SALVATION: INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL
One of the defects of traditional religion is its individualism,
and this defect belongs also to the morality associated with it.
Traditionally, the religious life was, as it were, a duologue between
the soul and God. To obey the will of God was virtue; and this was
possible for the individual quite regardless of the state of the
community. Protestant sects developed the idea of “finding salvation”,
but it was always present in Christian teaching. This individualism of
the separate soul had its value at certain stages of history, but in
the modern world we need rather a social than an individual conception
of welfare. I want to consider, in this chapter, how this affects our
conception of the good life.
Christianity arose in the Roman Empire among populations wholly
destitute of political power, whose national States had been destroyed
and merged in a vast impersonal aggregate. During the first three
centuries of the Christian Era, the individuals who adopted Christianity
could not alter the social or political institutions under which they
lived, although they were profoundly convinced of their badness. In
these circumstances, it was natural that they should adopt the belief
that an individual may be perfect in an imperfect world, and that the
good life has nothing to do with this world. What I mean may become
plain by comparison with Plato’s Republic. When Plato wanted to describe
the good life, he described a whole community, not an individual; he did
so in order to define justice, which is an essentially social
conception. He was accustomed to citizenship of a Republic, and
political responsibility was something which he took for granted. With
the loss of Greek freedom comes the rise of Stoicism, which is like
Christianity, and unlike Plato, in having an individualistic conception
of the good life.
We, who belong to great democracies, should find a more appropriate
morality in free Athens than in despotic Imperial Rome. In India, where
the political circumstances are very similar to those of Judea in the
time of Christ, we find Gandhi preaching a very similar morality to
Christ’s, and being punished for it by the christianized successors
of Pontius Pilate. But the more extreme Indian nationalists are not
content with individual salvation: they want national salvation. In
this they have taken on the outlook of the free democracies of the
West. I want to suggest some respects in which this outlook, owing to
Christian influences, is not yet sufficiently bold and self-conscious,
but is still hampered by the belief in individual salvation.
The good life, as we conceive it, demands a multitude of social
conditions, and cannot be realized without them. The good life, we
said, is a life inspired by love and guided by knowledge. The knowledge
required can only exist where governments or millionaires devote
themselves to its discovery and diffusion. For example: the spread of
cancer is alarming――what are we to do about it? At the moment, no one
can answer the question for lack of knowledge; and the knowledge is not
likely to emerge except through endowed research. Again: knowledge of
science, history, literature, and art ought to be attainable by all
who desire it; this requires elaborate arrangements on the part of
public authorities, and is not to be achieved by means of religious
conversion. Then there is foreign trade, without which half the
inhabitants of Great Britain would starve; and if we were starving
very few of us would live the good life. It is needless to multiply
examples. The important point is that, in all that differentiates
between a good life and a bad one, the world is a unity, and the man
who pretends to live independently is a conscious or unconscious
parasite.
The idea of individual salvation, with which the early Christians
consoled themselves for their political subjection, becomes impossible
as soon as we escape from a very narrow conception of the good life.
In the orthodox Christian conception, the good life is the virtuous
life, and virtue consists in obedience to the will of God, and the will
of God is revealed to each individual through the voice of conscience.
This whole conception is that of men subject to an alien despotism. The
good life involves much besides virtue――intelligence, for instance.
And conscience is a most fallacious guide, since it consists of vague
reminiscences of precepts heard in early youth, so that it is never
wiser than its possessor’s nurse or mother. To live a good life in the
fullest sense a man must have a good education, friends, love, children
(if he desires them), a sufficient income to keep him from want and
grave anxiety, good health, and work which is not uninteresting. All
these things, in varying degrees, depend upon the community, and are
helped or hindered by political events. The good life must be lived in
a good society, and is not fully possible otherwise.
This is the fundamental defect of the aristocratic ideal. Certain good
things, such as art and science and friendship, can flourish very
well in an aristocratic society. They existed in Greece on a basis of
slavery; they exist among ourselves on a basis of exploitation. But
love, in the form of sympathy or benevolence, cannot exist freely in
an aristocratic society. The aristocrat has to persuade himself that
the slave or proletarian or coloured man is of inferior clay, and
that his sufferings do not matter. At the present moment, polished
English gentlemen flog Africans so severely that they die after hours
of unspeakable anguish. Even if these gentlemen are well-educated,
artistic, and admirable conversationalists, I cannot admit that they
are living the good life. Human nature imposes some limitation of
sympathy, but not such a degree as that. In a democratically-minded
society, only a maniac would behave in this way. The limitation of
sympathy involved in the aristocratic ideal is its condemnation.
Salvation is an aristocratic ideal, because it is individualistic. For
this reason, also, the idea of personal salvation, however interpreted
and expanded, cannot serve for the definition of the good life.
Another characteristic of salvation is that it results from a
catastrophic change, like the conversion of Saint Paul. Shelley’s
poems afford an illustration of this conception applied to societies;
the moment comes when everybody is converted, the “anarchs” fly, and
“the world’s great age begins anew”. It may be said that a poet is
an unimportant person, whose ideas are of no consequence. But I am
persuaded that a large proportion of revolutionary leaders have had
ideas extremely like Shelley’s. They have thought that misery and
cruelty and degradation were due to tyrants or priests or capitalists
or Germans, and that if these sources of evil were overthrown there
would be a general change of heart and we should all live happy ever
after. Holding these beliefs, they have been willing to wage a “war to
end war”. Comparatively fortunate were those who suffered defeat or
death; those who had the misfortune to emerge victorious were reduced
to cynicism and despair by the failure of all their glowing hopes.
The ultimate source of these hopes was the Christian doctrine of
catastrophic conversion as the road to salvation.
I do not wish to suggest that revolutions are never necessary, but I
do wish to suggest that they are not short cuts to the millennium.
There is no short cut to the good life, whether individual or social.
To build up the good life, we must build up intelligence, self-control,
and sympathy. This is a quantitative matter, a matter of gradual
improvement, of early training, of educational experiment. Only
impatience prompts the belief in the possibility of sudden improvement.
The gradual improvement that is possible, and the methods by which it
may be achieved, are a matter for future science. But something can be
said now. Some part of what can be said I shall try to indicate in a
final chapter.