Each bit of handiwork, each artifact, tool and machine is an expression of man's wish and will. Each transcends nature and is an affirmation that takes its place in the vast storehouse of human culture.
Cities, the building blocks of civilization, not only transcend nature; they replace her. Up to a certain point man lived more or less consciously as a part of nature. Bit by bit and step by step man shifted from the stream, the glade, the tree and the cave to the hut, the village, the city, the nation, the empire, the civilization.
Early in this study I wrote of civilization as an experiment: an aspiration, a creative urge, a concept, a purpose, a unity of thought and act, a conscious sequence of related actions, a construct of multiplying complexity.
These terms, by and large, are constructive and, to a degree, creative. I might have written a parallel series of words associated with destructiviness. In every social situation construction and destruction are Siamese twins. One does not appear without the other. The same forces, the same implements, the same institutions and practices that construct can be used to destroy.
Through ages, men learned how to establish, maintain and perpetuate community and organize society. At every stage of the building process it was necessary to check, to question, to evaluate, unlearn, tear down, make a new start. Pushing up and tearing or wearing down is implicit in nature. It is an essential aspect of human society.
Each human being is a living example of production and destruction. Each generation repeats the affirmation, modifying it little or much in accord with circumstances.
Modification means purposeful change—partially or wholly abandoning the old and replacing it with something new. In the course of these changes the conservative elements in man and in society, voluntarily or under coercion, give up the old and learn how to use the new. The learning process is always more or less painful, especially to people past middle age.
The world-wide revolution resulted from a long-continued related series of affirmations, punctuated and interrupted by contradictions and conflicts.
Trends inherent in the world-wide revolution of 1750-1970 suggest a cycle that reached its high point at the turn of the century and began its downward course around 1900. The chief European empires were jointly and severally involved in the bitter struggle for survival and supremacy from 1870 onward. Until the outbreak of war in 1914, events followed an irregular course marked by the shifting relationships of Italy and the increased pressure from Germany for a showdown. The showdown was the war of 1914-18, continued in a second phase from 1936 to 1945.
Immediate political results of the showdown were victory for one side and defeat for the other side. Economic, sociological and ideological consequences were profound and far reaching. We noted some of them in the previous chapter.
UNESCO'sHistory of Mankinddevotes its final volume six to the twentieth century. The authors note that the chief European powers emerged from the general war of 1914-18 "weakened in every way: in men and wealth, in the balance of their economies and the stability of their political structure and above all in their relation to other powers rising or beginning to rise in other parts of the world". (Vol. VI p. 10.)
Aside from the victory-defeat relationship which led to political realignments during the post-war years, the essence of the experience is to be found in the UNESCO phrase "weakened in every way". Another way of describing the experience is to state that the participants in this four year blood bath were "bled white."
It is easy to be specific. In the course of the war sixty million people were mobilized. Most of these people stopped what they had been doing until mid-summer of 1914 and began an entirely new line of activity. Up to that point most of them had been living with their families, in their neighborhoods, going through a daily routine that included household cares, production or service work, the conduct of neighborhood affairs, the maintenance of normal livelihood activities, the upbringing of the new generation and perhaps most important of all, adaptation to a rapidly changing social situation.
The changes that took place in the summer of 1914 involved an almost complete reversal of purpose and direction. Up to that point Europeans were devoting a considerable proportion of their time to production and the maintenance of the normal life routine. At that point they left their homes, exchanged ordinary clothes for uniforms, laid down the implements of peace, picked up the weapons of war and prepared, under very expert leadership and direction, a series of mass movements designed to disrupt the ordinary life routine of other human beings on the other side of lines drawn on a map, but having little relation to customary life activity and even less to geography.
Execution of this purpose involved a mass movement from the home territory into that occupied by the "enemy". If the enemy resisted he must be forced to do the will of the invaders. Instead of cooperating in a joint effort to maintain and improve the general welfare, uniformed, armed, expertly-led masses began beating up each other, until one side gave in and cried "enough."
Plans for war had been drawn and redrawn for years, for decades. Elaborate preparations had been made. Destructive weapons had been designed and built. Transport had been provided, food stored. Defensive preparations had also been made in the form of fortifications so placed as to obstruct or prevent "the enemy" from crossing the "frontier".
When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a competition in another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.
If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have gone on without them—handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted. But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.
Mobilized to carry on the war were 42.2 million on the Allied side. On the side of the Central Powers, 22.8 millions. The total: 65 million. 12 million of those mobilized were Russian, 11 million were Germans, 8.4 million were French, 8 million were from the British Empire. From Austro-Hungary came 7.8 million, from Italy, 5.6 million. Turkey furnished 2.9 million, Bulgaria 1.2 million; 4.4 million came from the United States; 0.8 million from Japan. Lesser numbers came from other countries.
Except for Spain, the largest contributions of war conscripts came from the countries with the largest populations. With the exception of Spain, all of the great powers of Europe provided the "cannon fodder"; the human beings which Europe's "great powers" assembled to take part in this profligate orgy of mass murder which went on for more than four years, from July 1914 until November 1918.
Body count reports and "estimates" give the total number of human beings murdered in the four year period as 8,538,315. (The legal definition of "murder" is killing, not accidentally but with the intention of taking life.)
This figure of 8.5 million murdered human adults, most of them in the prime of life, refers to the murdered bodies that were recovered and disposed of. In addition there were "prisoners" and "missing."
As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as battleships, tanks, big guns and by war's end, of airplanes. Human beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed the buttons. Their efforts were supplemented and multiplied by the killing power of physics, chemistry and mechanics brought to the task of wholesale murder, which produced 8.5 million dead human bodies.
"Prisoners and missing" accounted for 7,750,000 additional human beings. Many of them were torn to shreds and smithereens by the gigantic concentration of mechanical and explosive power, designed, constructed and transported to the European battlefields for the express purpose of carrying on this month-long and year-long collective endeavor to take as much life as possible and destroy as much property as possible while war declarations authorized and legalized mass murder and wholesale destruction.
Not all victims of the hideous 1914-18 blood bath were killed. "Wound casualties" numbered 12.8 million among the Allies; 8.4 million among the boys, young men and adults mobilized by the Central Powers. Some of the wounded were crippled for life. Some were less severely injured, but all 22.2 million were more or less severely handicapped when they stood up to face the rigors of civilian life at war's end. All were denied the possibility of living normal, productive, creative, satisfying lives.
Wars are fought on battlefields. In the war of 1914-18 many of the battlefields included villages, towns, cities. These complex institutions, occupied by men, women and children were smashed and burned wholesale.
The figures which I have used in listing the 1914-18 war losses were compiled by the United States War Department. They are more or less accurate, but they underline the fact that for years on end the centers of western civilization concentrated their energies and devoted every means at their disposal to cripple or destroy fellow human beings and their habitations.
When we read of the destruction of the Roman Empire we console and perhaps try to fool ourselves by saying that the immense network of civilization which the Romans and their Greek associates spread across Eurasia and Africa during the historical period that began about 700 B.C. was destroyed by hordes of migrating "barbarians." When we turn to our own civilization, however, there are no barbarian hordes to take the blame. The wholesale destruction which took place in Europe from 1914 to 1918 and which was repeated and multiplied during the wars of 1936-1945 was carried on officially by spokesmen for the most advanced, most highly developed, most civilized countries of the western world.
We have been using the word "murder" to describe the wholesale slaughter of Europeans by Europeans that took place from 1914 to 1918 and from 1936 to 1945. The word "murder" is inaccurate. The Europeans who carried on the wholesale destruction and mass murder during the two most general wars of modern times were committing murder in one sense. In quite another sense they were engaged in collective suicide. Europeans were blotting out the life and well-being of fellow Europeans. When the process came to a temporary halt in 1945 every European participant in the struggle was weaker in human potential and poorer in economic means than they were when the war began.
Arnold Toynbee describes the entire episode as the "down grading" ofEurope. He might have added two words and reported "the down grading ofEurope by Europeans", as a glaring example of large scale, longcontinued, deliberate self-destruction.
Fundamental social changes were bound to follow the revolutionary technical transformations that took place during the world-wide revolution of 1750-1970. Changes may be made in various ways. Some are slow and relatively painless, particularly when they extend over generations; other changes are so rapid that they are agonizingly painful. Involuntary changes, made under outside pressure are almost always painful. World-wide revolution, under the best of conditions, promises to be painful. When it comes from alien sources, and is under forced pressure, the costs are almost sure to be excessively high.
This brings us face to face with one of the most important problems facing mankind at the present moment. Given the worldwide revolution of the past two centuries, what changes—political, economic, sociological and ideological—must be made to prepare the way for the new society and shift the family from the old homestead to the new apartment with a minimum of pain and a maximum of satisfaction?
Blatant contradictions disorganized human life after war's end in 1945. In the crucial area of war and peace three groups were bidding for attention: dedicated peace partisans (peacenicks); nationalist enthusiasts waging wars of liberation; and massive semi-official and official nationalistic groups busily preparing for the next big war.
Occasionally these groups joined hands on "hot" issues. Generally they were far apart. Often they were in active opposition.
Dedicated peace advocates were an important factor in this post-war period. They had been vocal and influential in July, 1914 immediately before the outbreak of the first general war. They had continued to play an active role between the first and second general wars. In the autumn of 1972 the World Peace Council called together a peace assembly in Moscow representing significant elements from 143 countries. The largest single element in the World Peace Council was the Socialist bloc, headed by the Soviet Union.
Peace advocates mobilized wide public support for the "no more war" movement that developed during the closing months of the 1914-18 war; for the Briand-Kellogg Treaty of 1928 which renounced war as an instrument of policy; for the effort to secure general disarmament that resulted in the General Disarmament Conference of 1933 and for the United Nations Charter of 1945.
Official declarations in favor of disarmament and peace had been paralleled by the organization of unofficial peace committees and societies in western Europe, in the Americas and in the socialist countries.
Peace efforts had been strengthened by the outbreak of local wars—between India and Pakistan, between Israel and the Arab League; by wars of independence and liberation in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Africa.
Much of the public backing for the peacenicks came from student groups in official and private high schools, colleges and universities.
Nationalist liberation movements were active in settled communities such as Ireland and Canada's Province of Quebec. There were less established movements in newly liberated restless ex-colonies and remaining colonies of the chief European empires, of Japan and of the United States. The widely advertised World Peace Council turned more and more from general advocacy of peace, such as the Stockholm Peace Petition, to the support of liberation movements among colonials and supressed minor nationalities.
Preparations for another general war were expanded and intensified as the competitive struggle for oil and other natural resources mounted. By the end of the 1960's total arms expenditures of the chief powers were running at $200 billion per year. In 1973 the total reached $225 billion.
There was much general talk about peace, but the most insistent note sounded for a high level of spending on armaments. Britain's Prime Minister Heath voiced a sentiment vigorously promulgated by every representative of national security "British interests come first".
Confusion was heightened by the presence of men who faced all three ways: talking peace, waging small wars and preparing for the next big one. In February, 1974 in his State of the Union message to the U.S. Congress, President Nixon spoke of "our goal of building a structure of lasting peace in the world." At the same moment the Washington administration was feeding the fires of war in South East Asia and asking the United States Congress to increase 1975 U.S.A. defense appropriations from $80 billion to $90 billion per year.
When war ended in 1945 there was a planet-wide sigh of relief and a devout hope that after so many years of local and general wars, the time had come for western man to take a long decisive step in the direction of peace. The United Nations Charter expressed this hope to end the use of war as an instrument of policy.
Since the period of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer, planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and transformed the social environment.
Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of an agricultural-feudal society. Improvements in navigation and the growth of trade, commerce and industry opened the way for the bourgeois revolution with its rapid growth of cities and the parallel increase of wealth, income, and living standards among the newly-enriched businessmen and their associates and dependents.
Social changes in feudal Europe had been gradual. The dynamism implicit in the bourgeois revolution escalated the rate of social change with corresponding modifications in the pattern of European political, economic and cultural institutions and practices.
In the early stages of the transformation the awareness of change was limited to a minority of city dwellers. To the rural illiterate majority, change was a closed book. A great social gulf separated the feudal countryside from the growing centers of trade, commerce and industry. Bourgeois life processes narrowed and gradually bridged the gulf. Differences between city and country living persisted, but the stark contrast between city abundance of goods and services and their virtual absence from the common life of the countryside grew less and less marked as the proportion of the total population living in the countryside declined with the trek to cities and their suburbs.
Europeans living for the most part in a pre-civilized rural environment passed through generations of illiterate unawareness of the social process through which European life was expanding. The rapid extension of industry and commerce after 1750 (the bourgeois revolution) completed the transformation of a rural, semi-feudal west and central Europe into a continent of town and city dwellers devoting their lives to pursuits unknown to their immediate forebears. In this new Europe the countryside played a decreasing role, as food supplies and raw materials came increasingly from less developed parts of eastern Europe or from the colonies which were opened up by the planet-wide trade and commerce promoted by the aggressive expansion of the European empires.
Most Europeans, satisfied with the axiom "old fashions please me best" were stand-patters in the early stages of this transformation. As the conversion of Europe from feudal status to urban dynamism continued, however, an ever larger part of the population became aware of the change through which their society was passing. With the Renaissance and the Enlightenment inert unawareness gave place to enthusiastic propaganda in the writings of pamphleteers, essayists, poets, novelists and social reformers who set the intellectual tone for the new society.
In a very real sense, the bourgeois Europe which emerged after 1750 was something new under the sun. Large elements of the population, previously engaged in producing and consuming the bare necessaries of food, shelter and clothing were increasingly engaged in trades and professions and rendering services unknown to the feudal countryside. As the expansion of western civilization continued, entire European nations like the Low Countries, England and Germany turned to trade, commerce, industry, leaving only a dwindling minority engaged in agricultural pursuits. The change was speeded by the revolution in science and technology.
Changes in economic and social relations are paralleled by corresponding alterations in the total way of living. Western civilization was, in its entirety, a cultural departure from the pattern of any preceding experiment with civilization because of the drastic changes that the revolution in science and technology had introduced into human society.
Throughout the life-cycle of western civilization minor and major alterations have been made in its structure and its function. Some of the earlier political changes were part and parcel of the bourgeois revolution. They included:
1. The abolition of absolute monarchies and hereditary aristocracies and their replacement by limited monarchies and republics with various types of representative and popular governments selected by ballot.
2. The replacement of personal tyrannies and autocracies by written constitutions and laws passed by elected parliaments.
3. Replacement of war as the sport of kings and the chief instrument of policy makers, by negotiation, diplomacy, and treaties which became the core of existing "international law."
4. Arbitrary national sovereignty was supplemented by more or less permanent alliances and by the formal international organizations such as the Universal Postal Union, the World Court and the League of Nations.
5. Regional Associations were organized; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the Organization of American States and the Organization for European Unity.
6. Disarmament conferences were held. General peace treaties were signed like the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928 and the United Nations Charter.
7. Two major efforts were made to establish a general confederation of nations and empires—the League of Nations in 1919 and the United Nations a quarter of a century later. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations proved to be feeble and ineffectual efforts to bridge the gulf between limited national sovereignty and planet-wide order and peace. But they were tentative steps in the direction of a federation of the world and they did mark a notable advance from the chaos and conflict incident to the planet-wide expansion of the European empires toward more stable economic and social conditions and more orderly international relationships.
Paralleling these changes in the political life of western civilization there have been a number of drastic economic reforms. One was the abolition of chattel slavery. A second was the replacement of serfdom and peonage by free labor receiving fixed wages and salaries. A third change was the division of large feudal estates and other concentrated landed properties into small units owned and operated by working farmers. A fourth change was the establishment of free trade areas within and among sovereign states. A fifth innovation was the transfer of individually operated and family businesses into associations and corporations with limited liability and widespread ownership by bond and stockholders. Sixth, trade unions and consumers' cooperatives were recognized and legalized. Seventh, legal provisions were made for social security against accident, sickness, unemployment, old age. Minimum incomes were guaranteed. Eighth, many steps were taken toward public or social ownership of the means of production, including land and other natural resources. Ninth, repeated governmental efforts were made to deal with the inflation that attends prolonged exhausting wars. These efforts included the regulation of credit and debt and the substitution of new currencies for old ones that had been hopelessly devalued.
Political and economic changes in the life-patterns of western civilization have been accompanied by far-reaching cultural reforms such as the provision of free public education; the emancipation of women; the provision of public recreation facilities; popularized culture through information, the drama, music, literature, art; equalizing opportunity and facilitating movement up and down the ladder of recognition, approval, disapproval.
Political reforms of western civilization date from the Reformation and the Renaissance. Economic reforms were speeded by the industrial revolution. Together they are often described as the bourgeois revolution, which resulted in the power shift from landlords, ecclesiastics and knights in armor to businessmen, protected and assisted by the state, the church, channels of information and propaganda, the police and other armed forces. Cultural reforms accompanied the reforms in politics and economics.
Underlying the changes and supplementing reforms were improvements in the means of communication and transportation; the discovery and use of new sources of energy and the changes in production and merchandizing which have played so vital a role in the transition from a skimpy economy of scarcity to an open-handed economy of abundance, extravagance and conspicuous waste.
Through all of the political, economic and social changes made in the structure and function of western civilization its basic activities have remained unchanged. The nuclei of civilized life have been cities concerned primarily with trade, commerce, industry, finance—planned, organized and administered by businessmen, their professional and technical associates and assistants. In practice, city centers of wealth and power have expanded, using the military as the readiest means of implementing policy. They have occupied and garrisoned the foreign territory brought under their control. At home and abroad they have exploited nature, men and other animals in their interest and for their profit. The trading cities of medieval Europe, the emerging nations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the colonizing empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the industrial European empires of the nineteenth century devoted their energies increasingly to expanding into new territory, occupying and exploiting it, and fighting the wars which pock-marked the ceaseless struggle for pelf and power. In short, they continued to build up the institutions and to follow the practices of civilized peoples. This has been true of the millennium that began with the crusades and has hastened the rise of western civilization and its extension to planet-wide proportions.
Similar conclusions can be drawn from the life stories of the score or more of civilizations that rose, flourished and sank into inconsequence during the previous five thousand years.
Each civilization has had its own habitat, its own life pattern. Each has had its own languages, laws, traditions and customs. But despite such local differences, all of the civilizations have had in common those characteristics which justify their inclusion in the family of civilizations.
Anyone who wishes to test the accuracy of these generalizations may be satisfied by reading and observing the events that began with the wars between Japan, China and Russia, the Spanish American War, the Boer War, and the revolts in Cuba, China and the Philippines, all of which took place between 1895 and 1905. The present century opened in a period of critical struggle between empires, within empires and between imperial centers and colonial dependencies. These preliminary skirmishes led up to two general wars in 1914-1918 and 1936-1945, accompanied and followed by a score of minor wars and a planet-wide rash of civil wars and wars of independence waged by peoples of the erstwhile colonies.
Three johnnie-come-lately empires played star-roles in the drama: Germany, the United States and Japan. The histories of all three countries from 1870 to 1950 provide ample support for the contention that the central theme of western civilization, as of its predecessors, is a competitive struggle for wealth and power, aimed at expansion and exploitation, using war and the threat of war as instruments of policy.
Even under the pressures generated by the innovations and the political and economic changes of the current world wide revolution, the principle objectives of civilization have remained constant: geographical expansion; military, economic and cultural occupation; exploitation of the newly acquired territories and peoples. Each civilization has built up and maintained a professional military apparatus and used it as the final arbiter in the determination of domestic and foreign policy.
The means used to achieve these objectives have varied from time to time and from place to place. The basic pattern of civilization has appeared, disappeared and reappeared.
Each civilization has made heroic efforts to reform itself when submerged in a time of troubles that made its institutions and its practices intolerable to those in power or those groups and classes which had grown so desperate under its exploitation and oppression that they preferred death to continuance of the established order.
Each civilization has made its contribution, retaining its essential form while modifying its practices to meet the requirements of particular situations. Western civilization is no exception to this general rule.
Following the all but universal principle that "action and reaction tend to be equal and opposite," subjugated, occupied peoples revolt against "foreign" occupation and exploitation. Again western civilization is no exception, as the movements for independence and self-determination that followed the 1946 post-war collapse of the European empires clearly showed.
Reaction against western civilization went beyond revolt to include the rejection of the obsolete concepts, forms and practices inherent in civilization. Rejection has been accompanied and followed by proposals for replacing civilization by concepts, forms and practices more in keeping with the social relations and situations resulting from the current world revolution.
Most reforms of civilization have been attempted during the life of western civilization because during that era both the structure and functioning of civilization have been called into question. In no civilization (Egypt, Rome or the modern West) have the essential principles of civilization been seriously modified. Again and again, during the times of trouble that marked the breakdown of successive civilizations, particular institutions were rejected but civilization as a way of life has been accepted and re-established in the course of each new cycle.
During previous cycles the breakdown of a civilization had been followed by a period of rest and recuperation before the beginning of the next experiment. The breakdown of western civilization, a negative reaction, has been accompanied by a planet-wide drive to replace the concepts, forms and practices of civilization by the concepts, forms and practices of socialism-communism.
Socialism-communism as a way of life for nations and continents is a new experiment on the planet earth. Heretofore there have been small groups—families, tribes and sects—that have adopted and followed cooperation as a way of life, but widespread planned cooperation on a national or continental scale is a novelty.
As a result of these changes, conflict-torn and fragmenting western civilization found itself divided into three factional groups:
I. Corporate business organized domestically and internationally to preserve and extend its wealth and power. Big business interests, their dependents and backers were concentrated chiefly in West Europe and North America. Their network of interests and controls was planet-wide. Literally they were the backbone of western civilization.
II. Builders of socialism-communism, an alternative and rival life pattern, have been concentrated in East Europe and Asia. The socialists-communists occupied a minority position in most of the countries dominated by big business. Their program called for the replacement of capitalist competition and conflict by a cooperating, planned, planet-wide society operated for service rather than for profit.
III. A third segment, made up largely of nations and peoples located in Africa, Asia and Latin America, who up to war's end in 1945 had been colonies or dependencies of the big business directed empires. Since 1945 they have become increasingly independent and self-determining.
The three-fold division of the planet was determined in part by the age-old ideas, principles and practices of civilized peoples during the past six thousand years. In part, it was the outcome of the planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970. It was likewise the result of the wars, revolutions and independence movements that have upset and realigned the world since 1776. Under the impact of these forces human society was being unmade, re-examined and remade.
By comparison with its own beginnings and with its predecessors, western civilization has made many changes in its political, economic and sociological way of life. It has also developed national and regional variants of its overall pattern.
Despite these changes, and with the possible exception of its very large and significant socialist-communist sector, the West has retained the structural and functional features of previous civilizations: urban nuclei supporting themselves by trade, commerce and finance; expansion up to and beyond the point of no return; the life and death power struggle within and between its constituent peoples, nations and empires; the use of war as the final arbiter in these struggles; the rise of the military to a position of supremacy in policy making and public administration; an all-pervasive pattern of exploitation within the urban nuclei and between rival provincial factions; speculation in the necessaries of life; the growth of overhead costs far beyond the increase of production and of income; the degradation of currency; multiple taxation; the abuse of credit; inflation, unemployment and chronic hard times.
Western civilization differs from its predecessors in one crucial respect: it is planet-wide. Previous civilizations known to history have been limited by oceans, deserts and other geographical barriers. The revolution in communication and transportation has by-passed geographic barriers.
The French saying "the more things change the more they remain the same" finds ample justification in the story of western civilization and its predecessors. In one instance after another, for at least six thousand years, civilizations have been built up to summits of wealth and power. Then, on the downward sweep of the cycle, they have declined, decayed and been dumped on the scrap heap of history. No two of these cycles were exactly alike. Each cycle was a social experiment that followed a well marked path. There were variations, innovations, deviations from the norm, but institutions and practices were strikingly similar. In this broad sense, and despite minor departures, the life patterns of civilization have appeared, disappeared and reappeared with close similarity in structure and function.
Western civilization has had a life cycle of approximately a thousand years. During that millennium it has undergone many changes—political, economic, sociological, ideological. Throughout these changes its basic characteristics have remained; have appeared and reappeared. In the 1970's western civilization retains the essential features which justify us in describing it as a civilization.
The great revolution which began about 1750 and has increased in breadth and depth throughout the past two centuries had led to vital changes in structure and functioning, particularly of the West but generally in the entirety of human society. So far-reaching are these changes, and so deep running, that human society, particularly in the West, has outgrown or is outgrowing the life pattern evolved by civilizations during the past four or five millenia. As a consequence, geographical expansion by the time-honored method of grab-and-keep has become more difficult, far more expensive in manpower and material wealth and is in growing disrepute among a sizeable minority of individuals and social groups, even in the centers of western civilization. It is in notable disfavor among the former colonies and dependencies of the European empires.
At the same time, war as a means of achieving social ends has fallen into greater and greater disrepute. War costs, measured in terms of human well-being and welfare had soared to fantastic heights before 1945. The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far more destructive than the fission bombs used on the two Japanese cities.
Under the conditions prevailing before the great revolution, competitive struggle between nations and empires, expanding as a result of victory in war, had ceased to be a practicable means of gaining, holding and increasing wealth and power. If the costs of the international power struggle exceeded the gains, there were no longer victors who won and vanquished who lost. Instead, everybody lost as the entire social structure was wrenched, dislocated, wracked and down-graded. Certainly this seemed to be the plain-as-day lesson of the two general wars and the flurry of minor wars which swept the earth after 1910.
Expansion through armed struggle no longer paid its way. It was the obvious lesson stressed by J.A. Hobson and Nicolai Lenin in their respective studies of imperialism (1903 and 1916). It was the theme of Norman Angel'sGreat Illusion.It was summarized by Arnold Toynbee'sWar and Civilization.
If the costs of expansion exceeded the income, the outcome of expansion would be dismemberment for the vanquished and bankruptcy for the victors. Indeed, this formula generalises the experience of the survival struggles during the war years which began in 1911. I summarized the experience inThe Twilight of Empire(1929).
The catastrophic economic breakdown during the Great Depression of 1929-1938, the spectacular and fateful rise of Hitlerism in Germany after 1927, the destructive Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939, followed immediately by the war devastations of 1939-45 were part and parcel of the same picture. The same may be said for the revolt of the colonial peoples, downgrading all European "victors" in the war of 1914-18, and the social revolutions following 1945 that shook up the planetary power structure and opened the way for socialist-communist forces to begin socialist construction in one country after another.
Some European states had become super-states, armed to the teeth, surrounded with their satellites, dependencies and colonies. They expanded, exploited and battled as they played the absorbing and ruinous game of "Beggar My Neighbor". Politically and economically the struggle reached and passed its high point between 1914 and 1945. The subsequent years have revealed the aftermath—a down-graded Europe and an ascendant Asia.
Empire building has been made prohibitively expensive by the revolution in science and technology; if the human family is to survive in anything like its present numbers, a way must be found to end the use of war as a means of attaining social objectives. New techniques, chiefly non-competitive, must be discovered and employed in the maintenance of social relations.
Not only must war be abandoned as a means of achieving social objectives, but exploitation of nature and man must be superceded by a planet-wide life style that conserves natural wealth and shifts the center of economic endeavor from competition to cooperation.
Abandonment of war as an instrument of policy and the renunciation of exploitation of man by man and nation by nation as a means of enrichment would put an end to the scandalous and corrosive extremes of riches and poverty that have cursed every civilization of which we have a written record.
Western civilization, like its predecessors, had consisted of rival nations and empires competing for living-space, wealth, position, expanding territorially as they exploited nature and available labor power for the advantage of the few.
Civilization as a life style, built around the competitive struggle for wealth and power, using war as an instrument of policy and multiplying the techniques of expansion and exploitation, has had a series of experimental tryouts already under way at the dawn of written history. Under no circumstances has civilization proved to be wholly rewarding and satisfying. The current revolution in science and technology has rendered civilization unreformable as well as obsolete.
The structure or pattern of civilization has divided western civilization into separate parts that benefit by separateness and profit from conflict. The result is a typical example of a self-destroying life style struggling through an impasse from which there is no escape save through a third fratricidal war.
Today civilization is a bad buy, especially for young people starting out in life. Civilization still has its advantages for those who have lived actively, achieved many of their material objectives and retired to spend their declining years in a well-feathered nest. For some privileged young people, willing to settle for comfort and conformity, civilization offers the leisure to learn, and an opportunity to test themselves out against a big field of ardent competitors. But for energetic, forward-looking, idealistic young people, the opportunities offered by western civilization are deemed inconsequential, trivial and in the long run, inadequate. For them, the game is not worth the candle.
Today civilization is a bad buy for two reasons. The first is that antisocial, predatory, exploitive and parasitic elements are unfortunately and unnecessarily prominent in the lives of all civilized peoples, including the present West. The second reason is the arrogant, self-righteous, peremptory, bragging, bullying, dictatorial approaches adopted by civilized people in their dealings with those who live on the fringes or outside the pale of civilization. The first reason is an inescapable consequence of the political, economic, ideological and sociological assumptions of the civilizing process. The second reason is inherent in the methods used by civilized peoples in their dealing with the uncivilized majority of humanity.
Part IV
Steps Beyond Civilization
In the previous chapter I argued that we are marking time in a fool's paradise while western civilization slips backward and downward toward dissolution and oblivion. Like many of its predecessors, our civilization seems to have exhausted its capacity to create, progress, advance. Instead it is disintegrating and breaking up in our current time of troubles.
In an earlier epoch of human history civilization helped to bridge the wide gap between man the victim and plaything of nature, and man as the user, director and, to a limited degree, the coordinator of natural forces. Today questions of our demise or our survival and advance are pressing and urgent.
Civilization has played an important role in the social history of mankind during the several thousand years when segments of the human family have turned their backs on barbarism, regrouped their forces, revamped their patterns of association and experimented with the more complicated, specialized and integrated life pattern of civilization. These experiments have paralleled or followed one another, separated by shorter or longer ages of rest and recuperation. Each epoch of civilization has contributed ideas, artifacts and institutions to the sum total of human culture. This has been the case with past civilizations. It is true of western civilization.
Civilization, like other aspects of human culture, is never static but always dynamic. It changes constantly, waxing and waning. It develops, expands and contracts. It reaches out toward universality, then breaks down and dissolves into a welter of conflicting regional and local interest groups. These changes are the outcome of hard-nosed experience. They are related to alterations in ideas, outlooks and purposes. They are often associated with technical discoveries and inventions. They come and go in more or less clearly defined cycles. They are influenced by deep running political, economic and social forces and trends.
Each civilization matures into forms and develops functions and institutions that tend to consolidate and crystallize in well defined social patterns and habit grooves in which two forces oppose each other: one force is status—preserving that which is; the other force is change—that which tends to become or is becoming.
Status and change confront each other at all social levels. During periods of rapid social change they take the center of the stage and dominate the drama.
The planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 is an outstanding example of rapid change. The current opposition of status and change has pushed other aspects of social life into second place and has made the social status of yesterday outmoded today and obsolete tomorrow.
The disintegration of western civilization (indicated by its 1910-1975 time of troubles) is having profound effects on western man. The effects are physical, mental, energenic and moral for individuals. Socially they find expression in vandalism, hooliganism, major crime, in the break-up of the family; in alienation, inertia, boredom; in laxity, indiscipline; loss of faith, weakness or absence of purpose. Most serious of all, perhaps, western peoples are learning to ignore principle, live for the moment, satisfy their already sated appetites and pay little or no attention to the future. These attitudes are widespread in the western world of the 1970's, particularly among the young. These effects, on the whole negative, are offset by a number of positive factors. Human beings are curious and imaginative. They are also ingenious, inventive and intuitive. All of these attributes are assets when dealing with the future and the unknown.
In a previous generation, preceding the war of 1914-18, a very large part of the West was under the influence of the Christian church, which promised good things in the hereafter. During the ensuing years of military conflict, planned destruction and wholesale murder, another considerable part of the West, both socialist and liberal, was promising security, comfort and convenience here and now. The influence of the Christian church on life style, even among its own membership, has declined in the past half century. Affluent monopoly capitalism, meanwhile, has provided the rich, the middle class and important numbers of workers and farmers with necessaries and amenities far beyond the levels imagined by reformers and revolutionaries of a previous generation. As an integral part of this maturing revolutionary situation a generation of human beings born since war's end in 1945 has come on the scene, surrounded by the concrete and glass buildings, block printed nylons, the automobiles and domestic appliances of monopoly capitalism and by the social security of socialism. In both segments, capitalist and socialist, the more gifted, original, sensitive, creative members of this comfort-pampered generation have turned their backs on affluence and security and begun shouting a new slogan: "We want to live!"
There is nothing surprising about this development. Many trained, experienced observers have been predicting it. Youth, idealism, aspiration, optimism, ambition—cannot be satisfied with status in any form. They want to live, to achieve, to face difficulties, to overcome dangers, to express themselves, to create. They are not content merely to arrive at physical affluence. Affluence and social security cannot satisfy. They merely sharpen the appetite for a continuance of the life journey, on the best terms permitted by the current time of troubles.
Among the members of the post-war generation, this ambitious, perceptive elite is aware of two disturbing and compelling realities. The first is the peril to mankind implicit in a continuance along its present disaster course of war, with its inescapable counterpart, social dissolution. The second is the possibility that out of the wreckage and rubble of an outmoded cultural pattern, a mature, chastened, more experienced, more consciously purposive generation will arise, possessing the wit to see the necessity of creative advance, and the wisdom to guide the pioneers of humanity along the difficult and dangerous path that they must follow if they are to reach the land of purpose and promise.
Current frustrating experience with the breakdown of western civilization, coupled with historical precedents, confront the present generation of mankind with a compelling challenge and a unique, precious opportunity. The challenge arises out of experiments with particular civilizations and with civilization as a way of life. Our analysis of this situation leads to only one possible conclusion: Repeated experiments with civilization unmask it as a way, not of life, but as a cycle of rise, expansion, maturity, decline and certain death.
The challenge is emphasized by the failure of reforms and reformers of civilization to make changes in structure and function sufficient to meet the challenge of the birth-maturity-death cycle. Nor has it been possible for western civilization to take advantage of the drastic changes and challenges arising out of the current world revolution.
Man's top negative priority at the present moment is to reject the wiles, the temptations, the mortal conflicts and the annihilative destruction which have disrupted and decimated civilized society during the past six thousand years and reached their apex in the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. These experiences prove beyond the shadow of doubt that this pattern of human collective life is inadequate to meet the present and future needs of the human family.
Man's top positive priority is the present-day occupancy of the planet Earth by 3,700 million human beings who wish to survive, to utilize and conserve the natural habitat and to improve the social environment. Within narrow limits, almost all members of the human family want to live and to help other humans to do likewise. Multitudes of human beings, particularly among the youth, want to enjoy outward looking, satisfying, productive, creative lives. They also want those near and dear to do the same thing.
What steps must they take in order to realize their hope and fulfill their aspirations?
Broadly speaking, they must pick their way warily through the maze of artifacts, gadgets and gimmicks produced by human ingenuity during the current world revolution. Most of them are superficial and time consuming. A few are fundamental. They are of the utmost importance as implements to human advance. Taking what advantage they can of recent innovations, avoiding dead-ends and illusion leading to rainbows, the more sensitive and more competent segments of mankind must close ranks and move upward and onward to a new level of culture. The chief instrument available for such an enterprise is the twentieth century version of the political state. The bourgeois revolution was achieved through the developing, evolving political state. The political state is the binding force that held scattered fragments of the human family together during the stresses and strains of the current revolution in science and technology. It is the political state that must be depended upon to resist the fragmentating forces of a disintegrating western civilization, to preserve the social structure and administer human society through the transition from civilization into the structure and functioning of the new social order which is presently supplanting civilization.
Through Europe's transition from feudalism to capitalism, the feudal state, here and there, step by step, was replaced by the bourgeois state as the chief structural building block of western civilization. The bourgeois revolution, in various parts of Europe, lasted for several centuries; the process was well under way by 1450. As lately as 1945 feudal pockets remained in Eastern Europe.
An even more profound transformation of European society is made in the course of the Great Revolution of 1750-1970. The transformation is in its early stages. During the process, the political life of Europe-in-transition will be administered by the political institutions of the bourgeois state, together with the closely related state patterns of socialism-communism which have come into being during the present century.
During this transition the bourgeois state itself has evolved. At the outset it was a revolutionary force devoting its energies to the elimination of feudal institutions and practices and replacing them by the institutions and practices needed for the advancement of bourgeois interests.
Today the bourgeois state is a bulwark of conservatism; devoting its energies to the preservation of bourgeois forms and practices and doing its utmost to fulfill its counter-revolutionary role of resisting and, if possible, destroying the institutions and practices needed to replace the political institutions and practices of civilization by the new institutions required to move mankind from the outmoded lifestyle of civilization to a lifestyle beyond and above that to which humanity has become adapted during the now obsolete epoch of civilization.
At the same time, the socialist-communist variant of the bourgeois state pattern is providing the framework within which the institutions and practices needed for the transition from civilization to a newer and more universal social order are being matured. At the next stage in the birth process, the institutions and practices necessary for upbuilding the social order that will replace civilization are being worked out in theory and embodied in experimental practice.
In practice, an accurate distinction must be made between the conservative bourgeois state, the temporary transitional state and the universal socialist-communist state that will shepherd humanity along the difficult and dangerous path of the political life pattern beyond civilization. In theory such distinctions are needed as part of the scaffolding within which the social pattern of beyond-civilization will be constructed.
Like most decisive epochs of human history, the revolution through which we are passing has had both a negative and a positive aspect. In Chapter 11 I wrote about one of its destructive aspects—the extreme destructivity of two periods of general war. At this point, I would like to list ten positive contributions made by the same revolution toward the development of a social life style that is offering itself as an alternative to civilization.
1. NEW SOURCES OF ENERGY. Up to 1750 human beings had the energy of the human body plus the energy of domestic animals. They used wind to turn mills and sail ships and water to turn crude wheels. They also burned various things, particularly vegetable fibres, to produce heat. During the revolution they have learned to use steam, electricity and chemical explosives. Recently they have learned to use the energy in the atom, to use water power extensively and, to a slight extent, the energy of the sun and the tides.
2. The revolution has taught people who previously feared CHANGE, to welcome change and take full advantage of discoveries and inventions that modified nature and profoundly altered human society.
3. Among the INVENTIONS were the extensive use of the wheel for movement on land, the use of steam engines and electric motors for moving, manufacturing and transportation and the use of electricity for communication.
4. INCREASED HUMAN MOBILITY on land and water, and, more recently, in the air and, still more recently, in outer space. Easy and rapid movement, and almost instantaneous communication brought people together in towns and cities, built up trade in goods and services, increased speed of communications and enabled people living at a distance from one another to keep in close touch, bringing human enterprises and human beings into continuing contact. Human life, thought and action were coordinated. Increased mobility UNIFIED HUMAN SOCIETY.
5. RESEARCH is now an accepted aspect of all phases of human life and activity. Research is a recognized occupation. Research teams solve problems, map the paths of enterprise. We are learning first to think, then, only after careful study, decide on courses of action and follow them through.
6. The field of inquiry and research covered the entire range of human experience. Information, resulting from research, provided the subject matter of new sciences. In the new fields new skills were developed and new professions built up. The members of this new TECHNOLOGICAL INTELLIGENTSIA, added to the learned professions, created a large group who expected and enjoyed affluent living conditions.
7. SPREADING AFFLUENCE increased the number of families that enjoyed abundance of goods and services, comforts and luxuries mass produced and offered in a mass market, lifting people out of scarcity by growing abundance. Scarcity ceased to restrain. Instead, people learned the values of RESTRAINT, ECONOMY, FRUGALITY, SIMPLICITY.
8. Increase in size and complexity called into being a new profession. MANAGEMENT with the necessary PLANNING, BUDGETING, COST KEEPING.
9. Large numbers of well-fed, housed, educated and aware human beings created the possibility of arousing, mobilizing and utilizing people—especially young people—to take part in voluntary group projects, co-operate and create. Such experiences developed SOCIAL AWARENESS and led to LARGE SCALE MASS ACTION.
10. People growing up in affluence, living above the rigors of poverty, asked questions about themselves, their society and the universe in which they lived. They learned that they and their fellows had not only the five accepted "senses," but additional senses with corresponding experiences. This opened their eyes to the possibility of additional or extra senses, opening the immense field of "EXTRA SENSORY PERCEPTION," E.S.P.
These ten areas, opening up largely during the years of the great revolution are "new wine" which cannot be contained in the old wine skins. They raise questions and open up vistas which transcend the narrower confines of civilization. They are among the materials and facilities out of which a new world is coming into existence.
One of man's earliest collective experiences is summed up in the saying:United we stand; divided we fall.
United we survive and prosper. Divided we quarrel, fight and sooner or later break up into smaller sovereign competing groups. If human beings wish to utilize nature or to enjoy the advantages of collective action and group life they must get together and stay together.
This necessity for collective action has appeared and reappeared all through written history. It is one of the most important lessons of present-day human experience. It holds for families, neighborhoods, villages, cities, nations, for mankind as a whole. It is joint action for the general welfare.
The principle of collective action has been recognized and put into practice during the ten centuries that span the rise of western civilization—put into practice up to a certain point—the nation or the empire. Beyond that point, collective action has taken two forms: competition and conflict, including war, and coordination or cooperation under agreement, contract or treaty.
Among the outstanding results of the great revolution, improvement in communication and transportation have brought humans into contact with one another on an increasingly extensive scale, reaching its high water mark in planet-wide networks of trade, travel, migration and diplomacy, leading up to the One World which was so much in the foreground of public discussions between the two general wars of 1914 and 1939.
Much has been written on the subject. I contributed by two bits inThe Next Step, a book published in 1922 andUnited World, published in 1945. Perhaps the most critical failure of western civilization was its inability or unwillingness to take that next step during the decisive years that followed the Hague Conference of 1899.
In listing the Ten Building Blocks for a New World (Chapter 13 of this book) I began with world federation because in terms of the public life of the earth around 1900, the planet was divided into two alliances of nations and empires—the Allies, headed by Great Britain and the Central Powers, headed by Germany.
Instead of cooperating to gain their declared objectives of peace, prosperity and progress these two power blocs engaged in an armament race from 1903 to 1914, leading up to general war in 1914, with a second general war between the rivals in 1939.
When I was organizing Part II of this study (A Social Analysis of Civilization) I had to decide whether to begin with economics or politics. As an economist I was inclined to put economics first, but since the study centered on civilization, and since all known civilizations were not groupings of economic subdivisions but aggregates of nations, empires and their dependencies, and since the expansion of civilization has consisted in enlarging the geographical area of the civilization in question, I decided to begin with politics. As the study has progressed I have seen no reason for reversing the choice.
On the contrary, since I began collecting data for this study at the time of the first general war, I have watched the unfolding political struggle for economic and cultural objectives with the increasing conviction that politics is the primary focus, with economic forces always in play, but usually in the background, leaving the center of the stage to politics.
This is another way of saying that the present-day world is divided primarily into political nation states rather than into areas of economic function. Always, economics is important. But, at least superficially, political considerations are in the foreground to clinch decisions. A time may come when economists or sociologists occupy the central offices where primary decisions are made. That time has not yet arrived. In so far as the present generation is concerned, politics is in the foreground. The politicians make the crucial announcements and sign the key documents.
Therefore our survey of the Steps Beyond Civilization begins with politics. Our attention centers on the political aspects of World Federation with economic considerations present and always operating, but not dominating the crucial decisions.
For better or worse, in 1975 and the years immediately succeeding, we will be living on a planet divided into some 140 politically sovereign states. In view of the widespread pressure toward self-determination, the number of sovereign states has increased considerably, especially since war's end in 1945.
Presumably the principal "united we stand" applies to those 140 sovereign states.
Sovereignty includes the right of self determination—putting the interests of one particular state above the interests of the entire family of nations—the part before the whole. Here is a contradiction and a possible conflict of interest. Britain's Prime Minister Heath, like many another spokesman in his position, summed up the issue in the pithy phrase: "British interests come first."
If the French, Italian, Japanese and other prime ministers take a similar stand, implied by the principle of sovereignty, situations are bound to arise in which the interests of two or more nations clash, opening the way for conflicts at many levels: differences of interpretation, negotiations in the course of which concessions may be made by both parties. The differences may be settled by diplomats sitting around conference tables or by armies on the battlefield.
With 140 sovereign states on the planet, the probability of conflict would seem to be overwhelming. As a matter of daily experience such confrontations and conflicts do occur. Most of them are handled by negotiation. A few lead to armed struggle.
Since 140 sovereign states exist on one earth, means must be found that will enable them to co-exist, if possible, without conflict, and certainly without military conflict. The means generally relied upon today for dealing with such problems is negotiation between representatives of all parties at interest. At the national level this would mean negotiations between representatives of the involved governments.
Negotiations between representatives of various governments are always going on—dealing with political, economic and cultural issues. Within each nation such negotiations are conducted between spokesmen for various government departments. Internationally they are conducted by representatives of various governments working through their diplomatic or consular services. Within each nation and between nations confrontations may be settled by negotiation. At each level they may result in armed conflict.
Governments exist to deal with conflicts and, where possible, to resolve them before they reach the shooting stage. This is notably true in domestic affairs because there are usually public officials charged with the duty of dealing with problems. Internationally, unless there is an international agency such as the Universal Postal Union of the Organization of American States, the issue must be settled by special representatives of the parties.
The argument for a world government begins with the assumption that means should exist to deal with international issues before they reach an acute stage. Such means exist within each local government. Similar arrangements should exist at the international level to deal with issues that arise between governments.
The political core of a social stage beyond civilization will be a planet-wide, international, regional and local network of institutions, integrated, coordinated and administered on the federal principle: local affairs controlled locally; regional affairs controlled regionally; international affairs controlled by a planet-wide political authority. Such a relationship would imply states rights for the local authority; regional rights for the regional authority, and full awareness in the central authority of the possibility, at this juncture, of establishing order, justice and mercy on the planetary level—in our present terminology, a "world government."
Basic to this federal structure would be the Jeffersonian assumption: "That government governs best which governs least", with an amendment: "provided that the authority in question governs sufficiently to establish and maintain physical health, social decency, order, justice and mercy in reasonable proportions throughout the area subject to its jurisdiction".
At each level, local, national, regional and planetary, there will be committees, councils or other authorities with full responsibility for the conduct of public administration at the local, the national, the regional and the planetary or international level.
Currently the federal principle is widely established at local and national levels. Attempts are being made in various regions to effectuate stable authorities at the regional level, such as the United States of North America or the United States of Mexico. There has been much talk of planet-wide government established by one wealthy and militarily powerful nation over its peers, or by a voluntary association with its peers. Institutions established thus far: League of Nations, The United Nations, The World Court, the Universal Postal Union, have fallen far short of stable, planet-wide, all inclusive political authority.
At the moment there are 122 states which are members of the United Nations. There are perhaps an additional score of nations which have applied for membership or which might be accepted if they made an application. Accept this rounded figure, and we have perhaps 140 nations or potential nations on the planet. Some are long established and stable. Other nations are new-born, with small populations, few resources and minimal means of defense or offense. By and large this is the family of nations which might be coordinated into an effective world authority which would be responsible for order, decency and peace in a federally coordinated world.
World authority, to be effective and reasonably stable, must be equipped with sufficient delegated powers to maintain orderly and decent relations between its members, establish peace, and carry out policies necessary to provide and promote ecological and sociological welfare. To achieve such results it must have a built-in balance between central authority and local-regional self-determination. It must also enjoy sufficient elbow-room to provide for social change and for consistent social improvement.
The goal of world government, as of any political enterprise that pretends to represent human needs, will be social stability, security, efficiency of service, and enlarged opportunities for citizens to speak and act for themselves, directly or through their representatives, at all levels. Politics is the theory and practice of the possible in any given situation. Executives and administrators in Los Angeles, London and Tokyo or in the United States, Britain and Japan will deal with public transportation, public education and public law and order in terms of general principles such as those stated in the opening sentences of this paragraph. They will also face specific situations arising out of climate, access to raw materials, custom, habit and other ecological and cultural factors which differ profoundly from continent to continent, nation to nation, city to city and district to district in the same nation.
Human communities have sought and found different means of dealing with the problems of community administration. At one extreme of social administration are various types of arbitrary, personal dictatorships. The Greeks called them tyrannies—arbitrary rule by individuals or small groups subject only to their own decisions.
At the other extreme are social groups that arrive at decisions as the outcome of discussion in which all group members may take part. Group decisions may require unanimity or they may be the outcome of voting, with a majority or plurality vote carrying with it the right and duty to put decisions into effect as part of the public life of the community.
Various forms of government have been established locally and regionally. At the level of a civilization, the government has been established almost universally as the outcome of armed struggle and military conquest, and has been exercised through the use of armed force in the hands of armed minorities.