It is painful to hear relatively cultured people speak concerning the most elementary problems of the day. They seem like rough farmhands trying with thick, clumsy fingers to pick up a needle lying on a table. Political and social subjects, for example, are handled with the same rude instruments of thought which served two hundred years since to tackle situations in effect two hundred times less complex. Advanced civilisation is one and the same thing as arduous problems. Hence, the greater the progress, the greater danger it is in.
Life gets gradually better, but evidently also gradually more complicated.
Of course, as problems become more complex, the means of solving them also become more perfect. But each new generation must master these perfected means. Historical knowledge is a technique of the first order to preserve and continue a civilisation already advanced. But if, in addition to being old and, therefore, beginning to find life difficult, you have lost the memory of the past, and do not profit by experience, then everything turns to disadvantage. Well, it is my belief that this is the situation of Europe.