Definitions Of Society

( Originally Published 1919 )

As it has been the grim privilege of those who have eyes to see to behold human life flayed by the tragedy of the European War of 1914-18, it is no less than their duty to set down what they have seen for those who shall come after them, that they may provide for their tragedies not to be as futile and sterile as this has been. Properly instructed, they should be able to protect themselves against the operation of theories so antiquated that they have lost all relation to the common practice of human existence.

It is the aim of the writer to avoid as far as possible the ideal theories which govern to so large an extent the efforts of revolutionaries, and to discover what, in fact, the organisation of society is, where it fails, and why it produces that feeling of helplessness in reaction against which men hurl themselves in the vain efforts of war and revolution, both of which apparently do bit aggravate injustice and increase the inertia to which most social calamities can be traced.

There are times when young men must attempt to say what old men cannot think, and this is one of them. For old men ideas become words, and only those ideas are valid as a motive force for a change of spirit, which have not yet found expression, and are still part of that mysterious being in humanity which almost imperceptibly produces the variations of habit whereby progress is made.

The tragedy through which we have passed has made us for a little while conscious of being human, and the fate of the twentieth century depends upon our having the force necessary to maintain that consciousness long enough to undo the harm wrought by the conventionalism of the nineteenth century. Fundamentally, men, and the institutions by which they live, do not and cannot change. What can and must be altered is the relationship between men and their institutions, and the change can best be wrought by definition. That is not so simple, because human indolence has been such that thought has become painful, and the development of social machinery has reached such a pitch that life on its material side can be lived without thought. On the other hand, without thought, life on its spiritual side remains stagnant and the profoundest need of human nature turns into a bitter dissatisfaction. Hence the false exaltation with which great calamities are greeted, and hence, also, the acute disappointment which follows when those calamities are revealed as calamities and nothing more. Such disappointment is followed by a sullen creeping back into old habits, and a dull and sceptical refusal to believe in the promises of religion and art, both of which have reiterated "The kingdom of God is within you" to men who, captive in their institutions, have looked to them to realise both the kingdom and the truth of the saying. The Church, the State, the family, have all promised realisation, but all have only established tyranny because the unthinking mind has accepted them and not the truth they promised as objects of worship. It is only when the mind begins to see the visible as a symbol of the invisible that it can perceive truth at all. The science to which the honest endeavour of the nineteenth century was given was a testing of symbols, so many of which have been proved worthless as to induce the despair upon which disaster could creep with full warning but unresisted, rather welcomed. Without worship the human mind cannot endure its own success. Self-worship it loathes as the most potent deterrent upon its activity. If the worship of human nature is directed upon unworthy symbols it will, in time, so heartily detest them that it will accept any means, however vile, of destroying them.

It is easier to destroy than to build, and, therefore, men are joined together most easily for purposes of destruction, and it is such purposes that dominate the existing social machinery out of which the attempt is now being made to evolve some kind of international organisation. These purposes are more awful than worshipful, but, for lack of definition, none others are forthcoming, and it is sought to restore order to the present chaos by creating an international destructive force which shall be irresistible. Such a force can only be valid if the human capacity for worship is directed upon it; but such a force can only be detestable to that capacity, and in the end means will be found to destroy it. Such means are already being discussed by those who look to syndicalism violently to repair the injustice that violence has produced through the ages.

We have to begin at the beginning, and to attempt to achieve by taking thought what material and mechanical organisation has failed to do. Denunciation helps no one, and bitterness is barren. The machinery which feeds and clothes the many is in the hands of the few, who, carried by the impetus of ancient tradition, see the advantage of all in their own. The unthinking revolt of the many disquiets but does not enlighten them who think it right to do what they have the power to do.

This introduces the vital question: By what authority?

The hastiest examination of the social problem reveals the fact that ancient authority is broken. The symbols by which it ruled have been tested and found worthless. In old times the few and the many were agreed that there was a God from Whom all blessings and all evils flowed. As to the nature and existence of God there were schisms and divisions, but this direct and controlling interest in the affairs of men was not disputed. That God could move in a more mysterious way than men could imagine was not suspected. Those customs which survived from age to age were held to have His blessing, and those powers which could sustain themselves were accepted as having His authority, so much so, indeed, that the means of sustaining power, which do not vary from age to age, were never questioned until increasing knowledge forced upon men the need for definition. Then began after Galileo and his revelation of the comparative unimportance of Man the slow disintegration of human institutions which has reached its tragic climax at the beginning of the twentieth century. As this disintegration has proceeded, men, merely to live from day to day, have been forced back upon money, the symbol of work done, and, as that also has been consumed, upon credit, and finally upon labour. The organisation of credit has sufficed to pull humanity through its final tragedy, but, as that collapses, we shall have to fall back upon the organisation of labour, which is practically non-existent and cannot come into being until authority is restored to its place in the human mind.

In the first place, let it be agreed that it is not enough for humanity collectively to live from day to day. The individual sustained by the organised work of humanity, in which he plays so infinitesimal a part, can do that for the brief period of his years, but humanity, whose existence is incalculable, cannot, because that existence is sustained by the awful processes of the universe. The individual living from day to day exists in the bubble of his own egoism, and until now humanity has emulated that pathetic example, being misled by the long line of egoists who have been set up as kings, princes and governors. Through these egoists it has been attempted to set up an authority supported by taboos, conventions and superstitions, all of which have been swept away by the intellectual effort of the nineteenth century, which proved that men were not governed by authority but by economic power which has never yet been allied with justice. The development of machinery increased economic power an hundredfold, until its influence was felt and recognised in every household, and the lack of justice in its employment has brought bitterness and despair into the great majority of human lives.

In that realisation the European War has been only an incident in which a certain amount of social machinery has been scrapped. The top-hamper of society has been blown away and left in ruins in the mud of Flanders and Poland, the two cockpits in which the Europeans are accustomed to wrestle with their discomforts. We are not here concerned with the war, but with those great movements of the human spirit which are discernible through the smoke-clouds of the ruins it has left. Nor are we concerned with the League of Nations or Bolshevism or Socialism, or any of the catch-phrases with which modern men and women are accustomed to avoid the travail of thought. Our business is to discover, if we can, the large facts upon which thought must be based, and from them to set our minds working, if only to encourage mental activity, the only means by which the many can disconcert the few, with whom our quarrel is, not that they are few but that they are the wrong few. The fatal flaw of the present organisation of society is that it raises into positions of control the wrong type of mind, and where foresight and imagination are needed provides cupidity, cunning, a narrow traditionalism, and in a dangerous and terrible world a mean hunger for safety, to be procured with the minimum of risk. This produces the curious inversion whereby property is regarded as of more value than life. It is true, of course, that the accumulation of work done must be jealously safeguarded to facilitate the doing of work in the future, but at least an equal care should be taken for those who are to do the work. The airiest and most utopian schemes to procure security cannot do away with the fact that there will always be rough and dirty work to be done in the world. The question is: Need those who do that work be so rough and dirty as to induce a habit of mind which regards them as of no account? There lies the rub, and no tinkering with the superstructure of society can alter it. In political thinking it is usually forgotten, even by men like Cobden and Bright, and it needs a Lassalle, a Marx, a Cobbett to bring it home. Humanity is one, and an injury to one member is an injury to the whole. We have travelled far since it was admitted that the peasant de-scribed so terribly by La Bruyère was also a human being, but we have not yet so arranged matters that he can live a human life; and his slow loss of humanity as he drags through existence is a dead weight upon the advancement of the race, and those who gather up the wealth created by the millions of peasants and artisans are, by that also, condemned to a slow loss of humanity, since the weight they carry is too heavy for human shoulders. That wealth accumulated about a Prince could be borne, since he was sustained by his people, but, accumulated about an irresponsible capitalist, sustained only by his shareholders, it becomes as destructive as the lack of wealth is to those who labour at his bidding. Responsibility can only be restored by the discovery of authority, and for that we have to look to humanity, through and beyond it. That we have always done, but with eyes only lit by the sun. It is when the inward light of the soul mingles with that of the sun that the objects of every day can be seen as visions, and it is only when things are so seen that men can begin to speak the truth that is in them. Otherwise they do but repeat what has been said, or, worse still, they say that which their hearers wish to hear and become flatterers. The flatterers of a Prince were never so injurious as those of what we are pleased for the moment to call democracy.

The need of this time (as of all times) is vision, and never was there so much organised effort to crush it out of existence. So great is this effort that men are forced each in solitude to gaze in upon his own soul, thus to acquire a new blindness which prevents his seeing the great soul of humanity or the soul of the past in the handiwork of his fellows, or the soul that is in the things of Nature, birds and beasts, flowers and streams, mountains and clouds. This may be necessary. A man must be aware of his own soul before he can perceive any other, and the brooding that fills the world with silence may be the sign of pregnancy. We make a great din, the noise of many battles, the whir of many machines thrumming on land and sea and in the air, to hide this silence from ourselves, but in vain. It fills our minds with awe and anguish. It is not, we know, the silence of that peace which passes understanding. Between that and ourselves there should be the song of the human heart, but the heart is dumb and the tongue chatters without meaning, and we know, rich and poor alike, that our state is pitiful. In our desperate effort to break the silence that oppresses us we have thrown away our superfluity and are astonished that the ruin we half desired has not come upon us, We have wasted young and vigorous men, but those who were left have been able to do the necessary work of the world, and only stupidity and greedy nationalism inflicts starvation upon certain segregated commutties. Work by itself, sacrifice by itself, cannot then break the silence. Blind effort cannot undo our misery, nor can those drugs with which we alleviate our misery dishonest words, false worship, bad art and blatant politics much longer retain their potency. The silence before the storm is broken by the storm, but the silence which comes after it is broken by the stirring of life, the glad expansion of leaves, the chirp of insects in the grass, the crisping of the grass itself, the delighted song of birds. Such a stirring must come in the human world if we are not to perish of our own ingenuity. Subtle and cunning we may be to fill our bellies and to clothe our backs, but to fill our souls and to clothe them in the raiment of joy we have to be simple, devout and thankful.

Who, then, will break the silence? The teachers of religion mutter old incantations, the politicians consult with the financiers and cover their operations with words, but only from the hearts of the people can the great song come for which the human soul is aching with impatience. But the people are divided; their eyes gaze inward; they see nothing; they are allowed to know nothing. The impulse with which they threw themselves into the orgy of destruction is denied when it comes to building anew, because the fabric is already de-signed without reference to their wishes or their needs, but only with a view to the profit it can be made to yield. The society of the future, world-embracing, has been designed, or rather improvised, on the model of those hideous towns wherein all over the world the song of the human heart has been lost in the droning of machinery. Call it what you will, League of Nations, Society of Nations, Inter-national, society has taken shape as a collection of nations, each of which is a suburb of the central small city which is called Finance. Life, from being urban has become suburban, and has lost its character and its savour. That much every man can know from his own existence. It is harder for every man to know what it is that is squeezing his existence dry and at the same time giving him no joy nor beauty in which to find compensation in worship such as was vouchsafed to the feudal peas-ant, the splendour of whose Lord or King was as that of the sun. The suburban modern worker can find little to ease him in the report of the stale pleasures of the city of Finance, which is given to him by his illustrated paper. He must begin to ask what is done with his work that it brings him so little gain, material or spiritual, and it is not enough for him to learn that his work is gradually opening up oil-fields in Persia, mines in Canada, or wheat-lands in Siberia. These names also have lost the magic of remoteness ; discovery, even of Arctic regions, has become so cut and dried that he desires new romance, and turns to the Eldorado within himself and begins to ask that his daily toil shall open and dig out the treasure there. Here, he knows, is the true gold, but his life is governed by men who can only see the gold that is dug out of the earth, whose vastness overwhelms them so that they are filled with the earth's cruelty; and always when it comes, as in every adventure it does come, to a choice between the gold of the heart and the gold of the earth, choose the latter. It is this choice, perpetually made, that brings its perpetual retribution in which the innocent suffer with the guilty. Men pay for their greed in the stifling of their song, without which everything they do reacts to their hurt because it is not well done, and when it is done, as it is in the modern world, on a vast scale, it is hard to see whether it is done well or ill. Reaction is slow and is spread over innumerable lives, and may not come to a crisis for a generation or two. Hence the recklessness and the impudent levity with which, in the city of Finance, life for the suburbs is ordered. A law passed hastily to meet an emergency breeds diseases which only afflict the grandchildren of those who make them. The rich can secure themselves against the physical but not the moral consequences, and if they can leave their children the gold of the earth they are indifferent to the fact that they are filching from them the gold of the heart, which is the deepest and most subtle offence by which human beings can sin against humanity. The offence, like that of Claudius, is rank and smells to Heaven, and it is upon this that, if we are to restore the architecture of society, we must concentrate. It is a small thing that the few are rich and the many are poor compared with the fact that all are poor in spirit, so poor, in-deed, that a tragedy like the war, an heroic convulsion like the Russian Revolution, can leave us unmoved, numbed by the silence in which we live because our fathers have left us an inheritance of much earthly gold and have robbed us of that which should shine in our hearts. They have built us a city of Finance when we looked for a city of God, and we are ashamed because that which is handed on to us with so much pride arouses in us no joy, not even a fleeting pleasure ; a dull magnificence, a massive ugliness, cannot compensate for the lack of form, colour and character which we, in our eagerness, desire. The fundamental fact in the present crisis in the evolution of humanity is the inability of the young to accept the society which their elders have so industriously, and with such an appalling sacrifice of life, shaped for them. It is not that they will not, but that they cannot, accept it. Its form does not correspond to their needs or their de-sires. Its conveniencies, its luxuries can be accepted, but to no particular purpose. It is not enough to go on digging out material and energy from this extraordinary planet. The force of the earth may be tremendous, but Man is its most miraculous instrument, its most supple and varied; and society to be tolerable must be not only a means to daily bread, but also an expression as supple and varied as Man himself. Otherwise it becomes so oppressive that it must be destroyed. No one wants to destroy it, but every one who is men-tally alive wants to overhaul and reshape it and to remove from it all vestiges of tyranny. Dullness and ugliness are created by tyranny, and we find ourselves suffering not from the tyranny of persons but from the tyranny of systems by which men who sacrifice understanding for power are so placed that their words and deeds can influence the lives of mil-lions of their fellows.

It may be said that the stupidity of men is such that they deserve any system that they can be induced to create, but the objection to the present system is precisely that it is not created, but rather manufactured piecemeal, to meet the need of each day as it arises, and being so manufactured it denies the creative impulse which is the source of human happiness. There is in the stupidest man the element of devotion. Alone he has not the courage of it. With others it can stir in him and give him that joy without which he cannot live. This is perfectly well known to those who profit by the existing system, and they have attained an abominable skill in confusing this element of devotion in simple men with prejudice and inflamed passion. Those who profit by the simplicity of human beings will not admit how simple they are, and treat them as though they were as cunning and as ruthless as themselves. In situation after situation when the uttered truth could resolve the central difficulties a lie is told to create confusion in which those things that cannot be done openly are accomplished in secret. Those who, having power, are trustees for the people do not trust the people. It is true that complicated economic problems cannot be decided by the mass intelligence, but the greater problems of right or wrong can be, and in the long run always are so decided. The trouble is, that under existing conditions the run is so devilish long that moral decisions are always made years, perhaps generations, after the event, when other problems have arisen, in turn to be shelved in favour of More superficial aspects of the conditions that give rise to them. For instance, when British workers, finding they cannot marry for lack of houses, say so, they are asked to consider the question of the exportation of aliens. Just as material problems are settled by continual expansion (Imperialism), so moral problems are dealt with by a continual shuffling and hedging. The fault lies in the mentality brought to bear on these matters, and the mentality is defective because the spirit is impoverished, and the spirit is impoverished by the attempt to deal with humanity and its erratic career only on the basis of calculable things, leaving out everything that is incalculable though discernible, not, Moving through an individual at all powerfuI, but, moving through the mass, irresistible.