What's Wrong with the World
Now a direction is always far more fantastic than a plan. I would
rather have the most archaic map of the road to Brighton than a general
recommendation to turn to the left. Straight lines that are not parallel
must meet at last; but curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers might
walk along the frontier of France and Germany, one on the one side and
one on the other, so long as they were not vaguely told to keep away
from each other. And this is a strictly true parable of the effect of
our modern vagueness in losing and separating men as in a mist.
It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of
creed unites men--so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary
unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been
nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two
homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr. Campbell’s chapel. “I say God is
One,” and “I say God is One but also Three,” that is the beginning of a
good quarrelsome, manly friendship. But our age would turn these creeds
into tendencies. It would tell the Trinitarian to follow multiplicity as
such (because it was his “temperament”), and he would turn up later with
three hundred and thirty-three persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it
would turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful intellectual fall. It
would force that previously healthy person not only to admit that there
was one God, but to admit that there was nobody else. When each had, for
a long enough period, followed the gleam of his own nose (like the Dong)
they would appear again; the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a
Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit to understand each other
than before.
It is exactly the same with politics. Our political vagueness divides
men, it does not fuse them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm in
clear weather, but they will edge miles away from it in a fog. So a
Tory can walk up to the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is
Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism is a spirit, a sublime
atmosphere, a noble, indefinable tendency, why, then he keeps out of its
way; and quite right too. One can meet an assertion with argument; but
healthy bigotry is the only way in which one can meet a tendency. I
am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly
pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for
disliking the Japanese civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is the
very worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hard
to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force that
always yields and then returns. Such is the force of a great impersonal
prejudice, such as possesses the modern world on so many points. Against
this there is no weapon at all except a rigid and steely sanity, a
resolution not to listen to fads, and not to be infected by diseases.
In short, the rational human faith must armor itself with prejudice in
an age of prejudices, just as it armoured itself with logic in an age of
logic. But the difference between the two mental methods is marked and
unmistakable. The essential of the difference is this: that prejudices
are divergent, whereas creeds are always in collision. Believers bump
into each other; whereas bigots keep out of each other’s way. A creed
is a collective thing, and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is a
private thing, and even its tolerance is misanthropic. So it is with our
existing divisions. They keep out of each other’s way; the Tory paper
and the Radical paper do not answer each other; they ignore each other.
Genuine controversy, fair cut and thrust before a common audience, has
become in our special epoch very rare. For the sincere controversialist
is above all things a good listener. The really burning enthusiast never
interrupts; he listens to the enemy’s arguments as eagerly as a spy
would listen to the enemy’s arrangements. But if you attempt an actual
argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will find that no
medium is admitted between violence and evasion. You will have no answer
except slanging or silence. A modern editor must not have that eager ear
that goes with the honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent; and that is
called dignity. Or he may be deaf and noisy; and that is called slashing
journalism. In neither case is there any controversy; for the whole
object of modern party combatants is to charge out of earshot.
The only logical cure for all this is the assertion of a human ideal.
In dealing with this, I will try to be as little transcendental as is
consistent with reason; it is enough to say that unless we have some
doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution
may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrat to
maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now
consider evil. The old tyrants invoked the past; the new tyrants
will invoke the future evolution has produced the snail and the owl;
evolution can produce a workman who wants no more space than a snail,
and no more light than an owl. The employer need not mind sending a
Kaffir to work underground; he will soon become an underground animal,
like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver to hold his breath in the
deep seas; he will soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not trouble to
alter conditions, conditions will so soon alter men. The head can be
beaten small enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fetters off
the slave; knock the slave until he forgets the fetters. To all this
plausible modern argument for oppression, the only adequate answer is,
that there is a permanent human ideal that must not be either confused
or destroyed. The most important man on earth is the perfect man who
is not there. The Christian religion has specially uttered the ultimate
sanity of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the incarnate and human
truth. Our lives and laws are not judged by divine superiority, but
simply by human perfection. It is man, says Aristotle, who is the
measure. It is the Son of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the quick
and the dead.
Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissensions; rather a doctrine alone
can cure our dissensions. It is necessary to ask, however, roughly,
what abstract and ideal shape in state or family would fulfil the human
hunger; and this apart from whether we can completely obtain it or not.
But when we come to ask what is the need of normal men, what is the
desire of all nations, what is the ideal house, or road, or rule, or
republic, or king, or priesthood, then we are confronted with a strange
and irritating difficulty peculiar to the present time; and we must call
a temporary halt and examine that obstacle.
*****
IV. THE FEAR OF THE PAST
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of
the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to
misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to
stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern
man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but
is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his
great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead,
we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is
apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance.
Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the
novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth
century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was
supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have
been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening
two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements
of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so
many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened;
of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in
advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the
age is really rather odd.
But when full allowance has been made for this harmless element of
poetry and pretty human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesitate to
maintain here that this cult of the future is not only a weakness but
a cowardice of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch that even
its pugnacity is fundamentally frightened; and the Jingo is contemptible
not because he is impudent, but because he is timid. The reason why
modern armaments do not inflame the imagination like the arms and
emblazonments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart from optical
ugliness or beauty. Some battleships are as beautiful as the sea; and
many Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman noses. The atmospheric
ugliness that surrounds our scientific war is an emanation from that
evil panic which is at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a
charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout,
a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch the hindmost. It is
impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and longer
French lances, with precisely the quivering employed about larger and
larger German ships The man who called the Blue Water School the “Blue
Funk School” uttered a psychological truth which that school itself
would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard, if it be
a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has more
alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial enterprises than the fact
that they are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden defenses against a
world of cold rapacity and fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored
not so much by the creed that we were doing something right, as by
the creed that Boers and Germans were probably doing something wrong;
driving us (as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said
that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was: a white feather.
Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The
modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue,
not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled
towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular
phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives
it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity Futurity does not
exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a
fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past
also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind.
There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many
harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of
monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once
sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition
of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking
at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street
of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to
play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank
wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes;
the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato,
Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as
narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as
humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that
men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They