Chapter 4— The Pattern of Change
The culture of a society can be divided into six aspects: military, political, economic, social, religious, intellectual. There are connections between these aspects; and in each aspect there are very close connections between the present and the past. To understand the present state of society we need to examine the past state of each aspect and its relation to the others. Naturally we cannot talk intelligently unless we have a clear definition of what we mean by the words we use. Thus, the definitions:
- Organization of power - The political aspect
- The Military aspect of Western Civilization
- The Rise of Authoritarian Government
- The Political Level in Western Civilization
- The social level of culture
- The shift of control
1)The organization of power refers to the methods of obtaining obedience in the society by the political level of society. By force, buying it, or by persuasion, each of these methods reflects a social aspect (military, economic, or intellectual) respectively. The politics of today is a development of the methods used to obtain obedience in the society in an earlier period.
Because of the changes in the 20th of the social aspects of western civilization and their relationships, all this as it was influenced by other cultures and vice versa; we need to oversimplify the sequence of events to get a general understanding of what transpired. perhaps then, we’ll be able to raise the level of our understanding by bringing into our minds, little by little, some of the complexities which do exist in the world itself.
2) On the military level there are generally two stages in civilization, a stage of equal capability among all members of the society and a period of advanced weaponry that requires what is termed specialists. In the twentieth century the chief development was a transition from the earlier to the latter as weapons and technology developed. In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such weapons can usually force the majority who lack them to obey; thus, a period of specialist weapons tends to give rise to a period of minority rule and authoritarian government. But a period of amateur weapons is a period in which all men are roughly equal in military power, a majority can compel a minority to yield, and majority rule or even democratic government tends to rise. # The medieval period was a period of knights, minority rule and authoritarian government. Even when the medieval knight was made obsolete by the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of firearms, these new weapons were expensive and difficult to use, thus authoritarian government continued even though that government through musketeers. But after 1800, guns became cheaper to obtain and easier to use. By 1840 citizens replaced specialized armies and democracy raised.
# Apparently access to weaponry determines or at least affects the character of the government. If weapons are easy to obtain and use than democracy rises, if they are not authoritarianism rises. In the 21st century we have cybersecurity and technology that allows the average person a powerful weapon. If organized a group with cybersecurity capability can pose a threat to even countries since it requires ability and not just resources which makes it harder to access since smart and capable people have the potential of not being easily brainwashed by the social system. For a democracy or a republic to exist, decentralization of violence is vital.
The elements of communication and transportation for military activity are vital. That’s why in the 19th century the appearance of mass armies (because of the population explosion), created a need for the development of those technologies. The solution before these technologies were developed was to plan beforehand an operation against a specific opponent, with an established timetable and detailed instructions for each military unit. This plan was so inflexible that the signal to mobilize was practically a signal to attack a specified neighboring state because the plan, once initiated, could not be changed, or slowed up. With this method Prussia created the German Empire by smashing Austria in 1866 and France in 1871. By 1900 all the states of Europe had implemented the same plan so that in 1914, when the first signal came the states of Europe leaped at each other.
3) The Rise of authoritarian government in the twentieth century was made possible by two changes in the military situation. On the one hand, communications and transportation developed so much that mobilization ceased to be equivalent to attack, and attack ceased to be equivalent to total war. On the other hand, specialist weapons became superior to amateur weapons. This resulted in the drafted army of citizen-soldiers being replaced by a smaller army of specialist soldiers, and authoritarian government began to replace democratic government.
The Political Level in Western Civilization changed because of the need to find an acceptable basis of allegiance which could win loyalty over increasingly larger groups of people. This need was solved by nationalism and the rise of the state which was achieved by evolving the feudal monarchies into governments using the development of weapons, transportation, and communications to compel obedience over wider and wider areas.
This shift was not possible for the larger dynastic states which ruled over many different linguistical and national groups. By the year 1900 three old dynastic monarchies were being threatened with disintegration by the rising of nationalism. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire of the Romanovs, did disintegrate because of the defeats of the First World War. But the smaller territorial units which replaced them, states like Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Lithuania, organized largely on the basis of language, reflecting adequately enough the nationalistic sentiments of the nineteenth century, but they reflected very inadequately the developments in weapons, communications, transportation, and in economics of the 20th century. By the middle of the 20th century these developments were reaching a point where states which could produce the latest instruments of coercion were in a position to compel obedience over areas much larger than those occupied by peoples speaking the same language or otherwise regarding themselves as sharing a common nationality. Even as early as 1940 it began to appear that some new basis more continental in scope than existing nationality groups must be found for the new super-states which were beginning to be born. It became clear that the basis of allegiance for these new super-states of continental scope must be ideological rather than national. Thus, the 19th century's national state began to be replaced by the 20th century's ideological bloc. At the same time, the shift from amateur to specialist weapons made it likely that the new form of organization would be authoritarian rather than democratic as the earlier national state had been. However, Britain's power and influence in the 19th century was so great in the first third of the twentieth century that the British parliamentary system continued to be copied everywhere. This happened in Russia in 1917, in Turkey in 1908, in Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1918-1919 and in most of the states of Asia (such as China in 1911). #
# Allegiance is the commitment of a subordinate to a master or of an individual to a group or a cause. The very definition shows us the historic evolution of political organization. In the Middle Ages allegiance was based on personal ties of a group to a feudal lord, in the 19th century it was replaced by nationalism and gave rise to the state. In the 20th century, political organization began a transition to allegiance based on ideology giving the power of rulers to those who control the ideology of a population. We can see it if we look at the ideological character of the social response to covid.
4)The economic level of western civilization can be divided into four aspects:
• (a) energy;
• (b) materials;
• (c) organization;
• (d) control.
No economic goods can be made without energy and materials. The history of energy has two parts and each part two stages. The first part consists of energy being produced by living organism, first by people and then by animals (1000-1830 A.C.). The second part (since 1830) consists of a stage which used coal in steam engines, and a stage which used petroleum in internal-combustion engines. The first stage ended at about 1900 or a little later. The development of the use of materials we can speak of as follows:
• age of iron (before 1830),
• age of steel (1830-1910),
• age of alloys, light metals, and synthetics (since 1910).
Naturally, all these dates are arbitrary and approximate, since the different periods started at different dates in different areas, diffusing outward from their origin in the core area of Western Civilization in northwestern Europe.
In the developments of economic organization, we can see a sequence of six periods which show different forms of economic organization.In the early Middle Ages, Western Civilization had an economic system that was almost entirely agricultural, organized in self-sufficient manors, with almost no commerce or industry. To this manorial-agrarian system there was added, after about 1050, a new economic system based on trade in luxury goods of remote origin for the sake of profits. This we might call commercial capitalism. It had two periods of expansion, one in the period 1050-1270, and the other in the period 1440-1690. The typical organization of these two periods was the trading company. The next period of economic organization was the stage of industrial capitalism, beginning about 1770, and characterized by owner management through the single-proprietorship or the partnership. The third period we might call financial capitalism. It began about 1850, reached its peak about 1914, and ended about 1932. Its typical forms of economic organization were the limited-liability corporation and the holding company. It was a period of financial or banker management rather than one of owner management as in the earlier period of industrial capitalism. This period of financial capitalism was followed by a period of monopoly capitalism. In this fourth period, typical forms of economic organization were cartels and trade associations. This period began to appear around 1890, took over control of the economic system from the bankers about 1932, and is distinguished as a period of managerial dominance in contrast with the owner management and the financial management of the two periods immediately preceding it. Many of its characteristics continue, even today, but the dramatic events of World War II and the post-war period put it in such a different social and historical context as to create a new, sixth, period of economic organization which might be called "the pluralist economy." The features of this sixth period will be described later.
Because these six periods were built on top of each other, many aspects of preceding systems survived into the new systems. Also, all the later periods are called capitalism. This term means "an economic system motivated by the pursuit of profits within a price system." The commercial capitalist sought profits from the exchange of goods; the industrial capitalist sought profits from the manufacture of goods; the financial capitalist sought profits from the manipulation of claims on money; and the monopoly capitalist sought profits from manipulation of the market to make the market price and the amount sold such that his profits would be maximized.
As a result of these various stages of economic organization, Western Civilization has passed through four major stages of economic expansion marked by the approximate dates 970-1270, 1440-1690, 1770-1928, and since 1950. Three of these stages of expansion were followed by the outbreak of imperialist wars, at the end of the stage of expansion. These were the Hundred Years' War and the Italian Wars (1338-1445, 1494-1559), the Second Hundred Years' War (1667-1815), and the world wars (1914-1945).
Economic control has passed through four stages in Western Civilization. Of these the first and third were periods of "automatic control" in the sense that there was no conscious effort at a centralized system of economic control, while the second and fourth stages were periods of conscious efforts at control (Austrian and Keynesian economics?). These stages, with approximate dates, were as follows:
1. Automatic control: manorial custom, 650-1150
2. Conscious control
a. municipal mercantilism, 1150-1450
b. state mercantilism, 1450-1815
3. Automatic control: laissez-faire in the competitive market, 1815-1934
4. Conscious control: planning (both public and private), 1934
It should be evident that these four stages of economic control are closely associated with the stages previously mentioned regarding kinds of weapons on the military level or the forms of government on the political level. The same five stages of economic control have a complex relationship to the six stages of economic organization already mentioned, the important stage of industrial capitalism overlapping the transition from state mercantilism to laissez-faire, to a free market.
5) The social level of a culture consists mainly of demographic phenomena. Three notable changes on the social level in the 19th century and into the 20th century were the transition from growth in type B populations to type C. At about the same time or shortly after, the rise of monopoly capitalism and a shift from in which residence concentrated in the suburbs around the cities rather than in them.
Each of the stages in the development of economic organization was accompanied by the rise in status of a new social class. In the manorial agrarian system, it was the feudal nobility. The growth of commercial capitalism gave a new class of commercial bourgeoisie. The growth of industrial capitalism gave rise to two new classes, the industrial bourgeoisie, and the industrial workers. The development of financial and monopoly capitalism provided a new group of managerial technicians. The distinction between industrial bourgeoisie and managers essentially rests on the fact that the former control industry and possess power as owners, while managers control industry (also government or labor unions or public opinion) because they are skilled or trained in certain techniques. As we shall see later, the shift from one to the other was associated with a separation of control from ownership in economic life. The shift was also associated with what we might call a change from a two-class society to a middle-class society. Under industrial capitalism and the early part of financial capitalism, society began to develop into a polarized two-class society in which an entrenched bourgeoisie stood opposed to a mass proletariat. It was on the basis of this development that Karl Marx, about 1850, formed his ideas of an inevitable class struggle in which the group of owners would become fewer and fewer and richer and richer while the mass of workers became poorer and poorer but more and more numerous, until finally the mass would rise up and take ownership and control from the privileged minority. By 1900 social developments took a direction so different from that expected by Marx that his analysis became almost worthless, and his system had to be imposed by force in a most backward industrial country (Russia) instead of occurring inevitably in the most advanced industrial country as he had expected.
6) The Shift of Control brought about by the social developments which made Marx's theories obsolete were the result of technological and economic developments which Marx did not foresee. The energy for production was derived more and more from inanimate sources of power and less and less from human labor. As a result, mass production required less labor. But mass production required mass consumption so that the products of the new technology had to be distributed to the working groups as well as to others so that rising standards of living for the masses made the proletariat fewer and fewer and richer and richer. At the same time, the need for managerial and white-collar workers of the middle levels of the economic system raised the proletariat into the middle class in large numbers. The spread of the corporate form of industrial enterprise allowed control to be separated from ownership and allowed the latter to be dispersed over a much wider group, so that, in effect, owners became more and more numerous and poorer and poorer. And, finally, control shifted from owners to managers. The result was that the polarized two-class society envisaged by Marx was, after 1900, increasingly replaced by a mass middle-class society, with fewer poor and, if not fewer rich, at least a more numerous group of rich who were relatively less rich than in an earlier period. This process of leveling up the poor and leveling down the rich originated in economic forces but was speeded up and extended by governmental policies in regard to taxation and social welfare, especially after 1945. #
# I am not sure about the social welfare part since it is a form of taxation which opposes the effects of the free market based on the theoretical models that I have studied so far.
7) The Religious and Intellectual Stages of Culture, the higher levels of culture, display a sequence of stages similar to those which have been found in the more material levels. We shall make no extended examination of these at this time except to say that the religious level shifted from a basically secularist, materialist, and antireligious outlook in the late nineteenth century to a much more spiritualist and religious point of view in the course of the 20th century. At the same time a very complex development on the intellectual level has shown a profound shift in outlook from an optimistic and scientific point of view in the period 1860-1890 to a much more pessimistic and irrational point of view in the period following 1890. This shift in point of view, which began in a rather restricted group forming an intellectual vanguard about 1890, a group which included such figures as Freud, Sorel, Bergson, and Proust, spread downward to larger and larger sections of Western society in the course of the 20th century as a result of the devastating experience of two world wars and the great depression.