Before we can consider the forms and methods of attacking their
inevitable task that the serious minority of human beings must adopt,
it will be well to draw the main lines and attempt some measure of the
magnitude of that task. What are the new forms that it is sought to
impose upon human life and how are they to be evolved from or imposed
upon the current forms? And against what passive and active resistances
has this to be done?
There can be no pause for replacement in the affairs of life. Day must
follow day and the common activities continue. The new world as a going
concern must arise out of the old as a going concern.
Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one
politically, socially and economically unified. Within that frame fall
all the other ideas of our progressive ambition. To this end a small
but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to
direct their lives. Still more at present apprehend it as a possibility
but do not _dare_ to desire it, because of the enormous
difficulties that intervene and because they see as yet no intimations
of a way through or round these difficulties. The great majority of
human beings have still to see the human adventure as one whole; they
are obsessed by the air of permanence and finality in established
things; they accept current reality as ultimate reality. They take the
world as they find it. But here we are writing for the modern-minded,
and for them it is impossible to think of the world as secure and
satisfactory until there exists a single world commonweal, preventing
war and controlling those moral, biological and economic forces that
would otherwise lead to wars.
The method of direction of such a world commonweal is not likely to
imitate the methods of existing sovereign states. It will be a new
sort of direction with a new psychology. There will be little need for
President or King to lead the marshalled hosts of humanity, for where
there is no war there is no need of any leader to lead hosts anywhere,
and in a polyglot world a parliament of mankind is an inconceivable
instrument of government. The fundamental organisation of contemporary
states is still plainly military and that is exactly what a world
organisation cannot be. Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism
sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare and bluster
of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase of development we
would supersede. The reasonable desire of all of us is that we should
have the collective affairs of the world managed by suitably equipped
groups of the most interested, intelligent and devoted people and
that their activities should be subjected to a free, open, watchful
criticism, restrained from making spasmodic interruptions but powerful
enough to modify or supersede without haste or delay whatever is
weakening or unsatisfactory in the general direction.
A world movement for the supersession or enlargement or fusion of
existing political, economic and social institutions, must necessarily,
as it grows, draw closer and closer to questions of practical
control. It is likely in its growth to incorporate many active public
servants, and many industrial and financial leaders and directors.
It may also assimilate great numbers of intelligent workers. As its
activities spread it will work out a whole system of special methods of
co-operation. It will learn as it grows and by growing the business of
general direction and how to develop its critical function. So that the
movement we contemplate will by its very nature be one aiming, not so
much to set up a world direction as to become itself a world direction,
and the educational and militant forms of its opening phase will, as
experience is gained and power and responsibility acquired, evoke step
by step forms of administration and research and correction.
The modernisation of the religious impulse leads us straight to the
effort for the establishment of the world state as a duty, and the
close consideration of the necessary organisation of that effort
will bring the reader to the conclusion that a movement aiming at
the establishment of a world-directorate, however restricted that
movement may be at first in numbers and power, must either contemplate
the prospect of itself developing in part or as a whole into a
world-directorate, and by assimilation, as a whole into a modern world
community, or admit from the outset the futility, the spare-time
amateurishness, of its gestures.
_Chapter VI_