C. THE TESTIMONY OF THE HISTORIES
OF THE CIVILIZATIONS

(I) WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH NON-WESTERN
PRECEDENTS

IN earlier Parts of this Study we have tried to gain some insight into
the causes of the breakdowns of civilizations and into the process of
their disintegrations by making empirical surveys of relevant historical
facts,1 and in these surveys we have taken a synoptic view of evidence
from the histories of all the civilizations known to us, including the
Western. At the point which we have now reached in our present in-
quiry into the prospects of the Western Civilization mid-way through
the twentieth century of the Christian Era, it may be useful to recall and
review any conspicuous counterparts in Western history of phenomena
in the histories of other civilizations which, in those histories, are recog-
nizable symptoms of breakdown and disintegration.

In studying the breakdowns of civilizations, we found that the cause
was, in every case, some failure of self-determination, and that, when
human beings thus lost control over their own destinies, this social
disaster usually turned out to have been the consequence of a moral
aberration. A broken-down society, community, or individual would
prove to have forfeited a salutary freedom of choice through having
fallen into bondage to some idol of its own making. Mid-way through
the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western Society was mani-
festly given over to the worship of a number of idols that had been the
bane of other civilizations in the past; but, among these, one stood out
above all the rest, and this was the cult of the institution of Parochial
Sovereignty embodied in parochial states that were being worshipped by
their respective subjects as very godsz and that were demonstrating
their demonic power over their devotees by exacting from them human
sacrifices of ever greater enormity in cycles of fratricidal wars of a
violence that was increasing in a geometrical progression.

This grimly prominent feature of post-Modern Western life was a
terrifying portent on two accounts: first because this idolization of

1 See IV. iv. 7—584; V. v. 15—568; and "V. vL 1—326.

3 At some date during the latter part of the breathing-space between the general wars
of A.D. 1914-18 and A.D. 1939—45, the -writer of this Study heard the presiding officer of
one of the livery companies of the City of London bear testimony which was convincing,
because it was unselfconscious, to the primacy, in his Weltanschauung, of one of these
tribe-worships. The occasion -was a dinner at which the company was entertaining the
delegates to an international congress that was in session in London at the time, and the
presiding officer had risen to propose the toast 'Church and King*. Having it on his
mind that a majority of his guests were foreigners who would not be familiar with an
English tribal custom, the president prefaced the toast vrith an apology and, an explana-
tion. No doubt, he said, the order in which he had rehearsed the two institutions that
were to be honoured conjointly in the toast that he was about to propose might seem to
a foreigner not only quaint but perhaps even positively unseemly. He apologized for
abiding, nevertheless, by the traditional order, and explained that be did so because it
was the pride of the city companies to be meticulous in preserving antique usages, even.
when these had become so anachronistic as to be open to misconstruction by the urt-
initiated.