467

*
Conditions for a recovery of civilization
In the Spring of 1935 I tried to make up a brief account of the general situation and
1
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.

* The Fortnightly, Vol. CXLVII (new series), April 1940, p. 390-400.

1 In the Shadow of To-morrow, English edition, Heinemann, London 1936. [Verz. Werken VII,
p 313 vg.]

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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
1
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.]

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bility of world trade reopened, the danger of a submersion of human culture by

despotism and the systematic enslaving of fellow-creatures dispelled. If these
conditions were fulfilled, would then the road be free for civilization to resume its
upward course? Five years ago doubts about the future of civilization were still so
rare that the possibility of its down-fall rather than of survival was in question. To-day
it is the possibility of redress which seems doubtful. In the present article we can
hardly do more than to point out some grave obstacles standing in the way of
recovery of a healthy state of civilization. We might call these obstacles Idola, after
Bacon's fashion, sources of error in judgment and action, impeding a favourable
development of human faculties. But before we come to these general obstacles
we have first to allude to some extremely unpleasant facts which await us in the
near future as a legacy of the present war. Part of the world will be mentally rotten
to the core as the result of the systematic heaping-up ofnonsense and falsehood
which sticks to civilization like a crust of decomposition not to be removed either by
reason or education. Whole generations will have been spoilt by the teaching of
absurd and malicious doctrines and the training in sterile occupations. When the
dismal work of goalers, spies, denouncers and slave-drivers comes to an end, a
host of these elements will still remain, a burden to the social life and civilization of
their native communities, a pest to their surroundings and a lasting hindrance to the
revaluation of culture. Nobody can as yet foresee how the very urgent task of clearing
the ground of these poisonous weeds will be handled. But it seems safe to say that
only those nations and groups which have escaped the extremes of mental infection
can furnish a starting-point for the process of recovery and renascence.
Among the general obstacles referred to above surely the most essential is a
deep-lying habit common to the whole of modern mankind, viz., the glorification of
size and quantity. Ever since the human mind began to lose hold of the old
Aristotelian system of measuring the world by quality the opposite tendency set in
of over-estimating the importance of quantity. Modern science was built up on
quantitative analysis. It revealed dimensions and distances in the universe
challenging our imagination of infinity. Technology learnt to accumulate masses of
energy unthinkable before. Politics through the boundless extension of the means
and methods of exercising power became the victim of its own limitless possibilities
of destructive action. It was forgotten in the meantime that the lasting values of
civilization have

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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

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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

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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

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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

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and veracity as universal values. Unfortunately it is not so easy to deny immorality,

lying and fraud because their presence is too manifest. Nobody does, as a matter
of fact. Is it not curious that just those sectarians of a moral system based on class
interest and nothing else show the largest command of moral indignation and
appropriate invective against their enemies? Has the history of religions already
taken notice of the following fact? - Repentance is perhaps the most highly spiritual
of all Christian virtues. It has always been so strictly linked up with the Christian
faith, that the looser Christendom of the newer ages had almost forgotten it. Who
rediscovered it? Who invented the new type of public repentance exhibited ad
nauseam in their big political trials of recent years? Soviet-repentance, the newest
article in our spiritual treasury!
The case for civilization would seem to stand rather badly. Large parts of the world
and numbers of individuals do not yet present signs of the wholesale contagion,
which does not mean they are immune from it. Can we detect signs that dispel the
alarming visions of impending decay? Is it possible to describe a probable basis for
regeneration and restoration of our civilization? We premised before that peace,
law and order by themselves will not be enough. Peace, law and order will not work,
unless they rest on the basis of a renewed sense of human culture. The most
indispensable, though still only preliminary condition for such a renewal will be the
restoration of political good faith. It is a platitude to repeat it, yet all the same it
remains an all-important truth. No orderly intercourse between states and nations
will ever be possible without a certain minimum of reliability universally acknowledged
and generally practised. Even the ordinary minimum commonly exhibited in trade
would be an enormous gain. Everybody admits that in trade you cannot do without
some form of mutual credit. Credit has become so worn in our common speech that
we hardly ever realize that it states most explicitly one of the highest ethical values
of human life. Literally credit means: he trusts, he has faith in some other person.
It expresses confidence, good faith, i.e., a certain sacrifice, a surrender of your own
absolute safety. Thus one of the most primitive forms of commerce, the so-called
Silent trade, reposes on a sort of balance between confidence and distrust. Is it not
strange that in the political field there are many who not only reject the necessity of
keeping faith, but also firmly believe that politics should be possible and even better
without it?

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Diplomacy, the inevitable instrument of politics, is often regarded as a play, and

rightly so. We are used to expect from it tricks and devices and secrecies and
dissimulations, all common in playing too. Still, we expect one thing more from our
partner than skill alone: fair play, which means keeping to the rules. Now fair play
again presupposes and includes mutual trust, good faith. If these latter are the
essential and indispensable conditions of playing, how much more indispensable
even must they be to this painfully bad performance called the life of nations!
So let us return to world-wide international good faith, once for all! Who begins?
- Here we meet once more with an obstacle of the gravest kind. Mutual confidence
between two parties requires first of all a common ground for them to stand upon.
Each should be convinced, if not of his reasons for keeping faith, then at least of
his duty to do so, Does such a common ground between the states and the nations
exist in the present world? It is doubtful, or more than that. The ultimate ground for
a mutual conviction of moral obligation can only reside in the metaphysical order of
things. Unfortunately our machines and all that have made us so extremely stupid
that most of us are likely to forget how we are linked up with the metaphysical at
every step we take, at every thought we form. In face of the metaphysical, even if
you should have no other word for it than simply death, all political concerns dwindle
into nothingness. A serious and active restoration of Christianity or of another of the
universal high forms of religion would be able to create the common ground and to
effect the state of mind indispensable to real culture. Anybody may answer for
himself, whether such a restoration seems near at hand.
If it is not, where are the regenerative forces to be looked for which may save
civilization? Are there any signs of the acquisitive life loosening its grip on human
collectivities or individuals? Or may we count as a healing factor the impending
general reduction of consumption, which Professor Carr sees as an inevitable result
1
of the crisis through which we are passing ? However healthy it may prove, it will
not be enough as long as it only affects material life. There must be a reduction of
cultural output and consumption as well. In my book, In the Shadow of Tomorrow,
I suggested the urgent need of a certain restriction of culture, a voluntary renunciation
by the human mind of all the superfluous, useless, trivial and insipid things that
weigh down on pre-

1 E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, p. 305.

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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.

Johan Huizinga, Geschiedwetenschap / hedendaagsche cultuur