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Are We Modern Barba rians ? 1 " y we had the power to choose, what period to live in, whether nowadays, or l,n some period before our ■birth, then most of us would ■with conviction choose the ■present. All of us take pleas ure in vociferously berating ■ •hr many absurdities of mod- Irrn life; most of us will occa- Isionally have the feeling that the mechanization of our lives i% cheating us of the true sense of life. Nonetheless, there is so deeply implanted in us, even in those who deny it, the notion of evolution, of prog ress, that instinctively and without further examination we consider our ways of life and our institutions to be bet ter than earlier ones. Repeatedly poets, writers, have amused themselves by throwing different periods pellmell together, by trans planting contemporary human beings into earlier times, or the men of previous periods into our times. Think of Os car VY ilde or H. G. Wells or Mark 1'wain. 1 believe that it is no idle pastime to open up this problem. It appears promising to me to inquire whether we white races have made use of our amazing and justly lauded technology' in or der to fashion our lives more rationally, whether we are less dull, whether we are happier nowadays than, say 2,000 years ago. I m not referring to the barbarian inhabitants °* the Europe of that period. That our civiliza tion has broadened out since 2,000 years ago, that *t has come also to embrace regions then bar- 'ariau. that it today encompasses almost all of the white man’s world, that is patent. But in this aspect the problem seems to me too aimless. If wc are to reach a meaningful result we must limit ourv whu An Analysis of Two Thousand Years of Civilization By Lion Feuchtwanger Lion Feuchtwanger The distinguished German Jewish au thor in which he contrasts dispassion ately our modern age with the ancient world. He arrives at a startling an swer to the query—“Are We Modern Barbarians f” v es for our comparison to those regions were at that time civilized, that is, the n of the Roman Empire. Let us then put luestion thus: w’ould an ancient Roman of iperial period, placed among our present con- get on any w’orse than we, or w'ould one irselves, put back into the Roman Empire, rt er than its own citizens? I t s take a look, first of all, at a child, a child r lav, born let us say, into the most favorable <nment, let us ask: has this child, as a result ? attainment of the 2,000-ycars-long develop- • a nature different from that of an infant years ago? w possible to test this problem experimentally, dom our the ditit of , do en\ of me 2,0 and this has been done. Infants of our race have been compared with infants of primitive tribes, culturally on a level above which we rose thousands of years ago. The results showed that the so cial instinct of our children, up to an amazingly advanced age, is not a jot more highly developed than the social instinct of the children of primitive peoples. We may hold, positively, that our white civilization has not suc ceeded in civilizing the instincts of the individual the least bit above the instinctive level of 2,- 000 years ago. Probably we have grown somewhat in social insight —I shall revert to this later; the social instinct, how'ever, is just as weakly rooted today as it w'as 2,000 years ago, and if it comes into serious conflict with older mature urges, the sexual one and the destructive one, then most commonly one of these tw-o older drives will win the day. As definitely as we must deny any growth of the social instinct or the native intelligence of the race, just as definitely may w'c claim that the bodily efficiency of the white race has at least not declined. On the contrary. 'The life- expectancy of the contemporary child, its chances of reaching old age, are nowadays incomparably better than they were 2,000 years ago. We are dependent on esti mates, but w'e shall not be going too far in assuming that a child born today has four times better chances of remaining in good health and of reach ing an age of at least 50 years, than had the child of 2,000 years ago. The ancient world, by the way, was as fond as we are of drawing comparisons with the past, and it indulged in psychological child experiments, that tended in the direction of our own. Only their experiments were somewhat more robust. Diony sius, the tyrant of Syracuse, for example, wanted to ascertain whether language was inborn in man or not, that is, whether a child without receiving any instruction could of his own accord come to communicate by words, for this purpose he made the following experiment. On a secluded island he had placed a number of children who were looked after exclusively by deaf-and-dumb attend ants. The result of the experiment was; that when the children were grown up they could ut ter but inarticulate sounds. The same result w'as obtained when 1,500 years later Frederick the Second, the German emperor, repeated the experi ment. Let us return to our starting point. Very well, you may say, the evolution of civilization in the last 2,000 years has not been able to heighten our race's native power of judgment. But we know how infinitely long it takes before qualities become instincts. To change an instinct takes ten thou sands of years. Y'et, have w f c not perhaps in these 2,000 years at least changed the fVeltanschauung of the adult to such an extent that from the be ginning his attitude or conduct in many situations, nay, in most situations, will be different from that of the man of antiquity? Has not his attitude to ward nature become clarified? Have not his re ligious ideas become deeper, less childish, in these last 2,000 years? No, they have not. You will counter; the an cient world believed in gods in a thoroughly child like w f ay, and the ancient world in a thoroughly childlike manner believed in miracles. Granted that that was so in broad masses of the people, but those broad masses had for coun terfoil equally broad masses that decidedly denied the real existence of the popular gods and the prov idence supposedly exercised by them. 'The domi nant IVeltanschauung—world viewpoint—of the educated was that of the Stoa, whose teaching did not, indeed, deny the gods, but sublimated them to such an extent as to reduce them to forces of Nature. Betw'een the conception which an educated member of the ancient world entertained, say, of the god Vulcan, and the conception of electricity entertained by an educated person of today, there’s hardly much difference. And when one of the ancients talked of the power of Venus, he said hardly more—and didn’t mean to say more —than, that the sex instinct plays an important role in life. The views of the time are most characteristi cally expressed in Pliny’s natural history. As for himself, so explains this great scientist of antiquity, (iod and nature cannot be separated. Nature, he asserts, is the mother of all things. Only the weakness of man makes him seek the image and form of the deity. All mythology is childish claptrap. It is very doubtful, whether the su preme power, whatever that may be, cares about human beings. For maintaining human society in good order, the belief of the uneducated in the guidance of human affairs by Heaven is indeed of undoubted utility: as also is the idea that mis deeds unfailingly incur penalties. For the imper fection of human nature, Pliny adds ironically, there is a special solace in the circumstance that (Jod, too, cannot do everything. The possibility of suicide, for instance, that nature has given to much-plagued man, is denied to God. Neither can God prevent two times ten being twenty. Pliny reaches the conclusion that it is wiser to identify God with Nature, and to employ the be lief in the deity, as such, only as an educational instrument among the lower classes. This was written exactly 1,860 years ago, in a pretty villa on the shore of Lago di Como; its foundation-w'alls stiil stand today. I leave it to you to decide how far Pliny’s views are congruent with those of the powers that be today, but I can’t help citing, side by side (Please turn to page 10) Th SOUTHERN ISRAELITE * [9]