The Movement of World Revolution

7. The Age of Discovery

78 7 The Age of Discovery The change in the world position of Europe which has taken place during the last fifty years has inevitably caused a strong reaction against the spirit of nineteenth-century imperialism. The idea of empire has become identified with the oppression of subject peoples, and the whole colonial development is regarded as a form of economic exploitation. Yet the imperialist phase of Western culture is not confined to the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the culmination of a much wider movement which goes back to the close of the Middle Ages and which has been one of the main forces in the formation of the modern world. However great may be our moral disapproval of Homo Europaeus in his relations with weaker and more primitive peoples, we cannot ignore his positive achievements, for they have changed the face of the earth and created a new world, or even a number of new worlds. Consequently it is impossible to understand the nature of the present world crisis apart from the Western movement of colonial expansion which has transformed the closed Mediterranean continental world of ancient and medieval culture into an oceanic civilization which has unified the world. As I wrote concerning the nature of that process ten years ago: “How did it come about that a small group of peoples in Western Europe should in a relatively short space of time acquire the power to transform the world and to emancipate themselves from man’s agelong dependence on the forces of nature? In the past this miraculous This chapter contains brief excerpts from Understanding Europe (London, 1952), Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (London, 1950), and The Judgment of the Nations (London, 1943). The Age of Discovery 79 achievement was explained as the manifestation of a universal Law of Progress which governed the universe and led mankind by inevitable stages from apehood to perfection. Today such theories are no longer acceptable, since we have come to see how much they depend on an irrational optimism which was part of the phenomenon they attempted to explain. Instead we now tend to ask ourselves what were the factors in European culture which explain the peculiar achievement of Western man? or to use the brutal and expressive American phrase, ‘What makes him tick?’ But when we reach this point we shall find the religious factor does have a very important bearing upon the question. “For, side by side with the natural aggressiveness and the lust for power which are so evident in European history, there were also new spiritual forces driving Western man towards a new destiny. The activity of the Western mind, which manifested itself alike in scientific and technical invention as well as in geographical discovery, was not the natural inheritance of a particular biological type; it was the result of a long process of education which gradually changed the orientation of human thought and enlarged the possibilities of social action. “The other great world cultures realized their own synthesis between religion and life and then maintained their sacred order unchanged for centuries and millennia. But Western civilization has been the great ferment of change in the world, because the changing of the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal.”1 There is no doubt, however, that the rapid material progress and external expansion of Western culture has coincided with its increasing secularization, so that the religious element seems less prominent in the very period when the influence of Western civilization has been most widespread, and this in turn has meant the spread of a secularized culture throughout the world. Now it is true that world empires usually tend to lose touch with their spiritual roots, and the same factor may be seen at work in the expansion of a civilization by way of administrative and intellectual influence, as in the Hellenistic world culture in the third and second centuries b.c. However, this is not the basic cause for the process of secularization which has occurred. For Western cul1 . Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, pp. 8, 10. 80 The Movement of World Revolution ture was becoming secularized before the great period of its expansion had begun. The fundamental causes of that process were spiritual and closely related to the whole spiritual development of Western Man. But the same causes which produced the secularization of culture were...