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Om
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--[b]--
THE ECLIPSE OF COLONIALISM
Page 1178
The massive economic mobilization for World War II showed clearly
that there could be an equally massive post-war mobilization of
resources for prosperity.
Page 1184
It is usually not recognized that the whole economic expansion of
Western society rests upon a number of psychological attitudes that
are prerequisites to the system as we have it but are not often stated
explicitly. Two of these may be identified as:
1) future preference and
2) infinitely expandable material demand.
In a sense, these are contradictory since the former implies that
Western economic man will make almost any sacrifice in the present for
the same of some hypothetical benefit in the future while the latter
implies almost insatiable demand in the present. Nonetheless, both are
essential features of the overwhelming Western economic system.
Future preference came out of the Christian outlook and
especially the Puritan tradition which was prepared to accept almost
any kind of sacrifice in the temporal world for the sake of future
eternal salvation, willing to restrict their enjoyment of income for
the sake of capital accumulation.
The mass production of this new industrial system was able to
continue and to accelerate to the fantastic rate of the 20th century
so that today, the average middle-class family of suburbia has a
schedule of future material demands which is limitless.
Without these two psychological assumptions, the Western economy
would break down or would never have started. At present, future
preference may be breaking down and infinitely expanding material
demand may soon follow it in the weakening process. If so, the
American economy will collapse unless it finds new psychological
foundations.
Page 1187
In Asia, as is traditional along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, the
structure of societies had been one in which a coalition of army,
bureaucracy, landlords, and moneylenders have exploited a great mass
of peasants by extortion of taxes, rents, low wages, and high interest
rates in a system of such persistence that its basic structure goes
back to the Bronze Age empires before 1000 B.C.
CHAPTER XX: TRAGEDY AND HOPE, THE FUTURE IN PERSPECTIVE
THE UNFOLDING OF TIME
Page 1200
Weapons will continue to be expensive and complex. This means
that they will increasingly be the tools of professionalized, if not
mercenary, forces. All of past history shows that the shift from a
mass army of citizen-soldiers to a smaller army of professional
fighters leads, in the long run, to a decline of democracy.
Page 1204
When Khrushchev renounced the use of both nuclear war and
conventional violence, and promised to defeat the West by peaceful
competition, he was convinced that the Soviet Union could out-perform
the U.S. because it could, in his opinion, overcome the American lead
in the race for economic development that the Socialist way of life
would become the model for emulation by the uncommitted nations.
Page 1213
In other economies, when additional demands are presented to the
economy, less resources are available for alternative uses. But in the
American system, as it now stands, additional new demands usually lead
to increased resources becoming available for alternative purposes,
notably consumption. Thus if the Soviet Union embraced a substantial
increase in space activity, the resources available for raising
Russian levels of consumption would be reduced while in America, any
increases in the space budget makes levels of consumption also rise.
Page 1214
It does this because increased space expenditures provide
purchasing power for consumption that makes available previously
unused resources out of the unused American productive capacity.
This unused capacity exists in the American economy because the
structure of our economic system is such that it channels flows of
funds into the production of additional capacity (investment) without
any conscious planning process or any real desire by anyone to
increase our productive capacity. It does this because certain
institutions in our system (such as insurance, retirement funds,social
security payments, undistributed corporate profits and such) and
certain individuals who personally profit by the flow of funds not
theirs into investment continue to operate to increase investment even
when they have no real desire to increase productive capacity (and
indeed many decry it). In the Soviet Union, on the contrary, resources
are allotted to the increase of productive capacity by a conscious
planning process and at the cost of reducing the resources available
in their system for consumption or for the government (largely
defence).
Thus the meaning of "costs" and the limitations on ability to
mobilize economic resources are entirely different in our system from
the Soviet system and most others. In the Soviet economy, "costs" are
real costs, measurable in terms of the allotment of scarce resources
that could have been used otherwise. In the American system, "costs"
are fiscal or financial limitations that have little connection with
the use of scarce resources or even with the use of available (and
therefore not scarce) resources. The reason for this is that in the
American economy, the fiscal or financial limit is lower than the
limit established by real resources and therefore, since the financial
limits act as the restraint on our economic activities, we do not get
to the point where our activities encounter the restraints imposed by
the limits of real resources (except rarely and briefly in terms of
technically trained manpower, which is our most limited resource).
These differences between the Soviet and American economies are:
1) the latter has built-in, involuntary, institutionalized investment
which the former lacks;
2) the latter has fiscal restraints at a much lower level of economic
activity which the Soviet system also lacks.
Thus greater activity in defence in the USSR entails real costs
since it puts pressure on the ceiling established by limited real
resources while greater activity in the American defence or space
effort releases money into the system which presses upward on the
artificial financial ceiling, pressing it upward closer to the higher,
and remote, ceiling established by the real resources limit of the
American economy. This makes available the unused productive capacity
that exists in our system between the financial ceiling and the real
resources ceiling; it not only makes these unused resources available
for the government sector of the economy from which the expenditure
was directly made but also makes available portions of these released
resources for consumption and additional capital investment.
Page 1215
For this reason, government expenditures in the U.S. for things
like defence or space may entail no real costs at all in terms of the
economy as a whole. In fact, if the volume of unused capacity brought
into use by expenditures for these things (that is, defence and so on)
is greater than the resources necessary to satisfy the need for which
the expenditure was made, the volume of unused resources made
available for consumption or investment will be greater than the
volume of resources used in the governmental expenditure and this
additional government effort will cost nothing at all in real terms,
but will entail "negative" real costs. (Our wealth will be increased
by making the effort).
The basis for this strange, and virtually unique, situation is to
be found in the large amount of unused productive capacity in the U.S.
even in our most productive years. In the second quarter of 1962, our
productive system was running at a very high level of prosperity, yet
it was functioning about 12% below capacity, which represented a loss
of $73 billion annually. In this way, in the whole period from the
beginning of 1953 to the middle of 1962, our productive system
operated at $387 billion below capacity. Thus if the system had
operated near capacity, our defence effort over the nine years would
have cost us nothing, in terms of loss of goods or capacity.
This unique character in the American economy rests on the fact
that the utilization of resources follows flow lines in the economy
that are not everywhere reflected by corresponding flow lines of
claims on wealth (that is, money). In general, in our economy the
lines of flow of claims on wealth are such that they provide a very
large volume of savings and a rather large volume of investment, even
when no one really wants new productive capacity; they also provide an
inadequate flow of consumer purchasing power, in terms of flows, or
potential flows, of consumer goods; but they provide very limited,
sharply scrutinized and often misdirected flows of funds for the use
of resources to fulfill the needs of the government sector of our
trisectored economy. As a result, we have our economy distorted
resource-utilization patterns, with overinvestment in many areas,
overstuffed consumers in one place and impoverished consumers in
another place, a drastic undersupply of social services, and
widespread social needs for which public funds are lacking.
In the Soviet Union, money flows follow fairly well the flows of
real goods and resources, but, as as result, pressures are directly on
resources. These pressures mean that saving and investment conflict
directly with consumption and government services (including defence),
putting the government under severe direct strains, as the demands for
higher standards of living cannot be satisfied except by curtailing
investment, defence, space, or other government expenditures.
Page 1216
Many countries of the world are worse off the Soviet Union
because their efforts to increase consumers' goods may well require
investment based on savings that must be accumulated at the expense of
consumption.
As a chief consequence of these conditions, the contrast between
the "have" nations and the "have-not" nations will become even wider.
This would be of little great importance to the rest of the world were
it not that the peoples of the backward areas, riding the "crisis of
rising expectations" are increasingly unwilling to be ground down in
poverty as their predecessors were. At the same time, the Superpower
stalemate increases the abilities of these nations to be neutral, to
exercise influence out of all relationship to their actual powers, and
to act, sometimes, in an irresponsible fashion.
These neutrals and other peoples of backward areas have acute
problems. Solutions do exist but the underdeveloped nations are
unlikely to find them.
Page 1221
A growing lowest social class of the social outcasts (the
Lumpenproletariat) has reappeared. This group of rejects from the
bourgeois industrial society provide one of our most intractable
future problems because they are gathered in urban slums, have
political influence, and are socially dangerous.
In the U.S. where these people congregate in the largest cities
and are often Negroes or Latin Americans, they are regarded as a
racial or economic problem, but they are really an educational and
social problem for which economic or racial solutions would help
little. This group is most numerous in the more advanced industrial
areas and now forms more than 20% of the American population. Since
they are a self-perpetuating group and have many children, they are
increasing in numbers faster than the rest of the population.
Page 1229
The pattern of outlook on which the tradition of the West is
based has six parts:
1) There is truth, a reality (thus the West rejects skepticism,
solipsism and nihilism)
2) No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the
truth (thus there is no absolute or final authority.)
3) Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision
of it from the angle of his own experience.
4) Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be
pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any
of the sources that contributed to it.
5) This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth which new
experiences make it necessary to reformulate.
6) Thus Western man's picture of the truth advances closer and closer
to the whole truth without ever reaching it.
This methodology of the West is basic to the success, power and
wealth of Western Civilization.
Page 1231
To the West, in spite of all its aberrations, the greatest sin
from Lucifer to Hitler, has been pride, especially in the form of
intellectual arrogance, and the greatest virtue has been humility,
especially in the intellectual form which concedes that opinions are
always subject to modification by new experiences, new evidence, and
the opinions of our fellow men.
The most triumphant of these aspects is science, whose method is
a perfect example of the Western tradition. The scientist goes eagerly
to work each day because he has the humility to know that he does not
have any final answers and must work to modify and improve the answers
he has. He publishes his opinions and research reports or exposes
these in scientific gatherings so that they may be subjected to the
criticism of his colleagues and thus gradually play a role in
formulating the constantly unfolding consensus that is science. That
is what science is, "a consensus unfolding in time by a cooperative
effort in which each works diligently seeking the truth and submits
his work to the discussion and critique of his fellows to make a new,
slightly improved, temporary consensus."
THE UNITED STATES AND THE MIDDLE-CLASS CRISIS
Page 1234
American society in the 1920s was largely middle-class. Its
values and aspirations were middle-class and power or influence within
it was in the hands of middle-class people.
Most defenders of bourgeois America saw the country in middle-
class terms and looked forward to a not remote future in which
everyone would be middle-class except for a small shiftless minority
of no importance. America was regarded as a ladder of opportunity.
Wealth, power, prestige and respect were all obtained by the same
standard, based on money. This in turn was based on a pervasive
emotional insecurity that sought relief in the ownership and control
of material possessions.
Page 1235
Years ago in Europe, the risks (and rewards) of commercial
enterprise, well reflected in the fluctuating fortunes of figures such
as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice were extreme. A single venture
could ruin a merchant or make him rich. This insecurity was increased
by the fact that the prevalent religion of the day disapproved of what
he was doing, seeking profits or taking interest, and he could see no
way of providing religious services to the town dwellers because of
the intimate association of the ecclesiastical system with the
existing arrangement of rural landholding.
Page 1236
Credit became more important than intrinsic personal qualities,
and credit was based on the appearance of things, especially the
appearances of the external material accessories of life. Old values
such as future preference or self-discipline, remained, but were
redirected. Future preference ceased to be transcendental in its aim
and became secularized.
Page 1237
Middle-class self-discipline and future preference provided the
savings and investment without which any innovation - no matter how
appealing in theory - would be set aside and neglected.
The middle-class character is psychic insecurity founded on lack
of secure social status. The cure for such insecurity became
insatiable material acquisition. From this flowed attributes of future
preference, self-discipline, social conformity, infinitely expandable
material demand, and a general emphasis on externalized impersonal
values. The urge to seek truth or to help others are not really
compatible with the middle-class values.
Page 1238
One of the chief changes, fundamental to the survival of the
middle-class outlook, was a change in society's basic conception of
human nature. This had two parts to it. The traditional Christian
attitude was that human nature was essentially good and that it was
formed and modified by social pressures and training. The "goodness"
of human nature was based on the belief that it was a kind of weaker
copy of God's nature. In this Western point of view, evil and sin were
negative qualities; they arose from an absence of good, not from the
presence of evil. Thus sin was the failure to do the right thing, not
doing the wrong thing.
Opposed to this view was another which received its most explicit
formulation by the Persian Zoroaster in the seventh century B.C. It
came in through the Persian influence on the Hebrews, especially
during the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, in the sixth century and
more fully through the Greek rationalist tradition from Pythagoras to
Plato. The general distinction of this point of view from Zoroaster to
William Golding (in Lord of the Flies) is that the world and the flesh
are positive evils and that man, in at least this physical part of his
nature, is essentially evil. As a consequence, he must be disciplined
totally to prevent him from destroying himself and the world. In this
view, the devil is a force, or being, of positive malevolence and man,
by himself, is incapable of good and is, accordingly, not free. He can
be saved in eternity by God's grace alone and he can get through this
temporal world only by being subjected to a regime of total despotism.
The contrasts can be summed up thus:
Orthodox;
Puritan.
Evil is an absence of Good;
Evil is a positive entity.
Man is basically good;
Man is basically evil.
Man is free;
Man is a slave of his nature.
Man can contribute to his salvation by good works;
Man can be saved only by God.
Self-discipline is necessary to guide or direct;
Discipline must be external and total.
Truth found from experience and revelation interpreted by tradition;
Truth is found by rational deduction from revelation.
Luther, Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal and others believed
that truth was to be found in rational deduction from a few basic
revealed truths in sharp contrast with the orthodox point of view
still represented by the Anglican and Roman churches which saw men as
largely free in a universe whose rules were to be found by tradition
and consensus.
Page 1240
The Puritan point of view led directly to mercantilism which
regarded political-economic life as a struggle to the death in a world
where there not sufficient wealth or space for different groups. To
them, wealth was limited to a fixed amount and one man's gain was
someone else's loss. That meant that the basic struggles of this world
were irreconcilable and must be fought to a finish. This as part of
the Puritan belief that nature was evil and that a state of nature was
a jungle of violent conflicts.
One large change was the Community of Interests which rejected
mercantilism's insistence on limited wealth and the basic
incompatibility of interests for the more optimistic belief that all
parties could somehow adjust their interests within a community in
which all would benefit mutually.
Above all, the middle-class which dominated the country in the
first half of the 20th century were a small group of aristocrats.
Below were the petty bourgeoisie who had middle-class aspirations.
Below these two were two lower classes: the workers and the
Lumpenproletariat.
Page 1242
In America, as elsewhere, aristocracy represents money and
position grown old, and is organized in terms of families rather than
of individuals. Traditionally it was made up of those families who had
money, position,and social prestige for so long that they never had to
think about these and,above all, never had to impress any other person
with the fact that they had them. They accepted these attributes of
family membership as a right and an obligation. Since they had no idea
that these could be lost, they were self-assured, natural but distant.
Their manners were gracious but impersonal. Their chief characteristic
was the assumption that their family position had obligations. This
"noblesse oblige" led them to participate in school sports (even if
they lacked obvious talent) to serve their university (usually a
family tradition) in any helpful way, and to offer their services to
their local community, their state, and their country as an
obligation.
Page 1243
Another good evidence of class may be seen in the treatment given
to servants who work in one's home: the lower classes treat these as
equals, the middle-classes treat them as inferiors, while the
aristocrats treat them as equals or even superiors. On the whole, the
number of aristocratic families in the U.S. is very few, with a couple
in each of the older states. A somewhat larger group of semi-
aristocrats consists of those like the Lodges, Rockefellers, or
Kennedys,who are not yet completely aristocratic either because they
are not, in generations, far enough removed from money-making, or
because of the persistence of a commercial or business tradition in
the family.
The second most numerous group in the U.S. is the petty
bourgeoisie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as
middle-class and are under all the middle-class anxieties and
pressures but often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a
result of these things, they are often very insecure, envious, filled
with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any Radical
Right, Fascist, or hate campaigns against any group that is different
or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. Made up of clerks,
shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers in business,
government, finance and education, these tend to regard their white
collar status as the chief value in life, and live in an atmosphere of
envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major
portion of the Republican Party's supporters in the towns of America,
as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago.
Page 1244
Eisenhower himself was repelled by the Radical Right whose
impetus had been a chief element in his election although the lower-
middle-class had preferred Senator Taft as their leader. Eisenhower
however had been preferred by the Eastern Establishment of old Wall
Street, Ivy League, semi-aristocratic Anglophiles whose real strength
rested in their control of eastern financial endowments operating from
foundations, academic halls, and other tax-exempt refuges.
As we have said, this Eastern Establishment was really above
parties. They had been the dominant element in both parties since 1900
and practiced the political techniques of J.P. Morgan.
Page 1245
They were, as we have said, Anglophile, cosmopolitan, Ivy League,
internationalist, astonishingly liberal, patrons of the arts, and
relatively humanitarian. All these things made them anathema to the
lower-middle-class and petty-bourgeois groups who supplied the votes
in Republican electoral victories but found it so difficult to control
nominations (especially in presidential elections) because the big
money necessary for nominating in a Republican convention was allied
to Wall Street and to the Eastern Establishment. The ability of the
latter to nominate Eisenhower over Taft in 1952 was a bitter pill to
the radical bourgeoisie.
Kennedy was an Establishment figure. His introduction to the
Establishment arose from his support in Britain. His acceptance into
the English Establishment opened its American branch as well. Another
indication of this connection was the large number of Oxford-trained
men appointed to office by President Kennedy.
Page 1246
In the minds of the ill-informed, the political struggle in the
U.S. has always been viewed as a struggle between Republicans and
Democrats at the ballot box in November. Wall Street long ago had seen
that the real struggle was in the nominating conventions. This
realization was forced upon the petty-bourgeois supporters of
Republican candidates by their inability to nominate their
congressional favorites. Just as they reached this conclusion, the new
wealth appeared in the political picture, sharing petty-bourgeois
suspicions of the East, big cities, Ivy League universities,
foreigners, intellectuals, workers and aristocrats. By the 1964
election, the major political issue in the country was the financial
struggle behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized and
cultured in foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed,
arising from the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations
in the West and Southwest.
At issue here was the whole future face of America, for the older
wealth stood for values and aims close to the Western traditions of
diversity, tolerance, human rights and values, freedom, and the rest
of it, while the newer wealth stood for the narrow and fear-racked
aims of petty-bourgeois insecurity and egocentricity. The nominal
issues between them, such as that between internationalism and
unilateral isolationism (which its supporters preferred to rename
"nationalism") were less fundamental than they seemed, for the real
issue was the control of the Federal government's tremendous power to
influence the future of America by spending of government funds. The
petty bourgeois and new wealth groups wanted to continue that spending
into the industrial-military complex, such as defence and space, while
the older wealth and non-bourgeois groups wanted to direct it toward
social diversity and social amelioration for the aged and the young,
for education, for social outcasts, and for protecting national
resources for future use.
Page 1247
The outcome of this struggle, which still goes on, is one in
which civilized people can afford to be optimistic. For the newer
wealth is unbelievably ignorant and misinformed.
The National parties and their presidential candidates, with the
Eastern Establishment assiduously fostering the process behind the
scenes, moved closer together and nearly met in the center with almost
identical candidates and platforms although the process was concealed,
as much as possible, by the revival of obsolescent or meaningless war
cries and slogans.
Page 1248
The two parties should be almost identical so that the American
people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to
any profound or extensive shifts in policy. The policies that are
vital and necessary for America are no longer subjects of significant
disagreement, but are disputable only in details of procedure,
priority, or method: we must remain strong, continue to function as a
great World power in cooperation with other Powers, avoid high-level
war, keep the economy moving, help other countries do the same,
provide the basic social necessities for all our citizens, open up
opportunities for social shifts for those willing to work to achieve
them, and defend the basic Western outlook of diversity, pluralism,
cooperation,and the rest of it, as already described.
Either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired,
unenterprising and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it
every four years by the other party which will be none of these things
but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic
policies.
The capture of the Republican National Party by the extremist
elements of the Republican National Party in 1964 and their effort to
elect Barry Goldwater with the petty-bourgeois extremists alone, was
only a temporary aberration on the American political scene and arose
from the fact that President Johnson had pre-empted all the issues so
that it was hardly worthwhile for the Republicans to run a real
contestant against him. Thus Goldwater was able to take control of the
party by default.
The virulence behind the Goldwater campaign, however, had nothing
to do with default or lack of intensity. Quite the contrary. His most
ardent supporters were of the extremist petty-bourgeois mentality
driven to near hysteria by the disintegration of the middle-class and
the steady rise to prominence of everything they considered anathema:
Catholics, Negroes, immigrants, intellectuals, aristocrats,
scientists, and educated men generally, cosmopolitans and
internationalists and, above all, liberals who accept diversity ad a
virtue.
This disintegration of the middle classes had a variety of
causes, some of them intrinsic, many of them accidental, a few of them
obvious, but many of them going deeply into the very depths of social
existence. All these causes acted to destroy the middle-class by
acting to destroy the middle-class outlook.
Page 1250
In the earlier period, even down to 1940, literature's attack on
the middle-class outlook was direct and brutal, from such works as
Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" or Frank Norris's "The Pit," both
dealing with the total corruption of of personal integrity in the
meatpacking and wheat markets. These early assaults were aimed at the
commercialization of life under bourgeois influence and were
fundamentally reformist in outlook because they assumed that the evils
of the system could somehow be removed. By the 1920s, the attack was
much more total and saw the problem in moral terms so fundamental that
no remedial action was possible. Only complete rejection of middle-
class values could remove the corruption of human life seen by
Sinclair Lewis in Babbitt or Main Street.
Page 1252
The Puritan point of view of man as a creature of total depravity
without hope of redemption which in the period 1550-1650 justified
despotism in a Puritan context, now may be used, with petty-bourgeois
support, to justify a new despotism to preserve, by force instead of
conviction, petty-bourgeois values in a system of compulsory
conformity. George Orwell's 1984 has given us the picture of this
system as Hitler's Germany showed us its practical operation. Barry
Goldwater's defeat moved the possibility so far into the future that
the steady change in social conditions makes it remote indeed.
Page 1253
For generations, even in fairly rich families, the indoctrination
continued because of emphasis on thrift and restraints on consumption.
By 1937, the world depression showed that the basic economic problems
were not saving and investment but distribution and consumption. Thus
there appeared a growing readiness to consume, spurred on my new sales
techniques, installment selling and the extension of credit from the
productive side to the consumption side of the economic process. As a
result, an entirely new phenomenon appeared in middle-class families,
the practice of living up to, or even beyond, their incomes - an
unthinkable scandal in any 19th century bourgeois family.
Page 1255
Middle-class marriages were usually based on middle-class values
of economic security and material status rather than on love. More
accurately, middle-class marriages were based on these material
considerations in fact, while everyone concerned pretended that they
were based on Romantic love. Even when the marriage becomes a success,
in the sense that it persists, it is never total and merely means that
the marriage becomes an enslaving relationship to the husbands and a
source of disappointment and frustration to the wives.
EUROPEAN AMBIGUITIES
Page 1300
In the old days, the merchant bankers of London controlled fairly
well the funds that were needed for almost any enterprise to become a
substantial success. Today, much larger funds are available from many
diverse sources, from abroad, from government sources, from insurance
and pension funds, from profits from other enterprises. These are no
longer held under closely associated controls and are much more
impersonal and professional in their disposal so that on the whole, an
energetic man (or a group with a good idea) can get access to larger
funds today, and can do so without anyone much caring if he accepts
the established social precedents.
Page 1303
Lycurgus renounced social change in prehistoric Sparta only by
militarizing the society.
CONCLUSION
Page 1310
Tragedy and Hope? The tragedy of the period covered by this book
is obvious but the hope may seem dubious to many. Only the passage of
time will show if the hope I seem to see in the future is actually
there or is the result of mis-observation and self-deception.
The historian has difficulty distinguishing the features of the
present and generally prefers to restrict his studies to the
past,where the evidence is more freely available and where perspective
helps him to interpret the evidence. Thus the historian speaks with
decreasing assurance about the nature and significance of events as
they approach his own day. The time covered by this book seems to this
historian to fall into three periods: the 19th century from 1814 to
1895; the 20th century after World War II, and a long period of
transition from 1895 to 1950.
The 20th century is utterly different from the 19th century and
the age of transition between the two was one of the most awful
periods in all human history. Two terrible wars sandwiching a world
economic depression revealed man's real inability to control his life
by nineteenth century techniques of laissez-faire, materialism,
competition, selfishness, nationalism, violence, and imperialism.
These characteristics of late nineteenth-century life culminated in
World War II in which more than 50 million persons were killed, most
of them by horrible deaths.
The hope of the twentieth century rests on the recognition that
war and depression are man-made, and needless. They can be avoided in
the future by turning from the 19th century characteristics just
mentioned and going back to other characteristics that our Western
society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion,
cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role
in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline.
On the whole, we do know now that we can avoid continuing the
horrors of 1914-1945 and on that basis alone we maybe optimistic over
our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to
resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.
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As a prerequisite, you should familiar with the LETS interest-
free banking system explained at:
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/bankmath.htm
For those unfamiliar with the LETS interest-free banking system,
much information is available at:
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/letssites.htm
A bank of interest-free poker chips will be referred to
regularly as a useful model.
--
John C. "The Engineer" Turmel, Founder, Abolitionist Party of Canada
915-2045 Carling Ave., Ottawa, K2A 1G5, Tel/Fax: 613-728-2196
LETS Abolish Interest Rates http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel
For TURMEL topic http://www.onelist.com/subscribe.cgi/lets
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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