During the twentieth century our world began to explode. Among other things, it hurled particles of itself first into the sky, then into the empty space of the universe. Early in this century two Americans flew for the first time in an engine above the sands of North Carolina. Sixty-six years later another two Americans were stepping cautiously on the moon. There was a great difference between these two events. In 1903 the flying mechanics rose into a light sky. In 1969 the astronauts were shot forth into darkness. In 1903 most people were optimistic; they greeted man's self-made liberation from the laws of gravity on earth. In 1969 many people looked at the moon with mixed emotions; the word that crept along the bottom of their minds was not liberation, it was escape. In 1903 most people of the white race, and virtually all of the American people, thought that their civilization was triumphant. In 1969 many people, including many Americans, felt that their civilization was collapsing. In 1903 people thought that the flight of the Wright brothers was the beginning of something. In 1969 they thought that the moon flight of the American astronauts may have been the beginning of something but they also felt that it was the end of something. Between these two dates took place the evolution of the twentieth century, including a slow revolution of minds. We live now amidst the ruins of a civilization: but most of these ruins are in our minds.
Certain thinkers predicted some of this. In Europe, the realization that European civilization was mortal, that it was about to be endangered from the outside, occurred suddenly to Paul Valery around the time of the Wright brothers' Hight as he contemplated what the swift American victory over Spain and what the Japanese triumph over Russia meant for Europe. Ten years later a massive German cerebrator, Oswald Spengler, began the writing of his Decline or, more precisely translated, Fall of the West, the first volume of which was published during the dark summer of 1918. Another world war later a small volume, comprising a series of lectures by the German-Italian theologian Romano Guardini, entitled The End of the Modern World, in 1950 expressed, in a telling combination of philosophical reasoning and apocalyptic prophecies, what we may be coming to. But, then, the nineteenth century, too, had its share of seers and thinkers and poets who were the forerunners of these modern prophets of doom, who had seen that the civilization of their day was dangerously hollow. This made not much difference, at least not for some time. Most people had reacted to Nietzsche in much the same way in which they reacted to other professional pessimists: their reading of impending doom resulted in a bit of a shiver, a novel kind of intellectual recognition, after which they put this matter out of their minds.
At the beginning of the century the notion that Western civilization might collapse occurred but to a handful of people. By the time Spengler was published, many more people would entertain such notions, especially in the Germanies. By 1950 this notion had become a commonplace in the minds of many millions of Europeans and, for the first time in their history, even in the minds of some Americans. Most of us could still put this notion out of the conscious portion of our minds for long periods of time, relatively reasonably so. By the 1960's this became less and less possible. The notion that the breakdown in our civilization is actually occurring has been flooding the unconscious portions of our minds: it is now swimming up to the very surface of our consciousness.
We live in a time when there is developing an increasing intrusion of mental processes into the structure of events. The dissolution of modern civilization is involved in this; indeed, it is to some extent the effect of this evolving “internalization.” Now the crumbling of mental buildings rather clearly precedes the breakdown of material ones. Our civilization is in ruins because our beliefs about civilization are in ruins. We are far more beset by self-doubt than were our ancestors two or three hundred years ago. It is this self-doubt which has produced the end of empires. Few historians mustered the insight with which the philosopher Santayana, more than twenty years ago, wrote down his thoughts on the dissolution of empires, such as the British one:
. . . England, for instance, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, acted the great power with conviction; she was independent, mistress of the sea, and sure of her right to dominion. Difficulties and even defeats, such as the loss of the American Colonies, did not in the least daunt her; her vitality at home and her liberty abroad remained untouched. But gradually, though she suffered no final military defeat, the heart seemed to fail her for so vast an enterprise. It was not the colonies she had lost that maimed her, but those she had retained or annexed. Ireland, South Africa, and India became thorns in her side. The bloated industries which helped her to dominate the world made her incapable of feeding herself; they committed her to forced expansion, in order to secure markets and to secure supplies. But she could no longer be warlike with a good conscience; the virtuous thing was to bow one's way out and say: My mistake. Her kings were half-ashamed to be kings, her liberals were half-ashamed to govern, her Church was half-ashamed to be Protestant. All became a medley of sweet reasonableness, stupidity, and confusion. Being a great power was now a great burden. It was urgent to reduce responsibility, to reduce armaments, to refer everything to conferences, to support the League of Nations, to let everyone have his own way abroad, and to let everyone have his own way at home. Had not England always been a champion of liberty? But wasn't it time now for the champion to retire? And wouldn't liberty be much freer without a champion?
The other great powers, for abdicating more unwillingly, have not avoided the same fate; they are embarrassed by greater inertia or rebellion at home, and by the same tangle abroad. . . ."
Increasing self-doubt; increasing weakness. The growing self-doubt of our civilization has evolved together with our growing self-awareness: yet this self-awareness may perhaps become the shining side of the coin whose other, dark side is self-doubt.
Taken from The Passing of the Modern Age by John Lukacs