UNPRECEDENTED WESTERN EXPERIENCES 469
level of the primitive societies and by the distinctive individuality of the
contours of each of these uprising cultural peaks, an abrupt encounter
between two or more sharply diversified societies had been a perpetual
possibility that had also frequently been realized as a matter of tragic
historical fact. In such encounters between diverse contemporaries the
weaker party was apt, as we have already observed,1 to be confronted
with the agonizing necessity of having to attempt to achieve an adapta-
tion beyond the compass of its adaptational capacity as the only alterna-
tive choice to going under without a struggle; and, though we have not
come across any instance of a civilization in its growth-phase having been
broken down by a collision with a more potent alien society, we have
noted a number of examples of civilizations already in disintegration
receiving their coup de grace from an alien hand.z

The Western Civilization, for example, had played either the mur-
derous or the insidious aggressor's part in encounters with ten contem-
porary societies of its own species. It had assassinated the Mexic, Yucatec,
and Andean civilizations, and had led the other seven the dance that
Goethe's Mephistopheles leads Goethe's Faust.3 The new element in
the situation in a Westernizing World inAJ>. 1952 was not the destructive
or subversive effect that was the familiar consequence of any cultural en-
counter, but the fact that, in an Oikoumenl that was in process of being
made into the common home of a single all-embracing society within a
Western framework, the unifying Western Civilization had carried the
acceleration of its own spontaneous internal change to a pitch at which it
was now already victimizing itself by acting as its own Mephistopheles
and was threatening to victimize itself more crudely than that by acting
as its own Cortes or Pizarro. The pace of Western change had now be-
come so fast that, even within the Western Civilization's own original
Western patrimony, where this pace was being set from within and was not
being forced upon the Subconscious Psyche by the pressure of any external
agent, it was imposing an intolerable tax on the stamina of the best-trained
native-born Western runners. A fortiori, this was a killing pace for that
great majority of Mankind who were not native children of Hesperia's
household but were alien conscripts in her immense internal proletariat.

At this critical moment in the history both of the West and of the
World, when it would have been difficult in any circumstances for the
Human Psyche to move fast enough and far enough along the path of
psychological adaptation to a process of technological advance that was
now rushing at a break-neck speed, the difficulty had been aggravated by
revolutionary social and political changes that the revolutionary techno-
logical changes had brought with them.

Since the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, the work
of unifying the World within a Western framework had been mostly
carried out by six West European countries—Portugal, Spain, Holland,
France, Britain, and Belgium—and, within these countries, mainly by
one class, the bourgeoisie; and, after the two Iberian pioneer countries
in a Modern Western movement of world-wide Oceanic expansion had
fallen out of the race, the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian middle

i In IX. viiL 88-629. * S«e IV. iv. 76-114. * See II. L 372-99.