REBELLION AND REFORM.
Rebellion and reform are not exactly twins, but they are very closely
related. For while all rebellion is not reform, yet in the widest sense
of the word, there is no reform without rebellion. To fight for reform
is to rebel against the existing order and is part of the eternal and
fundamentally healthful struggle of the new against the old, and of the
living present against the dead past. The rebel is thus at once a public
danger and a benefactor. He threatens the existing order, but it is in
the name of a larger and better social life. And because of this it is
his usual lot to be crucified when living and deified when dead. So it
has always been, so in its main features will it always be. If
contemporaries were to recognize the reformer as such, they would
destroy his essential function by making it useless. Improvement would
become an automatic process that would perfect itself without
opposition. As it is, the function of the rebel is to act as an
explosive force, and no society of average human beings likes
explosions. They are noisy, and they are dangerous. For the reformer to
complain at not being hailed as a deliverer is for him to mistake his
part and place in social evolution.
The rebel and the reformer is, again, always in minority. That follows
from what has already been said. It follows, too, from what we know of
development in general. Darwinism rests on the supreme importance of the
minority. It is an odd variation here and there that acts as the
starting point for a new species--and it has against it the swamping
influence of the rest of its kind that treads the old biological line.
Nature's choicest variations are of necessity with the few, and when
that variation has established itself and become normal another has to
appear before a new start can be made.
Whether we take biology or psychology the same condition appears. A new
idea occurs to an individual and it is as strictly a variation from the
normal as anything that occurs in the animal world. The idea may form
the starting point of a new theory, or perhaps of a new social order.
But to establish itself, to become the characteristic property of the
group, it must run the gamut of persecution and the risk of suppression.
And suppressed it often is--for a time. It is an idle maxim which
teaches that truth always conquers, if by that is implied that it does
so at once. That is not the truth. Lies have been victorious over and
over again. The Roman Catholic Church, one of the greatest lies in the
history of the human race, stood the conqueror for many centuries. The
teaching of the rotundity of the earth and its revolution round the sun
was suppressed for hundreds of years until it was revived in the 16th
century. In the long run truth does emerge, but a lie may have a
terribly lengthy innings. For the lie is accepted by the many, while the
truth is seen only by the few. But it is the few to whom we turn when we
look over the names of those who have made the world what is it. All the
benefits to society come from the few, and society crucifies them to
show its gratitude. One may put it that society lives on the usual, but
flourishes on account of the exception.
Now there is something extremely significant in the Christian religion
tracing all the disasters of mankind to a primal act of disobedience. It
is a fact which discloses in a flash the chief social function of
religion in general and of Christianity in particular. Man's duty is
summed up in the one word obedience, and the function of the
(religiously) good man is to obey the commands of God, as that of the
good citizen is to obey the commands of government. The two commands
meet and supplement each other with the mutual advantage which results
from the adjustment of the upper and lower jaws of a hyena. And it
explains why the powers that be have always favoured the claims of
religion. It enabled them to rally to their aid the tremendous and
stupefying aid of religion and to place rebellion to their orders on the
same level as rebellion against God. In Christian theology Satan is the
arch-rebel; hell is full of rebellious angels and disobedient men and
women. Heaven is reserved for the timid, the tame, the obedient, the
sheep-like. When the Christ of the Gospels divides the people into goats
and sheep, it is the former that go to hell, and the latter to heaven.
The Church has not a rebel in its calendar, although it has not a few
rogues and many fools. To the Church rebellion is always a sin, save on
those rare occasions when revolt is ordered in the interests of the
Church itself. In Greek mythology Prometheus steals fire from heaven for
the benefit of man and suffers in consequence. The myth symbolizes the
fact. Always the man has had to win knowledge and happiness in the teeth
of opposition from the gods. Always the race has owed its progress to
the daring of the rebel or of the rebellious few.
Often the Freethinker is denounced because he is destructive or
dangerous. What other is he expected to be? And would he be of much use
if he were otherwise?? I would go further and say that he is the most
destructive of all agencies because he is so intimately concerned with
the handling of the most destructive of weapons--ideas. We waste a good
deal of time in denouncing certain people as dangerous when they are in
reality comparatively harmless. A man throws a bomb, or breaks into a
house, or robs one of a purse, and a judge solemnly denounces him as a
most "dangerous member of society." It is all wrong. These are
comparatively harmless individuals. One man throws a bomb, kills a few
people, damages some property, and there the matter ends. Another man
comes along and drops instead of a bomb a few ideas, and the whole
country is in a state of eruption. Charles Peace pursues a career of
piety and crime, gets himself comfortably and religiously hanged, and
society congratulates itself on having got rid of a dangerous person,
and then forgets all about it. Karl Marx visits England, prowls round
London studying the life of rich and poor, and drops _Das Kapital_ on
us. A quiet and outwardly inoffensive individual, one who never gave the
police a moment's anxiety, spends years studying earthworms, and
flowers, and horses and cats, and all sorts of moving things and
presents society with _The Origin of Species_. Organized society found
itself able to easily guard itself against the attacks of men such as
Charles Peace, it may with impunity extend its hospitality to the
thrower of bombs, or robber of houses, but by what means can it protect
itself against the "peaceful" Marx or the "harmless" Darwin? No society
can afford to ignore in its midst a score of original or independent
thinkers, or if society does ignore them they will not for long ignore
society. The thinker is really destructive. He destroys because he
creates; he creates because he destroys. The one is the obverse of the
other.
I am not making idle play with the word "destruction." It is literally
true that in human society the most destructive and the most coercive
forces at work are ideas. They strike at established institutions and
demand either their modification or their removal. That is why the
emergence of a new idea is always an event of social significance.
Whether it be a good idea or a bad one will not affect the truth of this
statement. For over four years our political mediocrities and muddle
headed militarists were acting as though the real problem before them
was to establish the superiority of one armed group of men over another
group. That was really a simple matter. The important issue which
society had to face was the ideas that the shock of the war must give
rise to. Thinkers saw this; but thinkers do not get the public ear
either as politicians or militarists. And now events are driving home
the lesson. The ideas of Bolshevism and Sinn Feinism proved far more
"dangerous" than the German armies. The Allied forces could handle the
one, but they were powerless before the other. It is not a question of
whether these particular ideas are good or bad, or whether we approve or
disapprove of them, but entirely one that, being ideas, they represent a
far more "destructive" power than either bomb or gun. They are at once
the forces that act as the cement of society and those that may hurl it
into chaotic fragments.
Whether an idea will survive or not must, in the end, be determined by
circumstances, but in itself a new idea may be taken as the mental
analogue of the variation which takes place in physical structures, and
which forms the raw material of natural selection. And if that is so, it
is evident that any attempt to prevent the play of new ideas on old
institutions is striking at the very fact of progress. For if we are to
encourage variation we must permit it in all directions, up as well as
down, for evil as well as for good. You cannot check variation in one
direction without checking it in all. You cannot prevent the appearance
of a new idea that you do not want without threatening the appearance of
a number of ideas that you would eagerly welcome. It is, therefore,
always better to encourage the appearance of a bad idea than it is to
risk the suppression of a good one. Besides, it is not always that force
applied to the suppression of ideas succeeds in its object. What it
often does is to cause the persecuted idea to assume a more violent
form, to ensure a more abrupt break with the past than would otherwise
occur, with the risk of a period of reaction before orderly progress is
resumed. The only way to silence an idea is to answer it. You cannot
reply to a belief with bullets, or bayonet a theory into silence.
History contains many lessons, but none that is plainer than this one,
and none that religious and secular tyrannies learn with greater
reluctance.
The Churches admit by their practice the truth of what has been said.
They have always understood that the right way to keep society in a
stationary position is to prevent the introduction of new ideas. It is
thought against which they have warred, the thinker against whom they
have directed their deadliest weapons. The Christian Church has been
tolerant towards the criminal, and has always been intolerant towards
the heretic and the Freethinker. For the latter the naming _auto da fe_,
for the former the moderate penance and the "go, and sin no more." The
worst of its tortures were neither created for nor applied to the thief
and the assassin, but were specially designed for the unbeliever. In
this the Church acted with a sure instinct. The thief threatens no
institution, not even that of private property. "Thou shalt not steal"
is as much the law of a thieves' kitchen as it is of Mayfair. But
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lyell, Darwin, these are the men who
convey a threat in all they write, who destroy and create with a
splendour that smacks of the power with which Christians have endowed
their mythical deity. No aggregation of criminals has ever threatened
the security of the Church, or even disturbed its serenity. On the
contrary, the worse, morally, the time, the greater the influence of
Christianity. It flourishes on human weakness and social vice as the
bacilli of tuberculosis do in darkness and dirt. It is when weakness
gives place to strength, and darkness to light that the Church finds its
power weakening. The Church could forgive the men who instituted the
black slave trade, she could forgive those who were responsible for the
horrors of the English factory system, but she could never forgive the
writer of the _Age of Reason_. She has always known how to distinguish
her friends from her foes.
Right or wrong, then, the heretic, the Freethinker, represents a figure
of considerable social significance. His social value does not lie
wholly in the fact of his opinions being sound or his judgment
impeccable. Mere revolt or heresy can never carry that assurance with
it. The important thing about the rebel is that he represents a spirit,
a temper, in the absence of which society would stagnate. It is bad when
people revolt without cause, but it is infinitely better that a people
should revolt without cause than that they should have cause for
rebellion without possessing the courage of a kick. That man should have
the courage to revolt against the thing which he believes to be wrong is
of infinitely greater consequence than that he should be right in
condemning the thing against which he revolts. Whether the rebel is
right or wrong time and consequence alone can tell, but nothing can make
good the evil of a community reduced to sheep-like acquiescence in
whatever may be imposed upon them. The "Their's not to reason why"
attitude, however admirable in an army, is intolerable and dangerous in
social life. Replying to those who shrieked about the "horrors" of the
French Revolution, and who preached the virtue of patriotic obedience to
established authority, Carlyle, with an eye on Ireland, sarcastically
admitted that the "horrors" were very bad indeed, but he added:--
What if history somewhere on this planet were to hear of a nation,
the third soul of whom had not for thirty weeks of each year as
many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him? History in that
case, feels bound to consider that starvation is starvation; that
starvation presupposes much; history ventures to assert that the
French Sansculotte of Nine-three, who roused from a long death
sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers and die fighting for an
immortal hope and faith of deliverance for him and his, was but the
second miserablest of men.
And that same history, looking back through the ages, is bound to
confess that it is to the great rebels, from Satan onward, that the
world mainly owes whatever of greatness or happiness it has achieved.
One other quality of the rebel remains to be noted. In his revolt
against established authority, in his determination to wreck cherished
institutions for the realization of an ideal, the rebel is not the
representative of an anti-social idea or of an anti-social force. He is
the true representative of the strongest of social influences. The very
revolt against the social institutions that exist is in the name and for
the realization of a larger and a better social order that he hopes to
create. A man who is ready to sacrifice his life in the pursuit of an
ideal cannot, whatever else he may be accused of, be reasonably accused
of selfishness or of a want of "social consciousness." He is a vital
expression of the centuries of social life which have gone before and
which have made us all what we are. Were his social sense weaker he
would risk less. Were he selfish he would not trouble about the
conversion of his fellows. The spirit of revolt represents an important
factor in the process of social development, and they who are most
strenuous in their denunciation of social control, are often, even
though unconsciously, the strongest evidence of its overpowering
influence.
Fed as we are with the mental food prepared by our Churches and
governments, to whose interests it is that the rebel and the Freethinker
should be decried and denounced, we are all too apt to overlook the
significance of the rebel. Yet he is invariably the one who voices what
the many are afraid or unable to express. The masses suffer dumbly, and
the persistence of their suffering breeds a sense of its inevitability.
It is only when these dumb masses find a voice that they threaten the
established order, and for this the man of ideas is essential. That is
why all vested interests, religious and social, hate him so heartily.
They recognize that of all the forces with which they deal an idea is
the greatest and the most untamable. Once in being it is the most
difficult to suppress. It is more explosive than dynamite and more
shattering in its effects. Physical force may destroy a monarch, but it
is only the force of an idea that can destroy a monarchy. You may
destroy a church with cannon, but cannon are powerless against Church
doctrines. An idea comes as near realizing the quality of
indestructibility as anything we know. You may quiet anything in the
world with greater ease than you may reduce a strong thinker to silence,
or subdue anything with greater facility than you may subdue the idea
that is born of strenuous thought. Fire may be extinguished and strife
made to cease, ambition may be killed and the lust for power grow faint.
The one thing that defies all and that finally conquers is the truth
which strong men see and for which brave men fight.
It is thus left for the philosophy of Freethought, comprehensive here as
elsewhere, to find a place for the rebel and to recognize the part he
plays in the evolution of the race. For rebellion roots itself
ultimately in the spirit of mental independence. And that whether a
particular act of revolt may be justifiable or not. It is bred of the
past, but it looks forward hopefully and fearlessly to the future, and
it sees in the present the material out of which that better future may
be carved. That the mass of people find in the rebel someone whom it is
moved to suppress is in no wise surprising. New things are not at first
always pleasant, even though they may be necessary. But the temper of
mind from which rebellion springs is one that society can only suppress
at its peril.