WESTERN EXPERIENCES WITH PRECEDENTS 443
ship had, in fact, already been the death of a Western city-state cosmos
which had disengaged itself from, and forged ahead of, the rest of the
Western World in the Medieval Age of Western history.1 In the unhappy
experience of this abortive sub-society within a Western Christian body
social, the Venetians' idolization of their own dead collective self from
the fifteenth to the nineteenth century of the Christian Era2 had, as we
have seen, been a startlingly close counterpart of the Athenians' idoliza-
tion of their dead collective self from the fourth century B.C. onwards;3
and such examples from the history of the disintegration of a Western
sub-society were not the only cases of this spiritual malady in the history
of the Western World. While the Epimethean stance of Eire4 might per-
haps be discounted on the ground that this was a defensive reaction of a
submerged relic of an originally alien Far Western Christian Civilization
which was showing in this way its recalcitrance to the Western Civiliza-
tion's attempt to assimilate it, the reaction of the Virginians and the
South Carolinians to their defeat in the Civil War of AJX 1861-5 in the
United States5 was an indubitable post-Modern Western instance of the
Venetian-Athenian attitude; and, while this backward-turned posture
was peculiarly incongruous with the forward-looking outlook normally
characteristic of pioneers on new ground, the post-Bellum Epimethean-
ism of 'the Old South' of the United States was not so significant a
portent for the prospects of the Western World as a whole as the Epi-
metheanism that had become rife in France after the General War of
A.D. 1914-18 and, to a still greater degree, after the General War of A J>.

1939-45-

Moreover, in the Western World as a whole in the post-Modern chap-
ter of its history, the devastating effects of the idolization of parochial
sovereign states had been enhanced by the importation of a demonic
'drive' into the suicidal performances of these tribal gods' votaries. The
restraining influence of an oecumenicalism on the ecclesiastical plane
which the Western Civilization had inherited from its chrysalis the
Western Christian Church had been removed by a lamentable victory of
parochialism over oecumenicalism in Western life on tbis ecclesiastical
plane at the transition to the Modem Age from the Middle Ages.6 The
capacity of the parochial sovereign states of a Modern Western World to
ruin their common civilization by ruining one another had been en-
hanced by the importation into their statecraft of an Italian efficiency
which had been the unfortunate legacy of a foundering Medieval Western
city-state cosmos.7 The impact of Nationalism upon the historic political
map of a Late Modern Western World had imported a new ferocity into
the fratricidal wars between Western parochial states by most inexpe-
diently raising the stakes.8 In the paroxysm of wars fought in the name of
Nationalism coupled with some form of political ideology which had be-
gun with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in A.D. 1775,
the contests could no longer be kept 'temperate and undecisive' because
the parochial states of the Western World were now fighting one another

* See III. iii. 299 and 342-50. 2 See IV, hr« 374-89.

3 See IV. iv. 263-74. * See IV, iv. 291-6. 5 See IV. iv. 289-91.

« See IV. iv. 214-22, 1 See IV. iv. 198-200. » See IV. iv. 185-90.