XII
THE PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN
CIVILIZATION
A. THE NEED FOR THIS INQUIRY
A
> he took up his pen to write the present Part of this book, the
writer was conscious of a sense of distaste for this self-imposed
task which was due to something more than a natural shrinking from the
obvious hazards of a speculative subject.
On the 3oth November, 1950, it was, of course, clear that the fore-
casts about the prospects of the Western Civilization that he was ventur-
ing to put on paper might be belied by events almost before the ink was
dry, and perhaps long before the manuscript could be printed and pub-
lished.1 Yet, if the risk of making himself ridiculous had been a govern-
ing consideration in the writer's mind, this would have deterred him
from ever embarking on any part of this Study; and, in committing him-
self to Part Twelve of the work after having already given eleven hos-
tages to Fortune, he could take heart from the reflection that at this date
the prospects of the Western Civilization were at any rate very much less
obscure than they had been when, in the early months of the year 1929,
he had been drafting the original notes for this Part that were now lying
at his elbow.
In a.d. 1929, before the break on Wall Street, it was already possible
to discern the general direction in which the Western World was moving,
but it was far more difficult then than it was twenty-one years later to
picture the alternative possible routes along which this movement might
take its course. In 1929 it could already be foreseen, for example, that,
in a Westernizing World that had become coextensive with the entire
habitable surface of the Planet, a process of unification which, on the
economic, technological, and intellectual planes, was accelerating in a geo-
metrical progression was bound to prevail on the military and political
planes likewise, sooner or later; yet in 1929 it was still impossible either
to guess how long it would take to arrive at this consummation or to
imagine how the unificatory process would overcome a passive and active
opposition which, at that date, were no less impressive than was the
contrary nisus towards unification. In 1929 an historian seemed to be in
presence here of a contest like the legendary race between the hound
who could never fail to catch his quarry and the fox who could never be
caught; and on the military and political plane this apparently insoluble
riddle of a.b. 1929 was illustrated by the situation of the Great Powers
1 'Lorsqu'il s'agit. . . d'un ensemble aussi complexe, la difficult^ de reconstituer le
passe", mSme le plus re'cent, est toute comparable a la difficult^ de construire 1'avenir,
m&ne le plus prpche; ou, plut6t, c'est la m6me difficult^. Le prophete est dans le m€me
sac £ue I'historien. Laissons-les y/ (Vale'ry, Paul: 'La Crise de 1'Esprit,* in Varidtt
(Paris 1924, Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Fran9aise), p. 17).