Race and history

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LEVI- STRAUSS

RACE AND HISTORY

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

IE RACE QUESTION IN MODERN SCIENCE

M^4J mOll^JSJL

by
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

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In I he same series:

Race and Culture

by Michel Lkiris. 46 pp.
liacc and Psychology

by Otto Klineberg. 39 ]ip.
Race and Biology

by Leslie C. Dunn. 48 pp.
Racial Myths

by Juan Comas. 51 pp.
The Roots of Prejudice

by Arnold M. Rosi:. 41 pp.

In preparation:

Race and Society

by Kenneth L. Little.
The Significance of Racial
Differences

by Geoffrey M. Morant.

Price per volume:

$ .25; 1/6; 75 fr.

Price: $-.25; 1/6; 75 fr

THE RACE QUESTION IN MODERN SCIENCE

RACE

AND
HISTORY

by

Claude Levi-Strauss

Director of Studies at the
Ecole pratique des hautes etudes

UNESCO PARIS

Published by the United Nations

Educational, Scientijic and Cultural Organization

19, avenue Kliber, Paris-16'^

Printed by G. Thone, Li^ge

Copyright 1952 by Unesco, Paris

SS.52.II. 6A

CONTENTS

I. Race and culture 5

II. The diversity of cultures 8

III. The ethnocentric attitude 11

IV. Archaic and primitive cultures .... 16

V. The idea of progress .20

VI. "Stationary" and "cumulative" history 24

VII. The place of western civilization .... 30

VIII. Chance and civilization 34

IX. Collaboration between cultures .... 41

X. The Counter-currents of progress .... 46
Bibliography 50

$ 746071

I. RACE AND CULTURE

It may seem somewhat surprising, in a series of booklets
intended to combat racial prejudice, to speak of the contribu-
tions made by various races of men to world civilization. It
vs^ould be a waste of time to devote so much talent and effort
to demonstrating that, in the present state of scientific
knowledge, there is no justification for asserting that any
one race is intellectually superior or inferior to another, if
we were, in the end, indirectly to countenance the concept
of race by seeming to show that the great ethnic groups
constituting human kind as a whole have, as such, made
their own peculiar contributions to the common heritage.

Nothing could be further from our intentions, for such a
course of action would simply result in an inversion of the
racist doctrine. To attribute special psychological charac-
teristics to the biological races, with a positive definition,
is as great a departure from scientific truth as to do so with
a negative definition. It must not be forgotten that Gobineau,
whose work was the progenitor of racist theories, regarded
"the inequality of the human races" as qualitative, not quan-
titative; in his view, the great primary races of early man —
the white, the yellow and the black — differed in their special
aptitudes rather than in their absolute value. Degeneration
resulted from miscegenation, rather than from the relative
position of individual races in a common scale of values; it
was therefore the fate in store for all mankind, since all
mankind, irrespective of race, was bound to exhibit an
increasing intermixture of blood. The original sin of anthro-
pology, however, consists in its confusion of the idea of race,
in the purely biological sense (assuming that there is any
factual basis for the idea, even in this limited field — which
is disputed by modern genetics), with the sociological and
psychological productions of human civilizations. Once he
had made this mistake, Gobineau was inevitably committed
to the path leading from an honest intellectual error to the
unintentional justification of all forms of discrimination and
exploitation.

When, therefore, in this paper, we speak of the contribu-
tions of different races of men to civilization, we do not
mean that the cultural contributions of Asia or Europe,
Africa or America are in any way distinctive because these
continents are, generally speaking, inhabited by peoples of
different racial stocks. If their contributions are distinctive —
and there can be little doubt that they are — the fact is to be
accounted for by geographical, historical and sociological
circumstances, not by special aptitudes inherent in the
anatomical or physiological make-up of the black, yellow or
white man. It seemed to us, however, that the very effort
made in this series of booklets to prove this negative side of
the argument, involved a risk of pushing into the background
another very important aspect of the life of man— the fact that
the development of human life is not everywhere the same
but rather takes form in an extraordinary diversity of societies
and civilizations. This intellectual, aesthetic and sociological
diversity is in no way the outcome of the biological differ-
ences, in certain observable features, between different groups
of men; it is simply a parallel phenomenon in a different
sphere. But, at the same time, we must note two important
respects in which there is a sharp distinction. Firstly, the
order of magnitude is different. There are many more human
cultures than human races, since the first are to be counted
in thousands and the second in single units; two cultures
developed by men of the same race may differ as much as,
or more than, two cultures associated with groups of entirely
different racial origin. Secondly, in contrast to the diversity
of races, where interest is confined to their historical origin
or their distribution over the face of the world, the diversity
of cultures gives rise to many problems; it may be wondered
whether it is an advantage or a disadvantage for human kind,
and there are naturally many subsidiary questions to be con-
sidered under this general head.

Last and most important, the nature of the diversity must
be investigated even at the risk of allowing the racial preju-
dices whose biological foundation has so lately been destroyed
to develop again on new grounds. It would be useless to
argue the man in the street out of attaching an intellectual or
moral significance to the fact of having a black or white skin,
straight or frizzy hair, unless we had an answer to another
question which, as experience proves he will immediately ask:
if there are no innate racial aptitudes, how can we explain
the fact that the white man's civilization has made the tre-

mendous advances with which we are all familiar while the
civilizations of the coloured peoples have lagged behind, some
of them having come only half way along the road, and others
being still thousands or tens of thousands of years behind the
times? We cannot therefore claim to have formulated a
convincing denial of the inequality of the human races, so
long as we fail to consider the problem of the inequality — or
diversity — of human cultures, which is in fact — however
unjustifiably — closely associated with it in the public mind.

II. THE DIVERSITY OF CULTURES

If wc are lo understand how, and to what extent, the various
human cultures differ from one another, and whether these
differences confhct or cancel one another out or, on the con-
trary, are all instrumental in forming a harmonious whole,
the first thing to do is to draw up a list of them. But here
we immediately run into difficulties, for we are forced to
recognize that human cultures do not all differ from one
another in the same way or on the same level. Firstly, we
have societies co-existing in space, some close together and
some far apart but, on the whole, contemporary with one
another. Secondly, we have social systems that have followed
one another in time, of which we can have no knowledge by
direct experience. Anyone can become an ethnographer and
go out to share the life of a particular society which interests
him. But not even the historian or archeologist can have any
personal contact with a vanished civilization; all his know-
ledge must be gleaned from the writings or the monuments
which it or other societies have left behind. Nor must we
forget that those contemporary societies which have no know-,
legde of writing, like those wich we call "savage" or "primi-
tive", were preceded by other forms of society of which we
can learn nothing, even indirectly. If we are honest in drawing
up our list, we shall have, in such cases, to leave blank spaces,
which will probably be far more numerous than the spaces in
which we feel we can make some entry. The first thing to
be noted is therefore that, in fact in the present, as well as
in fact and in the very nature of things in the past, the diver-
sity of human cultures is much greater and richer than we
can ever hope to appreciate to the full.

But however humble we may be in our approach, and how-
ever well we may appreciate our limitations in this respect,
there are other problems to be considered. What are we to
understand by "different" cultures.^ Some cultures appear to
qualify for this description, but, if they are derived from a
common stock, they cannot differ in the same way as two
societies which have had no contacts with one another at any

8

stage of their development. For instance, the ancient Inca
Empire in Peru and the Kingdom of Dahomey in Africa are
more absolutely different than are, let us say, England and the
United States today, although these two societies also are to be
regarded as distinct. Conversely, societies which have been
in very close contact since a recent date give the impression
of representing a single civilization, whereas in fact they have
reached the present stage by different paths, which we are
not entitled to ignore. Forces working in contrary directions
operate simultaneously in human societies, some being conduc-
tive to the preservation and even the accentuation of parti-
cularism, while others tend to promote convergence and
affinity. Striking instances are to be found in the study of
language for, while languages whose origin is the same tend
to develop differences from one another — e.g. Russian,
French and English — languages of different origin which are
spoken in adjacent territories developed common characteris-
tics; Russian, for example, has developed differences from
other Slavic languages in certain respects and grown closer,
at least in certain phonetic features, to the Finno-Ugrian and
Turkish languages spoken in its immediate geographic neigh-
bourhood.

A study of such facts — and we could easily find similar
instances in other aspects of civilization, such as social insti-
tutions, art and religion — leads us to ask whether, in the
inter-relations of human societies, there may not be an
optimum degree of diversity, which they cannot surpass but
which they can also not fall short of without incurring risks.
This optimum would vary according to the number of socie-
ties, their numerical strength their geographical distance from
one another, and the means of communication (material and
intellectual) at their disposal. The problem of diversity does
not, in fact, arise solely with regard to the inter-relations of
cultures; the same problem is found within each individual
society with regard to the inter-relations of the constituent
groups; the various castes, classes, professions or religious
denominations develop certains differences, which each of
them considers to be extremely important. It may be wondered
whether this internal differentiation does not tend to increase
Avhen the society becomes larger and otherwise more homo-
geneous; this may perhaps have been what happened in
ancient India, where the caste system developed as a sequel
to the establishment of the Aryan hegemony.

It is thus clear that the concept of the diversity of human

cultures cannot be static. It is not the diversity of a collection
of lifeless samples or the diversity to be found in the arid
pages of a catalogue. Men have doubtless developed differen-
tiated cultures as a result of geographical distance, the
special features of their environment, or their ignorance of
the rest of mankind; but this would be strictly and absolutely
true only if every culture or society had been born and had
developed without the slightest contact with any others. Such
a case never occurs however, except possibly in such excep-
tional instances as that of the Tasmanians (and, even then,
only for a limited period). Human societies are never alone;
when they appear to be most divided, the division is always
between groups or clusters of societies. It would not, for
instance, be an unwarranted presumption that the civiliza-
tions of North and South America were cut off from almost
all contacts with the rest of the world for a period lasting
from 10,000 to 25,000 years. But the great section of mankind
thus isolated consisted of a multitude of societies, great and
small, having very close contacts with one another. Moreover,
side by side with the differences due to isolation, there are
others equally important which are due to proximity, bred
of the desire to assert independence and individuality. Many
customs have come into being, not because of an intrinsic
need for them or of a favourable chance, but solely because
of a group's desire not to be left behind by a neighbouring
group which was laying down specific rules in matters in
which the first group had not yet thought of prescribing
laws. , We should not, therefore, be tempted to a piece-meal
study bf the diversity of human cultures, for that diversity
depends less on the isolation of the various groups than on
the relations between them.

10

III. THE ETHNOCENTRIC ATTITUDE

Yet it would seem that the diversity of cultures has seldom
been recognized by men for what it is — a natural phenomenon
resulting from the direct or indirect contacts between socie-
ties; men have tended rather to regard diversity as something
abnormal or outrageous; advances in our knowledge of these
matters served less to destroy this illusion and replace it by
a more accurate picture than to make us accept it or accommo-
date ourselves to it.

The attitude of longest standing which no doubt has a firm
psychological foundation, as it tends to reappear in each one
of us when we are caught unawares, is to reject out of hand
the cultural institutions — ethical, religious, social or aesthetic
which are furthest removed from those with which we inden-
tify ourselves. "Barbarous habits", "not what we do", "ought
not to be allowed", etc. are all crude reactions indicative of
the same instinctive antipathy, the same repugnance for ways
of life, thought or belief to which we are unaccustomed. The
ancient world thus lumped together everything not covered
by Greek (and later the Greco-Roman) culture under the
heading of "barbarian": Western civilization later used the
term "savage" in the same sense. Underlying both these epi-
thets is the same sort of attitude. The word "barbarian" is
probably connected etymologically with the inarticulate confu-
sion of birdsong, in contra-distinction to the significant
sounds of human speech, while "savage" — "of the woods" —
also conjures up a brutish way of life as opposed to human
civilization. In both cases, there is a refusal even to admit the
fact of cultural diversity; instead, anything which does not
conform to the standard of the society in which the individual
lives is denied the name of culture and relegated to the realm
of nature.

There is no need to dwell on this naive attitude, which is
nevertheless deeply rooted in most men, since this booklet
— and all those in the same series — in fact refutes it. It will be
enough, in this context, to note that a rather interesting para-
dox lies behind it. This attitude of mind, which excludes

11

"savages" (or any people one may choose to regard as savages)
from human kind, is precisely the attitude most strikingly
characteristic of those same savages. We knov^, in fact, that
«the concept of humanity as covering all forms of the human
species, irrespective of race or civilization, came into being
very late in history and is by no means widespread. Even
where it seems strongest, there is no certainty — as recent
history proves — that it is safe from the dangers of misunder-
standing or retrogression. So far as great sections of the
human species have been concerned, however, and for tens
of thousands of years, there seems to have been no hint of
any such idea. Humanity is confined to the borders of the
tribe, the linguistic group, or even, in some instances, to the
Nillage, so that many so-called primitive peoples describe
themselves as "the men" (or sometimes — though hardly more
discreetly — as "the good", "the excellent", "the well-
achieved"), thus implying that the other tribes, groups or
villages have no part in the human virtues or even in human
nature, but that their members are, at best, "bad", "wicked",
"ground-monkeys", or "lousy eggs". They often go further
and rob the outsider of even this modicum of actuality, by
referring to him as a "ghost" or an "apparition". In this way,
curious situations arise in which two parties at issue present

tragic reflexion of one another's attitude. In the GreaterH
Antilles, a few years after the discovery of America, while the 1
Spaniards were sending out Commissions of investigation to
discover whether or not the natives had a soul, the latter spent
their time drowning white prisoners in order to ascertain,
by long observation, whether or not their bodies Avould
decompose. ■^

This strange and tragic anecdote is a good illustration of
the paradox inherent in cultural relativism (which we shall
find again elsewhere in other forms); the more we claim to
discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad,
the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we
would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who
seem to us to be the most "savage" or "barbarous" of their
representatives, we merely adopt one of their own character-
istic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man
N\ho believes in barbarism.

Admittedly the great philosophic and religious systems
which humanity has evolved — Buddhism, Christianity or
Islam, the Stoic, Kantian of Marxist doctrines — have con-
stantly condemned this aberration. But the simple statement

12

that all men are iialurally equal and should be hound
together in brotlierhood, irrespective of race or culture, is not
very satisfactory to the intellect, for it overlooks a factual
diversity which we cannot help but see; and we are not
entitled, either in theory or in practice, to behave as if there
were no such diversity, simply because we say that it does not
affect the essence of the question. The preamble to Unesco's
second Statement on the race problem very rightly observes
that the thing which convinces the man in the street that there
are separate races is "the immediate evidence of his senses
when he sees an African, a European, an Asiatic and an Ame-
rican Indian together".

Likewise, the strength and the weakness of the great decla-
rations of human rights has always been that, in proclaiming
an ideal, they too often forget that man grows to man's
estate surrounded, not by humanity in the abstract, but by
a traditional culture, where even the most revolutionary
changes leave whole sectors quite unaltered. Such declarations
can themselves be accounted for by the situation existing at
a particular moment in time and in particular space. Faced
with the two temptations of condemning things which are
offensive to him emotionally or of denying differences which
are beyond his intellectual grasp, modern man has launched
out on countless lines of philosophical and sociological spe-
culation in a vain attempt to achieve a compromise between
these two contradictory poles, and to account for the diversity
of cultures while seeking, at the same time, to eradicate what
still shocks and offends him in that diversity.

But however much these lines of speculation may differ,
and however strange some of them may be, they all, in point
of fact, come back to a single formula, which might probably
best be described by the expression false evolutionism. In
what does this consist.^ It is really an attempt to wipe out the
diversity of cultures while pretending to accord it full recog-
nition. If the various conditions in which human societies
are found, both in the past and in far distant lands, are
treated as phases or stages in a single line of development,
starting from the same point and leading to the same end,
it seems clear that the diversity is merely apparent. Humanity
is claimed to be one and the same everywhere, but this unity
and identity can be achieved only gradually; the variety of
cultures we find in the world illustrates the several stages in
a process which conceals the ultimate reality or delays our
recognition of it.

13

This may seem an over-simplification in view of the
enormous achievements of Darwinism. But Darwinism is in
no way implicated here, for the doctrine of biological evolu-
tion, and the pseudo-evolutionism we have in mind, are two
very different things. The first was developed as a great
working hypothesis, based on observations in which there
was very little need for interpretation. The various types in
the genealogy of the horse, for instance, can be arranged in
an evolutive series for two reasons: firstly, a horse can only
be sired by a horse; and secondly, skeletons varying gradually
from the most recent to the most ancient forms are found at
different levels in the earth, representing earlier and earlier
periods of history as we dig deeper. It is thus highly probable
that Hipparion was the real ancestor of Equus caballus. The
same reasoning is probably applicable to the human species
and the different races constituting it. When, however, we
turn from biology to culture, things become far more compli-
cated. We may find material objects in the soil, and note that
the form or manufacture of a certain type of object varies
progressively according to the depth of the geological strata.
But an axe does not give birth to an axe in the physical sense
that an animal gives birth to an animal. Therefore, to say
that an axe has developed out of another axe is to speak
metaphorically and with a rough approximation to truth, but
without the scientific exactitude which a similar expression
has in biological parlance. What is true of material objects
whose physical presence in the earth can be related to deter-
minable periods, is even more true of institutions, beliefs and
customs, whose past history is generally a closed book to us.
The idea of biological evolution is a hypothesis with one of
the highest coefficients of probability to be found in any of
the natural sciences, whilst the concept of social or cultural
evolution offers at best a tempting, but suspiciously convenient
method of presenting facts.

Incidentally, this difference, which is too often overlooked,
between true and false evolutionism can be explained by the
dates of their development. The doctrine of biological evolu-
tion admittedly gave sociological evolutionism a decided fillip
but the latter actually preceded the former. Without going
back to the views which Pascal took over from antiquity, and
looking upon humanity as a living being passing through the
successive stages of childhood, adolescence and maturity, we
may see in the eighteenth century the elaboration of all the
basic images which were later to be bandied about — Vico's

14

"spirals", and his "three ages" foreshadowing Comte's
"three states", and Condorcet's "stairway". Spencer and
Tylor, the two founders of social evolutionism, worked out
and published their doctrine before the appearance of the
Origin of Species, or without having read that work. Prior
in date to the scientific theory of biological evolution, social
evolutionism is thus too often merely a pseudo-scientific mask
for an old philosophical problem, which there is no certainty
of our ever solving by observation and inductive reasoning.

15

IV. ARCHAIC AND PRIMITIVE CULTURES

We have already suggested that, from its own point of view,
each society may divide cultures into three categories: contem-
porary cultures found in another part of the world; cultures
which have developed in approximately the same area as the
society in question, but at an earlier period; and finally, those
earlier in time and occupying a different area in space.

We have seen that our knowledge of these three groups
cannot be equally exact. In the last case, when we are con-
cerned with cultures which have left behind no written records
or buildings, and which employed very primitive techniques
(as is true for one half of the inhabited world and for
90-99 per cent varying according to region, of the time since
the dawn of civilization), it may be said that we can really
know nothing of them, and that our best efforts at under-
standing them can be no more than suppositions.

On the other hand, there is a great temptation to try to
arrange cultures in the first category in an order representing
a succession in time. It is, after all, natural that contemporary
societies with no knowledge of electricity and the steam
engine should call to mind the corresponding phase in the
development of Western civilization. It is natural to compare
natives tribes, ignorant of writing and metallurgy, but
depicting figures on walls of rock and manufacturing stone
implements, with the primitive forms of that same civiliza-
tion, which, as the traces left behind in the caves of France
and Spain bear witness, looked similar. It is in such matters
that false evolutionism has mainly been given free reign. But
the almost irresistible temptation to indulge in such compa-
risons whenever opportunity offers (is not the Western tra-
veller wont to see the "Middle Ages" in the East, "the days
of Louis XIV" in pre-1914 Peking, and "Stone Age" among
the Aborigines in Australia or New Guinea.!*), is extraordina-
rily dangerous. We can know only certain aspects of a vanished
civilization; and the older the civilization, the fewer are those
aspects since we can only have knowledge of things which
have survived the assaults of time. There is therefore a ten-

16

dency to take the part for the whole and to conclude that,
since certain aspects of two civilizations (one contemporary
and the other lost in the past) show similarities, there must
be resemblances in all aspects. Not only is this reasoning
logically indefensible but, in many cases, it is actually refuted
by the facts.

Until a relatively recent date, the Tasmanians and Patago-
nians used chipped stone implements, and certain Australian
and American tribes still make such tools. But studying these
teaches us very little about the use of similar tools in the
palaeolithic period. How were the famous "hand-axes" used.^
And yet their purpose must have been so specific that their
form and manufacture remained rigidly standardized for one
or two hundred thousand years over an area stretching from
England to South Africa and from France to China. What
was the use of the extraordinary flat, triangular Levalloisian
pieces .3 Hundreds of them are found in deposits and yet we
have no hypothesis to explain them. What were the so-called
Batons de commandement, made of reindeer antler.** What
technical methods were used in the Tardenoisian cultures,
which have left behind them an incredible number of tiny
fragments of chipped stone, in an infinite variety of geo-
metrical shapes, but very few tools adapted to the size of the
human hand.** All these questions indicate that there may well
be one resemblance between palaeolithic societies and certain
contemporary native societies; both alike have used chipped-
stone tools. But, even in the technological sphere, it is
difficult to go further than that; the employment of the
material, the types of instruments and therefore the purpose
for which they were used, were quite different, and one group
can teach us very little about the other in this respect. How
then can we gain any idea of the language, social institutions
or religious beliefs of the peoples concerned.!*

According to one of the commonest explanations derived
from the theory of cultural evolution, the rock paintings left
behind by the middle palaeolithic societies were used for
purposes of magic ritual in connexion with hunting. The line
of reasoning is as follows: primitive peoples of the present day
practise hunting rites, which often seem to us to serve no
practical purpose; the many pre-historic paintings on rock
walls deep in caves appear to us to serve no practical purpose;
the artists who executed them were hunters; they were there-
fore used in hunting rites. We have only to set out his implicit
argument to see how entirely inconsequent it is. It is,

17

incidentally, most current among non-specialists, for ethno-
graphers, who have had actual dealings with the primitive
peoples whom the pseudo-scientist is so cheerfully prepared
to serve up for whatever purpose happens to concern him at
the moment, with little regard for the true nature of human
cultures, agree that there is nothing in the facts observed to
justify any sort of hypothesis about these paintings. While
we are on the subject of cave paintings, we must point out
that, except for the cave paintings found in South Africa
(which some hold to be the work of native peoples in recent
times), "primitive" art is as far removed from Magdalenian
and Aurignacian art as from contemporary European art, for
it is marked by a very high degree of stylization, sometimes
leading to complete distortion, while prehistoric art displays
a striking realism. We might be tempted to regard this
characteristic as the origin of European art; but even that
would be untrue, since, in the same area, palaeolithic art was
succeeded by other forms of a different character; the identity
of geographical position does not alter the fact that different
peoples have followed one another on the same stretch of
earth, knowing nothing or caring nothing for the work of
their predecessors, and each bringing in conflicting beliefs,
techniques and styles of their own.

The state which the civilizations of America had reached
before Columbus' discovery is reminiscent of the neolithic
period in Europe. But this comparison does not stand up to
closer examination either; in Europe, agriculture and the
domestication of animals moved forward in step, whereas in
America, while agriculture was exceptionally highly devel-
oped, the use of domestic animals was almost entirely
unknown or, at all events, extremely restricted. In America,
stone tools were still used in a type of agriculture which, in
Europe, is associated with the beginnings of metallurgy.

There is no need to quote further instances, for there is
another and much more fundamental difficulty in the way of
any effort, after discovering the richness and individuality of"*
human cultures, to treat all as the counterparts of a more or
less remote period in Western civilization: broadly speaking
(and for the time being leaving aside America, to which we
shall return later), all human societies have behind them a
past of approximately equal length. If we were to treat
certain societies as "stages" in the development of certain
others, we should be forced to admit that, while something
was happening in the latter, nothing — or very little — was

18

going on in the former. In fact, we are inclined to talk of
"peoples with no history" (sometimes implying that they are
the happiest). This ellipsis simply means that their history is
and will always be unknown to us, not that they actually have
no history. For tens and even hundreds of millenaries, men
there loved, hated, suffered, invented and fought as others
did. In actual fact, there are no peoples still in their child-
hood; all are adult, even those who have not kept a diary of
their childhood and adolescence.

We might, of course, say that human societies have made
a varying use of their past time and that some have even
wasted it; that some were dashing on while others were
loitering along the road. This would suggest a distinction
between two types of history: a progressive, acquisitive type,
in which discoveries and inventions are accumulated to build
up great civilizations; and another type, possibly equally
active and calling for the utilization of as much talent, but
lacking the gift of synthesis which is the hall-mark of the
first. All innovations, instead of being added to previous
innovations tending in the same direction, would be absorbed
into a sort of undulating tide which, once in motion, could
never be canalized in a permanent direction.

This conception seems to us to be far more flexible and
capable of differentiation than the over-simplified views we
have dealt with in the preceding paragraphs. We may well
give it a place in our tentative interpretation of the diversity
of cultures without doing injustice to any of them. But before
we reach that stage there are several other questions to be
considered.

19

V. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

We must first consider the cultures in the second category
we defined above: the historical predecessors of the "obser-
ver's" culture. The situation here is far more complicated than
in the cases vv^e have considered earlier. For in this case the
hypothesis of evolution, which appears so tenuous and doubt-
ful as a means of classifying contemporary societies occupying
different areas in space, seems hard to refute, and would
jindeed appear to be directly borne out by the facts. We
know, from the concordant evidence of archaeology, pre-
historic study and palaeontology, that the area now known
as Europe was first inhabited by various species of the genus
Homo, who used rough chipped flint implements; that these
first cultures were succeeded by others in which stone was
first more skilfully fashioned by chipping, and later ground
and polished, while the working of bone and ivory was also
perfected; that pottery, weaving, agriculture and stock rearing
then came in, associated with a developing use of metals, the
stages of which can also be distinguished. These successive
forms therefore appear to represent evolution and progress;
some are superior and others inferior. But, if all this is true,
it is surely inevitable that the distinctions thus made must
affect our attitude towards contemporary forms of culture
exhibiting similar variations. The conclusions we reached
above are thus in danger of being compromised by this new
line of reasoning.

The progress which humanity has made since its earliest
days is so clear and so striking that an attempt to question it
could be no more than an exercise of rhetoric. And yet, it is
not as easy as it seems to arrange mankind's achievements in
a regular and continuous series. About 50 years ago, scholars
had a delightfully simple scheme to represent man's advance:
the old stone age, the new stone age, the copper, bronze and
iron ages. But in this, everything was over-simplified. We
now suspect that stone was sometimes worked simultaneously
by the chipping and polishing methods; when the latter
replaced the former, it did not simply represent a natural

20

technical advance from the previous stage, but also an attempt
to copy, in stone, the metal arms and tools possessed by other
civilizations, more "advanced" but actually contemporary with
their imitators. On the other hand, pollery-making, which
used to be regarded as a distinctive feature of the so-called
"polished stone age", was associated with the chipping pro-
cess of fashioning stone in certain parts of northern Europe.

To go no further than the period when chipped-stone
implements were manufactured, known as the palaeolithic
age, it was thought only a few years ago that the variants of
this method — characteristic of the "core-tool", "flake-tool"
and "blade-tool" industries — represented a historical pro-
gression in three stages, known respectively as lower palaeoli-
thic, middle palaeolithic and upper palaeolithic. It is now
recognized that these three variants were all found together,
representing not stages in a single advance, but aspects or,
to use the technical term, "facies" of a technique which may
not have been static but whose changes and variations were
extremely complex. In fact, the Levallois culture which we
have already mentioned, and which reached its peak between
the 2o0th and 70th millenary B.C., attained to a perfection in
the art of chipping stone which was scarcely equalled until
the end of the neolithic period, 245,000 to 65,000 years later,
and which we would find it extremely difficult to copy today.

Everything we have said about the development of cultures
is also true of races, although (as the orders of magnitude
are different) it is impossible to correlate the two processes.
In Europe, Neanderthal Man was not anterior to the oldest
known forms of Homo sapiens; the latter were his contempo-
raries and maybe even his predecessors. And it is possible that
the most diverse types of Hominidae may have been contem-
porary even though they did not occupy the same parts of
the world — "pygmies" living in South Africa, "giants" in
China and Indonesia, etc.

Once more, the object of our argument is not to deny the
fact of human progress but to suggest that we might be more
cautious in our conception of it. As our prehistoric and
archaeological knowledge grows, we tend to make increasing
use of a spatial scheme of distribution instead of a time scale
scheme. The implications are two: firstly, that "progress"
(if this term may still be used to describe something very
different from its first connotation) is neither continuous nor
inevitable; its course consists in a series of leaps and bounds,
or, as the biologists would say, mutations. These leaps and

21

bounds are not always in the same direction; the general
trend may change too, rather like the progress of the knight
in chess, who always has several moves open to him but never
in the same direction. Advancing humanity can hardly be
likened to a person climbing stairs and, with each movement,
adding a new step to all those he has already mounted; a
more accurate metaphor would be that of a gambler who has
staked his money on several dice and, at each throw, sees
them scatter over the cloth, giving a different score each time.
What he wins on one, he is always liable to lose on another,
and it is only occasionally that history is "cumulative", that
is to say, that the scores add up to a lucky combination.

The case of the Americas proves convincingly that "cumu-
lative" history is not the prerogative of any one civilization
or any one period. Man first came to that enormous conti-
nent, no doubt in small nomadic groups crossing the Behring
Straits during the final stages of the Ice age, at some date
which cannot have been much earlier than the 20th millenary
B.C. In twenty or twenty-five thousand years, these men pro-
duced one of the most amazing examples of "cumulative"
history the world has ever seen: exploring the whole range of
the resources of their new natural environment, cultivating
a wide variety of plants (besides domesticating certain species
of animals) for food, medicines and poisons, and — as no-
where else — using poisonous substances as a staple article of
diet (e.g. manioc) or as stimulants or anaesthetics; collect-
ing various poisons or drugs for use on the animal species
particularly susceptible to each of them; and finally de-
veloping certain industries, such as weaving, ceramics and the
working of precious metals, to the highest pitch of perfection.
To appreciate this tremendous achievement, we need only
assess the contribution which America has made to the civi-
lizations of the Old World, starting with the potato, rubber,
tobacco and coca (the basis of modern anaesthetics), repre-
senting four pillars of Western culture, though admittedly
on very different grounds; followed by maize and ground-
nuts, which were to revolutionize the economy of Africa
before perhaps coming into general use as an article of diet
in Europe; coca, vanilla, the tomato, the pineapple, pepper,
several species of beans, cottons and gourds. Finally, the zero
on the use of which arithmetic and, indirectly, modern
mathematics are founded, was known and employed by the
Maya at least 500 years before it was discovered by the Indian
scholars, from whom Europe received it via the Arabs.

22

Possibly for that reason, the Maya calendar, at the same
period of history, was more accurate than that of the Old
World. Much has already been written on the question
whether the political system of the Inca was socialistic or
totalitarian, but, at all events, the ideas underlying it were
close to some of those most characteristic of the modern
world, and the system was several centuries ahead of similar
developments in Europe. The recent revival of interest in
curare would serve to remind us, if a reminder were needed,
that the scientific knowledge of the American Indians con-
cerning many vegetable substances not used elsewhere in the
world may even now have much to teach the rest of the globe.

23

VI. "STATIONARY" AND "CUMULATIVE" HISTORY

The foregoing discussion of the American case would suggest
that we ought to consider the difference between "stationary
history" and "cumulative history" rather more carefully.
Have we not, perhaps, acknowledged the "cumulative"
character of American history simply because we recognize
America as the source of a number of contributions we have
taken from it, or which are similar to those we ourselves have
made? W^hat would be the observer's attitude towards a civi-
lization which had concentrated on developing values of its
own, none of which was likely to affect his civilization?
Would he not be inclined to describe that civilization as
"stationary"? In other words, does the distinction between
the two types of history depend on the intrinsic nature of the
cultures to which the terms are applied, or does it not rather
result from the ethnocentric point of view which we always
adopt in assessing the value of a different culture? We should
thus regard as "cumulative" any culture developing in a direc-
tion similar to our own, that is to say, whose development
would appear to us to be significant. Other cultures, on the
contrary, would seem to us to be "stationary", not necessarily
because they are so in fact, but because the line of their de-
velopment has no meaning for us, and cannot be measured in
terms of the criteria Ave employ.

That this is indeed so is apparent from even a brief consider-
ation of the cases in which we apply the same distinction,
not in relation to societies other than our own, but within
our own society. The distinction is made more often than we
might think. People of advanced years generally consider that
history during their old age is stationary, in contrast to the
cumulative history they saw being made when they were
young. A period in which they are no longer actively con-
cerned, when they have no part to play, has no real meaning
for them; nothing happens, or what does happen seems to
them to be unproductive of good; while their grandchildren
throw themselves into the life of that same period with all
the passionate enthusiasm which their elders have forgotten.

24

The opponents of a political system are disinclined to admit
that the system can evolve; they condemn it as a whole, and
would excise it from history as a horrible interval when life
is at a standstill only to begin again when the interval is
over. The supporters of the regime hold quite a different
view, especially, we may note, when they take an intimate
part, in a high position, in the running of the machine. The
quality of the history of a culture or a cultural progression or,
to use a more accurate term, its eventfulness, thus depends
not on its intrinsic qualities but on our situation with regard
to it and on the number and variety of our interests involved.

The contrast between progressive and stagnant cultures
would thus appear to result, in the first place, from a differ-
ence of focus. To a viewer gazing through a microscope
focused on a certain distance from the objective, bodies placed
even a few hundredths of a millimetre nearer or further away
will appear blurred and "wolly", or may even be invisible;
he sees through them. Another comparison may be made to
disclose the same illusion. It is the illustration used to
explain the rudiments of the theory of relativity. In order to
show that the dimensions and the speed of displacement of
a body are not absolute values but depend on the position of
the observer, it is pointed out that, to a traveller sitting at
the window of a train, the speed and length of other trains
vary according to whether they are moving in the same or the
contrary direction. Any member of a civilization is as closely
associated with it as this hypothetical traveller is with his
train for, from birth onwards, a thousand conscious and
unconscious influences in our environment instil into us a
complex system of criteria, consisting in value judgments,
motivations and centres of interest, and including the
conscious reflexion upon the historical development of our
civilization which our education imposes and without which
our civilization would be inconceivable or would seem
contrary to actual behaviour. Wherever we go, we are bound
to carry this system of criteria with us, and external cultural
phenomena can be observed only through the distorting glass
it interposes, even when it does not prevent us from seeing
anything at all.

To a very large extent, the distinction between "moving
cultures" and "static cultures" is to be explained by a differ-
ence of position similar to that which makes our traveller
think that a train, actually moving, is either travelling for-
ward or stationary. There is, it is true, a difference, whose

25

importance will be fully apparent when we reach the stage
— already foreshadowed — of seeking to formulate a general
theory of relativity in a sense different from that of Einstein,
i.e. applicable both to the physical and to the social sciences:
the process seems to be indentical in both cases, but the other
way round. To the observer of the physical world (as the
example of the traveller shows) systems developing in the
same direction as his own appear to be motionless, while
those which seem to move swiftest are moving in different
directions. The reverse is true of cultures, since they appear to
us to be in more active development when moving in the
same direction as our own, and stationary when they are
following another line. In the social sciences, however, speed
has only a metaphorical value. If the comparison is to hold,
we must substitute for this factor information or meaning.
We know, of course, that it is possible to accumulate far more
information about a train moving parallel to our own at
approximately the same speed (by looking at the faces of the
travellers, counting them, etc.) than about a train which we
are passing or which is passing us at a high speed, or which
is gone in a flash because it is travelling in a different
direction. In the extreme case, it passes so quickly that we
have only a confused impression of it, from which even the
indications of speed are lacking; it is reduced to a momentary
obscuration of the field of vision; it is no longer a train; it
no longer has any meaning. There would thus seem to be
some relationship between the physical concept of apparent
movement and another concept involving alike physics, psy-
chology and sociology — the concept of the amount of infor-
mation capable of passing from one individual to another or
from one group to another, which will be determined by the
relative diversity of their respective cultures.

Whenever we are inclined to describe a human culture as
stagnant or stationary, we should therefore ask ourselves
whether its apparent immobility may not result from our
ignorance of its true interests, whether conscious or
unconscious, and whether, as its criteria are different from
our own, the culture in question may not suffer from the
same illusion with respect to us. In other words, we may well
seem to one another to be quite uninteresting, simply because
we are dissimilar.

For the last two or three centuries, the whole trend of
Western civilization has been to equip man willi increasingly
powerful mechanical resources. If this criterion is accepted,

26

the quantity of energy available for each member of the popu-
lation will be taken as indicating the relative level of develop-
ment in human societies. Western civilization, as represented
in North America, will take first place, followed by the
European societies, with a mass of Asiatic and African
societies, rapidly becoming indistinguishable from one
another, bringing up the rear. But these hundreds, or even
thousands of societies which are commonly called "under-
developed" and "primitive", and which merge into an
undifferentiated mass when regarded from the point of view
we have just described (and which is hardly appropriate in
relation to them, since they have had no such line of develop-
ment or, if they have, it has occupied a place of very
secondary importance) are by no means identical. From other
points of view, they are diametrically opposed to one another;
the classification of societies will therefore differ according
to the point of view adopted.

If the criterion chosen had been the degree of ability to
overcome even the most inhospitable geographical conditions,
there can be scarcely any doubt that the Eskimos, on the
one hand, and the Bedouins, on the other, would carry off
the palm. India has been more successful than any other civi-
lization in elaborating a philosophical and religious system,
and China, a way of life capable of minimizing the psycho-
logical consequences of over-population. As long as 13 centu-
ries ago, Islam formulated a theory that all aspects of human
life — technological, economic, social and spiritual — are closely
interrelated — a theory that has only recently been rediscovered
in the West in certain aspects of Marxist thought and in the
development of modern ethnology. We are familiar with the
pre-eminent position in the intellectual life of the Middle Ages
which the Arabs owed to this prophetic vision. The West, for
all its mastery of machines, exhibits evidence of only the most
elementary understanding of the use and potential resources
of that super-machine, the human body. In this sphere, on
the contrary, as on the related question of the connexion
between the physical and the mental, the East and the
Far East are several thousand years ahead; they have produced
the great theoretical and practical summae represented by
Yoga in India, the Chinese "breath-techniques", or the
visceral control of the ancient Maoris. The cultivation of
plants without soil, which has recently attracted public atten-
tion, was practised for centuries by certain Polynesian peoples,
who might also have taught the world the art of navigation,

27

and who amazed it, in the eighteenth century, by their revela-
tion of a freer and more generous type of social and ethical
organization than had previously been dreamt of.

In all matters touching on the organization of the family
and the achievement of harmonious relations between the
family group and the social group, the Australian aborigines,
though backward in the economic sphere, are so far ahead
of the rest of mankind that, to understand the careful and
deliberate systems of rules they have elaborated, we have to
use all the refinements of modern mathematics. It was they in
fact who discovered that the ties of marriage represent the
very warp and woof of society, while other social institutions
are simply embroideries on that background; for, even in
modern societies, where the importance of the family tends
to be limited, family ties still count for much: their ramifica-
tions are less extensive but, at the point where one tie ceases
to hold, others, involving other families, immediately come
into play. The family connexions due to inter-marriage may
result in the formation of broad links between a few groups,
or of narrow links between a great number of groups; whether
they are broad or narrow, however, it is those links which
maintain the whole social structure and to which it owes its
flexibility. The Australians, with an admirable grasp of the
facts, have converted this machinery into terms of theory, and
listed the main methods by which it may be produced, with
the advantages and drawbacks attaching to each. They have
gone further than empirical observation to discover the mathe-
matical laws governing the systems, so that it is no exaggera-
tion to say that they are not merely the founders of general
sociology as a whole, but are the real innovators of measure-
ment in the social sciences.

The wealth and boldness of aesthetic imagination found in
the Melanesians, and their talent for embodying in social life
the most obscure products of the mind's subconscious activity,
mark one of the highest peaks to which men have attained
in these two directions. The African contribution is more
complex, but also less obvious, for we have only recently
suspected what an important part the continent had played
as the cultural melting pot of the Old World — the place where
countless influences came together and mingled to branch
out anew or to lie dormant but, in every case, taking a new
turn. The Egyptian civilization, whose importance to mankind
is common knowledge, can be understood only when it is
viewed as the co-product of Asia and Africa: and the great

28

political systems of ancient Africa, its legal organization, its
philosophical doctrines which for so long remained unknown
to Western students, its plastic arts and music, systematically
exploring all the opportunities opened up by each of these
modes of expression, are all signs of an extraordinarily fertile
past. There is, incidentally, direct evidence of this great past
in the perfection of the ancient African methods of working
bronze and ivory, which were far superior to any employed
in the West at the same period. We have already referred to
the American contribution and there is no need to revert to
it now.

Moreover, it is unwise to concentrate attention too much
upon these isolated contributions, for they might give us
the doubly false impression that world civilization is a sort
of motley. Too much publicity has been given to the various
peoples who were first with any discovery: the Phoenicians
with the use of the alphabet; the Chinese with paper, gun-
powder and the compass; the Indians with glass and steel.
These things in themselves are less important than the way
in which each culture puts them together, adopts them or
rejects them. And the originality of each culture consists
rather in its individual way of solving problems, and in the
perspective in which it views the general A'alues which must
be approximately the same for all mankind, since all men,
without exception, possess a language, techniques, a form of
art, some sort of scientific knowledge, religious beliefs, and
some form of social, economic and political organization.
The relations aie never quite the same, however, in every
culture, and modern ethnology is concentrating increasingly
on discovering the underlying reasons for the choices made,
rather than on listing mere external features.

29

VII. THE PLACE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

It may perhaps be objected that such arguments are theo-
retical. As a matter of abstract logic, it may be said, it is
possible that no culture is capable of a true judgment of any
other, since no culture can lay aside its own limitations, and
its appreciation is therefore inevitably relative. But look
around you; mark what has been happening in the world for
the past 100 years, and all your speculations will come to
nought. Far from "keeping themselves to themselves", all
civilizations, one after the other, recognize the superiority of
one of their number — ^Western civilization. Are we not
witnesses to the fact that the whole world is gradually
adopting its technological methods, its way of life, its amuse-
ments and even its costume? Just as Diogenes demonstrated
movement by walking, it is the course followed by all human
cultures, from the countless thousands of Asia to the lost
tribes in the remote fastnesses of the Brazilian or African
jungles which proves, by the unanimous acceptance of a
single form of human civilization, such as history has never
Avitnessed before, that that civilization is superior to any other;
the complaint which the "underdeveloped" countries advance
against the others at international meetings is not that they
are being westernized, but that there is too much delay in
giving them the means to westernize themselves.

This is the most difficult point in our argument; indeed it
would be of no use to attempt to defend the individuality of
human cultures against those cultures themselves. Moreover,
it is extremely difficult for an ethnologist to assess at its true
value such a phenomenon as the universal acceptance of
Western civilization. There are several reasons for this fact.
In the first place, there has probably never before in history
been a world civilization or, if any paralled does exist, it
must be sought in remote pre-historic times, about which
we know practically nothing. Secondly, there is very con-
siderable doubt about the permanence of this phenomenon.
It is a fact that for the past 150 years there has been a tendency
for Western civilization to spread throughout the world, either

30

in its entirety or by the development of certain of its key
features, such as industrialization; and that, where other
cultures are seeking to preserve some part of their traditional
heritage, the attempt is usually confined to the superstructure
of society, thet is to say, to the least enduring aspects of a
culture, v\^hich it may be expected will be swept away by the
far more radical changes which are taking place. The process
is still going on, however, and we cannot yet know what the
result will be. Will it end in the complete westernization of
our planet, with Russian or American variations? Will
syncretic forms come into being, as seems possible so far as
the Islamic world, India and China, are concerned.!^ Or is the
tide already on the turn and will it now ebb back, before the
imminent collapse of the Western world, brought to ruin,
like the prehistoric monsters, by a physical expansion out of
proportion to the structure on which their working depends?
We must take all these possibilities into account in attempting
to assess the process going on under our eyes, whose agents,
instruments or victims we are, whether we know it or not.

In the first place, we may note that acceptance of the
Western way of life, or certain aspects of it, is by no means
as spontaneous as Westerners would like to believe. It is less
the result of free choice than of the absence of any alternative.
W^estern civilization has stationed its soldiers, trading posts,
plantations and missionaries throughout the world; directly
or indirectly it has intervened in the lives of the coloured
peoples; it has caused a revolutionary upheaval in their tra-
ditional way of life, either by imposing its own customs, or by
creating such conditions as to cause the collapse of the existing
native patterns without putting anything else in their place.
The subjugated and disorganized peoples have therefore had
no choice but to accept the substitute solutions offered them
or, if they were not prepared to do that, to seek to imitate
Western ways sufficiently to be able to fight them on their
own ground. When the balance of power is not so unequal,
societies do not so easily surrender; their Weltanschauung
tends rather to be similar to that of this poor tribe in eastern
Brazil, whose members adopted the ethnographer, Curt
Nimuendaju, as one of themselves and who, whenever he
returned to them after a visit to civilization, would weep for
pity to think of the sufferings he must have endured so far
away from the only place — their village — where, in their
opinion, life was worth living.

Nevertheless, this reservation merely shifts the question to

31

another point. If Western culture's claim to superiority is
not founded upon free acceptance, must it not be founded
upon its greater vitality and energy, which have enabled it
to compel acceptance? Here we are down to bedrock. For this
inequality of force is not to be accounted for by the subjective
attitude of the community as a whole, as was the acceptance
we were discussing above. It is an objective fact, and can only
be explained by objective causes.

This is not the place to embark on a study of the philosophy
of civilization; volumes might be devoted to a discussion of
the nature of the values professed by Western civilization.
We shall deal only with the most obvious of those values,
those that are least open to question. They would seem to be
two: in the first place, to borrow Dr. Leslie White's phrase.
Western civilization seeks continually to increase the per
capita supply of energy; secondly, it seeks to protect and
prolong human life. To put the matter in a nutshell, the
second aspect may be regarded as a derivative of the first, since
the absolute quantity of energy available increases in propor-
tion to the length and health of the individual life. For the
sake of avoiding argument, we may also admit at once that
compensatory phenomena, acting, as it were, as a brake, may
go with these developments, such as the great slaughters of
world warfare and the inequalities in the consumption of
available energy between individuals and classes.

Once this is admitted, it is immediately apparent that, while
Western civilization may indeed have devoted itself to these
forms of development, to the exclusion of all others — wherein
perhaps its weakness lies — it is certainly not the only civi-
lization which has done so. All human societies, from the
earliest times, have acted in the same way: and very early and
primitive societies, which we should be inclined to compare
with the "barbarian" peoples of today, made the most decisive
advances in this respect. At present, their achievements still
constitute the bulk of what we call civilization. We are still
dependent upon the tremendous discoveries which marked the
phase we describe, without the slightest exaggeration, as the
neolithic revolution: agriculture, stock-rearing, pottery, weav-
ing. In the last eight or ten thousand years, all we have done
is to improve all these "arts of civilization".

Admittedly, some people exhibit an unfortunate tendency
to regard only the more recent discoveries as brought about
by human effort, intelligence and imagination, while the
discoveries humanity made in the "barbarian" period are

32

regarded as due to chance, so that, upon the whole, humanity
can claim little credit for them. This error seems to us so
common and so serious, and is so likely to prevent a proper
appreciation of the relations between cultures, that we think
it essential to clear it up at once and for all.

33

VIII. CHANCE AND CIVILIZATION

Treatises on ethnology, including some of the best, tell us that
man owes his knowledge of fire to the accident of lightning
or of a bush fire; that the discovery of a wild animal
accidentally roasted in such circumstances revealed to him
the possibility of cooking his food; and that the invention of
pottery was the result of someone's leaving a lump of clay
near a fire. The conclusion seems to be that man began his
career in a sort of technological golden age, when inventions
could, as it were, be picked off the trees as easily as fruit or
flowers. Only modern man would seem to find it necessary
to strain and toil; only to modern man would genius seem to
grant a flash of insight.

This naive attitude is the result of a complete failure to
appreciate the complexity and diversity of operations involved
in even the most elementary technical processes. To make
a useful stone implement, it is not enough to keep on striking
a piece of flint until it splits; this became quite apparent when
people first tried to reproduce the main types of prehistoric
tools. That attempt — in conjunction with observation of the
same methods still in use among certain native peoples —
taught us that the processes involved are extremely com-
plicated, necessitating, in some cases, the prior manufacture
of veritable "chipping tools"; hammers with a counterweight
to control the impact and direction of the blow; shock-
absorbers to prevent the vibration from shattering the flake.
A considerable body of knowledge about the local origin of
the materials employed, the processes of extracting them, their
resistance and structure, is also necessary; so is a certain
mu.scular skill and "knack", acquired by training; in short,
the manufacture of such tools calls for a "lithurgy" matching,
mutatis mutandis, the various main divisions of metal-
lurgy.

Similarly, while a natural conflagration might on occasion
broil or roast a carcass, it is very hard to imagine (except in
the case of volcanic eruptions, which are restricted to a rela-
tively small number of areas in the world) that it could suggest

34

boiling or steaming food. The latter methods of cooking,
however, are no less universally employed than the others.
There is, therefore, no reason for ruling out invention, which
must certainly have been necessary for the development of
the latter methods, when trying to explain the origin of the
former.

Pottery is a very good instance, for it is commonly believed
that nothing could be simpler than to hollow out a lump of
clay and harden it in the fire. We can only suggest trying it.
In the first place, it is essential to find clays suitable for baking;
but while many natural conditions are necessary for this
purpose, none of them is sufficient in itself, for no clay would,
after baking, produce a receptable suitable for use unless
it were mixed with some inert body chosen for its special
properties. Elaborate modelling techniques are necessary to
make possible the achievement of keeping in shape for some
time a plastic body which will not "hold" in the natural state,
and simultaneously to mould it; lastly, it is necessary to
discover the particular type of fuel, the sort of furnace, the
degree of heat, and the duration of the baking process which
will make the clay hard and impermeable and avoid the
manifold dangers of cracking, crumbling and distortion. Many
other instances might be quoted.

There are far too many complicated operations involved for
chance to account for all. Each one by itself means nothing,
and only deliberate imaginative combination, based on
research and experiment, can make success possible. Chance
admittedly has an influence, but, by itself, produces no result.
For about 2,500 years, the Western world knew of the existence
of electricity — which was no doubt discovered by accident —
but that discovery bore no fruit until Ampere and Faraday and
others set deliberately to work on the hypotheses they had for-
mulated. Chance played no more important a part in the
invention of the bow, the boomerang or the blow-pipe, in the
development of agriculture or stock-rearing, than in the
discovery of penicillin, into which, of course, we know it
entered to some extent. We must therefore distinguish carefully
between the transmission of a technique from one generation
to another, which is always relatively easy, as it is brought
about by daily observation and training, and the invention and
improvement of new techniques by each individual generation.
The latter always necessitate the same power of imagination
and the same tireless efforts on the part of certain individuals,
whatever may be the particular technique in question. The

35

societies we describe as "primitive" have as many Pasteurs
and Palissys as the others.

We shall shortly come back to chance and probability, but
in a different position and a different role; we shall not
advance them as a simple explanation for the appearance of
full-blown inventions, but as an aid to the interpretation of
a phenomenon found in another connexion — the fact that, in
spite of our having every reason to suppose that the quantity of
imagination, inventive power and creative energy has been
more or less constant throughout the history of mankind, the
combination has resulted in important cultural mutations
only at certain periods and in certain places. Purely personal
factors are not enough to account for this result: a sufficient
number of individuals must first be psychologically pre-
disposed in a given direction, to ensure the inventor's
immediate appeal to the public; this condition itself depends
upon the combination of a considerable number of other
historical, economic and sociological factors. We should thus
be led, in order to explain the differences in the progress of
civilizations, to invoke so many complex and unrelated causes
that we could have no hope of understanding them, either for
practical reasons, or even for theoretical reasons, such as the
inevitable disturbances provoked by the very use of mass
observation methods. In order to untangle such a skein of
countless filaments, it would in fact be necessary to submit
the society in question (and the surrounding world) to a
comprehensive ethnographical study covering every moment
of its life. Even apart from the enormous scope of the
undertaking, we know that ethnographers working on an
infinitely smaller scale often find their opportunities for
observation limited by the subtle changes introduced by their
very presence in the human group they are studying. Wc
also know that, in modern societies, one of the most efficient
methods of sounding reactions — public opinion polls — tend
to modify opinion at the same time, since they introduce
among the population a factor which Avas previously absent —
awareness of their own opinions.

This justifies the introduction into the social sciences of
the concept of probability, which has long since been recog-
nized in certain branches of physics, e.g. thermodynamics. We
shall return to this question; for the time being we may
content ourselves with a reminder that the complexity of
modern discoveries is not the result of the more common
occurrence or better supply of genius among our contem-

36

poraries. Rather the reveise, since we have seen that, through
the centuries, the progress of each generation depends merely
on its adding a constant contribution to the capital inherited
from earlier generations. Nine-tenths of our present wealth
is due to our predecessors — even more if the date when the
main discoveries made their appearance is assessed in relation
to the approximate date of the dawn of civilization. We then
find that agriculture was developed during a recent phase,
representing 2 per cent of that period of time; metallurgy
would represent 0.7 per cent, the alphabet 0.35 per cent,
Galileo's physics 0.035 per cent and Darwin's theories
0.009 per cent.^ The whole of the scientific and industrial
revolution of the West would therefore fall within a period
equivalent to approximately one-half of one-thousandth of
the life span of humanity to date. Some caution therefore
seems advisable in asserting that this revolution is destined
to change the whole meaning of human history.

It is nevertheless true — and this we think finally sums
up our problem — that, from the point of view of technical
inventions (and the scientific thought which makes such
inventions possible) , Western civilization has proved itself to
be more "cumulative" than other civilizations. Starting with
the same initial stock of neolithic culture, it successfully
introduced a number of improvements (alphabetic script,
arithmetic and geometry), some of which, incidentally, it
rapidly forgot; but, after a period of stagnation, lasting roughly
for 2,000 or 2,500 years (from the first millenary b.c. until
approximately the eighteenth century a.d.), it suddenly pro-
duced an industrial revolution so wide in scope, so com-
prehensive and so far-reaching in its consequences that
the only previous comparison was the neolithic revolution
itself.

Twice in its history, at an interval of approximately
10,000 years, then, humanity has accumulated a great number
of inventions tending in the same direction; enough such
inventions, exhibiting a sufficient degree of continuity have
come close enough together in time for technical co-ordination
to take place at a high level; this co-ordination has brought
about important changes in man's relations with nature,
w^hich, in their turn, have made others possible. This process,
which has so far occurred twice, and only twice, in the history
of humanity, may be illustrated by the simile of a chain

1. Leslie A. White, The Science of Culture, New York, 1949, p. 356.

37

reaction brought about by catalytic agents. What can account
for it?

First of all, we must not overlook the fact that other revolu-
tions with the same cumulative features may have occurred else-
where and at other times, but in different spheres of human
activity. We have explained above why our own industrial
revolution and the neolithic revolution (which preceded it
in time but concerned similar matters) are the only groups
of events which we can appreciate as revolutions, because they
are measurable by our criteria. All the other changes which
have certainly come about are only partially perceptible to us,
or are seriously distorted in our eyes. They cannot have any
meaning for modern Western man (or, at all events, not their
full meaning); they may even be invisible to him.

Secondly, the case of the neolithic revolution (the only one
which modern Western man can visualize clearly enough)
should suggest a certain moderation of the claims he may be
tempted to make concerning the preeminence of any given
race, region or country. The industrial revolution began in
Western Europe, moving on to the United States of America
and then to Japan; since 1917 it has been gathering momentum
in the Soviet Union, and in the near future, no doubt, we
shall see it in progress elsewhere; now here, now there, within
a space of 50 years, it flares up or dies down. What then of the
claims to be first in the field, on which we pride ourselves so
much, when we have to take into account thousands upon
thousands of years .^

The neolithic revolution broke out simultaneously, to within
1,000 or 2,000 years, around the Aegean, in Egypt, the Near
East, the 'Valley of the Indus, and China; and since radio-
active carbon has been used for determining archaeological
ages, we are beginning to suspect that the neolithic age in
America is older than we used to think and cannot have
begun much later than in the Old World. It is probable that
three or four small valleys might claim to have led in the
race by a few centuries. What can we know of that today? On
the other hand, we are certain that the question of who was
first matters not at all, for the very reason that the simul-
taneity of the same technological upheavals (closely followed
by social upheavals) over such enormous stretches of territory,
so remote from one another, is a clear indication that they
resulted not from the genius of a given race or culture but from
conditions so generally operative that they are beyond the con-
scious sphere of man's thought. We can therefore be sure

38

that, if the industrial revolution had not begun in North-
western Europe, it would have come about at some other
time in a different part of the world. And if, as seems
probable, it is to extend to cover the whole of the inhabited
globe, every culture will introduce into it so many contri-
butions of its own that future historians, thousands of years
hence, will quite rightly think it pointless to discuss the
question of which culture can claim to have led the rest 100
or 200 years.

If this is admitted, we need to introduce a new qualification,
if not of the truth, at least of the precision of our distinction
between stationary history and cumulative history. Not only
is this distinction relative to our own interests, as we have
already shown, but it can never be entirely clear cut. So far
as technical inventions are concerned, it is quite certain
that no period and no culture is absolutely stationary. All
peoples have a grasp of techniques, which are sufficiently
elaborate to enable them to control their environment and
adapt, improve or abandon these techniques as they proceed.
If it were not so, they would have disappeared long since.
There is thus never a clear dividing line between "cumulative"
and "non-cumulative" history; all history is cumulative and
the difference is simply of degree. We know, for instance,
that the ancient Chinese and the Eskimos had developed the
mechanical arts to a very high pitch; they very nearly reached
the point at which the "chain reaction" would set in and carry
them from one type of civilization to another. Everyone knows
the story of gunpowder; from the technical point of view,
the Chinese had solved all the problems involved in its use
save that of securing a large-scale effect. The ancient Mexicans
were not ignorant of the wheel, as is often alleged; they were
perfectly familiar with it in the manufacture of toy animals on
wheels for children to play with; they merely needed to take
one more step forward to have the use of the cart.

In these circumstances, the problem of the relatively small
number (for each individual system of criteria) of "more
cumulative" cultures, as compared with the "less cumulative"
cultures, comes down to a problem familiar in connexion with
the theory of probabilities. It is the problem of determining
the relative probability of a complex combination, as com-
pared with other similar but less complex combinations. In
roulette, for instance, a series of two consecutive numbers
(such as 7 and 8, 12 and 13, 30 and 31) is quite
frequent; a series of three is rarer, and a series of four

39

very much more so. And it is only once in a very large
number of spins that a series of six, seven or eight numbers
may occur in their natural order. If our attention is con-
centrated exclusively on the long series (if, for instance, we
are betting on series of five consecutive numbers), the shorter
series will obviously mean no more to us than a non-con-
secutive series. But this is to overlook the fact that they differ
from the series in which we are interested only by a fraction
and that, when viewed from another angle, they may display
a similar degree of regularity. We may carry our comparison
further. Any player who transferred all his winnings to longer
and longer series of numbers might grow discouraged, after
thousands and millions of tries, at the fact that no series of
nine consecutive numbers ever turned up, and might come to
the conclusion that he would have been better advised to stop
earlier. Yet there is no reason why another player, following
the same system but with a different type of series (such as
a certain alternation between red and black or between odd
and even) might not find significant combinations where the
first player would see nothing but confusion. Mankind is not
developing along a single line. And if, in one sphere, it appears
to be stationary or even retrograde, that does not mean that,
from another point of view, important changes may not be
taking place in it.

The great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, Hume,
set out one day to clear up the mistaken problem which has
puzzled many people, why not all women, but only a small
minority, are pretty. He had no difficulty in showing that
the question means nothing at all. If all women were at least
as pretty as the most beautiful woman of our acquaintance,
we should think they were all ordinary and should reserve
the adjective for the small minority who surpassed the average.
Similarly, when we are interested in a certain type of progress,
we restrict the term "progressive" to those cultures which
are in the van in that type of development, and pay little
attention to the others. Progress thus never represents
anything more than the maximum progress in a given direc-
tion, pre-determined by the interests of the observer.

40

IX. COLLABORATION BETWEEN CULTURES

Lastly, there is one more point of view from which we must
consider our problem. A gambler such as we have discussed
in the preceding paragraphs, who placed his bets only upon
the longest series (however arranged), would almost certainly
be ruined. But this would not be so if there were a coalition of
gamblers betting on the same series at several different tables,
with an agreement that they would pool the numbers which
each of them might reqpiire to proceed with his series. For
if I, for instance, have already got 21 and 22 myself, and need
23 to go on, there is obviously more chance of its turning up
if 10 tables, instead of only one, are in play.

The situation of the various cultures which have achieved
the most cumulative forms of history is very similar. Such
history has never been produced by isolated cultures but by
cultures which, voluntarily or involuntarily, have combined
their play and, by a wide variety of means (migration,
borrowing, trade and warfare), have formed such coalitions
as we have visualized in our example. This brings out very
clearly the absurdity of claiming that one culture is superior
to another. For, if a culture were left to its own resources, it
could never hope to be "superior"; like the single gambler,
it would never manage to achieve more than short series of a
few units, and the prospect of a long series' turning up in its
history (though not theoretically impossible) would be so
slight that all hope of it would depend on the ability to con-
tinue the game for a time infinitely longer than the whole
period of human history to date. But, as we said above, no
single culture stands alone; it is always part of a coalition
including other cultures, and, for that reason, is able to
build up cumulative series. The probability of a long series'
appearing naturally depends on the scope, duration and
variation allowed for in the organization of the coalition.

Two consequences follow.

In the course of this study, we have several times raised the
question why mankind remained stationary for nine-tenths
or even more of its history; the earliest civilizations date back

41

from 200,000 to 500,000 years, while living conditions have
been transformed only in the last 10,000 years. If we are
correct in our analysis, the reason was not that palaeolithic
man was less intelligent or less gifted than his neolithic
successor, but simply that, in human history, the combination
took a time to come about; it might have occurred much
earlier or much later. There is no more significance in this
than there is in the number of spins a gambler has to wait
before a given combination is produced; it might happen at
the first spin, the thousandth, the millionth or never. But,
throughout that time of waiting, humanity, like the gambler,
goes on betting. Not always of its own free will, and not
always appreciating exactly what it is doing, it "sets up
business" in culture, embarks on "operation civilization",
achieving varying measures of success in each of its under-
takings. In some cases, it very nearly succeeds, in others, it
endangers its earlier gains. The great simplifications which
are permissible because of our ignorance of most aspects of
prehistoric societies help to illustrate more closely this
hesitant progress, with its manifold ramifications. There can
be no more striking examples of regression than the descent
from the peak of Levallois culture to the mediocrity of the
Mousterian civilization, or from the splendour of the Auri-
gnacian and Solutrean cultures to the rudeness of the Magda-
lenean, and to the extreme contrasts we find in the various
aspects of mesolithic culture.

What is true in time is equally true in space, although it
must be expressed in a different way. A culture's chance of
uniting the complex body of inventions of all sorts which
we describe as a civilization depends on the number and
diversity of the other cultures with which it is working out,
generally involuntarily, a common strategy. Number and
diversity: a comparison of the Old World with the New on
the eve of the latter 's discovery provides a good illustration
of the need for these two factors.

Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance was the meeting-
place and melting-pot of the most diverse influences: the
Greek, Roman, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon traditions com-
bined with the influences of Arabia and China. Pre-Columbian
America enjoyed no fewer cultural contacts, quantitatively
speaking, as the various American cultures maintained relations
with one another and the two Americas together represent a
whole hemisphere. But, while the cultures which were cross-
fertilizing each other in Europe had resulted from diffcren-

42

tiation dating back several tens of thousands of years, those
on the more recently occupied American continent had had
less time to develop divergences; the picture they offered was
relatively homogeneous. Thus, although it would not be true
to say that the cultural standard of Mexico or Peru was
inferior to that of Europe at the time of the discovery (we
have in fact seen that, in some respects, it was superior), the
various aspects of culture were possibly less well organized
in relation to each other. Side by side with amazing achieve-
ments, we find strange deficiencies in the pre-Columbian
civilizations; there are, so to speak, gaps in them. They also
afford evidence of the coexistence — not so contradictory as
it may seem — of relatively advanced forms of culture with
others which were abortive. Their organization, less flexible
and diversified, probably explains their collapse before a
handful of conquerors. And the underlying reason for this
may be sought in the fact that the partners to the American
cultural "coalition" were less dissimilar from one another
than their counterparts in the Old World.

No society is therefore essentially and intrinsically cumu-
lative. Cumulative history is not the prerogative of certain
races or certain cultures, marking them off from the rest.
It is the result of their conduct rather than their Jiature. It
represents a certain "way of life" of cultures which depends
on their capacity to "go-along-together". In this sense, it may
be said that cumulative history is the type of history charac-
teristic of grouped societies — social super-organisms — while
stationary history (supposing it to exist) would be the
distinguishing feature of an inferior form of social life, the
isolated society.

The one real calamity, the one fatal flaw which can afflict a
group of men and prevent them from fulfilment is to be alone.

We can thus see how clumsy and intellectually unsatisfactory
the generally accepted efforts to defend the contributions of
various human races and cultures to civilization often are.
We list features, we sift questions of origin, we allot first
places. However well-intentioned they may be, these efforts
serve no purpose, for, in three respects, they miss their aim.
In the first place, there can never be any certainty about a
particular culture's credit for an invention or discovery. For
100 years, it was firmly believed that maize had been produced
by the American Indians, by crossing wild grasses; this
explanation is still accepted for the time being, but there is
increasing doubt about it, for it may well be, after all, that

43

maize was introduced into America (we cannot tell when
or how) from South-East Asia.

In the second place, all cultural contributions can be divided
into two groups. On the one hand, we have isolated acqui-
sitions or features, whose importance is evident but which are
also somewhat limited. It is a fact that tobacco came from
America; but after all, and despite the best efforts of inter-
national institutions, we cannot feel overwhelmed with
gratitude to the American Indians every time we smoke a
cigarette. Tobacco is a delightful adjunct to the art of living,
as other adjuncts are useful (such as rubber) ; we are indebted
to these things for pleasures and conveniences we should not
otherwise enjoy, but if we were deprived of them, our civi-
lization would not rock on its foundations and, had there been
any pressing need, we could have found them for ourselves
or substituted something else for them.

At the other end of the scale (with a whole series of inter-
mediates, of course), there are systematized contributions,
representing the peculiar form in which each society has
chosen to express and satisfy the generality of human
aspirations. There is no denying the originality and particularity
of these patterns, but, as they all represent the exclusive choice
of a single group, it is difficult to see how one civilization can
hope to benefit from the way of life of another, unless it is
prepared to renounce its own individuality. Attempted com-
promises are, in fact, likely to produce only two results: either
the disorganization and collapse of the pattern of one of the
groups; or a new combination, which then, however, represents
the emergence of a third pattern, and cannot be assimilated
to either of the others. The question with which we are con-
cerned, indeed, is not to discover whether or not a society
can derive benefit from the way of life of its neighbours, but
whether, and if so to what extent, it can succeed in under-
standing or even in knowing them. We have already seen that
there can be no definite reply to this question.

Finally, wherever a contribution is made, there must be a
recipient. But, while there are in fact real cultures which can
be localized in time and space, and which may be said to
have "contributed" and to be continuing their contributions,
what can this "world civilization" be, which is supposed to
be the recipient of all these contributions.!^ It is not another
civilization distinct from all the others, and yet real in the
same sense that they are. When we speak of world civilization,
we have in mind no single period, no single group of men:

44

we are employing an abstract conception, to which we
attribute a moral or logical significance — moral, if we are
thinking of an aim to be pursued by existing societies; logical,
if we are using the one term to cover the common features
which analysis may reveal in the different cultures. In both
cases, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that the concept
of world civilization is very sketchy and imperfect, and that
its intellectual and emotional content is tenuous. To attempt
to assess cultural confribulions with all the weight of count-
less centuries behind them, rich with the thoughts and
sorrows, hopes and toil of the men and women who brought
them into being, by reference to the sole yard-stick of a world
civilization which is still a hollow shell, would be greatly to
impoverish them, draining away their life-blood and leaving
nothing but the bare bones behind.

We have sought, on the contrary, to show that the true
contribution of a culture consists, not in the list of inventions
which it has personally produced, but in its difference from
others. The sense of gratitude and respect which each single
member of a given culture can and should feel towards all
others can only be based on the conviction that the other
cultures differ from his own in countless ways, even if the
ultimate essence of these differences eludes him or if, in spite
of his best efforts, he can reach no more than an imperfect
understanding of them.

Secondly, Ave have taken the notion of world civilization as
a sort of limiting concept or as an epitome of a highly complex
process. If our arguments are valid, there is not, and can
never be, a world civilization in the absolute sense in which
that term is often used, since civilization implies, and indeed
consists in, the coexistence of cultures exhibiting the maxi-
mum possible diversities. A world civilization could, in fact,
represent no more than a world-wide coalition of cultures,
each of which would preserve its oAvn originality.

45

X. THE COUNTER-CURRENTS OF PROGRESS

We thus surely find ourselves faced with a curious paradox.

Taking the terms in the sense in which we have been using
them above, we have seen that all cultural progress depends
on a coalition of cultures. The essence of such a coalition is
the pooling (conscious or unconscious, voluntary or invo-
luntary, deliberate or accidental, on their own initiative or
under compulsion) of the w^ins which each culture has scored
in the course of its historical development. Lastly, we have
recognized, that, the greater the diversity between the cultures
concerned, the more fruitful such a coalition will be. If this
is admitted, we seem to have two conditions which are
mutually contradictory. For the inevitable consequence of the
practice of playing as a syndicate, which is the source of all
progress, is, sooner or later, to make the character of each
player's resources uniform. If, therefore, one of the first
requisites is diversity, it must be recognized that the chances
of winning become progressively less as the game goes on.

There are, it would seem, two possibilities of remedying this
inevitable development. The first would be for each player
deliberately to introduce differences in his own game; this
is possible, because each society (the "player" in our
hypothetical illustration) consists of a coalition of denomi-
national, professional and economic groups, and because the
society's stake is the sum total of the stakes of all these con-
stituent groups. Social inequalities are the most striking
instance of this solution. The great revolutions we have chosen
to illustrate our argument — the neolithic and the industrial —
were accompanied not only by the introduction of diversity
into the body of society, as Spencer perceived, but by the
introduction of differences in status between the several groups,
particularly from the economic point of view. It was noted
a long time ago that the discoveries of the neolithic age rapidly
brought about social differentiation, as the great cities of
ancient times grew up in the East, and States, castes and
classes appeared on the scene. The same applies to the indus-
trial revolution, which was conditioned by the emergence of

46

a proletariat and is leading on to new and more elaborate
forms of exploiting human labour. Hitherto, the tendency has
been to treat these social changes as the consequence of the
technical changes, the relation of the latter to the former
being that of cause and effect. If we are right in our inter-
pretation, this causality (and the succession in time which
it implies) must be rejected — as, incidentally, is the general
trend in modern science — in favour of a functional correlation
between the two phenomena. We may note in passing that
recognition of the fact that the historical concomitant of
technical progress has been the development of the exploi-
tation of man by man may somewhat temper the pride we
are so apt to take in the first of these developments.

The second remedy is very largely modelled on the first:
it is to bring into the coalition, whether they will or no, new
partners from outside, whose "stakes" are very different from
those of the parties to the original coalition. This solution has
also been tried and, while the first may roughly be identified
with capitalism, the second may well be illustrated by the
history of imperialism and colonialism. The colonial expansion
of the nineteenth century gave industrial Europe a fresh
impetus (which admittedly benefited other parts of the world
as well) whereas, but for the introduction of the colonial
peoples, the momentum might have been lost much sooner.

It will be apparent that, in both ca-ses, the remedy consists
in broadening the coalition, either by increasing internal
diversity or by admitting new partners; in fact, the problem
is always to increase the number of players or, in other words,
to restore the complexity and diversity of the original situation.
It is also apparent, however, that these remedies can only
temporarily retard the process. Exploitation is possible only
within a coalition; there is contact and interchange between
the major and the minor parties. They, in turn, in spite of
the apparently unilateral relationship between them, are
bound, consciously or unconsciously, to pool their stakes and,
as time goes by, the differences between them will tend to
diminish. This process is illustrated by the social improve-
ments that are being brought about and the gradual attainment
of independence by the colonial peoples; although we have
still far to go in both these directions, we must know that
the trend of developments is inevitable. It may be that the
emergence of antagonistic political and social systems should,
in fact, be regarded as a third solution; conceivably, by a
constant shifting of the grounds of diversity, it may be

47

possible to maintain indefinitely, in varying forms which will
constantly take men unawares, that state of disequilibrium
which is necessary for the biological and cultural survival of
mankind.

However this may be, it is difficult to conceive as other
than contradictory a process which may be sximmed up as
follows: if men are to progress, they must collaborate; and,
in the course of their collaboration, the differences in their
contributions will gradually be evened out, although col-
laboration was originally necessary and advantageous simply
because of those differences.

Even if there is no solution, however, it is the sacred duty
of mankind to bear these two contradictory facts in mind,
and never to lose sight of the one through an exclusive con-
cern with the other; man must, no doubt, guard against the
blind particularism which would restrict the dignity of
humankind to a single race, culture or society; but he must
never forget, on the other hand, that no section of humanity
has succeeded in finding universally applicable formulae, and
that it is impossible to imagine mankind pursuing a single way
of life for, in such a case, mankind would be ossified.

From this point of view our international institutions have
a tremendous task before them and bear a very heavy res-
ponsibility. Both task and responsibility are more complex
than is thought. For our international institutions have a
double part to play; they have firstly, to wind up the past and,
secondly to issue a summons to fresh activity: In the first
place, they have to assist mankind to get rid, with as little
discomfort and danger as possible, of those diversities now
serving no useful purpose, the abortive remnants of forms of
collaboration whose putrefying vestiges represent a constant
risk of infection to the body of international society. They
will have to cut them out, resorting to amputation where
necessary, and foster the development of other forms of
adaptation.

At the same time, they must never for a moment lose sight
of the fact that, if these new forms are to have the same
functional value as the earlier forms, they cannot be merely
copied or modelled on the same pattern; if they were, they
would gradually lose their efficacy, until in the end they
would be of no use at all. International institutions must be
aware, on the contrary, that mankind is rich in unexpected
resources, each of which, on first appearance, will always
amaze men; that progress is not a comfortable "bettering of

48

what we have", in which we might look for an indolent
repose, but is a succession of adventures, partings of the way,
and constant shocks. Humanity is forever involved in two
conflicting currents, the one tending towards unification, and
the other towards the maintenance or restoration of diversity.
As a result of the position of each period or culture in the
system, as a result of the way it is facing, each thinks that
only one of these two currents represents an advance, while
the other appears to be the negation of the first. But we
should be purblind if we said, as we might be tempted to do,
that humanity is constantly unmaking what it makes. For,
in different spheres and at different levels, both currents are
in truth two aspects of the same process.

The need to preserve the diversity of cultures in a world
which is threatened by monotony and uniformity has surely
not escaped our international institutions. They must also be
aware that it is not enough to nurture local traditions and
to save the past for a short period longer. It is diversity itself
which must be saved, not the outward and visible form in
which each period has clothed that diversity, and which can
never be preserved beyond the period which gave it birth.
We must therefore hearken for the stirrings of new life, foster
latent potentialities, and encourage every natural inclination
for collaboration which the future history of the world may
hold; we must also be prepared to view without surprise,
repugnance or revolt whatever may strike us as strange in the
many new forms of social expression. Tolerance is not a
contemplative attitude, dispensing indulgence to what has
been or what is still in being. It is a dynamic attitude, con-
sisting in the anticipation, understanding and promotion of
what is struggling into being. We can see the diversity of
human cultures behind us, around us, and before us. The
only demand that we can justly make (entailing corresponding
duties for every individual) is that all the forms this diversity
may take may be so many contributions to the fullness of
all the others.

49

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auger, P., L'homme microscopique, Paris, 1952.
Boas, F., The Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1931.
DiLTHEY, W., Gesammelte Schriften, Leipzig, 1914-31.
Dixon, R. B., The Building of Cultures, New York, London,

1928.
De Gobineau, a., Essai sur I'inigalite des races humaines,

2nd ed. Paris, 1884.
Hawkes, C. F. C, Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, London,

1939.
Herskovits, M. J., Man and his Works, New York, 1948.
Kroeber, a. L., Anthropology, new ed.. New York, 1948.
Leroi-Gourhan, a., L' Homme et la matiere, Paris, 1943.
Linton, R., The Study of Man, New York, 1936.
Moraze, Ch., Essai sur la civilisation d'occident, VoL L, Paris,

1949.
PiRENNE, J., Les grands courants de I'histoire universelle.

Vol. 1., Paris 1947.
Pittard, E., Les races et I'histoire, Paris, 1922.
Spengler, 0., The Decline of the West, New York, 1927-28.
ToYNBEE, A. J., A Study of History, London, 1934.
White, L. A., The Science of Culture, New York, 1949.

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