Fixing Our Failures: Challenged to Chang

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Watching the World Go By

Fixing Our Failures: Challenged to Change
By Ralph Lynn

[Dr. Ralph Lynn is retired professor of history at Baylor University. He is a frequent contributor to this journal.]

A ninety-year old professional student of history, I have been thinking of what may b the two chief failures of Western Civilization in the hundred years just past.

Our grossly obscene wars and murderous dictatorships do not seem to me to be our most significant failures. Rather, they are, at least in some part, explicable in terms of our chief failures.

One of these failures is so obvious that it probably needs only a reminder: we have treated non-Western people superciliously, patronizingly, haughtily. We have looked down our noses at them.

Not just Americans but Europeans in general were brought up to use the equivalent of calling brown people "greasers," black people, "niggers," and to repeat the contemptuous, dismissive statement: "You don`t have a Chinaman`s chance."

Even the missionaries we sent tot he "heathens" seldom quite accepted their converts as equals.

Some of our wars and much of the terrorism we now suffer are the fruits of this basic failure.

Our other chief failure has been and still is our refusal to adapt our government services to the needs of our people as they have tried to cope with the results of our change from the agricultural-farm village society to the great cities of the industrial-urban world.

The traditional "watch-dog" state designed only to protect citizens from each other and from foreign invaders was-in any informed retrospect-obviously inadequate in an urban world of citizens without the ancient, built-in social security of every family`s having a cow, some chickens, a vegetable garden, a pig or two, and neighbors to help a sick farmer "make his crop."

The problem: we have only to live and do what comes naturally in our free society to change the realities of existence it is nearly impossible to change what is in our heads.

Bismarck, Prime Minister of the new 1871 German nation, was the first statesman to understand and to react at all sensibly to this strange new world.

From his observation of the struggles of the British and French industrial workers to gain basic human rights and because he wanted to maintain autocratic rule in Germany, Bismarck introduced in the 1880s the prototype of the modern welfare state which all developed countries have subsequently found unavoidable.

Quite cynically, Bismarck remarked that he had "bought off a democratic revolution with fifty cents a day." Perhaps it is not totally inaccurate to say that in so doing, he unwittingly sowed the noxious seeds of Hitler`s Fascism.

In Great Britain the business community and the aristocracy quite intelligently, although cynically and reluctantly, introduced the necessary changes just soon enough to avoid bloody revolution.

In France, the fading secular and religious aristocracies made common cause with the business community against any notion of adapting government services to the needs of great urban populations.

The result: one violent revolution after another.

In these bloody battles, the propertied classes invariably crushed the urban workers suffering from the out-moded "watch-dog" state.

The last of these struggles took place in 1871 when France became a republic for the third time. Once more, the new provisional government, dominated by the properties classes, refused to make the changes the urban masses had to have.

Not surprisingly, the people of Paris formed their own municipal government, seceded from France, and began, most gingerly, to make some of the changes long denied. Once more, the propertied classes made bloody war against the people of Paris.

The result: by 1940 the masses of French urban workers did not care whether they continued to be governed by the old regime or by the Germans.

In tragically backward Russia, no effective leadership for change emerged. The result was the chaos of World War I followed by the Communist dictatorship which made a mockery of the democratic developments of Western Europe.

In the United States, our adaptation to reality had to await the shock of the Great Depression. Then, in a peaceful, quite conservative revolution, the Democrats with Franklin D. Roosevelt at the helm built upon and enlarged the kinds of wise changes already begun by the unfairly maligned Herbert Hoover.

The question for the 21st century: Will our minds be supple enough to change soon enough to remain the healthy society of our past?