A society, like any living thing, needs to be opportunistic, constantly testing and searching for ways to grow, even though many citizens in its establishment may resent the means by which it does so and may do everything in their power to quell the process. Often they can, but not always. For Western society, until the practical features of its classical beliefs were integrated with its more humane Christian ones, Europeans largely did not support those whose ideas and morés focused on life in this material world.

Artists, scientists, inventors, explorers, and entrepreneurs are, by their very nature, eccentric. They don’t support the status quo, they threaten it. But the dreamers are the ones who move the rest forward toward newer, better ways of doing things. They only really flourish in a society that not only tolerates but takes pride in its eccentrics. In a truly dynamic society, cleverness is melded with kindness and acceptance of those who are different. In short, European culture needed a thousand years to even begin to “get its act together” and meld all of its values into a single smoothly functioning whole.

                                                      

   

                                                         Gutenberg at work in printing shop (circa 1440)                    

                                           https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Gutenberg

                                           

To flourish, a society must use resources and grow when it has opportunities to do so, or it will lose out later when events in the environment grow harsher or when competition gets fiercer, and it has few or no savings accumulated. How do new, improved ways of doing things become established ways of doing things? One means is by war, as has been mentioned. But the peaceful mechanism can also work, and it is seen in tolerant societies when the people who use new ways are allowed to do so undisturbed, and then they live better. At that point, the majority begins to pay attention and to take up the eccentrics’ ways.

This market-driven way is the way of peaceful cultural evolution, the alternative to the war-driven one. Humans have taken a long time to reach it, but as a species, we are almost to the point of being able to evolve culturally without resorting to war.

Now, where are we? What has been shown in this chapter is that values endure down generations. In the nations of the West, Judeo-Christian respect and compassion took a thousand years to synthesize with the Greek abstract thought and Roman practicality, but once the Western nations learned to see science, exploration, and commerce as ways of glorifying God, material progress had to result. Whether that progress produced a concomitant moral progress I will deal with later in this book. For now, let’s keep following what really did happen in the West and save what it meant in moral terms for a later chapter.

Notes

1. Matthew Allen Fox, The Accessible Hegel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005).

2. Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1999), pp. 16–19.

3. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776; Project Gutenberg). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/731/731-h/731-h.html.