The Next Development in Man, page 18
The development of industrialism introduced a new element into the processes of society. All the aspects of industrialism were direct expressions of the quantitative method. As a research technique the method stimulated mechanical discovery; as a method for facilitating man's dominance over nature the method made possible the raising of the standard of life; as the channel of a multiplying and expansive tendency out of the control of the organizing processes of the human personality the method offered an unrestricted opportunity for personal greed, ambition, and aggression. In earlier civilizations the desire for profit and power had never been inflamed by the connivance of a systematic method of expansion.
By the middle of the century this process was gaining momentum, and steadily sapping the vitality of Europe's traditional institutions. Hitherto the instinctive tendencies had been molded into the pattern of European social life by a great system of traditions and ideals, religious, rational, and patriotic, but now society was being transformed by an incentive that bore no relation to the social order. The fierce lust to multiply and expand, whether in power, wealth, territory, or family, knew no restraint. The European dissociation of spontaneity and deliberation remained, but the new technical principles which were beginning to dominate behavior, unlike the great ideals of Europe's past, played no part in maintaining the organization of society. Europe had silently deserted the ideals which had maintained its dissociated state. During the nineteenth century only a few isolated thinkers realized that this must eventually result in an outbreak of the dissociated, and therefore distorted, instinctive tendencies. Europe and the West were on the way to an unholy marriage of distorted instinct and mechanical technique.
It is no figure of speech to regard the quantity method as having got out of control. The organizing processes of a healthy organism ensure that its behavior is such as to facilitate its own development. The fact that man has been able to civilize himself shows that some such self-regulating development has in the main dominated the history of the species. Local civilizations have displayed cycles imposed on this general trend, but so far neither the species as a whole, nor any important sub-group, has ever shown any persisting tendency to develop along a path which threatened its health as gravely as the world is threatened today through the spread of western techniques. There has been no cumulative masochistic tendency leading to failure to survive, no universal suicide, no mad development of behavior patterns unrelated to organic needs.
The main forms of human behavior can be regarded as expressing developments of tendencies which form part of man's instinctive and animal nature, and bear some relation to the primitive animal harmony and balance. The European dissociation was a radical departure from the animal harmony, but it provided a system of partial control. Even war has been limited by unwritten conventions which saved the fabric of community life. The discovery of a heuristic method set going for the first time in history a cumulative process which absorbed the vital energies of man and yet was not subject to any central co-ordinating control. It was as though in the hierarchy of the human system tendencies and energies flowed into the development of the new technique and in doing so escaped the dominance of the central organizing processes, just as at a lower level the proliferating cells of cancerous tissue may escape the dominance of the formative processes which mold and maintain the individual organs.
During the nineteenth century the new technique was definitely out of control; it was producing results which no one had desired or planned and yet were not expressions of instinctive or traditional tendencies. No one willed the social consequences of the industrial revolution. They were as far-reaching as some vast climatic or planetary disaster, yet they were the consequence not of arbitrary circumstance but of human action. The activities of countless individuals were producing results which apparently could not be controlled by any individual or group. A relentless transformation was proceeding of its own accord far beyond the range of deliberate intention, for man was not aware that he was intoxicated by quantity. The essential feature of laissez faire was the assumption that the automatic operation of the quantity symbols, through the actions of individuals organizing their behavior by means of them, would lead to the satisfaction of human needs. Thus, in a time of general expansion, the new resources of manpower, horsepower, and money power were dominated by private manipulation of the quantity symbols.
This is no allegory but a situation characteristic of the organization of behavior in organic communities using verbal and algebraic symbols, that is, in every human community at the appropriate stage. A man could sit at a desk in a perverted condition of sustained ecstasy, dream of numerical manipulations, and finally write a check or a cable. Driven by his lust for expansion, by the relentless passion for quantity which is more general than power, or wealth, or sex, and gives man the illusion of possessing all of these; without the catharsis of rhythmic relaxation or satisfying achievement, and therefore perpetually lusting for more; haunted by his own frustrated life and blind to the lives distorted by his money apparatus, he commanded the lives of countless men and women. Another nought on an order and the world-wide machinery of credit operated without scrutiny of purpose or result, and thousands more were able to live or compelled to die, to work more or less, to experience once again the instability of their employment. Every check written in this blind passion was a forgery of right, every company registered a conspiracy of theft, every dividend declared the further reproduction of greed.
The world has had opportunity of late to learn that strange allies collect when great issues are at stake. When ignorance and privilege struggle against vision and development, then all the vested interests are found together, however incompatible may seem their overt aims. That is obvious enough in the political field. But when the issue is that of abstract thought, systematic, static, and divorced from life, against the unitary organization of thought as one of the processes that make up the human community, the alliances are stranger still and largely unaware of their mutual co-operation.
The great capitalists and industrialists of the nineteenth century, in so far as they pursued the technique of expansion without scruple, were supported by the mathematical physicists who neglected the asymmetry of process and acclaimed elementary numbers as the sole key to the structure of nature. While science maintained the separation of abstract number from real process, it was scarcely surprising that vested interest would also succeed in maintaining the bluff that the esoteric truths of finance must operate without consideration of the concrete processes of social life. These deeper correlations are unmistakable if approached at their own level, and in the next chapter we shall see that the two partners of this particular alliance gave up the game at the same moment, as is appropriate, since their activities expressed a common prejudice. Yet it is misleading to ascribe any degree of conscious intent to such innocent instruments of the historical process; the capitalist and the quantitative scientist were working out the final consequences of tendencies that had begun with Plato and Archimedes, borne fruit in Kepler and Galileo, and were reaching their culmination in Carnegie, Ford, and Zaharoff, and -- as we shall see -- in Heisenberg. Yes, it would be unfair, and perhaps libelous, to accuse recent leaders of the West of a mature consciousness of their own historical significance.
The reckless development of industrialism did not go without challenge. The decay of humanism and the nihilism of the new outlook were evident to many throughout the nineteenth century. Behind the trumpeting of progress, which became more strident as the doom of European civilization approached and reassurance was needed, many warning voices were raised. Some were even listened to with tolerance as a pleasantly astringent contrast to the general optimism.
For each of the few who can be cited here, there must have been many other contemporaries who were losing the humanistic faith in the efficacy of rational idealism and in the power of the enlightened mind to control human fate. Schopenhauer, Marx, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and many others understood much of what was in store for Europe and the West. Uncontrolled industrialism and an excess of analytical thought were leading man to disaster; redemption might come from the renunciation of the will to power, from the inevitable pressure of the economic needs of the people, from a universal religious vision, or from aristocratic leadership, but not, according to these, through the free operation of the individual mind. Rational thought was a mere iridescence on the surging of the will to power, the historical-economic process, the divine purpose, or the vital impulse of man. These thinkers were at one in their repudiation of the assumptions of subjective humanism; the aims of humanism might be harmless enough, though that was itself doubtful, but man was clearly impotent to realize them. More comprehensive processes than those of the conscious mind control human destiny.
Such was the development of the quantity technique and its effect on the progress and decline of humanism. Throughout these aspects of the general transformation there can be traced one main positive component: the continuing achievements of theoretical and applied science in extending knowledge and gradually liberating man from poverty and disease. But this process of the differentiation of knowledge and behavior was uncontrolled and unstable, and if it had been the only constructive tendency which marked these centuries, the disorganization and despair would have been greater than they were.
Through the whole of this period another tendency was at work which, because later in development than these others, is of even greater importance for the interpretation of the twentieth century. We saw that as medievalism faded and humanism took root, the inhibitions which obscured man's view of nature began to fade. Man, as subject, looked out on nature with less prejudiced vision. To Kepler it was enough that God linked man and nature; to Bruno, his contemporary, it was not. For him, as for many thinkers, from Aristotle and Lucretius to Darwin, Marx, and Freud, the integrity of thought required that man must be understood as a part of nature.
This demand had little influence on the general tradition of European thought until the active personality of the humanist period began to draw the obvious conclusions from the many similarities between men and animals. The discovery of "universal laws of nature" gave prestige to the conception of one all-embracing natural order, the religious inhibitions grew still weaker, and an objective conception of man as part of the animal kingdom began to develop, and even his thought to be regarded as a process in conformity with the general order of nature. In Bruno, Spinoza, and Goethe we see this attitude developing through the forms appropriate to the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, or rather, to the genius of those centuries, which in this respect was many generations ahead of its time. Each of these men repudiated the European dualism, Bruno in a confused search for unity, Spinoza in a systematic demonstration of a kind more appropriate to static geometry than to his theme of God, nature, and man, and Goethe in an attitude to life expressed in poetry and philosophic aper�u. In Goethe the dualism of the thinking and feeling subject confronted by objective nature is finally rejected and a conscious attempt is made to fuse subjective experience with objective knowledge of man in intuitive formulations which are at once personal and biological.
One of the most profound, and for us certainly one of the most important consequences of quantitative science, because not yet exhausted, was the stimulus which it gave to this tendency to view man and society objectively. In the long run this stimulus outweighed the intensification of the European dualism. The fact that the science of quantity could not provide symbols or concepts appropriate to biological and human organization did not lessen this stimulus to objectivity, but it had the result that the objective picture of man which could be developed at the time lacked any principle of integration or form. Man was therefore regarded as a "machine," a term which begged all the crucial questions. A machine was a thing constructed of component parts, each part being a static independent entity, and the relations between the parts being those of changing spatial arrangement rather than the record of a common history. This conception of man as machine drew attention away from the organizing aspects of personality which are known subjectively, and this encouraged the decline of confidence in the powers of the subjective mind. The trend towards objectivity thus reinforced the decline of subjective humanism, and the state of science at the time was such that it could provide no adequate substitute.
Language is too restricted in its degrees of freedom to describe at one stroke this many-faceted transformation, for it must proceed in one dimension from word to word and from sentence to sentence, and thus cannot present simultaneously all the aspects of such a process. The historical process is a unitary transformation, a complex form steadily transforming itself, and is too rich for the thread of language to portray in a single sequence. Hence the need to retrace the centuries and follow through in turn the development of each component of the story. Orchestral music might portray the process in one movement: the bass instruments maintaining the slowly modulating rhythm of the genesis, development, and final disappearance of the dissociation, while the others trace the varied discords and harmonies of the changing human habits in which this fundamental rhythm is displayed. Even the musical image would involve too great a condensation, but it is relevant, since music is concerned with the non-verbal expression of this very architecture of the soul.
A better presentation of the transformation of Europe is given by the record of its art, through which the representatives of past times can speak directly to the receptive mind. But here we are reduced to words, and the attempt to express the changing structure of European man in conceptual form would imply a failure to recognize the diversity and complexity of the process, if it were attempted by any other method than unitary thought. Unitary concepts carry with them the implication that they can never achieve more than a partial conformity to the historical process of which they are themselves part. Late European or western man can understand something of his own history, precisely because that history has made him what he is and brought him to the verge of unitary thought.
Beneath the lovely cadences and threatening discords of humanism in decay there persists this major theme: through the discovery of the objective order of nature, the subject is losing his conviction of the autonomy of his own mind. This surrender of the conscious essence of all that had made Europe great is at the same time the prelude to the re-integration of the dissociated western soul. The separation of subject and object conditioned both the achievements and the limitations of the European tradition. The blended triumph and misery of the last century arise from the fact that those achievements and limitations must come to an end together. Subject and object can only be transcended in a single approach after the decay of the subjective ideals that inspired the old tradition. The objective order is more extensive than the individual subject; to achieve their fusion the subject must first accept the fact that his method of thought has rested on an illusion, the separation and autonomy of his own mental processes.
This step requires the courage that can discard what appears as beautiful and good, trusting that some truth will arise to give new conviction to the anxious soul. Has all the dreaming of Europe ended in this nightmare of recurrent total war? Failure and despair are the commonplaces of the individual life; as individuals we are all always in the grip of circumstance. But the despair of a tradition is graver than personal despair when it seems to herald the collapse of the only convictions that men can accept.
Yet thought, which has led us to this point, can also lead us on -- on one condition. To overcome a conflict which derives from the very origins of Europe, thought must be uncompromising in its demand for a single comprehensive method. This implies humility in the subject. If the facts have not already demonstrated the invalidity of the assumptions of humanism, then the need for a unitary method must now displace those assumptions. Once this is accepted, the scene is transformed, and a new world is at our feet. In renouncing a dream-illusion, man's imagined feet of clay are rediscovered as the tissues, organs, and tendencies which make him all that he is. We find that what we have surrendered is not the source of human dignity, but only what Europe mistook for its source.
The humiliation suffered by European man in the first half of the twentieth century -- which we shall consider in the next chapter -- expresses the final loss of the sense of the autonomy of the subject. Through all the fluctuations of European thought, the emphasis had been on man as subject, with the objective world as his field of operation. In the subject-object antithesis, the subject had been dominant and the object subordinate. Therefore in the continuous transformation which is leading towards the replacement of this antithesis by a unitary form, the first step was the transfer of emphasis from subject to object, the objective approach being the more comprehensive and reliable. The objective study of nature developed the mind further than could introspective idealism, and in the process of this development the emphasis inevitably swung over. Instead of subject being dominant to object, the object now dominated the subject, though in the new picture of objective nature there was no element corresponding to the constructive mental processes of the subject.
