act for the World State as a whole, then I suppose the senior judges of
the Supreme Court, or the Speaker of the Council, or the head of the
Associated Scientific Societies, or some such person, could step out
and do what had to be done.
But if there is to be no single head person, there must be at least some
sort of assembly or council. That seems to be necessary. But will it be
a gathering at all like Congress or the British Parliament, with a
Government side and an opposition ruled by party traditions and party
ideas?
There again, I think we may be too easily misled by existing but
temporary conditions. I do not think it is necessary to assume that the
council of the World State will be an assembly of party politicians. I
believe it will be possible to have it a real gathering of
representatives, a fair sample of the thought and will of mankind at
large, and to avoid a party development by a more scientific method of
voting than the barbaric devices used for electing representatives to
Congress or the British Parliament, devices that play directly into the
hands of the party organizer who trades upon the defects of political
method.
Will this council be directly elected? That, I think, may be found to be
essential. And upon a very broad franchise. Because, _firstly_, it is
before all things important that every adult in the world should feel a
direct and personal contact between himself and the World State, and
that he is an assenting and participating citizen of the world; and
_secondly_, because if your council is appointed by any intermediate
body, all sorts of local and national considerations, essential in the
business of the subordinate body, will get in the way of a simple and
direct regard for the world commonweal.
And as to this council: Will it have great debates and wonderful scenes
and crises and so forth--the sort of thing that looks well in a large
historical painting? There again we may be easily misled by analogy. One
consideration that bars the way to anything of that sort is that its
members will have no common language which they will be all able to
speak with the facility necessary for eloquence. Eloquence is far more
adapted to the conditions of a Red Indian pow-wow than to the ordering
of large and complicated affairs. The World Council may be a very
taciturn assembly. It may even meet infrequently. Its members may
communicate their views largely by _notes_ which may have to be very
clear and explicit, because they will have to stand translation, and
short--to escape neglect.
And what will be the chief organs and organizations and works and
methods with which this Council of the World State will be concerned?
There will be a Supreme Court determining _not_ International Law, but
World Law. There will be a growing Code of World Law.
There will be a world currency.
There will be a ministry of posts, transport and communications
generally.
There will be a ministry of trade in staple products and for the
conservation and development of the natural resources of the earth.
There will be a ministry of social and labour conditions.
There will be a ministry of world health.
There will be a ministry, the most important ministry of all, watching
and supplementing national educational work and taking up the care and
stimulation of backward communities.
And instead of a War Office and Naval and Military departments, there
will be a _Peace Ministry_ studying the belligerent possibilities of
every new invention, watching for armed disturbances everywhere, and
having complete control of every armed force that remains in the world.
All these world ministries will be working in co-operation with local
authorities who will apply world-wide general principles to local
conditions.
These items probably comprehend everything that the government of a
World State would have to do. Much of its activity would be merely the
co-ordination and adjustment of activities already very thoroughly
discussed and prepared for it by local and national discussions. I think
it will be a mistake for us to assume that the work of a world
government will be vaster and more complex than that of such governments
as those of the United States or the British Empire. In many respects it
will have an enormously simplified task. There will be no foreign enemy,
no foreign competition, no tariffs, so far as it is concerned, or tariff
wars. It will be keeping order; it will not be carrying on a contest.
There will be no necessity for secrecy; it will not be necessary to have
a Cabinet plotting and planning behind closed doors; there will be no
general policy except a steady attention to the common welfare. Even the
primary origin of a World Council must necessarily be different from
that of any national government. Every existing government owes its
beginnings to force and is in its fundamental nature militant. It is an
offensive-defensive organ. This fact saturates our legal and social
tradition more than one realizes at first. There is, about civil law
everywhere, a faint flavour of a relaxed state of siege. But a world
government will arise out of different motives and realize a different
ideal. It will be primarily an organ for keeping the peace.
And now perhaps we may look at this project of a World State mirrored in
the circumstances of the life of one individual citizen. Let us consider
very briefly the life of an ordinary young man living in a World State
and consider how it would differ from a commonplace life to-day.
He will have been born in some one of the United States of the World--in
New York or California, or Ontario or New Zealand, or Portugal or France
or Bengal or Shan-si; but wherever his lot may fall, the first history
he will learn will be the wonderful history of mankind, from its nearly
animal beginnings, a few score thousand years ago, with no tools, but
implements of chipped stone and hacked wood, up to the power and
knowledge of our own time. His education will trace for him the
beginnings of speech, of writing, of cultivation and settlement.
He will learn of the peoples and nations of the past, and how each one
has brought its peculiar gifts and its distinctive contribution to the
accumulating inheritance of our race.
He will know, perhaps, less of wars, battles, conquests, massacres,
kings and the like unpleasant invasions of human dignity and welfare,
and he will know more of explorers, discoverers and stout outspoken men
than our contemporary citizen.
While he is still a little boy, he will have the great outlines of the
human adventure brought home to his mind by all sorts of vivid methods
of presentation, such as the poor poverty-struck schools of our own time
cannot dream of employing.
And on this broad foundation he will build up his knowledge of his own
particular state and nation and people, learning not tales of ancient
grievances and triumphs and revenges, but what his particular race and
countryside have given and what it gives and may be expected to give to
the common welfare of the world. On such foundations his social
consciousness will be built.
He will learn an outline of all that mankind knows and of the
fascinating realms of half knowledge in which man is still struggling to
know. His curiosity and his imagination will be roused and developed.
He will probably be educated continuously at least until he is eighteen
or nineteen, and perhaps until he is two or three and twenty. For a
world that wastes none of its resources upon armaments or soldiering,
and which produces whatever it wants in the regions best adapted to that
production, and delivers them to the consumer by the directest route,
will be rich enough not only to spare the first quarter of everybody's
life for education entirely, but to keep on with some education
throughout the whole lifetime.
Of course the school to which our young citizen of the world will go
will be very different from the rough and tumble schools of to-day,
understaffed with underpaid assistants, and having bare walls. It will
have benefited by some of the intelligence and wealth we lavish to-day
on range-finders and submarines.
Even a village school will be in a beautiful little building costing as
much perhaps as a big naval gun or a bombing-aeroplane costs to-day. I
know this will sound like shocking extravagance to many contemporary
hearers, but in the World State the standards will be different.
I don't know whether any of us really grasp what we are saying when we
talk of greater educational efficiency in the future. That means--if it
means anything--teaching more with much less trouble. It will mean, for
instance, that most people will have three or four languages properly
learnt; that they will think about things mathematical with a quickness
and clearness that puzzles us; that about all sorts of things their
minds will move in daylight where ours move in a haze of ignorance or in
an emotional fog.
This clear-headed, broad-thinking young citizen of the World State will
not be given up after his educational years to a life of toil--there
will be very little toil left in the world. Mankind will have machines
and power enough to do most of the toil for it. Why, between 1914 and
1918 we blew away enough energy and destroyed enough machinery and
turned enough good grey matter into stinking filth to release hundreds
of millions of toilers from toil for ever!
Our young citizen will choose some sort of interesting work--perhaps
creative work. And he will be free to travel about the whole world
without a passport or visa, without a change of money; everywhere will
be his country; he will find people everywhere who will be endlessly
different, but none suspicious or hostile. Everywhere he will find
beautiful and distinctive cities, freely expressive of the spirit of the
land in which they have arisen. Strange and yet friendly cities.
The world will be a far healthier place than it is now--for mankind as a
whole will still carry on organized wars--no longer wars of men against
men, but of men against malarias and diseases and infections. Probably
he will never know what a cold is, or a headache. He will be able to go
through the great forests of the tropics without shivering with fever
and without saturating himself with preventive drugs. He will go freely
among great mountains; he will fly to the Poles of the earth if he
chooses, and dive into the cold, now hidden, deep places of the sea.
But it is very difficult to fill in the picture of his adult life so
that it will seem real to our experience. It is hard to conceive and
still more difficult to convey. We live in this congested, bickering,
elbowing, shoving world, and it has soaked into our natures and made us
a part of itself. Hardly any of us know what it is to be properly
educated, and hardly any what it is to be in constant general good
health.
To talk of what the world may be to most of us is like talking of baths
and leisure and happy things to some poor hopeless, gin-soaked drudge in
a slum. The creature is so devitalized; the dirt is so ingrained, so
much a second nature, that a bath really isn't attractive. Clean and
beautiful clothes sound like a mockery or priggishness. To talk of
spacious and beautiful places only arouses a violent desire in the poor
thing to get away somewhere and hide. In squalor and misery, quarrelling
and fighting make a sort of nervous relief. To multitudes of slum-bred
people the prospect of no more fighting is a disagreeable prospect, a
dull outlook.
Well, all this world of ours may seem a slum to the people of a happier
age. They will feel about our world just as we feel about the ninth or
tenth century, when we read of its brigands and its insecurities, its
pestilences, its miserable housing, its abstinence from ablutions.
But our young citizen will not have been inured to our base world. He
will have little of our ingrained dirt in his mind and heart. He will
love. He will love beautifully. As most of us once hoped to do in our
more romantic moments. He will have ambitions--for the world state will
give great scope to ambition. He will work skilfully and brilliantly, or
he will administer public services, or he will be an able teacher, or a
mental or physical physician, or he will be an interpretative or
creative artist; he may be a writer or a scientific investigator, he may
be a statesman in his state, or even a world statesman. If he is a
statesman he may be going up perhaps to the federal world congress. In
the year 2020 there will still be politics, but they will be great
politics. Instead of the world's affairs being managed in a score of
foreign offices, all scheming meanly and cunningly against each other,
all planning to thwart and injure each other, they will be managed under
the direction of an educated and organized common intelligence intent
only upon the common good.
Dear! Dear! Dear! Does it sound like rubbish to you? I suppose it does.
You think I am talking of a dreamland, of an unattainable Utopia?
Perhaps I am! This dear, jolly old world of dirt, war, bankruptcy,
murder and malice, thwarted lives, wasted lives, tormented lives,
general ill health and a social decadence that spreads and deepens
towards a universal smash--how can we hope to turn it back from its
course? How priggish and impracticable! How impertinent! How
preposterous! I seem to hear a distant hooting....
Sometimes it seems to me that the barriers that separate man and man are
nearly insurmountable and invincible, that we who talk of a world state
now are only the pioneers of a vast uphill struggle in the minds and
hearts of men that may need to be waged for centuries--that may fail in
the end.
Sometimes again, in other moods, it seems to me that these barriers and
nationalities and separations are so illogical, so much a matter of
tradition, so plainly mischievous and cruel, that at any time we may
find the common sense of our race dissolving them away....
Who can see into that darkest of all mysteries, the hearts and wills of
mankind? It may be that it is well for us not to know of the many
generations who will have to sustain this conflict.
Yes, that is one mood, and there is the other. Perhaps we fear too much.
Even before our lives run out we may feel the dawn of a greater age
perceptible among the black shadows and artificial glares of these
unhappy years.
IV
THE BIBLE OF CIVILIZATION
PART ONE
Sec. 1
In my next two papers I am going to discuss and--what shall I
say?--experiment with an old but neglected idea, an idea that was first
broached I believe about the time when the State of Connecticut was
coming into existence and while New York was still the Dutch city of New
Amsterdam.
The man who propounded this idea was a certain great Bohemian, Komensky,
who is perhaps better known in our western world by his Latinized name
Comenius. He professed himself the pupil of Bacon. He was the friend of
Milton. He travelled from one European country to another with his
political and educational ideas. For a time he thought of coming to
America. It is a great pity that he never came. And his idea, the
particular idea of his we are going to discuss, was the idea of a common
book, a book of history, science and wisdom, which should form the basis
and framework for the thoughts and imaginations of every citizen in the
world.
In many ways the thinkers and writers of the early seventeenth century
seem more akin to us and more sympathetic with the world of to-day, than
any intervening group of literary figures. They strike us as having a
longer vision than the men of the eighteenth century, and as being
bolder--and, how shall I put it?--more desperate in their thinking than
the nineteenth century minds. And this closer affinity to our own time
arises, I should think, directly and naturally, out of the closer
resemblance of their circumstances. Between 1640 and 1650, just as in
our present age, the world was tremendously unsettled and distressed. A
century and more of expansion and prosperity had given place to a phase
of conflict, exhaustion and entire political unsettlement. Britain was
involved in the bitter political struggle that culminated in the
execution of King Charles I. Ireland was a land of massacre and
counter-massacre. The Thirty Years War in Central Europe was in its
closing, most dreadful stages of famine and plunder. In France the crown
and the nobles were striving desperately for ascendancy in the War of
the Fronde. The Turk threatened Vienna. Nowhere in Western Europe did
there remain any secure and settled political arrangements. Everywhere
there was disorder, everywhere it seemed that anything might happen, and
it is just those disordered and indeterminate times that are most
fruitful of bold religious and social and political and educational
speculations and initiatives.
This was the period that produced the Quakers and a number of the most
vigorous developments of Puritanism, in which the foundations of modern
republicanism were laid, and in which the project of a world league of
nations--or rather of a world state--received wide attention. And the
student of Comenius will find in him an active and sensitive mind
responding with a most interesting similarity to our own responses, to
the similar conditions of his time. He has been distressed and
dismayed--as most of us have been distressed and dismayed--by a rapid
development of violence, by a great release of cruelty and suffering in
human affairs. He felt none of the security that was felt in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the _certainty_ of progress. He
realized as we do that the outlook for humanity is a very dark and
uncertain one unless human effort is stimulated and organized. He traced
the evils of his time to human discords and divisions, to our political
divisions, and the mutual misconceptions due to our diversity of
languages and leading ideas. In all that he might be writing and
thinking in 1921. And his proposed remedies find an echo in a number of
our contemporary movements. He wanted to bring all nations to form one
single state. He wanted to have a universal language as the common
medium of instruction and discussion, and he wanted to create a common
Book of Necessary Knowledge, a sort of common basis of wisdom, for all
educated men in the world.
Now this last is the idea I would like to develop now. I would like to
discuss whether our education--which nowadays in our modern states
reaches everyone--whether our education can include and ought to include
such a Book of Necessary Knowledge and Wisdom; and (having attempted to
answer that enquiry in the affirmative) I shall then attempt a sketch of
such a book.
But to begin with perhaps I may meet an objection that is likely to
arise. I have called this hypothetical book of ours the Bible of
Civilization, and it may be that someone will say: Yes, but you have a
sufficient book of that sort already; you have the Bible itself and that
is all you need. Well, I am taking the Bible as my model. I am taking it
because twice in history--first as the Old Testament and then again as
the Old and New Testament together--it has formed a culture, and unified
and kept together through many generations great masses of people. It
has been the basis of the Jewish and Christian civilizations alike. And
even in the New World the State of Connecticut did, I believe, in its
earliest beginnings take the Bible as its only law. Nevertheless, I hope
I shall not offend any reader if I point out that the Bible is not all
that we need to-day, and that also in some respects it is redundant. Its
very virtues created its limitations. It served men so well that they
made a Canon of it and refused to alter it further. Throughout the most
vital phases of Hebrew history, throughout the most living years of
Christian development the Bible changed and grew. Then its growth ceased
and its text became fixed. But the world went on growing and discovering
new needs and new necessities.
Let me deal first with its redundancy. So far as redundancy goes, a
great deal of the Book of Leviticus, for example, seems not vitally
necessary for the ordinary citizen of to-day; there are long explicit
directions for temple worship and sacrificial procedure. There is again,
so far as the latter day citizen is concerned, an excess of information
about the minor Kings of Israel and Judah. And there is more light than
most of us feel we require nowadays upon the foreign policies of Assyria
and Egypt. It stirs our pulses feebly, it helps us only very indirectly
to learn that Attai begat Nathan and Nathan begat Zabad, or that Obed
begat Jehu and Jehu begat Azariah, and so on for two or three hundred
verses.
And so far as deficiencies go, there is a great multitude of modern
problems--problems that enter intimately into the moral life of all of
us, with which the Bible does not deal, the establishment of American
Independence, for example, and the age-long feud of Russia and Poland
that has gone on with varying fortunes for four centuries. That is much
more important to our modern world than the ancient conflict of Assyria
and Egypt which plays so large a part in the old Bible record. And there
are all sorts of moral problems arising out of modern conditions on
which the Bible sheds little or no direct light: the duties of a citizen
at an election, or the duties of a shareholder to the labour employed by
his company, for example. For these things we need at least a
supplement, if we are still to keep our community upon one general basis
of understanding, upon one unifying standard of thought and behaviour.
We are so brought up upon the Bible, we are so used to it long before we
begin to think hard about it, that all sorts of things that are really
very striking about it, the facts that the history of Judah and Israel
is told twice over and that the gospel narrative is repeated four times
over for example, do not seem at all odd to us. How else, we ask, could
you have it? Yet these are very odd features if we are to regard the
Bible as the compactest and most perfect statement of essential truth
and wisdom.
And still more remarkable, it seems to me, is it that the Bible breaks
off. One could understand very well if the Bible broke off with the
foundation of Christianity. Now this event has happened, it might say,
nothing else matters. It is the culmination. But the Bible does not do
that. It goes on to a fairly detailed account of the beginnings and
early politics of the Christian Church. It gives the opening literature
of theological exposition. And then, with that strange and doubtful
book, the Revelation of St. John the Divine, it comes to an end. As I
say, it leaves off. It leaves off in the middle of Roman imperial and
social conflicts. But the world has gone on and goes on--elaborating its
problems, encountering fresh problems--until now there is a gulf of
upwards of eighteen hundred years between us and the concluding
expression of the thought of that ancient time.
I make these observations in no spirit of detraction. If anything, these
peculiarities of the Bible add to the wonder of its influence over the
lives and minds of men. It has been The Book that has held together the
fabric of western civilization. It has been the handbook of life to
countless millions of men and women. The civilization we possess could
not have come into existence and could not have been sustained without
it. It has explained the world to the mass of our people, and it has
given them moral standards and a form into which their consciences could
work. But does it do that to-day? Frankly, I do not think it does. I
think that during the last century the Bible has lost much of its former
hold. It no longer grips the community. And I think it has lost hold
because of those sundering eighteen centuries, to which every fresh year
adds itself, because of profound changes in the methods and mechanisms
of life, and because of the vast extension of our ideas by the
development of science in the last century or so.