This open and declared intention of establishing a world order out
of the present patchwork of particularist governments, of effacing
the militarist conceptions that have hitherto given governments
their typical form, and of removing credit and the broad fundamental
processes of economic life out of reach of private profit-seeking
and individual monopolisation, which is the substance of this Open
Conspiracy to which the modern religious mind must necessarily address
its practical activities, cannot fail to arouse enormous opposition.
It is not a creative effort in a clear field; it is a creative effort
that can hardly stir without attacking established things. It is
the repudiation of drift, of “leaving things alone.” It criticises
everything in human life from top to bottom and finds everything not
good enough. It strikes at the universal human desire to feel that
things are “all right.”
One might conclude, and it would be a hasty unsound conclusion, that
the only people to whom we could look for sympathy and any passionate
energy in forwarding the revolutionary change would be the unhappy, the
discontented, the dispossessed and the defeated in life’s struggle.
This idea lies at the root of the class-war dogmas of the Marxists,
and it rests on an entirely crude conception of human nature. The
successful minority is supposed to have no effective motive but a
desire to retain and intensify its advantages. A quite imaginary
solidarity to that end is attributed to it, a preposterous base class
activity. On the other hand, the unsuccessful mass--“proletariat”--is
supposed to be capable of a clear apprehension of its disadvantages,
and the more it is impoverished and embittered, the nearer draws its
uprising, its constructive “dictatorship” and the Millennium.
No doubt a considerable amount of truth is to be found distorted
in this theory of the communist revolution. Human beings, like
other animals, are disposed to remain where their circumstances are
tolerable and to want change when they are uncomfortable, and so a
great proportion of the people who are “well off” want little or no
change in present conditions, particularly those who are too dull
to be bored by an unprogressive life--and a great proportion of
those who actually feel the inconveniences of straitened means and
population pressure, do. But much vaster masses of the rank and file
of humanity are accustomed to inferiority and dispossession, they do
not feel these things to the extent even of desiring change, or given
so much apprehension they still fear change more than they dislike
their disadvantages. Moreover, those who are sufficiently distressed
to realise that “something ought to be done about it” are much more
disposed to childish and threatening demands upon heaven and the
governments for redress and vindictive and punitive action against the
envied fortunate with whom they happen to be in immediate contact,
than to any reaction towards such complex, tentative disciplined
constructive work as alone can better the lot of mankind. In practice
Marxism is found to work out in a ready resort to malignantly
destructive activities and to be so uncreative as to be practically
impotent in the face of material difficulties. In Russia where--in and
about the urban centres at least--Marxism has been put to the test, the
doctrine of the Workers’ Republic remains as a unifying cant, a test of
orthodoxy of as little practical significance there as the communism
of Jesus and communion with Christ in Christendom, while beneath this
creed a small oligarchy which has attained power by its profession does
its obstinate best, much hampered by the suspicion and hostility of the
Western financiers and politicians, to carry on a series of interesting
and varyingly successful experiments in the socialisation of economic
life. Each year shows more and more clearly that Marxism and Communism
are divagations from the path of human progress and that the line of
advance must follow a course more intricate and less flattering to the
common impulses of our nature.
The one main strand of truth in the theory of social development woven
by Marx and Engels is that successful, comfortable people are disposed
to dislike, obstruct and even resist actively any substantial changes
in the current patchwork of arrangements, however great the ultimate
dangers of that patchwork may be or the privations and sufferings of
other people involved in it. The one main strand of error in that
theory is the facile assumption that the people at a disadvantage will
be stirred to anything more than chaotic and destructive expressions of
resentment. If now we reject the error and accept the truth, we lose
the delusive comfort of belief in that magic giant, the Proletariat,
who will dictate, arrange, restore and create, but we clear the way
for the recognition of an élite of intelligent religious-minded people
scattered through the whole community, and for a study of the method
of making this creative element effective in human affairs against the
massive oppositions of selfishness and unimaginative self-protective
conservatism.
Now certain classes of people such as thugs and burglars seem to
be harmful to society without a redeeming point about them, and
others such as race-course bookmakers seem to provide the minimum of
distraction and entertainment with a maximum of mischief. Wilful
idlers are a mere burthen on the community. Other social classes
again, professional soldiers for example, have a certain traditional
honourableness which disguises the essentially parasitic relationship
of their services to the developing modern community. Armies and
armaments are cancers produced by the malignant development of the
patriotic virus under modern conditions of exaggeration and mass
suggestion. But since there are armies prepared to act coercively in
the world to-day, it is necessary that the Open Conspiracy should
contain within itself the competence to resist military coercion and
combat and destroy armies that stand in the way of its emergence.
Possibly the first two types here instanced may be condemned as classes
and excluded as classes from any participation in the organised effort
to recast the world, but quite obviously the soldier cannot. The world
commonweal will need its own scientific methods of prevention so long
as there are people running about the planet with flags and uniforms
and weapons, offering violence to their fellow men and interfering with
the free movements of commodities in the name of national sovereignty.
And when we come to the general functioning classes, landowners,
industrial organisers, bankers and so forth, who control the present
system such as it is, it should be still plainer that it is very
largely from the ranks of these classes and from their stores of
experience and traditions of method, that the directive forces of the
new order must emerge. The Open Conspiracy can have nothing to do with
the heresy that the path of human progress lies through an extensive
class war.
Let us consider how it stands to such a complex of activities,
usages, accumulations, advantages as constitutes the banking world.
There are no doubt many bankers and many practices in banking which
make for personal or group advantage to the general detriment. They
forestall, monopolise, constrain and extort and so increase their
riches. And another large part of that banking world follows routine
and establishes usage; it is carrying on and keeping things going,
and it is neither inimical nor conducive to the development of a
progressive world organisation of finance. But there remains a residuum
of original and intelligent people in banking or associated with
banking or mentally interested in banking, who do realise that banking
plays a very important and interesting part in the world’s affairs, who
are curious about their own intricate function and disposed towards
a scientific investigation of its origins, conditions and future
possibilities. Such types move naturally towards the Open Conspiracy.
Their enquiries carry them inevitably outside the bankers’ habitual
field to an examination of the nature, drift and destiny of the entire
human economic process.
Now the theme of the preceding paragraph might be repeated with
variations through a score of paragraphs in which appropriate
modifications would adapt it to the industrial organiser, the merchant
and organiser of transport, the advertiser, the retail distributor,
the agriculturalist, the engineer, the builder, the economic chemist,
and a number of other types functional to the contemporary community.
In all we should distinguish a base and harmful section, a mediocre
section following established usage and an active, progressive section
to whom we turn naturally for developments leading towards the
progressive world commonweal of our desires. And our analysis might
penetrate further than separation into types of individuals. In nearly
every individual instance we should find a mixed composition, a human
being of fluctuating moods and confused purposes, sometimes base,
sometimes drifting with the tide and sometimes alert and intellectually
and morally quickened. The Open Conspiracy must be content to take a
fraction of a man, as it appeals to fractions of many classes, if it
cannot get him altogether.
This idea of drawing together a proportion of all or nearly all the
functional classes in contemporary communities in order to weave the
beginnings of a world community out of their selection, is a fairly
obvious one--and yet it has still to win practical recognition. Man
is a morbidly gregarious and partisan creature; he is deep in his
immediate struggles; the industrialist is best equipped to criticise
his fellow industrialist, but he finds the root of all evil in the
banker; the wages worker shifts the blame for all social wrongs on the
“employing class.” There is an element of exasperation in most economic
and social reactions and there is hardly a reforming or revolutionary
movement in history which is not essentially an indiscriminate attack
of one functioning class or type upon another, on the assumption that
the attacked class is entirely to blame for the clash and that the
attacking class is self-sufficient in the commonweal and can dispense
with its annoying collaborator. A considerable element of justice
enters into most such recriminations. But the Open Conspiracy cannot
avail itself of these class animosities for its driving force. It
can have therefore no uniform method of approach. For each class it
has a conception of modification and development, and each class it
approaches therefore at a distinctive angle. Some classes no doubt it
would supersede altogether; others--the scientific investigator for
example--it must regard as almost wholly good and seek only to expand
and empower, but it can no more adopt the prejudices and extravagances
of any particular class as its basis than it can adopt the claims of
any existing state or empire.
When it is clearly understood that the binding links of the Open
Conspiracy we have in mind are certain broad general ideas and
that--except perhaps in the case of scientific workers--we have no
current set of attitudes of mind and habits of activity which we can
turn over directly and unmodified to the service of the conspiracy, we
are in a position to realise that the movement we contemplate must from
the outset be diversified in its traditions and elements and various
in its methods. It must fight upon several fronts and with many sorts
of equipment. It will have a common spirit but it is quite conceivable
that between many of its contributory factors there may be very wide
gaps in understanding and sympathy.
_Chapter IX_
FORCES AND RESISTANCES IN THE GREAT MODERN COMMUNITIES NOW PREVALENT
WHICH WILL BE ANTAGONISTIC TO THE OPEN CONSPIRACY
We have now stated broadly but plainly the idea of the world commonweal
which is the objective of the Open Conspiracy, and we have made a
preliminary examination of the composition of the movement, showing
that it must be necessarily not a class development but a convergence
of many different sorts of people upon this common idea. Its opening
task must be the elaboration, exposition and propaganda of this common
idea, and, arising out of this, the incomparably vaster task of its
realisation.
These are the tasks not to be done _in vacuo_; they have
to be done in a dense world of crowding, incessant, passionate,
unco-ordinated activities, the world of market and newspaper, seed-time
and harvest, births, deaths, jails, hospitals, riots, barracks and
army manœuvres, false prophets and royal processions, games and shows,
fire, storm, pestilence, earthquake, war. Every day and every hour
things will be happening to help or thwart, stimulate or undermine,
obstruct or defeat the creative effort to set up the world commonweal.
Before we go on to discuss the selection and organisation of these
heterogeneous and mainly religious impulses upon which we rest our
hopes of a greater life for mankind, before we plan how these impulses
may be got together into a system of co-ordinated activities, it will
be well to review the main antagonistic forces with which, from its
very inception, the Open Conspiracy will be--is now--in conflict.
To begin with, we will consider these forces as they present themselves
in the highly developed Western European States of to-day and in their
American derivatives, derivatives which in spite of the fact that
in most cases they have far outgrown their lands of origin, still
owe a large part of their social habits and political conceptions to
Europe. All these States touch upon the Atlantic or its contributory
seas; they have all grown to their present form since the discovery
of America; they have a common association rooting in the idea of
Christendom and a generic resemblance of method. They present what is
known in current parlance as the Capitalist system, but it will relieve
us of a considerable load of disputatious matter if we call them here
simply the “Atlantic” civilisations and communities.
The consideration of these Atlantic civilisations in relation to
the coming world civilisation will suffice for the present chapter.
Afterwards we will consider the modification of the forces antagonistic
to the Open Conspiracy as they display themselves beyond the formal
confines of these now dominant States in the world’s affairs, in the
social systems weakened and injured by their expansion and among such
less highly organised communities as still survive from man’s savage
and barbaric past.
The Open Conspiracy is not necessarily antagonistic to any existing
government. The Open Conspiracy is a creative organising movement and
not an anarchistic one. It does not want to destroy existing controls
and forms of human association, but either to supersede or amalgamate
them into a common world directorate. If constitutions, parliaments
and kings can be dealt with as provisional institutions, trustees for
the coming of age of the world commonweal, and in so far as they are
conducted in that spirit, the Open Conspiracy makes no attack upon them.
But most governments will not set about their business as in any
way provisional, they and their supporters insist upon a reverence
and obedience which repudiate any possibility of supersession. What
should be an instrument becomes a divinity. In nearly every country
of the world there is, in deference to the pretended necessities of a
possible war, a vast degrading and dangerous cultivation of loyalty
and mechanical subservience to flags, uniforms, presidents and kings.
A president or king who does his appointed work well and righteously
is entitled to as much subservience as a bricklayer who does his work
well and righteously and to no more, but instead there is a sustained
endeavour to give him the privilege of an idol above criticism or
reproach, and the organised worship of flags has become--with changed
conditions of intercourse and warfare--an entirely evil misdirection
of the gregarious impulses of our race. Emotion and sentimentality
are evoked in the cause of disciplines and co-operations that could
quite easily be sustained and that are better sustained by rational
conviction.
The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all such implacable
loyalties and still more so to the aggressive assertion and propaganda
of such loyalties. When these things take the form of suppressing
reasonable criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of other forms
of government they become plainly antagonists to any comprehensive
project for human welfare. They become manifestly, from the wider point
of view, seditious, and loyalty to “king and country” passes into
plain treason to mankind. Almost everywhere at present, educational
activities organise barriers in the path of progress and there are
only the feeblest attempts at any counter-education that will break up
these barriers. There is little or no effort to restrain the aggressive
nationalist when he waves his flag against the welfare of our race
or to protect the children of the world from the infection of his
enthusiasms. And this last is as true now of the American system as it
is of any European State.
In the great mass of the modern community there is little more than
a favourable acquiescence in patriotic ideas and in the worship of
patriotic symbols, and that is based largely on such training. These
things are not necessary things for the generality to-day. A change
of mental direction would be possible for the majority of people now
without any violent disorganisation of their intimate lives or any
serious social or economic readjustments for them. Mental infection
in such cases could be countered by mental sanitation. A majority of
people in Europe and a still larger majority in the United States
and the other American Republics could become citizens of the world
without any serious hindrance to their present occupations, and with
incalculably vast increase of their present security.
But there remains a net of special classes in every community, from
kings to custom-house officers, far more deeply involved in patriotism
because it is their trade and their source of honour, and prepared in
consequence with an instinctive resistance to any re-orientation of
ideas towards a broader outlook. In the case of such people no mental
sanitation is possible without dangerous and alarming changes in their
way of living. For the majority of these patriots by _métier_, the
Open Conspiracy unlocks the gates leading from a paradise of eminence,
respect and privilege, and motions them towards an outer wilderness
which does not present even the faintest promise of a congenial,
distinguished life for them. Nearly everything in human nature will
dispose them to turn away from these gates which open towards the world
peace, to bang-to and lock them again if they can, and to grow thickets
as speedily as possible to conceal them and get them forgotten. The
suggestion of being trustees in a transition will seem to most of such
people only the camouflage of an ultimate degradation.
From such classes of patriots by _métier_, it is manifest that the
Open Conspiracy can expect only opposition. It may detach individuals
from them, but only by depriving them of their essential class
loyalties and characteristics. The class as a class will remain none
the less antagonistic. About royal courts and presidential residences,
in diplomatic, consular, military and naval circles and wherever people
wear titles and uniforms and enjoy pride and precedences based on
existing political institutions, there will be the completest general
inability to grasp the need for the Open Conspiracy. These people
and their womankind, their friends and connections, their servants
and dependants are fortified by time-honoured traditions of social
usage, of sentiment and romantic prestige. They will insist that they
are reality and Cosmopolis a dream. Only individuals of exceptional
imaginative liveliness, rare intellectual power and innate moral force
can be expected to break away from the anti-progressive habits such
class conditions impose upon them.
This tangle of traditions and loyalties, of interested trades and
professions, of privileged classes and official patriots, this complex
of human beings embodying very easy and natural and time-honoured
ideas of eternal national separation and unending international and
class conflict, is the main objective of the Open Conspiracy in its
opening phase. This tangle must be disentangled as the Open Conspiracy
advances, and until it is largely disentangled and cleared up that Open
Conspiracy cannot become anything very much more than a desire and a
project.
The tangle of “necessary patriots” as one may call them is different
in its nature, less intricate and extensive proportionally in the
United States and the States of Latin America than it is in the old
European communities, but it is none the less virulent in its action
on that account. It is only recently that military and naval services
have become important factors in American social life, and the really
vitalising contact of the interested patriot and the State has hitherto
centred mainly upon the custom-house and the concession. Instead of a
mellow and romantic loyalty to “king and country” the American thinks
simply of America and his flag.
American independence began as a resistance to exploitation from
overseas. Even when political and fiscal freedom were won, there was
a long phase of industrial and financial dependence. The American’s
habits of mind, in spite of his recent realisation of the enormous
power and relative prosperity of the United States and of the expanding
possibilities of their Spanish and Portuguese-speaking neighbours, are
still largely self-protective against a now imaginary European peril.
For the first three quarters of the nineteenth century the people of
the American continent and particularly the people of the United States
felt the industrial and financial ascendency of Great Britain and had
a reasonable fear of European attacks upon their continent. A growing
tide of immigrants of uncertain sympathy threatened their dearest
habits. Flag worship was imposed primarily as a repudiation of Europe.
Europe no longer looms over America with overpowering intimations,
American industries no longer have any practical justification for
protection, American finance would be happier without it, but the
patriotic interests are so established now that they go on and will go
on.
We have said that the complex of classes in any country interested
in the current method of government is sustained by traditions and
impelled by its nature and conditions to protect itself against
exploratory criticism. It is therefore unable to escape from the forms
of competitive and militant nationalism in which it was evolved. It
cannot without grave danger of enfeeblement, change any such innate
form. So that while parallel complexes of patriotic classes are found
in greater or less intricacy grouped about the flags and governments
of most existing states, these complexes are by their nature obliged
to remain separate, nationalist and mutually antagonistic. You cannot
expect a world union of soldiers or diplomatists. Their existence
and nature depend upon the idea that national separation is real
and incurable, and that war, in the long run, is unavoidable. Their
conceptions of loyalty involve an antagonism to all foreigners, even
to foreigners of exactly the same types as themselves, and make for a
continual campaign of annoyances, suspicions and precautions--together
with a general propaganda, affecting all other classes, of the
necessity of an international antagonism--that creeps persistently
towards war.
But while the methods of provoking war employed by the patriotic
classes are traditional, modern science has made a new and enormously
more powerful thing of warfare and, as the Great War showed, even the
most conservative generals on both sides are unable to prevent the
gigantic interventions of the mechanician and the chemist. So that a
situation is brought about in which the militarist element is unable to
fight without the support of the modern industrial organisation and the
acquiescence of the great mass of people. We are confronted therefore
at the present time with the paradoxical situation that a patriotic
tradition sustains in power and authority warlike classes who are quite
incapable of carrying on war. The other classes to which they must go
for support when the disaster of war is actually achieved are classes
developed under peace conditions, which not only have no positive
advantage in war, but must, as a whole, suffer great dislocation,
discomfort, destruction and distress from war. It is of primary
importance to the formally dominant classes that these new social
masses and powers should remain under the sway of the old social,
sentimental and romantic traditions, and equally important is it to the
Open Conspiracy that they should be released.
Here we bring into consideration another great complex of persons,
interests, traditions--the world of education, the various religious
organisations, and, beyond these, the ramifying indeterminate world
of newspapers and other periodicals, books, the drama, art and all
the instruments of presentation and suggestion that mould opinion and
direct action. The sum of the operations of this complex will be either
to sustain or demolish the old nationalist militant ascendency. Its
easiest immediate course is to accept it. Educational organisations on
that account are now largely a conservative force in the community;
they are in most cases directly controlled by authority and bound
officially as well as practically to respect current fears and
prejudices. It evokes fewer difficulties for them if they limit and
mould rather than release the young. The schoolmaster tends therefore
to accept and standardise and stereotype, even in the living,
progressive fields of science and philosophy. Even there he is a brake
on the forward movement. It is clear that the Open Conspiracy must
either continually disturb and revivify him or else frankly antagonise
him. Universities also struggle between the honourable past on which
their prestige rests, and the need of adaptation to a world of enquiry,
experiment and change. It is an open question whether these particular
organisations of intellectual prestige are of any real value in the
living world. A modern world planned _de novo_ would probably
produce nothing like a contemporary University. Modern research,
one may argue, would be stimulated rather than injured by complete
detachment from the lingering mediævalism of such institutions, their
entanglement with adolescent education and their ancient and contagious
conceptions of precedence and honour.
Ordinary religious organisations, again, exist for self-preservation
and are prone to follow rather than direct the currents of popular
thought. They are kept alive indeed by revivalism and new departures
which at the outset they are apt to resist, as the Catholic Church
for instance resisted the Franciscan awakening, but their formal
disposition is conservative. They say to religious development, thus
far and no farther.
Here is school, college and church are activities of thought and
instruction, which generally speaking drag upon the wheels of progress,
but which need not necessarily do so. A schoolmaster may be original,
stimulating and creative, and if he is fortunate and a good fighter he
may even achieve considerable worldly success; University teachers and
investigators may strike out upon new lines and yet escape destruction
by the older dons. Universities compete against other Universities at
home and abroad and cannot altogether yield to the forces of dullness
and subservience. They must maintain a certain difference from vulgar
opinion and a certain repute of intellectual virility.
As we pass from the more organised to the less organised intellectual
activities, we find conservative influence declining in importance and
a freer play for the creative drive. Freshness is a primary condition
of journalistic, literary and artistic success, and orthodoxy has
nothing new to say or do. But the desire for freshness may be satisfied
all too readily by merely extravagant, superficial and incoherent
inventions.
The influence of the old traditional nationalist social and political
hierarchy is not, however, exerted exclusively through its control
over schools and Universities. Nor is that indeed its more powerful
activity. Would that it were! There is also a direct, less defined
contact of the old order with the nascent powers, that plays a far
more effective part in delaying the development of the modern world
commonweal. Necessarily the old order has determined the established
way of life, which is at its best large, comfortable, amusing,
respected. It possesses all the entrances and exits and all the
controls of the established daily round. It is able to exact and it
does exact, almost without design, many conformities. There can be
no very ample social life therefore for those who are conspicuously
dissentient. Again the old order has a complete provision for the
growth, welfare and advancement of its children. It controls the
founts of honour and self-respect; it provides a mapped-out world of
behaviour. The new initiatives make their appearance here and there
in the form of isolated individuals, here an inventor, there a bold
organiser or a vigorous thinker. Apart from his specific work the
innovating type finds that he must fall in with established things
or his womenfolk will be ostracised and he will be distressed by a
sense of isolation even in the midst of successful activities. The
more intensely he innovates in particular, the more likely is he to be
too busy to seek out kindred souls and organise a new social life in
general. The new things and ideas, even when they arise abundantly,
arise scattered and unorganised, and the old order takes them in its
net. America for example--both on its Latin and its English-speaking
side--is in many ways a triumph of the old order over the new.
Men like Winwood Reade thought that the New World would be indeed a
new world. They idealised its apparent emancipations. But as the more
successful of the toiling farmers and traders of republican America
rose one by one to affluence, leisure, and freedom, it was far more
easy for them to adopt the polished and prepared social patterns and
usages of Europe than to work out a complete new civilisation in
accordance with their equalitarian professions. Yet there remains a gap
in their adapted “Society.” Henry James, that acute observer of subtle
social flavours, has pointed out the peculiar _headlessness_ of
social life in America because of the absence of court functions to
“go on” to and justify the assembling and dressing. The social life
has intimated the preparation for the Court without any political
justification. In Europe the assimilation of the wealthy European
industrialist and financier by the old order has been parallel and
naturally more logically complete. He really does find a court to “go
on” to. His social scheme is still undecapitated.
In this way the complex of classes vitally involved in the old militant
nationalist order is mightily reinforced by much larger masses of
imitative and annexed and more or less assimilated rich and active
people. The great industrialist marries the daughter of the marquis and
has a couple of sons in the Guards and a daughter who is a princess.
The money of the American Leeds, fleeing from the social futility of
its land of origin, helps bolster up a mischievous monarchy in Greece.
The functional and private life of the new men are thus at war with one
another. The real interests of the great industrialist or financier lie
in cosmopolitan organisation and the material development of the world
commonweal, but his womenfolk pin flags all over him and his sons are
prepared to sacrifice themselves and all his business creations, for
the sake of trite splendours and Ruritanian romance.
But just so far as the great business organiser is capable and
creative, so far is he likely to realise and resent the price in
frustration that the old order obliges him to pay for amusement, social
interest and domestic peace and comfort. The Open Conspiracy threatens
him with no effacement; it may even appear with an air of release. If
he had women who were interested in his business affairs instead of
women who had to be amused, and if he realised in time the practical,
intellectual and moral kidnapping of his sons and daughters by the old
order that goes on, he might pass quite easily from acquiescence to
antagonism. But in this respect he cannot act single-handed. This is
a social and not an individual operation. The Open Conspiracy, it is
clear, must include in its activities a great fight for the souls of
economically functional people. It must carve out a Society of its own
from Society. Only by the creation of a new and better social life can
it resist the many advantages and attractions of the old.
This constant gravitation back to traditional uses on the part of
what might become new social types applies not merely to big people
but to such small people as are really functional in the modern
economic scheme. They have no social life adapted to their new
economic relationships, and they are forced back upon the methods of
behaviour established for what were roughly their analogues in the
old order of things. The various sorts of managers and foremen in big
modern concerns, for example, carry on ways of living they have taken
ready made from the stewards, tradesmen, tenantry and upper servants
of an aristocratic territorial system. They release themselves and
are released almost in spite of themselves, slowly, generation by
generation, from habits of social subservience that are no longer
necessary nor convenient in the social process, acquire an official
pride in themselves and take on new conceptions of responsible
loyalty to a scheme. And they find themselves under suggestions of
class aloofness and superiority to the general mass of less cardinal
workers, that are often unjustifiable under new conditions. Machinery
and scientific organisation have been and still are revolutionising
productive activity by the progressive elimination of the unskilled
worker, the hack, the mere toiler. But the social organisation of the
modern community and the mutual deportment of the associated workers
left over after this elimination are still haunted by the tradition of
the lord, the middle class tenant and the servile hind. The development
of self-respect and mutual respect among the mass of modern functional
workers is clearly an intimate concern of the Open Conspiracy.
A vast amount of moral force has been wasted in the past hundred
years by the antagonism of “Labour” to “Capital,” as though this was
the primary issue in human affairs. But this never was the primary
issue and it is steadily receding from its former importance. The
ancient civilisations did actually rest upon a broad basis of slavery
and serfdom. Human muscle was a main source of energy--ranking with
sun, rain and flood. But invention and discovery have so changed the
conditions under which power is directed and utilised that muscle
becomes economically secondary and inessential. We no longer want
hewers of wood and drawers of water, carriers and pick and spade men.
We no longer want that breeding swarm of hefty sweaty bodies without
which the former civilisations could not have endured. We want watchful
and understanding guardians and drivers of complex delicate machines,
which can be mishandled and brutalised and spoiled all too easily.
The less disposed these masters of our machines are to inordinate
multiplication, the more room and food in the world for their ampler
lives. Even to the lowest level of a fully mechanicalised civilisation
it is required that the human element should be select. In the
modern world, crowds are a survival and they will presently be an
anachronism, and crowd psychology therefore cannot supply the basis of
a new order.
It is just because labour is becoming more intelligent, responsible and
individually efficient that it is becoming more audible and impatient
in social affairs. It is just because it is no longer mere gang labour
and becoming more and more intelligent co-operation in detail, that
it now resents being treated as a serf, housed like a serf, fed like
a serf and herded like a serf and its pride and thoughts and feelings
disregarded. Labour is in revolt because as a matter of fact it is, in
the ancient and exact sense of the word, ceasing to be labour at all.
The more progressive elements of the directive classes recognise this,
but as we have shown, there are formidable forces still tending to
maintain the old social attitudes when arrogance became the ruler and
the common man accepted his servile status. A continual resistance
is offered by large sections of the prosperous and advantaged to the
larger claims of the modernised worker, and in response the rising and
differentiating workers develop an angry antagonism to these directive
classes which allow themselves to be controlled by their conservative
and reactionary elements. Moreover, the increasing relative
intelligence of the labour masses, the unprecedented imaginative
stimulation they experience, the continually more widespread
realisation of the available freedoms and comforts and indulgences
that might be and are not shared by all in a modern state, develop a
recalcitrance where once there was little but fatalistic acquiescence.
An objection to direction and obligation, always mutely present in
the toiling multitude since the economic life of man began, becomes
articulate and active. It is the taste of freedom that makes labour
desire to be free. This series of frictions is a quite inevitable
aspect of social reorganisation but they do not constitute a primary
antagonism in the process.
The class war was invented by the classes; it is a natural tradition
of the upper strata of the old order. It was so universally understood
that there was no need to state it. It is implicit in nearly all the
literature of the world before this nineteenth century--except the
Bible, the Koran and other sequelæ. The “class war” of the Marxist
is merely a poor snobbish imitation, a _tu quoque_, a pathetic,
stupid, indignant reversal of and retort to the old arrogance, an
_upward_ arrogance.
These conflicts cut across rather than oppose or help the progressive
development to which the Open Conspiracy devotes itself. Labour,
awakened, enquiring and indignant, is not necessarily progressive;
if the ordinary undistinguished worker is no longer to be driven as
a beast of burthen, he has--which also goes against the grain--to be
educated to as high a level of co-operative efficiency as possible.
He has to work better, even if he works for much shorter hours and
under better conditions, and his work must be subordinated work still;
he cannot become _en masse_ sole owner and master of a scheme
of things he did not make and is incapable of directing. Yet this is
the ambition implicit in an exclusively “Labour” movement. Either the
Labour revolutionary hopes to cadge the services of exceptional people
without acknowledgment or return on sentimental grounds or he really
believes that anyone is as capable as anyone else--if not more so. The
worker at a low level may be flattered by dreams of “class-conscious”
mass dominion from which all sense of inferiority is banished, but they
will remain dreams. The deep instinctive jealousy of the commonplace
individual for outstanding quality and novel initiative may be
organised and turned to sabotage and destruction, masquerading as and
aspiring to be a new social order, but that will be a blind alley and
not the road of progress. Our hope for the human future does not lie in
crowd psychology and the indiscriminating rule of universal democracy.
The Open Conspiracy can have little use for mere resentments as a
driving force towards its ends; it starts with a proposal not to
exalt the labour class but to abolish it, its sustaining purpose is
to throw drudges out of employment and eliminate the inept--and it is
far more likely to incur suspicion and distrust in the lower ranks of
the developing industrial order of to-day than to win support there.
There, just as everywhere else in the changing social complexes of our
time, it can appeal only to the exceptionally understanding individual
who can without personal humiliation consider his present activities
and relationships as provisional and who can, without taking offence,
endure a searching criticism of his present quality and mode of living.
_Chapter X_
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY AND THE RESISTANCES OF THE LESS INDUSTRIALISED
PEOPLES
So far in our accounting of the powers, institutions, dispositions,
types and classes to which the Open Conspiracy will run counter, we
have surveyed only such territory in the domain of the future world
commonweal as is represented by the complex, progressive, highly
industrialised communities, based on a preceding landlord-soldier,
tenant, town-merchant and tradesman system, of the Atlantic type.
These communities have developed farthest in the direction of
mechanicalisation and they are so much more efficient and powerful
that they now dominate the rest of the world. India, China, Russia,
Africa present _mélanges_ of social systems, thrown together,
outpaced, overstrained, shattered, invaded, exploited and more or less
subjugated by the finance, machinery and political aggressions of the
Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean civilisation. In many ways they have
an air of assimilating themselves to that civilisation, evolving modern
types and classes and abandoning much of their distinctive traditions.
But what they take from the West is mainly the new developments, the
material achievements, rather than social and political achievements
that, empowered by modern inventions, have won their way to world
predominance. They may imitate European nationalism to a certain
extent; for them it becomes a convenient form of self-assertion
against the pressure of a realised practical, social and political
inferiority; but the degree to which they will or can take over the
social assumptions and habits of the long-established European-American
hierarchy is probably very restricted. Their nationalism will remain
largely indigenous; the social traditions to which they will try to
make the new material forces subservient will be traditions of an
Oriental life widely different from the original life of Europe. They
will have their own resistances to the Open Conspiracy, therefore,
but they will be different resistances from those we have hitherto
considered. The automobile and the wireless set, the harvester and
steel construction building, will come to the jungle raja and the head
hunter, the Brahmin and the Indian peasant with a parallel and yet
dissimilar message to the one they brought the British land-owner or
the corn and cattle farmers of the Argentine and the Middle West. Also
they may be expected to evoke dissimilar reactions.
To a number of the finer, more energetic minds of these overshadowed
communities which have lagged more or less in the material advances to
which this present ascendency of Western Europe and America is due, the
Open Conspiracy may come with an effect of immense invitation. At one
step they may go from the sinking vessel of their antiquated order,
across their present conquerors into a brotherhood of world rulers.
They may turn to the problem of saving and adapting all that is rich
and distinctive of their inheritance to the common ends of the race.
But to the less vigorous intelligences of this outer world, the new
project of the Open Conspiracy will seem no better than a new form
of Western envelopment, and they will fight a mighty liberation as
though it were a further enslavement to the European tradition. They
will watch the Open Conspiracy for any signs of conscious superiority
and racial disregard. Necessarily they will recognise it as a product
of Western mentality and they may well be tempted to regard it as an
elaboration and organisation of current dispositions rather than the
evolution of a new phase which will make no discrimination at least
between the effete traditions of either East or West. Their suspicions
will be sustained and developed by the clumsy and muddle-headed
political and economic aggressions of the contemporary political and
business systems, such as they are, of the West, now in progress.
Behind that cloud of aggression Western thought has necessarily
advanced upon them; it could have got to their attention in no other
way.
Partly these resistances and criticisms of the decadent communities
outside the Atlantic capitalist systems will be aimed, not at the
developing methods of the coming world community, but at the European
traditions and restrictions that have imposed themselves upon these
methods, and so far the clash of the East and West may be found to
subserve the aims of the Open Conspiracy. In the conflict of old
traditions and in the consequent deadlocks lies much hope for the
direct acceptance of the groups of ideas centring upon the Open
Conspiracy. One of the most interesting areas of humanity in this
respect is the great system of communities under the sway or influence
of Soviet Russia. Russia has never been completely incorporated with
the European system; she became a just passable imitation of a western
European monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
talked at last of constitutions and parliaments--but the reality of
that vast empire remained an Asiatic despotism and the European mask
was altogether smashed by the successive revolutions of 1917. The
ensuing system is a government presiding over an enormous extent of
peasants and herdsmen, by a disciplined association professing the
faith and dogmas of Marx, as interpreted and qualified by Lenin.
In many ways this government is a novelty of extraordinary interest.
In the fact that it is a propagandist association becoming a
commonweal, it is manifestly the inspiration and precursor of the Open
Conspiracy. It labours against enormous difficulties within itself
and without. Flung amazingly into a position of tremendous power,
its intellectual flexibility is greatly restricted by the urgent
militant necessity for mental unanimity and a consequent repression
of criticism. It finds itself separated, intellectually and morally,
by an enormous gap, from the illiterate millions over which it rules.
More open perhaps to scientific and creative conceptions than any other
government, and certainly more willing to experiment and innovate,
its enterprise is starved by the economic depletion of the country in
the Great War and by the technical and industrial backwardness of the
population upon which it must draw for its personnel. Moreover, it
struggles within itself between concepts of a modern scientific social
organisation and a vague anarchistic dream in which the “State” is to
disappear and an emancipated proletariat, breeding and expectorating
freely, fills the vistas of time for evermore. The tradition of heavy
years of hopeless opposition have tainted the world policy of the
Marxist cult with a mischievous and irritating quality that focuses
upon it the animosity of every other government in the dominant
Atlantic system. Nevertheless it has maintained itself for more than
ten years and it seems far more likely to evolve than to perish. It
is quite possible that it will evolve towards the conceptions of the
Open Conspiracy, and in that case Russia may witness once again a
conflict between new ideas and Old Believers. So far the Communist
Party in Moscow has maintained a considerable propaganda of ideas in
the rest of the world and especially across its western frontier. Many
of these ideas are trite and stale. The time may be not far distant
when the tide of propaganda will flow in the reverse direction. It has
pleased the vanity of the Communist Party to imagine itself conducting
a propaganda of world revolution. Its fate may be to develop upon
lines that will make its more intelligent elements easily assimilable
to the Open Conspiracy for a world revolution. The Open Conspiracy as
it spreads and grows may find a less encumbered field for trying out
the economic developments implicit in its conceptions in Russia and
Siberia, than anywhere else in the world.
However severely the guiding themes and practical methods of the
present Soviet Government in Russia may be criticised, the fact remains
that it has cleared out of its way many of the main obstructive
elements that we find still vigorous in the more highly organised
communities in the west. It has liberated vast areas from the kindred
superstitions of monarchy and the need for a private proprietary
control of great economic interests. And it has presented the Oriental
China and India with the exciting spectacle of a social and political
system capable of throwing off many of the most characteristic
features of triumphant Westernism, and yet holding its own. In the
days when Japan faced up to modern necessities, there were no models
for imitation that were not communities of the Atlantic type pervaded
by the methods of private capitalism, and in consequence the Japanese
reconstituted their affairs on a distinctly European plan, adopting a
Parliament and bringing their monarchy, social hierarchy and business
and financial methods into a general conformity with that model. It
is extremely doubtful whether any other Asiatic community will now
set itself to a parallel imitation, and it will be thanks largely to
the Russian revolution that this breakaway from Europeanisation has
occurred.
But it does not follow that such a breakaway will necessarily lead
more directly to the Open Conspiracy. If we have to face a less highly
organised system of interests and prejudices in Russia and China, we
have to deal with a vastly wider ignorance and a vastly more formidable
animalism. Russia is a land of tens of millions of peasants ruled over
by a little band of the intelligentsia who can be counted only by tens
of thousands. It is only these few score thousands who are accessible
to ideas of world construction, and the only hope of bringing the
Russian system into active participation in the world conspiracy is
through that small minority and through its educational repercussion
on the myriads below. As we go eastward from European Russia the
proportion of soundly prepared intelligence to which we can appeal for
understanding and participation diminishes to an even more dismaying
fraction. Eliminate that fraction and one is left face to face with
inchoate barbarism incapable of social and political organisation
above the level of the war boss and the brigand leader. Russia itself
is still by no means secure against a degenerative process in that
direction, and the hope of China struggling out of it without some
forcible directive interventions is a hope to which constructive
liberalism clings with very little assurance.
We turn back therefore from Russia, China and the communities of
Central Asia to the Atlantic world. It is in that world alone that
sufficient range and amplitude of thought and discussion is possible
for the adequate development of the Open Conspiracy. In these
communities it must begin and for a long time its main activities will
need to be sustained from these necessary centres of diffusion. It
will develop amidst incessant mental strife and through that strife it
will remain alive. It is no small part of the practical weakness of
present day communism that it attempts to centre its intellectual life
and its directive activities in Moscow and so cuts itself off from
the free and open discussions of the Western world. Marxism lost the
world when it went to Moscow and took over the traditions of Tzarism,
as Christianity lost the world when it went to Rome and took over the
traditions of Cæsar. Entrenched in Moscow from searching criticism, the
Marxist ideology may become more and more dogmatic and unprogressive,
repeating its sacred _credo_ and issuing its disregarded orders to
the proletariat of the world, and so stay ineffectively crystallised
until the rising tide of the Open Conspiracy submerges, dissolves it
afresh and incorporates whatever it finds assimilable.
India like Japan is cut off from the main body of Asiatic affairs.
But while Japan has become a formally Westernised nationality in the
comity of such nations, India remains a world in itself. In that one
peninsula nearly every type of community is to be found, from the
tribe of jungle savages through a great diversity of barbaric and
mediæval principalities to the child and women sweating factories and
the vigorous modern commercialism of Bombay. Over it all the British
imperialism prevails, a constraining and restraining influence, keeping
the peace, checking epidemics, increasing the food supply by irrigation
and the like (so that population increases horribly), and making little
or no effort to evoke responses to modern ideas. Britain in India is
no propagandist of modern ferments: all those are left the other side
of Suez. In India the Briton is a ruler as firm and self-assured and
uncreative as the Roman. The old religious and social traditions, the
complex customs, castes, tabus and exclusions of a strangely mixed but
unamalgamated community, though a little discredited by this foreign
predominance, still hold men’s minds. They have been, so to speak,
pickled in the preservative of the British raj.
The Open Conspiracy has to invade the Indian complex in conflict
with the prejudices of both ruler and governed. It has to hope for
individual breaches in the dull Romanism of the administration; here a
genuine educationist, here a creative civil servant, here an official
touched by the distant stir of the living homeland--and it has to try
to bring these types into a corporated relationship with a fine native
scholar here or an active-minded prince or land-owner or industrialist
there. As the old methods of passenger transport are superseded by
flying, it will be more and more difficult to keep the stir of the
living homeland out of either the consciousness of the official
hierarchy or the knowledge of the recalcitrant “native.”
Very similar to Indian conditions is the state of affairs in the
foreign possessions of France, the same administrative obstacles to
the Open Conspiracy above, and below the same resentful subordination,
cut off from the mental invigoration of responsibility. Within these
areas of restraint, India and its lesser, simpler parallels in North
Africa, Syria and the Far East, there goes on a rapid increase of
low-grade population, undersized physically and mentally, and retarding
the mechanical development of civilisation by its standing offer of
cheap labour to the unscrupulous entrepreneur, and possible feeble
insurrectionary material to the unscrupulous political adventurer.
It is impossible to estimate how slowly or how rapidly the knowledge
and ideas that have checked the rate of increase of all the Atlantic
populations may be diffused through these less alert communities.
We must complete our survey of the resistances against which the Open
Conspiracy has to work by a few words about the negro world and the
regions of forest and jungle in which barbaric and even savage human
life still escapes the infection of civilisation. It seems inevitable
that the development of modern means of communication and the conquest
of tropical diseases should end in giving access everywhere to
modern administration and to economic methods, and everywhere the
incorporation of the former wilderness in the modern economic process
means the destruction of the material basis, the free hunting, the free
access to the soil, of such barbaric and savage communities as still
precariously survive. The dusky peoples, who were formerly the lords
of these still imperfectly assimilated areas, are becoming exploited
workers, slaves, serfs, hut-tax payers or labourers to a caste of white
immigrants. The spirit of the plantation broods over all these lands.
The negro in America differs only from his subjugated brother in South
Africa or Kenya Colony in the fact that he also, like his white master,
is an immigrant. The situation in Africa and America adjusts itself
therefore towards parallel conditions, the chief variation being in the
relative proportions of the two races and the details of the methods by
which black labour is made to serve white ends.
In these black and white communities which are establishing themselves
in all those parts of the earth where once the black was native, or in
which a sub-tropical climate is favourable to his existence at a low
level of social development, there is--and there is bound to be for
many years to come--much racial tension. The steady advance of birth
control may mitigate the biological factors of this tension later on,
and a general amelioration of manners and conduct may efface that
disposition to persecute dissimilar types, which man shares with many
other gregarious animals. But meanwhile this tension increases and a
vast multitude of lives is strained to tragic issues.
To exaggerate the dangers and evils of miscegenation is a weakness
of our time. Man interbreeds with all his varieties and yet deludes
himself that there are races of outstanding purity, the “Nordic,”
the “Semitic” and so forth. These are phantoms of the imagination.
The reality is more intricate, less dramatic and grips less easily
upon the mind; the phantoms grip only too well and incite to terrible
suppressions. Changes in the number of half-breeds and in the
proportion of white and coloured are changes of a temporary nature
that many become controllable and rectifiable in a few generations.
But until this level of civilisation is reached, until the colour of
a man’s skin or the kinks in a woman’s hair cease to have the value
of Shibboleths that involve educational, professional and social
extinction or survival, a black and white community is bound to be
continually preoccupied by a standing feud too intimate and pervasive
to permit of any long views of the world’s destiny.
We come to the conclusion therefore that it is from the more vigorous,
varied and less severely obsessed centres of the Atlantic civilisations
in the temperate zone, with their abundant facilities for publication
and discussion, their traditions of mental liberty and their immense
variety of interacting free modern types, that the main beginnings
of the Open Conspiracy must develop. For the rest of the world, its
propaganda, finding but poor nourishment in the local conditions, may
retain a missionary quality for many years.
_Chapter XI_