Enquiries into Religion and Culture (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

I The New Leviathan

3 i The New Leviathan the great fact of the twentieth century is the definite emergence of a new type of civilisation different from anything that the world has known hitherto. all through the nineteenth century the new forces which were to transform human life were already at work, but their real tendency was to a great extent veiled by current modes of thought and preconceived ideas which had their origin in political and philosophical doctrines. the mind of the nineteenth century was dominated by the ideals of nationalism and liberalism, and the actual process of social and economic change was interpreted in terms of these doctrines. in reality, however, the forces that were at work were only partially amenable to such theories; in many respects they were actually moving in a contrary direction. thus, while the peoples of Europe were consciously accentuating their national idiosyncrasies and their political independence, they were at the same time becoming more and more alike in their customs, their ideas, and their whole apparatus of material culture. at the same time, they were losing their economic self-sufficiency and being drawn into the meshes of a super-national industrial and commercial system, which transcends political frontiers and renders each people dependent on the rest for the very necessities of material existence. in the same way, while liberalism was destroying the old restrictions which interfered with the liberty of the individual and was basing political life anew on free representative institutions, the individual was losing all control over the circumstances of his daily life and becoming , more than ever before, the servant of impersonal economic forces, which absorbed all his time and energies. Human life was becoming 4 Enquiries mechanized, and man was losing his spontaneity under the vast pressure of the new material organisation. the new civilisation is not the civilisation which the nineteenth century believed that it was creating. it is a new social organism which cannot be understood unless we set aside all preconceived ideas and study it with strict scientific impartiality. this is what M. lucien romier has attempted to do in the series of works which he has devoted to “the Explanation of our times,” and he has succeeded better perhaps than any of the multitude of writers on the subject, because he combines in such a remarkable way the actuality of the journalist and the man of affairs with the sympathetic imagination of a true historian.1 to M. romier the distinguishing note of the new order is that it is a “mass-civilisation,” by which he means a civilisation not so much of the masses in the ordinary sense of the word, as of economic aggregates which arise from the grouping of masses of population and capital round particular economic interests. “in a hundred years,” he writes, “the population of the world has doubled, that of Europe has tripled, and that of north america has multiplied thirty or forty times. this new humanity, actually created by the new sources of wealth, lives in masses and can only live in masses. if you alter one of the facts which contribute to the life of the mass, if you suppress the wealth that is being exploited, the aggregation or the unity of the individuals who together exploit this, if you take away their outlet or their profit from the collective activity, everything crumbles, the mass falls in ruins, the surplus population dies off, the children who were to be born fail to see the light of day.”2 the old divisions which have determined the historic life of Europe break down or vanish into insignificance by the side of these impersonal economic forces. an economic unit may come into existence on either side of a political frontier, as in Belgium and the north of France, or in Prussian and Polish silesia, and all the forces of national antagonism and official red tape are powerless to prevent its development. the population itself changes not only its social character, but its racial 1. M. romier established his reputation as an historian by his numerous works on the history of France in the sixteenth century. 2. l. romier: Who will be Master: Europe or America ? pp. 19–20. The New Leviathan 5 composition in obedience to the vital needs of the mass. it brings Berbers from north africa and Poles from Eastern Europe to work side by side in the automobile...