Foreign markets and materials may be lost to more enterprising
competition; excess of imports over exports may drain precious metal from
domestic reserves. The concentration of wealth may disrupt the nation in
class or race war. The concentration of population and poverty in great
cities may compel a government to choose between enfeebling the
economy with a dole and running the risk of riot and revolution.
Since inequality grows in an expanding economy, a society may find
itself divided between a cultured minority and a majority of men and
women too unfortunate by nature or circumstance to inherit or develop
standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a
cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation,
feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization
by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of
educational and economic opportunity.
As education spreads, theologies lose credence, and receive an external
conformity without influence upon conduct or hope. Life and ideas become
increasingly secular, ignoring supernatural explanations and fears. The
moral code loses aura and force as its human origin is revealed, and as
divine surveillance and sanctions are removed. In ancient Greece the
philosophers destroyed the old faith among the educated classes; in many
nations of modern Europe the philosophers achieved similar results.
Protagoras [Protagoras (5th century B.C.)] became Voltaire, Diogenes
Rousseau [Diogenes (412?-323 B.C.)], Democritus [Democritus (fl. 400
B.C.)] Hobbes [Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679)], Plato Kant [Kant,
Immanuel (1724-1804)], Thrasymachus Nietzsche, Aristotle Spencer
[Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903)], Epicurus Diderot [Epicurus (342?-270
B.C.)]. In antiquity and modernity alike, analytical thought dissolved the
religion that had buttressed the moral code. New religions came, but they
were divorced from the ruling classes, and gave no service to the state. An
age of weary skepticism and epicureanism followed the triumph of
