Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
It will be perceived that the reaction of the new social force in the
case of industrial organization is fundamentally opposed to that which
occurred in the political sphere. The one is working steadily towards an
autocratic imperialism and the "servile state," the other towards the
fluctuating, incoherent control of the making and administering of laws
by the untrained, the uncultivated, and the generally unfit, the issue
of which is anarchy. The industrial-commercial-financial oligarchy that
dominated society for the century preceding the Great War is the result
of the first; Russia, today, is an exemplar of the second. The working
out of these two great devices of the new force released by the
destructive processes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries, simultaneously though in apparent opposition, explains why,
when the war broke out, imperialism and democracy synchronized so
exactly: on the one hand, imperial states, industry, commerce, and
finance; on the other, a swiftly accelerating democratic system that was
at the same time the effective means whereby the dominant imperialism
worked, and the omnipresent and increasing threat to its further
continuance.
A full century elapsed before victory became secure, or even proximate.
Republicanism rapidly extended itself to all the governments of western
Europe, but it could not maintain itself in its primal integrity. Sooner
here, later there, it surrendered to the financial, industrial,
commercial forces that were taking over the control and direction of
society, becoming partners with them and following their aims, conniving
at their schemes, and sharing in their ever-increasing profits. By the
end of the first decade of the twentieth century these supposedly "free"
governments had become as identified with "special privilege," and as
widely severed from the people as a whole, as the autocratic governments
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while they failed
consistently to match them in effectiveness, energy and efficiency of
operation.
For this latter condition democracy was measurably responsible. For
fifty years it had been slowly filtering into the moribund republican
system until at last, during the same first decade of the present
century, it had wholly transformed the governmental system, making it,
whatever its outward form, whether constitutional monarchy, or republic,
essentially democratic. So government became shifty, opportunist,
incapable, and without the inherent energy to resist, beyond a certain
point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not
alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the very
government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and organized and
administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very fabric of
society itself.
Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social force
were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical
justification just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a
certain amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to
regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were
joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the last
century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something
else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by
evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it
appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the
final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law;
through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life,
the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the
anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had
devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things
were eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very
highly developed animals to experience and environment, it had given
weighty support to the increasingly popular movement towards democracy
both in theory and in act.
Its greatest contribution, however, was its argument that, since the
invariable law of life was one of progressive evolution, therefore the
acquired characteristics which formed the material of evolution, and
were heritable, could be mechanically increased in number by education;
hence the body of inheritance (which unfortunately varied as between man
and man because of past discrepancies in environment, opportunities, and
education) could be equalized by a system of teaching that aimed to
furnish that mental and physical training hitherto absent.
Whether the case was ever so stated in set terms does not matter; very
shortly this became the firm conviction of the great mass of men, and
the modern democracy of method is based on the belief that all men are
equal because they are men, and that free, compulsory, secularized,
state-controlled education can and does remove the last difference that
made possible any discrimination in rights and privileges as between one
man and another.
In another respect, however, the superstition of mechanical evolution
played an important part, and with serious results. Neither the prophets
nor the camp-followers seemed to realize that evolution, while
undoubtedly a law of life within certain limits, was inseparable from
degradation which was its concomitant, that is to say, that as the
rocket rises so must it fall; as man is conceived, born and matures,
even so must he die. The wave rises, but falls again; the state waxes to
greatness, wanes, and the map knows it no more; each epoch of human
history arises out of dim beginnings, magnifies itself in glory, and
then yields to internal corruption, dilution and adulteration of blood,
or prodigal dissipation of spiritual force, and takes its place in the
annals of ancient history. Without recognition of this implacable,
unescapable fact of degradation sequent on evolution, the later becomes
a delusion and an instrument of death, for the eyes of man are blind to
incipient or crescent dangers; content, self-secure, lost in a vain
dream of manifest destiny they are deaf to warnings, incapable even of
the primary gestures of self-defense. Such was one of the results of
nineteenth-century evolutionism, and the generation that saw the last
years of the nineteenth century and the first part of the new, basking
in its day dreams of self-complacency, made no move to avert the dangers
that threatened it then and now menace it with destruction.
When, therefore, modernism achieved its grand climacteric in July, 1914,
we had on the one hand an imperialism of force, in industry, commerce,
and finance, expressing itself through highly developed specialists, and
dictating the policies and practices of government, society, and
education; on the other, a democracy of form which denied, combated, and
destroyed distinction in personality and authority in thought, and
discouraged constructive leadership in the intellectual, spiritual, and
artistic spheres of activity. The opposition was absolute, the results
catastrophic. The lack of competent leadership in every category of life
finds a sufficient explanation in the two opposed forces, in their
origin and nature, and in the fact of their opposition.
In the somewhat garish light of the War and the Peace, it would not be
difficult to feel a real and even poignant sympathy for two causes that
were prominent and popular in the first fourteen years of the present
century, namely, the philosophy that based itself on a mechanical system
of evolution which predicted unescapable, irreversible human progress,
and that religion which denied the reality of evil in the world. The
plausibility of each was dissipated by the catastrophic events though
both still linger in stubborn unconsciousness of their demise. The
impulse towards sympathy is mitigated by realization of the unfortunate
effect they exerted on history. This is particularly true of
evolutionary philosophy, which was held as an article of faith, either
consciously or sub-consciously, by the greater part of Western society.
Not only did it deter men from realizing the ominous tendency of events
but, more unhappily, it minimized their power to discriminate between
what was good and bad in current society, and even reversed their sense
of comparative values. If man was indeed progressing steadily from bad
to good, and so to better and best, then the vivid and even splendid
life of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its headlong
conquest of the powers of nature, its enormous industrial development,
its vast and ever-increasing wealth in material things, must be not only
an amazing advance beyond any former civilization but positively good in
itself, while the future could only be a progressive magnifying of what
then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr.
Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other
pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will
some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently
acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any
period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches
the sky."
Nothing but a grave inability to estimate values, based on a
pseudo-scientific dogma, can explain the lack of any just standard of
comparative values that was the essential quality in pre-war society.
Extraordinary as were the material achievements of the time, beneficent
in certain ways, and susceptible in part of sometime being used to the
advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in
value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image
which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were
voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into
idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life
were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real
that they were unreal became the object and the measure of achievement.
It was an unhappy and almost fatal attitude of mind, and it was
engendered not so much by the trend of civilization since the
Renaissance and Reformation, nor by the compulsion and cumulative
influence of the things themselves, as by the natural temper and
inclinations and the native standards of this emancipated mass of
humanity that, oppressed, outraged and degraded for four hundred years
had at last burst out of its prison-house and had assumed control of
society through industrialism, politics and social life. The saving
grace of the old aristocracies had disappeared with the institution
itself: between 1875 and 1900 the great single leaders, so fine in
character, so brilliant in capacity, so surprising in their numbers,
that had given a deceptive glory to the so-called Victorian Age, had
almost wholly died out, and the new conditions neither fostered the
development of adequate successors, nor gave audience to the few that,
anomalously, appeared. It is not surprising therefore that the new
social element that had played so masterly a part in bringing to its
perfection the industrial-financial-democratic scheme of life should
have developed an apologetic therefor, and imposed it, with all its
materialism, its narrowness, its pragmatism, its, at times, grossness
and cynicism, on the mind of a society where increasingly their own
followers were, by sheer energy and efficiency, acquiring a predominant
position.
I am not unconscious that these are hard sayings and that few indeed
will accept them. They seem too much like attempting that which Burke
said was impossible, viz., to bring an indictment against a people. I
intend nothing of the sort. Out of this same body of humanity which _as
a whole_ has exerted this very unfavourable influence on modern society,
have come and will come personalities of sudden and startling nobility,
men who have done as great service as any of their contemporaries
whatever their class or status. Out of the depths have come those who
have ascended to the supreme heights, for since Christianity came into
the world to free the souls of men, this new liberty has worked without
limitations of caste or race. Indeed, the very creations of the emergent
force, industrialism and democracy, while they were the betrayal of the
many were the opportunity of the few, taking the place, as they did, of
the older creeds of specifically Christian society, and inviting those
who would to work their full emancipation and so become the servants of
God and mankind. By the very bitterness of their antecedents, the
cruelty of their inheritance, they gained a deeper sense of the reality
of life, a more just sense of right and wrong, a clearer vision of
things as they were, than happened in the case of those who had no such
experience of the deep brutality of the regime of post-Renaissance
society.
True as this is, it is also true that for one who won through there were
many who gained nothing, and it was, and is, the sheer weight of numbers
of those who failed of this that has made their influence on the modern
life as pervasive and controlling as it is.
What has happened is a certain degradation of character, a weakening of
the moral stamina of men, and against this no mechanical device in
government, no philosophical or social theory, can stand a chance of
successful resistance, while material progress in wealth and trade and
scientific achievement becomes simply a contributory force in the
process of degeneration. For this degradation of character we are bound
to hold this new social force in a measure responsible, even though it
has so operated because of its inherent qualities and in no material
respect through conscious cynicism or viciousness; indeed it is safe to
say that in so far as it was acting consciously it was with good
motives, which adds an element of even greater tragedy to a situation
already sufficiently depressing.
If I am right in holding this to be the effective cause of the situation
we have now to meet, it is true that it is by no means the only one. The
emancipation and deliverance of the downtrodden masses of men who owed
their evil estate to the destruction of the Christian society of the
Middle Ages, was a clamourous necessity; it was a slavery as bad in some
ways as any that had existed in antiquity, and the number of its victims
was greater. The ill results of the accomplished fact was largely due to
the condition of religion which existed during the period of
emancipation. No society can endure without vital religion, and any
revolution effected at a time when religion is moribund or dissipated in
contentious fragments, is destined to be evacuated of its ideals and its
potential, and to end in disaster. Now the freeing of the slaves of the
Renaissance and the post-Reformation, and their absorption in the body
politic, was one of the greatest revolutions in history, and it came at
a time when religion, which had been one and vital throughout Western
Europe for six centuries, had been shattered and nullified, and its
place taken, in the lands that saw the great liberation, by Calvinism,
Lutheranism, Puritanism and atheism, none of which could exert a guiding
and redemptive influence on the dazed hordes that had at last come up
into the light of day.
In point of fact, therefore, we are bound to trace back the
responsibility for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as
well as to the tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and
profligate ordering of society, which followed on the end of
Mediaevalism.
So then we stand today confronting a situation that is ominous and
obscure, since the very ideals and devices which we had held were the
last word in progressive evolution have failed at the crisis, and
because we who created them and have worked through them, have failed in
character, and chiefly because we have accepted low ideals and inferior
standards imposed upon us by social elements betrayed and abandoned by a
world that could not aid them or assimilate them since itself had
betrayed the only thing that could give them force, unity and coherency,
that is, a vital and pervasive religious faith.
There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the
disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast
heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought
nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps natural,
but it is none the less both irrational and wicked. If it is persisted
in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify itself, but
only so. We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination,
we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of our own making,
for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will. What we will that
shall we be, or rather, what we _are_ that shall we will, and if we make
of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then the victory rests
with us. It is true that we are in the last years of a definite period,
on that decline that precedes the opening of a new epoch. Never in
history has any such period overpassed its limit of five hundred years,
and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the fifteenth century,
cannot outlast the present. But these declining years are preceding
those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will
see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is
our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. It is for us
to say what this shall be. It is not foreordained; true, if we will it,
it may be a reign of disaster, a parallel to the well-recognized "Dark
Ages" of history, but also, if we will, it may be a new and a true
"renaissance," a rebirth of old ideals, of old honour, of old faith,
only incarnate in new and noble forms.
The vision of an old heaven and a new earth was vouchsafed us during the
war, when horror and dishonour and degradation were shot through and
through with an epic heroism and chivalry and self-sacrifice. What if
this all did fade in the miasma of Versailles and the cynicism of trade
fighting to get back to "normalcy," and the red anarchy out of the East?
There is no fiat of God that fixes these things as eternal. Even they
also may be made the instruments of revelation and re-creation. Paris
and London, Rome, Berlin and Washington are meshed in the tangled web of
the superannuated who cannot escape the incubus of the old ways and the
old theories that were themselves the cause of the war and of the
failure of "modern civilization," but another generation is taking the
field and we must believe that this has been burned out of them. They
may have achieved this great perfection in the field, they may have
experienced it through those susceptible years of life just preceding
military age. It does not matter. Somehow they have it, and those who
come much in contact in school or college with boys and men between the
ages of seventeen and twenty-five, know, and thankfully confess, that if
they can control the event the future is secure.
In the harlequinade of fabulous material success the nations of "modern
civilization" suffered a moral deterioration, in themselves and in their
individual members; by a moral regeneration they may be saved. How is
this to be accomplished? How, humanly speaking, is the redemption of
society to be achieved? Not alone by change of heart in each individual,
though if this could be it would be enough. Humanly speaking there is
not time and we dare not hope for the divine miracle whereby "in the
twinkling of an eye we shall all be changed." Still less by sole
reliance on some series of new political, social, economic and
educational devices; there is no plan, however wise and profound, that
can work effectively under the dead weight of a society that is made up
of individuals whose moral sense is defective. Either of these two
methods, put into operation by itself, will fail. Acting together they
may succeed.
I repeat what I have said before. The material thing and the spiritual
force work by inter-action and cooerdinately. The abandonment or reform
of some device that has proved evil or inadequate, and the substitution
of something better, changes to that extent the environment of the
individual and so enables him more perfectly to develop his inherent
possibilities in character and capacity, while every advance in this
direction reacts on the machinery of life and makes its improvement more
possible. With a real sense of my own personal presumption, but with an
equally real sense of the responsibility that rests on every man at the
present crisis, I shall venture certain suggestions as to possible
changes that may well be effected in the material forms of contemporary
society as well as in its methods of thought, in order that the
spiritual energies of the individual may be raised to a higher level
through the amelioration of a hampering environment, and, with even
greater diffidence, others that may bear more directly on the
character-development of the individual. In following out this line of
thought I shall, in the remaining seven lectures, speak successively on:
A Working Philosophy; The Social Organism; The Industrial and Economic
Problem; The Political Organization of Society; The Function of
Education and Art; The Problem of Organic Religion; and Personal
Responsibility.
I am only too conscious of the fact that the division of my subject
under these categorical heads, and the necessities of special argument,
if not indeed of special pleading, have forced me to such particular
stress on each subject as may very likely give an impression of undue
emphasis. If each lecture were to be taken by itself, such an impression
would, I fear, be unescapable; I ask therefore for the courtesy of a
suspension of judgment until the series is completed, for it is only
when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another,
that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.
II
A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]
[*This lecture has been very considerably re-written
since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained
has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix. These
excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain
bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures,
might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it
has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and
give them a supplementary place by themselves.]
The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the
technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did
these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the
clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem
is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no
right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human
indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to
expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we
had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even
in spite of the peace. It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the
reason and the meaning of it all.
It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are
searching the way towards "The Great Peace" we must establish some
working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid
like perils in the future. The explanation I assume for myself, and on
which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of
the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application
of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but
was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion.
In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that
had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps
as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void
religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with
life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force
interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite
directions and after certain definite methods.
The rather complete failure of our many modern and ingenious
institutions, the failure of institutionalism altogether, is due far
less to wrong theories underlying them, or to radical defects in their
technique, than it is to this false philosophy and this progressive
abandonment of religion. The wrong theories were there, and the
mechanical defects, for the machines were conditioned by the principle
that lay behind them, but effort at correction and betterment will make
small progress unless we first regain the right religion and a right
philosophy. I said this to Henri Bergson last year in Paris and his
reply was significant as coming from a philosopher. "Yes," he said, "you
are right; and of the two, the religion is the more important."