A Journal for Western Man-- Issue VI
Part I: The Value of Civilization
Harry Roolaart
“In order to rise from the caves, man had to grasp the fact of values”, says Peter Schwartz. “Every step forward entailed the knowledge not only of how to take that step, but of why it was of value – of why it was a step forward.” (“Multicultural Nihilism” – Return of the Primitive). Prehistorically, man behaved like a pack of wolves. In order to survive he was forced to protect himself through sheer numbers: primitive man practiced tribalism in order to survive. He occupied himself with the hunting for food and fighting other tribes. In order to live, primitive man’s primary value was physical prowess.
Then, at some point, mankind discovered other means of satisfying his needs other than by sheer physical strength. Man learned to reason, to think, and began developing his mental capacity. Once man began to live by his mental capacity, survival no longer required physical prowess. The process of thinking became man’s means of survival. Primitive man fashioned tools. He learned to value tools as being better than the use of his bare hands. He discovered fire and learned to value it for its warmth and its use in cooking food. While other animals continued to rely on strength and speed, man began to rely on the process of thinking to guide his actions. In doing so, “primitive man” began a long course of evolution in which he sought to separate the “primitive” from the “man”.
Physical prowess, primitive man’s fundamental value, was greater when the number was greatest: for most of his existence, man required tribalism. Thinking however, can only be done on an individual level. It is not an external process, such as fighting, in which a collective number greatly enhances success. No matter how many people are gathered, the process that culminates in an idea being formed occurs in one individual. That he then communicates the idea to others - gives it to them - and that via choice his idea is imitated and reproduced does not negate the fact that thinking is, and always has been, an individual process and does not require strength in numbers – no collective action can reproduce this process. Just as he separated the primitive from the man, so man severed the requirement of a “tribe” from his means to “survival”.
Ideas do not originate spontaneously within a group. Ideas are formed in lone individuals. Nor do ideas happen frequently. It’s astounding to contemplate the fact that for most of human history, approximately 990,000 years, man lived like an animal. It took that long for the first “idea” to surface, for long range thinking to occur in man. And the one idea that more than any other enabled him to separate the primitive from the man occurred when some lone individual had the brilliant idea to plant a seed. That idea, that act, resulted in what we now call the agricultural revolution. That idea freed man from the necessity to spend all his time obtaining food. That one seed, the idea of it, was the birth of all civilization.
Having freed up most of his time, man got to the business of evaluating his life, one idea at a time. Man became a valuing animal. In order to grow crops he had to make the evaluation between the nomadic life of a hunter-gatherer and the life of a settler. Cultivation, he concluded, required that he settle down. A settled life was better than a nomadic one. Man began to value property rights. Each idea built upon the other, each value constituted the good, and with it man’s conceptual faculty flourished – he began to set long term goals. He developed simple technologies, then more complex ones. At first slowly as the process of thinking occurred only with the individual as he learned to evaluate the world according to the knowledge available to him. With each new idea, that knowledge increased and with the acquisition of facts, of truths, ideas began to occur more frequently. Civilization’s growth parallels precisely the volume of knowledge previously available to man and matches its growth to the rate at which new ideas occur within certain select individuals.
From the Agricultural to the Industrial and from the Technological to the Informational, man’s advancement has experienced an exponential growth unmatched to any other period in history. Where it took him 999,000 years to achieve the Agricultural Revolution, and 500 years to accomplish an Industrial one, it is estimated that man’s current goal – what we term the Information Revolution - will take him only 30 years to realize. One might say that man’s goal is to realize a Revolution based on knowledge itself: knowledge being the necessary counterpart to valuing man.
Today, we have the culmination of a ten thousand year process of man’s thinking, evaluating, and acting to gain or keep his values, in the United States of America. That it exists is a profound and heroic achievement unmatched in man’s history. The United States stands alone, as the last remnant of the Renaissance, of the Enlightenment, and of the Age of Reason. As a nation, it exists in a world that, unbelievable as it may seem, still harbors primitive cultures living in the Stone Age. In between these extremes we find an assortment of man’s previous experiments: from the tribal to the democratic, the theocratic to the royal, the totalitarian to the dictatorial. At one extreme stands the United States, alone, as it champions individual rights, liberty, and man’s right to the pursuit of his happiness. Its fundamental principles as set forth by its Founding Fathers are objective. They are based on the necessary requirements of man. They were written in recognition of the crucial role the individual plays in man’s progress, that without the individual - whose mind must be free to think, evaluate, and act - the United States, and in a larger sense civilization, could not exist.
Having said this, it must be recognized that just as primitive man required physical prowess to protect himself from other aggressors, so it becomes necessary for civilized man to protect himself from his enemies. That America has enemies can no longer be doubted. The recent terrorist attacks against the United States make one such enemy quite obvious. He is a caveman who used nothing more than the equivalent of simple, hunter gatherer tools – namely, box cutters – and brought down America’s two greatest icons. In the process, this caveman who calls himself Osama Bin Laden, slaughtered thousands of our true heroes, the men and women who ran the engine of the world: Wall Street.
Our government, stupefied, announced the attack on the United States as one of the most sophisticated terrorist operations ever staged against any country. It took years of planning, they said, thousands if not millions of dollars to finance it and involved the cooperation of several nation states. To do what, I ask? Grab a couple of box cutters, ride a few airplanes until you have the schedule down pat, and then read a technical manual on how to steer an airplane that you know you don’t have to land? Sophistication by cavemen? Or was it made possible as a result of careful planning by another enemy, one much more cunning and sophisticated than even you and I can imagine?