Whither Are We Civilizing?

A Rapid Survey of the Profits and Penalties of Civilization, Past, Present and Future

ALDOUS HUXLEY

WE call Plato a civilized man; we also call President Coolidge a civilized man. Which of them is more civilized? Greece had a civilization, so had Egypt and Babylonia, so has still their surviving contemporary, China, so have Western Europe and America. Which is the highest of these civilizations? Twentieth-century patriots—for one can be patriotic about one's native time as well as one's native place—will give the palm to Coolidge and the contemporary West. Naturally; what is near is always impressive. A cottage two yards away can eclipse the sun. Reason, however, demonstrates that the sun is really larger than the cottage, though considerably further away from ourselves. What reason can do to correct our perceptions of things in space, it can do equally effectively for our perceptions of events in time. Immediacy foreshortens history just as illusion foreshortens space. Abstracting ourselves from the first immediate impression, we are able, by the aid of reason to form some conception of the real magnitude of happenings, whose remoteness in time makes them seem smaller and less significant than the apparently enormous events in our immediate temporal vicinity.

BUT even when we have made our preliminary rational effort and discounted our natural tendency to overrate the size and importance of the near, we are still confronted by enormous difficulties. It is fairly easy to realize that the civilizations of Greece and China are not really quite so small as their remoteness makes them seem. But when it comes to measuring their respective magnitudes, when it is a matter of fixing their positions in the scale of civilization and showing how they stand in relation to the contemporary West, we find ourselves sadly perplexed. For measurements cannot be made without rulers; quantity and position cannot be compared, unless we have some fixed scale in terms of which to compare them. The difficulty of measuring and comparing civilizations consists in the fact that we have no rulers and no scales in terms of which to make our measurements. Or rather, we have no single ruler, no one scale; we are embarrassed by an almost indefinite wealth of possible measuring rods, by a multitude of vague and incommensurable scales. This is inevitable. For though "civilization" is a single word, the phenomena it connotes are very numerous and belong to a great variety of material and spiritual categories.

Historically, the basis of all civilization is technology. Tools gave man a command over nature which he could not have obtained without them. Tools delivered humanity from the tyranny of blind evolutionary forces. Tools created the wealth and leisure, without which art, science, philosophy would have been all but impossible. Technological achievement is a symbol and condition of civilization. Along with the other material aspects of civilization —wealth and luxury—it is easily measurable. But technological achievement, wealth and luxury are not the only symptoms of civilization (though a great many people in the industrialized West talk and write as though they were). We are agreed to demand of a civilized society other things than material prosperity and efficiency. We demand art, metaphysics, literature, science. (Which comes to very much the same thing as demanding men of genius.) We demand an art of life and individual happiness. We demand (we moderns at any rate; for humanitarianism is a recent invention) political democracy, equality of all individuals before the law, universal education. It would be possible to extend this list of the components of a desirable civilization. But this summary catalogue contains, I think, all the principal ingredients which the average person would include in his enumeration of the things that go to make up a civilization. A man of science would probably add foresight for the future of the species as a desideratum. A historian would be interested in the civilization's stability.

IT is sufficiently obvious that many of these components of civilization are very hard to measure. Who, for example, is going to decide whether Chinese art is superior to that of the Greeks or the Egyptians? We are perhaps justified in saying that any one of these systems of art is superior to, shall we say, negro art, for the good reason that primitive art is less various and less in amount. True, if our taste runs that way, we may say that negro sculpture is better than the sculpture of fifth century Greece. But Greek art as a whole can be regarded as superior because there is more of it. It is a question of variety of excellence. But where the arts of several highly developed civilizations must be compared, one is reduced to personal taste. The difficulties of assessing the value of civilizations on artistic grounds are well illustrated by such authors as Spengler and Flinders Petrie. The opinions of these two writers with regard to the artistic quality of works belonging to different epochs do not agree, and they consequently disagree in their evaluation of the corresponding civilizations. Which of them is right? De gustibus is the only answer.

Still more difficult is it to measure the amount of individual happiness in any given society. Works of art have an actual visible or audible existence; they are there to be judged. But happiness is intangible. Who will venture to pronounce dogmatically on the happiness or unhappiness of any individual with whom he is not intimately acquainted? The best we can do is to make more or less intelligent guesses.

Having thus hinted at the difficulty of measuring the components of civilization, we may go on to enquire how far these various components can co-exist in one and the same society—or rather (since we are still too ignorant to be able to make such a generalization) how far they have co-existed in any actual society. For example, have art, science, metaphysics and the other generally recognized spiritual components of civilization been found to co-exist with humanitarianism and democratic institutions? The answer is, surely: No. The societies in which the highest pitch of spiritual civilization was reached were either slave-holding, caste-ridden, or feudal. In the century and a half, from 1450 to 1600 the tiny city state of Florence produced a far larger quantity of what is generally admitted to be good art and literature than the whole of America, during the corresponding period from the War of Independence to the present day. Whether there is any necessary and causal connection between humanitarianism and political democracy on the one hand and dearth of artistic creation on the other it is, of course, quite impossible to say. It is perhaps significant that America, besides being the most democratic, is also the most highly technicized of any country. There may perhaps be a causal connection between hypertrophied technology and atrophied art. On the other hand there may not. We are not in a position to generalize.

ANOTHER question: how far is highly developed technology compatible with individual happiness? The difficulty of measuring happiness renders this a very speculative question. But the restlessness and dissatisfaction expressed by workers in the modern technicized world are certainly signficant. A starving man is obviously less happy than one who has enough to eat. Modern industrialism has perhaps diminished the relative number of underfed human beings (though by leading to vast increase of population it has probably not diminished the absolute number), and to that extent it has increased individual happiness. Has it increased it in any other way? I will not venture to answer. But there are many sociologists who affirm that the life of the modern factory worker is less satisfactory, in spite of the luxuries and amusements provided by technology, than that of the artisan of earlier epochs.

Again, is highly developed technology compatible with foresight for the future of the species? Up till now it certainly has not been. More planetary capital has been wantonly consumed during the modern industrial epoch than during all the period of man's previous existence on earth. If we go on at the present rate, our world will soon be bankrupt. In this respect civilizations like the Chinese are superior to ours. The traditional Chinese method of providing for the manuring of the land may not, in our eyes and to our noses, be precisely elegant. But it is perfectly rational and economical. In China not a grain of phosphorus pentoxide is allowed to go out of circulation. It has thus been possible for Chinese agriculture to support a vast population during thousands of years.

To risk sweeping generalizations about cause and effect would be rash and foolish. The most that the above examples allow us to affirm is that, as a matter of historical fact, no civilization containing all the components we now consider desirable has ever existed. Our own epoch is unprecedentedly technicized and wealthy. It is an age of democracy, humanitarianism and universal education. It has produced scientific work of the first order. But there will, I think, be a fairly general agreement that in the sphere of art, literature and music, our twentieth-century civilization is inferior to many earlier ones, which were in their turn inferior to ours in technology, humanitarianism and scientific discovery. Whether there is more or less individual happiness under the modern Western regime than existed at other times and places I leave an open question. But when we come to consider the future of the race we must admit that our civilization is incomparably more wasteful, improvident and destructive than any which has preceded it. In this context we may also-consider the relative durability of civilizations. In spite of constantly repeated invasions and conquests, the Chinese and Indian civilizations have lasted for thousands of years. They are what they were. Beyond a certain point there has been little progress or decadence. They continue, in spite of everything, to exist. Our modern Western civilization never stands still; but is it likely to last as long as the civilization of China? The most patriotic modern must admit that stability hardly seems to be the strong point of contemporary Western societies.

Continued on page 124

(Continued from page 64

That civilization has disadvantages has been a commonplace at least since the time of Rousseau. It is significant, for example, that one of the recognized w'ays of measuring the degree of civilization attained by any given society should be to count the number of suicides annually committed by its members. A high suicide rate is found empirically to be closely correlated with high civilization. Equally striking correlations could doubtless be established between high civilizations and a high rate of drunkenness, neurasthenia, cancer, sexual perversity, tuberculosis, diabetes, boredom and bad teeth. By investigating the nature and causes of the various mental and bodily ailments which are peculiarly the product of civilized life, we may be able to form a rational conception of the ideally desirable civilization. It is already known, for example, that lack of fresh air, sunlight and exercise, excessive or ill-chosen nourishment, overcrowding and bad hygenic conditions are responsible for many of the most characteristic diseases of modern civilized life. It is hardly less clear that the boredom, perversities, neurasthenia and discontent so common in civilized societies, are due to the suppression or discouragement, by modern conditions of existence and modern customs, of certain fundamental instinctive and emotional activities. Drunkenness is a method of escaping from the prison of civilized existence. To be drunk is to take a brief holiday from enforced respectability, efficiency and intellectualism. Suicide is a man's permanent holiday from the worries of civilized life. The modern world is full of physical and mental cripples. The ideal civilization is one which does not maim the civilized. In modern civilized societies the man, in Rousseau's words, is sacrificed to the citizen—the whole instinctive, emotional, physiological being is sacrificed to the specialized intellectual part of every man which performs the socially useful function. To eliminate the causes of most physical diseases will be a fairly easy matter. But we cannot feel so certain that it will ever be possible entirely to prevent the sacrifice of the instinctive and emotional man to the intellectually specialized citizen. The advantages of civilization must be paid for. Tbe art of getting something for nothing has not yet been discovered. To find it out will be the greatest task of our posterity.