What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
want an academic example of the process of individualisation, consider the immense
diversification over the past fifty or sixty years of history, or of science, or of any
particular science, and the enormously increased variety of individual specialisation’s
which it offers. But I have a far more striking example of the process at a different level.
More than thirty years ago a high German military officer visiting the Soviet Union
listened to some illuminating remarks from a Soviet officer concerned with the building
up of the Red air force:
We Russians have to do with still primitive human material. We are compelled to adapt
the dying machine to the type of dyer who is at our disposal. To the extent to which we are
successful in developing a new type of men, the technical development of the material will
also be perfected. The two factors condition each other. Primitive men cannot be put into
complicated machines.'
Today, a bare generation later, we know that Russian machines are no longer primitive,
and that millions of Russian men and women who plan, build, and operate these machines
are no longer primitive either. As a historian, I am more interested in this latter
phenomenon. The rationalisation of production means something far more important - the
rationalisation of man. All over the world today primitive men are learning to use
complicated machines, and in doing so are learning to think, to use their reason. The
revolution, which you may justly call a social revolution, but which I will call in the
present context the expansion of reason, is only just beginning. But it is advancing at a
staggering pace to keep abreast of the staggering technological advances of the last
generation. It seems to me one of the major aspects of our twentieth-century revolution.
Some of our pessimists and sceptics will certainly call me to order if I fail at this point to
notice the dangers and the ambiguous aspects of the role assigned to reason in the
contemporary world. In an earlier lecture I pointed out that increasing individualisation in
the sense described did not imply any weakening of social pressures for conformity and
uniformity. This is indeed one of the paradoxes of our complex modern society.
Education, which is a necessary and powerful instrument in promoting the expansion of
individual capacities and opportunities, and therefore of increasing individualisation, is
also a powerful instrument in the hands of interested groups for promoting social
uniformity. Pleas frequently heard for more responsible broadcasting and television, or for
a more responsible press, are directed in the first instance against certain negative
phenomena which it is easy to condemn. But they quickly become pleas to use these
powerful instruments of mass persuasion in order to inculcate desirable tastes and
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