I said that after my biological analogy I should cite the judgments of
some great sages who saw in civilization an enemy of man. Of these I
have just been mentioning the greatest. The Founder of Christianity set
His Will dead against the established order of society, rebuking the
upholders of thrones and altars, and becoming the champion of the
outcasts. The kingdom, He announced, was not to be of this our world of
moneylenders. No wonder the rulers of His day gave Him short quarter,
so that after three years of agitation this speaker of rousing parables
to the multitude, who had no bank account, was silenced forever.
Likewise, it was a foregone conclusion that every disciple of Christ
whose spirit was to be set aflame by His--like St. Francis, and
Savonarola, Wycliffe, Luther (at the first), and John Wesley--should
turn in pity to the living foundations and in horror of spirit from the
entombing thrones.
But the protest against the sacrifice of man to mammonized society has
been no monopoly of Christ and those spiritually descended from Him.
The ancient Hebrew prophets taught equally a kingdom that was to be
diametrically the opposite in principle from that which prevailed in
the Jewish State or in Babylon, and later in Macedon or Rome. It should
be noted that the prophets and Christ accompanied their censure of the
formative principle, upon which nations and traders had built up their
dealings with one another, with a proposed substitute. But if we go
back to Gautama and the India of his time, we find that the Buddha's
protest against civilization was still more extreme; for he did not
wait to submit a new principle before condemning the old. Indeed, he
felt that self-conscious existence for the individual, as he beheld it
everywhere, was a tragic calamity, and altogether unendurable.
Preferable would be the extinction utterly of all individualized
selfhood. He would isolate the individual and submit him to a
discipline, the object of which was escape forever from the wheel of
existence. He advocated not mere individualistic anarchy, but the
annihilation of individuality as preferable to civilized life. A third
of the human race still believe in his discipline, and in the
alternative he proposed to the highly developed type of social order
which prevailed in his time in India.
Nor do Gautama, the prophets, and Christ stand alone. All the great
humanists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although
professing no discipleship of earlier teachers, were at one with them
in condemning the root-principle of the existing co-ordination of human
lives in politics, economics, and education. The cry of Rousseau, "Back
to Nature!" and all the watchwords of Voltaire and the encyclopaedists,
were so many summonses to revolt against the entire order of organized
society. The same meaning underlay all the writings of Fourier and
Prudhomme, of Owen and the other English communists. It was as if they
all said, "Civilization is a disease; let us rid ourselves of it." With
the socialists, Marx and Lassalle, and the anarchists, like Stepniak
and Kropotkin, the condemnation of society, as it is and always had
been, was equally radical and sweeping. Even humanists less violent in
their protest, not so negative in their criticism, nor so positive in
their offered substitutes, like Carlyle and Emerson, like Shelley and
Whitman and Swinburne, like Henry George and Henry Demorest Lloyd, all
aim to create in us the judgment that civilization, as it has been from
the first, is no friend to the best in any man. No lover of humanity
seems ever to have worshipped the god who rules over the things that
are established. They all agree with the mediaeval theologians that this
world has been given over to the Prince of Darkness.