CONVERSION
Some people think of the world as if it were made all through, people
and all, of reinforced concrete, as if everything in it--men, women,
children, churches, colleges, and parties, were solidly, inextricably
imbedded in it.
Every age in history has had to get on as well as it could with two sets
of totally impracticable people, our two great orders of Philistines in
this world, the people who put their trust in Portland Cement and the
people who put their trust in Explosives.
There has not been a single great movement in history yet that every
thoughtful man has not had to watch being held up by these people--by
millions of worthy, simple, rudimentary creatures who consent to be mere
conservatives or mere radicals.
One set says, "People cannot be converted so we will blow them up."
The other set says, "We are going to be blown up, so let us put on
Plaster of Paris as a garment, we will array ourselves before the Lord
in Portland Cement."
Both of these classes of people believe alike on one main point.
They do not believe in Conversion.
If the conservatives believed in conversion they would not be so afraid
that they feel obliged to resort to Portland Cement. If the radicals
believed in conversion they would not be so afraid that they feel
obliged to resort to Explosives.
In our machine civilization to these two great standard classes of
scared people, there has been added what seems to be a third class--the
people who have responded to a kind of motor spirit in the time, who
have modulated a little their unbelief in human nature. They have
substituted for their reinforced concrete Unbelief, a kind of Whirling
Unbelief, called machinery.
They admit that in our modern life men are not made of reinforced
concrete. We may move, but we move as wheels move, they tell us. We arc
whirlingly imbedded. We are cogs and wheels in an Economic Machine.
I would like to consider for a moment this Whirling Unbelief.
There was a time once when I took the Economic Machine very seriously.
I looked up when I went by, at the Economic Machine as the last and the
most terrific of the inventions among the machines. The machine that
mocked all the other machines, that made all our machines look pathetic
and ridiculous, was the Economic Machine. There were days when I heard
it or seemed to hear it--this Economic Machine closing in around my
life, around all our lives like the last hoarse mocking laugh of
civilization.
I said I will love every machine that runs except the Economic
Machine--the machine for making people into machines.
But one day when I had waited or dared to wait, I know not why, a little
longer than usual before the Whirling Unbelief, I heard the hoarse
mocking laugh die away. I became very quiet. I began to think, I
reflected on my experiences. I began to notice things.
I noted that every time I had found myself being discouraged about
people, I had caught myself thinking of people as Cogs and Wheels.
Were they really Cogs and Wheels?
Possibly it was merely the easiest, most mechanical-minded thing to do
to think of people (with all this machinery around one) as cogs and
wheels in an economic machine.
Then it began to occur to me that it was because I had looked upon the
economic machine a little lazily, a little innocently that I had been
awed and terrific--and had been swept away with it into the Whirling
Unbelief.
Then I stood quietly and calmly for days, for weeks, for years before
it. I watched it Go Round.
I then discovered under close observation that what had looked to me
like an economic machine was not an economic machine at all.
The modern economic world has innumerable mechanical elements in it, but
it is not an economic machine.
It is a biological engine.
It is the biology in it that conceives, desires, and determines the
machinery in it.
The most important parts of the machine are not the very mechanical
parts. They are the very biological parts.
The economic machine is full of made-people, but it does not make very
much difference about the made-people. I find that as a plain, practical
matter of fact I do not need to watch the made-people so very much to
understand the world, or to get ready for what is happening to it.
In prospecting for a world, I watch the born people.
I watch especially the people who have been born twice.
As one watches the way the world is going round one finds that what is
really making it go round, is not its being an economic machine, but its
being a biological engine.
Industrial reform is a branch of biology.
The main fact of biology as regards a man is that he can be born.
The main fact of biology as regards society--that is, the main fact of
social biology--is that a man can be born twice.
As long as a man is born to go with a father and a mother it is well
enough to have been born once, but the moment a man deals with other
people or with the world, he has to be born again.
This is the main fact about the biological engine we call the world.
The main fact about the Engine is the biology in it.
Every other fact for a man has to be worked out from this--that is: out
of being born once if one wants to belong merely to a father and mother,
and out of being born twice if one wants to belong to a world.
A man does not need to enter again into his mother's womb and come out a
child. He enters into the World's Womb and comes out a man.
* * * * *
The world is being placed to-day before our eyes in the hands of the men
who are born twice.
Not all men are cogs and wheels.
The first day I discovered this and believed this I went out into the
streets and looked into the faces of the men and the women and I looked
up at the factories and the churches and I was not afraid.
I do not deny that cogs and wheels are very common.
But I do not believe that an economic system or industrial scheme based
on the general principle of arranging a world for cogs and wheels would
work. I believe in arranging the world on the principle that there are
now and are going to be always enough men in it who are born, and enough
who are born twice to keep cogs and wheels doing the things men who have
been born twice, who have visions for worlds, want done, and to keep
people who prefer being cogs and wheels where they will work best and
where they will help the running gear of the planet most--by going round
and round, in the way they like--going round and round and round and
round.
But why is it, one cannot help wondering, that the moment a man rises up
suddenly in this modern world and bases or seeks to base an industrial
or social reform frankly on courage for other people, on believing in
the inherent and eternal power of men of changing their minds, of being
put up in new kinds and new sizes of men, in other words, on
conversion--why is it that clergymen, atheists, ethical societies,
politicians, socialists will all unite, will all flock together and
descend upon him, shout and laugh him away, bully him with dead
millionaires, bad corporations and humdrum business men, overawe him
with mere history, argue him with statistics, and thunder him with
sermons out of the world--if he puts up a faint little chirrup of hope
that men can be converted?
It is not that the synods, ethical societies, anarchists, the bishops
and Bernard Shaw, have merely given up expecting individual men to be
converted. There would be a measure of plausibility in giving up on a
few particular men's being born again. It is worse than that. What seems
to have happened to nearly all the people who have schemes of industrial
reform is that they have really given up at one fell swoop a whole new
generation's being born again. It is going to be just like this one,
they tell us, the new generation--the same old things the same old
foolish ways of deceiving the world, that any child can see have not
worked--Bernard Shaw and the bishops whisper to us, are coming around
and around again. They must be planned for. All these young men of
wealth about us who read the papers and who are ashamed of their fathers
are going to be just like their fathers. The atheists, the socialists,
and the single taxers, missionaries and evangelists have given up their
last loophole of hope in the new business generation and they trust only
to machines to save us, or to professors, or to paper-treatises on
eugenics!
And yet, after all, if we were going to start an absolute, decisive, and
practical scheme of eugenics to-morrow with whom would we begin, with
which particular people would we begin? We would have to go back,
Bernard Shaw and the bishops and all of us, to the New Testament--to the
old idea of being born again.
I have watched now these many years the professors, caught in their
culture-machines going round and round, and the priests caught in their
religion-machines going round and round, and the business men caught in
their economic machine, and I have heard them all saying over and over
in a kind of terrible sing-song day and night, the silly, lazy words of
a glorious old roue four thousand years ago, "The thing that hath been
is the thing which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall
be done and there is no new thing under the sun."
There are some of us who do not believe this. We defy the
culture-machines. We believe that even professors can be converted, can
be educated.
We defy the bishops. We believe that business men can be converted.
We defy the business men. We believe the bishops can be converted.
I speak for a thousand, thousand men.
In the hum and drive of the wheels and the great roar around me of the
Whirling Unbelief. I speak for these men--for all of us. _We are not
cogs and wheels. We are men. We are born again ourselves. Other men can
be born again._
Men shall not look each other in the eyes wisely and nod their heads and
say that human nature will not change.
We will change it. If we cannot get but two or three together to change
it, then two or three by just being two or three and by daring to be two
or three, or even one if necessary shall change it.
The moment ninety million people in a great nation have welded out a
vision of the kind of man of wealth--the kind of employer they want, the
moment they set the millionaire in the vise of some great national
expectation, carve upon him firmly, implacably the will of the people,
the people will have the millionaire they want. If a nation really wants
a great man it invents him. We have hut to see we really want him, and
that no other machinery will work, and we will invent him.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Here in these United States sixty
years ago were we not all at work on a man named Abraham Lincoln? We had
been at work on him for years trying to make him into a Lincoln. He
could not have begun to be what he was without us, without the daily
thought, the responsibility, the tragical national hope and fear, the
sense of crisis in a great people. All these had been set to work on
him, on making him a Lincoln.
Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man
with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful,
believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons'
lives in his hands. He did not have the smallest possible chance from
the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray
a nation, or to back down out of being himself. He had been filled night
and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim
glory of it. He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way
he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it,
if he had tried. We had clinched Lincoln in 1862. He was caught fast in
the vise of our hopes.
Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be
siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in
them that they get them.
If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and
kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born
again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and
overshadow him. They will create him, in scorn and joy will they
conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth.
It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true,
steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the
vision, the expectation of a great nation.
To be born again is simple with ninety million people to help. We have
all been born again in little things with a few people to help. We have
been swung over from little short motives to big, long-levered
controlling ones. We have known in a small way what Conversion is. We
have seen how naturally it works out in little things.
There is nothing new about it. There is not a man who does not know what
it is to get over a small motive. We have seen, when we looked back,
what it was that happened.
The way to get over a small motive is to let it get lost in a big one.
A man does not stop to pick up a penny or a million dollars when he is
running to save his life.
A man does not stop to pick up two pennies, or two thousand dollars, or
two million dollars when he is running to save ten thousand lives or
running to save ninety million lives, when he is running to save a city
or a nation.
This is Conversion--entering into the World's Womb, the world's vision
or expectation and being born again.
* * * * *
It is not for nothing that I have seen the sun lifting up the faces of
the flowers, and crumbling the countenances of the hills. And I have
seen music stirring faintly in the bones of old men. And I have heard
the dead Beethoven singing in the feet of children.
And I have watched the Little Earth in its little round of seasons
dancing before the Lord.
And I have believed that music is wrought into all things, and that the
people I see about me have not one of them been left out.
I believe in sunshine and in hothouses. I believe in burning glasses. I
believe in focusing light into heat and heat into white fire, and
turning white fire into little flowing brooks of steel.
And I believe in focusing men upon men.
I believe in Conversion.
Of course it would all be different--focusing men upon men, if men were
cogs and wheels, or if the men they were focused on were made of stones.
I stand and look at this stone and believe it is all rubber and
whalebone inside.
But what of it?
It does not get true.
While I am looking at a man and believing a certain thing about the man,
it gets true.
What is going on in my mind while I look at him effects actual
mechanical changes in him, affects the flow of blood in his veins. A
look colours him, whitens him, twists and turns the muscles and tissues
in his body. I draw lines upon his inmost being. I lay down a new face
upon his face. A moment after I look upon the man's face it has become,
as it were, or may have become, a new little landscape. I have seen a
great country opened up in him of what he might be like. While I look I
have been ushered softly, for a second, into the presence of a man who
was not there before.
Such things have happened.
Beatrice looked at Dante once. Ten silent centuries began singing.
A man named Stephen, one day, while he was dying, gave a look at a man
named Paul. Paul came away quietly and hewed out history for two
thousand years.