It seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and
implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result of
that speedily is that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them
from chaos. But there is really no need to choose between anarchy and
tyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is practicable if we proceed
on human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults will frankly
give up their claim to know better than children what the purposes
of the Life Force are, and treat the child as an experiment like
themselves, and possibly a more successful one, and at the same time
relinquish their monstrous parental claims to personal private property
in children, the rest must be left to common sense. It is our attitude,
our religion, that is wrong. A good beginning might be made by enacting
that any person dictating a piece of conduct to a child or to anyone
else as the will of God, or as absolutely right, should be dealt with
as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the unpardonable sin against the
Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at once of that
scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raise
the cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes.
From curates and governesses, who may claim a sort of professional
standing, to parents and uncles and nurserymaids and school teachers
and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of human insects
groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own
tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every
possible subject; to explain how and why the universe was made (in my
youth they added the exact date) and the circumstances under which
it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right and wrong
conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious
character; and all this with such certainty that they are prepared to
visit all the rigors of the law, and all the ruinous penalties of social
ostracism on people, however harmless their actions maybe who venture
to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions the
extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall
say what canings and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire
and impositions and humiliations and petty imprisonings and sendings
to bed and standing in corners and the like they have suffered because
their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much better
than Socrates or Solon?
It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger on the
planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough
ridicule to cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens.
Just as our ill health delivers us into the hands of medical quacks and
creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences that doctors can
cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance and
helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretend
that they can save our souls from their own damnation. If a doctor were
to say to his patients, "I am familiar with your symptoms, because I
have seen other people in your condition; and I will bring the very
little knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that very
shallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cant
undertake to cure you," he would be a lost man professionally; and if a
clergyman, on being called on to award a prize for good conduct in
the village school, were to say, "I am afraid I cannot say who is the
best-behaved child, because I really do not know what good conduct is;
but I will gladly take the teacher's word as to which child has
caused least inconvenience," he would probably be unfrocked, if not
excommunicated. And yet no honest and intellectually capable doctor or
parson can say more. Clearly it would not be wise of the doctor to say
it, because optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a
doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
And a clergyman who is not prepared to lay down the law dogmatically
will not be of much use in a village school, though it behoves him all
the more to be very careful what law he lays down. But unless both the
clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these speeches
they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more
than a provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have
to act vigorously on it. The world has no use for the Agnostic who wont
believe anything because anything might be false, and wont deny anything
because anything might be true. But there is a wide difference between
saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or, "I dont
believe it; and I wont act on it," and saying, "It is true; and it is
my duty and yours to act on it," or, "It is false; and it is my duty
and yours to refuse to act on it." The difference is as great as that
between the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed. When you repeat
the Apostles' Creed you affirm that you believe certain things. There
you are clearly within your rights. When you repeat the Athanasian
Creed, you affirm that certain things are so, and that anybody who
doubts that they are so cannot be saved. And this is simply a piece of
impudence on your part, as you know nothing about it except that as good
men as you have never heard of your creed. The apostolic attitude is
a desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of sympathy and
light: the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who dont
agree with us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate a law
for the speedy execution of all Athanasians, because they violate the
fundamental proposition of my creed, which is, I repeat, that all
living creatures are experiments. The precise formula for the Superman,
_ci-devant_ The Just Man Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered.
Until it is, every birth is an experiment in the Great Research which is
being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.