Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 13, 2025
Western civilization, despite repeated efforts, was never able to establish the kind of superficial unity that marked the high point in the Egyptian and Roman civilizations. The stresses and strains of the current great revolution have introduced into western civilization new disintegrative forces of which the capitalist-Marxist confrontation is the most extensive, divisive and decisive.
Feudalism itself, with its curious net-work of fealties and obligations running through the fabric of society in every direction, was by no means purely disintegrative in its tendencies. The mutual relations of rival baronies were by no means like those of rival clans or tribes in pre-Roman days.
Its upshot can, it seems to me, be summed up in Simon Patten's word, that mankind was nursed in pain and fear, and that the transition to a "pleasure-economy" may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences.
Europeans have carried the burdens of western civilization and inherited its disintegrative consequences for so long a period that the fate of western civilization and the fate of present day Europe are closely interwoven.
All these things mean, not that a minister must grow discouraged, but that he must set his teeth, and with pluck and endurance rise strong and masterful and say, This shall not be! Let him not listen to the barking and baying: let him hearken to the great primal voices of man and nature. Love lies deeper than discord. The constructive forces of humanity are stronger than the disintegrative.
If the disintegrative forces are dominant, form breaks down and function stagnates. This shifting balance and/or imbalance with its resulting build-up and/or break-down exists geographically, biologically, sociologically. It can perhaps be best described as successive change. It cannot be referred to as evolution except in its integrative aspect. Disintegratively it becomes devolution.
In the Stube he would probably see, drinking heavily, representatives of the ubiquitous Landsknechte, the mercenary troops enrolled for Imperial purposes by the Emperor Maximilian towards the end of the previous century, who in the intervals of war were disbanded and wandered about spending their pay, and thus constituted an excessively disintegrative element in the life of the time.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking