The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  The Sinic [Chinese] Civilization originated in the Yellow River Valley. The nature of the challenge which started it is unknown but it is clear that the conditions were severe rather than easy.

  The Mayan Civilization originated from the challenge of a tropical forest; the Andean from that of a bleak plateau. . . .

  The Indic Civilization in Ceylon flourished in the rainless half of the island. . . .

  New England, whose European colonists have played a predominant part in the history of North America, is one of the bleakest and most barren parts of the continent. . . .

  The natives of Nyasaland, where life is easy, remained primitive savages down to the advent of invaders from a distant and inclement Europe.

  The elementary notion, what gave Toynbee’s work its popular appeal, was readily capsuled in the ideas of “challenge” and “response.”

  Toynbee offers his own explanation of how and why societies survive and prosper. It is the leadership of “creative minorities” that keeps societies alive and flourishing. But when the “creative” minority becomes a “dominant” minority, imposing its will by force and oppression, then proletariats (internal and external) are created and the society disintegrates. Though fervent and profuse with the data of his “English empiricism,” Toynbee still developed his own mystique to replace “destiny.” The real progress of a civilization consists in what Toynbee calls “etherialization”—“an overcoming of material obstacles which releases the energy of the society to make responses to challenges which henceforth are internal rather than external, spiritual rather than material.”

  Religions played an increasingly dominant role in Toynbee’s view as he grew older and advanced with his “Study of History.” “The principal cause of war in our world today,” he wrote on April 9, 1935, in the Manchester Guardian, “is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities of States. This tribe-worship is the oldest religion of mankind, and it has only been overcome in so far as human beings have been genuinely converted to Christianity or one of the other higher religions. . . . The spirit of man abhors a spiritual vacuum. . . . People will sacrifice themselves for the ‘Third Reich’ or whatever the Ersatz-Götzen may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God.” After 1937, Toynbee flirted with Catholicism and he came to believe that the meaning of history would be revealed only in the slow and painful clarification of the relation between God and man.

  For Toynbee, finally, the “higher religions” displaced societies or civilizations as the units that gave meaning to history. While brashly insisting on his naively English empirical reliance on facts, which he amassed in prodigious quantity, still in his personal quest for salvation he had developed his own universal apocalyptic view. His reassurance of universal salvation had wide appeal in an age of two world wars. Scholars have objected less to Toynbee’s vague definitions of society and civilization than to his tendency to simplify the study of history into a branch of theodicy—an answer to Job, a science of justifying God’s ways to man.

  32

  A World in Revolution?

  The grand scholarly schemes of universal history purporting to explain the plight and destiny of civilization in the early twentieth century had their counterparts in a flood of popular literature in the West. People had been taught history, H. G. Wells complained, “in nationalist blinkers, ignoring every country but their own, and now they were turned out into a blaze.”

  There were many reasons to move a writer to attempt a World History in 1918. It was the last, the weariest, most disillusioned year of the first World War. Everywhere there were unwonted privations; everywhere there was mourning. The tale of the dead and mutilated had mounted to many millions. Men felt they had come to a crisis in the world affairs. They were too weary and heart-sick to consider complicated possibilities. They were not sure whether they were facing a disaster to civilization or the inauguration of a new phase of human association; they saw things with the simplicity of such flat alternatives, and they clung to hope.

  H. G. Wells (1866-1946) widened the Western readers’ vision by providing a wonderfully compact, readable, and comprehensive history of the world. He revealed the interconnectedness and uncertainty of human destiny in the twentieth century and the need to transcend national ambitions.

  This Western search for hope took many forms. Wells was only one of a community of popular Seekers. The most optimistic saw the world in revolution, and were exhilarated by the remarkable coincidence of so many peoples across the world rising against entrenched forces of privilege and evil. John Reed (1887-1920) was one of the most romantic and most focused of these enthusiastic Seekers—the Western spectators of revolution. Born to a wealthy family in Portland, Oregon, to a father who was active in the Progressive movement, Reed went to Harvard. On graduation in 1910, he worked his way across the Atlantic on a cattle boat and hitchhiked across England, France, and Spain. Settling in New York he wrote poetry and short stories for Poetry and The Masses and joined the avant-garde of Greenwich Village who came to call him their Golden Boy.

  Reed had his first view of the struggle for social justice when he covered the strike against the steel mills in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, and spent four days in jail with members of the International Workers of the World. Six months later he went to Mexico to cover the revolutionary exploits of Pancho Villa (1877-1923). Finding Pancho Villa and his army in Chihuahua, he traveled with them. He came to know them well, while other reporters were sitting in the El Paso bars, waiting word from refugees from battle. Reed’s melodramatic stories for Metropolitan Magazine led Walter Lippmann to say that “with Jack Reed reporting begins. . . . incidentally, the stories are literature.” Reed put the stories together in a book called Insurgent Mexico (1914). Now one of the highest-paid reporters in the United States at five hundred dollars a week, he was sent to Europe to cover the Western front, and then the Eastern front, of the new world war.

  Suspecting that the revolution of February 1917 in Russia signaled greater events to come, he went to Petrograd in September and was there observing and recording the climactic October when the Bolsheviks took over. On Reed’s return to the United States his papers were seized on suspicion of his being a Bolshevik agent. When they were given back to him a year later, he wrote Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). “Unreservedly,” Lenin wrote in his introduction, “I recommend it to the workers of the world. . . . It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Reed helped organize a Communist Party in the United States, then went to Russia as delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International. When he was stricken by the typhus that was killing millions of Russians he could not be treated because of the Allied blockade on food and medical supplies to the Soviet Union, and so died at thirty-three.

  Reed’s carefully documented day-to-day account of how the Bolsheviks seized power came to be called a Bible for revolutionaries in this century—a magic mirror to inspire young revolutionaries around the world. “Now there was all great Russia to win—and then the world! Would Russia follow and rise? And the world—what of it? Would the peoples answer and rise, a red world-tide?” After describing the funeral ceremony and the playing of the Internationale in Red Square for five hundred proletarian martyrs of the revolution, Reed concluded:

  The poor love each other so! . . . I suddenly realized that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.

  The promise and the threat signaled by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermaths were expressed in myriad ways across the West. There was hardly a writer who did not find his own way of depicting the world crisis. Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), the leading muckraker journalist and Reed’s mentor, went to the Soviet Union an
d returned with an unforgettable apocalyptic phrase: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) in his novel Darkness at Noon (1940) offered a parable of the evils of Stalin’s regime and the “so-called Moscow trials.” John Steinbeck (1902-1968) toured the Soviet Union and published an “affectionate account” in his Russian Journal (1948) concluding “that Russian people are like all other people in the world . . . by far the greater number are very good.” For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the longest novel written by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), preached the universality of revolutionary hope. “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now,” Robert Jordan, the heroic American who had joined the fight against the fascists says. “If we win here we will win everywhere.” For some years this was a surprisingly widespread view among Western intellectuals.

  The frustration of Seekers who hoped to find salvation in Communism was summed up in The God That Failed (1950). The witnesses were a stellar group of intellectuals, including Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, André Gide, Richard Wright, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender, who had been attracted to Communism in the time between the October Revolution and the Stalin-Hitler pact. As the editor, Richard Crossman, explains:

  In this book six intellectuals describe the journey into Communism, and the return. They saw it at first from a long way off—just as their predecessors 130 years ago saw the French Revolution—as a vision of ‘the Kingdom of God on earth’ and, like Wordsworth and Shelley, they dedicated their talents to working humbly for its coming. They were not discouraged by the rebuffs of the professional revolutionaries, or by the jeers of their opponents, until each discovered the gap between his own vision of God and the reality of the Communist State—and the conflict of conscience reached breaking point.

  PART SEVEN

  SANCTUARIES OF DOUBT

  There are no whole truths;

  all truths are half-truths.

  It is trying to treat them as

  whole truths that plays the devil.

  —ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, DIALOGUES (1953)

  33

  “All History Is Biography”: Carlyle and Emerson

  The dogmas of science and destiny would not remain long unchallenged. Man the restless Seeker would not be satisfied by such simplicities. The slaughter on Tiananmen Square in China and the dissolving of the Soviet empire were only climaxes of Western refusals to rest on the couch of dogma. The West had seen again and again the encompassing of the world in dogma, the embodiment of dogma in institutions, with the usual consequences of inquisition and persecution. The twentieth century, even more than ever before, saw the horrors of ideology enforced by institutions, whole nations organized for the slaughter of innocents. But seeking had never ceased. The centuries following the French Revolution of 1789 saw thinkers in the West questioning the certitudes of science and the very concepts that social scientists had devised to make experience amenable to dogma. Again, Western thought was stirred and enriched by champions of human autonomy, of the free individual, of the courage to doubt—rebels against grand simplicities. These dissolvers of ideology were prophets and the vanguard of a new cycle of seeking. They saw uncertainty in the mystery of existence, in the challenge to individual decision, in the vagaries of biography, in the elusive stream of consciousness, in the unpredictable diversity of nature, in the unknowable future of knowledge. Some even were awed by the absurdity of experience. Yet the seeking has never ceased.

  The desperate search for the true past and its clues to the future led ingenious thinkers to turn from the unintelligible to the unknowable. In the early nineteenth century there was overwhelming evidence of the power of groups and impersonal forces. The community of French Enlightenment philosophers revealed what seemed the inevitable march of civilization. The baffling momentum of the Paris mob in the French Revolution of 1789 and what Carlyle called “the new omnipotence of the Steam-engine” led believers in the power of the human spirit to seek reassurance in the autonomy of the individual person.

  For centuries, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans had shone in the classical canon. A lively style and vivid detail had made Plutarch (c. 46-c. 120) the popular interpreter of the ancient past. His “lives of the greatest men,” Plutarch explained, marked the farthest reach of our knowledge of the past. “Beyond these there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther.” “Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history.” A latter-day Greek, troubled by what he saw as Roman decadence, Plutarch was less interested in how men shaped history than in their moral strength or weakness. They would provide lessons for an age when faith in old gods was declining.

  In the early nineteenth century, two antithetic personalities were challenged by the threats of impersonal forces to give a role to the individual person. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) from Scotland and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) from America drew quite opposite historical lessons from their views of past and present. Each saw a different kind of charisma or divine favor in the “great man,” who seemed to dominate history. The overshadowing historical figure in their time was Napoleon (1769-1821). He was Carlyle’s “last great man.” Emerson too found him among the eminent men of the nineteenth century, “far the best known and the most powerful.”

  Carlyle, who had a way of making a mystery of all experience, was not discouraged by translating the simplicities of history into the mysteries of biography. “History is the essence of innumerable Biographies,” he wrote, “but if one Biography, nay our own Biography, study and recapitulate it as we may, remains in so many points unintelligible to us; how much more must these million, the very facts of which, to say nothing of the purport of them, we know not, and cannot know!” Emerson in his own way would agree that “there is properly no history, only biography.” And Thoreau, the American individualist, went on to the logical extreme: “Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography.”

  Carlyle’s own early life in Ecclefechan, a village in southern Scotland, was a parable of his view of the focus of history. The family was governed by his father, James Carlyle, a stonemason and small farmer. “I call him a natural man; singularly free from all manner of affectation; he was among the last of the true men, which Scotland (on the old system) produced, or can produce; a man healthy in body and in mind. . . . He was never visited with Doubt; the old Theorem of the Universe was sufficient for him, and he worked well in it, and in all senses successfully and wisely as few now can do.” “He was irascible, choleric, and we all dreaded his wrath. Yet passion never mastered him; it rather inspired him with new vehemence of insight, and more piercing emphasis of wisdom.”

  Perhaps then and there young Thomas Carlyle learned “that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him.” For his father was a committed and explicit Calvinist. “Man’s chief end, my father could have answered from the depths of his soul, ‘is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever.’ By this light he walked, choosing his path, fitting prudence to principle with wonderful skill and manliness—through ‘the ruins of a falling Era; not once missing his footing.’ ” “This great maxim of Philosophy he had gathered by the teaching of nature alone: that man was created to work, not to speculate, or feel, or dream.”

  It was no wonder, then, that Carlyle was impatient with parliaments and detested democracy: “Man is sent hither not to question, but to work: ‘The end of men,’ it was long ago written ‘is an Action, not a Thought.’ ” Nor surprising that he saw the world shaped by Heroes who saved their worshipers the pains of reflection. In society and individuals, he insisted, “the sign of health is Unconsciousness. . . . Never since the beginning of Time was there . . . so intensely self-conscious a Society.” In Carlyle’s time, the “dyspepsia” of self-consciousness appeared everywhere. For example, in the “diseased self-consc
ious state of Literature disclosed in . . . the prevalence of Reviewing. . . . All Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review . . . Thus does Literature also, like a sick thing, superabundantly ‘listen to itself.’ ” Unreflective worship of the Hero could cure all. So, against the American antislavery writer Elizur Wright he insisted that “men ought to be thankful to get themselves governed, if it is only done in a strong and resolute way.”

  Carlyle gave his views classic explosive statement in a series of popular lectures (published 1841), Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. Worship of a hero, he said, was the test of human nobility. “I say there is, at bottom, nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of Admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life.” Carlyle’s hero had many shapes—Divinity (Odin), Prophet (Mahomet), Poet (Dante, Shakespeare), Priest (Luther, Reformation; Knox, Puritanism), Man of Letters (Johnson, Rousseau, Burns), King (Cromwell, Napoleon).

  Before offering his dogma of the “Great Man,” Carlyle had made his reputation with a work of history. His French Revolution (1837) also became a literary legend and an object lesson to authors. For comment and criticism he had lent the unique manuscript of the first volume to John Stuart Mill, in whose house it was accidentally destroyed. Doggedly, Carlyle simply rewrote it. When published in three volumes in 1837 it was an enormous success in the bookstores, ending his struggle for money and public notice. Lecture invitations now brought the financial support he sorely needed.

  Though praised more often as poetry and rhetoric than as history, the work has its peculiar virtues. Perhaps it justifies G. M. Trevelyan’s claim that Carlyle was “in his own strange way, a great historian.” For Carlyle somehow captures the Paris mob, to whom he is surprisingly sympathetic. He also gives poignant insights into Danton, Robespierre, and other leaders. Finally, the book is an epic of the overwhelming power of grand forces. Carlyle sees the fate of the aristocracy as retribution for centuries of foolish misgoverning—another chapter in the text of Carlyle’s “History as Divine Scripture.”