Carroll Quigley on Western Ideology
The following is an abridged excerpt from Carroll Quigley’s The Evolution of Civilizations. The whole book is worth reading, and regular readers know that it’s a huge influence on my thinking. (Chapter 6 can safely be skipped).
I’ve been going through the posts on Western culture from Richard Ngo’s 21st Century Civilization Curriculum and it reminded me of Quigley’s analysis. His is the best characterization I’ve seen of what distinguishes the ideology of Western civilization from the other civilizations.
We might begin by saying that Western ideology is optimistic, moderate, hierarchical, democratic, individualistic yet social, and dynamic. All these terms refer only to aspects of the whole and do not really get us to its essence. This essence might be summed up in the belief that “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” Before we attempt to analyze this rather cryptic statement, we should say a few words about the more superficial aspects.
The Western outlook is optimistic because it believes that the world is basically good and that the greatest good lies in the future. … Western ideology believes that the material is good and the spiritual is better but that they are not opposed to each other since the material world is necessary for the achievement of the spiritual world. The world and the flesh are good because they were both made by God (as in the Old Testament). The material world is necessary to the spiritual in two ways: (1) no soul exists without a body and (2) no soul can be saved except by its own efforts and cooperative actions with other persons, both of which can be achieved only by bodily actions in this world.
…
The democratic and individualistic aspects of the Western outlook were always present, and go back, like other aspects, to the New Testament. They rest on the belief that all men have souls fit for salvation and, in the long run, have equal opportunity to achieve salvation. These ideas also appear in Christ’s concern with the downtrodden and oppressed, in the belief that the first and greatest sin was pride (the sin of Lucifer) and that the greatest virtue was humility, in the Beatitudes and in many parables (such as that of the lost sheep). It is worthy of note that all these points are concerned not only with the individual’s relationship to himself and to God but also with his relationship to his fellow men.
…
All these different aspects of the Western outlook cluster about the essence of the outlook that we have tried to express in the statement that “Truth unfolds through a communal process.” The outlook to which this statement refers lies at the foundation of Western culture and is reflected equally in its religion, its politics, its science, and its economics. This outlook assumes, first, that there is a truth or goal for man’s activity. Thus it rejects despair, solipsism, skepticism, pessimism, and chaos. It implies hope, order, and the existence of a meaningful objective external reality. And it provides the basis for science, religion, and social action as the West has known these.
Second, this attitude assumes that no one, now, has the truth in any complete or even adequate way; it must be sought or struggled for. Thus this outlook rejects smugness, complacency, pride, and personal authority in favor of the Christian virtues and a kind of basic agnosticism (with the implication “We don’t yet know everything”), as well as the idea of achievement of good through struggle to reach the good. The earliest great work of German literature, Parzival, has as its subtitle “The Brave Man Slowly Wise.” This is typical of the Western ideology’s belief that wisdom (or any real achievement) comes as a consequence of personal effort in time. The same idea is to be found in Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Shakespeare’s tragedies (taken as a whole), and in Beethoven’s symphonies.
There are two important ideas here: one is that no one has the whole truth now but that it can be approached closer and closer in the future, by vigorous effort, and the other is that no single individual does this or achieves this, but that it must be achieved by a communal effort, by a kind of cooperation in competition in which each individual’s efforts help to correct the errors of others and thus help the development of a consensus that is closer to the truth than the actions of any single individual ever could be. We might call these two aspects the temporal and the social. They are covered in our maxim by the words “unfolds” and “social.”
There is also a third idea here; namely, that the resulting consensus is still not final, although far superior to any earlier or more individual version. Thus the advance of mankind or of any single individual is an endless process in which truth (or any achievement, even the development of an individual’s personality) is constantly approached closer and closer without ever being finished or reached.
We might mention also another phase of this outlook; namely, the idea that the cooperative effort that unfolds truth through a continuously developing consensus is a competitive process. More accurately it is cooperation through competition, as a game is. This refers to a social process that is superficially competitive but fundamentally cooperative, or, viewed in another way, a situation in which individuals compete and even struggle together for a higher social end (the consensus). This is a dialectic process and is one of the heritages from Classical antiquity, where this idea of the emergence of truth from pluralistic debate in the market place is found in the earlier dialogues of Plato and of other thinkers.
…
The same idea about the social (and dialectic) unfolding of truth is at the foundation of Western science. It assumes that science is never static or fully achieved, but pursues a constantly receding goal to which we approach closer and closer from the competition-cooperation of individual scientists, each of whom offers his experiments and theories to be critically reexamined and debated by his fellow scientists in a joint effort to reach a higher (and temporary) consensus.
The same outlook appears in the basic political ideas of the West. These are liberal and not authoritarian. They cannot be authoritarian because no individual or institution has full and final truth; instead a fuller and more complete truth emerges as a guide to social activity from the free debate in free assembly of all men’s partial truths.
…
The same kind of pluralist outlook is the real justification of capitalism and of all laissez-faire or pluralist economic systems so typical of the West even in its early period when economic development was taking its first steps.
…
Thus we see the basic ideology of the West reflected in all aspects of the society, and continuing to influence ideas and actions even after it has been explicitly rejected. It is, for example, behind the theories of such late and “unconventional” thinkers as Darwin or Marx, both of whom believed that the Better emerged from the Good by the superficial struggles of the many to achieve what could never have been reached by any single individual alone. In fact, of these two, Marxist dialectic materialism is rather closer to the Western tradition than Darwin’s struggle for existence is. Marx, like his mentor Hegel, was Western in his belief that progress is achieved through struggle, but, like Hegel, he committed the Western sin of pride (the sin of Lucifer) in the intellectual arrogance which expected achievement of a final goal in the material world and in the near future.