J. M. Robertson

THE LAWS OF SOCIO-POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

§ 1

The word "progressive," however, raises one of the most complex issues in sociology. It would be needless to point out, were it not well to anticipate objection, that the foregoing summaries are not offered as a complete theory of progress even as commonly conceived, much less as sufficing to dismiss the dispute[134] as to what progress is, or what basis there is for the modern conceptions bound up with the word. Our generalisations proceed on the assumption—not of course that human affairs must constantly improve in virtue of some cosmic law, but—that by most men of any education a certain advance in range of knowledge, of reflection, of skill, of civic amenity, of general comfort, is held to be attainable and desirable; that such advances have clearly taken place in former periods; and that the due study of these periods and of present conditions may lead to a further and indefinitely prolonged advance. Conceiving progress broadly as occurring by way of rise in the quantity and the quality of pleasurable and intelligent life, we beg the question, for the purposes of this inquiry, as against those who may regard such a tendency with aversion, and those who may deny that such increase ever takes place. Taking as proved the evolution of mankind from lower forms of animal life, we conceive such evolution as immeasurably slow in the period before the attainment of agriculture, which may serve as the stage at which what we term "civilisation" begins. Only with agriculture begins the "civitas," as distinct from the horde or tribe. Thenceforth all advance in arts and ethics, no less than in political co-ordination, counts as "civilisation." The problem is, how to diagnose advance.

All of us, roughly speaking, understand by progress the moving of things in the way we want them to go; and the ideals underlying the present treatise are easily seen, though it does not aim at an exhaustive survey of the conditions and causes of what it assumes to be progressive forms or phases of civilisation. To reach even a working theory, however, we have to make, as it were, cross-sections in our anatomy, and to view the movement of civilisation in terms of the conditions which increase men's stock of knowledge and extend their imaginative art. To lay a foundation, we have to subsume Buckle's all-important generalisation as to the effect of food and life conditions in differentiating what we may broadly term the primary from the secondary civilisation. Thus we think from "civilisation" to a civilisation.

Buckle drew his capital distinction, so constantly ignored by his critics, between "European" and "non-European" civilisations. This broadly holds good, but is a historical rather than a sociological proposition. The process of causation is one of life conditions; and the first great steps in the higher Greek civilisation were made in Asia Minor, in contact with Asiatic life, even as the earlier civilisations, such as the "Minoan" of Crete, now being traced through recovered remains, grew up in contact with both Egypt and the East. (Cp. Prof. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, chs. v, ix.) The distinction here made between "primary" and "secondary" civilisations is of course merely relative, applying as it does only to the historic period. We can but mark off the known civilisations as standing in certain relations one to another. Thus the Roman civilisation was in reality complex before the conquest of Greece, inasmuch as it had undergone Italo-Greek and Etruscan influences representing a then ancient culture. But the Roman militarist system left the Roman civilisation in itself unprogressive, and prevented it from being durably fertilised by the Greek.

Proceeding from general laws to particular cases, we may roughly say that:—

(1) Primary civilisations arise in regions specially favourable to the regular production of abundant food, and lying inland, so as not to offer constant temptation to piratical raids. (Fertile coast land is defensible only by a strong community.)

(2) Such food conditions tend to maintain an abundant population, readily lending itself to exploitation by rulers, and so involving despotism and subordination. They also imply, as a rule, level territories, which facilitate conquest and administration, and thus also involve military autocracy.

(3) If the nation with such conditions is well aloof from other nations, in virtue of being much more civilised than its near neighbours, and of being self-sufficing as regards its produce, its civilisation (as in the cases of China and Incarial Peru and ancient Egypt) is likely to be extremely conservative. Above all, lack of racial interbreeding involves lack of due variation. No "pure" race ever evolved rapidly or highly. Even the conservative primary civilisations (as the Egyptian, Chinese, and Akkadian) rested on much race mixture.

(4) When an old civilisation comes in steady contact with that of a race of not greatly inferior but less ancient culture, physically so situated as to be much less amenable to despotism (that is, in a hilly or otherwise easily defensible region), it is likely so to fecundate the fresher civilisation that the latter, if not vitiated by a bad political system, will soon surpass it,[135] provided that the latter community in turn is duly crossed as regards its stock, and that the former has due resources.

(5) In other words, a primitive but not barbarous people, placed in a region not highly fruitful but not really unpropitious to human life, is the less likely to fall tamely under a despotism because its population is not so easily multiplied and maintained;[136] and such a people, when physiologically variated by a mixture of stocks, and when mentally fecundated by contact with older civilisations, tends to develop what we term a secondary civilisation, higher in all respects than those which have stimulated it.[137]

(6) A very great disparity in the culture-stages of meeting races, however, is as unfavourable to the issue of a higher civilisation from their union as to a useful blending of their stocks.[138] Thus it fares ill with the contact of higher and lower races even in a climate equally favourable to both; and where it is favourable to the latter only, there is likely to be no immediate progress in the lower race, while in the terms of the case the higher will deteriorate or disappear.[139]

(7) Where a vigorous but barbarian race overruns one much more civilised, there is similarly little prospect of immediate gain to progress, though after a period of independent growth the newer civilisation may be greatly fecundated by intelligent resort to the remains of the older.

(8) Where, again, independent States at nearly the same stage of civilisation, whether speaking the same or different languages, stand in a position of commerce and rivalry, but without desperate warfare, the friction and cross-fertilisation of ideas, together with the mixture of stocks, will develop a greater and higher intellectual and artistic life than can conceivably arise in one great State without great or close rivals, since there one set of ideals or standards is likely to overbear all others, with the result of partly stereotyping taste and opinion.

(9) Thus, while an empire with a developed civilisation may communicate it to uncivilised conquered peoples not too far below its own anthropological level, the secondary civilisation thus acquired is in its nature less "viable," less capable of independent evolution, than one set up by the free commerce of trading peoples. The most rapid growths of civilisation appear always to have occurred by way of the multiplying of free contacts among trading communities, and among the free colonies of such.[140] The "money economy" they introduced was a great instrument of social and industrial evolution;[141] and on such city civilisations the ancient empires themselves seem always to have proceeded.[142]

(10) Every phase of civilisation has its special drawbacks, so that great retrogression may follow on great development, especially when adventitious sources of wealth are the foundation of a luxurious culture. In some cases a great development may be dependent on an exhaustible source of wealth, as in the case of Britain's coal supply, the empire of ancient Rome, the primacy of the Pope before the Reformation, or even the Periclean empire of Athens, and the trade monopolies of Venice, the Hansa Towns, and the Dutch Republic.

(11) The expression "decay" as applied to a people, however, has only a relative significance: used absolutely, it stands for a delusion. Economic conditions may worsen, and military power decline; but such processes imply no physiological degeneration. All the "dead" civilisations of the past were overthrown or absorbed by military violence; and there is no known case of a nation physically well placed dying out.

In the cases above dealt with, however, and in many others, there is seen to have been intellectual decay, in the sense of, first, a cessation of forward movement, and, next, a loss of the power to appreciate ideas once current. A common cause of such paralysis of the higher life is the malignant action of dogmatic religious systems, as in the cases of Persia, Jewry, Byzantium, Islam, Spain under Catholicism, and Scotland for two centuries under Protestantism. Such paralysis by religion may arise alike in a highly-organised but isolated State like Byzantium, and in a semi-civilised country like Anglo-Saxon England.[145] The special malignity of dogma in these cases is itself of course a matter for analysis and explanation. Other cases are partly to be explained by (a) the substitution of systematic militarism, always fatal to progressive culture, for a life of only occasional warfare, favourable to study among the leisured class.[146] But (b) there is reason to surmise a further and profoundly important cause of intellectual retrogression in the usage which develops the culture of a people for the most part in one sex only. The thesis may be ventured that whereas vigorous and creative brains may arise in abundance in a young civilisation, where the sexes are physiologically not far removed from the approximate equality of the semi-barbarous stage, the psychological divergence set up by mentally and physically training the males and not the females is likely to be unfavourable to the breeding of mentally energetic types.

(12) Whether or not the last hypothesis be valid, it is clear that the co-efficient or constituent of intellectual progress in a people, given the necessary conditions of peace and sufficient food, is multiplication of ideas; and this primarily results from international contact, or the contact of wholly or partly independent communities of one people. Multiplication of arts and crafts is of course included under the head of ideas. But unless the stock of ideas is not merely in constant process of being added to among the studious or leisured class, but disseminated among the other classes, stagnation will take place among these, and will inevitably infect the educated class.

(13) In the intellectual infectiousness of all class degradation, properly speaking, lies the final sociological (as apart from the primary ethical) condemnation of slavery. The familiar argument that slavery first secured the leisure necessary for culture, even were it wholly instead of being merely partially true, would not rebut the censure that falls to be passed on slavery in later stages of civilisation. All the ancient States, before Greece, stood on slavery: then it was not slavery that yielded her special culture. What she gained from older civilisations was the knowledge and the arts developed by specialisation of pursuits; and such specialisation was not necessarily dependent on slavery, which could abound without it. It was in the special employment, finally, of the exceptionally large free population of Athens that the greatest artistic output was reached.[147] In later periods, the slave population was the great nucleus of superstition and anti-culture.

Inasmuch, then, as education is in only a small degree compatible with toilsome poverty, the betterment of the material conditions of the toiling class is essential to progress in ideas. That is to say, continual progress implies gradual elimination of class inequality, and cannot subsist otherwise. At the same time, a culture-class must be maintained by new machinery when leisured wealth is got rid of.[148]

(14) Again, it follows from the foregoing (4-10) that the highest civilisation will be that in which the greatest number of varying culture-influences meet,[149] in the most happily-crossed stock, under climatic conditions favourable to energy, on a basis of a civilisation sufficiently matured.[150] But in order to the effectual action of such various culture-influences through all classes of the nation in which they meet, there is needed a constant application of social or political regimen. In the lack of that, a great conflux of culture-forces may miss fruition. A mere fortuitous depression of the rich class, and elevation of the poor, will not suffice to place a society on a sound or even on an improved footing. Such a change occurred in ancient Athens after Salamis, when the poorer sort, who had constituted the navy, flourished[151] as against the richer, who had been the land soldiery, and whose lands had been ravaged. But the forces of disintegration played afresh. Yet again, transient financial conditions, such as those of Italy before the Reformation, of Holland until the decline of its fishing and trade, and of Venice until its final commercial decay, may sustain a great artistic life, art having always depended on private or public demand. Thus with a change in the geographical course of trade, a great phase of culture-life may dwindle. So many and so complex are the forces and conditions of progress in civilisation.

§ 2

It will readily be seen that most of the foregoing propositions have direct reference to well-known facts of history. Thus (a) ancient Egypt represents a primary civilisation, marked indeed by some fluctuations connected with dynastic changes which involved mixture of stocks, but on the whole singularly fixed; while ancient Greek civilisation was emphatically a secondary one, the fruit of much race-mixture and many interacting culture-forces, all facilitated by the commercial position and coast-conformation of Hellas.

(b) The Greek land as a whole, especially the Attic, was only moderately fertile, and therefore not so cheaply and redundantly populated as Egypt.

(c) Hellas was further so decisively cut up into separate cantons by its mountain ranges, and again in respect of the multitude of the islands, that the Greek districts were largely foreign to each other,[152] and their cultures had thus the advantage of reacting and interacting, as against the disadvantage of their incurable political separateness—that disadvantage in turn being correlative with the advantage of insusceptibility to a despotism.

(d) In Egypt, again, culture was never deeply disseminated, and before Alexander was hardly at all fecundated by outside contact. In Greece there was always the great uncultured slave substratum; and the arrest of freedom, to say nothing of social ignorance, female subjection, and sexual perversion, ultimately kept vital culture stationary. In Rome, militarism and the multiplication of the slave class, along with the deletion of the independent and industrious middle class, made progressive culture impossible, as surely as it broke down self-government. In all cases alike, over-population, not being met by science, either bred poverty or was obviated by crime and vice.

The so-called regeneration of Europe by the barbarian conquest, finally, was simply the beginning of a long period of corrupted and internecine barbarism, the old culture remaining latent; and not till after many centuries did the maturing barbaric civilisation in times of compulsory peace reach the capacity of being fecundated by the intelligent assimilation of the old. But after the Renaissance, as before, the diseases of militarism and class privilege and the political subjection caused a backthrow and intellectual stagnation, which was assisted by the commercial decline brought upon Italy; so that in the feudal period, in one State after another, we have the symptoms of, as it were, senile "decay" and retrogression.[153] In all cases this is to be set down proximately to the deficit of new ideas, and in some to excess of strife, which exhausted spare energy among the leisured class, deepened the misery of the toilers, and normally prevented the intelligent intercourse of peoples. It is become a commonplace of historical philosophy that the Crusades wrought for good inasmuch as they meant fresh communication between East and West. Yet it may be doubted whether much more was not done through the quiet contacts of peace between Saracen and Christian in Western Europe, and by the commerce with the East which preceded the Crusades,[154] than by the forced intercourse following on religious war. In any case, the transition from quasi-decay to progress in Christendom is clearly due to the entrance of new ideas of many species from many directions into the common stock; Greek letters, Saracen physics, and new geographical discovery all combining to generate thought.

The case of Japan, again, compares with both that of ancient Greece and that of modern Europe. Its separate civilisation, advantageously placed in an archipelago, drew stimulus early in the historic period from that of China; and, while long showing the Chinese unprogressiveness in other respects, partly in virtue of the peculiar burdensomeness of the Chino-Japanese system of ideograms, it made remarkable progress on the side of art. The recent rapid industrial development (injurious to the artistic life) is plainly a result of the European and American contact; and if only the mechanism of reading and writing be made manageable on the European lines, and the snare of militarism be escaped, the Japanese civilisation may develop mentally as much as it is doing industrially and in military organisation.

It suffices the practical political student, then, to note that progress is thus always a matter of intelligible causation; and, without concerning himself about predicting the future or estimating the sum of possibilities, to take up the tasks of contemporary politics as all other tasks are taken up by practical men, as a matter of adaptation of means to ends. The architect and engineer have nothing to do with calculating as to when the energy of the solar system will be wholly transmuted. As little has the politician to do with absolute estimates of the nature of progress. All alike have to do with the study of laws, forces, and economics.

§ 3

We may now, then, set forth the all-pervading biological forces or tendencies of attraction and repulsion in human affairs as the main primary factors in politics or corporate life, which it is the problem of human science to control by counteracting or guiding; and we may without further illustration set down the principal modes in which these instincts appear. They are, broadly speaking:—

In every one of these modes, be it observed, the instinct of repulsion correlates with the instinct of attraction. The strifes are the strifes of combinations, of groups or masses united in themselves by sympathy, in antipathy to other groups or masses. The esprit de corps arises alike in the species, the horde, the tribe, the community, the class, the faction, the nation, the trade or profession, the Church, the sect, the party. Always men unite to oppose; always they must love to hate, fraternise to struggle.

I have said that it is extremely difficult to imagine a state of society in which there shall be no public operation of any one of these forces. I am disposed to say it is impossible, but for scientific purposes prefer to put simply the difficulties of the conception. A cessation of war is not only easily conceivable, but likely; but a cessation of strife of aspiration would mean a state of biological equilibrium throughout the civilised world. Now, pure equilibrium is by general consent a state only momentarily possible; and the state of dissolution of unions, were that to follow, would involve strife of opinion at least up to a certain point. But just as evolution is now visibly towards an abandonment of brute strife among societies, so may it be reasonably expected that the strife of ideals and doctrines within societies, though now perhaps emotionally intense in proportion to the limitation of brute warfare, will gradually be freed of malevolent passion as organisms refine further. Passion, in any case, has hitherto been at once motive-power and hindrance—the omnipresent force, since all ideas have their correlative emotion. A perception of this has led to some needless dispute over what is called the "economic theory" of history; critics insisting that men are ruled by non-economic as well as economic motives.[155] The solution is perfectly simple. Men are proximately ruled by their passions or emotions; and the supremacy of the economic factor consists in its being, for the majority, the most permanent director or stimulant of feeling. Therefore, the great social rectification, if it ever come, must needs be economic.

Certainly, on the principle laid down, there is a likelihood that strife of ideals and doctrines may be for a time intensified by the very process of social reform, should that go to lessen the stress of the industrial struggle for existence. It is easy to see that England has in the past hundred and twenty years escaped the stress of domestic strife which in France wrought successive revolutions, not so much by any virtue in its partially democratic constitution as by the fact that on the one hand a war was begun with France by the English ruling classes at an early stage of the first revolution, and that on the other hand the animal energies of the middle and lower classes were on the whole freer than those of the French to run in the channels of industrial competition. People peacefully fighting each other daily in trade, not to speak of sports, were thereby partly safeguarded from carrying the instincts of attraction and repulsion in politics to the length of insurrection and civil war. When the strife of trade became congested, the spirit of political strife, fed by hunger, broke out afresh, to be again eased off when the country had an exciting foreign war on hand. So obvious is this that it may be the last card of Conservatism to play off the war spirit against the reform spirit, as was done with some temporary success in England by Beaconsfield, and as is latterly being done by his successors.[156] The climaxing movement of political rationalism is evidently dependent on the limitation of the field of industrial growth and the absence of brute warfare. And if, as seems conceivable, political rationalism attains to a scientific provision for the well-being of the mass of the people, we shall have attained a condition in which the forces of attraction and repulsion, no longer flowing freely in the old social channels, may be expected to dig new ones or deepen those lately formed. The future channels, generally speaking, would tend to lie in the regions of political, ethical, and religious opinion; and the partial disuse of any one of these will tend to bring about the deepening of the others.

But this is going far ahead; and it is our business rather to make clear, with the help of an analysis of analogous types of civilisation, what has happened in the modern past of our country. The simple general laws under notice are universal, and will be found to apply in all stages of history, though the interpretation of many phases of life by their means may be a somewhat complex matter.

For instance, the life of China[157] (above discussed) and that of India may at first sight seem to give little colour to the assumption of a constant play of social attraction and repulsion. The "unprogressiveness of Asia" is dwelt on alike by many who know Asia and many who do not. But this relative unprogressiveness is to be explained, like European progress, in terms of the conditions. China is simply a case of comparative culture-stability and culture-isolation. The capital condition of progress in civilisation has always been, as aforesaid, the contact of divergent races whose independent culture-elements, though different, are not greatly different in grade and prestige. Now, the outside contacts of China, down till the eighteenth century, had been either with races which had few elements of civilisation to give her, like the Mongols, or with a civilisation little different from or less vigorous than her own, like that of India. Even these contacts counted for much, and Chinese history has been full of political convulsions, despite—or in keeping with—the comparative stagnation of Chinese culture. (On this see Peschel, Races of Men, Eng. tr. pp. 361-74. Cp. Huc, Chinese Empire, Eng. tr. ed. 1859, p. xvii; Walckenaer, Essai sur l'histoire de l'espÈce humaine, 1798, pp. 175, 176; and Maine, Early History of Institutions, pp. 226, 227). The very pigtail which for Europe is the symbol of Chinese civilisation is only two hundred years old, having come in with the Mantchoo dynasty; and the policy of systematically excluding foreigners dates from the same period (Huc, p. 236). "No one," writes Professor Flint, "who has felt interest enough in that singular nation to study the researches and translations of Remusat, Pauthier, Julien, Legge, Plath, Faber, Eitel, and others, will hesitate to dismiss as erroneous the commonplace that it has been an unprogressive nation" (History of the Philosophy of History, vol. i, 1893, p. 88).

China was in fact progressive while the variety of stocks scattered over her vast area reacted on each other in virtue of variety of government and way of life:[158] it was when they were reduced under one imperial government that unity of state-system, coupled with the exclusion of foreign contacts, imposed stagnation. But the stagnation was real, and other factors contributed to its continuance. The fecundity of the soil has always maintained a redundant and therefore a poor and ignorant population—a condition which we have described as fatal to progress in culture if not counteracted, and which further favours the utter subjection of women and the consequent arrest of half the sources of variation. Mencius, speaking to the rulers of his day (3rd c. B.C.), declared with simple profundity that "They are only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood it follows that they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license" (Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, p. 49). That lesson the rulers of China could not learn, any more than their European congeners.

We cannot, therefore, accede to Professor Flint's further remark that "The development and filiation of thought is scarcely less traceable in the history and literature of China than of Greece"—that is, if it be meant that Chinese history down till our own day may be so compared with the history of pagan Greece. The forces of fixation in China have been too strong to admit of this. The same factors have been at work in India, where, further, successive conquests, down till our own, had results very similar to those of the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire. Yet at length, next door to China, in Japan, there has rapidly taken place a national transformation that is not to be paralleled in the world's history; and in India the Congress movement has developed in a way that twenty years ago was thought impossible.[159] And while these things are actually happening before the world's eyes, certain Englishmen vociferate more loudly than ever the formula of the "unchangeableness of Asia." A saner, though still a speculative view, is put forth by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his work on National Character. It was anticipated by—among others—M. PhilarÈte Chasles. See his L'Angleterre politique, Édit. 1878, pp. 250, 251. And Walckenaer, over a hundred years ago (Essai cited, p. 368), predicted the future civilisation of the vast plains of Tartary.

[134] On this may be consulted a suggestive paper by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in the Free Review, April, 1894, and an instructive study by Mr. T. Whittaker, "A Critical Essay on the Philosophy of History," in his Essays and Notices, 1895. Cp. Spencer, "Progress: Its Law and Cause," in Essays, vol. i.