All Things Considered
suddenly. This does seem to me the case against any extreme revolution
in spelling. If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to
think it wrong.
HUMANITARIANISM AND STRENGTH
Somebody writes complaining of something I said about progress. I have
forgotten what I said, but I am quite certain that it was (like a
certain Mr. Douglas in a poem which I have also forgotten) tender and
true. In any case, what I say now is this. Human history is so rich and
complicated that you can make out a case for any course of improvement
or retrogression. I could make out that the world has been growing more
democratic, for the English franchise has certainly grown more
democratic. I could also make out that the world has been growing more
aristocratic, for the English Public Schools have certainly grown more
aristocratic. I could prove the decline of militarism by the decline of
flogging; I could prove the increase of militarism by the increase of
standing armies and conscription. But I can prove anything in this way.
I can prove that the world has always been growing greener. Only lately
men have invented absinthe and the _Westminster Gazette_. I could prove
the world has grown less green. There are no more Robin Hood foresters,
and fields are being covered with houses. I could show that the world
was less red with khaki or more red with the new penny stamps. But in
all cases progress means progress only in some particular thing. Have
you ever noticed that strange line of Tennyson, in which he confesses,
half consciously, how very _conventional_ progress is?—
“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”
Even in praising change, he takes for a simile the most unchanging
thing. He calls our modern change a groove. And it is a groove; perhaps
there was never anything so groovy.
Nothing would induce me in so idle a monologue as this to discuss
adequately a great political matter like the question of the military
punishments in Egypt. But I may suggest one broad reality to be
observed by both sides, and which is, generally speaking, observed by
neither. Whatever else is right, it is utterly wrong to employ the
argument that we Europeans must do to savages and Asiatics whatever
savages and Asiatics do to us. I have even seen some controversialists
use the metaphor, “We must fight them with their own weapons.” Very
well; let those controversialists take their metaphor, and take it
literally. Let us fight the Soudanese with their own weapons. Their own
weapons are large, very clumsy knives, with an occasional old-fashioned
gun. Their own weapons are also torture and slavery. If we fight them
with torture and slavery, we shall be fighting badly, precisely as if
we fought them with clumsy knives and old guns. That is the whole
strength of our Christian civilisation, that it does fight with its own
weapons and not with other people’s. It is not true that superiority
suggests a tit for tat. It is not true that if a small hooligan puts
his tongue out at the Lord Chief Justice, the Lord Chief Justice
immediately realises that his only chance of maintaining his position
is to put his tongue out at the little hooligan. The hooligan may or
may not have any respect at all for the Lord Chief Justice: that is a
matter which we may contentedly leave as a solemn psychological
mystery. But if the hooligan has any respect at all for the Lord Chief
Justice, that respect is certainly extended to the Lord Chief Justice
entirely because he does not put his tongue out.
Exactly in the same way the ruder or more sluggish races regard the
civilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it is
precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel
expedients. According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off
the heads of dead Englishmen, Englishmen must cut off the heads of dead
Zulus. Whenever Arabs or Egyptians constantly use the whip to their
slaves, Englishmen must use the whip to their subjects. And on a
similar principle (I suppose), whenever an English Admiral has to fight
cannibals the English Admiral ought to eat them. However unattractive a
menu consisting entirely of barbaric kings may appear to an English
gentleman, he must try to sit down to it with an appetite. He must
fight the Sandwich Islanders with their own weapons; and their own
weapons are knives and forks. But the truth of the matter is, of
course, that to do this kind of thing is to break the whole spell of
our supremacy. All the mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry
of the white man, so far as it exists in the eyes of these savages,
consists in the fact that we do not do such things. The Zulus point at
us and say, “Observe the advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these
magicians, who do not cut off the noses of their enemies.” The
Soudanese say to each other, “This hardy people never flogs its
servants; it is superior to the simplest and most obvious human
pleasures.” And the cannibals say, “The austere and terrible race, the
race that denies itself even boiled missionary, is upon us: let us
flee.”
Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general
proposition I suggest is the plainest common sense. The elements that
make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilisation are
precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For
the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the
same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.
It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is
imagination that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because
this picturing of the other man’s point of view is in the main a thing
in which Christians and Europeans specialise that Christians and
Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both
the arts of peace and war.
They alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented
ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for
the same reason for which they have invented machine-guns. Both involve
a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East,
with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is
weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are
still—merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy’s sufferings
they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the
Englishman’s head they might really borrow it. For if you do not
understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him,
very probably you will not.
When I was about seven years old I used to think that the chief modern
danger was a danger of over-civilisation. I am inclined to think now
that the chief modern danger is that of a slow return towards
barbarism, just such a return towards barbarism as is indicated in the
suggestions of barbaric retaliation of which I have just spoken.
Civilisation in the best sense merely means the full authority of the
human spirit over all externals. Barbarism means the worship of those
externals in their crude and unconquered state. Barbarism means the
worship of Nature; and in recent poetry, science, and philosophy there
has been too much of the worship of Nature. Wherever men begin to talk
much and with great solemnity about the forces outside man, the note of
it is barbaric. When men talk much about heredity and environment they
are almost barbarians. The modern men of science are many of them
almost barbarians. Mr. Blatchford is in great danger of becoming a
barbarian. For barbarians (especially the truly squalid and unhappy
barbarians) are always talking about these scientific subjects from
morning till night. That is why they remain squalid and unhappy; that
is why they remain barbarians. Hottentots are always talking about
heredity, like Mr. Blatchford. Sandwich Islanders are always talking
about environment, like Mr. Suthers. Savages—those that are truly
stunted or depraved—dedicate nearly all their tales and sayings to the
subject of physical kinship, of a curse on this or that tribe, of a
taint in this or that family, of the invincible law of blood, of the
unavoidable evil of places. The true savage is a slave, and is always
talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man and
is always talking about what he may do. Hence all the Zola heredity and
Ibsen heredity that has been written in our time affects me as not
merely evil, but as essentially ignorant and retrogressive. This sort
of science is almost the only thing that can with strict propriety be
called reactionary. Scientific determinism is simply the primal
twilight of all mankind; and some men seem to be returning to it.
Another savage trait of our time is the disposition to talk about
material substances instead of about ideas. The old civilisation talked
about the sin of gluttony or excess. We talk about the Problem of
Drink—as if drink could be a problem. When people have come to call the
problem of human intemperance the Problem of Drink, and to talk about
curing it by attacking the drink traffic, they have reached quite a dim
stage of barbarism. The thing is an inverted form of fetish worship; it
is no sillier to say that a bottle is a god than to say that a bottle
is a devil. The people who talk about the curse of drink will probably
progress down that dark hill. In a little while we shall have them
calling the practice of wife-beating the Problem of Pokers; the habit
of housebreaking will be called the Problem of the Skeleton-Key Trade;
and for all I know they may try to prevent forgery by shutting up all
the stationers’ shops by Act of Parliament.
I cannot help thinking that there is some shadow of this uncivilised
materialism lying at present upon a much more dignified and valuable
cause. Every one is talking just now about the desirability of
ingeminating peace and averting war. But even war and peace are
physical states rather than moral states, and in talking about them
only we have by no means got to the bottom of the matter. How, for
instance, do we as a matter of fact create peace in one single
community? We do not do it by vaguely telling every one to avoid
fighting and to submit to anything that is done to him. We do it by
definitely defining his rights and then undertaking to avenge his
wrongs. We shall never have a common peace in Europe till we have a
common principle in Europe. People talk of “The United States of
Europe;” but they forget that it needed the very doctrinal “Declaration
of Independence” to make the United States of America. You cannot agree
about nothing any more than you can quarrel about nothing.
WINE WHEN IT IS RED
I suppose that there will be some wigs on the green in connection with
the recent manifesto signed by a string of very eminent doctors on the
subject of what is called “alcohol.” “Alcohol” is, to judge by the
sound of it, an Arabic word, like “algebra” and “Alhambra,” those two
other unpleasant things. The Alhambra in Spain I have never seen; I am
told that it is a low and rambling building; I allude to the far more
dignified erection in Leicester Square. If it is true, as I surmise,
that “alcohol” is a word of the Arabs, it is interesting to realise
that our general word for the essence of wine and beer and such things
comes from a people which has made particular war upon them. I suppose
that some aged Moslem chieftain sat one day at the opening of his tent
and, brooding with black brows and cursing in his black beard over wine
as the symbol of Christianity, racked his brains for some word ugly
enough to express his racial and religious antipathy, and suddenly spat
out the horrible word “alcohol.” The fact that the doctors had to use