Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on
the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook,
would remain as they are at present.
This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain.
What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious
fact--the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918,
uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten--that our salvation
is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or
institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run
too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs
too far, there is revolution.
At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us.
The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the
Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight,
experience and culture will come of themselves.
The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is
no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes.
I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they
are saying what is not true.
Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place;
something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of
manhood in the individual.
In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living
being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he
takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to
shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that
guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely
chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he
will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the
divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment,
this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost.
We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited
influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from
us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the
present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle,
are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained:
mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can
never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through
police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a
blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a
kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of
the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths
will grow up of themselves.
We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain
life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be
so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it.
A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted
these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the
hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon
Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the
Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce,
plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on
Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a
mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and
some still believe them to be everlasting.
A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has
opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject
it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and
mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and
the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into
the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring
life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and
the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to
drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near
or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described,
the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles?
Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an
easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had
cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class,
the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its
aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And
the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already
trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it
alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had
acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and
for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed
fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the
Continent came into being.
Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are
stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the
surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the
masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an
ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build
from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the
changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of
forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question!
Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to
birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations;
it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only
institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe
this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding
of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed
simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if
there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though
only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a
spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it,
"thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of
institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to
any mission for humanity, it does not lead.
What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a
people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the
Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese
ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured
peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative
epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility
and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own
unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to
isolate and intensify it.
What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place
as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure
and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on
our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and
prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been
scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society
which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is
deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more
each other's enemies than the people's.
And yet it is this very class--not as possessor of means but as
possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable,
and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German
spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of
militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this
for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it
cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its
and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by
the way of service and sacrifice--it can only do it if the service and
the sacrifice are approved and accepted.
The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more
responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow;
but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the
truth. At first they will do as in Russia; when want becomes acute,
they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from
individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought--only labour
and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the
highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given
away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to
serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who
serve in order to rule.
So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the
understanding of the lower classes prevailed--through our fault--a
reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the
unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind--all
mankind, the outcast as well as the weak--every man and all men. But
the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who
congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities
consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a
part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with
his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind
only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the
Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no
decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into
themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his
extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager
for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions
and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they
return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the
masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at
their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later
the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their
leaders.
The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses.
They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor
what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets
and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the
game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it
used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as
when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first
fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off
silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time
everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with
their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are
fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly
they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend
with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has
really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they
will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be
meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and
what is worth saving.