Civilization is still advancing by leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, at
the same time, with a greater acceleration of development, the men are
checkmating the master and transferring control and initiative to the
will of the commonwealth. At least, not otherwise am I able to
interpret the new deference for nationality which has been aroused in
protest against aggressive militarism; nor the kind of industrial
legislation that has been enacted during the last decade in California
and other western states, in New Zealand and Australia, and even in
Italy and England. It all means that the new inventions, although at
first seized upon by monopolists, are seen to be such as to provide
channels through which the pent-up instincts and hopes of the masses
can act with concerted power. It means that also political machinery is
being devised for securing the public welfare and protecting
opportunities for individual genius and talent. No man asks for more.
The world over we have reached the threshold of collective democracy,
wherein the consuming of material wealth will be shared with
approximate equality and wherein social control will be retained by the
collective will, to safeguard individual initiative, and will be
administered by public servants who have proved their superior ability,
but who remain subject to almost instantaneous recall.
Such a substitute for civilization, however, is the opposite of a
return to the individualism of Nature or to a primeval communism. It
presupposes the highest mastery of man over matter and social unity
among all mankind co-operating as nation-states and federations of
states.
As regards external government and law, it is the antithesis of Mr.
Carpenter's proposal that they should disappear, because they are the
travesty of inward government and order. On the contrary, I hope that
external government, animated by the general will of a social
democratic commonwealth and vested in representatives sensitively
accountable to an alert and intelligent public opinion, will appear to
my listeners not as a travesty, but as the very incarnation of that
inward government and order which every individual man must feel to be
the law of his own being unless he has lost his manhood's centrality. A
crushing indictment of Mr. Carpenter's modern movement back to Nature
is to be found in the fact that it has declined instead of advancing
during the twenty-six years since he wrote. Probably fewer persons in
England preach salvation by sandals and sunbaths to-day than did a
quarter of a century ago, while the sandals themselves and sunbaths
have become but items among the general products of industry and
governmental hygiene. The sunbath is only one of the many remedies
prescribed to the poor by doctors impanelled by the British state, and
the sandals are better made by machinery than by the hands of poetic
hermits.
But while the vision of philosophical anarchy has been fading away,
whole nations on a gigantic scale have been subjecting the power of
trusts and monopolies to the general will of the community. In America
you have changed your federal law and many of your state constitutions,
in order that the right of the common will to dictate may be
unquestioned, and that no occasion for lawless violence need ever arise
through any legal barrier to the full assertion of the mind of the
common life.
So in every particular of his cure for civilization Mr. Carpenter's
worship of savagery and barbarism is being rejected as fantastic. We
may return to uncooked fruits and grains. But what a task for the most
highly developed industrial state, to raise and distribute an adequate
supply of grapes, apples, and nuts the year round for the 1,000,000,000
inhabitants of the globe! What a call for many wizards of California to
produce new species of luscious edibles! It would seem to me that the
curse of civilization has lain in the direction of too little of either
cooked or uncooked food, instead of too much. If the common people are
to come into their own, trade in every necessity and luxury must be
more highly integrated. The difference of the new era as regards
foreign commerce will chiefly be that nations as a whole by their
governments will conduct it instead of private traders. In other words,
foreign trade will be nationalized, in the way that social democrats
have long demanded that land and capital should be. The community will
own and control it through state agents for the common welfare. Nothing
of good which civilization has brought forth will be lost, nor will the
organization of wealth be relaxed.
Machinery will be multiplied a thousandfold. Like the human body
itself, social life must become as complex as it can without losing its
centrality. Be it remembered that the truly simple life is not gained
by meagreness of possessions and interests, but by singleness of aim
controlling a seemingly infinite number of detailed means. But this
unity dominating a multiplicity of interests is attainable only through
the entire mechanism of external government. And again, as the man
resides in all the organs of the body, but is himself no organ, and as
by the central unity of his life-energy is able to rush the white
corpuscles to any part that is wounded or poisoned, so the general
will, the community-self of the social democratic state, is beginning
to direct all the healing agencies in the body politic to the rescue of
the unfortunate. Such beneficence and benevolence, systematized and
alert, is more than civilization. It is Christianity, it is the doing
unto the least of one's fellow-men what self-interest prompts one never
to do; but its power is equal to the redemptive goodness that inspires
it. In motive and method it is not business, it is different from
trade; for it is a progeny of pity. But nevertheless, it is socialized
wealth and applied science and politics. It is government by the
governed.
When civilization has been superseded by this democratic process, which
in our century is advancing at such rapid gait, there will surely be in
the sphere of religion no more return to Nature than in that of
economics. There will be no more the worship of any one instinct or
organ, or any external object or agent. How could Carpenter have so far
forgotten his own definition of health as to applaud the primitive
ritualistic worship of the glories of the human body and the procession
of the stars? That ritual was itself the symptom of the break-up of
man's character into multiplicity, and the insubordination of specific
organs. Surely when man has gained centrality of health, he will
worship the unifying will which is dominant whenever health prevails.
He will adore the spirit which makes the many one. But men will never
gain that centrality of health until they have established this worship
of the one heart that beats in every human breast and, being inspired
with religious passion for it, have brought the entire economic order
into conformity with its behests.
_The Riverside Press_
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A