Johan Huizinga - Conditions For A Recovery of Civilization (Ensaio)
Johan Huizinga - Conditions For A Recovery of Civilization (Ensaio)
Johan Huizinga - Conditions For A Recovery of Civilization (Ensaio)
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Conditions for a recovery of civilization
In the Spring of 1935 I tried to make up a brief account of the general situation and
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the outlook for Western civilization . I called it a diagnosis, because it seemed to
me undeniable that we were confronted with a serious distemper of social life.
Misgivings about the solidity of our civilization had then less generally spread than
they have now. Warning signs of possible downfall or decay were less conspicuous
than they have become since. The political order, as it had been established after
the great war, though far from reassuring, was on the whole still undisturbed. Italy
had not yet started her campaign in Abyssinia, the fire in Spain was still smouldering,
the Rhineland had not yet been remilitarized, Central Europe was chaffing but
outwardly quiet, and Russia seemed on the way to regain her place in the European
system. But for anybody looking beyond the outward appearance of political
conditions all the symptoms of cultural deterioration and threatening decay were as
easily recognizable as they are now. Leaving aside economical and social problems
and considering only the mental situation of our Western world, the outlook seemed
by no means cheerful. First of all, a survey of intellectual conditions could not fail to
leave the impression of a general weakening of the average power of judgment in
the individual and in the masses. The age of technical achievement and universal
education, instead of effecting the high degree of mental progress once expected
of it, had brought the rather disquieting result of a decline of the critical spirit which
once had made possible a society based on scientific knowledge. Shallowness of
thought and dissipation of mental energy seemed to have invaded all classes
everywhere.
Moreover, the intellectual principle itself, as one of the main directives of life, had
in many parts been forsaken for systems of philosophy extolling life in its crude state
above thinking. Moral standards had been deliberately dropped in ever wider circles,
either by conviction or by fashion, without being replaced by any new principle in
life.
If now, after five years, we ask ourselves, whether the prospect for civilization has
brightened, a negative answer will seem almost inevitable. The ailments have not
been cured and could not have been.
Their effects, in the shape of follies, inhumanities, waste of energy and the like, have
grown ten times worse than they were, manifesting themselves in a succession of
acts of violence and perfidy that has culminated in the outbreak of the new war. If
for the moment cultural preoccupations worry us less than they did before, it is simply
because now the all-important political issue crowds out concerns of a more
theoretical kind and absorbs all our faculties. Perhaps it is not exclusively the state
of war which is responsible for this absorption of our mind by political questions.
This evergrowing concentration on the political is itself to be regarded as a symptom
of our cultural disease. Society at large and the human individual personally have
less and less time and attention to spare for pursuits of life outside the political and
economical sphere. The importance of the political seems so overwhelming that we
are apt to forget that politics and economics together only form part of that nether
domain of human activity which the Greek called the acquisitive art. Now if we still
agree that the acquisitive life does not mean civilization, at least not the whole of it,
there is no need for pointing out that the absorption of mental faculties by the political
and economic purposes of society raises grave fears as to the healthy state of our
civilization. In a paper which should have been read in 1938 before an audience in
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Vienna, if Vienna had remained Austrian , I ventured to call this process the
sliding-down of civilization into the political, das Abgleiten der Kultur in das Politische.
Politics, however important and unavoidable, are always a secondary function of
human life. They can never be either the essence or the ultimate pursuit of a
civilization. Their aims are limited, their views restricted, their results provisional,
their means clumsy and inefficient, and their preponderance merely a ‘cursed plight’.
If it be granted that for the recovery of civilization we want something more than
the adjustment of international disputes, we can now proceed to ask ourselves,
whether there are any signs of a coming betterment to be detected. Let us suppose
a general peace concluded on the best terms we can imagine for the near future.
This would mean: Law and order restored, as far as that goes, safety against
aggression more or less guaranteed, for the smaller units of political society as well
as for the large ones, a regular practice of diplomatic communication in terms of
decent behaviour taken up again, the possi-
1 Der Mensch und die Kultur, Schriftenreihe ‘Ausblicke’, Bermann-Fischer Verlag, Stockholm
1938. [Verz. Werken VII, p. 442 vg.]
always sprung up in very restricted circumstances of power and output, and that
the big State as such never added a single one to them. The idol of bigness once
set up continues to devour us. This over-emphasis on size and quantity pervades
our social thinking of to-day to such a degree that by this alone the way back to real
civilization seems badly blocked.
The next obstacle to be mentioned here is of a subtler character. I am inclined to
call it modern man's inaccessibility to persuasion. Perhaps former ages were not
much better than ours in this respect. All the same, as a feature of social life it is
very striking just now. On the face of it it is in contradiction to what we should be
allowed to expect. Man is supposed to be a reasonable being. If he really were, his
mind when holding some opinion should yield to such arguments as proved its
untenableness. But in actual fact it seldom shows itself willing or capable to do so,
even on scientific matters, not to speak of political or confessional opinions. It is
quite probable that in some of the earlier periods in history the power of the logical
argument to convince a man of being wrong was much greater than it is now. The
Greeks attached a great importance to the art of persuading other men. We all have
heard about Persuasion sitting on the lips of Pericles. Persuasion was the Sophist's
professional art. The whole Platonic dialogue would lose its sense without a certain
amount of susceptibility to persuasion by argument. The same holds good of later
epochs of a markedly intellectualist type, e.g., those of the wars of religion, and of
rationalism. Conversions between the Catholic and the Protestant side were always
frequent. They presuppose a susceptibility to conviction which to-day would seem
almost entirely lost. Has there ever been a Fascist or a Communist who allowed
himself to be cured by having it expounded to him that his premises were wrong?
This imperviousness of modern man to reason is the more surprising because
universal education ought to have moulded him into a flexible thinking and doubting
being. In a talk about the increasing rigidity of mind among the younger generations
M. Paul Valéry put in the remark: ‘Mais Monsieur, le doute se perd’.
Instead of that pale but venerable goddess called Peitho, Persuasion, we have
now Propaganda. Propaganda is the art of making other people believe what you
do not believe yourself. Opinions are prescribed, prepared and administered to the
masses like medicine in a giant clinic. It is questionable whether the mental attitude
of the masses still
deserves the name of an opinion and whether it would not be better described as
a simple reflex. Anyhow its inflexibility and perversion will constitute a very serious
hindrance to the restoration of a free and living mode of civilization.
It will seem contradictory, if, after having indicated inaccessibility to reason and
argument as a dangerous state of modern man, causing excessive and persistent
distortions of opinion, we now go on to call our next item on the list of obstacles by
the name of shallowness and feebleness of convictions and opinions. The one
seems to exclude the other. The fanatical clinging to parties and programmes and
catchwords and rallying cries all over the world, the grim consistency in carrying-out
tenets of the most inhuman kind, would seem to speak of passionate strength in
holding to the opinions once adopted. Two historical instances from the recent past
will suffice to show this expectation to be unfounded. The history of Europe knows
two epochs rightly called age of the martyrs, in which men and women willingly died
for ideas they believed in, because they represented for them perfect and eternal
truth. One is the age of early Christianity, the other that of the splitting of the Latin
Church in the sixteenth century. We moderns, whatever vindication the future may
have in store again for the Christian faith, mostly prefer to speak of ideologies rather
than of confessions. An ideology is a more or less consistent system of some often
rather crude and simplistic ideas serving as a spiritual basis in the strife for personal
or public welfare and power. Such an ideology is supposed to be held with all the
strength of conviction of which the man or the group is capable, even to the point
of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. In actual fact the ideologies most fervently adhered
to have a very weak persuasive power and are easily surrendered. The world is
very forgetful. Only twenty-five years ago it saw one of the mightiest ideologies
crashing down in ruins. Socialism had grown and grown ever more imposingly.
During more than half a century it had preached universal brotherhood of the workers
all over the world. The worker has no country, Marx taught. Proletarians of all
countries, unite. Socialists took pride in being scornfully called Vaterlandslose
Gesellen, and remained decidedly anti-nationalistic to the last, that is to say to August
1, 1914, when Socialism suddenly fell flat and its followers rushed to arms for the
different countries at war. It was not the cause that had proved empty, but the
ideology.
The second instance of the shallowness of modern ideologies is so
fresh in our memory that it is hardly necessary to recall it. Two powerful States and
nations stand facing and opposing one another as the champions of two fiercely
proclaimed doctrinal systems of policy and economy, two Weltanschauungen. One
of them especially aspires to world-wide ideals of earthly bliss and perfection.
Suddenly the two join hands, forgetting not only the purport of their conflicting
ideologies but also the heaps of invective and abuse they had until the last moment
been slinging at each other. The one keeps true to its monstrous theory of national
domination, the other, hitherto the champion of a universal cause and of a creed of
humanity and peace, shamelessly reveals itself as a conquering power of the most
vulgar type. The amazing and ominous thing about this is not the fact that such
political reversals happen but that the nations involved suffer the doctrines, for years
preached to them as a gospel, and the mutual hate and contempt, artificially infused
in to them, suddenly to be forsaken and wiped out. The wholesale renunciations of
all that authority had always held up as the highest truth demanding fanatical
adherence, must be hard to swallow for individuals of some degree of culture. It is
a paradoxical state of affairs. On the one hand these so-called ideologies are inflated
with passion and delusion. They would seem to fill the mind to the bursting-point.
On the other hand they can be pricked by the simplest practical circumstance of the
moment and fall down. Evidently these ideologies are not the sort of thing the early
Christian or the Protestant and Catholic martyrs of the sixteenth century died for.
But, it will be asked, do not people die for these ideologies in thousands? No
doubt, but it would be rash to infer that the nations are dying for the several ideologies
professed by their leaders. It is their country they are dying for. Here is the awful
tragedy of modern war. Leviathan State, having fettered and paralysed civilization,
is swallowing up all it can get hold of: the minds, the hearts, the lives of men, no
matter what conception of cosmos or society may stand behind the furious combat
of the parties.
There is still another grave obstacle which is liable to prevent cultural resurrection,
the growing heterogeneity of the cultural ideal and of culture itself within the range
of Western civilization. A really uniform Western civilization never existed, and could
not exist. Horizontally according to national and geographical lines, and vertically
according to classes and groups, our hemisphere has always presented that rich
and fine pattern of as many cultural units as there were
countries and nations. For many centuries the general type of Western civilization
was conditioned by the Christian religion. After its hold on the minds as the
dominating factor of social life slackened, there still remained for some time, say
from about 1700 to 1850, a common aspiration towards an ideal of universal
civilization based on freedom, peace, tolerance, prosperity, humanity and education.
The force which challenged the universalism of liberal ideals was Socialism. It
shattered the liberal illusion by proclaiming the victory of the working man's cause
the only way to the fulfilment of the promised bliss. But in so doing it not only
maintained but even exalted the ideal of a uniform, or at least homogeneous
world-civilization. Up to 1914 nobody could suspect that, instead of the day of
reckoning coming near, an opposite current would set in, leading to the splitting of
the ideal of homogeneous culture itself.
After 1918 the world was supposed to be safe for democracy, except for the
danger of bolshevism. Meanwhile hyper-nationalism had begun to spread. It appeared
first in a form that appealed to the sound instincts of those pursuing an efficacious
policy, viz., Italian fascism, then in that of German national-socialism, deeply tinged
with the rancour of the lost war and rendered unsound from the beginning by the
agelong inferiority-complex of the German nation. Both these forms soon developed
a tendency to hem in national culture within the borderlines of the State. They
imposed culture in a special, regularized form, and by coercive measures. They
extolled primeval national self-glorification and vainglory and they were able to
impose themselves on their peoples only because it was the half-educated masses
who were the masters now. One powerful nation after another set up an ideal of a
self-sufficient and separate civilization, renouncing and often abusing others who
wished to maintain the older values, and virtually isolating themselves form the
domain of a world-community. Standards of opinion and conduct, strange,
unbelievable and sometimes disgusting to the world at large, became officially
approved and prescribed doctrines at the other side of some European frontier.
Even the measure of sanity is no longer identical in all countries.
It is clear that the mutual decrying of standpoints, systems and doctrines must
lead to a helpless confusion of ethical and rational concepts in the common man's
brain. His ethical equipment nowadays is poor enough, as it is. It is all very well to
do away with ethics on philosophical grounds. It is easy enough to deny morality as
a force or goodness
sent day civilization. Civilization always tends to grow luxurious, and thereby to
decay. Ours has certainly become exuberant in nearly every respect. Honour, valour,
firmness, resignation and many other good things that we stand in need of, have
always been the product of some state of civilization in which sobriety and simplicity
reigned throughout, as they did in the best days of Arab, Japanese or Roman culture.
If a civilized world cannot subsist without retrieving some of these values it is
difficult to see other resources or promises of recovery but in our will to regain them.
Whether we shall succeed will depend on the number of peoples and of persons all
over the earth who remain anxious to select their own culture, and wish to keep
together in some sort of mental aristocracy, of whatever kind it may be. Probably
the greater part of the world is not willing to pass from democracy to demonocracy,
bad pun and worse Greek though this may be. Let it be excused, because most
truly the choice now seems to lie between pandemonium and pandemium, if this
latter substantive may be excused too. It might serve to denote a world-wide society
in which all peoples or nations, while keeping their previous individuality and
particularity, would be able to live together held by a common bond of mutual and
universal obligation, firm enough to preclude war and loose enough to guarantee
freedom.