Equipped with spiritual armor against the threats and blows of a new, strange life, literate man marches forth to win victories in war and statecraft, art and science, religion and business. But in achieving these triumphs each civilization brings into being, willy-nilly, a larger and more complex community, increasingly divided against itself by internal cleavages of needs and creeds and fraught with growing contradictions in all spheres of life between theory and practice, faith and works, ideals and realities. The new unity of sentiment and purpose which gloriously characterizes the coming of the great age proves to be short-lived.
The uneasy balance of instinct, egotism, and ethics, woefully lost with the initial transition from preliteracy to civilization and transiently regained in new devotions to tribal gods, human or divine, is again lost as the orbit of civilization moves from tribe and kingdom and nation to the complex and confusing imperium of the great society and the World State. The acids of rationalism and skepticism dissolve old loyalties. The injunctions of morality, even when reinforced by the vision of the monotheistic higher religions, conflict with reason and self-interest. Man is divided against himself. And therefore men become divided against themselves in new cleavages of rich and poor, in-group and out-group, faithful and infidel, orthodox and heterodox, my side and your side.
Frederick L. Schuman. International politics: the destiny of the
Western State System. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1948.