Social balance therefore depended on class collaboration.  Successful collaboration, in its turn, is the outcome of a general acceptance of class and caste and general willingness to go on living and functioning in a class divided society.

A fifth collective goal of civilization has been expansion from the nucleus outward, with final authority exercised by and from the nucleus.  At the outset of the survival struggle which led to the establishment of one language, one religion, one law, one authority, one loyalty, each among the many contestants had its own language, its own religion, its own law, its own authority.

These rival forces were temporarily confederated against internal disruption or foreign invasion. ("Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”) In the course of the survival struggle, the separate parts of which the civilization was composed began with the local autonomy permitted by confederation, and ended up with one among the many contestants donning the imperial purple and establishing itself as the master and supreme dictator—­the Caesar or Pharoah of the conquered, unified world.

Foreign territories conquered and brought by force of arms within this imperium were subjects of a central authority which they never really accepted.  Authority continued to be exercised from the imperial nucleus.  The newly conquered territories were policed by professional soldiers whose primary loyalty was national but whose responsibility was to the aggregate composing the Roman or the Egyptian civilization.

The acid test of the expanding civilization was embodied in the degree of acceptance of wholeness as opposed to self-determination.  Were the individual members—­the provinces and colonies composing the whole—­willing and able to sink their differences in an unquestioned wholeness, or were they prepared at the first opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination and declare their independence of the whole?

The resolution of this question constituted the sixth collective goal of civilization:  to establish a whole in which the component members were able and willing to recognize the axiom that the interests of the whole come before the interests of any of its component parts.

The issue of central authority versus local self determination has been one of the basic issues of the present century because during the preceding period, the British, French, Dutch and Spanish Empires had been built up by the conquest and occupation of foreign lands.  If the nineteenth century was an epoch of expanding imperial authority, the twentieth century has been an epoch of the dismemberment of empires by movements for independence and self-determination.

Seventh, and finally, among the collective goals of civilization, each has developed an ideology that justified empire building by conquest, exploitation, chattel slavery, peonage, wagery, the supremacy of the empire nucleus, the subordination of the periphery to the nucleus and other aspects of ascendancy and mastery including “divine” rights in politics and “natural” rights in economics.