periods was the Community of Interests, which rejected mercantilism's insistence on limited wealth and the basic incompatibility of interests for the more optimistic belief that all parties could somehow adjust their interests within a community in which all would benefit mutually. The application of Darwinism to human society changed this idea again, toward the end of the nineteenth century, and provided the ideological justification for the wars of extermination of Nazism and Fascism. Only after the middle of the twentieth century did a gradual reappearance of the old Christian ideas of love and charity modify this view, replacing it with the older idea that diverse human interests are basically reconcilable.

     All this shifting of ideas, many of them unstated, or even unconscious, assumptions, and the gradual growth of affluence helped to destroy middle-class motivations and values. American society had been largely, but not entirely, middle class. Above the middle class, which dominated the country in the first half of the twentieth century, were a small group of aristocrats. Below were the petty bourgeoisie, who had middle-class aspirations, but were generally more insecure and often bitter because they did not obtain middle-class rewards. Below these two middle classes were two lower classes: the workers and the Lumpenproletariat or socially disorganized, who had very little in common with each other.

     Outside this hierarchical structure of five groups in three classes (aristocrat, middle, and lower) were two other groupings that were not really part of the hierarchical structure. On the left were the intellectuals and on the right were the religious. These held in common the idea that the truth, to them, was more important than interests; but they differed greatly from the fact that the religious believed that they knew what the truth was, while the intellectuals were still seeking it.

     This whole arrangement was much more like a planetary arrangement of social-economic groupings than it was like the middle-class vision of society as a ladder of opportunity. The ladder really included only the middle classes with the workers below. The planetary view, becoming increasingly widespread, saw the middle classes in the center with the other five surrounding these. Social movement was possible in circular as well as in vertical directions (as the older ladder view of society believed), so that sons of workers could rise into the middle classes or move right into the religious, left into the intelligentsia, or even fall downward into the de-classed dregs. So too, in theory, the children (or more likely the grandchildren) of the upper middle class could move upward into the aristocracy, which could also be approached from the intellectuals or the religious.

     Strangely enough, the non-middle classes had more characteristics in common with each other than they did with the middle classes in their midst. The chief reason for this was that all other groups had value systems different from the middle classes and, above all, placed no emphasis on display of material affluence as proof of social status. From this came a number of somewhat similar qualities and attitudes that often gave the non-middle-class groups more in common and easier social intercourse than any of them had with the middle classes. For example, all placed much more emphasis on real personal qualities and much less on such things as clothing, residence, academic background, or kind of transportation used (all of which were important in determining middle-class reactions to people). In a sense all were more sincere, personally more secure (not the Lumpenproletariat), and less hypocritical than the middle class, and accordingly were much more inclined to judge any new acquaintance on his merits. Moreover, the middle classes, in order to provide their children with middle-class advantages, had few children, while the other groups placed little restriction on family size (except for some intellectuals). Thus aristocrats, religious, workers, the de-classed, and many intellectuals had large families, while only the uppermost and most securely established middle-class families, as part of the transition to aristocracy, had larger families.

     Ideas of morality also tended to set the middle classes off from most of the others. The latter tended to regard morality in terms of honesty and integrity of character, while the middle classes based it on actions, especially sexual actions. Even the religious based sin to some extent on purpose, attitude, and mental context of the act rather than on the act itself, and did not restrict morality as narrowly to sexual behavior as did the middle classes. However, the middle-class influence has been so pervasive in the modern world that many of the other groups fell under its influence to the extent that the word "morality," by the early twentieth century, came to mean sex. The Jansenist influence in American Roman Catholicism, for example, is so strong that sins concerning sex are widely regarded by Catholics as the worst of sins, in spite of the fact that Catholic doctrine continues to regard pride as the worst sin and sexual sins as much less important (as Dante did). At any rate, sex was generally regarded with greater indulgence hy aristocrats, workers, intellectuals, or the de-classed than by the middle classes or the more puritanical religious.

     In America, as elsewhere, aristocracy represents money and position grown old, and is organized in terms of families rather than of individuals. Traditionally it was made up of those whose families had had money, position, and social prestige for so long that they never had to think about these and, above all, never had to impress any other person with the fact that they had them. They accepted these attributes of family membership as a right and an obligation. Since they had no idea that these could be lost, they had a basic psychological security, similar to that of the religious and workers. Thus like these other two, they were self-assured, natural, but distant. Their manners were gracious but impersonal. Their chief characteristic was the assumption that their family position had obligations. This noblesse oblige led them to participate in school sports (even if they lacked obvious talent), to serve their university (usually a family tradition) in any helpful way (such as fund raising), to serve their church in a similar way, and to offer their services to their local community, their state, and their country as an obligation. They often scandalized their middle-class acquaintances by their unconventionality and social informality, greeting workers, recent immigrants, or even outcasts by their given names, arriving at evening meetings in tweeds, or traveling in cheap, small cars to formal weddings.

     The kind of a car a person drove was, until very recently, one of the best guides to middle-class status, since a car to the middle classes was a status symbol, while to the other classes it was a means of getting somewhere. Oversized Oldsmobiles, Cadillacs, and Lincoln Continentals are still middle-class cars, but in recent years, with the weakening of the middle-class outlook, almost anyone might be found driving a Volkswagen. Another good evidence of class may be seen in the treatment given to servants (or those who work in one's home): the lower classes treat these as equals, the middle classes treat them as inferiors, while aristocrats treat them as equals or even superiors.

     On the whole, the number of aristocratic families in the United States is very few, with a couple in each of the older states, especially New England, and in the older areas of the South such as Charleston or Natchez, Mississippi, with the chief concentrations in the small towns around Boston and in the Hudson River Valley. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt would be an example. A somewhat larger group of semi-aristocrats consist of those like the Lodges, Rockefellers, or Kennedys who are not yet completely aristocratic either because they are not, in generations, far enough removed from money-making, or because of the persistence of a commercial or business tradition in the family. But these are aristocrats in the sense that they have accepted a family obligation of service to the community. The significance of this aristocratic tradition may be seen in Massachusetts politics; there two decades ago, the governorship and both senatorial seats were held by a Bradford, a Saltonstall, and a Lodge, while in 1964 two of these positions were held by Endicott Peabody and Leverett Saltonstall.

     The working class in the United States is much smaller than we might assume, since most American workers are seeking to rise socially, to help their children to rise socially, and are considerably concerned with status symbols. Such people, even if laborers, are not working class, but are rather petty bourgeoisie. The real working class are rather relaxed, have present rather than future preference, generally worry very little about their status in the eyes of the world, enjoy their ordinary lives, including food, sex, and leisure, and have little desire to change their jobs or positions. They are generally relaxed, have a taste for broad humor, are natural, direct, and friendly, without large basic insecurities of personality. The world depression, by destroying their jobs and economic security, much reduced this group, which was always proportionately smaller in America, the land of aspiration for everyone, than in Europe.

     The second most numerous group in the United States is the petty bourgeoisie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the middle-class anxieties and pressures, hut often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a result of these things, they are often very insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any ... Right, Fascist, or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. Made up of clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers in business, government, finance, and education, these tend to regard their white-collar status as the chief value in life, and live in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major portion of the Republican Party's supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago.

     In general, the political alignments in the United States have been influenced even more by these class and psychological considerations than they have been by income, economic, or occupational considerations. The Republican Party has been the party of the middle classes and the Democratic Party has been the party of the rest. In general, aristocrats have tended to move toward the Democrats, while semi-aristocrats often remain Republican (with their middle-class parents or grandparents), except where historical circumstance (chiefly in New England, the Middle West, and the South, where Civil War memories remained green) operated. This meant that the Republican Party, whose nineteenth century superiority- had been based on the division of farmers into South and West over the slave issue, became an established majority party in the twentieth century, but became, once again, a minority party' because of the disintegration of their middle-class support following 1945.

     Even in the period of middle-class dominance, the Republicans had lost control of the Federal government because of the narrowly plutocratic control of the party that split it in 1912 and alienated most of the rest of the country in 1932. Twenty years later, in 1952, the country looked solidly middle class, but, in fact, by that date middle-class morale was almost totally destroyed, the middle classes themselves were in disintegration, and the majority of Americans were becoming less middle class in outlook. This change is one of the most significant transformations of the twentieth century. The future of the United States, of Western Civilization, and of the world depends on what kind of outlook replaces the dissolving middle-class ideology in the next generation.

     The weakening of this middle-class ideology was a chief cause of the panic of the middle classes, and especially of the petty bourgeoisie, in the Eisenhower era. The general himself was repelled by the ...

     Right, whose impetus had been a chief element (but far from the most important element) in his election, although the lower-middle-class groups had preferred Senator Taft as their leader. Eisenhower, however, had been preferred by the Eastern Establishment of old Wall Street, Ivy League, semi-aristocratic Anglophiles whose real strength rested in their control of eastern financial endowments, operating from foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.

     As we have said, this Eastern Establishment was really above parties and was much more concerned with policies than with party victories. They had been the dominant element in both parties since 1900, and practiced the political techniques of William C. Whitney and J. P. Morgan. They were, as we have said, Anglophile, cosmopolitan, Ivy League, internationalist, astonishingly liberal, patrons of the arts, and relatively humanitarian. All these things made them anathema to the lower-middle-class and petty-bourgeois groups, chiefly in small towns and in the Middle West, who supplied the votes in Republican electoral victories, but found it so difficult to control nominations (especially in presidential elections) because the big money necessary for nominating in a Republican National Convention was allied to Wall Street and to the Eastern Establishment. The ability of the latter to nominate Eisenhower over Taft in 1952 was a bitter pill to the radical bourgeoisie, and was not coated sufficiently by the naming of Nixon, a man much closer to their hearts, for the vice-presidential post. The split between these two wings of the Republican Party, and Eisenhower's preference for the upper bourgeois rather than for the petty-bourgeois wing, paralyzed both of his administrations and was the significant element in Kennedy's narrow victory over Nixon in 1960 and in Johnson's much more decisive victory over Goldwater in 1964.

     Kennedy, despite his Irish Catholicism, was an Establishment figure. This did not arise from his semi-aristocratic attitudes or his Harvard connections (which were always tenuous, since Irish Catholicism is not yet completely acceptable at Harvard). These helped, but John Kennedy's introduction to the Establishment arose from his support of Britain, in opposition to his father, in the critical days at the American Embassy in London in 1938-1940. His acceptance into the English Establishment opened its American branch as well. The former was indicated by a number of events, such as sister Kathleen's marriage to the Marquis of Hartington and the shifting of Caroline's nursery school from the White House to the British Embassy after her father's assassination. (The ambassador, Ormsby-Gore, fifth Baron Harlech, was the son of an old associate of Lord Milner and Leo Amery, when they were the active core of the British-American Atlantic Establishment.) Another indication of this connection was the large number of Oxford-trained men appointed to office by President Kennedy.

     The period since 1950 has seen the beginnings of a revolutionary change in American politics. This change is not so closely related to the changes in American economic life as it is to the transformation in social life. But without the changes in economic life, the social influences could not have operated. What has been happening has been a disintegration of the middle class and a corresponding increase in significance by the petty bourgeoisie at the same time that the economic influence of the older Wall Street financial groups has been ... challenged by new wealth springing up outside the eastern cities, notably in the Southwest and Far West. These new sources of wealth have been based very largely on government action and government spending but have, none the less, adopted a petty-bourgeois outlook rather than the semi-aristocratic outlook that pervades the Eastern Establishment. This new wealth, based on petroleum, natural gas, ruthless exploitation of national resources, the aviation industry, military bases in the South and West, and finally on space with all its attendant activities, has centered in Texas and southern California. Its existence, for the first time, made it possible for the petty-bourgeois outlook to make itself felt in the political nomination process instead of in the unrewarding effort to influence politics by voting for a Republican candidate nominated under Eastern Establishment influence.

     In these terms the political struggle in the United States has shifted in two ways, or even three. This struggle, in the minds of the ill informed, had always been viewed as a struggle between Republicans and Democrats at the ballot box in November. Wall Street, long ago, however, had seen that the real struggle was in the nominating conventions the preceding summer. This realization was forced upon the petty-bourgeois supporters of Republican candidates by their antipathy for Willkie, Dewey, Eisenhower, and other Wall Street interventionists and their inability to nominate their congressional favorites, like Senators Knowland, Bricker, and Taft, at national party conventions. Just as these disgruntled voters reached this conclusion, with Taft's failure in 1952, the new wealth appeared in the political picture, sharing the petty bourgeoisie's suspicions of the East, big cities, Ivy League universities, foreigners, intellectuals, workers, and aristocrats. By the 1964 election, the major political issue in the country was the financial struggle behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized and cultured in foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed, arising from the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations in the Southwest and West.

     At issue here was the whole future face of America, for the older wealth stood for values and aims close to the Western traditions of diversity ... while the newer wealth stood for the narrow and fear-racked aims of petty-bourgeois insecurity and egocentricity. The nominal issues between them, such as that between internationalism and unilateral isolationism (which its supporters preferred to rename "nationalism"), were less fundamental than they seemed, for the real issue was the control of the Federal government's tremendous power to influence the future of America by spending of government funds. The petty bourgeois and new-wealth groups wanted to continue that spending into the industrial-military complex, such as defense and space, while the older wealth and non-bourgeois groups wanted to direct it toward social diversity and social amelioration for the aged and the young. for education, for social outcasts, and for protecting national resources for future use.

     The outcome of this struggle, which still goes on, is one in which civilized people can afford to be optimistic. For the newer wealth is unbelievably ... misinformed. In their growing concern to control political nominations, they ignored the even greater need to win elections. They did not realize that the disintegration of the middle classes, chiefly from the abandonment of the middle-class outlook, was creating an American electorate that would never elect any candidate the newer wealth would care to nominate. As part of this lack of vision, the new vv earth and its petty-bourgeois supporters ignored the well-established principle that a national candidate must have a national appeal and that this is obtained best by a candidate close to the center.

     In American politics we have several parties included under the blanket words "Democratic" and "Republican." In oversimplified terms, as I have said, the Republicans were the party of the middle classes, and the Democrats were the party of the fringes. Both of these were subdivided, each with a Congressional and a National Party wing. The Republican Congressional Party (representing localism) was much farther to the Right than the National Republican Party, and as such was closer to the petty-bourgeois than to the upper-middle-class outlook. The Democratic Congressional Party was much more clearly of the fringes and minorities (and thus often further to the Left) than the Democratic National Party. The party machinery in each case was in Congressional Party control during the intervals between the quadrennial presidential elections, but, in order to win these elections, each had to call into existence, in presidential election years, its shadowy National Party. This meant that the Republicans had to appear to move to the Left, closer to the Center, while the Democrats had also to move from the fringes toward the Center, usually by moving to the Right. As a result, the National parties and their presidential candidates, with the Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost identical candidates and platforms, although the process was concealed, as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war cries and slogans (often going back to the Civil War). As soon as the presidential election was over, the two National parties vanished, and party controls fell back into the hands of the Congressional parties, leaving the newly elected President in a precarious position between the two Congressional parties, neither of which was very close to the brief National coalition that had elected him.

     The chief problem of [the Eastern Establishment] ... for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is [to the Eastern Establishment] a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, [they believe that] the two parties should be almost identical, so that [can control the elections] ... without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The [Eastern Establishment believes that] policies that are vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure, priority, or method: we must remain strong, continue to function as a great world Power in cooperation with other Powers, ... keep the economy moving without significant slump, help other countries do the same, provide the basic social necessities t or all our citizens, open up opportunities for social shifts for those willing to work to achieve them, and defend the basic Western outlook of diversity, pluralism, cooperation, and the rest of it, as already described. These things any national American party hoping to win a presidential election must accept. But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigor-less. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.

     The capture of the Republican National Party by the extremist elements of the Republican Congressional Party in 1964, and their effort to elect Barry Goldwater to the Presidency with the petty-bourgeois extremists alone, was only a temporary aberration on the American political scene, and arose from the fact that President Johnson had preempted all the issues (which are, as we have said, now acceptable to the overwhelming majority) and had occupied the whole broad center of the American political spectrum, so that it was hardly worth while for the Republicans to run a real contestant against him in the same area. Thus Goldwater was able to take control of the Republican National Party by default..

     The virulence behind the Goldwater campaign, however, had nothing to do with default or lack of intensity. Quite the contrary. His most ardent supporters were of the extremist petty-bourgeois mentality driven to near hysteria by the disintegration of the middle classes and the steady rise in prominence of everything they considered anathema: Catholics, Negroes, immigrants, intellectuals, aristocrats (and near aristocrats), scientists, and educated men generally, people from trig cities or from the East, cosmopolitans and internationalists and, above all, liberals who accept diversity as a virtue.

     This disintegration of the middle classes had a variety of causes, some of them intrinsic, many of them accidental, a few of them obvious, but many of them going deeply into the very depths of social existence.

     All these causes acted to destroy the middle classes by acting to destroy the middle-class outlook. And this outlook was destroyed ... by adult middle-class persons abandoning it ... [and] ... by a failure or inability of parents to pass it on to their children. Moreover, this failure was largely restricted to the middle class itself and not to the petty bourgeoisie (lower middle class), which, if anything, was clinging to its particular version of the middle-class outlook more tenaciously and was passing it on to its offspring in an even more intensified form.

     What I am saying here is that the disintegration of the middle class arose from a failure to transfer its outlook to its children. This failure was thus a [deliberate] failure of education, and may seem, at first glance, to be all the more surprising, since our education system has been, consciously or unconsciously, organized as a mechanism for indoctrination of the young in [secularism, socialism and internationalism, not traditional] middle-class ideology. In fact, rather surprisingly, it would appear that our educational system, unlike those of continental Europe, has been more concerned with indoctrination of middle-class outlook than with teaching patriotism or nationalism. As a reflection of this, it has been more concerned with instilling attitudes and behavior than with intellectual training. In view of the fact that the American ideals of the 1920's were as much middle class as patriotic, with the so-called "American way of life" identified rather with the American economic and social system than with the American political system, and the fact that a majority of schoolchildren were not from middle-class families, it is not surprising that the educational system was devoted to training in the middle-class outlook. Children of racial, religious, national, and class minorities all passed through the same system and received the middle-class formative process, with, it must be recognized, incomplete success in many cases. This refers to the public schools, but the Roman Catholic school system, especially on its upper levels, was doing the same things. The large number of Catholic men's colleges in the country, especially those operated by the Jesuits, had as their basic, if often unrecognized, aim the desire to transform the sons of working class, and often of immigrant, origins into middle-class people in professional occupations (chiefly law, medicine, business, and teaching).

     On the whole, this system ... is now becoming less and less successful in turning out middle-class people, especially from its upper educational levels. This failure can be attributed ... to a failure of the system itself. As we shall see in a moment, this failure occurred chiefly within the middle-class family, a not unexpected situation, since outlook is still determined rather by reaction to family conditions than by submission to a formal educational process.

     Much of the disintegration of the middle-class outlook can be traced to a weakening of its chief aspects, such as future preference, intense self-discipline and, to a lesser degree, to a decreasing emphasis on infinitely expandable material demand and on the importance of middle-class status symbols. Only a few of the factors that have influenced these changes can he mentioned here.

     The chief external factor in the destruction of the middle-class outlook has been the relentless attack upon it in literature and drama through most of the twentieth century. In fact, it is difficult to find works that defended this outlook or even assumed it to be true, as was frequent in the nineteenth century. Not that such works did not exist in recent years; they have existed in great numbers, and have been avidly welcomed by the petty bourgeoisie and by some middle-class housewives. Lending libraries and women's magazines of the 1910's, 1920's, and 1930's were full of them, but, by the 1950's they were largely restricted to television soap dramas. Even those writers who explicitly accepted the middle-class ideology, like Booth Tarkington, Ben Ames Williams, Sloan Wilson, or John O'Hara, tended to portray middle-class life as a horror of false values, hypocrisy, meaningless effort, and insecurity. In Alice Adams, for example, Tarkington portrayed a lower-middle-class girl, filled with hypocrisy and materialistic values, desperately seeking a husband who would provide her with the higher social status for which she yearned.

     In the earlier period, even down to 1940, literature's attack on the middle-class outlook was direct and brutal, from such works as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Frank Norris's The Pit, both dealing with the total corruption of personal integrity in the meat-packing and wheat markets. These early assaults were aimed at the commercialization of life under bourgeois influence and were fundamentally reformist in outlook because they assumed that the evils of the system could somehow be removed, perhaps by state intervention. By the 1920's the attack was much more total, and saw the problem in moral terms so fundamental that no remedial action was possible. Only complete rejection of middle-class values could remove the corruption of human life seen by Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt or Main Street.

     After 1940, writers tended less and less to attack the bourgeois way of life; that job had been done. Instead they described situations, characters, and actions that were simply non-bourgeois: violence, social irresponsibility, sexual laxity and perversion, miscegenation, human weakness in relation to alcohol, narcotics, or sex, or domestic and business relationships conducted along completely non-bourgeois lines. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, and a host of lesser writers, many of them embracing the cult of violence, showed the trend. A very popular work like The Lost Weekend could represent the whole group. A few, like Hemingway, found a new moral outlook to replace the middle-class ideology they had abandoned. In Hemingway's case he shook the dust of upper-middle-class Oak Park, Illinois, off his feet and immersed himself in the tragic sense of life of Spain with its constant demand upon men to demonstrate their virility by incidental activity with women and unflinching courage in facing death. To Hemingway this could be achieved in the bullring, in African big-game hunting, in war or, in a more symbolic way, in prizefighting or crime. The significant point here is that Hemingway's embrace of the outlook of the Pakistani-Peruvian axis as a token of his rejection of his middle-class background was always recognized by him as a pretense, and, when his virility, in the crudest sense, was gone, he blew out his brains.

     The literary assault on the bourgeois outlook was directed at all the aspects of it that we have mentioned, at future preference, at self-discipline, at the emphasis on materialistic acquisition, at status symbols. The attack on future preference appeared as a demonstration that the future is never reached. Its argument was that the individual who constantly postpones living from the present (with living taken to mean real personal relationships with individuals) to a hypothetical future eventually finds that the years have gone by, death is approaching, he has not yet lived, and is, in most cases, no longer able to do so. If the central figure in such a work has achieved his materialist ambitions, the implication is that these achievements, which looked so attractive from a distance, are but encumbrances to the real values of personal living when achieved. This theme, which goes back at least to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol or to George Eliot's Silas Marner, continued to be presented into the twentieth century. It often took the form, in more recent times, of a rejection of a man's whole life achievement by his sons, his wife, or himself.

     The more recent form of this attack on future preference has appeared in the existentialist novel and the theater of the absurd. Existentialism, by its belief that reality and life consist only of the specific, concrete personal experience of a given place and moment, ignores the context of each event and thus isolates it. But an event without context has no cause, meaning, or consequence; it is absurd, as anything is which has no relationship to any context. And such an event, with neither past nor future, can have no connection with tradition or with future preference. This point of view came to saturate twentieth-century literature so that the original rejection of future preference was expanded into total rejection of time, which Noms portrayed as simply a mechanism for enslaving man and depriving him of the opportunity to experience life. The writings of Thomas Wolfe and, on a higher level, of the early Dos Passos, were devoted to this theme. The bourgeois time clock became a tomb or prison that alienated man from life and left him a cipher, like the appropriately named Mr. Zero in Elmer Rice's play The Adding Machine (1923).

     A similar attack was made on self-discipline. The philosophic basis for this attack was found in an oversimplified Freudianism that regarded all suppression of human impulse as leading to frustration and psychic distortions that made subsequent life unattainable. Thus novel after novel or play after play portrayed the wickedness of the suppression of good, healthy, natural impulse and the salutary consequences of self-indulgence, especially in sex. Adultery and other manifestations of undisciplined sexuality were described in increasingly clinical detail and were generally associated with excessive drinking or other evasions of personal responsibility, as in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises or in John Steinbeck's love affair with personal irresponsibility in Cannery Row or Tortilla Flat. The total rejection of middle-class values, including time, self-discipline, and material achievement, in favor of a cult of personal violence was to be found in a multitude of literary works from James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler to the more recent antics of James Bond. The result has been a total reversal of middle-class values by presenting as interesting or admirable simple negation of these values by aimless, shiftless, and totally irresponsible people.

     A similar reversal of values has flooded the market with novels filled with pointless clinical descriptions, presented in obscene language and in fictional form, of swamps of perversions ranging from homosexuality, incest, sadism, and masochism, to cannibalism, necrophilia, and coprophagia. These performances, as the critic Edmund Fuller has said, represent not so much a loss of values as a loss of any conception of the nature of man. Instead of seeing man the way the tradition of the Greeks and of the West regarded him, as a creature midway between animal and God, "a little lower than the angels?" and thus capable of an infinite variety of experience, these twentieth-century writers have completed the revolt against the middle classes by moving downward from the late nineteenth century's view of man as simply a higher animal to their own view of man as lower than any animal would naturally descend. From this has emerged the Puritan view of man (but without the Puritan view of God) as a creature of total depravity in a deterministic universe without hope of any redemption.

     This point of view, which, in the period 1550-1650, justified despotism in a Puritan context, now may be used, with petty-bourgeois support, to justify a new despotism to preserve, by force instead of conviction, petty-bourgeois values in a system of compulsory conformity. George Orwell's 1984 has given us the picture of this system as Hitler's Germany showed us its practical operation. But in view of the present upsurge of non-bourgeois social groups and social pressures, this possibility becomes decreasingly likely, and Barry Goldwater's defeat in the presidential election of 1964 moved the possibility so far into the future that the steady change in social conditions makes it remote indeed.

     The destruction of the middle classes by the destruction of the middle-class outlook was brought about to a much greater degree by internal than by external forces. And the most significant of these influences have been operating within the middle-class family. One of the most obvious of these has been the growing affluence of American society, which removed the pressure of want from the childbearing process. The child who grows up in affluence is more difficult to instill with the frustrations and drives that were so basic in the middle-class outlook. For generations, even in fairly rich families, this indoctrination had continued because of continued emphasis on thrift and restraints on consumption. By 1937 the world depression showed that the basic economic problems were not saving and investment, but distribution and consumption. Thus there appeared a growing readiness to consume, spurred on by new sales techniques, installment selling, and the extension of credit from the productive side to the consumption side of the economic process. As a result, an entirely new phenomenon appeared in middle-class families, the practice of living up to, or even beyond, their incomes—an unthinkable scandal in any nineteenth-century bourgeois family. One incentive in this direction was the increased emphasis, within the middle-class ideology, upon the elements of status and ostentatious display of wealth as status symbols rather than on the elements of frugality and prudence. Thus affluence weakened both future preference and self-denying self-discipline training.

     Somewhat related to this was the influence of the depression of 1929-1933. The generation that was entering manhood at that time (having been born in the period 1905-1915) felt that their efforts to fulfill their middle-class ambitions had involved them in intensive hardships and suffering, such as working while going to college, doing without leisure, cultural expansion, and travel, and by the 1950's these were determined that their children must never have it as hard as they had had it. They rarely saw that their efforts to make things easy for their children in the 1950's as a reaction against the hardships they had suffered themselves in the 1930's were removing from their children's training process the difficulties that had helped to make them achieving men and successful middle-class persons and that their efforts to do this were weakening the moral fiber of their children.

     Another element in this process was a change in the educational philosophy of America and a somewhat similar change in the country's ideas on the whole process of child training. Early generations had continued to cling to the vestiges of the Puritan outlook to the degree that they insisted that children must be trained under strict discipline, including corporal punishment. This seventeenth-century idea, by 1920, was being replaced in American family ideology by an idea of the nineteenth century that child maturation is an innate process not subject to modification by outside training. In educational theory this erroneous idea went back to the Emile of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), which idealized the state of nature as equivalent to the Garden of Eden, and believed that education must consist in leaving a youth completely free so that his innate goodness could emerge and reveal itself. This idea was developed, intensified, and given a pseudoscientific foundation by advances in biology and genetics in the late nineteenth century. By 1910 or so, child-rearing and educational theories had accepted the idea that man was a biological organism, like any animal, that his personality was a consequence of hereditary traits, and that each child had within him a rigid assortment of inherited talents and a natural rate of maturation in the development of these talents. These ideas were incorporated in a series of slogans of which two were: "Every child is different," and "He'll do it when he's ready."

     From all this came a wholesale ending of discipline, both in the home and in school, and the advent of "permissive education," with all that it entailed. Children were encouraged to have opinions and to speak out on matters of which they were totally ignorant; acquisition of information and intellectual training were shoved into the background; and restrictions of time, place, and movement in schools and homes were reduced to a minimum. Every emphasis was placed on "spontaneity"; and fixed schedules of time periods or subject matter to be covered were belittled. All this greatly weakened the disciplinary influence of the educational process, leaving the new generation much less disciplined, less organized, and less aware of time than their parents. Naturally this disintegrative process was less evident among the children of the petty bourgeois than in the middle class itself. These influences in themselves would have contributed much to the weakening of the middle-class outlook among the rising generation, but other, much more profound, influences w ere also operating. To examine these we must look inside the middle-class family structure..

     In marriage, as in so many other things, Western Civilization has been subjected to quite antithetical theories; these we might call the Western and the Romantic theories of love and marriage. The Romantic theory of these things was that each man or woman had a unique personality consisting of inborn traits, accumulated by inheritance from a unique combination of ancestors. This is, of course, the same theory that was used to justify permissive education. In Romantic love, however, the theory went on to assume, simply as a matter of faith, that for each man or woman there existed in a world a person of the opposite sex whose personality traits would just fit into those of his or her destined mate. The only problem was to find that mate. It was assumed that this would he done, at first sight, when an almost instantaneous flash of recognition would reveal to both that they had found the one possible life's partner.

     The idea of love at first sight as a flash of recognition was closely related to the Manichaean and Puritan religious idea that God's truth came to men in a similar flash of illumination (an idea that goes back, like so many of these ideas, to Plato's theory of knowledge as reminiscence). In its most extreme form, this Romantic theory of love assumed that each of the destined lovers was only part of a person, the two parts fitting together instantly on meeting into a single personality. Associated witl1 this were a number of other ideas, including the idea that marriages were “made in heaven," that such a Romantic marriage was totally satisfying to the partners, and that such a marriage should be "eternal."

     These ideas of Romantic love and marriage were much more acceptable to women than to men (for reasons we have not time to analyze) and were embraced by the middle class, but not, to any great extent, by other classes. The theory, like so much of the middle-class outlook, originated among the medieval heresies, such as Manichaeism (as the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont has shown), and was thus from the same tradition that saw the rise of the bourgeois outlook in the Middle Ages and its reinforcement by the closely associated Puritan movement of modern times. The Romantic theory of love was spread through the middle class by incidental factors, such as that the bourgeoisie were the only social class that read much, and Romantic love was basically a literary convention in its propagation whatever it may have been in its origins. It made no real impression on the other social classes in European society, such as the peasants, the nobility, or the urban working craftsmen.

     Strangely enough, Romantic love, accepted as a theory and ideal by the bourgeoisie, had little influence on middle-class marriages in practice, since these were usually based on middle-class values of economic security and material status rather than on love. More accurately, middle-class marriages were based on these material considerations in fact, while everyone concerned pretended that they were based on Romantic love. Any subsequent recognition of this clash between fact and theory often gave a severe jolt and has sometimes been a subject for literary examination, as in the first volume of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga.

     Opposed to this Romantic theory of love and marriage, and almost equally opposed to the bourgeois practice of "sensible" marriage, was what we may call the Western idea of love and marriage. This assumes that personalities are dynamic and flexible things formed largely by experiences in the past. Love and marriage between such personalities are, like everything in the Western outlook, diverse, imperfect, adjustable, creative, cooperative, and changeable. The Western idea assumes that a couple come together for many reasons (sex, loneliness, common interests, similar background, economic and social cooperation, reciprocal admiration of character traits, and other reasons). It further assumes that their whole relationship will be a slow process of getting to know each other and of mutual adjustment—a process that may never end. The need for constant adjustment shows the Western recognition that nothing, even love, is final or perfect. This is also shown by recognition that love and marriage are never total and all-absorbing, that each partner remains an independent personality with the right to an independent life. (This is found throughout the Western tradition and goes back to the Christian belief that each person is a separate soul with its own, ultimately separate, fate. )

     Thus there appeared in Western society at least three kinds of marriage, which we may call Romantic, bourgeois, and Western. The last, without being much discussed (except in modern books on love and marriage), is probably the most numerous of the three, and the other two, if they prove successful, do so by gradually developing into this third kind. Romantic marriage, based on the "shock of recognition," has in fact come to be based very largely on sexual attraction, since this is the chief form that love at first sight can take. Such marriages often fail, since even sex requires practice and mutual adjustment and is too momentary a human relationship to sustain a permanent union unless many other common interests accumulate around it. Even when this occurs and the marriage becomes a success, in the sense that it persists, it is never total, and the Romantic delusion that marriage should be totally absorbing of the time, attention, and energies of its partners, still expected by many women brought up on the Romantic idea, merely means that the marriage becomes an enslaving relationship to the husbands and a source of disappointment and frustration to the wives.

     Middle-class marriage, in fact, was not romantic, for, in the middle class, marriage, like everything else, was subject to the middle-class system of values. Within that value system, middle-class persons chose a marriage partner who would assist in achieving middle-class goals of status and achievement. A woman, with her parents' approval, chose a husband who showed promise of being a good provider and a steady, reliable, social achiever, who would be able to give her a material status at least as high as that provided by her own parents. A man chose as a wife one who showed promise of being a help in his upward struggle, one able to act as hostess to his aspirant activities and to provide the domestic decorum and social graces expected of a successful business or professional man.

     Such a marriage was based, from both sides, on status factors rather than on personal factors. The fact that a man was a Yale graduate, was trained for a profession, had a position with a good firm, drove an expensive car, could order dinner with assurance in an expensive restaurant, and had already applied for membership in a golf or country club were not reasons for loving him as a person, since they were simply the accessories of his status. Yet middle-class persons married for reasons such as these and, at the same time, convinced themselves and their friends that they were marrying for Romantic love (based on the fact that they were, in addition to their mutual social acceptability, sexually attracted).

     For a time the new marriage could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations ago, but today the question is posed by every women's magazine, "Is your marriage a success?" But unconsciously, long before this, realization had been growing that the marriage relationship was not based on love, which must be a recognition and appreciation of personal qualities, not of status accessories. Without personal feeling based on such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners, with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class minds, still insisted that it was based on love. The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and "fulfillment," will be examined in a moment.

     Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally. Brought up in a male-dominated family, she was prepared to accept a similar situation in her own life. This means that her outside contacts and her general picture of the world came to her through the screen of her husband's vision of these things.

     The decrease in the number of children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife increasing leisure in the 1920's and 1930'5. Enterprising editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women's magazines (like the Ladies' Home Journal). Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women's clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed children. By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women's magazines. Her increasing leisure gave her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to greater effort in pursuit of money. To him this became nagging; to her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under which she had entered upon the marriage relationship.

     While this was going on, the outside world was also changing. Women became "emancipated" as a consequence of World War I, with considerable urging onward from the women's magazines. Shorter skirts and shorter hair became symbols of this process, but even more significant was the appearance in the outside world of a great increase in the number of jobs that could be done best, or only, by women. As part of this process, there took place considerable changes in bourgeois morality, the ending of chaperonage, greater freedom between the sexes, and the acceptance of divorce as morally possible in bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the stage and cinema).

     As part of this whole process, there occurred a dramatic event of great social significance. This was the reversal in longevity expectations of men and women in adult life. A century ago (to be sure, in a largely rural context), a twenty-year-old man could expect to live longer than a twenty-year-old wife. In fact, such a man might well bury two or three wives, usually from the mortality associated with childbirth or other female problems. Today, a twenty-year-old man has little expectation of living as long as a twenty-year-old woman. To make matters worse, a twenty-year-old woman a century ago married a man considerably older than herself, at least in the middle classes, simply because future preference required that a man be established economically before he began to raise a family.

     Today, from a series of causes, such as the extension of the female expectation of life faster than the male expectation, the increased practice of birth control, coeducation (which brings the sexes into contact at the same age), weakening of future preference and of the middle-class outlook generally, which leads to marriages by couples of about the same age, husbands now generally die before their wives. Recognition of this, the increased independence of women, adaptation to taxes and other legal nuisances, has given rise to joint financial accounts, to property being put in the wife's name, and to greatly increased insurance benefits for wives. Gradually the wealth of the country became female-owned, even if still largely male-controlled.

     But this had subtle results; it made women more independent and more outspoken. Bourgeois men gradually came to live under a regime of persistent nagging to become "better providers." To many men, work became a refuge and a relief from domestic revelations of the inadequacy of their performance as economic achievers. This growth of overwork, of constant tension, of frustration of emotional life and of leisure began to make more and more men increasingly willing to accept death as the only method of achieving rest. Bourgeois men literally began to kill themselves, by unconscious psychic suicide, from overwork, neurotic overindulgence in alcohol, smoking, work, and violent leisure, and the middle class slowly increased its proportion of materially endowed widows.

     One notable change in this whole process was a shift, over the past century, from the male-dominated family to a female-dominated family. The locality in which the young couple set up their home had an increasing tendency to be matrilocal rather than patrilocal. In increasing numbers of cases, where the young couple married before the groom's educational process was finished, they even lived with her family (but very rarely with his family). Increasingly part of the burden of housework was shifted to the husband: washing dishes, buying groceries, even tending the children. In 1840 a child could cry at night and would invariably be tended by its mother, while the father slept peacefully on, totally unaware of what was going on. By 1960, if a child cried at night, the chances were as likely as not that the mother would hear nothing while the father took over the necessary activities. If this were questioned by anyone, the mother's retort was pointed: "I take care of baby all day; I don't see why he can't take care of it at night!".

     Closely related to this confusion, or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was decreasing sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As recently as the 1920's girl babies were reared differently from boys. They were dressed differently, treated differently, permitted to do different things, and admonished about different dangers. By 1960, children, regardless of sex, were all being brought up the same. Indeed, with short cropped hair and play-suits on both, it became impossible to be sure which was which. This led to a decrease in the personality differences of men and women, with males becoming more submissive and females more aggressive.

     This tendency was accelerated by new techniques of education, especially in the first twelve years of life. The neurological maturation of girls was faster shall that of boys, especially in regard to coordination, such as in feeding oneself, talking, dressing oneself, toilet-training, learning to read, and general adjustment to school. The shift from home to school in the early grades was adjusted to by girls more easily than by boys, partly because girls were more self-assured and gregarious. By the age of ten or twelve, girls were developed physically, neurologically, emotionally, and socially about two years in advance of boys. All this tended to make boys less self-assured, indecisive, weak, and dependent. The steady increase in the percentage of women teachers in the lower grades worked in the same direction, since women teachers favored girls and praised those attitudes and techniques that were more natural to girls. New methods, such as the whole-word method of teaching reading or the use of true-and-false or multiple-choice examinations, were also better adapted to female than to masculine talents. Less and less emphasis was placed on critical judgment, while more and more was placed on intuitive or subjective decisions. In this environment girls did better, and boys felt inferior or decided that school was a place for girls and not for boys. The growing aggressiveness of girls pushed these hesitant boys aside and intensified the problem. As consequences of this, boys had twice as many "non-readers" as girls, several times as many stutterers, and many times as many teen-age bed-wetters.

     While the outside world was decreasing its differential treatment of children on a sexual basis by treating boys and girls more and more alike (and that treatment was better adapted to girls than to boys) within the middle-class home, the growing emotional frustrations of the mother were leading to an increasing distinction on a sexual basis in her emotional treatment of her children.

     The earliest feeling of sensual reassurance and comfort any child experiences is against the body of its mother. To a boy baby this is a heterosexual relationship, while to the girl it is a relationship with the same sex. In most cases the little girl avoids any undesirable persistence of this homosexual tendency by shifting her admiration and attention to some available male, usually her father. Thus by the age of six or eight, a daughter has become "Daddy's girl," awaiting his return from work to communicate the news of the day, getting his slippers and newspaper, and hoping that he will read her a story or share her viewing of a favorite television program before she must go to bed. By the age of twelve, in a normal girl, this interest in male creatures has begun to shift to some boy in her class at school. With a boy baby the transference is later and less gradual. The undesirable aspects of his love for his mother are avoided by the powerful social pressures of the incest taboo, but this merely means that the sexual element in his concern for the opposite sex is suppressed and is undeveloped. Thus there is a natural, we might almost say biological, tendency in our society for the sexual development of the boy to be delayed and for the girl to be free from this retarding influence.

     In the American middle-class family of today, these influences have been extraordinarily exaggerated. Because the middle-class marriage is based on social rather than personal attraction, the emotional relation of the wife to her husband is insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his work, hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and unsatisfactory it becomes for his wife. Part of the wife's unused emotional energy begins to be expended in her love for her son. At the same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother's relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded as an emotional rival for the husband's affection. This resentment of the daughter is most likely to occur when there is some other cause of disturbance in the mother's psychology, especially if this cause is associated with her relationship to her own father. For example, as female domination becomes, generation by generation, a more distinctive feature of American family life, the daughter's shift of attention to her father becomes less complete, and, by adolescence, she tends to pity him rather than to admire him and may become relatively ambivalent in her feelings toward both her father and mother, sometimes hating the latter for dominating her father and despising his weakness in allowing it. In such a case, the whole development of which we speak is accelerated and intensified in the next generation, and the daughter's relatively ambivalent feelings toward her parents are repeated in her relatively ambivalent feelings toward her husband. This serves to intensify both her emotional smothering and overprotection of her son and her tendency toward emotional rejection of her daughter as a potential danger to the relatively precarious emotional relationship between husband and wife.

     As a consequence of this situation, the frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by keeping him dependent and immature as long as possible and to seek to hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her out of the family circle as soon as possible. The chief consequence of this is the increasingly late maturity, the weakness, under-sexuality, and dependence of American boys and American men of middle-class origins and the increasingly early maturing, aggressiveness, over-sexuality, and independence of American middle-class girls. The mother's alienation of the daughter (which often reaches an acute condition of mutual hatred) may begin in childhood or even at birth (especially if the girl baby is beautiful, is not nursed by the mother, and is welcomed with excessive joy by the husband). It usually becomes acute when the daughter reaches puberty and may become very acute if the mother, about the same time, is approaching her menopause (which she often mistakenly feels will reduce her attraction as a woman to her husband).

     During this whole period, the mother's rejection of her daughter appears chiefly in her efforts to force her to grow up rapidly, and leads to premature exposure of the daughter to such modern monstrosities as preteen "mixed parties," training bras, access to overly "sophisticated" movies, books, and conversations, and the practice of leaving daughters un-chaperoned in the house with boy classmates, on the early high school or even junior high school level. Such experiences and the increasingly frequent clashes of temperament between mother and daughter lead a surprisingly large percentage of middle-class girls to move from the home before the age of twenty. And whether she leaves or not, sexual and emotional maturity comes to the American middle-class girl earlier and earlier, not only in comparison with the middle-class boy but even in absolute terms. We are told, for example, that the onset of puberty among American girls (an event which can be dated exactly by the first menstrual period) has been occurring at an earlier age by about nine months for each passing decade. As a result, this milestone is reached by American girls today up to three years earlier than with American girls of the early twentieth century.

     Over the same period, the American middle-class boy has been moving in the opposite direction, although the physiological element cannot be documented. Indeed, it need not be. More significant is the changing relationship between the arrival of sexual awareness and of emotional readiness to accept sex. There can be no doubt that the American child today, especially in a middle-class family, becomes aware of sex much earlier than he did a generation or two ago, and long before he is emotionally ready to face the fact of his own sexuality. In the nineteenth century three things came fairly close together in the fifteen to seventeen age bracket: (1) sexual awareness; (2) emotional readiness for sex; and (3) the ending of education and the opportunity to seek economic independence from parents. Today sexual awareness comes very early for all, perhaps around the age of ten. Emotional readiness to face the fact of one's own sexuality comes earlier and earlier for the girl today, but later and later for the boy, chiefly because the middle-class mother forces independence and recognition of the fact that she is a woman upon her daughter but forces dependence and blindness to the fact that he is a man upon her son. And the date for the ending of education and seeking economic independence from parents gets somewhat later for girls but immensely later for men (a process that becomes increasingly extravagant).

     One result of this is that the much greater (sometimes indefinitely postponed) delay for a boy of emotional readiness after sexual awareness leaves the boy emotionally desexed for so long that it affects his sexuality and emotional maturity adversely and to an increasingly advanced age. But the opposite is true for a girl, because of the shorter and decreasing lag of her emotional readiness after her sexual awareness. Lolita, who is not as rare as the readers of that novel wanted to imagine, becomes increasingly frequent, and cannot be satisfied by boys of her own age; consequently she seeks for many reasons, including financial resources and greater emotional maturity, her sex companions among older men.

     On the other hand, the position of the middle-class boy becomes even more complex and pitiful, since he not only must face the fluctuating chronology of these developments to a greater degree but must free himself from his emotional dependence on his mother with little help from anyone. If his father tries to help (and he is the only one who is likely to try to do so), and insists that his son become a responsible and independent human being, the mother fights like a tigress to defend her son's continued immaturity and dependence, accusing the husband of cruelty, of hatred for his son, and of jealousy of his son's feeling for the mother. She does not hesitate to use the weapons that she has. They are many and powerful, including a "reluctant" and ambiguous "revelation" to the son that his father hates him. Any effort by the father to argue that true love must seek to help the son advance in maturity and independence, and that insistence that he avoid or postpone these advances might well be regarded as hatred rather than love, are usually blocked with ease. At this stage in the family history, emotional frustrations and confusions are generally at so high a level that it is fairly easy for mother and son to agree that black is white. "Momism" is usually triumphant for a more or less extended period, while normal adolescent rebellion becomes a wholesale rejection of the father and only much later a delayed effort at achieving emotional detachment from the mother.

     The point of all this is that normal adolescent rebellion has become, in America today, a radical and wholesale rejection of parental values, including middle-class values, because of the protracted emotional warfare which now goes on in the middle-class home with teen-age children. The chief damage in the situation lies in the pervasive destruction of the adolescent middle-class boy and his alienation from the achieving aspects of middle-class culture. The middle-class girl, chiefly because she still tries to please her father, may continue to be a considerable success as an achiever, especially in academic life where her earlier successes make continuance of the process fairly easy. But the middle-class boy who rejects the achieving aspects of middle-class life often does so in academic matters that seem to him to be an alien and feminine world from the beginning. His rejection of this world and his unconscious yearning for academic failure arise from a series of emotional influences: (1) a desire to strike back at his father; (2) a desire to free himself from dependence on his mother and thus to escape from the feminine atmosphere of much academic life; and (3) a desire to escape from the endless academic road, going to age twenty-three or later, which modern technical and social complexities require for access to positions leading to high middle-class success. The lengthening of the interval of time between sexual awareness and the ending of education, from about two years in the 1880'5 to at least ten or twelve years in the 1960's, has set up such tensions and strains in the bourgeois American family that they threaten to destroy the family and are already in the process of destroying much of the middle-class outlook that was once so distinctive of the American way of life.

     From this has emerged an almost total breakdown of communication between teen-agers and their parents' generation. Generally the adolescents do not tell their parents their most acute problems; they do not appeal to parents or adults but to each other for help in facing such problems (except where emotionally starved girls appeal to men teachers); and, when any effort is made to talk across the gap between the generations, words may pass but communication does not. Behind this protective barrier a new teen-age culture has grown up. Its chief characteristic is rejection of parental values and of middle-class culture. In many ways this new culture is like that of African tribes: its tastes in music and the dance, its emphasis on sex play, its increasingly scanty clothing, its emphasis on group solidarity, the high value it puts on interpersonal relations (especially talking and social drinking), its almost total rejection of future preference and its constant efforts to free itself from the tyranny of time. Teen-age solidarity and sociality and especially the solidarity of their groups and subgroups are amazingly African in attitudes, as they gather nightly, or at least on weekends, to drink "cokes," talk interminably in the midst of throbbing music, preferably in semidarkness, with couples drifting off for sex play in the corners as a kind of social diversion, and a complete emancipation from time. Usually they have their own language, with vocabulary and constructions so strange that parents find them almost incomprehensible. This Africanization of American society is gradually spreading with the passing years to higher age levels in our culture and is having profound and damaging effects on the transfer of middle-class values to the rising generation. A myriad of symbolic acts, over the last twenty years, have served to demonstrate the solidarity of teen culture and its rejection of middle-class values. Many of these involve dress and "dating customs," both major issues in the Adolescent-Parental Cold War.

     In the days of Horatio Alger, the marks of youthful middle-class aspiration were such obvious symbols as well-polished shoes, a necktie and suit coat, a clean-shaved face and well-cut hair, and punctuality. For almost a generation now, teen culture has rejected the necktie and suit coat. Well-polished shoes gave way to dirty saddle shoes, and these in turn to "loafers" and thong sandals. Shaving became irregular, especially when schools were not in session; haircuts were postponed endlessly, with much parental-adolescent bickering. Fewer and fewer young people carried watches, even when they lived, as on a college campus, in fairly scheduled lives.

     "Dating," as part of adolescent rebellion, became less and less formalized. The formal middle-class dance of a generation ago, arranged weeks ahead and with a dance program, became almost obsolete. Everything has to be totally "casual" or today's youth rejects it. By 1947 a dance program (listing the dances in numbered order with the girl's partner for each written down) was obsolete. "Going steady," which meant dancing only with the boy who invited her, became established, a complete rejection of the middle-class dance whose purpose was to provide the girl with a maximum number of different partners in order to widen her acquaintance with matrimonial possibilities.

     "Going steady," like much of adolescent culture of the "jive" era, was derived from the gangster circles of south Chicago and was first introduced to middle-class knowledge through George Raft movies of the 1930's. It was satirized in a now forgotten popular song of the 1920's called "I Want to Dance with the Guy What Brung Me." But by 1947 it was the way of life of much of adolescent America. As a consequence, teen-age couples at high school dances "sat out" most of the evening in bored silence or chatted in a desultory fashion with friends of the same sex. The "jive" language of the period also had a south-Chicago origin and has been traced back, to a large extent, to a saloon run by a certain local oracle called "Hep" early in the twentieth century.

     Fortunately, "going steady" was only a brief, if drastic, challenge to parental attitudes, and was soon replaced by tribal gregariousness and tolerant sexual broad-mindedness, which might be called "clique going," since it involved social solidarity (sometimes sexual promiscuity) within a small group, usually of ten or less. This became, to their adults, the "teen-age gang," which still thrives, but never in a very formal way in middle-class circles as it does in lower-class ones. Two casualties of this process are sexual jealousy and sexual privacy, both of which have largely disappeared among many upper-middle-class young people. In some groups sex has become a purely physiological act, somewhat like eating or sleeping. In others, sexual experience is restricted to loved ones, but since these youths love many persons (or even love everyone) this is much less of a restriction than it might seem to a middle-class mind. Generally a sharp distinction is made between "loving someone" (which justifies sex) and being "in love" with someone (which justifies monogamous behavior).

     But there is widespread tolerance and endless discussion of all these issues. This discussion, like most of the adolescents' endless talk, never reaches any decisions but leaves the question open or decides that "it all depends on how you look at it." As part of such discussions, there is complete casual frankness as to who has had or is having sexual experiences with whom. Widely permeated with an existentialist outlook, the adolescent society regards each sexual experience as an isolated, context-less act, with no necessary cause or consequence, except the momentary merging of two lonelinesses in an act of togetherness. Among middle-class youth it is accompanied by an atmosphere of compassion or pity rather than of passion or even love (the way Holden Caulfield might experience sex). Among lower-class persons it is much more likely to be physiologically inspired and associated with passion or roughness. This often attracts middle-class girls who become dissatisfied with the weakness and under-sexuality of middle-class boys. But petty-bourgeois youth, as befits the final defenders of middle-class conventionality and hypocrisy, still tend to approach sex with secrecy and even guilt.

     Because of the breakdown of communication between the generations of middle-class families, parents know little of this side of teen-age culture, at least so far as their own children are concerned. They usually know much more about the behavior of their friends' children, because they are more likely to catch glimpses of the behavior of the latter in unguarded moments. On the whole, middle-class parents today are surprisingly (and secretly) tolerant about the behavior of their daughters so long as they do not create a public scandal by "getting into trouble." Mothers usually feel that their sons are too young and should wait for sexual experience, while fathers sometimes secretly think it might do their son's immaturity some good. When middle-class children get into trouble, or any kind of a scrape, their only large anxiety is to prevent their parents from finding out. Petty-bourgeois parents, as the last defense of middle-class conventionality, generally disapprove of any illicit sexual experiences by any of their children. Naturally there are great variations in all these things, with religion as the chief varying factor and variety of local customs in secondary significance. However even in religious circles, the behavior of the young is not at all what their adults expect or believe. For example, the number of Roman Catholic young people who have premarital, or even casual, sexual experiences is much larger than the number who are willing to eat meat on Friday..

     One reason for the spreading of these relaxed ideas on behavior is the devastating honesty of the younger generation, especially about themselves. This seems to be based on their gregarious garrulity. An earlier generation had its share of illicit actions of various kinds, but they kept these a secret and regarded each as an aberrant action that was psychologically excluded from their accepted social patterns and would not, therefore, be repeated. This view continued, no matter how often it was repeated. But the younger generation of today has accepted the existentialist idea, "I am what I do." The adolescent tells his group what he did, and they usually agree that this is the way he is, however surprising it is. Their whole attitude is pragmatic, almost experimental: "This is what happened. This is the way things are. This is the way I am." They are engaged in a search for themselves as individuals, something they were called upon to do in the early grades of school, thanks to the misconceptions of John Dewey, and they are quite alien to any theory that the self is a creature of trained patterns and is not a creature of discovered secrets. Now, in the 1960's, this opinion of man's nature is changing and, as a consequence of George Orwell, mishmash conceptions of brainwashing, and the revival of Pavlovian psychology through the work of men like Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, the idea of personality as something trained under discipline to a desired pattern is being revived. With this revival of a basically Puritanical idea of human nature reappears the usual Puritan errors on the nature of evil and acceptance of the theory of the evil of human nature (as preached in William Golding's Lord of the Flies).

     The new outlook emerging from all this is complex, tentative, and full of inconsistencies, but it will surely play an increasing role in our history as the younger generation grows older, abandoning many of the ideas they now hold, with increasing responsibility; but at the same time the new outlook will force very great modifications in the American point of view as a whole.

     This new outlook of the rising generation of the middle class has a negative and a positive side. Its negative side can be seen in its large-scale unconcern for the basic values of the middle-class outlook, its rejection of self-discipline, of future preference, of infinitely expandable material living standards, and of material symbols of middle-class status. In general this negative attitude appears in many of the activities we have described and above all in a profound rejection of abstractions, slogans, cliches, and conventions. These are treated with tolerant irony tinged with contempt. The targets of these attitudes are the general values of the petty bourgeoisie and of middle-class parents: position in society, "what people think," "self-respect," "keeping up with the Joneses," "the American Way of Life," "virtue," "making money," "destroying our country's enemies," virginity, respect for established organizations (including their elders, the clergy, political leaders, or big businessmen), and such.

     The shift from a destructive or negative to a positive view of the new American outlook is, to some extent, chronological; it may be seen in the former popularity of Elvis Presley and the newer enthusiasm for Joan Baez (or folk singers generally). There is also a social distinction here to some extent, as Elvis remains, to a fair degree, popular with the lower classes, while Joan is a middle-class (or even college-level) favorite. But the contrast in outlook between the two is what is significant. Joan is gentle, compassionate, unemphatic, totally honest, concerned about people as individuals, free of pretenses (singing quietly in a simple dress and bare feet), full of love and fundamental human decency, and committed to these.

     The rejection of acquisitiveness and even of sensuality may be seen in the change in tastes in movies, especially in the popularity of foreign films directed by men like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. The latter's La Dolce Vita (1961), a smash hit in the United States, was a portrayal of the meaningless disillusionment of material success and of sensuality in contrast with the power and mystery of nature (symbolized by a giant fish pulled from the sea and left to die by thoughtless men and the direct honesty and innocence of a child watching the scene).

     This rejection of material things and of sensuality is, in some strange way, leading the younger generation to some kind of increased spirituality. Property and food mean very little to them. They share almost everything, give to others when they have very little for themselves, expect reciprocal sharing but not repayment, and feel free to "borrow" in this way without permission. Three meals a day is out; in fact, meals are almost out. They eat very little and irregularly, in sharp contrast to the middle classes early in the century who overate, as many mature middle-class persons still do. The petty bourgeoisie and lower classes still tend to overeat or to be neurotic snackers, but middle-class youth is almost monastic in its eating. Food just is not important, unless it is an occasion for a crowd to gather. Much of this decrease in emphasis on food is a consequence of their rejection of the discipline of time. Everything in their lives is irregular (including their natural bodily processes). They usually get up too late to eat breakfast, snack somewhere along the day, refuse to carry watches, and often have no idea what day of the week it is.

     This new outlook is basically existentialist in its emphasis on direct, momentary personal experience, especially with other people. It emphasizes people, and finds the highest good of life in interpersonal relations, handled generally with compassion and irony. The two chief concerns of life are "caring" and "helping." "Caring," which they usually call "love," means a general acceptance of the fact that people matter and are subjects of concern. This love is diffuse and often quite impersonal, not aimed at a particular individual or friend but at anyone, at persons in general, and especially at persons one does not know at all, as an act of recognition, almost of expiation, that we are all helpless children together. The whole idea is very close to Christ's message, "Love one another," and has given rise to the younger generation's passionate concern with remote peoples, the American Negroes, and the outcast poor. It is reflected in the tremendous enthusiasm among the young for the Peace Corps, civil rights, and racial equality, and the attack on poverty, all of which have much greater support among middle-class young people than can be measured even by the surprisingly large numbers who actively do something.

     This desire to do something is what I call "helping." It is a strange and largely symbolic kind of helping, since there is with it a fairly widespread feeling that nothing that the helper can do will make any notable dent in the colossal problem; none the less, there is an obligation to do something, not only as a symbolic act but also as an almost masochistic rejection of the middle-class past. The younger generation who support the Peace Corps, the attack on poverty, and the drive for Negro rights have an almost irresistible compulsion to do these things as a demonstration of their rejection of their parents' value system, and as some restitution for the adults' neglect of these urgent problems. But the real motivation behind the urge "to help" is closely related with the urge "to care"; it consists simply of a desire to show another human being that he is not alone. There is little concern for human perfectibility or social progress such as accompanied middle-class humanitarianism in the nineteenth century.

     Both of these urges are existentialist. They give rise to isolated acts that have no significant context. Thus an act of loving or helping has no sequence of causes leading up to it or of consequences flowing from it. It stands alone as an isolated experience of togetherness and of brief human sharing. This failure or lack of context for each experience means a failure or lack of meaning, for meaning and significance arise from context; that is, from the relationship of the particular experience to the whole picture. But today's youth has no concern for the whole picture; they have rejected the past and have very little faith in the future. Their rejection of intellect and their lack of faith in human reason gives them no hope that any meaning can be found for any experience, so each experience becomes an end in itself, isolated from every other experience.

     This skepticism about meaning, closely allied with their rejection of organizations and of abstractions, is also closely related with a failure of responsibility. Since consequences are divorced from the act or experience itself, the youth is not bound by any relationship between the two. The result is a large-scale irresponsibility. If a young person makes an appointment, he may or may not keep it. He may come very late or not at all. In any case, he feels no shame at failure to carry out what he had said he would do. In fact, the young people of today constantly speak of what they are going to do—after lunch, tonight, tomorrow, next week—but they rarely do what they say. To them it was always very tentative, a hope rather than a statement, and binding on no one. If the young fail to do what they say, they are neither embarrassed nor apologetic, and hardly think it necessary to explain or even mention it. Their basic position is that everyone concerned had the same freedom to come or not, and if you showed up while they did not, this does not give you any right to complain because you also had the same right to stay away as they had.

     The other great weakness of the younger generation is their lack of self-discipline. They are as episodic in their interests and ambitions as they are in their actions. They can almost kill themselves with overwork for something that catches their fancy, usually something associated with their group or with "caring" and "helping," but in general they have little tenacity of application or self-discipline in action.

     They lack imagination also, an almost inevitable consequence of an outlook that concentrates on experiences without context. Their experiences are necessarily limited and personal and are never fitted into a larger picture or linked with the past or the future. As a result they find it almost impossible to picture anything different from what it is, or even to see what it is from any long-range perspective. This means that their outlooks, in spite of their wide exposure to different situations through the mass media or by personal travel, are very narrow. They lack the desire to obtain experience vicariously from reading, and the vicarious experiences that they get from talk (usually with their fellows) are rarely much different from their own experiences. As a result, their lives, while erratic, are strangely dull and homogeneous. Even their sexual experiences are routine, and any efforts to escape this by experimenting with homosexuality, alcohol, drugs, extra-racial partners, or other unnecessary fringe accessories generally leave it dull and routine.

     Efforts by middle-class parents to prevent their children from developing along these non-middle-class lines are generally futile. An effort to use parental discipline to enforce conformity to middle-class values or behavior means that the child will quote all the many cases in the neighborhood where the children are not being disciplined. He is encouraged in his resistance to parental discipline by its large-scale failure all around him. Moreover, if his parents insist on conformity, he has an invincible weapon to use against them: academic failure. This weapon is used by boys rather than by girls, partly because it is a weapon for the weak, and involves doing nothing rather than doing something, but also because the school seems to most middle-class boys an alien place and an essential element in their general adolescent feeling of homelessness. Girls who are pressured by their parents to conform resist by sexual delinquencies more often than boys, and in extreme cases get pregnant or have sexual experiences with Negro boys. From this whole context of adolescent resistance to parental pressures to conform to middle-class behavior flows a major portion of middle-class adolescent delinquency, which is quite distinct in its origin from the delinquency of the lowest, outcast class in the slums. It involves all kinds of activities from earliest efforts to smoke or drink, through speeding, car stealing, and vandalism of property, to major crimes and perversions. It is quite different in origin and usually in character from the delinquencies of the uprooted, which are either crimes for personal benefits (such as thievery and mugging) or crimes of social resentment (such as slashing tires and convertible tops or smashing school windows). Some activities, of course, such as automobile stealing, appear among both.

     These remarks, it must be emphasized, apply to the middle class, and are not intended to apply to the other classes in American society. The aristocrats, for example, have considerable success in passing along their outlook to their children, partly because it is presented as a class or family attitude, and not as a parental or personal attitude, partly because their friends and close associates are also aristocrats or semi-aristocrats, and rejection of their point of view tends to leave an aristocratic adolescent much more personally isolated than rejection of his parents' view leaves a middle-class adolescent (indeed, the latter finds group togetherness only if he does reject his parents), partly because there is much more segregation of the sexes among aristocrats than in the middle class, but chiefly because the aristocrats use a separate school system, including disciplined boarding schools. The use of the latter, the key to the long persistence of the aristocratic tradition in England, makes it possible for outsiders to discipline adolescents without disrupting the family. Among the middle class, effort to discipline adolescents is largely in the hands of parents, but the effort to do so tends to disrupt the family by setting husband against wife and children against parents. As a result, discipline is usually held back to retain at least the semblance of family solidarity as viewed from the outside world (which is what really counts with middle-class people). But the aristocratic private boarding school, modeled on those of England in accord with the basic Anglophilism of the American aristocracy, is sexually segregated from females, tough, sports-orientated, usually High Episcopal (almost Anglican), and disciplines its charges with the importance of the group, their duty to the group, and the painfulness of the ultimate punishment, which is alienation from the group. As a consequence of this, any resentment the aristocratic adolescent may have is aimed at his masters, not at his home and parents, and home comes to represent a relatively desirable place to which he is admitted occasionally as a reward for long weeks on the firing line at school. Such a boy is removed from the smothering influence of "momism," grows up relatively shy of girls, has more than his share of homosexual experiences (to which he may succumb completely), but, on the whole, usually grows up to be a very energetic, constructive, stable, and self-sacrificing citizen, prepared to inflict the same training process on his own sons.

     Unfortunately for the aristocrat who wishes to expose his son to the same training process as that which molded his own outlook, he finds this a difficult thing to do because the organizations that helped form him outside the family, the Episcopal Church (or its local equivalent), the boarding school, the Ivy League university, and the once-sheltered summer resort have all changed and are being invaded by a large number of non-aristocratic intruders who change the atmosphere of the whole place.

     This change in atmosphere is hard to define to anyone who has not experienced it personally. Fundamentally it is a distinction between playing the game and playing to win. The aristocrat plays for the sake of the game or the team or the school. He plays whether he is much good or not, because he feels that he is contributing to a community effort even if he is on the scrubs rather than a star or starting player. The newer recruits to former aristocratic educational institutions play for more personal reasons, with much greater intensity, even fanaticism, and play to excel and to distinguish themselves from others.

     One reason for the accessibility of formerly aristocratic organizations to people of non-aristocratic origin has already been noted, but probably was discounted by the reader. That is my statement that the American Establishment, which is so aristocratic and Anglophile in its foundation, came to accept the liberal ideology The Episcopal Church, exclusive boarding schools, and Ivy League universities (like Eton and Oxford) decided that they must open their door to the "more able" of the non-aristocratic classes. Accordingly, they established scholarships, recruited for these in lower schools they had never thought of before, and made efforts to have their admission requirements and examinations fit the past experiences of non-aristocratic applicants. By the end of the 1920's, Philips Exeter Academy was welcoming on scholarships the sons of laboring immigrants with polysyllabic names, and by the 1950's Episcopal clergymen were making calls on "likely-looking" Negro families.

     As a consequence of this, the sons of aristocrats found themselves being squeezed out of the formative institutions that had previously trained their fathers and, at the same time, discovered that these institutions were themselves changing their character and becoming dominated by petty-bourgeois rather than by aristocratic values. At the alumni reunions of June 1964, the President of Harvard was asked in an open forum what the questioner should do with his son, recently rejected for admission to Harvard in spite of the fact that the son was descended from the Mayflower voyagers by eleven consecutive generations of Harvard men. To this tragic question President Pusey replied: "I don't know what we can do about your son. We can't send him back, because the Mayflower isn't running any more." Despite this facetious retort, which may have been called forth by the inebriate condition of the questioner, the fact remains that the aristocratic outlook has a great deal to contribute to any organization fortunate enough to share it. Among other things, it has kept Harvard (where aristocratic control continued almost to the present day) at the top or close to the top of the American educational hierarchy decade after decade.

     The ... effort, by aristocrats and democrats alike, to make the social ladder in America a ladder of opportunity rather than a ladder of privilege has opened the way to a surge of petty-bourgeois recruits over the faltering bodies of the disintegrating middle class.

     The petty bourgeois are rising in American society along the channels established in the great American hierarchies of business, the armed forces, academic life, the professions, finance, and politics. They are doing this not because they have imagination, broad vision, judgment, moderation, versatility, or group loyalties but because they have neurotic drives of personal ambition and competitiveness, great insecurities and resentments, narrow specialization, and fanatical application to the task before each of them. Their fathers, earning $100 a week as bank clerks or insurance agents while unionized bricklayers were getting $120 a week when they cared to work, embraced the middle-class ideology with tenacity as the chief means (along with their "white collared" clothing) of distinguishing themselves from the unionized labor they feared or hated. Their wives, whom they had married because they held the same outlook, looked forward eagerly to seeing their sons become the kind of material success the father had failed to reach. The family accepted a common outlook that believed specialization and hard work either in business or in a profession, would win this material success.

     The steps up that ladder of success were clearly marked—to be the outstanding boy student and graduate in school, to win entrance to and graduation from "the best" university possible (naturally an Ivy League one), and then the final years of specialized application in a professional school.

     Many of these eager workers headed for medicine, because to them medicine, despite the ten years of necessary preparation, meant up to $40,000 a year income by age fifty. As a consequence, the medical profession in the United States ceased, very largely, to be a profession of fatherly confessors and un-professing humanitarians and became one of the largest groups of hardheaded petty-bourgeois hustlers in the United States, and their professional association became the most ruthlessly materialistic lobbying association of any professional group. Similar persons with lesser opportunities were shunted off the more advantageous rungs of the ladder into second-best schools and third-rate universities. All flocked into the professions, even to teaching (which, on the face of it, might have expected that its practitioners would have some allegiance to the truth and to helping the young to realize their less materialistic potentialities), where they quickly abandoned the classroom for the more remunerative tasks of educational administration. And, of course, the great mass of these eager beavers went into science or business, preferably into the largest corporations, where they looked with fishy-eyed anticipation at those rich, if remote, plums of vice-presidencies, in General Motors, Ford, General Dynamics, or International Business Machines.

     The success of these petty-bourgeois recruits in America's organizational structure rested on their ability to adapt their lives to the screening processes the middle classes had set up covering access to the middle-class organizational structures. The petty bourgeoisie, as the last fanatical defenders of the middle-class outlook, had, in excess degree, the qualities of self-discipline and future preference the middle classes had established as the unstated assumptions behind their screens of aptitude testing, intelligence evaluation, motivational research, and potential-success measurements. Above all, the American public school system, permeated with the unstated assumptions of middle-class values, was ideally suited to demonstrate petty-bourgeois "success quotients." These successive barriers in the middle-class screening process were almost insurmountable to the working class and the outcast, became very difficult to the new generation of middle-class children, who rejected their parents' value system, but were ideally adapted to the petty-bourgeois anxiety neuroses.

     By 1960, however, big business, government civil service, and the Ivy League universities were becoming disillusioned with these petty-bourgeois recruits. The difficulty was that these new recruits were rigid, unimaginative, narrow and, above all, illiberal at a time when liberalism (in the sense of reaching tentative and approximate decisions through flexible community interaction) was coming to be regarded as the proper approach to large organization problems. In his farewell report the Chairman of Harvard's Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender, summed up the problem this way:

     "The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents' ambitions or a conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers' prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn independence, with a vivid imagination and desire to explore fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to read the un-required books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a rebel, may not conform to their stereotype, and may not get the top grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the highest level in the standard multiple choice admissions tests, which may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind."

     These remarks bring us close to one of the major problems in American culture today. We need a culture that will produce people eager to do things, but we need even more a culture that will make it possible to decide what to do. This is the old division of means and goals. Decisions about goals require values, meaning, context, perspective. They can be set, even tentatively and approximately, only by people who have some inkling of the whole picture. The middle-class culture of our past ignored the whole picture and destroyed our ability to see it by its emphasis on specialization. Just as mass production came to be based on specialization, so human preparation for making decisions about goals also became based on specialization. The free elective system in higher education was associated with choice of a major field of specialization, and all the talk about liberal arts, outside electives, general education, or required distribution were largely futile. They were futile because no general view of the whole picture could be made simply by attaching together a number of specialist views of narrow fields, for the simple reason that each specialist field looks entirely different, presenting different problems and requiring different techniques, when it is placed in the general picture. This simple fact still has not been realized in those circles that talk most about broadening outlooks. This was clearly shown in the influential Harvard Report on General Education (1945). As one reviewer of this document said, "It cost $40,000 to produce and a better answer could have been found by buying one of the books of Sir Richard Livingstone for $2.75." This remark is equally mistaken on the opposite side, a fact that shows that the solution can be found only by all parties freeing themselves from their preconceptions by getting as familiar as possible with the diverse special areas in a skeptical way.

     Means are almost as difficult as ends. In fact, personal responsibility, self-discipline, some sense of time value and future preference, and, above all, an ability to distinguish what is important from u hat is merely necessary must be found. simply as valuable attributes of human beings as human beings. Neither America nor the world can be saved by a wholesale re-creation of African social realities here in consequence of our rejection of the middle-class outlook that brought us this far. Here we must discriminate. We have an achieving society because we have an achieving outlook in our society. And that achieving outlook has been, over the last few centuries, the middle-class outlook. But there are other achieving outlooks. An achieving society could be constructed on the aristocratic outlook, on the scientific outlook (pursuit of truth), on a religious basis, and probably on a large number of other outlooks. There is no need to go back to the middle-class outlook, which really killed itself by successfully achieving u hat it set out to do. But parts of it we need, and above all we need an achieving outlook. It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought of the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system would itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us.

     We must have an achieving society and an achieving outlook. These will inevitably contain parts of the middle-class outlook, but these parts will unquestionably be fitted together to serve quite different purposes. Future preference and self-discipline were originally necessary in our society so that people would restrict consumption and accumulate savings that could be spent to provide investment in capital equipment. Now we no longer need these qualities for this purpose, since flows of income in our economy provide these on an institutional basis, but we still need these qualities so that young people will be willing to undergo the years of hard work and training that will prepare them to work in our complex technological society. We must get au av from the older crass materialism and egocentric selfish individualism, and pick up some of the younger generation's concern for the community and their fellow-men. The unconventionality of this younger group may make them more able to provide the new outlook and innovation every society requires, but they cannot do this if they lack imagination or perspective.

     Above all, we must bring meaning back into human experience. This, like establishing an achieving outlook, can be done by going backward in our Western tradition to the period before we had any bourgeois outlook. For our society had both meaning and purpose long before it had any middle class. Indeed, these are intrinsic elements in our society. In fact, the middle-class outlook obtained its meaning and purpose from the society where it grew up; it did not give meaning and purpose to the society. And capitalism, along with the middle-class outlook, became meaningless and purposeless when it so absorbed men's time and energies that men lost touch with the meaning and purpose of the society in which capitalism was a brief and partial aspect. But as a consequence of the influence of capitalism and of the middle classes, the tradition was broken, and the link between the meaning and purpose of our society as it was before the middle-class revolution is no longer connected with the search for meaning and purpose by the new post-middle-class generation. This can be seen even in those groups like the Christian clergy who insisted that they were still clinging to the basic Christian tradition of our society. They were doing no such thing, but instead were usually offering us meaningless verbiage or unrealistic abstractions that had little to do with our desire to experience and live in a Christian way here and now.

     Unfortunately, very few people, even highly regarded experts on the subject, have any very clear idea of what is the tradition of the West or how it is based on the fundamental need of Western Civilization to reconcile its intellectual outlook with the basic facts of the Christian experience. The reality of the world, time, and the flesh forced, bit by bit, abandonment of the Greek rationalistic dualism (as in Plato) that opposed spirit and matter and made knowledge exclusively a concern of the former, achieved by internal illumination. This point of view that gave final absolute knowledge ... was replaced in the period 1100-1350 by the medieval point of view that derived knowledge from the tentative and partial information obtained through sensual experience from which man derived conceptual universals that fitted the real individual cases encountered in human experience only approximately. Aquinas, who said, "Nothing exists in the intelligence which was not first present in the senses," also said, "We cannot shift from the ideal to the actual." On this epistemological basis was established the root foundations of both modern science and modern liberalism, with a very considerable boost to both from the Franciscan nominalists of the century following Aquinas.

     The Classical world had constantly fallen into intellectual error because it never solved the epistemological problem of the relationship between the theories and concepts in men's minds and the individual objects of sensual experience. The medieval period made a detailed examination of this problem, but its answer was ignored when post-Renaissance thinkers broke the tradition in philosophy because they felt it necessary to break the tradition in religion. From Descartes onward, this epistemological problem was ignored or considered in a childish way, as if the medieval thinkers had never examined it. Today it remains as the great philosophic problem of our age. Irrational Activism, semanticism, and existentialism flourish because the present century has no answer to the epistemological problem. In fact, most contemporary thinkers do not even recognize that there is a problem. But Bergson's rejection of intelligence and his advocacy of intuition was based, like the Irrational Activism whence it sprang, on recognition of the fact that the space-time continuum in which man generally operates is nonrational. The whole existential movement was based on the same idea.

     Semanticism tried to solve the problem, in a similar fashion, by bringing the infinitely varied and dynamic quality of actuality into the human mind by insisting that the meaning of each word must follow the dynamics of the world by changing every time it is used. All these movements tried to reject logic and rationality from the human thinking process because they are not found in space-time actuality. But the tradition of the West, as clearly established in the Christian religion and in medieval philosophy, was that man must use rationality to the degree it is possible in handling a universe whose ultimate nature is well beyond man's present rational capability to grasp. This is the conclusion that the success of the West in World War II forces the West and the world to recognize once again. And in recognizing it, we must return to the tradition, so carelessly discarded in the fifteen century, which had shown the relationship between thought and action.

     Alfred Korzybski argued (in Science and Sanity) that mental health depended on successful action and that successful action depended on an adequate relationship between the irrational nature of the objective world and the vision of the world that the actor has subjectively in his head. Korzybski's solution, like most other thinkers over the last two generations, has been to bring the irrationality of the world into man's thinking processes. This solution of the problem is now bankrupt, totally destroyed at Hiroshima and Berlin in 1945. The alternative solution lies in the tradition of the West. It must be found, and the link with our past must be restored so that the tradition may resume the process of growth that was interrupted so long ago.

     Korzybski, Bergson, and the rest of them are quite correct—most of man's experience takes place in an irrational actuality of space-time. But we now know that man must deal with his experience through subjective processes that are both rational and logical (using rules of thought explicitly understood by all concerned); and the necessary adjustments between the conclusions reached by thought and the confused irrationalities of experience must be made in the process of shifting from thought to action, and not in the thinking process itself. Only thus will the West achieve successful thought, successful action, and the sanity that is the link between these two.

     As a result of this rupture of tradition, the thinkers of today are fumbling in an effort to find a meaning that will satisfy them. This is as true of the contemporary babbling philosophers as it is of the younger generation who fumblingly try to express Christ's message of love and help without any apparent realization that Christ's message is available in writing and that generations of thinkers debated its implications centuries ago. The meaning the present generation is seeking can be found in our own past. Part of it, concerned with loving and helping, can be found in Christ by going back to the age before his message was overwhelmed in ritualism and bureaucracy. Part of it can be found in the basic philosophic outlook of the West as seen in medieval philosophy and the scientific method that grew out of it.

     The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act. This can be achieved only by a hierarchy that distinguishes what is necessary from what is important, as the medieval outlook did. But any modern explanation based on hierarchy must accept dynamicism as an all-pervasive element in the system, as the medieval hierarchy so signally failed to do. The effort of Teilhard de Chardin to do this has won enormous interest in recent years, but its impact has been much blunted by the fact that his presentation contained, in reciprocal relationship, a deficiency of courage and a surplus of deliberate ambiguity.

     However, the real problem does not rest so much in theory as in practice. The real value of any society rests in its ability to develop mature and responsible individuals prepared to stand on their own feet, make decisions, and be prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions and actions without whining or self-justification. This was the ideal that the Christian tradition established long ago, and in consequence of its existence, our Western society, whatever its deficiencies, has done better than any other society that has ever existed. If it has done less well recently than earlier in its career (a disputable point of view), this weakness can be remedied only hy some reform in its methods of child-rearing that will increase its supply of mature and responsible adults.

     Once this process had been established, the adults thus produced can be relied upon to adopt from our Western heritage of the past a modified ideology that will fit the needs of the present as well as the traditions of the past. And if Western culture can do that, either in America or in Europe, it need fear no enemies from within or from without.

Chapter 76: European Ambiguities

     The problems facing Europe cannot be presented in a simple outline such as we have offered for those of the United States. Europe is too diverse, on a national or even regional basis; its long history has left too many influential survivals as exceptions to any simple analysis; and its class lines are more complicated and much more rigid than in America. Nonetheless, it is probably true to way that America has passed Europe in the evolution of our Western Civilization and that Europeans in general are concerned with problems, notably the problems of material acquisition, which were dominant in the United States almost a generation ago. However, because of the diversity of Europe, any statements we make about this situation would almost certainly have more exceptions than confirming examples, in Europe as a whole.

     The general picture we might draw is of a continent deprived, for at least one full generation (1914-1950), of political, economic, social, and psychological security; in consequence, that area came to regard these things as major aims in its personal behavior patterns. So many European families were deprived of even the necessary materials of living that they are today, to varying degrees, obsessed with the desire for these, now that it seems possible to get them. For this reason, the chief impression the visiting American brings back from Europe is one of grasping materialism and exaggerated individualism. This is a spirit akin to America of the 1920's rather than of the 1950's. It is found, with a variety of emphasis, among the peasants, the workers, and even the aristocracy, as well as among the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, where we expect it. It is combined with an antagonism between classes and groups that is rare in America (except among the petty bourgeoisie). The middle-class adolescent revolt is rarer and much harsher in Europe, shot through with elements of hatred, where in America it is shot through with elements of indiscriminate loving. And in Europe the selfishness ... of middle-class girls is much greater than in the United States, probably because the stronger male-dominant tradition of Europe leaves them less freedom, less self-esteem, and lower personal evaluation. As an example of the diversity of Europe, we should say that this last remark is more true of southern Europe than of northern Europe, and largely untrue of England. In fact, most generalizations about Europe do not apply to England at all.

     In the European search for security the two dominant aims have been security against a Soviet attack and nuclear war and security against economic collapse such as occurred in the 1930's and opened the way to Nazism and World War II. [As noted above, the threat of a war with the Soviet Union was a myth to create giant military-industrial complexes which enrich certain families who own the multinational armament industries in the Western World.] The disorganization of Europe in the immediate postwar period allowed the United States to play a dominant role in both of these aims. However, by the later 1950's, as fear of war and depression subsided, it became possible for Europe to adopt a more independent attitude. At the same time, the personal influence of President de Gaulle gave this new independence anti-American overtones, which, however justified by the general's personal experiences with incompetent American foreign policies, none the less were injurious to the solidarity and prosperity of Europe.

     As long as American influence was dominant, the security of Europe was based primarily on America's strategic nuclear power, supplemented in an ambiguous way by the fifteen-nation NATO Treaty, which included both the United States and Canada. On the economic side, European prosperity was based, for many years, on American economic aid. Both of these influences were exercised to develop, as an ultimate goal, an integrated western Europe that would include Britain and be closely allied to North America.

     As we have already seen, these efforts gradually bogged down in a complicated morass of partly integrated systems on a functional, rather than a federative, basis and by 1965 were stalemated over a number of unresolved inconsistencies of approach. These problems will be analyzed in a moment, but before we do so we should point out that a new Europe is clearly being formed on lines that have little in common with the Europe of prewar days. That earlier Europe was based on the social and ideological patterns of the past, and continued to reflect them, even when the real forces of military and economic technology were creating quite different relationships. Moreover, these older patterns were quite rigid and doctrinaire. In most of Europe they showed sharp, almost irreconcilable, divisions into three political groupings that we might designate as conservative, liberal, and Socialist. These represented, in order, the social forces of the eighteenth century, of the mid-nineteenth century, and of the early twentieth century. The conservatives stood for an alliance of all the forces of the period before the French Revolution of 1789: the agrarian and landed interests, the old nobility and monarchy, the clerical interests, and the old army. The liberals stood for the bourgeois interests of the commercial, financial, and industrial revolutions; they were concerned with maintaining the dominant position of property, were usually rigid supporters of laissez faire, were opposed to influence based on birth or land, were opposed to extension of state authority, and were usually anti-clerical and anti-militarist. The Socialists represented the interests and ideas of the working masses of the cities. They were in favor of democracy and individual political equality, and wanted the activities of the state to be extended to regulate economic life for the benefit of the ordinary man. The Socialists were generally opposed to the same social groups and older interests as the liberals, but added to these enemies the bourgeoisie also. In general, these three diverse groupings were rigid, and put more emphasis on the things that divided them than on matters of common concern. Their hatreds were more dominant than their common interests.

     These divisions of Europe along lines of selfish interests, old slogans, doctrinaire hatreds, and misconceived rivalries made possible the rise of Fascism and the disasters of World War II. Out of these disasters, in the turmoil and violence of the Resistance, there began to appear the lineaments of a new Europe. This new Europe was much more pragmatic, and thus less doctrinaire; it was much more cooperative and less competitive; it was much more receptive to diversity, partial solutions, and the need for mutual dependence than the period before 1939 had been. On the whole this new spirit, found among the leaders rather than among the masses, was much closer to what we have defined as the tradition of the West than the Europe of 1900 had been.

     It must be recognized that this new Europe had its roots in the Resistance, and, as such, had traces of those elements of self-sacrifice, human solidarity, personal integrity, and flexible improvisation that appeared so unexpectedly among the hardened Resistance fighters. We might say that many of the elements of outlook and leadership of the new postwar Europe emerged from underground, and were unnoticed by those who had not been in active contact with the underground. Thus they were not observed by the leaders in Washington and in London, even by De Gaulle, and, above all, were unreported by Allen Dulles, who was supposed to be observing the underground for the OSS from Switzerland.

     Supporters of this new outlook were determined to break free from the nationalistic hatreds of the prewar period and to emphasize instead Europe as a cultural entity of diverse nationalities. Above all, they were insistent on the urgent need to heal the terrible breach, running through the heart of Europe, between France and Germany. They were eager to establish some kind of liaison between religion and Socialism, by way of Christian charity and social welfare, in order to repudiate the unnatural nineteenth-century alliance between the clergy and capitalism. They were determined to use the power of the state to settle the common problems of man, unhampered by doctrinaire liberalism and laissez faire. And they recognized the joint role of capital and labor in any productive process, although they had no way of measuring or of dividing the rewards of each from that process. In two words this new outlook was determined to make Europe more "unified" and more "spiritual."

     This new outlook was unable to influence the fate of Europe for at least a decade after the ending of World War II in 1945 because of the urgent material need to repair the devastation of the war, the overwhelming threat to Europe from the Soviet Union and from doctrinaire Communism, and because of the dependence of Europe, both for reconstruction and defense, on the United States and Britain, both of whom ignored the new forces stirring on the Continent. By 1955, however, as these urgent problems receded into the background and Europe became increasingly able to stand on its own feet, the new structure began to become visible, indicated by the cooperation of Christian Socialists and Social Democrats in the constructive process and by the continued decline of the forces of the extreme Right and the extreme Left.

     It was the new spirit, rooted in the Resistance and the tacit agreement of the Christian Socialist and Social Democratic political groups, that made it possible to work toward European unity and to use this unity as the foundation for a rich and independent Europe. The task is still only partly done; it may, indeed, never be completed, for nothing is more persistent than the old established institutions and outlooks that stand as barriers along the way.

     The central problem of Europe remains today, as it has for a century, the problem of Germany. And today, as before, this problem cannot be solved without Britain. But such a solution requires that Britain accept the fact that it is, since the invention of the airplane and the rocket, a European, and not a world, or even an Atlantic, Power. This the leaders of Britain and the American branch of the British Establishment have been unwilling to accept. As a consequence, Britain remains aloof from the Continent, committed to the "Atlantic Community" and to the Commonwealth of Nations, and, accordingly, the political unification of Western Europe stands suspended, part way to fulfillment, while the German problem, still capable of triggering the destruction of Western society, remains unsolved.

     Briefly the problem is this: no one concerned—the Soviet Union, the United States, or Europe itself—can permit Germany to be unified again in the foreseeable future. A united Germany would be a force of instability and danger to everyone, including the Germans, because it would be the most powerful nation in Europe and, balanced between East and West, might at any time fall into collaboration with one of these to the intense danger of the other; or, if the Russian-American antithesis remained irreparable, a united Germany could put extreme pressures on its lesser neighbors between the two Superpowers. The peace and stability of Europe thus require the permanent division of Germany, something on which the Soviet Union is adamant to the point of resorting to force to retain it, although the official policy of the United States is still committed to a reunification of Germany, partly in the belief that the loyalty of West Germany to the Atlantic Alliance can he retained only if the United States remains explicitly committed to a future reacquisition of East Germany by West Germany. In fact, the eagerness of the latter to acquire the former is dwindling, although very slowly, since the east is now so poor that it could bring little but poverty to West Germany's booming prosperity.

     This separation of the Germanys can be made permanent only if each is incorporated, as fully as possible, into a larger, and distinct, political system. But the smaller countries of Europe, particularly the Netherlands and Belgium, do not wish to be united with Germany; in any federated system that includes only one other large Power, such as France (or even France and Italy), since an alignment of West Germany and France in such a federation could dominate the small states completely. Accordingly, the small states want Britain, as a democratic counterweight to Germany, within any West European federal structure. But De Gaulle, as he made evident in January 1963, will accept Britain into a West European federation only if Britain becomes clearly a European Power and renounces its special relationship of close collaboration with the United States and if it is also N7villing to subordinate its position as leader of the British Commonwealth of Nations to its membership in the European system. The abandonment of its "special relationship" with the United States and with the Commonwealth, the two major concerns of the English Establishment for more than forty years, was too heavy a price to pay for membership in the European Economic Community and would have been an unacceptable reversal of established policy in return for something that Britain sought without great enthusiasm.

     The integration of Western Europe began in 1948 as a consequence of the growth of Soviet aggression that culminated in the Prague coup and the Berlin blockade. The United States had offered Marshall Plan aid with the provision that the European recovery be constructed on a cooperative basis. This led to the Convention for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) signed in April 1948 and the Hague Congress for European union held the following month. The OEEC, which eventually had eighteen countries as members and in 1961 was reorganized as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), sought to administer American aid and further economic cooperation between sovereign states. The Hague meeting of May 1948, with Winston Churchill and Konrad Adenauer as its chief figures, called for a united Europe, and took a very minor step in that direction by establishing a purely advisory consultative body of ten (later fifteen) states, the Council of Europe, as a parliamentary assembly at Strasbourg.

     These steps were clearly inadequate. In 1950 Robert Schuman, then French foreign minister and later prime minister, who had been a German subject during World War I, suggested that a first step be taken toward a federation of Europe hy putting the entire coal and steel production of France and Germany under a common High Authority. The real attraction of this project was that it would so integrate this basic industry that it would make any war between France and Germany "physically impossible." One element in this project was to reconcile the anti-Germans to the economic rehabilitation of Germany which the continued Soviet aggressions made increasingly necessary. It would also provide a solution to the Franco-German disagreement over the final disposition of the Saar. From this came the European Coal and Steel Community. This was a truly revolutionary organization, since it had sovereign powers, including the authority to raise funds outside any existing state's power. This treaty, which came into force in July 1952, brought the steel and coal industries of six countries (France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux) under a single High Authority of nine members. This "supranational" body had the right to control prices, channel investment, raise funds, allocate coal and steel during shortages, and fix production in times of surplus. Its power to raise funds for its own use by taxing each ton produced made it independent of governments. Moreover, its decisions were binding, and could be reached by majority vote without the unanimity required in most international organizations of sovereign states.

     The ECSC was a rudimentary government, since the High Authority was subject to the control of a Common Assembly, elected by the parliaments of the member states, which could force the Authority to resign by a two-thirds vote of censure, and it had a Court of Justice to settle disputes. Most significantly, the ECSC Assembly became a genuine parliament with political party blocs—Christian-Democrats, Socialists, and liberals—sitting together independent of national origins.

     By 1958 the ECSC had abolished internal barriers to trade in oil and steel among the Six (such trade increased by 157 percent during the first five years) and had set up a common tariff against imports of coal and steel into the Six. Production of steel increased 65 percent during the five years, and the process of using ECSC funds to modernize the coal industry and to close down exhausted mines (moving hundreds of thousands of miners out of mining and into other employment) had begun.

     When the Korean War began in 1950, the United States demanded formation of twelve German divisions to strengthen NATO in Europe. The French, who feared any rebirth of German militarism, drew up an elaborate scheme for a European Defense Community (EDC) that would merge the German recruits into a European army under joint European control. Like ECSC, the European Defense Community was to be a supranational agency that would eventually take its place, along with the ECSC, within a European government. The general pattern of this super-government was established in the EDC project itself, with a bicameral European parliament and a president to preside over a European Cabinet Council. Unfortunately for these plans, the Left and the Right in the French Assembly joined together to reject the EDC treaty (August 1954). The Left was opposed to EDC because any union of Europe would reduce Soviet influence on the Continent, while the Right, led by the Gaullists, were unwilling to see German armed forces reestablished without any guarantee that Britain and the United States would retain forces within Europe to balance the new German forces. Failure of Britain to recognize explicitly its inevitable commitment to European defense early in allowed EDC to die.

     A symbolic, but ineffectual, step was made to calm these French fears in September 1954, when Sir Anthony Eden instigated a Western European Union (WEU) of seven states (the Six plus Britain) as a consultative group to oversee German rearmament. As part of this agreement the British promised to keep four divisions in Europe until the year 2000 if necessary, but within three years one of these divisions was pulled out and the other three fell substantially below full strength.

     As a result of this agreement and a number of other factors, including recognition that the rearmament of Germany was inevitable, the French Assembly in December 1954 ratified the Paris Treaties that legalized the changes in Germany's status that France most feared. Western Germany regained its sovereign independence, obtained the right to have a national army (although without nuclear weapons), and became an equal member of NATO.

     Having thus accepted much of what they did not want (an armed and sovereign Germany), it became clear to many Frenchmen that they must make a strenuous effort to get some of the things they did want (chiefly the merging of Germany into a West European system that would prevent the new German power from being used in a nationalistic aggression). Accordingly, the Six met again, at Messina in June 1955. There they decided that the next step toward West European integration must be economic rather than political. From this flowed the Rome Treaty of March 1957, which established the European Economic Community, better known as the Common Market, as well as the European Atomic Community for joint exploitation of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes (Euratom). Both agreements went into effect at the beginning of 1958.

     The EEC Treaty, with 572 articles over almost 400 pages, like the treaties establishing ECSC and Euratom, looked forward to eventual political union in Europe, and sought economic integration as an essential step on the way. The project originated with the head of the French economic planning commission, Jean Monnet, whose ideas were pushed along by the energy of Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spank of Belgium. Within the three large nations, agreement was obtained by the efforts of the leaders of the respective Christian-Democratic parties: Adenauer, Schuman, and Alcide de Gasperi. The Catholic religious background of all three was a significant factor in their willingness to turn from nationalistic to international economic methods, while Spaak's Socialist prestige helped to reconcile the moderate Left to the scheme. The slowing up of the process of economic recovery that had begun with the Marshall Plan in 1949 helped to win widespread acceptance of the new effort for joint economic expansion.

     Briefly the Rome Treaty established the methods and time schedule by which the signatory countries, as well as other nations that might wish to join, could integrate their economies into a single, more expansive, system. Tariffs and other restrictions on trade between them were to be abolished by stages and replaced by a common tariff against the outside world. At the same time, investment was to be directed so as to integrate their joint economy as a whole, with special attention to the industrialization of backward and underdeveloped regions such as southern Italy. Special consideration was given to agriculture, largely detaching it from the market economy to cushion the integrative process while improving the standards of living and social protection of the farming population. As part of the integrative process there was to be free movement of persons, services, and capital within the Community, witl1 gradual development of Community citizenship for workers. This whole process was to be achieved by stages over many years. The agricultural agreement, for example, was implemented by an elaborate agreement that was signed after 140 hours of almost continuous negotiation in January 1962. By the middle of that year the internal tariffs among members had been reduced in three stages to half their 1958 levels.

     The institutional organization for carrying on this process was similar to that set up for the ECSC and the abortive EDC: a European Parliamentary Assembly of supranational party blocs of Christian-Democrats, Socialists, and liberals sitting and voting together irrespective of national origins; a Council of Ministers representing the member governments directly; an executive High Commission of nine that is enjoined by law to "exercise their functions in complete independence" of their national governments; a Court of Justice vvitl1 powers to interpret the treaty and settle disputes; two advisory groups (the Monetary Committee and the Social and Economic Committee); a European Investment Bank to channel funds for integrative and development purposes within the Community; the Overseas Development Fund to do the same for former colonial territories now associated indirectly with the ECC; a European Social Fund for industrial retraining and unemployment compensation; and finally the two associated Communities (ECSC and Euratom). These last two were integrated with ECC from the fact that the Parliamentary Assembly, the Court of Justice, and the Council of Ministers are shared by all three communities.

     These organizations have some of the aspects of sovereignty from the fact that their decisions do not have to be unanimous, are binding on states and on citizens who have not agreed to them, and can he financed by funds that may be levied without current consent of the persons being taxed. On the whole, the supranational aspects of these institutions will be strengthened in the future from provisions in the treaties themselves. All this is very relevant to the remarks in the last chapter on the disintegration of the modern, unified sovereign state and the redistribution of its powers to multilevel hierarchical structures remotely resembling the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in the late medieval period.

     The impact of these tentative steps toward an integrative Europe has been spectacular, especially in the economic sphere. In general, the economic expansion of Western Europe, especially its industrial expansion, has been at rates far higher than those of Communist-dominated eastern Europe, with the EEC rates higher than those of non-EEC Western European countries, and considerably higher than those of either Britain or the United States. By 1960 the 300 million people of Western Europe had per capita incomes over a third higher than the 260 million persons in the same area had in 1938-1939. Industrial production more than doubled over the same time span, while agricultural production was a third larger with a smaller working force. This optimistic picture was even brighter for the Six of the EEC, whose general economic growth rate was considerably over 6 percent a year during the 1950's. This was more than double the rate of growth in the United States, which was not much different from that in Britain. If these rates are maintained, it has been estimated that the income per head in the EEC would increase from about a third of the income per head in the United States in 1960 to more than half the United States income per head in 1970.

     The reasons for this relative boom in the EEC (and in Western Europe generally) in comparison with the slower economic dynamics of the English-speaking countries are of some importance. It does not seem to rest, as might appear at first glance, on a contrast between directed planning and laissez faire, because, within the EEC, the French economy is fairly rigorously planned and the West German economy is surprisingly free, yet both have had high rates of growth. The West German conditions, however, have been misleading and have arisen very largely from artificially low wage levels and thus low costs of production, especially on articles for export into the international competitive market, such as Volkswagens. These low labor costs arose from the large number of East European refugees seeking work in Germany, a condition that will be of decreasing importance in the future.

     The conditions of economic growth in the EEC has been based on steady demand, high rates of investment, and liberal fiscal and financial policies. In 1961, for example, the rate of net investment in Britain was about 9 percent compared to the West German rate of about 17 percent. The high demand that spurred on this process arose from fiscal policies, but also from the large new market of about 100 million persons provided in EEC.

     In Britain and in the United States (with Canada) fiscal policies were much more conservative, with demand somewhat dampened down by efforts to balance budgets, to control inflation, and to influence both adverse balances of international payments and the flows of domestic credit by conservative financial policies (notably, high interest rates). Moreover, in both countries, there was a good deal of unproductive expenditure either in misjudged enterprises and inefficient production or in defense and other nonproductive areas. As a consequence, not only have growth rates been low in the English-speaking countries but unemployment rates have been high. In 1960, for example, the United States unemployment rate was 5.4 percent and the Canadian 6.9 percent, while that of France was 1.3 percent and of West Germany only 0.9 percent.

     This sharp contrast between the prosperity of the EEC and the languishing economy of Britain eventually brought the latter to a recognition of the advantages of membership in the European system. But the decision was too late, based on wrong motives, and was eventually nullified by the imperious De Gaulle, who. like an elephant, never forgets an injury. Governments in London paid lip service to European unity and to British cooperation with it, but whenever an opportunity offered to take a real step toward European union, Britain balked. In the immediate postwar period, this reluctance was attributed to the rather provincial and doctrinaire Socialist outlook of the British Labour Party, but the situation did not improve when Winston Churchill returned to office in 1951. The general British outlook was that British participation in a united Europe was precluded by Britain's rather intangible and sentimental commitments to the Commonwealth and to the United States (that is, to the "English-speaking idea") and that a unification of Europe without Britain would be a threat to British markets on the Continent. This decision by Britain was copied by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries (Denmark and Finland), whose trade alliance with England went back to the creation of the "Sterling Bloc" in 1932. In a similar way Britain refused to cooperate in the ECSC or EDC.

     This reluctance in London was a great tragedy' excluding Britain from the European growth toward economic prosperity, making it difficult or impossible for the European effort toward integration to make decisions that would have hastened the whole integrative process, and leaving Britain emphasizing Commonwealth and American relationships that were less and less prepared to give due weight to British ideas and power. In a sense Britain was making commitments to areas that w ere not prepared to make reciprocal commitments to Britain and would, if the occasion arose, leave Britain out on a limb. This, indeed, is exactly what happened in October 1956, when the United States threatened to throw its power and prestige against Britain's efforts in the Suez fiasco. And throughout the period, the chief Commonwealth countries, notably South Africa and Canada, made it perfectly clear that they were not willing to make any notable sacrifices for Britain's prosperity, and were reluctant to follow London's lead in many of the world's political issues of the period.

     In fact, even with Commonwealth preference and all the intangibles that link the Commonwealth together, Britain's trade and financial links with the Commonwealth are decreasing in importance, and the links of both with outsiders are increasing. For example, Nigeria and Ghana doubled their exports to EEC over the 1955-1959 period, while their exports to Britain decreased by 15 percent. On the whole, in recent years, the countries associated with the sterling area have found that association one of decreasing satisfaction. This is reflected in matters other than market conditions. Sterling itself has been subject to periodic crises since the war ended. The reason is obvious, for the United Kingdom tries to handle $12.3 billion in imports and $10.9 billion in floating short-term debts on a base of reserves of no more than $3 billion (in 1961), while, at the same time, the EEC, with $16 billion in reserves, had only $2 billion in short-term debts and handled $23.2 billion in imports. As a result of all this, London is decreasingly attractive as a source of investment capital, while the EEC becomes increasingly prominent in that activity. And as a source of development funds for backward areas, the United Kingdom has ceased to be of major significance. In 1960, for example, the United States provided $3,781 million and EEC provided $2,626 million, compared to the United Kingdom's $857 million and the rest of the OECD countries' $469 million. In fact Germany's $616 million was almost comparable to Britain's $857 million, with both far less than France's $1,287 million. Thus the Six provide about a third of the world's financial assistance to underdeveloped countries, while Britain provides only one-ninth.

     Considerations such as these help to indicate that the Commonwealth attachment to the United Kingdom is based rather on the intangibles of traditions and old patterns than on the solid advantages of today's economic and financial situation. The merging of the United Kingdom into the EEC would still give a fair jolt to economic life both in England and in the Commonwealth, but the slack would be taken up very rapidly. In fact, the rising demand for goods of higher quality in Japan will probably draw much of the export trade of New Zealand and Australia in butter, meat, or even wool from their older English-speaking markets even without Britain joining the Common Market.

     The reluctance of the English leadership to face these changing conditions, like their refusal to face the causes of Britain's economic lassitude, contributed much to confuse the situation that Europe, and especially EEC, reached by the mid-1960's. In December 1956, in a vain effort to sidetrack European integration, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd produced a "Grand Design," a pompous name for an undigested scheme to dump an assortment of European consultative bodies into the Common Assembly of the Coal and Steel Community. This idea was generally recognized as sabotage, and sank without a ripple.

     The next British effort was for a Free Trade Area; this was a scheme to permit British goods to enter the Common Market without Britain joining it. This was necessary, in British eves, because the joint external tariff of the ECC was to he higher than the tariffs of four of the Six had previously been, and would reduce British sales in those countries. The Free Trade Area plan was for an all-Europe free-trade zone embracing the Six along with all those who did not wish to join the EEC. That means that the Free Trade Area would abolish mutual trade barriers but would not establish a common external tariff. This British suggestion, made in November 1956, was regarded within EEC as another effort at sabotage, or, at best, a typical British attempt to have the advantages of both worlds by combining the abolition of European tariffs on British goods with continued British preference for Commonwealth foodstuffs. The lower prices on the latter (compared to food prices within the Six) would permit Britain to have lower wage costs and thus lower industrial prices to give British industry a competitive advantage in the unprotected Common Market.

     When France, with West German support, broke off the Free Trade Area negotiations in December 1958, the British were left out of the EEC, which began to function in the ruins of the Free Trade Area. Britain reacted by forming the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) of Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, and (later) Finland.

     This EFTA provided for mutual tariff reductions of member states by steps to complete abolition by 1970, but the process added only 38 million persons to the existing British market of 52 million, and promised small prospect of any substantial increase in sales because the tariffs of most of these countries were already low on British goods. This could not compare with the EEC market of 170 million customers, but British public opinion, even in the 1960's, could not bring itself to accept the reorientation of outlook required to view itself as a European state necessary to make it possible to accept the economic integration that could make this great market available to British industry. For this, the semi-slump of 1960-1961 was needed, and only in July 1961 did the British government announce its readiness to start the complex negotiations needed for its joining the Common Market. By that late date, De Gaulle was well established in power in France, and was prepared to impose his own peculiar point of view on the negotiations.

     The French economic resurgence, which the British so belatedly asked to join, was in no sense a consequence of De Gaulle's policies, nor were they synchronized, except accidentally, with the advent of De Gaulle and his Fifth French Republic on May 13, 1958. The basis for the French economic boom was laid under the Fourth French Republic, and De Gaulle simply profited from it. It might be said that the economic expansion, and its continuation after 1958, was based on those factors of the French system which the new De Gaulle regime left relatively unchanged—an educational structure accessible to anyone willing to work hard at his studies, the high quality of upper-level technical education, the close alliance between the administrative bureaucracy and the industrial system, and the ease with which highly educated technicians can pass from one to the other; by the readiness of the French mind to accept a rational, over-all view of life and its problems (this contributed considerably to the success of French economic planning), and by the whole concept of individual opportunity and careers open to talent within a structured social arrangement. All these go back to the Napoleonic period of French history and were, thus, well adapted to De Gaulle's personal inclinations. The fact that they are all quite alien to the English way of life also helps to explain the relative failure of the British economy in the Plan Era.

     The Fifth Republic was obviously tailored to De Gaulle's personal inclinations, hut it was also adapted to the bureaucratic substructure that had continued, as a semi-alien basis, to underlie the French political system in the bourgeois era. Worded in another way, we might say that the shift of the Western world over the last three decades from a bourgeois to a technocratic pattern was well adapted to the subterranean bureaucratic basis that had survived in France, more or less unobserved, during the century in which property was obviously triumphant. The bureaucracy Louis XIV and Napoleon had built up had been directed toward totalitarian power and national glory; the age of property (roughly 1836-1936) had sought to establish the influence of wealtl1 unhampered by bureaucracy, and one of its chief aims had been to keep the bureaucratic structure, the centralized French tradition of administration, and the forces of French rationalism outside the sphere of economics and moneymaking. The economic depression of the 1930's and the defeat of 1940, both directly caused by the selfish interests and the narrow outlook (especially the narrow and selfish financial outlook) of the French bourgeoisie, made it clear that some new system was needed in France, just as the experience of the Resistance made it clear that some new system was needed in Europe. It was, in view of the French rationalist and bureaucratic tradition, almost inevitable that the new domestic system would he a more integrated, more rational, and more bureaucratic one than that of the bourgeois era, although it is not so clear what this new system will establish as its goal. This, indeed, is the problem facing France today, a problem concerned with goals rather than with methods, since there is now a broad consensus (including the bourgeoisie) prepared to accept a rationalized, planned, bureaucratized society dominated by a pervasive fiscalism, a kind of neo-mercantilism, but there is no consensus on what goals this new organization should seek.

     Only a very small group of Frenchmen share De Gaulle's idea that the new system of France, the Fifth Republic, should make national power and glory its primary aim. A larger, and surprisingly influential, group, best represented by Monnet, wishes to work for the kind of rational humanism or unified diversity that this volume has used as its chief criterion for judging historical change. This group hopes, by the proper organization of men and resources, to increase the production of wealth and to reduce the conflicts of power sufficiently to remove these distracting matters from the center of human concern so that, once prosperity and peace have been relatively secured, men will find the time and energy to turn to their more important ends of personality development, artistic expression, and intellectual exploration. This point of view, based on a significant distinction between what is necessary and what is important, hopes to find the opportunity to turn to important matters once the necessary ones have achieved a level of minimal satisfactions.

     The Frenchmen of a third group, which includes the major part of the population, have little concern with the goals of De Gaulle and even less with those of Monnet but are concerned with an almost repulsive pursuit of material affluence, something of which they had long heard but never considered achievable before. Today, for the first time, such affluence seems achievable to the great mass of Frenchmen as it does to the great mass of West Germans, to many English, and to increasing number of Italians. Americans and Swedes, who are already disillusioned with the fruits of affluence, must be indulgent to these recent arrivals in the materialist rat race. The chief political aim of this large group is for political stability free from partisan upheavals, an end that De Gaulle and the Fifth Republic seem more capable of securing than the unstable, multi-partied Fourth Republic.

     Much of the ambiguity about De Gaulle rests on a failure of historical synchronisms. This can be seen in regard to the three aspects of (a) political ideology, (b) economic management, and (c) the relationship between these two. In the 1920's, all three of these were antipathetic to De Gaulle's outlook, since forty years ago the three were: (a) a democratic, nationalist, sovereign, independent state pursuing the goal of national self-interest; (b) a capitalistic economy; and (c) a laissez-faire relationship of no government in business. De Gaulle's ideas are rather those of Louis XIV, that is: (a) a sovereign, independent, authoritarian state pursuing the goal of national glory; (b) a mixed economy of a corporative sort; and (c) political domination of economic life. The point of view of the "new Europeans" on these matters was: (a) a democratic, cooperative political structure of shared and divided powers on a European basis, seeking peace and stability in an interlocking organizational structure rising through European, Atlantic-Western, and worldwide levels; (b) a mixed economy; and (c) a planned, state-directed drive toward increased affluence. De Gaulle cares only for (a) and has little interest in (b) or (c) so long as they provide him with a rate of economic expansion capable of supporting his ambitions in (a). The mass of French people care little about De Gaulle's ambitions in (a) so long as they obtain political stability that will allow them to seek the affluence they wish from (c); while the technicians, concerned largely with (b), are prepared to let De Gaulle seek glory in (a) and the people seek affluence in (c) so long as both leave them alone to manage the proper mixture of the economy they desire in (b). Thus France, by this most extraordinary mixture of cross-purposes, is led into the future by a man whose ideas in all three areas are almost completely obsolete.

     It is easy for English-speaking persons to condemn De Gaulle. Many of them consider his obsolescent ideas a danger to Europe and to the world. Indeed, they are, but this does not mean that they do not have some basis in De Gaulle's personal experience and in the recent history of France itself. The general was determined to restore the power and prestige of France as an independent state within a context of national states similar to that in which France had suffered the blows to its prestige in 1919-1945. To him these defeats were almost personal psychic injuries that could be repaired only by new French triumphs in the same nationalistic context and not by successes in an entirely different context such as that of an integrated Europe. Obsessed by the pursuit of the glory of France in the nationalistic era in which his own character had been formed and personally piqued by the rebuffs he had received in his own career, the rejection of his military advice by his superiors in the 1920's and 1930s, the defeats of France in the diplomatic and military arenas in the period 1936-1940, the rebuffs administered by the United States Department of State and the White House to his efforts to make himself the leader of the Free French in 1940-1943, and finally the general belittling, as he saw it, to his ideas and dignity during the liberation— all these served to make his outlook more remote, more rigid, and more opinionated until he came to regard himself as the God-given leader for a revived France and came to regard the English-speaking nations as the chief obstacles in his path to this end.

     The culmination of De Gaulle's irritation with the United States came during the five years 1953-1958, during which he was retired from public life and had to watch, in helpless impotence, John Foster Dulles's studied belittling of France's role in world affairs. The American Secretary of State's unilateralism and "brinkmanship," his emphasis on the Far East and his ignoring of Europe, his refusal to consult with his NATO allies, and his lack of sympathy for the French position in Indochina, Algeria, and Europe itself—all this drove De Gaulle into an icy antipathy for American policy and a conviction that the interests of France could be protected only by France itself and could be furthered as well by collaboration with the Soviet Union as by alliance with the United States.

     De Gaulle was especially irritated by the American lack of concern for French and European interests in nuclear-weapons policy Dulles's willingness to go to war with the Communist Powers over Asiatic questions (such as the Chinese offshore islands or the Formosa Strait) without consultation with its European allies, when the most immediate consequence of any Soviet-American war would be a Russian attack on Europe and the exposure of France to a threat of nuclear attack over an issue on which Paris had not even been consulted gave De Gaulle (perfectly justifiably) profound irritation.

     When the disruption of French political life over the Algerian dispute brought De Gaulle back to public life as premier in June 1958, he took steps to end this situation. What he wanted was a "Western troika," that is, a tripartite consultation of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France on all world disputes that could involve NATO) in war in Europe. In this way he hoped to prevent in the future such events as Dulles's unilateral cancellation of the American offer of credits for the Aswan Dam that had led to the Suez crisis of 1956. This suggestion by De Gaulle was rebuffed, and led by logical steps to his decision to disentangle France from its NATO obligations and to establish an independent French nuclear force de frappe.

     According to De Gaulle's line of thought, Washington not only ignored French interests and ideas on a worldwide basis, hut involved it, without consultation, in the risk of war in Europe. The general also argued that the growth of nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union left Europe unprotected so long as it based its security on an American threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Washington, he felt, would not reply to a Soviet aggression in Europe by any nuclear attack on the Soviet Union when it realized that the Soviet counter-reply to such an attack would he the nuclear devastation of American cities by Soviet missiles. Why, according to De Gaulle, would the United States destroy its own cities in retaliation for a Soviet aggression, at any level, on Europe? This opened the whole problem of "nuclear credibility," with De Gaulle at such a high level of skepticism of American good faith that he saw little credibility and thus little deterrent value in the American threat to use nuclear u capons against the Soviet Union to defend France. According to De Gaulle, the only secure French defense must he based on France's own military power, which must, inevitably, be nuclear power.

     At first glance, the idea of modest French nuclear armaments serving as deterrence to the mighty Soviet threat to Europe, either conventional or nuclear, seems even less credible. But De Gaulle was one of the first to recognize, as a feasible policy, an idea that was subsequently adopted by the Soviet Union itself. This was the idea that a nuclear deterrence does not require the possession of overwhelming nuclear power or even the nuclear superiority in which Washington long believed, but may be based on the capacity to inflict unacceptable nuclear damage. In De Gaulle's mind, the explosion of French hydrogen bombs over three or four major Soviet cities, including Moscow, would constitute unacceptable damage in the Kremlin's eyes and would thus provide effective deterrence against a Soviet aggression in Europe (or at least against France) without any need for France to rely on any uncertain American response.

     To provide for such a French threat of nuclear response to Soviet aggression, De Gaulle's regime accepted the great economic and financial burden of obtaining a force de frappe. In its first stage, to be achieved by 1966, this would consist of 62 Mirage IV supersonic manned jet bombing planes to carry France's first-generation, 60-kiloton plutonium bombs. By the end of 1964, when twenty of these planes were operational, they were being produced at a rate of one a month and were being matched by the production of one bomb a month from the atomic pile at Marcoule. By 1966 the power of the bomb is expected to increase to its maximum size of about 300 kilotons.

     The Mirage IV, as vehicle for the French nuclear threat, will be replaced by twenty-five land-based missiles fired from underground silos. These will be operational about 1969, and will shift their warheads from A-bombs to H-bombs some time in the early 1970'5. The third generation of French nuclear weapons will probably be Polaris-type nuclear submarines to become operational some time in the 1970'5. If these can be speeded up and the Mirage IV could be retained, it is possible that the brief transition stage of land-based missiles might be skipped completely. The total nuclear submarine fleet will probably not exceed three vessels, even in the late 1970'5.

     These plans do not seem impressive in comparison with the nuclear armament of the two Superpowers, but they are expected to make France an independent nuclear Power and allow it to exercise an independent nuclear deterrence. However, if countermeasures, such as the development of an anti-missile missile, become more successful, the additional penetration devices needed to allow the French nuclear threat to be credible may raise the financial cost of the whole effort to a level that would put a very severe strain on the French budget. In that case, France must either give up the effort or try to persuade the European Community to do it as a joint effort. (This might re-activate the West European Union or fall to the largest fragment of a divided NATO.) But in this case, France, despite De Gaulle, will have to accept some kind of European political union.

     All of this points up the fact that the future political and military structure of Europe revolves about two quite separate problems: (1) Will it be a united Europe or a Europe of national states? (as De Gaulle wants), and (2) Will it be aligned with the United States or will it be an independent neutralist factor in the Cold War? The United States wants Europe to be united and allied; De Gaulle wants it to be disunited and independent; the Kremlin wants it disunited and neutral; London's policy, until 1960, was to see it disunited and allied to the Atlantic system. It seems likely, for reasons already given, that Europe's interests and those of the world as a whole might be served best if Europe could be united and independent. Moreover, in view of the conflicting forces involved, it seems very likely that Europe, after a considerable delay caused by De Gaulle, will finally emerge as united and independent.

     Thus the future of Europe, like that of France itself, depended, in the mid-1960's, on De Gaulle's continuance in office. This was ensured, at least until the next presidential election in 1965, unless interrupted by death, by the fact that no alternative to De Gaulle could be seen clearly even by his opponents. In the early 1960's, the political pattern of France was dominated by four factors: (1) the terrorism of the extreme Right, led by the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which resisted the Algerian settlement even after it was completed in 1962 and made several efforts to assassinate De Gaulle; (2) the disorganization and discontent of the older political leaders as De Gaulle continued to change French politics to a simple administrative structure with himself as an almost monarchical figure standing as a symbol of France above political considerations; (3) the steady, if not always enthusiastic, support of De Gaulle by the passive mass of Frenchmen who saw the general as a center of solidity in the middle of a sea of confusions; and (4) the unpredictable and despotic control of the political initiative by De Gaulle himself..

     The chief discontents came in 1960 and 1961 from those groups in the population, notably farmers, civil servants, and university students, who found that they were sharing in the economic boom less than others or were being squeezed by its dynamics. The price inflation of about 50 percent in the decade following 1953 injured government employees, whose salaries did not rise as rapidly as prices; university students were also squeezed by the inflation but were squeezed much more literally in housing, eating accommodations, and classroom space by a great increase in enrollments which was not sufficiently prepared for by government efforts to increase facilities. And the peasants, encouraged by government technocrats to modernize their methods, found that increased production led to lower farm prices and decreased incomes for themselves.

     In view of the authoritarian character of the De Gaulle regime, these discontents tended to become extralegal agitations. There were sporadic strikes, protest parades, and even riots of these groups to call public attention to their grievances. Farmers were particularly violent when agricultural prices decreased and industrial prices continued to inch upward. The Gaullist government hoped to remedy the situation by reducing the costs of distribution through middlemen and thus provide French farmers with an increasing share of the reduced price of produce to the consumer, but on the whole the incredibly inefficient distribution of French farm produce, which forced most produce, regardless of source or destination, to pass through the Parisian markets, was too difficult a problem even for De Gaulle's experts, at least in any time interval that mattered. To obtain concessions, the farmers rioted, often on a large scale, such as an outburst of 35,000 of them at Amiens in February 1960. They blocked national automobile routes with their tractors, spread unsold or unremuneratively priced farm produce over the roads or city streets, and responded with violence when efforts were made to disperse them.

     Through this whole period, De Gaulle's conduct of the government, through his handpicked prime ministers, made a shambles of the Fifth Republic constitution, which had been tailored to his specifications. Since a government could not be overthrown by defeat of a bill but only by a specific vote of censure, and this latter would lead to a general election in which all of De Gaulle's prestige could be used against those who had voted for the censure, the ordinary deputy's love of office and reluctance to wage an expensive and risky electoral campaign made it possible for De Gaulle's premiers to obtain almost any law he desired. The older political leaders were very restive under this system but could mobilize no organized opposition to it, because no one could see any real alternative to De Gaulle.

     A significant example of De Gaulle's high-handed operations may be seen in the way he forced through the bill to create an independent French nuclear force without allowing the Assembly to debate the issue or to vote on the bill itself (November-December 1960). This was done under Article 49 of the constitution, which allows the government to pass a bill on its own responsibility without consideration by the Assembly unless a vote of censure is passed by a majority (277) of all the deputies. By use of this article, the three readings of the Nuclear Arms bill were replaced by three motions of censure that obtained no more than 215 votes. There seems to have been a clear majority, both in the Assembly and in the country as a whole, against the nuclear force, but few were willing to risk the fall of the government with no acceptable alternative in sight, and even fewer were willing to precipitate a general election.

     As might be expected in such a system, the danger of assassination as a method for changing a government increased greatly, but De Gaulle continued on his imperturbable course in spite of a number of attempts on his life. One of the chief dangers to the Gaullist regime came from the discontent of the highest officers in the armed forces, but the mutiny and revolt of several army contingents in Algeria in April 1961 showed fairly clearly that this opposition movement was largely restricted to the highest officers, and De Gaulle was able to eliminate them and thus to reduce them, like the rest of his opponents, to angry impotence or to assassination efforts. De Gaulle's success in retiring from public life the only surviving Marshal of France, Alphonse Juin, clinched his superiority over the army.

     Equally successful, and typical of De Gaulle's actions, were his constant appeals to public opinion, by television or on personal regional tours, or by local elections or plebiscites, against the disunited opposition, especially against the traditional political party leaders. A successful example of these techniques occurred in 1962 when De Gaulle decided to change the method of electing the president (or reelecting himself) from the constitutional method of choice by an electoral college of 80,000 "notables" to election by popular vote. To bypass the Senate, which was constitutionally entitled to vote on such matters and would unquestionably reject the change, De Gaulle announced that the amendment would be submitted to a popular referendum of the whole electorate. This method of changing the constitution by referendum was denounced as unconstitutional by all the political parties except his own, and was declared illegal by the Council of State.

     Gaston Monnerville, president of the senate, who would become president of France if De Gaulle died, denounced the referendum as illegal, and accused De Gaulle of "malfeasance." When De Gaulle's rage at Monnerville became evident, the Senate reelected Monnerville as its presiding officer with only three dissenting votes. The Assembly, in an overnight session, October 4-5, 1962, passed a vote of censure with 280 votes. By the referendum on the constitutional change, on October 28, 1962, De Gaulle achieved his purpose with almost 62 percent of the votes registering "ayes" (this was only 46 percent of the registered votes because of the 23 percent non-voting) in spite of the fact that his proposal was opposed by all political parties except his own. The following month, November 1962, in the general election made necessary by the vote of censure, De Gaulle's bloc won 234 seats out of 480, with an additional 41 seats committed to his support. The Right was practically wiped out in the election, although the Communists increased slightly to 41 seats.

     This pattern of personal and rather arbitrary rule, opposed by the older ruling groups but sustained by the ordinary Frenchman whenever De Gaulle asked for such support, has continued to be the pattern of De Gaulle's political system, and will undoubtedly continue unless he meets some unforeseen sharp diplomatic defeat or a domestic economic collapse. Both of these are unlikely at the present time.

     While French political life passed through these stages of superficial drama and fundamental boredom, British political life wallowed in a malaise of mediocrity. No groups were actually discontented, and certainly none was enthusiastic about the situation in Britain over the1957-1964 period leading up to the General Election of October 1964. The Conservative Government came to office in 1951, was returned in the elections of 1955, and returned again in the elections of October 1959. Anthony Eden served a brief and rather unsuccessful prime ministership from the retirement of Winston Churchill in April 1955 until his own retirement in favor of Harold Macmillan in January 1957. The latter's term of office had no spectacular failures such as Eden had experienced in the Suez Crisis of October 1956, but on the whole there were also no great successes.

     Macmillan sought to avoid issues if possible, to strengthen contacts with the United States and the Commonwealth by personal diplomacy, to follow Washington's policy as closely as possible without appearing openly obsequious, and to hold a fairly tight rein over the Conservative Party and the House of Commons. An endless series of nasty little problems were met and somehow disposed of, to be followed by the rise of similar problems without any significant changes of course or speed. Abroad, the chief problems arose from the demands of various areas within the Commonwealth for self-government and the intrusion of the racial issue into these disputes, especially in Central Africa, East Africa, British Guiana, and Malaya. The chief problems at home were equally endless and were concerned with the continual weakness of the pound sterling on the foreign exchange market and the social problems associated with the British economic expansion, such as increased vehicular traffic, spreading juvenile and adolescent delinquency, an apparent decline in the level of adult moral behavior, and the growing attacks, especially in industry and finance, on the economic bases of the older Establishment.

     In general, there was a slow spreading disillusionment with the structure of English society, especially with the continued dominance hy the old established families of political and economic life. This was especially notable among the middle and lower middle classes, while the lower class was, apparently, less antagonistic because of the continued relative prosperity and, above all, from the weakening of what might be called the Labour Party ideology of class conflict.

     In spite of a weakening of class antagonisms, there was a spreading rejection of the established class structure of England as it had existed for about a century. The good manners of the lower and middle classes, which had made visits to England such a pleasure, have slowly worsened, since they have come to be regarded as a mark of acceptance of the rigid class structure of the country, something that is decreasing in all classes. This shift is evident even in legislation, such as an Act of 1963, permitting peers to give up their titles in order to run for office in the House of Commons. It is, perhaps, most threatening in the animosity expressed by some of the new class of very rich who reject the established social prestige of the older aristocratic families.

     This last point is of some importance, for it may mark the end of a very significant period of English history. In this history the English social structure was retained because of its flexibility rather than its rigidity. Access to higher social levels had never been closed to those with the energy and luck to work upward. These climbers invariably became strong defenders of the class structure, buying country houses, sending their children to boarding schools, and adopting the accent and other distinctive idiosyncrasies of the English upper classes. This "aping of their betters" on all levels preserved the English class structure and provided the relatively frictionless character of English social life. Frictions have now appeared at the very time that class antagonisms have been weakened. The reason for this has been the slow spreading in Britain of a kind of individualistic and nominalistic outlook that had been prevalent in much of the Western world for several generations but had been played down in Britain, until the last decade or so, by the pressures to conform on those who wished to rise socially and even on those who wished to remain in their same social level. As a result, traditionally in England, individualists have been eccentrics, that is, persons so well established that their social positions could not be changed notably by their personal behavior. This is now changing.

     Increasingly, those who wish to remain in their social status and, most significantly, a surprising number of those who are rising in the economic, academic, and political hierarchies feel called upon to reject in an explicit fashion the established class structure. This began with the writings of Labour Party intellectuals early in the century; but it has now become so widespread that rising young men today still continue to rise without conforming to the established behavioral patterns of their aspirant levels. One reason for this, of course, is that control of the ladders to success are no longer so closely held. In the old days, the merchant bankers of London, EC2, controlled fairly well the funds that were needed for almost any enterprise to become a substantial success. Today much larger funds are available from many diverse sources, from abroad, from government sources, from insurance and pension funds, from profits of other enterprises, and from other sources. These are no longer held under closely associated controls and are much more impersonal and professionalized in their disposal, so that, on the whole, an energetic man (or a group with a good idea) can get access to larger funds today and can do so without anyone much caring if he accepts the established social precedents.

     At the same time, on lower levels, young men working their way upward, although not, perhaps, to "the top," no longer conform in dress and behavior to the expected patterns of respectability of their social aspirations, but often show a more or less open defiance of these. The most obvious, and in a way most frightening, examples of this are to be found in the open defiance of all respectability by adolescents and post-adolescents of various social levels, but chiefly low ones, who have rioted by the thousands at various seaside resorts on long weekends in recent years.

     These most obvious examples of rebellion against English conformity are, however, not nearly so significant as the less obvious, but much more significant, rejections of the established system by men whose training and positions would lead us to expect that they would be firm supporters of it. This includes men like the following: (1) John Grigg, who disclaimed his title of Lord Altrincham in 1963, was educated at Eton and New College, was in the Grenadier Guards, edited the National Review (which had been acquired from Lady Milner), and was close to the Establishment from his father's long-time associations with the Milner Group, the Times, the Round Table, and his intimate friendship with Lord Brand; the son shocked the Court by his open criticism of the Queen's social associations as undemocratic; and his weekly articles for the Guardian advocated, among other things, abolition of a hereditary House of Lords; or (2) Goronwy Rees of New College and All Souls who had denounced the English amateur tradition in government and business as a "cult of incompetence," and demanded, to replace it, a system of training and recruitment that will provide a British managerial class marked by professional competence rather than by what he regards as "frivolity"; or (3) John Vaizey, one-time Scholar of Queens College, Cambridge and now Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, who denounces the whole English educational system as inadequate and misguided and would replace it with something more like the French openly competitive system of free education.

     One, perhaps surprising, voice in this criticism, aimed at attitudes rather than class structure, has been that of Prince Philip. He has tried, with only moderate success, to introduce scientists, technicians, and managerial types into Court circles (at least occasionally), but these circles continue, as in the past, to be dominated by the old rural upperclass interests of horses, hunting, and parlor games. At the same time, by a series of calculated indiscretions, His Royal Highness has sought to encourage the change of attitude that so many feel is essential to the continued survival of Britain in an era of advanced technology. Samples of his statements continue to be quoted, especially in circles that disapprove of them. In February 1961, the Prince said, "If anyone has a new idea in this country, there are twice as many people who advocate putting a man with a red flag in front of it," and eighteen months later, in a speech on Britain's inability to remain competitive in the world's export markets, he said, ". . . we are suffering a national defeat comparable to any lost military campaign, and, what is more, a self-inflicted one.... The bastions of the smug and the stick-in-the-mud can only be toppled by persistent undermining...." These criticisms of complacency, now a chronic disease of the British upper classes, have had relatively small influence, at least in those circles where they are most needed and where they are discreetly regarded as "unfortunate remarks."

     However, the volume of such criticism, especially on relatively high levels of the established hierarchies, has been growing, and must eventually force significant changes of outlook and behavior. They are more effective evidence of the breakdown of established outlooks than more spectacular events, like the antics of juvenile rioters or even the sinful lives of Cabinet ministers exposed in the popular press for the whole world to see, as was done of the war minister's encounters with a teenage prostitute whom he met (of all places) at Lady Astor's "Cliveden" estate. It seems possible, however, that any constructive change in England will be so long delayed that it may be anticipated by waves of unconstructive change, especially the rapid spread of frantic materialism, self-indulgence, and undisciplined individualism. That this should occur in the country that offered the world of the twentieth century its finest examples of self-disciplined response to the calls of social duty would, indeed, be a profound tragedy.

     It would seem that Britain, perhaps more than any other European country except Sweden, is passing through a critical phase where it does not know what it wants or what it should seek. The patterns of outlook and behavior that brought it to world leadership by 1880 were going to seed by 1938. There was sufficient vitality still left in them to bring forth the magnificent effort of 1940-1945, but since 1945 it has become clear that the old patterns are not adapted to success in the contemporary world of technocracy, operations research, rationalization, and mass mobilization of resources. The British method of operating through a small elite, coordinated by ... personal contact and shared outlooks, and trained in the humanities, cannot handle the problems of the late twentieth century. Britain has the quality to do this, for, as we have seen, operations research, jet engines, radar, and many of the technological advances that helped create the contemporary world originated in Britain; but these things must be available on a mass basis for any country wishing to retain a position of substantial world leadership today, and they cannot be made available in Britain on a quantity basis by any continuation of the patterns of training and recruitment used by Britain in the nineteenth century.

     There are those who say in al1 sincerity that there is no need for Britain to seek to retain a position of leadership that would require it to destroy everything that made the country distinctive. These people are prepared to abandon world leadership, international influence, and economic expansion for the sake of preserving the late nineteenth-century patterns of life and society. But pressures from outside as well as from within make this impossible. Lycurgus renounced social change in prehistoric Sparta only by militarizing the society. Britain certainly cannot refuse to change and at the same time hope to retain the leisurely, semi-aristocratic, informally improvising social structure of its recent past. The outside world is not prepared to allow this, and, above all, the mass of British people wil1 not allow it. In fact, the reluctance Or the Conservative Party under Macmillan to face up to this problem has pushed a large number of British voters, reluctantly, toward the Labour Party. As a result, Labour won the election of October 1964 by a bare majority of the House of Commons.

     It is widely agreed that Britain's problems in facing the contemporary world fal1 under two headings: (a) a rather complacent lack of enterprise and (b) an educational system that is not adapted to the contemporary world. The lack of enterprise is rooted in the self-satisfied attitude of the established elite, especially in their rather unimaginative attitude toward industry and business. For example, at the time that the Volkswagen was sweeping the American small-car import markets, the British Motor Corporation had in the Morris Minor a car that was slightly inferior in a few points, superior on several important points, and sold for several hundred dollars less, yet no real effort was made by the British firm to fight for a share of the American market.

     Critics of contemporary England tend to concentrate their fire on the educational system, which, despite great changes, remains inadequate, in the sense that large numbers of young people are not being trained for the tasks that have to be done, especially for teaching itself. To be sure, Britain has provided about three billion dollars on new educational buildings since the war, with about a hundred thousand more teachers, an extension in the school-leaving age of about eighteen months, and a sixfold increase in opportunities for higher education (with new universities being established in provincial towns almost yearly); but the subjects studied, the methods used, and the attitudes toward these are not directed toward the needs of the future world; no real coordination or ready access is provided between the educational system and the world of action, and access to either by the ordinary Englishman remains restricted by social and economic barriers.

     Instead of the gradual elimination of those who are unwilling to study, such as operates in theory in France and to a lesser extent in the United States, Britain still has barriers at ages eleven and eighteen that shunt the major part of the country's young people into terminating and specialized curricula, and do so on largely irrelevant criteria, such as ability to pay or social background. A survey of more than four thousand children, reported by Thomas Pakenham in The Observer, concluded that "the 11-plus examination and our selective educational system itself are seriously biased in favour of middle-class children and against virtually all those from poorer families." Using I.Q. tests that are themselves biased in favor of middle-class children, the survey showed that of all eight-year-old children with I.Q.'s of 105, only 12 percent of lower-class children were subsequently able to get to grammar schools, while 46 percent of those from the middle class could get to grammar schools (and thus get access to a curriculum preparing for college). Of eight-year-olds with I.Q.'s of 111, 30 percent from the lower class but 60 percent of a higher social background subsequently reached grammar school. And of those exceptional children with I.Q.'s above 126, about 8: percent of both social levels get to grammar school.

     These figures are taken from a recent volume, edited by Arthur Koestler, entitled Suicide of a Nation? ( Hutchinson, 1963). The significance of the volume does not rest so much in what it says as in the fact that a team of writers, including Koestler, Hugh Seton-Watson, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cyril Connolly, Austen Albu, M. P., Henry Fairlie, John Mander, Michael Shanks, and others, could contribute to a volume witl1 the rhetorical title borne by this one. Several of these writers apply to the ruling groups of contemporary Britain the designation that Gilbert Murray, more than a generation ago, taught their elders to use with reference to ancient Athens: "a failure of nerve." There may indeed be a failure of nerve in both historical cases, but there is equally evident a failure of imagination and of energy. For the Britain that won ... in World War II had many opportunities to do great things in the postwar period but failed to do so because its leaders were unwilling to grasp the opportunity.

     On the whole, the two contending political parties in Britain continue to offer the mass of English voters opposing visions that have no real appeal to the great majority of English, and, at the same time, show an obvious disinclination to take drastic action to realize these visions, probably because party leaders know that their views are repugnant to the majority.

     These two opposed visions offer, on the one hand, the nostalgic yearnings of the Conservatives for the world of 1908 and, on the other side, the state Socialism and unilateral disarmament of the Labour Party doctrinaires. Neither of these has much to contribute to the real problems facing Britain in the last half of the twentieth century, which is why the mass of British voters, who can detect irrelevance even when they themselves have no clear knowledge of what is relevant, have little enthusiasm for either. The Conservative stand-patters were challenged by a number of vigorous and able veterans of World War II, such as lain Macleod, Peter Thorneycroft, Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), Reginald Maudling, Enoch Powell, Ted Heath, and others. These were essentially empiricists, but they wanted Conservatism to make an active attack on Britain's problems and to make their party more appealing to the great mass of Englishmen by associating it with vigor and a social conscience.

     In one way or another, Macmillan was able to sidetrack all of these, to derail the traditional leader of the older aristocratic Conservative families, Lord Salisbury, and to block other significant contenders for control of the party such as R. A. Butler. In fact, Macmillan's eagerness to avoid decisions or activity in matters concerned with the welfare of the country was exceeded only by his activity in consolidating his own personal power in the party. In some ways, notably in his insatiable yearning for power, his skill in concealing this fact, and his evident lack of any very rigid principles on other matters, Macmillan recalled his predecessor, Baldwin. Both had the same pose as typical country squires and both had Oxford University closer to their hearts than any other public issue. But where Baldwin was lethargic and relatively sensitive, Macmillan was active and secretly ruthless, quite willing, apparently, to disrupt the Establishment or the party itself to further his personal position and his surprisingly narrow social interests. This was seen in his last-minute, successful, campaign against Sir Oliver Franks for the honorary position of Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960 and in the way in which, operating from a hospital bed in 1963, he pushed aside all other claimants to be his successor as prime minister to put into that office the fourteenth Earl of Home, Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home. This disregard of tradition, of the lines of expected procedure, of the claims of past service and cooperation, and, above all, of the expectations of public opinion in order to raise a man whose chief claim seemed to many to be based on long lineage was a fair commentary on Macmillan's attitude toward his office and his party. Its influence on the morale of the party itself cannot be assessed, but it cannot have been a good one.

     The Labour Party was similarly divided, and similarly fell under the control of a man whose will to power was stronger than any ideology or party principles. On the whole the party was split between leaders of labor-union origin and intellectuals from jobs in university teaching. At the same time, it was split between those who still saw some merit in the old theories of class struggles and imperialist wars and felt that the solutions to both was to be found in nationalization of industry and drastic, if not unilateral, disarmament (at least in regard to nuclear weapons). The postwar world, in Britain as elsewhere, violated all the anticipations of Socialist Party theories. The former Socialist Utopia, the Soviet Union, became the archenemy, and the United States, previously regarded as the epitome of capitalist corruption, became a combination of St. George and Santa Claus; the postwar experience with nationalization disillusioned all but the most doctrinaire of Socialists, and the majority of voters, once they had obtained the basic elements of social welfare, medical care, and social insurance in the immediate post-war period, showed a strange preference for moderate or even Conservative leaders rather than for the advocates of Left-wing policies..

     As a consequence of these experiences, the Labour Party tended to split into a major wing that sought to win votes and office by appeals to moderation and a minor wing that sought to repeat the older war cries for seeking working-class benefits through class legislation and nationalization. The disappearance from the scene of the prewar Labour Party leaders, such as Clement Atlee, Ernest Bevin, and Hugh Dalton, made Hugh Gaitskell leader of the party and of its moderate wing. By 1956 Gaitskell was being challenged from the Left by Frank Cousins, a former miner, who was backed by a million votes in the Transport and General Workers Union. At the Party Conference of 1960 Gaitskell was defeated on four resolutions favoring unilateral disarmament and rejecting British cooperation with NATO, which were passed over his objections. Gaitskell was able to reverse these votes in 196r, but could not wipe from the public mind the impression that the party might not be completely reliable in support of Britain's role in the defense of the West against Communist aggressions. While still concerned with this task, Gaitskell died early in 1963, and was succeeded as party leader by Harold Wilson, whose brilliant record as student and teacher did not hamper his work as a skilled and tireless manipulator of intra-party political influence.

     From 1959 onward, a small but steady sagging in popular support for the Conservatives was evident. The party delayed calling a new election until the very end of the five-year term of the Parliament's life in tile vain hope that some success, or at least some decisive improvement in Britain's economic condition, might provide the margin for an unprecedented fourth consecutive electoral victory. By late 1960 it w as clear that some decisive step must be taken to regain popular support. Macmillan was driven, still with reluctance, to seek membership for Britain in the booming European Economic Community. Application was made in August 1961, opening many months of onerous negotiations. During this period De Gaulle made a spectacular state visit to West Germany, spoke of the national glories of Germany, and persuaded Chancellor Adenauer to sign a special treaty of Franco-German friendship, whose real meaning was ambiguous to all concerned, except that it seemed to exclude both the great English-speaking Powers from the inner European circle. The latter two reaffirmed their solidarity—in what looked to some like British inferiority to Washington—in a conference between Macmillan and President Kennedy in the Bahamas in December 1962.

     The Nassau Conference sought to iron out various Anglo-American differences, to agree on steps that might avert De Gaulle's steady weakening of NATO, and, on Macmillan's part, to show the British electorate the Conservative leader's close relations with President Kennedy. The meeting confirmed an American decision to abandon the "Skybolt," an air-to-ground missile on which the British had constructed much of their nuclear defense, and proposed to strengthen NATO by establishing a "multinational force." The latter project hoped to establish NATO's strategic nuclear force in a fleet of surface naval vessels, armed with Polaris-type missiles and operated by mixed crews from all the NATO Powers. These mixed crews would prevent France from continuing its divisive policies within the NATO military array, increase the cohesion of Europe, give its nuclear strategy at least an appearance of independence from the United States, and provide the groundwork for some kind of European Defense Community, including Britain, if France split NATO completely.

     De Gaulle's answer to this weak and symbolic gesture of Anglo-American cooperation was decisive. Within less than a month, in January 1963, he rejected the British seventeen-month-old application to join the EEC. This resounding defeat to Macmillan and the United States was delivered in typical De Gaulle fashion. In superb disregard of the established EEC procedures for dealing with applications for membership, De Gaulle, at a personal press conference, announced that France would oppose the British request, on the grounds that it was a belated effort to get into a system that the British had earlier sought to impede witl1 their rival Outer Seven Free Trade Area and that Britain was not yet ready for admission to any purely European system since, as he said, "Britain, in effect, is insular, maritime, and linked by her trade, her markets, and her suppliers to a great variety of countries, many of them distant...[so that] the nature, structure, and circumstances of Britain differ profoundly from those of continental states." If Britain were admitted to EEC, according to De Gaulle, she would at once seek to bring in all the other members of OECD, and "in the end there would appear a colossal Atlantic community under American dominance and leadership which would completely swallow up the European Community."

     The other five EEC nations, with Britain and the United States, opposed De Gaulle's efforts to break off the Brussels talks on the British application for membership, but on January 29, 1963, the French vetoed continuance of the discussion, and the British application was, in effect, rejected.

     The De Gaulle veto suspended indefinitely the movement toward Europe's political unity. At tile same time, De Gaulle rejected the Anglo-American suggestion for a multinational nuclear force within NATO. On January 22, 1963, with President Adenauer of West Germany, he signed the French-German Treaty of friendship and consultation, providing periodic conferences of the two countries on foreign policy, defense, and cultural matters. Before the end of the month, over strong Labour Party opposition, the British Parliament approved the Anglo-American Nassau Pact and heard Prime Minister Macmillan announce his government's determination to build an independent nuclear force of four or five British-built Polaris submarines by purchasing the necessary equipment from the United States.

     In this way, the movement for European unity was suspended and the Continent remained "at sixes and sevens." This condition of stalemate was protracted for almost two years, through 1963 and 1964, by extensive governmental changes and important national elections. In February 1963, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Diefenbaker of Canada was overthrown on a no-confidence vote based on charges that he had failed in vigor in supplying warheads for Canada's section of the North American defense system. He was replaced by a Liberal government headed by Lester B. Pearson. In the same month, in England the death of the Labour Party leader Gaitskell brought to the head of that opposition group a relatively unknown Left-wing intellectual and former university instructor, Harold Wilson, who had often supported Aneurin Bevan against Gaitskell's more moderate views. In June of 1963 the whole movement for Christian religious reunion and reform of the Catholic Church was suspended by the death of the very popular Pope John XXIII and installation of his successor as Pope Paul VII. In October one of the semipermanent fixtures of the European postwar political scene disappeared when the eighty-seven-year-old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer resigned after a fourteen-year term; he was replaced in the chancellorship by Economic Minister Ludwig Erhard, who was widely regarded as the chief architect of Germany's spectacular economic recovery. Three days after Adenauer's resignation, Harold Macmillan, on grounds of ill health, resigned as prime minister and was able to impose on his party as his successor the ex-Earl of Home, renamed Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Thus the British General Election of October rg64 was fought with new leaders on both sides.

     A few weeks after the shift of government in London, a more significant change of government took place in Rome as part of a long-term shift to the Left in the Italian political balance. Essentially the dominant Christian-Democratic group broke free, to some extent, from its reactionary Right wing and from the need to seek support on the Right by detaching the Left-wing Socialists from their long and uncomfortable alliance with the Communists by bringing this group into the government and leaving the Communists almost completely isolated on the Left. Aldo Moro, political secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, became premier of the new arrangement in December 1963, with Pietro Nenni, of the Left-wing Socialists, as deputy premier. In theory the coalition rested on an agreement to seek to extend the benefits of the Italian prosperity boom to the less affluent workers' groups who had been relatively neglected in the hysterical pursuit of profits by more affluent entrepreneurs under the preceding governments.

     The Italian Cabinet shift was still in process when President Kennedy was assassinated by an unstable political fanatic in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. This, in view of the power and influence of the American Presidency, was the most significant governmental change for many years. After an unprecedented display of worldwide mourning, the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, of Texas, took control of the American Presidency's global responsibilities and national obligations with only eleven months in which to establish his position as a candidate in the presidential election of 1964.

     As a consequence of these changes, the removal from office of Khrushchev in October 1964, and the death that year of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been prime minister of India from the achievement of independence in 1947, the governments of all major countries except France and Red China underwent significant shifts of personnel in a period of about fifteen months. This gave rise to a "pause" in world history for almost all of 1963-1964, during which each country placed increased emphasis on its domestic problems, especially on the demands of its citizens for increased prosperity, civil rights, and social security. Since the same tendency became evident also in France and Red China where the previous leaders continued in power, the last two years covered by this book were years of hesitation, decreased world tension, and confused plans for future courses.

Chapter 77: Conclusion

     Tragedy and Hope? The tragedy of the period covered by this book is obvious, but the hope may seem dubious to many. Only the passage of time will show if the hope I seem to see in the future is actually there or is the result of mis-observation and self-deception.

     The historian has difficulty distinguishing the features of the present, and generally prefers to restrict his studies to the past, w here the evidence is more freely available and where perspective helps him to interpret the evidence. Thus the historian speaks with decreasing assurance about the nature and significance of events as they approach his own day. The time covered by this book seems to this historian to fall into three periods: the nineteenth century from about 1814 to about 1895; the twentieth century, which did not begin until after World War II, perhaps as late as 1950; and a long period of transition from 1895 to 1950. The nature of our experiences in the first two of these periods is clear enough, while the character of the third, in which we have been for only half a generation, is much less clear.

     A few things do seem evident, notably that the twentieth century now forming is utterly different from the nineteenth century and that the age of transition between the two was one of the most awful periods in all human history. Some, looking back on the nineteenth century across the horrors of the age of transition, may regard it with nostalgia or even envy. But the nineteenth century was, however hopeful in its general processes, a period of materialism, selfishness, false values, hypocrisy, and secret vices. It was the working of these underlying evils that eventually destroyed the century's hopeful qualities and emerged in all their nakedness to become dominant in 1914. Nothing is more revealing of the nature of the nineteenth century than the misguided complacency and optimism of 1913 and early 1914 and the misconceptions with which the world's leaders went to war in August of 1914.

     The events of the following thirty years, from 1914 to 194;, showed the real nature of the preceding generation, its ignorance, complacency, and false values. Two terrible wars sandwiching a world economic depression revealed man's real inability to control his life by the nineteenth century's techniques of laissez faire, materialism, competition, selfishness, nationalism, violence, and imperialism. These characteristics of late nineteenth-century life culminated in World War II in which more than 50 million persons, 23 million of them in uniform, the rest civilians, were killed, most of them by horrible deaths.

     The hope of the twentieth century rests on its recognition that war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in the future by turning from the nineteenth-century characteristics just mentioned and going back to other characteristics that our Western society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline. We now know fairly well how to control the increase in population, how to produce wealth and reduce poverty or disease; we may, in the near future, know how to postpone senility and death; it certainly should be clear to those who have their eyes open that violence, extermination, and despotism do not solve problems for anyone and that victory and conquest are delusions as long as they are merely physical and materialistic. Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1915, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.

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