Synthetic moderation: Ideology of The West

When these extremists argued ‘either-or,’ the Western tradition answered ‘both!’

I have been re-reading Carroll Quigley’s forgotten masterpiece of historical and sociological analysis, Evolution of Civilizations. As I was reading it struck me that Quigley’s description of Western ideology strongly agrees with the conclusion of Edwin Brown Firmage’s theological study of government which I wrote about in a recent post.

In an Ensign article from 1976 Firmage described a political tension between individualism and communalism, also reflected in the philosophical debate between universalism and nominalism through the ages. Firmage’s conclusion is that LDS theology points not to one extreme or other, but to a synthesis of the two: “Man’s goal is seen as being the perfection of his individuality in the image of his Heavenly Father, until he is able to enjoy a celestial community.” 

Carroll Quigley characterizes the essential Western ideology - the way of thinking that drove Western Civilization to great heights - as “synthetic moderation.” For example, Eastern and Platonic thought suggests that the material is opposed to the spiritual, and only the non-material holds true value. Modern materialist thought tends to completely lose sight of the spiritual. In contrast to these two extremes, Quigley teaches, “Western ideology believes that the material is good and the spiritual is better, but that they are not opposed to each other since the material world is necessary for the achievement of the spiritual world.” Also, “the spiritual rested on the material (not opposed to it) … This led to a basic distinction (now largely lost) between necessary and important, in which material things were necessary but spiritual things were important.” LDS thought takes this one step further by defining the “soul” as the union of body and spirit. 

On the topic of individualism vs communalism, the moderate Western ideology chooses both, in Quigley’s analysis. Classical society is characteristic of a communal society, in which where necessary the individual’s needs can be sacrificed for the good of the community. Our society today falls toward the other extreme, with individualism on a pedestal, and the old sense of community rapidly deteriorating into fragmentation and isolation. The old “Western” way of thinking, derived from Christianity and propelling our society during its time of growth, “was essentially a moderate one. It was constantly threatened, as moderates always are, by extremism. When these extremists argued ‘either-or,’ the Western tradition answered ‘both!’” The moderate synthesis of individualism and communalism was liberalism: “In its narrowest version this idea appeared as the theory that all men with different outlooks or contributions cooperate together to form something greater than the partial opinions of any of them.” 

Quigley worried that the Western ideology is being lost (writing in the 1960s). After describing threats from the “Right” (not quite the same as our political definitions today), he says "of course, the threat to the Western ideology based on synthetic moderation came equally, if not more, easily from the Left, from the materialists and nominalists. But this is a well-known story that needs to be mentioned here only because the loss of the ideology of Western civilization (like the earlier loss of the ideology of Classical civilization) will rest rather on the overemphasis on materialism and selfish individualism than it will on overemphasis of rationalism or spirituality." But he sees the West as having gone astray before and found its way again multiple times: “In most civilizations, … there is a strong tendency for the basic ideology of the society to become lost and misunderstood during the Age of Conflict and to be abandoned totally in the Age of Decay. Since Western civilization has gone into an Age of Conflict three times, the threat to the society’s ideology has been practically endemic. Anyone who wishes to recover this ideology can do so by reflecting on the “moderation” or the expression “reconciliation of extremes.” 

Let’s hope for the recovery of the Western ideology. But if moderation is at its core, I have to say it seems a long way off.