General Crisis affects all aspects of life from intellectual,
religious, and artistic, through social (concerned with human
gregarious and emotional needs) and economic, to constitutional,
political, and military.
Efforts to deal with all these aspects by political action,
or even by force, means that all aspects tend to be become
politicized, even such “private” matters as relationships between
the sexes, between the generations, within families, etc.
In the Age of Conflict this culminates in a great effort to
fuse into a single system three quite distinct social
organizations: the community, the state, and the
civilization itself. The last two of these usually do
reach a point where they obtain coterminous boundaries (as a
Universal Empire), but the effort to pretend that this huge social
aggregate is a community is always a failure.
There are two reasons for this failure. A community is a
social aggregate (group, society, or civilization) whose members
trust each other until they have explicit reasons to distrust a
particular person; such reasons for distrust can be found very
easily in an age of general conflict and general politicization, in
which power intrudes into all human relationships. More
important than this, however, is the second reason, the fact that
human emotional needs can be satisfied only by contacts with nature
and with other humans on an existential, unique, face-to-face basis
in which individuals know each other personally.
An institutionalized society is too cluttered up with
artifacts, institutions, and power factors to permit the
achievement of any “global village,” a McLuhan myth which is
typical of McLuhan’s efforts to please the contemporary
institutionalized establishment. Any large social
aggregate, especially a highly politicized one as a Universal
Empire must be, has to operate through artifacts, general rules,
abstractions, permanent status, and generalized, non-personal (that
is, not “face-to-face”) behavior.
All these things are obstacles to the unique, existential
relationships among persons and with nature required by human
emotional needs. The effort to make a Universal Empire
into a community, or to pretend that it is, is bound to fail from
the cumulative frustration of unexpressed emotional
energies. Contemporary student hatred of the IBM card as
a symbol of what is wrong, in their minds, with today’s world is a
notable example of this reaction.
Eventually, in the course of the Age of Conflict,
individuals begin to reject the effort to make the state and the
civilization into a community and begin to seek emotional
satisfaction by what I call “misplacement of satisfactions” or by
opting out of the system.
The first of these responses is too complex a problem to be dealt
with in any adequate fashion here. It includes a general
tendency to seek satisfaction of human needs on the wrong
levels: to seek security in the acquisition of property,
or in sex, or in unquestioning allegiance to an ideology as a
secular religion; or to seek emotional satisfaction in power, in
violence, in status, or in artifacts; and so forth. The
second of these responses, opting out of the system, includes the
use of narcotics, alcohol, or other irrationalities, as well as the
effort to lose oneself in a niche of the system, but it is most
notable as a renunciation of any ambition to create a community
from the whole society or the state, in favor of an effort to find
emotional and social satisfactions in some voluntary “little
community” or commune.
Such efforts appear in the Stage of Conflict and have a
fluctuating history until they finally become so pervasive (usually
late in the Universal Empire) that the whole system
disintegrates.
This “opting out of the system” involves a shifting of allegiance
and emotional attachments from the state to small
communities. It is clearly seen, for example, in the
Greek-speaking Classical world after it reached it reached its Age
of Conflict about 450 B.C. The first famous case is
Epicurus, who renounced allegiance to the state, to war, and to
military service, and invited men to find their true satisfactions
by sitting with their friends, eating and conversing “in a quiet
garden.” Later, the Cynics, the “hippies” of the ancient
world, sought similar “anti-social” but inter-personal
satisfactions.
This trend continued, vigorously resisted by the state, (especially
by Rome after the Latin world entered its Age of Conflict about 250
B.C.) but with decreasing success after the time of Augustus
Caesar. By that time, Lucullus had abandoned all
politics to devote himself to feasting, while men like Apollonius
of Tyana and Christ pointed the way to the satisfaction of human
social and emotional needs in religious
communes. However, only in the Second Century A.D., when
the Universal Empire of Classical Civilization was almost two
centuries old, did this trend become a torrent. At that
time, tens of thousands joined the church, finding in its catacombs
the emotional, religious, and intellectual satisfactions which had
been left frustrated by the Classical over-emphasis on military,
political, and economic concerns.
After A.D. 311 Constantine and his successors tried to regain the
political and military allegiance of the Christians by adopting
Christianity as the religion of a new Imperial system centered on
the Persian doctrine of Providential Empire. This effort
created a new civilization, Byzantine, in the east, but in the
west, civilized life collapsed into invasions and the Dark Age of a
new Western Civilization. Classical Civilization died
everywhere....
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/General_Crises_in_Civilizations.htm
lolilosor!
