Towards the Great Peace - Ralph Adams Cram
Now the inhuman scale has produced one set of septic conditions in
society while what is commonly called "democratization" has produced
another. We have a bloated society, but also we have one in which a
false theory has grown up and been put in practice, in accordance with
which an uniformity of human kind has been assumed which never has
existed and does not now, and in the effort to enforce this false theory
the achievement of distinction has been impeded, leadership discouraged
and leaders largely eliminated, the process of leveling downward carried
to a very dangerous point, the sane and vital organization of society
brought near to an end and a peculiarly vicious scale and standard of
social values established. I have urged the return to human scale in
human associations, but this does not imply any admixture of communism,
which is its very antithesis, still less does it permit the retention of
the theoretical uniformity and the unescapable leveling process of
so-called democracy.
Before the law all men are equal, that is, they are entitled to
even-handed justice. Before God all men are equal, that is, they are
granted charity and mercy which transcends the law, also they possess
immortal souls of equal value. Here their equality stops. In every other
respect they vary in character, capacity, intelligence and potentiality
for development along any or all these lines, almost beyond the limits
of computation. A sane society will recognize this, it will organize
itself accordingly, it will deny to one what it will concede to another,
it will foster emulation and reward accomplishment, and it will add
another category to those in which all men are equal, that is, the
freest scope for advancement, and the greatest facility for passing from
one social group into another, the sole test being demonstrated merit.
I am prepared at this point to use the word "aristocracy" for we have
the thing even now, only in its worst possible form. The word itself
means two things: a government by the best and most able citizens and,
to quote a standard dictionary "Persons noted for superiority in any
character or quality, taken collectively." There is no harm here, but
the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic
government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without
responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or
quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the
touchstones to recognition and acceptance. The latter are the antithesis
of Christianity and common sense, the former is consonant with both and,
paradoxical as it may seem, it is also the fulfilling of the ideals of a
real democracy, since its honours and distinctions imply service, its
relations with those in other estates are reciprocal, it is not a closed
caste but the prize of meritorious achievement, and it is therefore
equality of opportunity, utilization of ability and the abolition of
privilege without responsibility.
Men are forever and gloriously struggling onward towards better things,
but there is always the gravitational pull of original sin which
scientists denominate "reversion to type." The saving grace in the
individual is the divine gift of faith, hope and charity implanted in
every soul. These every man must guard and cherish for they are the way
of advancement in character. But society is man in association with men,
in a sense a new and complex personality, and the same qualities are as
necessary here as in the individual. Society, like man, may be said to
possess body, soul and spirit, and it must function vitally along all
these lines if it is to maintain a normal and wholesome existence.
Somewhere there must be something that achieves high ideals of honour,
chivalry, courtesy; that maintains right standards of comparative value,
and that guards the social organism as a whole from the danger of
surrender to false and debased standards, to plausible demagogues, and
to mob-psychology.
The greater the prevalence of democratic methods, the greater is the
danger of this surrender to propaganda of a thousand sorts and to the
dominance of the demagogue, and the existence of an estate fortified by
the inheritance of high tradition, measurably free from the necessity of
engaging too strenuously in the "struggle for life," guaranteed security
of status so long as it does not betray the ideals of its order, but
open to accessions from other estates on the basis of conspicuous merit
alone, such a force operating in society has proved, and will prove, the
best guardian of civilization as a whole and of the interests and
liberties of those who may rank in what are known as lower social
scales.
But, it may be objected, such an institution as this has never existed.
Every political or social aristocracy in history has been mixed and
adulterated with bad characters and recreant representatives. There
never has been and never will be a perfect aristocracy. Quite true;
neither has there ever been a perfect democracy, or a perfect monarchy
for that matter. As men we work with imperfections, but we live by
faith, and our sole duty is to establish the highest ideals, and to
compass them, in so far as we may, with unfailing courage, patience and
steadfastness. The _ideal_ of democracy is a great ideal, but the
_working_ of democracy has been a failure because, amongst other things,
it has tried to carry on without the aid of true aristocracy. If the two
can be united, first in ideal and in theory, then in operation, our
present failure may be changed into victory.
What, after all, does this imply, so far as the social organism is
concerned? It seems to me, something like this. First of all,
recognition of the fact that there are differences in individuals, in
strains of blood, in races, that cannot be overcome by any power of
education and environment, and can only be changed through very long
periods of time, and that these differences must work corresponding
differences in position, function and status in the social organism.
Second, that since society automatically develops an aristocracy of some
sort or other, and apparently cannot be stopped from doing this, it must
be protected from the sort of thing it has produced of late, which is
based on money, political expediency and the unscrupulous cleverness of
the demagogue, and given a more rational substitute in the shape of a
permanent group representing high character and the traditions of
honour, chivalry and courtesy. Third, that character and service should
be fostered and rewarded by that formal and august recognition, that
secure and unquestioned status, and those added opportunities for
service that will form a real and significant distinction. Finally, that
this order or estate must be able to purge itself of unworthy material,
and also must be freely open to constant accessions from without,
whatever the source, and for proved character and service.
I fear I must argue this case of the inequality in individual potential,
that inequality that does not yield to complex education or favourable
environment, for it is fundamental. If it does not exist, then my
argument for the organization of society along lines that recognize and
regularize diversity of social status and functions, falls to the
ground. I affirm that, the doctrine of evolution and modern democratic
theory to the contrary, it does exist and that the mitigating influence
of education, environment and inherited acquired characters, is small at
best.
Let us take the most obvious concrete examples. There are certain ethnic
units or races which for periods ranging from five hundred to two
thousand years have produced _character_, and through character the
great contributions that have been made to human culture and have been
expressed through men of distinction, dynamic force, and vivid
personality. Such, amongst many, are the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans,
the Normans, the Franks, the "Anglo-Saxons," and the Celts. There are
others that in all history have produced nothing. There are certain
family names which are a guarantee of distinction, dynamic force, and
vivid personality. There are thousands of these names, and they are to
be found amongst all the races that have contributed towards the
development of culture and civilization. On the other hand, there are
far more that have produced nothing distinctive, and possibly never
will.
What is the reason for this? Is it the result of blind chance, of
accidents that have left certain races and families isolated in stagnant
eddies from which some sudden current of a whimsical tide might sweep
them out into the full flood of progress, until they then overtook and
passed their hitherto successful rivals, who, in their turn, would drift
off into progressive incompetence and degeneracy? Biology does not look
with enthusiasm on the methods of chance and accident. The choice and
transmission of the forty-eight chromosomes that give to each individual
his character-potential are probably in accordance with some obscure
biological law through which the unfathomable divine will operates. Now
these chromosomes may be selected and combined after a fashion, and with
a persistence of continuity, that would guarantee character-potential,
for good or for ill, through many generations, or they might be so
varied in their combinations that no distinct traits would be carried
over from one generation to another. As a matter of experience all these
three processes take place and are recorded in families of distinct
quality, good, bad and indifferent. If the character-potential is
predetermined, then manifestly education and environment can play only
the subordinate part of fostering its development or retarding it.
In the same way the character and career of the various races of men are
determined by the potential inherent in the individuals and families
that compose them, and like them the races themselves are for long
periods marked by power and capacity or weakness and lack of
distinction. There are certain races, such as the Hottentot, the Malay,
the American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and
Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as
recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive. There
are family units, poverty-stricken and incompetent, in Naples, Canton,
East Side New York; or opulent and aggressive in West Side New York, in
Birmingham, Westphalia, Pittsburgh, that are no more subject to the
cultural and character-creating influences of education and
environment--beyond a certain definite point--than are the amphibians of
Africa or the rampant weeds of my garden.
This is a hard saying and a provocative. The entire course of democratic
theory, of humanitarian thought and of the popular type of scientific
speculation stands against it, and the Christian religion as well,
unless the statement itself is guarded by exact definitions. If the
contention of the scientific materialist were correct, and the thing
that makes man, and that Christians call the immortal soul, were but the
result of physical processes of growth and differentiation, then slavery
would be justifiable, and exploitation a reasonable and inevitable
process. Since, however, this assumption of materialism is untenable,
and since all men are possessed of immortal souls between which is no
distinction in the sight of God, the situation, regrettable if you like,
is one which at the same time calls for the exercise of a higher
humanitarianism than that so popular during the last generation, and as
well for a very drastic revision of contemporary political and social
and educational methods.
The soul of the man is the localization of divinity; in a sense each man
is a manifestation of the Incarnation. Black or white, conspicuous or
obscure, intelligent or stupid, offspring of a creative race or bound by
the limitations of one that is static or in process of decay, there is
no difference in the universal claim to justice, charity, and
opportunity. The soul of a Cantonese river-man, of a Congo slave, of an
East Side Jew, is in itself as essentially precious and worth saving as
the soul of a bishop, of a descendant of a Norman viking or an Irish
king, or that of a volunteer soldier in the late armies of France or
Great Britain or the United States.
Here lies absolute and final equality, and the State, the Law, the
Church are bound to guard this equality in the one case and the other
with equal force; indeed, those of the lower racial and family types
claim even more faithful guardianship than those of the higher, for they
can accomplish less for themselves and by themselves. But the
fundamental and inescapable inequality, in intellect, in character, and
in capacity, which I insist is one of the conditioning factors in life,
is vociferously denied, but ruthlessly enforced, by the people that will
be the first to denounce any restatement of what is after all no more
than a patent fact.
A little less enthusiasm for shibboleths, and a little more intelligent
regard for history and palpable conditions, will show that the assumed
equality between men "on the strength of their manhood alone," the
sufficiency of education for correcting the accidental differences that
show themselves, and the scheme of life that is worked out along
democratic lines on the basis of this essential (or potential) equality,
are "fond things vainly imagined" which must be radically modified
before the world can begin a sane and wholesome building-up after the
great purgation of war.
That equality between men which exists by virtue of the presence in each
of an immortal soul, involves an even distribution of justice and the
protection of law, without distinction of persons, and an even measure
of charity and compassion, but it does not involve the admission of a
claim to equality of action or the denial of varied status, since
race-values, both of blood and of the _gens_ enter in to establish
differences in character, in intelligence and in capacity which cannot
be changed by education, environment or heredity within periods which
are practical considerations with society. If we could still hold the
old Darwinian dogmas of the origin of species through the struggle for
existence and the survival of the fittest, and if the equally august and
authoritative dogma of the transmission by inheritance of acquired
characteristics were longer tenable, then perhaps we might invoke faith,
hope and patience and continue our generous method of imperilling
present society while we fixed our eyes on the vision of that to come
when environment, education and heredity had accomplished their perfect
work. Unfortunately--or perhaps fortunately--science is rapidly
reconsidering its earlier and somewhat hasty conclusions, and the
consensus of the most authoritative opinion seems to be that we must
believe these things no longer. Failing these premises, on which we have
laboured so long and so honestly and so sincerely, we are again thrown
back on the testimony of history and our own observation, and with this
reversal we also are bound to reconsider both our premises and the
constitution of those systems and institutions we have erected on them
as a foundation.
The existence of a general law does not exclude exceptions. The fact
that in the case of human beings we have to take into consideration a
powerful factor that does not come into play in the domain of zooelogy
and botany--the immortal soul--makes impossible the drawing of exact
deductions from precedents therein established. This determining touch
of the divine, which is no result of biological processes, but stands
outside the limitations of heredity and environment and education, may
manifest itself quite as well in one class as in another, for "God is no
respecter of persons." As has been said before, there is no difference
in degree as between immortal souls. The point is, however, that each is
linked to a specific congeries of tendencies, limitations, effective or
defective agencies, that are what they have been made by the parents of
the race. These may be such as enable the soul to triumph in its earthly
experience and in its bodily housing; they may be such as will bring
about failure and defeat. It is not that the soul builds itself "more
stately mansions"; it is that these are provided for it by the physical
processes of life, and it is almost the first duty of man to see that
they are well built.
Again, the soul is single and personal; as it is not a plexus of
inherited tendencies, so it is not heritable, and a great soul showing
suddenly in the dusk of a dull race contributes nothing of its essential
quality to the issue of the body it has made its house. The stews of a
mill town may suddenly be illuminated by the radiance of a divine soul,
to the amazement of profligate parents and the confusion of eugenists;
but unless the unsolvable mystery of life has determined on a new
species, and so by a sudden influx of the _elan vital_ cuts off the line
of physical succession and establishes one that is wholly new, then the
brightness dies away with the passing of the splendid soul, and the
established tendencies resume their sway.
The bearing of this theory on the actions of society is immediate.
Through the complete disregard of race-values that has obtained during
the last two or three centuries, and the emergence and complete
supremacy in all categories of life of human groups of low potential,
civilization has been brought down to a level where it is threatened
with disaster. If recovery is to be effected and a second era of "dark
ages" avoided, there must be an entirely new evaluation of things, a new
estimate of the principles and methods that obtained under Modernism,
and a fearless adventure into fields that may prove not to be so
unfamiliar as might at first appear.
Specifically, we must revise our attitude as to immigration, excluding
whole classes, and even races, that we have hitherto welcomed with open
hands from the disinterested offices of steamship companies: we must
control and in some cases prohibit, the mating of various racial stocks;
finally we must altogether disallow the practice of changing, by law,
one race-name for another. This process is one for which no excuse
exists and unless it can be brought to an end then, apart from certain
physical differentiations on which nature wisely insists, we have no
guaranty against the adulteration that has gone so far towards
substituting the mongrel for the pure racial type, while society is
bound to suffer still further deception and continued danger along the
lines that have recently been indicated by the transformation of
Treibitsch into "Lincoln," Braunstein into "Trotsky" and Samuels into
"Montague."
For its fulfillment, then, and its regeneration, the real democracy
demands and must achieve the creation and cooperation of a real
aristocracy, not an aristocracy of material force either military or
civil, nor one of land owners or money-getters, nor one of artificial
caste. All these substitutes have been tried from time to time, in Rome,
China, Great Britain, the United States, and all have failed in the end,
for all have ignored the one essential point of _character_, without
which we shall continue to reproduce what we have at present; a thing as
insolent, offensive and tyrannical as the old aristocracies at their
worst, with none of the constructive and beneficent qualities of the old
aristocracies at their best.
That race-values have much to do with this development of character I
believe to be true, but of far greater efficiency, indeed the actual
motive force, is the Christian religion, working directly on and through
the individual and using race as only one of its material means of
operation. Democracy has accomplished its present failure, not only
because it could not function without the cooperation of aristocracy,
but chiefly because, in its modernist form, it has become in fact
isolated from Christianity. All in it of good it derives from that
Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages which first put it into
practice, all in it of evil it owes to a falling back on paganism and a
denial of its own parentage and rejection of its control. I shall deal
with this later in more detail; I speak of it now just for the purpose
of entering a caveat against any deduction from what I have said that
any natural force, of race or evolution or anything else, or any formal
institution devised by man, ever has, or ever can, serve in itself as a
way of social redemption. I am anxious not to overemphasize these things
on which the development of my argument forces me to lay particular
stress.
For those who can go with me so far, the question will arise: How then
are we so to reorganize society that we may gain the end in view? It is
a question not easy of solution. Granted the fact of social
differentiation and the necessity of its recognition, how are we to
break down the wholly wrong system that now obtains and substitute
another in its place? It would be simple enough if within the period
allowed us by safety (apparently not any too extended at the present
moment) a working majority of men could achieve, in the old and exact
phraseology, that change of heart, that spiritual conversion, that would
bring back into permanent authority the supernatural virtues of faith,
hope, and charity, and that sense of right values in life, which
together make almost indifferent the nature of the formal devices man
creates for the organization of society. Certainly this is possible;
greater miracles have happened in history but, failing this, what?
One turns of course by instinct to old models, but in this is the danger
of an attempt at an archaeological restoration, a futile effort at
reviving dead forms that have had their day. In principle, and in the
working as well, the old orders of chivalry or knighthood strongly
commend themselves, for here there was, in principle, both the
maintenance of high ideals of honour courtesy and _noblesse oblige,_ and
the rendering of chivalrous service. Chesterton has put it well in the
phrase "the giving things which cannot be demanded, the avoiding things
which cannot be punished." Moreover, admission to the orders of
knighthood was free to all provided there were that cause which came
from personal character alone. Knighthood was the crown of knightly
service and it was forfeited for recreancy. Is there not in this some
suggestion of what may again be established as an incentive and a
reward, and as well, as a vital agency for the reorganization of
society?
Knighthood is personal, and is for the lifetime of the recipient. Is
there any value in an estate where status is heritable? If there is any
validity in the theory of varying and persistent race-values, it would
seem so, yet the idea of recognizing this excellence of certain families
and the reasonable probability of their maintaining the established
standard unimpaired, and so giving them a formal status, would no doubt
be repugnant to the vast majority of men in the United States. I think
this aversion is based on prejudice, natural but ill-founded. We resent
the idea of privilege without responsibility, as we should, but this,
while it was the condition of those aristocracies which were operative
at the time of the founding of the Republic, was opposed to the
Mediaeval, or true idea, which linked responsibility with privilege. The
old privilege is gone and cannot be restored, but already we have a new
privilege which is being claimed and enforced by proletarian groups, and
the legislative representatives of the whole people stand in such terror
of massed votes that they not only fail to check this astonishing and
topsy-turvy movement, but actually further its pretensions. The
"dictatorship of the proletariat" actually means the restoration of
privilege in a form far more tyrannical and monstrous than any ever
exercised by the old aristocracies of Italy, France, Germany and
England. Much recent legislation in Washington exempting certain
industrial and agricultural classes from the operation of laws which
bear heavily on other classes, and some of the claims and pretensions of
unionized labor, tend in precisely the same direction.
It is not restoration of privilege I have in mind but rather in a sense
the prevention of this through the existence of a class or estate that
has a fixed status dependent first on character and service and then on
an assured position that is not contingent on political favour, the bulk
of votes, or the acquisition of an inordinate amount of money. Surety of
position works towards independence of thought and action and towards
strong leadership. It establishes and maintains certain high ideals of
honour, chivalry, and service as well as of courtesy and manners. If the
things for which the gentlemen, the knighthood and the nobility of
Europe during the Christian dispensation were responsible were stricken
from the record there would be comparatively little left of the history
of European culture and civilization.