The Meaning of the Twentieth Century

The Great Transition

Kenneth Boulding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000523362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Sozialphilosophie

Originally published in 1965 and written by a noted economist and leader in the field of conflict resolution, this book traces the forces which have brought the 20 th century 'post-civilisation' into being: the ever-increasing power of science and the scientific attitude, the global communication network, the high efficiency of industrial societies. New conditions pointed to a life of ease but also enormous problems. The book discusses how though our technical resources have become immense, social and psychological conflicts remain. The author's training in psychology and economics combines with a deep sense of history to create a book which is as relevant now as when it was first published.

IV. The War Trap

I HAVE suggested earlier that although the great transition from civilization to postcivilization is now under way in many parts of the world, there is no guarantee that it will be completed successfully. I have identified at least three traps which may either delay or prevent the accomplishment of this transition and may even lead to irretrievable disaster and to a total setback to the evolutionary process in this part of the universe. The three traps may be labeled briefly war, population, and entropy. Any one of them could be fatal. Not one of them has to be fatal. And the more self-consciously aware we are as a human race of the nature of the traps that lie before us the better are the chances of avoiding them.

The war trap is the most immediate and urgent. The movement in technology in this area is so rapid that a strong case can be made that this is a problem which must be solved in this generation, for consequences of failure may be fatal. The reason is of course that the scientific revolution and even more the revolution in organized research and development have had a concentrated effect in the field of military technology and weaponry. There has been an enormous increase in man’s powers of destruction—at least in the rapidity with which he can employ these powers— and a spectacular increase in the range and deadliness of his deadly missiles. This has created a revolution in the art of war which makes the whole existing political structure of the world dangerously obsolete, and makes the consequences of political breakdown much more serious for mankind than they used to be. A major nuclear war at the present time would certainly be a massive setback, and in view of our ignorance of its ecological consequences it is at least possible that it might be an irretrievable disaster. Furthermore the process of research and development in weaponry which has produced the present situation continues in spite of the nuclear test ban. Most of the major powers are putting resources into research and development of chemical and bacteriological weapons which may easily exceed in ultimate deadliness the more spectacular nuclear weapons. If research and development in weaponry and the means of destruction continue at the rate of the last twenty years, the process would almost certainly lead to the development of what Herman Kahn* calls the “doomsday machine,” which will have the power to end all life on earth. Under these circumstances the search for stable peace takes on an urgency and an intensity which it has never had before in the history of mankind.

* Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press; Oxford University Press, 1961.

It is probably true, as Toynbee suggests, that war has been the downfall of all previous civilizations. These disasters in the past, however, have been essentially local in character. In some local areas such as Crete or Carthage the setbacks were so severe that the region never fully recovered. For mankind as a whole, with some minor ups and downs, the spread of civilization from its sources in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Shang China has represented an almost continuous geographical expansion. In spite of barbarian conquests and the destruction by war of many cities, it is doubtful whether the total number of people living in cities has ever declined absolutely for more than a century or two at a time. The character of war has changed so drastically in the last generation, however, that we may well regard the Second World War as the last of the “civilized” wars in spite of the airplane and the A-bomb. The destruction which it caused was largely repaired in less than a generation.

A strong case can be made for the proposition that war is essentially a phenomenon of the age of civilization and that it is inappropriate both to precivilized and postcivilized societies. It represents an interlude in man’s development, dated 3000 b.c. to, say, 2000 a.d. It is particularly associated with the development of cities by the expropriation through coercion of the food surplus from agriculture. It is significant that the neolithic villages which preceded the development of cities, in which agriculture was practiced but the surplus from agriculture was not yet collected into large masses to feed urban organization, seem to have been very peaceful. Most neolithic villages, as far as we can judge from the archaeological remains, were unwalled and undefended. Between the invention of agriculture about 8000 b.c. and the first cities of about 3000 b.c. we have the world-wide spread of a remarkably uniform neolithic agricultural culture from its origins in the hills above Mesopotamia west to the extremities of Europe, and east into Asia and the Americas, with Africa south of the Sahara and Australia as the last refuge of the paleolithic hunter. We can hardly doubt that there were many violent encounters between the neolithic farmers and the paleolithic hunters and food gatherers whom they so largely displaced, but these were not organized as war.

With the coming of civilization we have quite a new picture. It is true that by reason of its remoteness the civilization of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Valley of Indus seems to have enjoyed many centuries of peace. These, however, were the remote provincial outposts, and in the center of civilization in Mesopotamia the cities were walled almost from the start. Indeed even before Sumer, Jericho, which may reasonably be claimed to be the oldest city in the world, was a warlike city and itself was destroyed many times. Sometimes as in Egypt an initial period of internal war is followed by the unification of a country cut off from the outside world and a long period of internal peace follows. As contact with the outside world increases, however, the incidence of war once again rises.

This association of war with the urban revolution is no accident. I have suggested that the urban revolution itself is the result of the imposition of a threat system on a society possessing a surplus of food from agriculture. The collection of food from large numbers of farmers and its concentration in the cities is not at first so much the result of exchange as the result of coercion. As suggested earlier, in the first instance the coercion was probably spiritual, and the first city-states seem to have been theocracies. The farmer is threatened with the spiritual disaster if he does not turn over a proportion of his food to the priestly caste. The king, however, soon succeeds the priest as the main organizer of the threat system. Indeed, it was on the alliance of king and priest—that is, of temporal and spiritual coercion —that the urban revolution mainly rests. The concentrated food surplus then enabled the king to organize armies. An army is essentially a movable city. It is an organization quite distinct from mere banditry, raiding, and casual violence, and war is a matter of the interaction of organized armed forces. It requires as its prerequisite the urban revolution—that is, a surplus of food from agriculture collected in one place and put at the disposal of the single authority. Where that single authority is unchallenged from outside, as in favorable situations such as the Indus Valley or the Nile Valley, it might be that a stable system of threat on the part of the ruler and submission on the part of the ruled could be established which would last for many centuries. In more open, less protected, or more thickly populated countries like Mesopotamia the coercion system soon degenerated into war.

The reason for this is very simple. It is due to the fundamental principle that the ability of a threatener to carry out his threat diminishes the farther away from the seat of authority one travels. This is simply because it costs something to transport violence and the means of violence, or even more subtle instruments of doing harm. Like goods, “bads” have a cost of transport. The principle of “the further the weaker” (one should add “beyond a certain point”) is an iron law of all organization. The king and the priest can therefore set up a very effective coercive apparatus within the home territory. As they go away from the center, however, eventually they get to the point where their capability of carrying out threats is so diminished that the possibility arises of an independent locus of power. Another king or priest can then arise with a system of counterthreats. Submission is no longer necessary for those beyond the range of the old centers, and so defiance becomes possible. We then get a rival center of power, and the relation between the two power centers is almost inevitably that of counterthreat or deterrence.

A counterthreat system is one in which each party says to the other, “If you do something nasty to me I will do something nasty to you.” Such a system may be fairly stable for short periods. But it has a fatal instability. Its stability depends on the mutual credibility of the threats. The credibility of threat is a curious and highly subjective variable of social systems, for it is the credence which I attach to your threat and you to mine that is significant, and this may depend as much on the character of the threatened as on the character of the threatener. Furthermore the credibility of a threat may be only loosely related to the capability of carrying it out, even though there is undoubtedly a relationship of some sort between the two. It is quite possible, however, for one party to be capable of damaging another and for the other not to believe it, or alternatively, I may believe that you have a capability of threatening me which in fact you do not possess. What is clear, however, is that if threats are not carried out their credibility gradually declines. Credibility, as it were, is a commodity which depreciates with the mere passage of time.

In the old days—that is, in civilized societies—capability also frequently depreciated if it was not used. Armed forces, for instance, had a certain tendency to degenerate during peacetime and were re-formed and strengthened during war. This latter phenomenon is less true today in an age of research and development than it was in a cruder and more empirical age. If the credibility of threats in a counter-threat or deterrence system depreciates, however, the time eventually comes when the threats are no longer credible enough to keep the system stable. One party or the other decides that it believes so little in the threats of its potential opponent that it can defy them. When this happens the system experiences crisis. If one threatener is defied the next move in the system is up to him; ordinarily he sees only two choices, either to carry out the threat, which will be costly to him as well as to his defier, or not to carry it out—in which case his future credibility is likely to be impaired. There are possible exceptions to this rule. The failure to carry out a threat the first time it is defied may induce the belief that the threat is more likely to be carried out after a second act of defiance. At some points in this process, however, the threatener is always faced with the grim choice of carrying out the threat or of seeing the whole organization which is based on the threat system collapse, and if he sees nothing to take its place he is likely to carry out the threat at whatever cost to himself or to the defier.

War, therefore, is peculiarly a property of a system of deterrence under urban—that is, civilized—conditions. The cyclic character of war is clearly a product of a system of deterrence which, as we have seen, will be stable for a while but will eventually break down into war. Even from its earliest days, however, the object of war was peace—that is, the re-establishment of a workable and at least temporarily stable system of deterrence again. There are of course a number of different kinds and outcomes of war. There is the limited war characteristic of some periods of history which represents, as it were, the trying out or testing of threat capabilities and the re-establishment of a somewhat revised system of credibilities without much fundamental change in the structure of existing states. The wars of Europe in the eighteenth century, war in almost any feudal age, the wars of the Greek cities before Alexander—or perhaps it would be safer to say before the fall of Athens—were limited war systems.

Sometimes, however, the deterrence system becomes too unpleasant to be stable, and we find wars of conquest and consolidation in which states are actively eliminated. There are also wars of super conquest, such as those of Alexander or of the Roman Empire, which have as their objective the establishment of a world state or at least a state with no challengers. A state which experiences a long series of successes in limited wars may easily get ambitions to be a world state, and if at the same time it comes into the exclusive possession of a superior military technology this aim may be accomplished. In the age of civilization, however, world states were fundamentally unstable, mainly because of the high cost of transportation which constantly permitted the establishment of rival centers of power. The empires of great personal conquerors, Alexander, Alaric, Genghis Khan, and the like, have fallen apart immediately on the death of the conqueror himself. Empires of organization like the Roman Empire have been able to resist the tendency to fall apart over longer periods, as organization can to some extent diminish the cost of transport of military power. But even the Roman Empire was too large for the techniques of its day and eventually gave way to a large number of succession states, as did the Turkish Empire which eventually succeeded it. The instability of empire, the instability of peace, and the cyclical stability of war compose the constant theme of the whole age of civilization from 3000 b.c. to the present time.

I have said earlier, however, that civilization is passing away, and that this is the meaning of the twentieth century. The technical changes introduced by the scientific revolution are so great that we are passing into a new state of man. In this condition stable peace becomes necessary. A world state becomes possible though not necessary, and war becomes so costly and inefficient as a means either of gaining or preserving values that its abandonment is progressively organized. The crucial element in this revolution lies not so much in the increased destructiveness of particular weapons, important as this is, as in the increase in the range of deadliness and the general decline in the cost of transport of the means of violence. The destructiveness of modern weapons is so great and so spectacular that we are apt to exaggerate its importance. The limit of destructiveness is total destruction, and this was reached a long time ago. Babylon, Nineveh, Carthage, and Jerusalem were destroyed just as completely, indeed probably more completely, than Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or even Hamburg and Tokyo. The destruction of cities did not begin with nuclear weapons nor even with high explosives and airplanes. We can now destroy them more rapidly than we used to do, but certainly no more completely.

What is different in the present situation is that we can effect total destruction at much longer range than we used to be able to do. A system of deterrence will develop, as we have seen, if the capability and the credibility of the threatener diminish rapidly enough with increase in distance from his center so that at some point, say x miles away, a new center of threats can be established and a counterthreat system set up. The question is how far is x. When weapons consisted of battle axes, spears, and bows and arrows in the hands of casual and unorganized tribesmen, their threat capability might decline very rapidly as they moved away from their headquarters. Under these circumstances the city-states could prosper, and the wall around the city reduced the threat capability of potential enemies to negligible proportions within the city boundaries. Even the city-state, however, proved to be unstable the moment the organized army (a guided missile on legs) was invented, even though city-states constantly reappear for short periods in the ebb and flow of military technology and the network of supportive social organizations. It is not quite clear who invented the organized army, but it is plausible at any rate to credit Sargon as the first builder of empire and the welder of city-states into an imperial domain.

Even the organized army, however, had its limits. The farther it got from home the harder it was to feed and organize. Even in the Second World War this principle was important. As Hitler’s armies moved into Russia their lines of communication became longer, they became harder to supply, and they became weaker. As the Russians moved back, their lines of communication became shorter and they became stronger. At Stalingrad, at Leningrad, and before Moscow an equilibrium was reached temporarily in a long line where the Germans and Russians were of equal strength. Then the Germans overstrained the resources of the Reich, and German armies were rolled right back into Germany and destroyed. It is clear, however, that any increase in the effective range of the means of violence, whatever these are, is likely to increase the minimum size of the viable state and to diminish the number of such which can coexist.

A further complication in the situation is the existence of projectiles—that is, instruments of destruction which are not carried by hand but are shot to take effect at a distance from the organized armed force. If a state is to be viable in the military sense it must be able to dominate an area around its essential heartland equal in width to the range of the enemy’s deadly projectile. Otherwise the enemy can squat within the range of the essential values and shoot at them without ever occupying the territory in person. An increase in the range of the projectile has revolutionalized warfare and political relations of states almost as dramatically as an increase in the range of the armies. Thus the invention of the crossbow had a profound effect upon personal warfare, and the invention of firearms an even more striking effect. It has often been remarked that gunpowder destroyed the feudal system even though its foundations had no doubt been weakened by economic factors. Both the feudal castle and the walled city were useless in the face of gunpowder, and new forms of social organization had to be developed to take their place. This is largely a result of the increase in the range of the projectile.

The significance of the military revolution of the twentieth century is that there has been an enormous increase in the range of the deadly projectile and a very substantial diminution in the cost of transportation of organized violence of all kinds, especially of organized armed forces. The range of the deadly projectile, which covered only a few feet or at most a few yards in the days of arrows and spears, a few hundred yards in the early days of gunpowder, a few miles in the beginning of the twentieth century, and a few hundred miles by the time of the Second World War, is now rapidly approaching twelve and a half thousand miles—that is, half the circumference of the earth. This is the end of a long historic process. It cannot go any further than this and be significant. This means, however, that no place on earth is out of range, and the missile and the nuclear warhead have potentially made the conventional national states as obsolete as gunpowder made the feudal baron and the walled city. By the time of the Second World War it was clear that national states the size of France and Germany were no longer what I call unconditionally viable, as they probably had been even in the early twentieth century. In the Second World War it was clear that the Soviet Union and the United States alone perhaps of all the states of the world retained their unconditional viability, in the sense that they were both large enough for each to be stronger than the other or any likely combination of states at home. France and Germany could be overrun. The Soviet Union could not.

But the developments of the last twenty-five years have profoundly changed the picture. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have the power to do unacceptable damage to each other, and each from points well within their own boundaries. Under these circumstances it is reasonable to assume that unconditional viability has disappeared from the earth and that if we are to retain a world of national states we must all learn to live at each other’s mercy. This is not an unprecedented situation. We have in fact had to learn to do this in our personal relations, certainly since the invention of firearms—which had much the same impact on personal viability that the nuclear missile has on national viability. The invention of firearms and perhaps, even earlier, of the crossbow-it is significant that gentlemen never wore crossbows, only swords—led with surprising rapidity to personal disarmament over a very large range of human life and society. Indeed in the modern world a personal threat system backed up by a personal armament survives only in criminal and juvenile delinquent cultures or in remote and undeveloped parts of the world. It is reasonable to suppose that the development of the nuclear missile will have much the same effect on international relations and that it will lead to the abandonment of large-scale organized warfare as an instrument of national policy just as firearms led to personal disarmament and the abandonment of the use of weapons in personal relations.

It is easy to see that only a system of national disarmament which is close to universal and complete can ensure stability or even national defense in a world such as we have today. It is not so easy to see the dynamic steps which will lead to such a system, nor are we sure what the institutions will have to be to ensure stability of such a system once we have arrived at it. The system of general and complete disarmament will be stable if it pays no one to break it—that is, if it pays no one to rearm. Two conditions may generate such a situation. The first is where the pay-offs to peaceful activity are so great that the possible pay-offs of developing even a one-sided threat system do not look attractive by comparison. The second is the existence of an apparatus of law and government which can diminish the payoffs to onesided threats through the invoking of punishment.

The first condition...