The dynamism of our culture - the result of a complex of internal
tensions - and the molecular motion of our contradictions cause us from age
to age to create, to emigrate, to export, and condemn us to expansion. The
fact that this movement has been dubbed imperialism seem accidental and
relative: all energy and any physical or spiritual force may be called
imperialist by the objects or individuals which have to endure it, but that
is the very condition of life, the very unemotional law of love.
***
It is a fact that, through the random effects of colonisation, private
business contacts or sporadic cultural exchanges of an incredibly
disorganised but curiously effective type, Europe has spread right across
the world its technology, its hygiene, its political and social
institutions, its parliamentary government, its trades unions, and all its
arts and its philosophy as secular activities, and all of their processes
and a little of their logic. But Europe has not exported its self-regulating
dialectic, the result of balances that are being constantly challenged, of
intertwined tragedies, of countless tensions, both destructive and fruitful.
The whole world eagerly receives our machines, our doctrines, our
remedies and our poisons, and many of our secrets of material power - in a
word, the world receives our products, but it does not receive the
religious, ethical or philosophical value, which alone can explain the
genesis of those products, and which alone can help to keep them in balance.
It chooses the most dubious of our products - nationalism for example - and
turns them against us. It becomes westernised in appearance, with factories,
hygiene, dress, transport, town planning and architecture. But it despises
or simply ignores our psychology and our spirituality. It wants our machines
but rejects our work ethic. It wants us to help it to live better but
disdains the love of its fellow man.
