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Title: The open conspiracy
Blue prints for a world revolution
Author: H. G. Wells
Release date: April 4, 2025 [eBook #75786]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc, 1928
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OPEN CONSPIRACY ***
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY
MR. WELLS HAS ALSO WRITTEN THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ON SOCIAL, RELIGIOUS AND
POLITICAL QUESTIONS
Anticipations (1900)
A Modern Utopia
The Future in America
New Worlds for Old
First and Last Things
God the Invisible King
The Outline of History
Russia in the Shadows
The Salvaging of Civilisation
Washington and the Hope of Peace
A Short History of the World
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster
A Year of Prophesying
Democracy Under Revision
History
Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of History
The Way the World Is Going
H. G. WELLS
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY BLUE PRINTS FOR A WORLD REVOLUTION
[Illustration: Colophon Doubleday, Doran]
GARDEN CITY
NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
AND COMPANY, INC.
1928
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
& COMPANY, INC. ALL EIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
To
DANIEL GERBAULT
who asked me to
write this book
PREFACE
This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas
of my life, the perspective of my world. Everything else that I have
been or done seems to me to have been contributory to or illustrative
of these ideas and suggestions. My other writings, with hardly an
exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of
the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its
foundations and state unmistakably. This is my religion. Here are my
directive aims and the criteria of all I do.
Since the subject of this book is the whole destiny of man, and the
whole duty of man, it will certainly be called a pretentious book.
That will be a charge too obvious to miss and we can consider it made.
But it is no more pretentious to work upon the whole of life than upon
parts and aspects of life; it is a question of scale and method; the
intellectual effort needed, the quality of the work required for making
the map of a continent may be less than and inferior to that demanded
by the chemical examination of a muscle fibre or the investigation of
atomic structure. A man is not pretentious because he works with the
theodolite instead of the microscope. Some men work upon the bulkier
common issues; some upon finer and subtler questions. To every man his
task. There is no hierarchy in human thought.
Here, given tentatively, with many evident faults and gaps, is a scheme
for all human conduct. It discusses what should man be doing and what
should men be doing. It states a general form and direction for the
crowding rush of modern ideas and impulsions. I believe that upon
such lines as I have drawn, the creative forces in our species can
be organised and may be organised, in a comprehensive fight against
individual and collective frustration and death. I believe also that
there is no other direction but this direction along which mankind can
escape from the insecurity of an animal which has been evolved and
which may presently be degraded or extinguished in the play of material
things. The accident of a great opportunity, I hold, has happened to
our kind. It is opportunity and not destiny we face.
So I bear my witness and argue my design. This is, I declare, the truth
and the way of salvation. If I could, I would put this book before
every mind in the world. I would say, tell me where this is wrong, or
tell me why you do not live after these principles.
I pray the reader for a patient reading. This is, I submit, matter of
very great moment to him. My phrasing, my idiom of thought may not be
his. Will he forgive that for the sake of the substance I am putting
before him? It is astir already in many intelligences and it is an
amplifying group of ideas. I am merely the observer who notes his own
adhesion and draws attention, eagerly and earnestly, to what is going
on and to the quality of our present occasion. Will the reader at
least try to understand before he refutes? I am discussing here the
possibility of an immense and hopeful revolution in human affairs and
of an enlivening and ennobling change in our lives. I am discussing
whether our species, he and I with it and part of it, is to live or
die.
CONTENTS
Preface _p._ vii
Ch. I. Necessity of Religion to Human Life 1
II. Subordination of Self the Essence of Religion 8
III. Need for a Restatement of Religion 11
IV. Objective Expression of Modern Religion 20
V. The Frame of the Task before Mankind:
The World Commonweal 27
VI. Broad Characteristics of the World Commonweal 32
VII. No Stable Utopia Is Contemplated 55
VIII. The Open Conspiracy Must Be Heterogeneous 57
IX. Forces and Resistances in the Great Modern
Communities Now Prevalent, Which Will Be
Antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy 68
X. The Open Conspiracy and the Resistances of
the Less Industrialised Peoples 95
XI. Resistances and Antagonistic Forces in Ourselves 112
XII. The Open Conspiracy Must begin as a Movement
of Explanation and Propaganda 126
XIII. Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy 144
XIV. Existing and Developing Movements with Which
the Open Conspiracy May Hope to Coalesce 164
XV. The Creative Home, Social Group and School: The
Present Waste of Youthful Seriousness 178
XVI. Progressive Development of the Activities of
the Open Conspiracy into a World Control and
Commonweal: The Hazards of the Conflict 185
XVII. The World Community 194
Marginal Note 197
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY
_Chapter I_
NECESSITY OF RELIGION TO HUMAN LIFE
Few people, if any, are always sustained by unselfish or religious
motives, and few or none are altogether beyond their influence.
The daily lives of the great majority of human beings are frankly
irreligious; they seem to differ only in their scope, variety and
intelligence from the lives of animals; they are determined by
instinctive impulses, individual desires and personal ends; they pass
from one satisfaction or disappointment to another; they are attracted
and deflected by casual encounters; they forget more or less completely
and they resume. Nevertheless, the conduct of most lives is restricted
and defined by the prevalent conceptions of what is honourable and
becoming, and right and wrong. Although the lives of the great run of
people are neither moral essentially nor essentially religious, they
respect current moral and religious forms and maxims, just as they
conform to current usages and beaten tracks. It is the line of least
resistance for them, and that suffices.
Communities have been held together in the past and are still held
together by laws and moral codes systematised upon religious ideas,
and this although few people have more than a superficial apprehension
of such ideas. Religion in its completeness has always been the
peculiarity of a minority; it has shaped and innervated communities
but never pervaded them throughout. But its presence seems to have
been necessary for collective life. Without it morality was baseless
and law unjustifiable. The intermittent disposition of most human
beings towards some sort of righteousness beyond self-seeking has been
upheld, as some sprawling, weak-jointed climbing plant may be upheld
on a trellis, by that more steadfast minority of sincere and devoted
persons. It is these latter who have preserved disinterested standards,
and who still preserve them; who have been and who continue to be the
salt of the earth.
Religious ideas in the past have derived from the most diverse
emotional and intellectual origins in the integrating mind of
man. Speculative explanations, metaphors hardened by usage into
quasi-factual statements, fantasies arising out of germinating
and suppressed impulses, false analogies, parables begotten and
lit by flashes of spiritual insight, traditions misconceived and
distorted, dogmatic excesses in explicitness evoked by the irritation
of contradictory criticism, the odd compromises of theological
diplomatists, the craving for supernatural sanctions and vindications
and the nightmare creations of fear, that haunting shadow of all
conscious life, have mingled inextricably in every religious fabric.
But the survival value of a religion to a community has lain always in
the practical assistance it afforded in the subordination of self and
the achievement of co-operative loyalties not otherwise obtainable.
No community seems ever to have been held together in wholesome
and vigorous collective life by “enlightened self-interest” alone.
Enlightened self-interest in exceptional cases and under slight or
moderate stresses may produce enough simulated disinterestedness to be
practically undistinguishable from public virtue, and the great mass of
lives in every community is no doubt kept at this or that moral level,
and in this or that form of behaviour according to the quality and
intensity of the beliefs that hold that community together with little
or no co-operating force in the lives themselves. But somewhere and
effectively in that community the sustaining beliefs of the community
must be passionately and sincerely held and maintained. A community
where binding beliefs have decayed altogether is like a building whose
mortar has been changed to sand. It may stand for a time, but it stands
precariously.
Now in the communities in which we are living to-day there has been
a far-reaching weakening and change in religious beliefs. This has
been due to an enormous growth of knowledge, to an enhanced vigour
of criticism, to a relative enfeeblement of government and authority
which released unprecedented freedom of speech and permitted the
crystallisation of doubts into coherent and militant denials. At the
same time there have been developments of the mechanical conditions of
life that have enlarged the scale of possible human operations, made
economical life increasingly international and brought once autonomous
states and regions into a mutually disintegrative intimacy of reaction.
The stresses upon our communities are greater than they have ever
been and the blinding forces less. The outlook before our race seems
therefore to be wider, more uncertain and much more dangerous than has
ever appeared before.
In the past, in the history of every community there have been
phases of moral and religious confusion. The beliefs and ideas of
right conduct that have served hitherto begin, in the presence of
new circumstances or new challenges, to lose authority or to fail in
meeting current moral problems. An age of relaxation and a sort of
experimental wickedness dawns. Scruples vanish. Treachery, cruelty,
unrestrained self-indulgence, which have been kept under hatches,
emerge conspicuously. Government becomes more adventurous, tyrannous
and unjust, and the moral distinction between ruler and brigand fines
away to the vanishing-point. There seems no longer any good faith
nor any sweetness of soul in human life, except among the sacrificial
simple. What will for a better life still manifests itself in the world
is for a while quite unable to take hold of the disorder. Italy in
the Machiavellian period and Germany after the intricate wars of the
Reformation may be cited as typical instances of such “wicked” phases
in social history. Yet it was not that the heart of man changed for
the worse in those ages, not that there was a sudden generation of
vipers, but that intellectual confusion had divided and enfeebled that
graver-spirited minority which had, under more assured conditions,
sustained the faith of most people and the moral disciplines of
everyone. The quality of the ingredients of the human mixture remained
the same, but the restraining and directive forces had in their
interplay come upon a phase of mutual neutralisation and collective
ineffectiveness.
There are many signs that to-day over large parts of the world there is
a drift towards such another disintegrative and distressful phase. The
brigand, the boss and the adventurer become portentously successful
and immune. People who, in other times, would have been active and
confident in their own lives and vigorously co-operative in the control
of human affairs are uncertain in their hearts and unhappy in their
interventions. The old faiths have become unconvincing, unsubstantial
and insincere, and though there are clear intimations of a new faith in
the world, it still awaits embodiment in formulæ and organisations that
will bring it into effective reaction upon human affairs as a whole.
This present essay is an attempt to assemble these intimations in a
form that will be available for the practical direction of the writer’s
and the reader’s life.
_Chapter II_
SUBORDINATION OF SELF THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION
The religions that hitherto have served over wide regions and for
considerable periods of time to sustain men in more or less orderly,
honest, decent and progressive societies, have been presented to the
generality and accepted by the generality in extremely attenuated
forms. In their beginnings they were all intense and uncompromising.
Christianity, for example, began with the completest communism,
Buddhism with an entire renunciation of earthly desire, Islam with the
passionate and forcible dedication of the whole world to Allah. Sooner
or later, however, the propagandist came to terms with human weakness
and struck a bargain for a cheaper form of common proselyte.
But though the creed and practice might need lightening and fitting to
customary humanity before they could be universally accepted, there
appeared no essential conflict in the process between the intense and
the superficial form. The common man assented to everything in the
doctrine, and merely asked to have the more difficult and onerous terms
deferred or mitigated. His plea for his personal insufficiency was
weakness and not dissent.
In their completeness, in their esoteric forms, in the life that was
professionally _religious_, religions have always demanded great
subordinations of self. Therein lay their creative usefulness. There
is no such thing as a self-contained religion, a private religious
solo. Certain forms of Protestantism and some mystical types come
near to making religion a secluded duet between the individual and
his divinity, but here that may be regarded as a perversion of the
religious impulse. Just as the normal sexual complex excites and stirs
the individual out of his egotism to serve the ends of the race, so the
normal religious process takes the individual out of his egotism for
the service of the community. It is not a bargain, a “social contract,”
between the individual and the community; it is a subordination of
both the existing individual and the existing community in relation to
something, a divinity, a divine order, a standard, a righteousness,
more important than either. What is called in the phraseology of
certain religions “conviction of sin” and “the flight from the City
of Destruction” are familiar instances of this reference of the
self-centred individual and the current social life to something far
better than either the one or the other.
This is the third element in the religious relationship, a hope, a
promise, an objective which turns the convert not only from himself
but from the “world” as it is, towards better things. First comes
self-disregard, then service, and then this reconstructive creative
urgency.
For that minority of minds which I have already spoken of as the
salt of the earth, this aspect of religion seems to have been its
primary attraction. One has to remember that there is a will for
religion scattered throughout mankind. Religion has never pursued its
distinctive votaries; they have come to meet it. The desire to give
oneself to greater ends than the everyday life affords, and to give
oneself freely, is clearly dominant in that minority and traceable in
an incalculable proportion of the majority.
_Chapter III_
NEED FOR A RESTATEMENT OF RELIGION
Every great religion has explained itself in the form of a history and
a cosmogony. It has been felt necessary to say _Why_ and _To
what end_. Every religion has had necessarily to adopt the physical
conceptions and usually also to assume many of the moral and social
values current at the time of its foundation. It could not transcend
the philosophical phrases and attitudes that seemed then to supply the
natural frame for a faith, nor draw upon anything beyond the store of
scientific knowledge of its time. In these conditions lurked the seeds
of an ultimate decay and supersession of every religion.
But as the idea of continual change going farther and farther from
existing realities and never returning to them is a new one, each fresh
development of religion in the world so far has been proclaimed in
perfect good faith as the culminating and final truth. The suggestion
of the possibility of further restatement is an unsettling suggestion;
it seems to undermine conviction and it breaks the ranks of the
believers because there are enormous variations in the capacities of
men to recognise the same spirit under a changing shape. While some
intelligences can recognise the same God under a variety of names and
symbols without any severe strain, others cannot even detect the most
contrasted Gods one from the other, provided they wear the same mask
and title. It appears a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to many
minds to restate religion in terms of biological and psychological
necessity, while to others any variation in the phrasing of the faith
seems to be nothing less than atheistical misrepresentations of the
most damnable kind. For them God, a God still anthropomorphic enough
to have a will and purpose, to display preferences and reciprocate
emotions, to be indeed a person, must be retained until the end of
time. For others, God can be thought of as a Great First Cause, as
impersonal and inhuman as atomic structure.
It is because of the historical and philosophical commitments they
have undertaken, and because of concessions made to common human
weaknesses in regard to such once apparently minor but now vital moral
issues as property, mental activity and public veracity--rather than
of any inadequacy in their adaptation to psychological needs--that
the present discredit of recognised religions has come about. They no
longer seem even roughly truthful upon issues of fact, and they give
no imperatives over large fields of conduct in which perplexity is
prevalent. People will say: “I could be perfectly happy leading the
life of a Catholic devotee if only I could believe.” But most of the
framework of religious explanation upon which that life is sustained is
too old-fashioned and too irrelevant to admit of that thoroughness of
belief which is necessary for the devotion of intelligent people.
Great ingenuity has been shown by modern writers and thinkers in
the adaptation of venerated religious expressions to new ideas.
_Peccavi._ The word “God” is in most minds so associated with
the concept of religion that it is abandoned only with the greatest
reluctance. The word remains though the idea is continually attenuated.
He is pushed farther and farther from actuality and His definition
becomes increasingly a bundle of negations, until at last, in His
rôle of The Absolute, He becomes an entirely negative expression.
While we can speak of good, say some, we can speak of God. God is the
possibility of goodness, the good side of things. If phrases in which
the name of God is used are to be abandoned, they argue, religion will
be left speechless before many occasions.
Certainly there is something beyond the individual that is and the
world that is; on that we have already insisted as a characteristic
of all religions; that persuasion is the essence of faith and the
key to courage. But whether that is to be considered, even after the
most strenuous exercises in personification, as a greater person or
a comprehensive person is another matter. Personality is the last
vestige of anthropomorphism. The modern urge to a precise veracity is
against such concessions to traditional expression. On the other hand
there is in many fine religious minds a desire amounting almost to a
necessity for an object of devotion so individualised as to be capable
at least of a receptive consciousness even if no definite response
is conceded. One type of mind can accept a reality in itself which
another must project and dramatise before it can comprehend it and
react to it. The human soul is an intricate thing which will not endure
elucidation when that passes beyond a certain degree of harshness and
roughness. The human spirit has learnt love, devotion, obedience and
humility in relation to other personalities, and with difficulty it
takes the final step to a transcendent subordination, from which the
last shred of personality has been stripped. In matters not immediately
material, language has to work by metaphors, and though every metaphor
carries its own peculiar risks of confusion we cannot do without them.
Great intellectual tolerance is necessary, therefore--a cultivated
disposition to translate and retranslate from one metaphysical or
emotional idiom to another--if there is not to be a deplorable wastage
of moral force in our world.
Three profound differences between the mental dispositions of the
present time and those of preceding ages have to be realised if current
developments of the religious impulse are to be seen in their correct
relationship to the religious life of the past. There has been a great
advance in the analysis of psychic processes and the courage with
which men have probed into the origins of human thought and feeling.
Following upon the biological advances that have made us recognise fish
and amphibian in the bodily structure of man, have come these parallel
developments in which we see elemental fear and lust and self-love
moulded, modified and exalted, under the stress of social progress,
into intricate human motives. Our conception of sin and our treatment
of sin have been profoundly modified by this analysis. Our former sins
are seen as ignorances, inadequacies and bad habits, and the moral
conflict is robbed of three-fourths of its ego-centred melodramatic
quality. We are no longer moved to be less wicked; we are moved to
organise our conditioned reflexes and lead a life less fragmentary and
silly.
Secondly, the conception of individuality has been influenced and
relaxed by biological thought, so that we do not think so readily of
the individual _contra mundum_ as our fathers did. We begin to
realise that we are egotists by misapprehension. Nature cheats the self
to serve the purposes of the species by filling it with wants that war
against its private interests. As gut eyes are opened to these things,
we see ourselves as beings greater or less than the definitive self.
Man’s soul is no longer his own. It is, he discovers, part of a greater
being which lived before he was born and will survive him. The idea
of a survival of the definite individual with all the accidents and
idiosyncrasies of his temporal nature upon him, dissolves to nothing in
this new view of immortality.
The third of the main contrasts between modern and former thought which
have rendered the general shapes of established religion old-fashioned
and unserviceable, is a reorientation of current ideas about time.
The powerful disposition of the human mind to explain everything as
the inevitable unfolding of a past event which, so to speak, sweeps
the future helplessly before it, has been checked by a mass of subtle
criticisms. The conception of progress as a broadening and increasing
purpose, a conception which is taking hold of the human imagination
more and more firmly, turns religious life towards the future. We
think no longer of submission to the irrevocable decrees of absolute
dominion, but of participation in an adventure on behalf of a power
that gains strength and establishes itself. The history of our world,
which has been unfolded to us by science, runs counter to all the
histories on which religions have been based. There was no Creation in
the past, we begin to realise, but eternally there is creation; there
was no Fall to account for the conflict of good and evil, but a stormy
ascent. Life as we know it is a mere beginning.
It seems unavoidable that if religion is to develop unifying and
directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must
adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analysing turn
of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories, its gross
preoccupations, its posthumous prolongation of personal ends. The
desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an
escape from the distressful pettiness and morality of the individual
life, is the undying element in every religious system. The time has
come to strip religion right down to that, to strip it for greater
tasks than it has ever faced before. The histories and symbols that
served our fathers encumber and divide us. Sacraments and rituals
harbour disputes and waste our scanty emotions. The explanation of why
things are is an unnecessary effort in religion. The essential fact in
religion is the desire for religion and not how it came about. If you
do not want religion, no persuasions, no convictions about your place
in the universe can give it to you. The first sentence in the modern
creed must be, not “I believe” but “I give myself.”
To what? And how? To these questions we must next address ourselves.
_Chapter IV_
OBJECTIVE EXPRESSION OF MODERN RELIGION
To give oneself religiously is a continuing operation expressed in a
series of acts. It can be nothing else. You cannot dedicate yourself
and then go away to live just as you have lived before. It is a poor
travesty of religion that does not produce an essential change in the
life which embraces it. But in the established and older religions
of our race, this change of conduct has involved much self-abasement
merely to the God or Gods, or much self-mortification merely with
a view to the moral perfecting of self. Christian devotion, for
example, in these early stages, before the hermit life gave place
to organised monastic life, did not to any extent direct itself to
service except the spiritual service of other human beings. But as
Christianity became a definite social organising force, it took on
a great series of healing, comforting, helping, manufacturing and
educational activities. The modern tendency has been and is all in the
direction of minimising what one might call self-centred devotion and
self-subjugation, and of expanding and developing external service. The
idea of inner perfectibility dwindles with the diminishing importance
attached to individuality. We cease to think of mortifying or exalting
or perfecting ourselves and seek to lose ourselves in a greater life.
We think less and less of “conquering” self and more and more of
escaping from self. It we attempt to perfect ourselves in any respect
it is only as a soldier sharpens and polishes an essential weapon.
Our quickened apprehension of continuing change, our broader and fuller
vision of the history of life, disabuse our minds of many limitations
set to the imaginations of our predecessors. Much that they saw as
fixed and determinate, we see as transitory and controllable. They
saw life fixed in its species and subjected to irrevocable laws. We
see life struggling insecurely but with a gathering successfulness
for freedom and power against restriction and death. We see life
coming at last to our tragic and hopeful human level. Certain great
possibilities, certain mighty problems, we realise, confront mankind
to-day. They frame our existences. The practical aspect, the material
form, the embodiment, of the modernised religious impulse is the
direction of the whole life to the solution of these problems and the
realisation of their possibilities.
The modern religious life like all forms of religious life must needs
have its own subtle and deep inner activities, its meditations, its
self-confrontations, its phases of stress and search and appeal, its
serene and prayerful moods, but these inward aspects do not come into
the scope of this present enquiry, which is concerned entirely with the
outward shape, the direction and the organisation of modern religious
effort, with the question of what, given religious devotion, we have to
do and how that has to be done.
Now as the modern vision of life has grown clear, certain vast
possibilities and certain great dangers have become plain. They
challenge mankind. They furnish an entirely new frame and setting for
the moral life. In the fixed and limited outlook of the past, practical
good works took the form mainly of palliative measures against evils
that were conceived of as incurable; the religious community nursed the
sick, fed the hungry, provided sanctuary for the fugitive, pleaded with
the powerful for mercy. It did not dream of preventing sickness, famine
or tyranny. Otherworldliness was its ready refuge from the invincible
evil and confusion of the existing scheme of things. It is possible
now to imagine an order in human affairs from which these evils have
been largely or entirely eliminated. More and more people are coming
to realise that such an order is a material possibility. And with the
realisation that this is a material possibility, we can no longer
be content with a field of good deeds and right action restricted
to palliative and consolatory activities. Such things are merely
“first-aid.” The religious mind grows bolder than it has ever been
before. It pushes through the curtain it once imagined was a barrier.
It apprehends its larger obligations. The way in which our activities
conduce to the realisation of that conceivable better order in human
affairs, becomes the new criterion of conduct.
The realisation of this conceivable better order involves certain
necessary achievements. It is impossible for any clear-headed person
to suppose that the ever more destructive stupidities of war can be
eliminated from human affairs until some common political control
dominates the earth, and unless certain pressures due to the growth of
population, due to the enlarging scope of human operations or due to
conflicting standards and traditions of life, are disposed of. To avoid
the positive evils of war and to attain the new levels of prosperity
and power that now come into view, an effective world control, not
merely of armed force but of the production and main movements of
staple commodities and the drift and expansion of population, is
required. It is absurd to dream of peace and world-wide progress
without that much control. These things assured, the abilities and
energies of a greatly increased proportion of human beings could be
diverted to the happy activities of scientific research and creative
work with an ever-increasing release and enlargement of human
possibility. Such a forward stride in human life, the first stride in a
mighty continuing advance, an advance to which no limit appears, is now
materially possible. The opportunity is offered to mankind. But there
is no certainty, no material necessity, that it should ever be taken.
It will not be taken by mankind inadvertently. It can only be taken
through such an organisation of will and energy to take it as this
world has never seen before.
These are the new conditions that unfold themselves before the more
alert minds of our generation and which will presently become the
general mental background, as the modern interpretations of the history
of life and of material and mental possibilities establish themselves.
Evil political, social and economic usages and arrangements may seem
obdurate and huge, but they are neither permanent nor uncontrollable.
They can be controlled, however, only by an effort more powerful and
determined than the instincts and inertias that sustain them. Religion,
modern and disillusioned, has for its outward task to set itself to
the control and direction of political, social and economic life,
or admit itself a mere drug for easing discomfort. Can it or can it
not synthesise the needed effort to lift mankind out of our present
disorders, dangers, baseness, frustrations and futilities, to a phase
of relative security, accumulating knowledge, systematic and continuing
growth in power and the widespread deep happiness of hopeful and
increasing life?
Our answer here is that it can, and our subject now is to enquire what
are the necessary opening stages in the synthesis of that effort.
We write here for those who believe that it can, and who do already
grasp the implications of world history and contemporary scientific
achievement.
_Chapter V_
THE FRAME OF THE TASK BEFORE MANKIND:
THE WORLD COMMONWEAL
Before we can consider the forms and methods of attacking their
inevitable task that the serious minority of human beings must adopt,
it will be well to draw the main lines and attempt some measure of the
magnitude of that task. What are the new forms that it is sought to
impose upon human life and how are they to be evolved from or imposed
upon the current forms? And against what passive and active resistances
has this to be done?
There can be no pause for replacement in the affairs of life. Day must
follow day and the common activities continue. The new world as a going
concern must arise out of the old as a going concern.
Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one
politically, socially and economically unified. Within that frame fall
all the other ideas of our progressive ambition. To this end a small
but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to
direct their lives. Still more at present apprehend it as a possibility
but do not _dare_ to desire it, because of the enormous
difficulties that intervene and because they see as yet no intimations
of a way through or round these difficulties. The great majority of
human beings have still to see the human adventure as one whole; they
are obsessed by the air of permanence and finality in established
things; they accept current reality as ultimate reality. They take the
world as they find it. But here we are writing for the modern-minded,
and for them it is impossible to think of the world as secure and
satisfactory until there exists a single world commonweal, preventing
war and controlling those moral, biological and economic forces that
would otherwise lead to wars.
The method of direction of such a world commonweal is not likely to
imitate the methods of existing sovereign states. It will be a new
sort of direction with a new psychology. There will be little need for
President or King to lead the marshalled hosts of humanity, for where
there is no war there is no need of any leader to lead hosts anywhere,
and in a polyglot world a parliament of mankind is an inconceivable
instrument of government. The fundamental organisation of contemporary
states is still plainly military and that is exactly what a world
organisation cannot be. Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism
sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare and bluster
of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase of development we
would supersede. The reasonable desire of all of us is that we should
have the collective affairs of the world managed by suitably equipped
groups of the most interested, intelligent and devoted people and
that their activities should be subjected to a free, open, watchful
criticism, restrained from making spasmodic interruptions but powerful
enough to modify or supersede without haste or delay whatever is
weakening or unsatisfactory in the general direction.
A world movement for the supersession or enlargement or fusion of
existing political, economic and social institutions, must necessarily,
as it grows, draw closer and closer to questions of practical
control. It is likely in its growth to incorporate many active public
servants, and many industrial and financial leaders and directors.
It may also assimilate great numbers of intelligent workers. As its
activities spread it will work out a whole system of special methods of
co-operation. It will learn as it grows and by growing the business of
general direction and how to develop its critical function. So that the
movement we contemplate will by its very nature be one aiming, not so
much to set up a world direction as to become itself a world direction,
and the educational and militant forms of its opening phase will, as
experience is gained and power and responsibility acquired, evoke step
by step forms of administration and research and correction.
The modernisation of the religious impulse leads us straight to the
effort for the establishment of the world state as a duty, and the
close consideration of the necessary organisation of that effort
will bring the reader to the conclusion that a movement aiming at
the establishment of a world-directorate, however restricted that
movement may be at first in numbers and power, must either contemplate
the prospect of itself developing in part or as a whole into a
world-directorate, and by assimilation, as a whole into a modern world
community, or admit from the outset the futility, the spare-time
amateurishness, of its gestures.
_Chapter VI_
BROAD CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORLD COMMONWEAL
Continuing our examination of the practical task before the modern
mind, we may next note the main lines of contemporary aspiration
within this comprehensive outline of a world commonweal. Any sort of
unification of human affairs will not serve the ends we seek, we aim
at a particular sort of unification; a world Cæsar is hardly better
from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must
mean the liberation of human thought, experiment and creative effort. A
successful conspiracy merely to seize governments and wield and retain
world power would be at best only the empty frame of success, it might
be the exact reverse of success. Release from the threat of war and
the waste of international economic conflicts is a poor release if it
demands as its price the loss of all other liberties.
It is because we desire a unification of human direction, not simply
for the sake of unity, but as a means to certain definite ends,
that it is necessary, at any cost--in delay, in loss of effective
force, in strategic or tactical disadvantage--that the light of free,
abundant criticism should play upon that unified direction and upon
the movements and organisations leading to the establishment of that
unified direction.
Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.
Neither morally nor intellectually is he safe from lapses. Most of
us who are past our first youth know how little we can even trust
ourselves, and are glad to have our activities checked and guarded
by a sense of inspection. It is for this reason that a movement to
realise the conceivable better state of the world, must deny itself
the advantages of secret methods or tactical insincerities. It must
leave that to its adversaries. We must declare our end plainly from the
outset and risk no misunderstandings of our procedure.
The conspiracy of modern religion against the established institutions
of the world must be an open conspiracy and cannot remain righteous
otherwise. It is lost if it goes underground. Every step to world unity
must be taken in the daylight, or the sort of unity that will be won
will be found to be scarcely worth the winning. The essential task will
have to be recommenced within the mere frame of unity attained.
This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made
in the name and for the sake of science and creative activity. It is to
release science and creative ability, and every stage in the struggle
must be watched and criticised, lest there be any sacrifice of these
ends to the exigencies of conflict.
The security of creative progress and creative activity implies a
competent regulation of the economic life in the collective interest.
There must be food, shelter and leisure for all. The fundamental needs
of the animal life must be assured before human life can have free
play. Man does not live by bread alone; he eats that he may learn and
adventure creatively, but unless he eats he cannot adventure. His
life is primarily economic, as a house is primarily a foundation, and
economic justice and efficiency must underlie all other activities,
but to judge human society and organise political and social activities
entirely on economic grounds is to forget the objectives of life’s
campaign in a pre-occupation with supply.
It is true that man, like the animal world in general from which he
has arisen, is the creature of a struggle for sustenance, but unlike
the animals, man can resort to methods of escape from that competitive
pressure upon the means of subsistence, which has been the lot of every
other animal species. He can restrain the increase in his numbers
and he seems capable of still quite undefined expansions of his
productivity per head of population. He can escape therefore from the
struggle for subsistence altogether with a surplus of energy such as no
other kind of animal species has ever possessed. Intelligent control
of population is a possibility which puts man outside the competitive
processes that have hitherto ruled the modification of species, and he
can be released from these processes in no other way.
There is a clear hope that later, directed breeding will come within
his scope, but that goes beyond his present range of practical
achievement, and we need not discuss it further here. Suffice it
for us here that the world community of our desires, the organised
world community conducting and ensuring its own progress, requires a
deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition.
There is no strong instinctive desire for multitudinous offspring
as such, in the feminine make-up. The reproductive impulses operate
indirectly. Nature ensures a pressure of population through passions
and instincts that, given sufficient knowledge, intelligence and
freedom on the part of women, can be satisfactorily gratified and
tranquillised if need be, without the production of numerous children.
Very slight adjustments in social and economic arrangements will, in
a world of clear available knowledge and straightforward practice
in these matters, supply sufficient inducement or discouragement to
affect the general birthrate or the birthrate of specific types as the
directive sense of the community may consider desirable. So long as
the majority of human beings are begotten involuntarily in lust and
ignorance, so long does man remain like any other animal under the
moulding pressure of competition for subsistence. Social and political
processes change entirely in their character when we recognise the
possibility of practicability of this fundamental revolution in human
biology.
In a world so relieved, the production of staple necessities presents
a series of problems altogether less distressful than those of the
present scramble for possessions and self-indulgence on the part of the
successful and for work and a bare living on the part of the masses.
With the increase of population unrestrained there was, as the end
of the economic process, no practical alternative to a multitudinous
equality at the level of bare subsistence, except through such an
inequality of economic arrangements as allowed a minority to maintain a
higher standard of life by withholding whatever surplus of production
it could grasp, from consumption in mere proletarian increase. In the
past and at present, what is called the capitalist system, that is to
say the unsystematic exploitation of production by private owners
under the protection of the law, has, on the whole, in spite of much
haste and conflict, worked beneficially, by checking the gravitation to
a universal low-grade consumption which would have been the inevitable
outcome of socialism oblivious of biological processes. With effective
restraint upon the increase of population, however, entirely new
possibilities open out before mankind.
The besetting vice of economic science, orthodox and unorthodox alike,
has been the vice of beginning in the air, with current practice and
current convictions, with questions of wages, prices, values and
possession, when the profounder issues of human association are really
not to be found at all on these levels. The primary issues of human
association are biological and psychological, and the essentials of
economics are problems in applied physics and chemistry. The first
thing we should examine is what we want to do with natural resources,
and the next, how to get men to do what has to be done as pleasurably
and effectively as possible. Then we should have a standard by which to
judge the methods of to-day.
But the academic economists and still more so Marx and his followers,
refuse to deal with these fundamentals, and with a stupid air of sound
practical wisdom, insist on opening up their case with an uncritical
acceptance of the common antagonism of employers and employed and a
long rigmarole about profits and wages. Ownership and expropriated
labour are only one set of many possible sets of economic method.
The economists, however, will attend seriously only to the current
set, the rest they ignore, and the Marxists with their uncontrollable
disposition to use nicknames in the place of judgments, condemn all
others as “Utopian”--a word as final in its dismissal from the minds
of the elect as that other pet counter in the Communist substitute for
thought, “Bourgeois.” If they can persuade themselves that an idea or
a statement is “Utopian” or “Bourgeois,” it does not seem to matter in
the least to them whether it is right or wrong. It is disposed of. Just
as in genteeler circles anything is disposed of that can be labelled
“atheistical,” “subversive” or “disloyal.”
If a century and a half ago the world had submitted its problems of
transport to the economists they would have put aside, with as little
wasted breath and ink as possible, all talk about railways, motor-cars,
steamships and aeroplanes, and, with a fine sense of extravagance
rebuked, set themselves to long neuralgic dissertations, disputations
and treatises upon high-roads and the methods of connecting them,
turnpike gates, canals, the influence of lock-fees on bargemen, tidal
landing places, anchorages, surplus carrying capacity, carriers,
caravans, hand-barrows and the pedestrianariat. There would have been
a rapid and easy differentiation in feeling and requirements between
the horse-owning minority and the walking majority; the wrongs of the
latter would have tortured the mind of every philosopher who could
not ride and been minimised by every philosopher who could, and there
would have been a broad rift between the narrow footpath school, the no
footpath school and the school which would look forward to a time when
every horse would have to be led along one universal footpath under
the dictatorship of the pedestrianariat. All with the profoundest
gravity and dignity. These things, footpaths and roads and canals with
their traffic, were “real,” and “Utopian” projects for getting along
at thirty or forty miles an hour or more up hill and against wind and
tide, let alone the still more incredible suggestion of air transport,
would have been smiled and sneered out of court. Life went about on its
legs, with a certain assistance from wheels, or floated, rowed and was
blown about on water; so it had been--and so it would always be.
But as soon as this time-honoured pre-occupation with the allotment of
the shares of originators, organisers, workers, owners of material,
credit dealers and tax collectors in the total product, ceases to be
dealt with as the primary question in economics, as soon as we liberate
our minds from a pre-occupation which from the outset necessarily makes
that science a squabble rather than a science, and begin our attack
upon the subject with a survey of the machinery and other productive
material required in order that the staple needs of mankind should
be satisfied, if we go on from that to consider the way in which all
this material and machinery can be worked and the product distributed
with the least labour and the greatest possible satisfaction, we
shift our treatment of economic questions towards standards by which
all current methods of exploitation, employment and finance can be
judged rather than wrangle over. We can dismiss the question of the
claims of this sort of participant or that for later and subordinate
consideration, and view each variety of human assistance in the general
effort entirely from the standpoint of what makes that assistance least
onerous and most effective.
The germs of such really scientific economics exist already in the
study of industrial organisation and industrial psychology. As the
science of industrial psychology in particular develops, we shall
find all this discussion of ownership, profit, wages, finance and
accumulation, which has been treated hitherto as the primary issues
of economics, falling into place under the larger enquiry of what
conventions in these matters, what system of money and what conceptions
of property, yield the greatest stimulus and the least friction in that
world-wide system of co-operation which must constitute the general
economic basis to the activities of a unified mankind.
Manifestly the supreme direction of the complex of human economic
activities in such a world must centre upon a bureau of information and
advice, which will take account of all the resources of the planet,
estimate current needs, apportion productive activities and control
distribution. The topographical and geological surveys of modern
civilised communities, their government maps, their periodic issue
of agricultural and industrial statistics, are the first crude and
inco-ordinated beginnings of such an economic world-intelligence. In
the propaganda work of David Lubin, a pioneer whom mankind must not
forget, and in his International Institute of Agriculture in Rome,
there were the beginnings of an impartial review month by month and
year by year of world production, world needs and world transport. Such
a great central organisation of economic science would necessarily
produce direction; it would indicate what had best be done here, there
and everywhere, solve general tangles, examine, approve and initiate
fresh methods and arrange the transitional process from old to new.
It would not be an organisation of will, imposing its will upon a
reluctant or recalcitrant race; it would be a direction, just as a map
is a direction. A map imposes no will on anyone, breaks no one in to
its “policy.” And yet we obey our maps.
The will to have the map, full, accurate and up-to-date and the
determination to have its indications respected, would have to pervade
the whole community. To nourish and sustain that will must be the task
not of any particular social or economic division of the community but
of the whole body of religious-minded people in that community. The
organisation and preservation of that power of will is the primary
undertaking, therefore, of a world revolution aiming at universal
peace, welfare and happy activity.
The older and still prevalent conception of government is bullying,
is the breaking-in and subjugation of the “subject,” to the God, or
King, or Lords of the community. Will-bending, the overcoming of the
recalcitrant junior and inferior, was an essential process in the
establishment of primitive societies, and its tradition still rules our
education and law. No doubt there must be a necessary accommodation of
the normal human will to every form of society; no man is immaculately
virtuous; but compulsion and restraint are the friction of the social
machine and, other things being equal, the less compulsive social
arrangements are, the more willingly, naturally and easily they are
accepted, the less wasteful of moral effort and the happier that
community will be. The ideal state, other things being equal, is
the state with the fewest possible number of will fights and will
suppressions. This must be a primary consideration in determining the
economic, biological and mental organisation of the world community at
which we aim.
We have advanced the opinion that the control of population pressure
is practicable without any violent conflict with “human nature,” that
given a proper atmosphere of knowledge and intention, there need be
far less suppression of will in relation to production than prevails
to-day. In the same way, it is possible that the general economic life
of mankind may be made universally satisfactory, that there may be an
abundance out of all comparison greater than the existing supply of
things necessary for human well being, freedom and activity, with not
merely not more but infinitely less subjugation and enslavement than
now occurs. Man is still but half born out of the blind struggle for
existence and his nature still partakes of the infinite wastefulness of
his mother Nature. He has still to learn how to price the commodities
he covets in terms of human life. He is indeed only beginning to
realise that as something to be learnt. He wastes will and human
possibility extravagantly in his current economic methods.
We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth
of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and
Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives instead
of being questions of degree. Human society has been, is and always
must be, an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional
liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative
enterprise. Affairs do not move simply from a more individualist
to a more socialist state or vice versa; there may be a release of
individual initiative going on here and standardisation or restraint
increasing there. Personal property never can be socially guaranteed
and yet unlimited in action and extent as the extremer individualists
desired, nor can it be “abolished” as the extremer socialists
proposed. Property is not robbery, as Proudhon asserted; it is the
protection of things against promiscuous and mainly wasteful use. In
some cases it may restrict or forbid a use of things that would be
generally advantageous, and it may be and is frequently unfair in its
assignment of initiative, but the remedy for that is not an abolition
but a revision of property. In the concrete it is a form necessary
for liberty of action upon material, while abstracted as money, that
liquidated generalised form of property, it is a ticket for individual
liberty of movement and individual choice of reward.
The economic history of mankind is a history of the operation of
the idea of property; it relates the conflict of the unlimited
acquisitiveness of egoistic individuals against the resentment of the
disinherited and unsuccessful and the far less effective consciousness
of a general welfare. Money grew out of a system of abstracting
conventions and has been subjected to a great variety of restrictions,
monopolisations and regulations. It has never been an altogether
logical device and it has permitted the most extensive and complex
developments of credit, debt and dispossession. All these developments
have brought with them characteristic forms of misuse and corruption.
The story is intricate and the tangle of relationships of dependence,
of pressure, of interception, of misdirected services, crippling
embarrassments and crushing obligations in which we live to-day admits
of no such simple and general solutions as many exponents of socialism,
for example, seem to consider possible.
But the thought and investigations of the past century or so have made
it clear that a classification of property according to the nature of
the rights exercisable and according to the range of ownership involved
must be the basis of any system of social justice in the future.
Certain things, the ocean, the air, rare wild animals, must be the
collective property of all mankind and cannot be altogether safe until
they are so regarded, and until some concrete body exists to exercise
these proprietary rights. Whatever collective control exists must
protect these universal properties, the sea from derelicts, the strange
shy things of the wild from extermination by the hunter and the foolish
collector. The extinction of many beautiful creatures is one of the
penalties our world is paying for its sluggishness in developing a
collective common rule. And there are many staple things and general
needs that now also demand a unified control in the common interests.
The raw material of the earth should be for all, not to be monopolised
by any acquisitive individual or acquisitive sovereign state, and not
to be withheld from exploitation for the general benefit by any chance
claims to territorial priority of this or that backward or bargaining
person or tribe.
In the past, most of these universal concerns have had to be left to
the competitive enterprise of profit-seeking individuals because there
were as yet no collectivities organised to the pitch of ability needed
to develop and control these concerns, but surely nobody in his senses
believes that the supply and distribution of staple commodities about
the earth by irresponsible persons and companies working entirely for
monetary gain, is the best possible method from the point of view of
the race as a whole. The land of the earth, all utilisable natural
products, have fallen very largely under the rules and usages of
personal property because that was the only recognised and practicable
form of administrative proprietorship in the past. The development
both of extensive proprietary companies and of government departments
with economic functions has been a matter of the last few centuries,
the development that is to say of communal, more or less impersonal
ownership, and it is only through these developments that the idea of
organised collectivity of proprietorship has become credible.
Even in quite modern state enterprises there is a tendency to recall
the rôle of the vigilant, jealous and primitive personal proprietor in
the fiction of ownership by His Majesty the King. In Great Britain,
for example, George Rex is still dimly supposed to hover over the
Postmaster General of his Post Office, approve, disapprove and call
him to account. But the Postal Union of the world which steers a
registered letter from Chile to Norway or from Ireland to Pekin is
almost completely divorced from the convention of an individual owner.
It works; it is criticised without awe or malice. Except for the
stealing and steaming of letters by the political police of various
countries, it works fairly well. And the only force behind it to keep
it working well is the conscious common sense of mankind.
But when we have stipulated for the replacement of individual private
ownership by more highly organised forms of collective ownership,
subject to free criticism and responsible to the whole republic of
mankind, in the general control of sea and land, in the getting,
preparation and distribution of staple products and in transport,
we have really named all the possible generalisations of concrete
ownership that the most socialistic of contemporaries will be disposed
to demand. And if we add to that the necessary maintenance of a money
system by a central world authority upon a basis that will make
money keep faith with the worker who earns it, and represent from
first to last for him the value in staple commodities he was given
to understand it was to have, and if we conceive credit adequately
controlled in the general interest by a socialised world banking
organisation, we shall have defined the entire realm from which
individual property and unrestricted individual enterprise have been
excluded. Beyond that, the science of social psychology will probably
assure us that the best work will be done for the world by individuals
free to exploit their abilities as they wish. If the individual
land-owner or mineral-owner disappears altogether from the world, he
will probably be replaced over large areas by tenants with considerable
security of tenure, by householders and by licensees under collective
proprietors. It will be the practice, the recognised best course,
to allow the cultivator to profit as fully as possible by his own
individual productivity and to leave the householder to fashion his
house and garden after his own desire.
Such in the very broadest terms is the character of the world
commonweal towards which the modern imagination is moving, so far as
its direction and economic life are concerned. The organisation of
collective bodies capable of exercising these wider proprietorships
which cannot be properly used in the common interest by uncorrelated
individual owners, is the positive practical problem before the
intelligent portion of mankind to-day. The nature of such collective
bodies is still a series of open questions, even upon such points as
whether they will be elected bodies or groups deriving their authority
from other sanctions. Their scope and methods of operation, their
relations to one another and to the central bureau of intelligence,
remain also to be defined. But before we conclude this essay we may be
able to find precisions for at least the beginning of such definition.
Nineteenth-century socialism in its various forms, including the
indurated formulæ of communism, has been a series of projects for
the establishment of such collective controls, for the most part
very sketchy projects from which the necessary factor of a sound
psychological analysis was almost completely wanting. Primarily
movements of protest and revolt against the blazing injustices arising
out of the selfishly individualistic exploitation of the new and
more productive technical and financial methods of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, they have been apt to go beyond the limits
of reasonable socialisation in their demands and to minimise absurdly
the difficulties and dangers of collective control. Indignation and
impatience were their ruling moods and if they constructed little they
exposed much. We are better able to measure the magnitude of the task
before us because of the clearances and lessons achieved by these
pioneer movements.
_Chapter VII_
NO STABLE UTOPIA IS CONTEMPLATED
This unified world towards which the efforts of the religious minority
would direct human activities cannot be pictured for the reader as
any static and stereotyped spectacle of happiness. Indeed one may
doubt if such a thing as happiness is possible without steadily
changing conditions involving continually enlarging and exhilarating
opportunities. Mankind released from the pressure of population, the
waste of warfare and the private monopolisation of the sources of
wealth, will face the universe with a great and increasing surplus of
will and energy. Change and novelty will be the order of life; each day
will differ from its predecessor in its greater amplitude of interest.
Life which was once routine, endurance and mischance, will become
adventure and discovery. It will no longer be “the old, old story.”
We have still barely emerged from among the animals in their
struggle for existence. We live only in the early dawn of human
self-consciousness and in the first awakening of the spirit of mastery.
We believe that the persistent exploration of our outward and inward
worlds by scientific and artistic endeavour will lead to developments
of power and activity upon which at present we can set no limits nor
give any certain form.
Our antagonists are confusion of mind, want of courage, want of
curiosity and want of imagination, indolence and spendthrift egotism.
These are the enemies against which the Open Conspiracy arrays itself;
these are the jailers of human freedom and achievement.
_Chapter VIII_
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MUST BE HETEROGENEOUS
This open and declared intention of establishing a world order out
of the present patchwork of particularist governments, of effacing
the militarist conceptions that have hitherto given governments
their typical form, and of removing credit and the broad fundamental
processes of economic life out of reach of private profit-seeking
and individual monopolisation, which is the substance of this Open
Conspiracy to which the modern religious mind must necessarily address
its practical activities, cannot fail to arouse enormous opposition.
It is not a creative effort in a clear field; it is a creative effort
that can hardly stir without attacking established things. It is
the repudiation of drift, of “leaving things alone.” It criticises
everything in human life from top to bottom and finds everything not
good enough. It strikes at the universal human desire to feel that
things are “all right.”
One might conclude, and it would be a hasty unsound conclusion, that
the only people to whom we could look for sympathy and any passionate
energy in forwarding the revolutionary change would be the unhappy, the
discontented, the dispossessed and the defeated in life’s struggle.
This idea lies at the root of the class-war dogmas of the Marxists,
and it rests on an entirely crude conception of human nature. The
successful minority is supposed to have no effective motive but a
desire to retain and intensify its advantages. A quite imaginary
solidarity to that end is attributed to it, a preposterous base class
activity. On the other hand, the unsuccessful mass--“proletariat”--is
supposed to be capable of a clear apprehension of its disadvantages,
and the more it is impoverished and embittered, the nearer draws its
uprising, its constructive “dictatorship” and the Millennium.
No doubt a considerable amount of truth is to be found distorted
in this theory of the communist revolution. Human beings, like
other animals, are disposed to remain where their circumstances are
tolerable and to want change when they are uncomfortable, and so a
great proportion of the people who are “well off” want little or no
change in present conditions, particularly those who are too dull
to be bored by an unprogressive life--and a great proportion of
those who actually feel the inconveniences of straitened means and
population pressure, do. But much vaster masses of the rank and file
of humanity are accustomed to inferiority and dispossession, they do
not feel these things to the extent even of desiring change, or given
so much apprehension they still fear change more than they dislike
their disadvantages. Moreover, those who are sufficiently distressed
to realise that “something ought to be done about it” are much more
disposed to childish and threatening demands upon heaven and the
governments for redress and vindictive and punitive action against the
envied fortunate with whom they happen to be in immediate contact,
than to any reaction towards such complex, tentative disciplined
constructive work as alone can better the lot of mankind. In practice
Marxism is found to work out in a ready resort to malignantly
destructive activities and to be so uncreative as to be practically
impotent in the face of material difficulties. In Russia where--in and
about the urban centres at least--Marxism has been put to the test, the
doctrine of the Workers’ Republic remains as a unifying cant, a test of
orthodoxy of as little practical significance there as the communism
of Jesus and communion with Christ in Christendom, while beneath this
creed a small oligarchy which has attained power by its profession does
its obstinate best, much hampered by the suspicion and hostility of the
Western financiers and politicians, to carry on a series of interesting
and varyingly successful experiments in the socialisation of economic
life. Each year shows more and more clearly that Marxism and Communism
are divagations from the path of human progress and that the line of
advance must follow a course more intricate and less flattering to the
common impulses of our nature.
The one main strand of truth in the theory of social development woven
by Marx and Engels is that successful, comfortable people are disposed
to dislike, obstruct and even resist actively any substantial changes
in the current patchwork of arrangements, however great the ultimate
dangers of that patchwork may be or the privations and sufferings of
other people involved in it. The one main strand of error in that
theory is the facile assumption that the people at a disadvantage will
be stirred to anything more than chaotic and destructive expressions of
resentment. If now we reject the error and accept the truth, we lose
the delusive comfort of belief in that magic giant, the Proletariat,
who will dictate, arrange, restore and create, but we clear the way
for the recognition of an élite of intelligent religious-minded people
scattered through the whole community, and for a study of the method
of making this creative element effective in human affairs against the
massive oppositions of selfishness and unimaginative self-protective
conservatism.
Now certain classes of people such as thugs and burglars seem to
be harmful to society without a redeeming point about them, and
others such as race-course bookmakers seem to provide the minimum of
distraction and entertainment with a maximum of mischief. Wilful
idlers are a mere burthen on the community. Other social classes
again, professional soldiers for example, have a certain traditional
honourableness which disguises the essentially parasitic relationship
of their services to the developing modern community. Armies and
armaments are cancers produced by the malignant development of the
patriotic virus under modern conditions of exaggeration and mass
suggestion. But since there are armies prepared to act coercively in
the world to-day, it is necessary that the Open Conspiracy should
contain within itself the competence to resist military coercion and
combat and destroy armies that stand in the way of its emergence.
Possibly the first two types here instanced may be condemned as classes
and excluded as classes from any participation in the organised effort
to recast the world, but quite obviously the soldier cannot. The world
commonweal will need its own scientific methods of prevention so long
as there are people running about the planet with flags and uniforms
and weapons, offering violence to their fellow men and interfering with
the free movements of commodities in the name of national sovereignty.
And when we come to the general functioning classes, landowners,
industrial organisers, bankers and so forth, who control the present
system such as it is, it should be still plainer that it is very
largely from the ranks of these classes and from their stores of
experience and traditions of method, that the directive forces of the
new order must emerge. The Open Conspiracy can have nothing to do with
the heresy that the path of human progress lies through an extensive
class war.
Let us consider how it stands to such a complex of activities,
usages, accumulations, advantages as constitutes the banking world.
There are no doubt many bankers and many practices in banking which
make for personal or group advantage to the general detriment. They
forestall, monopolise, constrain and extort and so increase their
riches. And another large part of that banking world follows routine
and establishes usage; it is carrying on and keeping things going,
and it is neither inimical nor conducive to the development of a
progressive world organisation of finance. But there remains a residuum
of original and intelligent people in banking or associated with
banking or mentally interested in banking, who do realise that banking
plays a very important and interesting part in the world’s affairs, who
are curious about their own intricate function and disposed towards
a scientific investigation of its origins, conditions and future
possibilities. Such types move naturally towards the Open Conspiracy.
Their enquiries carry them inevitably outside the bankers’ habitual
field to an examination of the nature, drift and destiny of the entire
human economic process.
Now the theme of the preceding paragraph might be repeated with
variations through a score of paragraphs in which appropriate
modifications would adapt it to the industrial organiser, the merchant
and organiser of transport, the advertiser, the retail distributor,
the agriculturalist, the engineer, the builder, the economic chemist,
and a number of other types functional to the contemporary community.
In all we should distinguish a base and harmful section, a mediocre
section following established usage and an active, progressive section
to whom we turn naturally for developments leading towards the
progressive world commonweal of our desires. And our analysis might
penetrate further than separation into types of individuals. In nearly
every individual instance we should find a mixed composition, a human
being of fluctuating moods and confused purposes, sometimes base,
sometimes drifting with the tide and sometimes alert and intellectually
and morally quickened. The Open Conspiracy must be content to take a
fraction of a man, as it appeals to fractions of many classes, if it
cannot get him altogether.
This idea of drawing together a proportion of all or nearly all the
functional classes in contemporary communities in order to weave the
beginnings of a world community out of their selection, is a fairly
obvious one--and yet it has still to win practical recognition. Man
is a morbidly gregarious and partisan creature; he is deep in his
immediate struggles; the industrialist is best equipped to criticise
his fellow industrialist, but he finds the root of all evil in the
banker; the wages worker shifts the blame for all social wrongs on the
“employing class.” There is an element of exasperation in most economic
and social reactions and there is hardly a reforming or revolutionary
movement in history which is not essentially an indiscriminate attack
of one functioning class or type upon another, on the assumption that
the attacked class is entirely to blame for the clash and that the
attacking class is self-sufficient in the commonweal and can dispense
with its annoying collaborator. A considerable element of justice
enters into most such recriminations. But the Open Conspiracy cannot
avail itself of these class animosities for its driving force. It
can have therefore no uniform method of approach. For each class it
has a conception of modification and development, and each class it
approaches therefore at a distinctive angle. Some classes no doubt it
would supersede altogether; others--the scientific investigator for
example--it must regard as almost wholly good and seek only to expand
and empower, but it can no more adopt the prejudices and extravagances
of any particular class as its basis than it can adopt the claims of
any existing state or empire.
When it is clearly understood that the binding links of the Open
Conspiracy we have in mind are certain broad general ideas and
that--except perhaps in the case of scientific workers--we have no
current set of attitudes of mind and habits of activity which we can
turn over directly and unmodified to the service of the conspiracy, we
are in a position to realise that the movement we contemplate must from
the outset be diversified in its traditions and elements and various
in its methods. It must fight upon several fronts and with many sorts
of equipment. It will have a common spirit but it is quite conceivable
that between many of its contributory factors there may be very wide
gaps in understanding and sympathy.
_Chapter IX_
FORCES AND RESISTANCES IN THE GREAT MODERN COMMUNITIES NOW PREVALENT
WHICH WILL BE ANTAGONISTIC TO THE OPEN CONSPIRACY
We have now stated broadly but plainly the idea of the world commonweal
which is the objective of the Open Conspiracy, and we have made a
preliminary examination of the composition of the movement, showing
that it must be necessarily not a class development but a convergence
of many different sorts of people upon this common idea. Its opening
task must be the elaboration, exposition and propaganda of this common
idea, and, arising out of this, the incomparably vaster task of its
realisation.
These are the tasks not to be done _in vacuo_; they have
to be done in a dense world of crowding, incessant, passionate,
unco-ordinated activities, the world of market and newspaper, seed-time
and harvest, births, deaths, jails, hospitals, riots, barracks and
army manœuvres, false prophets and royal processions, games and shows,
fire, storm, pestilence, earthquake, war. Every day and every hour
things will be happening to help or thwart, stimulate or undermine,
obstruct or defeat the creative effort to set up the world commonweal.
Before we go on to discuss the selection and organisation of these
heterogeneous and mainly religious impulses upon which we rest our
hopes of a greater life for mankind, before we plan how these impulses
may be got together into a system of co-ordinated activities, it will
be well to review the main antagonistic forces with which, from its
very inception, the Open Conspiracy will be--is now--in conflict.
To begin with, we will consider these forces as they present themselves
in the highly developed Western European States of to-day and in their
American derivatives, derivatives which in spite of the fact that
in most cases they have far outgrown their lands of origin, still
owe a large part of their social habits and political conceptions to
Europe. All these States touch upon the Atlantic or its contributory
seas; they have all grown to their present form since the discovery
of America; they have a common association rooting in the idea of
Christendom and a generic resemblance of method. They present what is
known in current parlance as the Capitalist system, but it will relieve
us of a considerable load of disputatious matter if we call them here
simply the “Atlantic” civilisations and communities.
The consideration of these Atlantic civilisations in relation to
the coming world civilisation will suffice for the present chapter.
Afterwards we will consider the modification of the forces antagonistic
to the Open Conspiracy as they display themselves beyond the formal
confines of these now dominant States in the world’s affairs, in the
social systems weakened and injured by their expansion and among such
less highly organised communities as still survive from man’s savage
and barbaric past.
The Open Conspiracy is not necessarily antagonistic to any existing
government. The Open Conspiracy is a creative organising movement and
not an anarchistic one. It does not want to destroy existing controls
and forms of human association, but either to supersede or amalgamate
them into a common world directorate. If constitutions, parliaments
and kings can be dealt with as provisional institutions, trustees for
the coming of age of the world commonweal, and in so far as they are
conducted in that spirit, the Open Conspiracy makes no attack upon them.
But most governments will not set about their business as in any
way provisional, they and their supporters insist upon a reverence
and obedience which repudiate any possibility of supersession. What
should be an instrument becomes a divinity. In nearly every country
of the world there is, in deference to the pretended necessities of a
possible war, a vast degrading and dangerous cultivation of loyalty
and mechanical subservience to flags, uniforms, presidents and kings.
A president or king who does his appointed work well and righteously
is entitled to as much subservience as a bricklayer who does his work
well and righteously and to no more, but instead there is a sustained
endeavour to give him the privilege of an idol above criticism or
reproach, and the organised worship of flags has become--with changed
conditions of intercourse and warfare--an entirely evil misdirection
of the gregarious impulses of our race. Emotion and sentimentality
are evoked in the cause of disciplines and co-operations that could
quite easily be sustained and that are better sustained by rational
conviction.
The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all such implacable
loyalties and still more so to the aggressive assertion and propaganda
of such loyalties. When these things take the form of suppressing
reasonable criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of other forms
of government they become plainly antagonists to any comprehensive
project for human welfare. They become manifestly, from the wider point
of view, seditious, and loyalty to “king and country” passes into
plain treason to mankind. Almost everywhere at present, educational
activities organise barriers in the path of progress and there are
only the feeblest attempts at any counter-education that will break up
these barriers. There is little or no effort to restrain the aggressive
nationalist when he waves his flag against the welfare of our race
or to protect the children of the world from the infection of his
enthusiasms. And this last is as true now of the American system as it
is of any European State.
In the great mass of the modern community there is little more than
a favourable acquiescence in patriotic ideas and in the worship of
patriotic symbols, and that is based largely on such training. These
things are not necessary things for the generality to-day. A change
of mental direction would be possible for the majority of people now
without any violent disorganisation of their intimate lives or any
serious social or economic readjustments for them. Mental infection
in such cases could be countered by mental sanitation. A majority of
people in Europe and a still larger majority in the United States
and the other American Republics could become citizens of the world
without any serious hindrance to their present occupations, and with
incalculably vast increase of their present security.
But there remains a net of special classes in every community, from
kings to custom-house officers, far more deeply involved in patriotism
because it is their trade and their source of honour, and prepared in
consequence with an instinctive resistance to any re-orientation of
ideas towards a broader outlook. In the case of such people no mental
sanitation is possible without dangerous and alarming changes in their
way of living. For the majority of these patriots by _métier_, the
Open Conspiracy unlocks the gates leading from a paradise of eminence,
respect and privilege, and motions them towards an outer wilderness
which does not present even the faintest promise of a congenial,
distinguished life for them. Nearly everything in human nature will
dispose them to turn away from these gates which open towards the world
peace, to bang-to and lock them again if they can, and to grow thickets
as speedily as possible to conceal them and get them forgotten. The
suggestion of being trustees in a transition will seem to most of such
people only the camouflage of an ultimate degradation.
From such classes of patriots by _métier_, it is manifest that the
Open Conspiracy can expect only opposition. It may detach individuals
from them, but only by depriving them of their essential class
loyalties and characteristics. The class as a class will remain none
the less antagonistic. About royal courts and presidential residences,
in diplomatic, consular, military and naval circles and wherever people
wear titles and uniforms and enjoy pride and precedences based on
existing political institutions, there will be the completest general
inability to grasp the need for the Open Conspiracy. These people
and their womankind, their friends and connections, their servants
and dependants are fortified by time-honoured traditions of social
usage, of sentiment and romantic prestige. They will insist that they
are reality and Cosmopolis a dream. Only individuals of exceptional
imaginative liveliness, rare intellectual power and innate moral force
can be expected to break away from the anti-progressive habits such
class conditions impose upon them.
This tangle of traditions and loyalties, of interested trades and
professions, of privileged classes and official patriots, this complex
of human beings embodying very easy and natural and time-honoured
ideas of eternal national separation and unending international and
class conflict, is the main objective of the Open Conspiracy in its
opening phase. This tangle must be disentangled as the Open Conspiracy
advances, and until it is largely disentangled and cleared up that Open
Conspiracy cannot become anything very much more than a desire and a
project.
The tangle of “necessary patriots” as one may call them is different
in its nature, less intricate and extensive proportionally in the
United States and the States of Latin America than it is in the old
European communities, but it is none the less virulent in its action
on that account. It is only recently that military and naval services
have become important factors in American social life, and the really
vitalising contact of the interested patriot and the State has hitherto
centred mainly upon the custom-house and the concession. Instead of a
mellow and romantic loyalty to “king and country” the American thinks
simply of America and his flag.
American independence began as a resistance to exploitation from
overseas. Even when political and fiscal freedom were won, there was
a long phase of industrial and financial dependence. The American’s
habits of mind, in spite of his recent realisation of the enormous
power and relative prosperity of the United States and of the expanding
possibilities of their Spanish and Portuguese-speaking neighbours, are
still largely self-protective against a now imaginary European peril.
For the first three quarters of the nineteenth century the people of
the American continent and particularly the people of the United States
felt the industrial and financial ascendency of Great Britain and had
a reasonable fear of European attacks upon their continent. A growing
tide of immigrants of uncertain sympathy threatened their dearest
habits. Flag worship was imposed primarily as a repudiation of Europe.
Europe no longer looms over America with overpowering intimations,
American industries no longer have any practical justification for
protection, American finance would be happier without it, but the
patriotic interests are so established now that they go on and will go
on.
We have said that the complex of classes in any country interested
in the current method of government is sustained by traditions and
impelled by its nature and conditions to protect itself against
exploratory criticism. It is therefore unable to escape from the forms
of competitive and militant nationalism in which it was evolved. It
cannot without grave danger of enfeeblement, change any such innate
form. So that while parallel complexes of patriotic classes are found
in greater or less intricacy grouped about the flags and governments
of most existing states, these complexes are by their nature obliged
to remain separate, nationalist and mutually antagonistic. You cannot
expect a world union of soldiers or diplomatists. Their existence
and nature depend upon the idea that national separation is real
and incurable, and that war, in the long run, is unavoidable. Their
conceptions of loyalty involve an antagonism to all foreigners, even
to foreigners of exactly the same types as themselves, and make for a
continual campaign of annoyances, suspicions and precautions--together
with a general propaganda, affecting all other classes, of the
necessity of an international antagonism--that creeps persistently
towards war.
But while the methods of provoking war employed by the patriotic
classes are traditional, modern science has made a new and enormously
more powerful thing of warfare and, as the Great War showed, even the
most conservative generals on both sides are unable to prevent the
gigantic interventions of the mechanician and the chemist. So that a
situation is brought about in which the militarist element is unable to
fight without the support of the modern industrial organisation and the
acquiescence of the great mass of people. We are confronted therefore
at the present time with the paradoxical situation that a patriotic
tradition sustains in power and authority warlike classes who are quite
incapable of carrying on war. The other classes to which they must go
for support when the disaster of war is actually achieved are classes
developed under peace conditions, which not only have no positive
advantage in war, but must, as a whole, suffer great dislocation,
discomfort, destruction and distress from war. It is of primary
importance to the formally dominant classes that these new social
masses and powers should remain under the sway of the old social,
sentimental and romantic traditions, and equally important is it to the
Open Conspiracy that they should be released.
Here we bring into consideration another great complex of persons,
interests, traditions--the world of education, the various religious
organisations, and, beyond these, the ramifying indeterminate world
of newspapers and other periodicals, books, the drama, art and all
the instruments of presentation and suggestion that mould opinion and
direct action. The sum of the operations of this complex will be either
to sustain or demolish the old nationalist militant ascendency. Its
easiest immediate course is to accept it. Educational organisations on
that account are now largely a conservative force in the community;
they are in most cases directly controlled by authority and bound
officially as well as practically to respect current fears and
prejudices. It evokes fewer difficulties for them if they limit and
mould rather than release the young. The schoolmaster tends therefore
to accept and standardise and stereotype, even in the living,
progressive fields of science and philosophy. Even there he is a brake
on the forward movement. It is clear that the Open Conspiracy must
either continually disturb and revivify him or else frankly antagonise
him. Universities also struggle between the honourable past on which
their prestige rests, and the need of adaptation to a world of enquiry,
experiment and change. It is an open question whether these particular
organisations of intellectual prestige are of any real value in the
living world. A modern world planned _de novo_ would probably
produce nothing like a contemporary University. Modern research,
one may argue, would be stimulated rather than injured by complete
detachment from the lingering mediævalism of such institutions, their
entanglement with adolescent education and their ancient and contagious
conceptions of precedence and honour.
Ordinary religious organisations, again, exist for self-preservation
and are prone to follow rather than direct the currents of popular
thought. They are kept alive indeed by revivalism and new departures
which at the outset they are apt to resist, as the Catholic Church
for instance resisted the Franciscan awakening, but their formal
disposition is conservative. They say to religious development, thus
far and no farther.
Here is school, college and church are activities of thought and
instruction, which generally speaking drag upon the wheels of progress,
but which need not necessarily do so. A schoolmaster may be original,
stimulating and creative, and if he is fortunate and a good fighter he
may even achieve considerable worldly success; University teachers and
investigators may strike out upon new lines and yet escape destruction
by the older dons. Universities compete against other Universities at
home and abroad and cannot altogether yield to the forces of dullness
and subservience. They must maintain a certain difference from vulgar
opinion and a certain repute of intellectual virility.
As we pass from the more organised to the less organised intellectual
activities, we find conservative influence declining in importance and
a freer play for the creative drive. Freshness is a primary condition
of journalistic, literary and artistic success, and orthodoxy has
nothing new to say or do. But the desire for freshness may be satisfied
all too readily by merely extravagant, superficial and incoherent
inventions.
The influence of the old traditional nationalist social and political
hierarchy is not, however, exerted exclusively through its control
over schools and Universities. Nor is that indeed its more powerful
activity. Would that it were! There is also a direct, less defined
contact of the old order with the nascent powers, that plays a far
more effective part in delaying the development of the modern world
commonweal. Necessarily the old order has determined the established
way of life, which is at its best large, comfortable, amusing,
respected. It possesses all the entrances and exits and all the
controls of the established daily round. It is able to exact and it
does exact, almost without design, many conformities. There can be
no very ample social life therefore for those who are conspicuously
dissentient. Again the old order has a complete provision for the
growth, welfare and advancement of its children. It controls the
founts of honour and self-respect; it provides a mapped-out world of
behaviour. The new initiatives make their appearance here and there
in the form of isolated individuals, here an inventor, there a bold
organiser or a vigorous thinker. Apart from his specific work the
innovating type finds that he must fall in with established things
or his womenfolk will be ostracised and he will be distressed by a
sense of isolation even in the midst of successful activities. The
more intensely he innovates in particular, the more likely is he to be
too busy to seek out kindred souls and organise a new social life in
general. The new things and ideas, even when they arise abundantly,
arise scattered and unorganised, and the old order takes them in its
net. America for example--both on its Latin and its English-speaking
side--is in many ways a triumph of the old order over the new.
Men like Winwood Reade thought that the New World would be indeed a
new world. They idealised its apparent emancipations. But as the more
successful of the toiling farmers and traders of republican America
rose one by one to affluence, leisure, and freedom, it was far more
easy for them to adopt the polished and prepared social patterns and
usages of Europe than to work out a complete new civilisation in
accordance with their equalitarian professions. Yet there remains a gap
in their adapted “Society.” Henry James, that acute observer of subtle
social flavours, has pointed out the peculiar _headlessness_ of
social life in America because of the absence of court functions to
“go on” to and justify the assembling and dressing. The social life
has intimated the preparation for the Court without any political
justification. In Europe the assimilation of the wealthy European
industrialist and financier by the old order has been parallel and
naturally more logically complete. He really does find a court to “go
on” to. His social scheme is still undecapitated.
In this way the complex of classes vitally involved in the old militant
nationalist order is mightily reinforced by much larger masses of
imitative and annexed and more or less assimilated rich and active
people. The great industrialist marries the daughter of the marquis and
has a couple of sons in the Guards and a daughter who is a princess.
The money of the American Leeds, fleeing from the social futility of
its land of origin, helps bolster up a mischievous monarchy in Greece.
The functional and private life of the new men are thus at war with one
another. The real interests of the great industrialist or financier lie
in cosmopolitan organisation and the material development of the world
commonweal, but his womenfolk pin flags all over him and his sons are
prepared to sacrifice themselves and all his business creations, for
the sake of trite splendours and Ruritanian romance.
But just so far as the great business organiser is capable and
creative, so far is he likely to realise and resent the price in
frustration that the old order obliges him to pay for amusement, social
interest and domestic peace and comfort. The Open Conspiracy threatens
him with no effacement; it may even appear with an air of release. If
he had women who were interested in his business affairs instead of
women who had to be amused, and if he realised in time the practical,
intellectual and moral kidnapping of his sons and daughters by the old
order that goes on, he might pass quite easily from acquiescence to
antagonism. But in this respect he cannot act single-handed. This is
a social and not an individual operation. The Open Conspiracy, it is
clear, must include in its activities a great fight for the souls of
economically functional people. It must carve out a Society of its own
from Society. Only by the creation of a new and better social life can
it resist the many advantages and attractions of the old.
This constant gravitation back to traditional uses on the part of
what might become new social types applies not merely to big people
but to such small people as are really functional in the modern
economic scheme. They have no social life adapted to their new
economic relationships, and they are forced back upon the methods of
behaviour established for what were roughly their analogues in the
old order of things. The various sorts of managers and foremen in big
modern concerns, for example, carry on ways of living they have taken
ready made from the stewards, tradesmen, tenantry and upper servants
of an aristocratic territorial system. They release themselves and
are released almost in spite of themselves, slowly, generation by
generation, from habits of social subservience that are no longer
necessary nor convenient in the social process, acquire an official
pride in themselves and take on new conceptions of responsible
loyalty to a scheme. And they find themselves under suggestions of
class aloofness and superiority to the general mass of less cardinal
workers, that are often unjustifiable under new conditions. Machinery
and scientific organisation have been and still are revolutionising
productive activity by the progressive elimination of the unskilled
worker, the hack, the mere toiler. But the social organisation of the
modern community and the mutual deportment of the associated workers
left over after this elimination are still haunted by the tradition of
the lord, the middle class tenant and the servile hind. The development
of self-respect and mutual respect among the mass of modern functional
workers is clearly an intimate concern of the Open Conspiracy.
A vast amount of moral force has been wasted in the past hundred
years by the antagonism of “Labour” to “Capital,” as though this was
the primary issue in human affairs. But this never was the primary
issue and it is steadily receding from its former importance. The
ancient civilisations did actually rest upon a broad basis of slavery
and serfdom. Human muscle was a main source of energy--ranking with
sun, rain and flood. But invention and discovery have so changed the
conditions under which power is directed and utilised that muscle
becomes economically secondary and inessential. We no longer want
hewers of wood and drawers of water, carriers and pick and spade men.
We no longer want that breeding swarm of hefty sweaty bodies without
which the former civilisations could not have endured. We want watchful
and understanding guardians and drivers of complex delicate machines,
which can be mishandled and brutalised and spoiled all too easily.
The less disposed these masters of our machines are to inordinate
multiplication, the more room and food in the world for their ampler
lives. Even to the lowest level of a fully mechanicalised civilisation
it is required that the human element should be select. In the
modern world, crowds are a survival and they will presently be an
anachronism, and crowd psychology therefore cannot supply the basis of
a new order.
It is just because labour is becoming more intelligent, responsible and
individually efficient that it is becoming more audible and impatient
in social affairs. It is just because it is no longer mere gang labour
and becoming more and more intelligent co-operation in detail, that
it now resents being treated as a serf, housed like a serf, fed like
a serf and herded like a serf and its pride and thoughts and feelings
disregarded. Labour is in revolt because as a matter of fact it is, in
the ancient and exact sense of the word, ceasing to be labour at all.
The more progressive elements of the directive classes recognise this,
but as we have shown, there are formidable forces still tending to
maintain the old social attitudes when arrogance became the ruler and
the common man accepted his servile status. A continual resistance
is offered by large sections of the prosperous and advantaged to the
larger claims of the modernised worker, and in response the rising and
differentiating workers develop an angry antagonism to these directive
classes which allow themselves to be controlled by their conservative
and reactionary elements. Moreover, the increasing relative
intelligence of the labour masses, the unprecedented imaginative
stimulation they experience, the continually more widespread
realisation of the available freedoms and comforts and indulgences
that might be and are not shared by all in a modern state, develop a
recalcitrance where once there was little but fatalistic acquiescence.
An objection to direction and obligation, always mutely present in
the toiling multitude since the economic life of man began, becomes
articulate and active. It is the taste of freedom that makes labour
desire to be free. This series of frictions is a quite inevitable
aspect of social reorganisation but they do not constitute a primary
antagonism in the process.
The class war was invented by the classes; it is a natural tradition
of the upper strata of the old order. It was so universally understood
that there was no need to state it. It is implicit in nearly all the
literature of the world before this nineteenth century--except the
Bible, the Koran and other sequelæ. The “class war” of the Marxist
is merely a poor snobbish imitation, a _tu quoque_, a pathetic,
stupid, indignant reversal of and retort to the old arrogance, an
_upward_ arrogance.
These conflicts cut across rather than oppose or help the progressive
development to which the Open Conspiracy devotes itself. Labour,
awakened, enquiring and indignant, is not necessarily progressive;
if the ordinary undistinguished worker is no longer to be driven as
a beast of burthen, he has--which also goes against the grain--to be
educated to as high a level of co-operative efficiency as possible.
He has to work better, even if he works for much shorter hours and
under better conditions, and his work must be subordinated work still;
he cannot become _en masse_ sole owner and master of a scheme
of things he did not make and is incapable of directing. Yet this is
the ambition implicit in an exclusively “Labour” movement. Either the
Labour revolutionary hopes to cadge the services of exceptional people
without acknowledgment or return on sentimental grounds or he really
believes that anyone is as capable as anyone else--if not more so. The
worker at a low level may be flattered by dreams of “class-conscious”
mass dominion from which all sense of inferiority is banished, but they
will remain dreams. The deep instinctive jealousy of the commonplace
individual for outstanding quality and novel initiative may be
organised and turned to sabotage and destruction, masquerading as and
aspiring to be a new social order, but that will be a blind alley and
not the road of progress. Our hope for the human future does not lie in
crowd psychology and the indiscriminating rule of universal democracy.
The Open Conspiracy can have little use for mere resentments as a
driving force towards its ends; it starts with a proposal not to
exalt the labour class but to abolish it, its sustaining purpose is
to throw drudges out of employment and eliminate the inept--and it is
far more likely to incur suspicion and distrust in the lower ranks of
the developing industrial order of to-day than to win support there.
There, just as everywhere else in the changing social complexes of our
time, it can appeal only to the exceptionally understanding individual
who can without personal humiliation consider his present activities
and relationships as provisional and who can, without taking offence,
endure a searching criticism of his present quality and mode of living.
_Chapter X_
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY AND THE RESISTANCES OF THE LESS INDUSTRIALISED
PEOPLES
So far in our accounting of the powers, institutions, dispositions,
types and classes to which the Open Conspiracy will run counter, we
have surveyed only such territory in the domain of the future world
commonweal as is represented by the complex, progressive, highly
industrialised communities, based on a preceding landlord-soldier,
tenant, town-merchant and tradesman system, of the Atlantic type.
These communities have developed farthest in the direction of
mechanicalisation and they are so much more efficient and powerful
that they now dominate the rest of the world. India, China, Russia,
Africa present _mélanges_ of social systems, thrown together,
outpaced, overstrained, shattered, invaded, exploited and more or less
subjugated by the finance, machinery and political aggressions of the
Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean civilisation. In many ways they have
an air of assimilating themselves to that civilisation, evolving modern
types and classes and abandoning much of their distinctive traditions.
But what they take from the West is mainly the new developments, the
material achievements, rather than social and political achievements
that, empowered by modern inventions, have won their way to world
predominance. They may imitate European nationalism to a certain
extent; for them it becomes a convenient form of self-assertion
against the pressure of a realised practical, social and political
inferiority; but the degree to which they will or can take over the
social assumptions and habits of the long-established European-American
hierarchy is probably very restricted. Their nationalism will remain
largely indigenous; the social traditions to which they will try to
make the new material forces subservient will be traditions of an
Oriental life widely different from the original life of Europe. They
will have their own resistances to the Open Conspiracy, therefore,
but they will be different resistances from those we have hitherto
considered. The automobile and the wireless set, the harvester and
steel construction building, will come to the jungle raja and the head
hunter, the Brahmin and the Indian peasant with a parallel and yet
dissimilar message to the one they brought the British land-owner or
the corn and cattle farmers of the Argentine and the Middle West. Also
they may be expected to evoke dissimilar reactions.
To a number of the finer, more energetic minds of these overshadowed
communities which have lagged more or less in the material advances to
which this present ascendency of Western Europe and America is due, the
Open Conspiracy may come with an effect of immense invitation. At one
step they may go from the sinking vessel of their antiquated order,
across their present conquerors into a brotherhood of world rulers.
They may turn to the problem of saving and adapting all that is rich
and distinctive of their inheritance to the common ends of the race.
But to the less vigorous intelligences of this outer world, the new
project of the Open Conspiracy will seem no better than a new form
of Western envelopment, and they will fight a mighty liberation as
though it were a further enslavement to the European tradition. They
will watch the Open Conspiracy for any signs of conscious superiority
and racial disregard. Necessarily they will recognise it as a product
of Western mentality and they may well be tempted to regard it as an
elaboration and organisation of current dispositions rather than the
evolution of a new phase which will make no discrimination at least
between the effete traditions of either East or West. Their suspicions
will be sustained and developed by the clumsy and muddle-headed
political and economic aggressions of the contemporary political and
business systems, such as they are, of the West, now in progress.
Behind that cloud of aggression Western thought has necessarily
advanced upon them; it could have got to their attention in no other
way.
Partly these resistances and criticisms of the decadent communities
outside the Atlantic capitalist systems will be aimed, not at the
developing methods of the coming world community, but at the European
traditions and restrictions that have imposed themselves upon these
methods, and so far the clash of the East and West may be found to
subserve the aims of the Open Conspiracy. In the conflict of old
traditions and in the consequent deadlocks lies much hope for the
direct acceptance of the groups of ideas centring upon the Open
Conspiracy. One of the most interesting areas of humanity in this
respect is the great system of communities under the sway or influence
of Soviet Russia. Russia has never been completely incorporated with
the European system; she became a just passable imitation of a western
European monarchy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
talked at last of constitutions and parliaments--but the reality of
that vast empire remained an Asiatic despotism and the European mask
was altogether smashed by the successive revolutions of 1917. The
ensuing system is a government presiding over an enormous extent of
peasants and herdsmen, by a disciplined association professing the
faith and dogmas of Marx, as interpreted and qualified by Lenin.
In many ways this government is a novelty of extraordinary interest.
In the fact that it is a propagandist association becoming a
commonweal, it is manifestly the inspiration and precursor of the Open
Conspiracy. It labours against enormous difficulties within itself
and without. Flung amazingly into a position of tremendous power,
its intellectual flexibility is greatly restricted by the urgent
militant necessity for mental unanimity and a consequent repression
of criticism. It finds itself separated, intellectually and morally,
by an enormous gap, from the illiterate millions over which it rules.
More open perhaps to scientific and creative conceptions than any other
government, and certainly more willing to experiment and innovate,
its enterprise is starved by the economic depletion of the country in
the Great War and by the technical and industrial backwardness of the
population upon which it must draw for its personnel. Moreover, it
struggles within itself between concepts of a modern scientific social
organisation and a vague anarchistic dream in which the “State” is to
disappear and an emancipated proletariat, breeding and expectorating
freely, fills the vistas of time for evermore. The tradition of heavy
years of hopeless opposition have tainted the world policy of the
Marxist cult with a mischievous and irritating quality that focuses
upon it the animosity of every other government in the dominant
Atlantic system. Nevertheless it has maintained itself for more than
ten years and it seems far more likely to evolve than to perish. It
is quite possible that it will evolve towards the conceptions of the
Open Conspiracy, and in that case Russia may witness once again a
conflict between new ideas and Old Believers. So far the Communist
Party in Moscow has maintained a considerable propaganda of ideas in
the rest of the world and especially across its western frontier. Many
of these ideas are trite and stale. The time may be not far distant
when the tide of propaganda will flow in the reverse direction. It has
pleased the vanity of the Communist Party to imagine itself conducting
a propaganda of world revolution. Its fate may be to develop upon
lines that will make its more intelligent elements easily assimilable
to the Open Conspiracy for a world revolution. The Open Conspiracy as
it spreads and grows may find a less encumbered field for trying out
the economic developments implicit in its conceptions in Russia and
Siberia, than anywhere else in the world.
However severely the guiding themes and practical methods of the
present Soviet Government in Russia may be criticised, the fact remains
that it has cleared out of its way many of the main obstructive
elements that we find still vigorous in the more highly organised
communities in the west. It has liberated vast areas from the kindred
superstitions of monarchy and the need for a private proprietary
control of great economic interests. And it has presented the Oriental
China and India with the exciting spectacle of a social and political
system capable of throwing off many of the most characteristic
features of triumphant Westernism, and yet holding its own. In the
days when Japan faced up to modern necessities, there were no models
for imitation that were not communities of the Atlantic type pervaded
by the methods of private capitalism, and in consequence the Japanese
reconstituted their affairs on a distinctly European plan, adopting a
Parliament and bringing their monarchy, social hierarchy and business
and financial methods into a general conformity with that model. It
is extremely doubtful whether any other Asiatic community will now
set itself to a parallel imitation, and it will be thanks largely to
the Russian revolution that this breakaway from Europeanisation has
occurred.
But it does not follow that such a breakaway will necessarily lead
more directly to the Open Conspiracy. If we have to face a less highly
organised system of interests and prejudices in Russia and China, we
have to deal with a vastly wider ignorance and a vastly more formidable
animalism. Russia is a land of tens of millions of peasants ruled over
by a little band of the intelligentsia who can be counted only by tens
of thousands. It is only these few score thousands who are accessible
to ideas of world construction, and the only hope of bringing the
Russian system into active participation in the world conspiracy is
through that small minority and through its educational repercussion
on the myriads below. As we go eastward from European Russia the
proportion of soundly prepared intelligence to which we can appeal for
understanding and participation diminishes to an even more dismaying
fraction. Eliminate that fraction and one is left face to face with
inchoate barbarism incapable of social and political organisation
above the level of the war boss and the brigand leader. Russia itself
is still by no means secure against a degenerative process in that
direction, and the hope of China struggling out of it without some
forcible directive interventions is a hope to which constructive
liberalism clings with very little assurance.
We turn back therefore from Russia, China and the communities of
Central Asia to the Atlantic world. It is in that world alone that
sufficient range and amplitude of thought and discussion is possible
for the adequate development of the Open Conspiracy. In these
communities it must begin and for a long time its main activities will
need to be sustained from these necessary centres of diffusion. It
will develop amidst incessant mental strife and through that strife it
will remain alive. It is no small part of the practical weakness of
present day communism that it attempts to centre its intellectual life
and its directive activities in Moscow and so cuts itself off from
the free and open discussions of the Western world. Marxism lost the
world when it went to Moscow and took over the traditions of Tzarism,
as Christianity lost the world when it went to Rome and took over the
traditions of Cæsar. Entrenched in Moscow from searching criticism, the
Marxist ideology may become more and more dogmatic and unprogressive,
repeating its sacred _credo_ and issuing its disregarded orders to
the proletariat of the world, and so stay ineffectively crystallised
until the rising tide of the Open Conspiracy submerges, dissolves it
afresh and incorporates whatever it finds assimilable.
India like Japan is cut off from the main body of Asiatic affairs.
But while Japan has become a formally Westernised nationality in the
comity of such nations, India remains a world in itself. In that one
peninsula nearly every type of community is to be found, from the
tribe of jungle savages through a great diversity of barbaric and
mediæval principalities to the child and women sweating factories and
the vigorous modern commercialism of Bombay. Over it all the British
imperialism prevails, a constraining and restraining influence, keeping
the peace, checking epidemics, increasing the food supply by irrigation
and the like (so that population increases horribly), and making little
or no effort to evoke responses to modern ideas. Britain in India is
no propagandist of modern ferments: all those are left the other side
of Suez. In India the Briton is a ruler as firm and self-assured and
uncreative as the Roman. The old religious and social traditions, the
complex customs, castes, tabus and exclusions of a strangely mixed but
unamalgamated community, though a little discredited by this foreign
predominance, still hold men’s minds. They have been, so to speak,
pickled in the preservative of the British raj.
The Open Conspiracy has to invade the Indian complex in conflict
with the prejudices of both ruler and governed. It has to hope for
individual breaches in the dull Romanism of the administration; here a
genuine educationist, here a creative civil servant, here an official
touched by the distant stir of the living homeland--and it has to try
to bring these types into a corporated relationship with a fine native
scholar here or an active-minded prince or land-owner or industrialist
there. As the old methods of passenger transport are superseded by
flying, it will be more and more difficult to keep the stir of the
living homeland out of either the consciousness of the official
hierarchy or the knowledge of the recalcitrant “native.”
Very similar to Indian conditions is the state of affairs in the
foreign possessions of France, the same administrative obstacles to
the Open Conspiracy above, and below the same resentful subordination,
cut off from the mental invigoration of responsibility. Within these
areas of restraint, India and its lesser, simpler parallels in North
Africa, Syria and the Far East, there goes on a rapid increase of
low-grade population, undersized physically and mentally, and retarding
the mechanical development of civilisation by its standing offer of
cheap labour to the unscrupulous entrepreneur, and possible feeble
insurrectionary material to the unscrupulous political adventurer.
It is impossible to estimate how slowly or how rapidly the knowledge
and ideas that have checked the rate of increase of all the Atlantic
populations may be diffused through these less alert communities.
We must complete our survey of the resistances against which the Open
Conspiracy has to work by a few words about the negro world and the
regions of forest and jungle in which barbaric and even savage human
life still escapes the infection of civilisation. It seems inevitable
that the development of modern means of communication and the conquest
of tropical diseases should end in giving access everywhere to
modern administration and to economic methods, and everywhere the
incorporation of the former wilderness in the modern economic process
means the destruction of the material basis, the free hunting, the free
access to the soil, of such barbaric and savage communities as still
precariously survive. The dusky peoples, who were formerly the lords
of these still imperfectly assimilated areas, are becoming exploited
workers, slaves, serfs, hut-tax payers or labourers to a caste of white
immigrants. The spirit of the plantation broods over all these lands.
The negro in America differs only from his subjugated brother in South
Africa or Kenya Colony in the fact that he also, like his white master,
is an immigrant. The situation in Africa and America adjusts itself
therefore towards parallel conditions, the chief variation being in the
relative proportions of the two races and the details of the methods by
which black labour is made to serve white ends.
In these black and white communities which are establishing themselves
in all those parts of the earth where once the black was native, or in
which a sub-tropical climate is favourable to his existence at a low
level of social development, there is--and there is bound to be for
many years to come--much racial tension. The steady advance of birth
control may mitigate the biological factors of this tension later on,
and a general amelioration of manners and conduct may efface that
disposition to persecute dissimilar types, which man shares with many
other gregarious animals. But meanwhile this tension increases and a
vast multitude of lives is strained to tragic issues.
To exaggerate the dangers and evils of miscegenation is a weakness
of our time. Man interbreeds with all his varieties and yet deludes
himself that there are races of outstanding purity, the “Nordic,”
the “Semitic” and so forth. These are phantoms of the imagination.
The reality is more intricate, less dramatic and grips less easily
upon the mind; the phantoms grip only too well and incite to terrible
suppressions. Changes in the number of half-breeds and in the
proportion of white and coloured are changes of a temporary nature
that many become controllable and rectifiable in a few generations.
But until this level of civilisation is reached, until the colour of
a man’s skin or the kinks in a woman’s hair cease to have the value
of Shibboleths that involve educational, professional and social
extinction or survival, a black and white community is bound to be
continually preoccupied by a standing feud too intimate and pervasive
to permit of any long views of the world’s destiny.
We come to the conclusion therefore that it is from the more vigorous,
varied and less severely obsessed centres of the Atlantic civilisations
in the temperate zone, with their abundant facilities for publication
and discussion, their traditions of mental liberty and their immense
variety of interacting free modern types, that the main beginnings
of the Open Conspiracy must develop. For the rest of the world, its
propaganda, finding but poor nourishment in the local conditions, may
retain a missionary quality for many years.
_Chapter XI_
RESISTANCES AND ANTAGONISTIC FORCES IN OURSELVES
We have dealt in the preceding two chapters with great classes and
assemblages of human beings as, in the mass, likely to be more or less
antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy, and it has been difficult in those
chapters to avoid the implication that “we,” some sort of circle round
the writer, were aloof from these obstructive and hostile multitudes,
and ourselves entirely identified with the Open Conspiracy. But neither
are these multitudes so definitely against, nor those who are with us
so entirely for, the Open Conspiracy to establish a world community as
the writer in his desire for clearness and contrast and with an all too
human disposition perhaps towards plain ego-centred combative issues,
has been led to represent. There is no “we” and there can be no “we” in
possession of the Open Conspiracy.
The Open Conspiracy is in partial possession of us and we attempt
to serve it. But the Open Conspiracy is a natural and necessary
development of contemporary thought arising here and there and
everywhere. There are doubts and sympathies that weigh on the side of
the Open Conspiracy in nearly everyone, and not one of us but retains
many impulses, habits and ideas in conflict with our general devotion,
checking and limiting our service.
Let us therefore in this chapter cease to discuss classes and types and
consider general mental tendencies and reactions which move through all
humanity.
In our opening chapters we pointed out that religion is not universally
distributed throughout human society. And of no one does it seem to
have complete possession. It seizes upon some of us and exalts us
for one hour now and then, for a day now and then; it may leave its
afterglow upon our conduct for some time; it may establish restraints
and habitual dispositions; sometimes it dominates us with but brief
intermissions through long spells and then we can be saints and
martyrs. In all our religious phases there appears a desire to
hold the phase, to subdue the rest of our life to the standards and
exigencies of that phase. Our quickened intelligence sets itself to
a general analysis of our conduct and to the problem of establishing
controls over our unilluminated intervals.
And when the religious elements in the mind set themselves to such
self-analysis and attempts to order and unify the whole being upon
this basis of the service and advancement of the race, they discover
first a great series of indifferent moods, wherein the resistance to
thought and work for the Open Conspiracy is merely passive and in the
nature of inertia. There is a whole class of states of mind which may
be brought together under the head of “everydayism.” The dinner-bell
and the playing-fields, the cinema and the newspaper, the week-end
visit and the factory siren, a host of such expectant universal things,
call to a vast majority of people in our modern world to stop thinking
and get busy with the interest in hand, and so on to the next, without
a thought for the general frame and drama in which these momentary
and personal incidents are set. We are driven along these marked and
established routes and turned this way or that by the accidents of
upbringing, of rivalries and loves, of chance encounters and vivid
experiences, and it is rare for many of us, and never for some, that
the phases of broad reflection and self-questioning arise. For many
people the religious life now, as in the past, has been a quite
desperate effort to withdraw sufficient attention and energy from the
flood of events to get some sort of grasp, and keep whatever grip is
won, upon the relations of the self to the whole. Far more recoil in
terror from such a possibility and would struggle strenuously against
solitude in the desert, solitude under the stars, solitude in a silent
room or indeed any occasion for comprehensive thought.
But the instinct and purpose of the religious type is to keep hold
upon the comprehensive drama, and at the heart of all the great
religions of the world we find a parallel disposition to escape in
some manner from the aimless drive and compulsion of accident and
everyday. Escape is attempted either by withdrawal from the presence
of crowding circumstance into a mystical contemplation and austere
retirement, or--what is more difficult and desperate and reasonable--by
imposing the mighty standards of enduring issues upon the whole mass
of transitory problems which constitute the actual business of life.
We have already noted how the modern mind turns from retreat as a
recognisable method of religion, and faces squarely up to the second
alternative. The tumult of life has to be met and conquered. Aim must
prevail over the aimless. Remaining in normal life we must yet keep
our wills and thoughts aloof from normal life and fixed upon creative
processes. However busied we may be, however challenged, we must yet
save something of our best mental activity for self-examination and
keep ourselves alert against the endless treacheries within that would
trip us back into everydayism and disconnected responses to the stimuli
of life.
Religions in the past, though they have been apt to give a preference
to the renunciation of things mundane, have sought by a considerable
variety of expedients to preserve the faith of those whom chance or
duty still kept in normal contact with the world. Modern religion,
which has no alternative to constant normal contact with the world,
cannot lightly forgo the experiments of the old religions in such
expedients. Meetings for mutual reassurance, confession and prayer,
self-dedication, sacraments and seasons of fast and meditation need
to be modernised or replaced by modern equivalents if the religious
vitality of the Open Conspiracy is to be sustained. At present,
except in the case of a few friends and lovers, the modern religious
individual leads a life of extreme, wasteful and dangerous spiritual
isolation. He may forget and he has nothing to remind him; he may
relapse and he will hear no reproach to warn him of his relapse.
“Everyday” has many ways of justifying the return of the believer
to its sceptical casualness. It is easy to persuade oneself that
one is taking life or oneself “too seriously.” The mind is very
self-protective; it has a disposition to abandon too great or too
far-reaching an effort and return to things indisputably within its
scope. We have an instinctive preference for thinking things are
“all right”; we economise anxiety; we defend the delusions that we
can work with, even though we half realise they are no more than
delusions. We resent the warning voice, the critical question that
robs our activities of assurance. Our everyday moods are not only
the antagonists of our religious moods, but they resent all outward
appeals to our religious moods and they welcome every help against
religious appeals. We pass very readily from the merely defensive to
the defensive-aggressive, and from refusing to hear the word that might
stir our consciences to a vigorous effort to suppress its utterance.
Churches, religious organisations, try to keep the revivifying phase
and usage, where it may strike upon the waning or slumbering faith
of the convert, but modern religion as yet has no such organised
reminders. They cannot be improvised. Crude attempts to supply the
needed corrective of conduct may do less good than harm. Each one of
us for himself must do what he can to keep his high resolve in mind
and protect himself from the snare of his own moods of fatigue or
inadvertency.
But these passive and active defences of current things which operate
in and through ourselves, and find such ready sympathy and assistance
in the world about us, these massive resistance systems, are only the
beginning of our tale of the forces antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy
that lurk in our complexities.
Men are creatures with other faults quite beyond and outside our common
disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive. Not only
have we active creative impulses but also acute destructive ones.
Man is a jealous animal. In our youth and adolescence our egotism is
extravagant. A great number of us at that stage would rather not see
a beautiful or wonderful thing come into existence than have it come
into existence disregarding us. Something of that jealous malice,
self-assertive ruthlessness, there is in all of us. At his worst man
can be an exceedingly combative, malignant, mischievous and cruel
animal. And few of us--none of us--are altogether above the possibility
of such phases. When we consider the oppositions to the Open Conspiracy
that operate in the normal personality, we appreciate the soundness of
the catechism which instructs us to renounce not only the trivial world
and the heavy flesh, but the active and militant devil.
To make is a long and wearisome business, with many arrests and
disappointments, but to break gives an instant thrill. We all know
something of the delight of the bang. It is well for the Open
Conspirator to ask himself at times how far he is in love with the
dream of a world in order, and how far he is driven by hatred of
institutions that bore or humiliate him. He may be no more than a
revengeful incendiary in the mask of a constructive worker. How safe
is he then from the reaction to some fresh humiliation? The Open
Conspiracy which is now his refuge and vindication may presently
fail to give him the compensation he has sought, may offer him no
better than a minor rôle, may display irritating and incomprehensible
preferences. And for a great number of things in overt antagonism to
the great aim of the Open Conspiracy, he will still find within himself
not simply acquiescence but sympathy and a genuine if inconsistent
admiration. There they are, waiting for his phase of disappointment.
Back he may go to the old loves with a new animus against the greater
scheme.
Man has pranced a soldier in reality and fancy for so many generations
that few of us can altogether release ourselves from the brilliant
pretensions of flags, empire, patriotism and aggression. Business men,
especially in America, seem to feel a sort of glory in calling even
the underselling and overadvertising of rival enterprises “fighting.”
Pill vendors and public departments can have their “wars,” their
heroisms, their desperate mischiefs, and so get the Napoleonic feeling.
The world and our imaginations are full of the sentimentalities, the
false glories and loyalties of such refurbishing of the old combative
traditions, trailing after them, as they do, so much worth and virtue
in a dulled and stupefied condition. It is difficult to resist the fine
gravity, the high self-respect, examples of honour and good style in
small things, of the military and naval services, for all that they are
now no more than noxious parasites upon the nascent world commonweal.
In France not a word may be said against the army; in England, against
the navy. There will be many Open Conspirators at first who will
scarcely dare to say that word even to themselves.
But all these obsolete values and attitudes with which our minds are
cumbered must be cleared out if the new faith is to have free play. We
have to clear them out not only from our own minds but from the minds
of others who may be or become our associates. The finer and more
picturesque false loyalties, false standards of honour, false religious
associations, may seem to us, the more thoroughly must we seek to
release our minds and the minds of those about us from them and cut off
all thoughts of a return.
We cannot compromise with these vestiges of the ancient order. Whatever
we retain of them will come back to life and grow again. It is no good
to operate for cancer unless the whole growth is removed. Leave a crown
about and presently you will find it being worn by someone resolved to
be a king. Keep the name and image of a god without a distinct museum
label and sooner or later you will discover a worshipper on his knees
to it and be lucky not to find a human sacrifice upon the altar. Wave
a flag and it will wrap about you. Of yourself even more than of the
community is this true; there can be no half measures. You have not
yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of
the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward
glance.
And at last when we conceive that we have given ourselves altogether
to the Open Conspiracy frustration may overtake us. Then it is, when
we are assured that we are possessed by the Open Conspiracy, that we
shall be most disposed to think and act as though we possessed the Open
Conspiracy. And if we have made sacrifices, if we are conscious of
substantial success, then still more shall we be in danger. One of the
most disagreeable features of Christian hagiology is the value set by
the blessed saints upon their special privileges. The poor souls loved
to think they had caught the peculiar attention of God by their sores
and mortifications. This “weakness of the eminent claim” pervades all
religions. Most of those who will serve the Open Conspiracy will be
tempted to think they have deserved well and to compare their merits
and their share of influence and recognition in the movement with those
of others.
The Open Conspiracy will be no more free from rivalries, heartburnings,
distrust, touchy suspicions, mutual interference and disingenuous
negligences, than any other great human co-operation. The disciplines,
the trainings and methods of organisation that must be evolved as the
movement grows may be effective in restricting the mischief of such
humanities; they will certainly not suppress them altogether. Many a
good and serviceable man may die embittered by the preoccupation of his
fellow workers in this huge campaign. But the Open Conspiracy will grow
as science grows, greater at last than all its outer antagonisms, than
ancient tradition or instinctive resistance, greater than the conscious
or unconscious disloyalties of its adherents, greater than all the
present vices of mankind.
* * * * *
Beware of malice in this movement. Remember that man is a malicious
animal and you are human. Do not fall foul of your allies and
associates because some of them affect your richer nature as prigs or
pedants; do not be too scrupulous about the motives of others; your own
also may be misconceived; do not interpret enthusiastic service either
as conceited self-assertion or calculated self-advancement, nor give
way to excessive chagrin when some honourable task you had promised
yourself is seized upon by someone else. Avoid the belittlement of
useful work upon our side because it is not perfect. Do not let
differences of accent and idiom annoy you. Many great movements have
been crippled, many great opportunities lost, by the minor spites of
the elect. Vindictive self-assertion is an invariable characteristic of
the hopelessly damned. Watch yourself for the minutest first specks of
this leprosy.
The Open Conspiracy may learn a useful lesson if it bears in mind the
early phases of Christianity and Islam and guards itself against such
sordid dissensions as sprung and enfeebled those mighty initiatives
before even the first generation of disciples had passed away.
_Chapter XII_
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MUST BEGIN AS A MOVEMENT OF EXPLANATION AND
PROPAGANDA
And now, having taken the measure of the array of current things
against which the Open Conspiracy must pit itself, we may go on to
consider the germination and development of the Open Conspiracy.
It is fairly obvious that the primary and earliest task is to express,
develop and propagate the idea of the Open Conspiracy, to make its
external form clear, convincing, attractive and commanding to as many
people as possible. The primary organisation must be a propagandist
organisation.
The idea of the Open Conspiracy rests upon and arises out of a system
of historical, biological and sociological realisations. In the
case of people with sound knowledge in these fields we may look for
these realisations already; such people are prepared for adhesion
without any great explanatory work; there is nothing to set out to
them but the project. They do already constitute the Open Conspiracy
in an unorganised solution and will not so much adhere as admit to
themselves and others their state of mind. Directly we pass beyond that
comparatively restricted world, however, we shall find that we have
to deal with partial knowledge, distorted views or blank ignorance,
and that a revision and extension of historical and biological ideas
and a considerable elucidation of economic misconceptions has to be
undertaken.
For the past twelve years, the present writer has given much thought
and work to the question of presenting these foundation ideas for a
modern moral and political activity in a practicable form, and it will
be the easiest method of statement for him to describe the outcome of
his experiments and reflections. He reports therefore upon what he has
done and is doing not because that is in any way final or universally
applicable, but because it gives something sufficiently full and lucid
to serve as a concrete illustration of his idea. He has schemed out a
group of writings to embody the necessary ideas of the new time in a
form adapted to the current reading public and he considers what he is
doing as a sort of provisional “Bible,” so to speak, for some factors
at least in the Open Conspiracy. As the current reading public changes,
his work will become obsolescent so far as its present form and method
go. But not so far as its substantial method goes. That he believes
will remain.
These writings, this modern Bible scheme, has taken a threefold
form and he believes the mental basis of the Open Conspiracy must
necessarily retain this threefold form if only on account of its
lucidity of presentation. He has already written and published the
opening third of his scheme, first in a full and then in a compacter
book, as the _Outline of History_ and as _A Short History
of the World_. This furnishes a framework of fact within which
the general political ideas of the reader can be put in order. It
presents the history of life as a progress from fragmentation towards
world unity, mental and material. A second third of this statement
of fundamental modern ideas he is now preparing in collaboration
with two more specially qualified writers. This will be a companion
and parallel to the _Outline of History_ and it will be called
_The Science of Life_. It will be a summary of what is known
of the nature and possibilities of life. It will give the data for
personal conduct within a biologically conceived world society, just
as the _Outline of History_ gives a frame for the individual
political life in a unifying world state. The remaining third of this
encyclopædia, the third dealing mainly with inorganic and economic
science, is still a mere sketch and skeleton. It will treat of
economic and social organisation considered as the problem of man’s
exploitation of extraneous energy for the service of the species. Its
prospective title, _The Conquest of Power_, will perhaps convey
the spirit of its design. The general idea of these writings is to
present altogether, first a complete modern world outlook, politically
speaking, then the moral data of the new time, and then the forecast
of a collective economic policy, in a form accessible to a person of
ordinary education. It is the presentation of the threefold basis for a
modern ideology, historical, biological and economic. It is a pioneer
attempt to get this written down connectedly.
For a considerable section of the moderately educated public, with
historical ideas fragmentary and restricted to mere periods and
countries, the compilation of the _Outline of History_ has served
already, and still serves, as a stimulant and a release--and no doubt,
when its work is supplemented by its two companions and when all that
can be done now with life and matter is realised the three will help in
a great number of cases to pull people’s minds together into a shape
that will dispose them to full participation in the new movement. But
at the most exaggerated estimate possible, these works constitute a
merely provisional “Bible,” and the measure of their success will be
marked by the promptitude of their replacement by worthier successors.
Such compilations cannot but have many of the characteristic defects of
pioneer and elementary work; they have often to achieve their ends by
going rather roughly over secondary difficulties that would otherwise
delay their production indefinitely. Yet at the outset they will be
of use in marking out the shape and scope of the general concepts
of the Open Conspiracy. At the outset, the Open Conspiracy, as it
reaches beyond the range of exceptionally well-informed and mentally
active people, must be very largely an educational propaganda of such
material. Only later can it hope to relinquish this part of its task to
renascent educational organisations which can be trusted to ensure a
firm foundation for the modern conception of life.
The form in which the Open Conspiracy will first appear will certainly
not be that of a centralised organisation. Its most natural and
convenient method of coming into being will be the formation of small
groups of friends, family groups, groups of students and employees
or other sorts of people meeting and conversing frequently in the
course of their normal occupations, who will exchange views and find
themselves in agreement upon the general idea. Fundamentally important
issues upon which unanimity must be achieved from the outset are,
firstly, the entirely provisional nature of all existing governments,
and the entirely provisional nature, therefore, of all loyalties
associated therewith; secondly, the supreme importance of population
control in human biology and the possibility it affords us of a
release from the pressure of the struggle for existence on ourselves;
and thirdly, the urgent necessity of protective resistance against
the present traditional drift towards war. People who do not grasp
the vital significance of these test issues do not really begin to
understand the Open Conspiracy. Groups coming into agreement upon these
matters, and upon their general interpretation of history, will be in a
position to seek adherents, enlarge themselves and attempt to establish
communication with kindred groups for common ends. They can take up a
variety of activities to develop a sense and habit of combined action
and feel their way to greater enterprises.
We have shown already that the Open Conspiracy must be heterogeneous in
origin. Young men and young women may be collected into groups arranged
upon lines not unlike those of the Bohemian Sokols or the Italian
Fasci. Such groups may easily have an athletic and recreational side.
These initial groups will be of no uniform pattern. They will be of
very different size, average age, social experience and influence.
Their particular activities will be determined by these things. It
is highly improbable that the name of the Open Conspiracy will be
applied to any of them. That is just a provisional name in these Blue
Prints. Their diverse qualities and influences will express themselves
by diverse titles. A group of students may find itself capable of
little more than self-education and personal propaganda; a group of
middle-class people in a small town may find its small resources fully
engaged at first in such things as, for example, seeing that desirable
literature is available for sale or in the local public library,
protecting books and news-vendors from suppression, or influencing
local teachers. Most parents of school-children can press for the
teaching of universal history and sound biology and protest against the
inculcation of aggressive patriotism. On the other hand, a group of
ampler experience and resources may undertake the printing, publication
and distribution of literature, and exercise considerable influence
upon public opinion in turning education in the right direction. The
League of Nations movement, the Birth Control movement and most radical
and socialist societies are fields into which groups may go to find
adherents more than half prepared for them. The Open Conspiracy is a
fuller and ampler movement into which these incomplete activities must
necessarily merge as its idea takes possession of men’s imaginations.
From the outset, the Open Conspiracy will set its face against
militarism. There is a plain present need for the organisation now,
before war comes again, of an open and explicit refusal to serve in any
war--or at most to serve in war, directly or indirectly, only after the
issue has been fully and fairly submitted to arbitration. The time for
a conscientious objection to war service is manifestly before and not
after the onset of war. People who have acquiesced in a belligerent
foreign policy by silence right up to the onset of war, have little
to complain of if they are then compelled to serve. And a refusal
to participate with one’s country in warfare is a preposterously
incomplete gesture unless it is rounded off by the deliberate advocacy
of a world _pax_, a world economic control and a restrained
population, such as the idea of the Open Conspiracy embodies.
The putting upon record of its members’ reservation of themselves from
any or all of the military obligations that may be thrust upon the
country by military and diplomatic effort, will be, I think, the first
considerable overt act of the Open Conspiracy groups. It will supply
the practical incentive to bring many of them together in the first
place. It will follow closely upon the beginning of the propaganda and
it will probably necessitate the creation of regional or national _ad
hoc_ committees for the establishment of a collective legal and
political defensive for this dissent from current militant nationalism.
It will bring the Open Conspiracy very early out of the province of
discussion into the field of practical conflict. It will from the
outset invest it with a very necessary quality of present applicability.
The anticipatory repudiation of military service, so far as this
last may be imposed by existing governments in their factitious
international rivalries, need not necessarily involve a denial of the
need of military action on behalf of the world commonweal, for the
suppression of nationalist brigandage, nor need it prevent the military
training of members of the Open Conspiracy. It is simply the practical
form of assertion that the normal militant diplomacy and warfare of
the present time are offences against civilisation, processes in
the nature of brigandage, sedition and civil war, and that serious
men cannot be expected to play anything but a rôle of disapproval,
non-participation or active prevention towards them. Our loyalty to our
current government, we would intimate, is subject to its sane and adult
behaviour.
These educational and propagandist groups drawing together into an
organised resistance to militarism and to the excessive control of
individuals by the makeshift governments of to-day, are the possible
and probable form in which the Open Conspiracy will appear in the
world. But they constitute only the earliest and more elementary grade
of its activities, and we will presently go on to consider the more
specialised and constructive forms its effort must evoke. Before doing
so, however, we may say a little more about the structure and method
of these initiatory groups.
Since they are bound to be different and miscellaneous in form, size,
quality and ability, any early attempts to organise them into common
general action or even into regular common gatherings are to be
deprecated. There should be many types of groups. Collective action had
better for a time--perhaps for a long time--be undertaken not through
the merging of groups but through the formation of _ad hoc_
associations for definitely specialised ends. The groups will come into
these associations to make a contribution very much as people come into
limited liability companies, that is to say with a subscription and
not with their whole capital. A comprehensive organization attempting
from the first to cover all activities would necessarily rest upon and
promote one prevalent pattern of group and hamper or estrange the more
original and interesting forms.
There is a detestable sort of energetic human being which preys
upon human societies, delighting in procedure, by-laws, votings,
stereotyping and embarrassing “resolutions,” the “capture” of
committees and organisations, the delegation of powers and suchlike
politicians’ mischief. It is a blighting and accursed type, living
and multiplying in rules and precedents as bugs in old wallpaper. The
less the Open Conspiracy devotes itself to such elaborations in its
gatherings, the better for its spirit. Always it will be well to keep
its comprehensive organisation easy and simple.
Each group should come together and develop its ideas, frankly and
freely, at something like a common level of understanding and in a
friendly atmosphere. It would be advisable that most groups should
assemble with some regularity, and since in a large part of the world
Sunday is recognised as the day set apart from the concerns of the
individual for the consideration of wider issues, that day may well be
the usual day for group gatherings. A weekly meeting at which everyone
attempts to be present seems to be indicated as the normal habit of
a group. A member who finds weekly attendance at his group meeting
irksome, probably belongs to the wrong group and should seek another.
A normal group in the early stage of its existence will find most
of its energy engaged in confirming and cleaning up its conception
of the Open Conspiracy and in dealing with people invited to join
in, trying out its ideas upon interested visitors and so forth.
It will also experiment in outside activities determined by its
special circumstances. The ordinary group must bear in mind that
these practical activities must at first be preparatory and mainly
self-educational. It must not subordinate its general mental task in
them.
The clear conception of the Open Conspiracy is a considerable but
necessary intellectual effort. A group of historical, biological and
economic ideas and interpretations has to be assimilated and they are
not by any means simple and obvious ideas. And in addition--and what
is perhaps the more difficult part--many prevalent habits of mind and
current assumptions have to be got rid of. The conception of the Open
Conspiracy involves, for example, a sceptical and destructive criticism
of personal-immortality religions and also of the sacred formulæ
of communism. It can work, and may go far in certain ways, with
Christians or Communists, but it cannot incorporate them so long as
they are Christians or Communists. Vague goodwill for mankind, or for
progress, and adhesions based on some partial approval of its spirit,
its methods or its objective, are of no real value to an enterprise so
huge in its ultimate intentions.
For the furtherance of its aims, the Open Conspiracy may work in
alliance with all sorts of movements and people, but to take them
into its own essential substance is an altogether different matter.
Propaganda and education are seed-sowing and only in revivalist
religion is an immediate, a simultaneous reaping attempted with the
sowing of the seed. The general run of people are more eager to do than
to understand, and from the beginning of its first overt activities the
Open Conspiracy will have to deal with the friendly advances of those
who will want to share in its effort without any proper assimilation of
the ideas that promote it. This will be another reason for projecting
its practical activities into the form of _ad hoc_ associations,
into which outsiders with different or undeveloped religious,
political, social and philosophical views may come without penetrating
as permanent members into the actual groups, and it will also justify
the helpful participation of the Open Conspiracy groups in definitely
restricted movements which attend only to a portion of its programme.
But many of those who first come into touch with the Open Conspiracy
simply as helpers and allies will no doubt go on to a careful study of
its general concepts and so to complete participation.
The groups of the Open Conspiracy, it may be reiterated, will vary
much in leisure, knowledge, ability and scope. In the student world,
in the associated world of special social, political and philosophical
studies and in the world where speculative thought is combined with
writing and discussion, groups will appear which turn naturally to the
development and expression of the Open Conspiracy as their distinctive
contribution. The concepts of the Open Conspiracy will appear
increasingly in books and periodicals until some of these latter become
recognised definitely as means of communication within the movement. It
will acquire or provoke its own periodic literature. Such circles of
“intelligentsia” will also supply lecturers and leaders of discussions
who will be drawn upon by other groups and group combinations for
visits of stimulus and elucidation.
From that, the spreading, growing and ripening groups will go on to
combine with one another for local and regional meetings. People
who have met first in _ad hoc_ activities will find themselves
developing naturally and progressively into social association
and a loose general organisation with the Open Conspiracy. Such
an organisation should leave the fullest scope for group or even
individual autonomy in particular cases. The only binding restraint
upon independent initiatives in the Open Conspiracy should be its broad
essential requirements, namely:
(1) The complete assertion, practical as well as theoretical, of the
provisional nature of existing governments and of our acquiescence in
them;
(2) The resolve to minimise by all available means the conflicts of
these governments, their militant use of individuals and property and
their interferences with the establishment of a world economic system;
(3) The determination to replace private local or national ownership of
at least credit, transport and staple production by a responsible world
directorate serving the common ends of the race;
(4) The practical recognition of the necessity for world biological
controls, for example, of population and disease;
(5) The support of a minimum standard of individual freedom and welfare
in the world; and
(6) The supreme duty of subordinating the personal life to the creation
of a world directorate capable of these tasks and to the general
advancement of human knowledge, capacity and power.
The admission therewith that our immortality is conditional and lies in
the race and not in our individual selves.
_Chapter XIII_
EARLY CONSTRUCTIVE WORK OF THE OPEN CONSPIRACY
In such terms we may sketch the practicable and possible opening phase
of the Open Conspiracy.
We do not present it as a movement initiated by any individual
or radiating from any particular centre. It arises naturally and
necessarily from the present increase of knowledge and the broadening
outlook of many minds throughout the world. It is reasonable therefore
to anticipate its appearance all over the world in sporadic mutually
independent groups and to recognise not only that they will be
extremely various but that many of them will trail with them racial and
regional habits and characteristics which will only be shaken off as
its cosmopolitan character becomes imperatively evident. The passage
from the partial anticipations of the Open Conspiracy that already
abound everywhere to its complete and completely self-conscious
statement may be made by almost imperceptible degrees. To-day it may
seem no more than a visionary idea; to-morrow it may be realised as a
world-wide force of opinion and will. People will pass with no great
inconsistency from saying that the Open Conspiracy is impossible to
saying that it has always been plain and clear to them, that to this
fashion they have shaped their lives as long as they can remember.
In its opening phase, in the day of small things, quite minor accidents
may help or delay the clear definition and popularisation of its
main ideas. The changing pattern of public events may disperse or
concentrate attention upon it, or it may win the early adherence of
men of exceptional resources, energy or ability. It is impossible to
foretell the speed of its advance. Its development may be slower or
faster, direct or devious, but the logic of accumulating realisations
thrusts it forward, will persist in thrusting it on, and sooner or
later it will be discovered, conscious and potent, the working religion
of most sane and energetic people.
Meanwhile our supreme virtues must be faith and persistence.
So far we have considered only two of the main activities of the Open
Conspiracy, the one being its propaganda of confidence in the possible
world commonweal and the other its immediate practical attempt to
systematise resistance to militant and competitive imperialism and
nationalism. But such things are merely its groundwork undertakings;
they do no more than clear the site and make the atmosphere possible
for its organised constructive efforts.
Directly we turn to that we turn to questions of special knowledge,
special effort and special organisation.
Let us consider first the general advancement of science, the
protection and support of scientific research and the diffusion of
scientific knowledge. These things fall within the normal scheme of
duty for the members of the Open Conspiracy. The world of science
and experiment is the region of origin of nearly all the great
initiatives that characterise our times; the Open Conspiracy owes
its inspiration, its existence, its form and direction entirely to
the changes of condition these initiatives have brought about, and
yet a large number of scientific workers live outside the sphere of
sympathy in which we may expect the Open Conspiracy to materialise, and
collectively their political and social influence upon the community
is extraordinarily small. Having regard to the immensity of its
contributions and the incalculable value of its promise to the modern
community, science--research, that is, and the diffusion of scientific
knowledge--is extraordinarily neglected, starved and threatened by
hostile interference. This is largely because it has no strong unifying
organisation and cannot in itself develop such an organisation.
Science is a hard mistress and the first condition of successful
scientific work is that the scientific man should stick to his
research. The world of science is therefore in itself, at its core,
a miscellany of specialists, often very ungracious specialists,
and, rather than offer him help and co-operation, it calls for
understanding, tolerance and service from the man of more general
intelligence and wider purpose. The company of scientific men is
less like a host of guiding angels than like a swarm of marvellous
bees--endowed with stings--which must be hived and cherished and
multiplied by the Open Conspiracy.
But so soon as we have the Open Conspiracy at work, putting its
case plainly and offering its developing organisation to those most
preciously preoccupied men, then reasonably, when it involves no
special trouble for them, when it is the line of least resistance for
them, they may be expected to fall in with its convenient and helpful
ideas, and find in it what they have hitherto lacked, a common system
of political and social concepts to hold them together. When that
stage is reached, we shall be saved such spectacles of intellectual
prostitution as the last Great War offered, when men of science were
herded blinking from their laboratories to curse one another upon
nationalist lines, and when after the war stupid and wicked barriers
were set up to the free communication of knowledge by the exclusion
of scientific men of this or that nationality from international
scientific gatherings. The Open Conspiracy must help the man of
science to realise, what at present he fails most astonishingly to
realise, that he belongs to a greater comity than any king or president
represents to-day, and so prepare him for better behaviour in the next
season of trial.
The formation of groups in, and not only in, but about and in relation
to, the scientific world, which will add to those first main activities
of the Open Conspiracy, propaganda and pacificism, a special attention
to the needs of scientific work, may be enlarged upon with advantage
here, because it will illustrate quite typically the idea of a special
work carried on in relation to a general activity, which is the subject
of this section.
The Open Conspiracy extends its invitation to all sorts and conditions
of men, but the service of scientific progress is for those only who
are specially equipped or who are sufficiently interested to equip
themselves. For scientific work there is first of all a great need
of endowment and the setting up of laboratories, observatories,
experimental stations and the like in all parts of the world. Numbers
of men and women capable of scientific work never achieve it for want
of the stimulus of opportunity afforded by endowment. Few contrive to
create their own opportunities. The essential man of science is very
rarely an able collector or administrator of money and anyhow the
detailed work of organisation is a grave call upon his special mental
energy. But many men capable of a broad and intelligent appreciation
of scientific work, but not capable of the peculiar intensities of
research, have the gift of extracting money from private and public
sources, and it is for them to use that gift modestly and generously in
providing the framework for those more especially endowed.
And there is already a steadily increasing need for the proper storage
and indexing of scientific results, and every fresh worker enhances it.
Quite a considerable amount of scientific work goes fruitless or is
needlessly repeated, because of the growing volume of publication, and
men make discoveries in the field of reality only to lose them again in
the lumber-room of record. Here is a second line of activity to which
the Open Conspiracy with a scientific bias may direct his attention.
A third line is the liaison work between the man of science and the
common intelligent man; the promotion of publications which will
either state the substance, implications and consequences of new work
in the vulgar tongue, or, if that is impossible, train the general
run of people to the new idioms and technicalities which need to be
incorporated with the vulgar tongue if it is still to serve its ends as
a means of intellectual intercourse.
Through special _ad hoc_ organisations, societies for the
promotion of Research, for Research Defence, for World Indexing,
for the translation of Scientific Papers, for the Diffusion of New
Knowledge, the surplus energies of a great number of Open Conspirators
can be directed to entirely creative ends and a new world organisation
of scientific work built up, within which such dear old institutions
as the Royal Society of London, the various European Academies of
Science and the like, now overgrown and inadequate, can maintain
their venerable pride in themselves, their mellowing prestige and
their distinguished exclusiveness, without their present privilege of
inflicting cramping slights and restrictions upon the more abundant
scientific activities of to-day.
So in relation to Science--and here the word is being used in its
narrower accepted meaning for what is often spoken of as _pure_
science, the search for physical and biological realities,
uncomplicated by moral, social and “practical” considerations--we
evoke a conception of the Open Conspiracy as producing groups of
socially associated individuals, who engage primarily in the general
basic activities of the Conspiracy and adhere to and promote the six
broad principles summarised at the end of Chapter Twelve, but who work
also with the larger part of their energies, through international
and cosmopolitan societies and in a multitude of special ways, for
the establishment of an enduring and progressive world organisation
of pure research. They will have come to this special work because
their distinctive gifts, their inclinations, their positions and
opportunities have indicated it as theirs.
Now a very parallel system of Open Conspiracy groups is conceivable,
in relation to business and industrial life. It would necessarily be
a vastly bulkier and more heterogeneous system of groups but otherwise
the analogy is complete. Here we imagine those people whose gifts,
inclinations, positions and opportunities as directors, workers or
associates give them an exceptional insight into and influence in the
processes of producing and distributing commodities, can also be drawn
together into groups within the Open Conspiracy. But these groups
will be concerned with the huge and more complicated problems of the
processes by which even now the small isolated individual adventures in
production and trading, that constituted the economic life of former
civilisations, are giving place to larger, better instructed, better
planned industrial organisations, whose operations and combinations
become at last world wide.
The amalgamations and combinations, the substitution of large-scale
business for multitudes of small-scale businesses, which are going on
now, go on with all the cruelty and disregards of a natural process. If
man is to profit and survive, these unconscious blunderings--which now
stagger towards but which may never attain world organisation--must be
watched, controlled, mastered and directed. As uncertainty diminishes,
the quality of adventure and the amount of waste diminish also, and
large speculative profits are no longer possible or justifiable.
The transition from speculative adventure to organised foresight in
the common interest, in the whole world of economic life, is the
substantial task of the Open Conspiracy. And it is these specially
interested and equipped groups and not the movement as a whole which
may best begin the attack upon these fundamental readjustments.
The various Socialist movements of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth
centuries had this in common, that they sought to replace the “private
owner” in most or all economic interests by some vaguely apprehended
“public owner.” This, following the democratic disposition of the
times, was commonly conceived of as an elected body, a municipality,
the parliamentary state or what not. There were municipal socialists,
“nationalising” socialists, imperial socialists. In the mystic
teachings of the Marxist, the collective owner was to be “the
dictatorship of the proletariat.” Production for profit was denounced.
The contemporary mind realises the evils of production for profit and
of the indiscriminate scrambling of private ownership, but it has a
completer realisation and a certain accumulation of experience of the
difficulties of organising that larger ownership we desire. Private
ownership may not be altogether evil as a provisional stage even if
it has no more in its favour than the ability to transcend political
boundaries.
Moreover--and here again the democratic prepossessions of the
nineteenth century come in--the Socialist movements sought to make
every single adherent a reformer and a propagandist of economic
methods. In order to do so, it was necessary to simplify economic
processes to the crudity of nursery toys, and the intricate interplay
of will and desire in enterprise, normal employment and direction,
in questions of ownership, wages, credit and money, was reduced to
a childish fable of surplus value wickedly appropriated. The Open
Conspiracy is not so much a socialism as a more comprehensive scheme
that has eaten and assimilated whatever was digestible of its socialist
forebears. It turns to biology for guidance towards the regulation of
quantity and a controlled distribution of the human population of the
world, and it judges all the subsidiary aspects of property and pay by
the criterion of most efficient production and distribution in relation
to the indications thus obtained.
These economic groups, then, of the Open Conspiracy, which may come
indeed to be a large part of the Open Conspiracy, will be working in
that vast task of economic reconstruction--which from the point of
view of the older socialism was the sole task before mankind. They
will be conducting experiments and observing processes according to
their opportunities. Through _ad hoc_ societies and journals
they will be comparing and examining their methods and preparing
reports and clear information for the movement at large. The whole
question of money and monetary methods in our modern communities, so
extraordinarily disregarded in socialist literature, will be examined
under the assumption that money is the token of the community’s
obligation, direct or indirect, to an individual, and credit its
permission to deal freely with material.
The whole psychology of industry and industrial relationship needs
to be revised and restated in terms of the collective efficiency and
welfare of mankind. And just as far as can be contrived, the counsel
and the confidences of those who now direct great industrial and
financial operations will be invoked. The first special task of a
banker, or a bank clerk for that matter, who joins the Open Conspiracy,
will be to answer the questions: “What is a bank?” “What are you going
to do about it?” “What have we to do about it?” The first question
to a manufacturer will be: “What are you making and why?” and “What
are you and we to do about it?” Instead of the crude proposals to
“expropriate” and “take over by the state” of the primitive socialism,
the Open Conspiracy will build up an encyclopædic conception of the
modern economic complex as a labyrinthine pseudo-system progressively
eliminating waste and working its way along multitudinous channels
towards unity, towards clarity of purpose and method, towards abundant
productivity and efficient social service.
Let us come back now for a paragraph or so to the ordinary adherent
to the Open Conspiracy, the adherent considered not in relation to
his special aptitudes and services, but in relation to the movement
as a whole and to those special constructive organisations outside
his own field. It will be his duty to keep his mind in touch with the
progressing concepts of the scientific work so far as he is able and
with the larger issues of the economic reconstruction that is afoot, to
take his cues from the special groups and organisations engaged upon
that work, and to help where he finds his opportunity and when there
is a call upon him. But no adherent of the Open Conspiracy can remain
merely and completely an ordinary adherent. There can be no pawns in
the game of the Open Conspiracy, no “cannon fodder” in its war. A
special activity quite as much as a general understanding is demanded
from everyone who looks creatively towards the future of mankind.
We have instanced first the fine and distinctive world organisation of
pure science and then the huge massive movement towards co-operating
unity of aim in the economic life until at last the production and
distribution of staple necessities is apprehended as one world
business, and we have suggested that this latter movement may gradually
pervade and incorporate a very great bulk of human activities. But
besides this fine current and this great torrent of evolving activities
and relationships there are also a very considerable variety of other
great functions in the community towards which Open Conspiracy groups
must direct their organising enquiries and suggestions in their common
intention of ultimately assimilating all the confused processes of
to-day into a world community.
For example, there must be a series of groups in close touch at
one end with biological science and at the other with the complex
of economic activity, who will be concerned specially with the
practical administration of the biological interests of the race, from
food-plants and industrial products to pestilences and population. And
another series of groups will gather together attention and energy to
focus them upon the educational process. We have already pointed out in
Chapter Nine that there is a strong disposition towards conservatism
in normal educational institutions. They preserve traditions rather
than develop them. They are likely to set up a considerable resistance
to the reconstruction of the world outlook upon the threefold basis
defined in Chapter Twelve. This resistance must be attacked by special
societies, by the establishment of competing schools, by help and
promotion for enlightened teachers, and, wherever the attack is
incompletely successful, it must be supplemented by the energetic
diffusion of educational literature for adults, upon modern lines. The
forces of the entire movement may be mobilised in a variety of ways to
bring pressure upon reactionary schools and institutions.
A set of activities correlated with most of the directly creative
ones will lie through existing political and administrative bodies.
The political work of the Open Conspiracy must be conducted upon
two levels and by entirely different methods. Its main political
idea, its political strategy, is to weaken, efface, incorporate or
supersede existing governments. But there is also a tactical diversion
of administrative powers and resources to economic and educational
arrangements of a modern type. Because a country or a district is
inconvenient as a division and destined to ultimate absorption in
some more comprehensive and economical system of government, that is
no reason why its administration should not be brought meanwhile into
working co-operation with the development of the Open Conspiracy. Free
Trade nationalism in power is better than high tariff nationalism, and
pacificist party liberalism better than aggressive party patriotism.
This evokes the anticipation of another series of groups, a group in
every possible political division, whose task it will be to organise
the whole strength of the Open Conspiracy in that division as an
effective voting or agitating force. In many divisions this might
soon become a sufficiently considerable block to affect the attitudes
and pledges of the national politicians. The organisation of these
political groups into provincial or national conferences and systems
would follow hard upon their appearance. In their programmes they would
be guided by meetings and discussions with the specifically economic,
educational, biological, scientific and central groups, but they would
also form their own special research bodies to work out the incessant
problems of transition between the old type of locally centred
administrations and a developing world system of political controls.
In the preceding chapter we sketched the first practicable first phase
of the Open Conspiracy as the propaganda of a group of interlocking
ideas, a propaganda associated with pacificist action. In the present
chapter we have given a scheme of branching and amplifying development.
In this scheme, this scheme of the second phase, we conceive of the
Open Conspiracy as consisting of a great multitude and variety of
overlapping groups, but now all organised for collective political,
social and educational as well as propagandist action. They will
recognise each other much more clearly than they did at first and they
will have acquired a common name.
The groups, however, almost all of them, will still have specific
work also. Some will be organising a sounder setting for scientific
progress, some exploring new social and educational possibilities,
many concentrated upon this or that phase in the reorganisation of the
world’s economic life and so forth. The individual Open Conspirator
may belong to one or more groups and in addition to the ad hoc
societies and organisations which the movement will sustain, often in
co-operation with partially sympathetic people still outside its ranks.
The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be plainly displayed. It
will have become a great world movement as widespread and evident as
socialism or communism. It will largely have taken the place of these
movements. It will be more, it will be a world religion. This large
loose assimilatory mass of groups and societies will be definitely and
obviously attempting to swallow up the entire population of the world
and become the new human community.
_Chapter XIV_
EXISTING AND DEVELOPING MOVEMENTS WITH WHICH THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MAY
HOPE TO COALESCE
A suggestion has already been made in an earlier chapter of this
essay which may perhaps be expanded here a little more. It is that
there already exist in the world a considerable number of movements
in industry, in political life, in social matters, in education,
which point in the same direction as the Open Conspiracy. It will be
interesting to discuss how far some of these movements may not become
confluent with others and by a mere process of logical completion
identify themselves with the Open Conspiracy.
Consider, for example, the movement for a scientific study and
control of population pressure, known popularly as the Birth Control
Movement. By itself, assuming existing political and economic
conditions, this movement lays itself open to the charge of being
no better than a scheme of “race suicide.” If a population in some
area of high civilisation attempts to restrict increase, organise
its economic life upon methods of maximum individual productivity
and impose order and beauty upon its entire territory, that region
will become irresistibly attractive to any adjacent festering mass of
low-grade highly reproductive population. The cheap humanity of the
one community will make a constant attack upon the other, affording
facile servility, prostitutes, toilers, hand labour. Tariffs against
sweated products, restriction of immigration, tensions leading at
last to a war of defensive massacre are inevitable. The conquest of
an illiterate, hungry and incontinent multitude may be almost as
disastrous as defeat for the selector race. Indeed one finds that in
discussion the propagandists of Birth Control admit that their project
must be universal or dysgenic. But yet quite a number of them do not
follow up these admissions to their logical consequences, produce
the lines and continue the curves until the complete form of the
Open Conspiracy appears. It will be the business of the early Open
Conspiracy propagandists to make them do so, and to install groups and
representatives at every possible point of vantage in this movement.
And similarly the now very numerous associations for world peace halt
in alarm on the edge of their own implications. World Peace remains
a vast aspiration until there is some substitute for the present
competition of states for markets and raw material, and some restraint
upon population pressure. League of Nations Societies and all forms of
pacificist organisation are either futile or insincere until they come
into line with the complementary propositions of the Open Conspiracy.
The various socialist movements again are partial projects professing
at present to be self-sufficient schemes. Most of them involve a
pretence that national and political forces are intangible phantoms
and that the primary issue of population pressure can be ignored. They
produce one woolly scheme after another for transferring the property
in this, that or the other economic plant and interest from bodies
of shareholders and company promoters to gangs of politicians or to
syndicates of workers--to be steered to efficiency, it would seem, by
pillars of cloud by day and pillars of fire by night. The communist
party has trained a whole generation of disciples to believe that the
overthrow of a vaguely apprehended “Capitalism” is the simple solution
of all human difficulties. No movement ever succeeded so completely
in substituting phrases for thought. In Moscow communism has trampled
“Capitalism” underfoot for ten eventful years, and still finds all the
problems of social and political construction before it.
But as soon as the Socialist or Communist can be got to realise that
his repudiation of private monopolisation is not a complete programme
but just a preliminary principle, he is ripe for the ampler concepts
of the modern outlook. The Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of
socialist and communist enthusiasms; it may be in control of Moscow
before it is in control of New York.
The Open Conspiracy may achieve the more or less complete amalgamation
of all the radical impulses in the Atlantic community of to-day. But
its scope is not confined to the variety of sympathetic movements which
are brought to mind by that loose word _radical_. In the past
fifty years or so while Socialists and Communists have been denouncing
the current processes of economic life in the same invariable phrases
and with the same undiscriminating animosity, these processes have
been undergoing the profoundest and most interesting changes. While
socialist thought has recited its phrases, with witty rather than
substantial variations, a thousand times as many clever people have
been busy upon industrial, mercantile and financial processes. The
Socialist still reiterates that this greater body of intelligence has
been merely seeking private gain, which has just as much truth in it
as is necessary to make it an intoxicating lie. Everywhere competitive
businesses have been giving way to amalgamated enterprises, marching
towards monopoly, and personally owned businesses to organisations so
large as to acquire more and more the character of publicly responsible
bodies. In theory in Great Britain, banks are privately owned and
railway transport is privately owned, and they are run entirely for
profit--in practice their profit making is austerely restrained and
their proceedings are all the more sensitive to public welfare because
they are outside the direct control of party politicians.
Now this transformation of business, trading and finance has been
so multitudinous and so rapid as to be still largely unconscious of
itself. Intelligent men have gone from combination to combination
and extended their range, year by year, without realising how their
activities were enlarging them to conspicuousness and responsibility.
Economic organisation is even now only discovering itself for what
it is. It has accepted incompatible existing institutions to its own
great injury. It has been patriotic and broken its shins against the
tariff walls its patriotism has raised to hamper its own movements;
it has been imperial and found itself taxed to the limits of its
endurance, “controlled” by antiquated military and naval experts and
crippled altogether. The younger, more vigorous intelligences in the
great business directorates of to-day are beginning to realise the
uncompleted implications of their enterprise. A day will come when
the gentlemen who are trying to control the oil supplies of the world
without reference to anything else except as a subsidiary factor in
their game, will be considered to be quaint characters. The ends of
Big Business must carry Big Business into the Open Conspiracy, just
as surely as every other creative and broadly organising movement is
carried.
Now I know that to all this urging towards a unification of
constructive effort, a great number of people will be disposed to a
reply which will, I hope, be less popular in the future than it is
at the present time. They will assume first an expression of great
sagacity, an elderly air. Then, smiling gently, they will ask whether
there is not something preposterously ambitious in looking at the
problem of life as one whole. Is it not wiser to concentrate our
forces on more practicable things, to attempt one thing at a time,
not to antagonise the whole order of established things against our
poor desires, to begin tentatively to refrain from putting too great
a strain upon people, to trust to the growing common sense of the
world to adjust this or that line of progress to the general scheme of
things. Far better accomplish something definite here and there than
challenge a general failure. That is, they declare, how reformers and
creative things have gone on in the past; that is how they are going on
now; muddling forward in a mild and confused and partially successful
way. Why not trust them to go on like that? Let each man do his bit
with a complete disregard of the logical interlocking of progressive
effort to which I have been drawing attention.
Now I must confess that, popular as this style of argument is, it gives
me so tedious a feeling that rather than argue against it in general
terms I will resort to a parable. I will relate the story of the pig on
Provinder Island.
There was, you must understand, only one pig on Provinder Island, and
Heaven knows how it got there, whether it escaped and swam ashore or
was put ashore from some vessel suddenly converted to vegetarianism,
I cannot imagine. At first it was the only mammal there. But later on
three sailors and a very small but observant cabin-boy were wrecked
there, and after subsisting for a time on shell-fish and roots they
became aware of this pig. And simultaneously they became aware of a
nearly intolerable craving for bacon. The eldest of the three sailors
began to think of a ham he had met in his boyhood, a beautiful ham
for which his father had had the carving knife specially sharpened;
the second of the three sailors dreamed repeatedly of a roast loin of
pork he had eaten at his sister’s wedding, and the third’s mind ran
on chitterlings--I know not why. They sat about their meagre fire and
conferred and expatiated upon these things until their mouths watered
and the shell-fish turned to water within them. What dreams came to
the cabin-boy are unknown, for it was their custom to discourage his
confidences. But he sat apart brooding and was at last moved to speech.
“Let us hunt that old pig,” he said, “and kill it.”
Now it may have been because it was the habit of these sailors to
discourage the cabin-boy and keep him in his place, but anyhow, for
whatever reason it was, all three sailors set themselves with one
accord to oppose that proposal.
“Who spoke of killing the pig?” said the eldest sailor loudly, looking
round to see if by any chance the pig was within hearing. “Who spoke
of _killing_ the pig? You’re the sort of silly young devil who
jumps at ideas and hasn’t no sense of difficulties. What I said was
_AM_. All I want is just a Am to go with my roots and sea salt.
One Am. The Left Am. I don’t want the right one and I don’t propose to
get it. I’ve got a sense of proportion and a proper share of humour and
I know my limitations. I’m a sound clear-headed practical man. Am is
what I’m after, and if I can get that, I’m prepared to say Quits and
let the rest of the pig alone. Who’s for joining me in a Left Am Unt--a
simple reasonable Left Am Unt--just to get One Left Am?”
Nobody answered him directly, but when his voice died away, the next
sailor in order of seniority took up the tale. “That Boy,” he said,
“will die of Swelled Ed, and I pity im. My idea is to follow up the
pig and get hold of a loin chop. Just simply a loin chop. A loin chop
is good enough for me. It’s--feasible. Much more feasible than a great
Am. Here we are, we’ve got no gun, we’ve got no wood of a sort to make
bows and arrows, we’ve not nothing but our clasp knives, and that pig
can run like Ell. It’s ridiculous to think of killing that pig. But
if one didn’t trouble him, if one kind of got into his confidence and
crept near him and just quietly and insidiously went for his loin--just
sort of as if one was tickling him--one might get a loin chop almost
before he knew of it.”
The third sailor sat crumpled up and downcast with his lean
fingers tangled in his shock of hair. “Chitterlings,” he murmured,
“chitterlings. I don’t even want to _think_ of the pig.”
And the cabin-boy pursued his own ideas in silence, for he deemed it
unwise to provoke his elders further.
On these lines it was the three sailors set about the gratifying of
their taste for pork, each in his own way, separately and sanely and
modestly. And each had his reward. The first sailor after weeks of
patience got within arm’s length of the pig and smacked that coveted
left ham loud and good, and felt success was near. The other two
heard the smack and the grunt of dismay half a mile away. But the
pig in a state of astonishment carried the ham off out of reach,
there and then, and that was as close as the first sailor ever got
to his objective. The roast loin hunter did no better. He came upon
the pig asleep under a rock one day, and jumped upon the very loin he
desired, but the pig bit him deeply and septically, and displayed so
much resentment that the question of a chop was dropped forthwith and
never again broached between them. And thereafter the arm of the second
sailor was bandaged and swelled up and went from bad to worse. And as
for the third sailor, it is doubtful whether he even got wind of a
chitterling from the start to the finish of this parable. The cabin-boy
pursuing notions of his own made a pitfall for the whole pig, but as
the others did not help him, and as he was an excessively small--though
shrewd--cabin-boy, it was a feeble and insufficient pitfall and all it
caught was the hunter of chitterlings who was wandering distraught.
After which the hunter of chitterlings became a hunter of cabin-boys,
and the cabin-boy’s life, for all his shrewdness, was precarious and
unpleasant. He slept only in snatches and learned the full bitterness
of insight misunderstood.
When at last a ship came to Provinder Island and took off the three men
and the cabin-boy, the pig was still bacon intact and quite gay and
cheerful, and all four castaways were in a very emaciated condition
because at that season of the year shell-fish were rare and edible
roots were hard to find and the pig was very much cleverer than they
were in finding them and digging them up--let alone digesting them.
From which parable it may be gathered that a partial enterprise is not
always wiser or more hopeful than a comprehensive one.
And in the same manner, with myself in the rôle of that minute but
observant cabin-boy, I would sustain the proposition that none of these
movements of partial reconstruction has the sound common-sense quality
its supporters suppose. All these movements are worth while if they
can be taken into a world-wide movement; all in isolation are futile.
They will be overlaid and lost in the general drift. The policy of the
whole hog is the best one, the sanest one, the easiest and the most
hopeful. If sufficient men and women of intelligence can realise that
simple truth and give up their lives to it, mankind may yet achieve a
civilisation and power and fullness of life beyond our present dreams.
If they do not, frustration will triumph, and war, violence and a
drivelling waste of time and strength and desire, more disgusting even
than war, will be the lot of our race down through the ages to its
emaciated and miserable end.
For this little planet of ours is quite off the course of any rescue
ships, if the will in our species fails.
_Chapter XV_
THE CREATIVE HOME, SOCIAL GROUP AND SCHOOL: THE PRESENT WASTE OF
YOUTHFUL SERIOUSNESS
Human society began with the family. The natural history of
gregariousness is a history of the establishment of mutual toleration
among human animals, so that a litter or a herd keeps together instead
of breaking up. It is in the family group that the restraints,
disciplines and self-sacrifices which make human society possible were
worked out and our fundamental prejudices established, and it is in the
family group that our social life must be relearnt generation after
generation.
Now in each generation the Open Conspiracy must remain a minority
movement of intelligent converts until it can develop its own
reproductive methods. A unified progressive world community demands
its own type of home and training. It needs to have its fundamental
concepts firmly established in as many minds as possible and to guard
its children from the infection of the old racial and national hatreds
and jealousies, old superstitions and bad mental habits, and base
interpretations of life. From its outset the Open Conspiracy will be
setting itself to influence the existing educational machinery, but for
a long time it will find itself confronted in school and college by
powerful religious and political authorities determined to set back the
children at the point or even behind the point from which their parents
made their escape. At best, the liberalism of the state-controlled
schools will be a compromise. During the early phases of its struggle,
therefore, the Open Conspiracy will be obliged to adopt a certain
sectarianism of domestic and social life in the interests of its
children, and it may even in many cases have to consider the grouping
of its families and the establishment of its own schools. In many
modern communities, the English-speaking states, for example, there is
still liberty to establish educational companies, running schools of a
special type. In every country where that right does not exist it has
to be fought for.
There lies a great work for various groups of the Open Conspiracy.
Successful schools would become laboratories of educational methods
and patterns for the state schools. Necessarily for a time, the Open
Conspiracy children would become a social élite, they would begin from
their first conscious moments to think and talk among clear-headed
people speaking distinctly and behaving frankly, and it would be a
waste and loss to put them back for the scholastic stage among their
mentally indistinct and morally muddled contemporaries. A phase when
there will be a special educational system for the Open Conspiracy
is, therefore, clearly indicated. Its children will learn to speak,
draw, think, compute lucidly and subtly, and into their vigorous minds
they will take the broad concepts of history, biology and mechanical
progress, the basis of the new world, naturally and easily. Meanwhile,
those who grow up outside the advancing educational frontier of the
Open Conspiracy will never come under the full influence of its ideas,
or they will get hold of them only after a severe struggle against a
mass of misrepresentations and elaborately instilled prejudices.
The Open Conspiracy will not be in health until it has segregated its
home life and much of its social life from the general confusions
of to-day, until its adherents marry and associate preferentially
within the movement and keep themselves essentially aloof from the
prevalent methods of wasting time and interest. They must evolve a new
social atmosphere. It will be a minor aspect of the world revolution
to live down the contemporary theatre, contemporary “amusements,”
the sentimental booms and imitative chatter, the ovine congregating
to gape at this or that, the dull pursuit of sports and “games” and
quasi-innocent vices, the fashions and industrious futilities of
current life so soon as it escapes from poverty. The whole drift of
the contemporary world is to tempt and ensnare and waste our children.
It has a diabolical disposition to make life altogether trivial and
ineffective. Over all these matters women seem to have much more
aptitude and power than men. It may not be true that “woman’s sphere is
the home,” but certainly the home and its immediate social atmosphere
is her empire. She can be the moral quite as much as the physical
mother of the days to come.
* * * * *
Always, as long as I can remember, there has been a dispute and
invidious comparisons between the old and the young. The young find the
old prey upon and restrain them and the old find the young, shallow,
disappointing and aimless in vivid contrast to their own revised
memories of their own early days. The present time is one in which
these perennial accusations flower with exceptional vigour. But there
does seem to be some truth in the statement that the facilities to live
frivolously are greater now than they have ever been for old and young
alike. In the great communities that emerge from Christendom, there is
a widespread disposition to regard Sunday as merely a holiday. But that
was certainly not the original intention of Sunday. As we have noted
already in an earlier chapter, it was a day dedicated to the greater
issues of life. Now great multitudes of people do not even pretend to
set aside any time at all to the greater issues of life. The churches
are neglected and nothing of a unifying or exalting sort takes their
place.
Now what the contemporary senior tells his junior to-day is perfectly
correct. In his youth, no serious impulse of his went to waste. He
was not distracted by a thousand gay but petty temptations, and the
local religious powers, whatever they happened to be, seemed to
believe in themselves more and made a more comprehensive attack upon
his conscience and imagination. Now the old faiths are damaged and
discredited and the new and greater one, which is the Open Conspiracy,
takes shape only slowly. A decade or so ago, socialism preached
its confident hopes, and patriotism and imperial pride shared its
attraction for the ever grave and passionate will of emergent youth.
Now socialism and democracy are “under revision” and the flags that
once waved so bravely reek of poison gas, are stiff with blood and mud
and shameful with exposed dishonesties. Youth is what youth has always
been, eager for fine interpretations of life, capable of splendid
resolves. But it comes up out of its childhood to-day into a world of
ruthless exposures and cynical pretensions. The past ten years has
seen the shy and powerful idealism of youth at a loss and dismayed as
perhaps it has never been before. It is in the world still, but masked,
hiding even from itself in a whirl of small excitements and futile
defiant depravities.
The old flags and faiths have lost their magic for the intelligence of
the young; they can command it no more; it is in the mighty revolution
to which the Open Conspiracy directs itself that the youth of mankind
must once more find its soul if ever it is to find its soul again.
_Chapter XVI_
PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THE OPEN CONSPIRACY INTO A
WORLD CONTROL AND COMMONWEAL: THE HAZARDS OF THE CONFLICT
We have now sketched out in these Blue Prints, the methods by which the
confused radicalism and constructive forces of the present time may
and can and probably will be drawn together about a core of modernised
religious feeling into one great and multifarious creative effort.
A way has been shown by which this effort may be developed from a
mere propagandist campaign and a merely resistant protest against
contemporary militarism into an organised foreshadowing in research,
publicity and experiment in educational, economic and political
reconstructions, of that _Pax Mundi_, which has become already
the tantalised desire of great multitudes throughout the world. These
foreshadowings and reconstructions will ignore and transcend the
political boundaries of to-day. They will continually become more
substantial as project passes into attempt and performance. In phase
after phase and at point after point, therefore, the Open Conspiracy
will come to grips with the powers that sustain these boundaries.
And it will not be merely topographical boundaries that will be passed.
The Open Conspiracy will also be dissolving and repudiating many
existing restrictions upon conduct and many social prejudices. The Open
Conspiracy proposes to end and shows how an end may be put to that huge
substratum of under-developed, under-educated, subjugated, exploited
and frustrated lives upon which such civilisation as the world has
known hitherto has rested, and upon which most of our social systems
still rest.
Whenever possible, the Open Conspiracy will advance by illumination and
persuasion. But it has to advance and even from the outset where it is
not allowed to illuminate and persuade it must fight. Its first fights
will probably be for the right to spread its system of ideas plainly
and clearly throughout the world.
There is, I suppose, a flavour of treason about the assumption that any
established government is provisional, and a quality of immorality in
any criticism of accepted moral standards. Still more is the proposal,
made even in times of peace, to resist war levies and conscription, an
offence against absolute conceptions of loyalty. But the ampler wisdom
of the modern Atlantic communities, already touched by premonitions of
change and futurity, has continually enlarged the common liberties of
thought for some generations, and it is doubtful if there will be any
serious resistance to the dissemination of these views and the early
organisation of the Open Conspiracy in any of the English-speaking
communities or throughout the British Empire, in the Scandinavian
countries, or in such liberal-minded countries as Holland, Switzerland,
republican Germany or France. France, in the hasty years after the
war, submitted to some repressive legislation against the discussion
of birth control or hostile criticism of the militarist attitude; but
such a check upon mental freedom is altogether contrary to the clear
and open quality of the French mind; in practice it has already been
effectively repudiated by such writers as Victor Margueritte, and it is
unlikely that there will be any effective suppression of the opening
phases of the Open Conspiracy in France.
This gives us a large portion of the existing civilised world in
which men’s minds may be readjusted to the idea that their existing
governments are in the position of trustees for the greater government
of the coming age. Throughout these communities it is conceivable that
the structural lines of the world community may be materialised and
established with only minor struggles, local boycotts, vigorous public
controversies, normal legislative obstruction, social pressure and
overt political activities. Police, jail, expulsions and so forth, let
alone outlawry and warfare, may scarcely be brought into this struggle
upon the high civilised level of the Atlantic communities. But where
they are brought in, the Open Conspiracy to the best of its ability
and the full extent of its resources, must become a fighting force and
organise itself upon resistant lines.
Non-resistance, the restriction of activities to moral suasion,
is no part of the programme of the Open Conspiracy. In the face of
unscrupulous opposition creative ideas must become aggressive, must
define their enemies and attack them. By its own organisations or
through the police and military strength of governments amenable to
its ideas, the movement is bound to find itself fighting for open
roads, open frontiers, freedom of speech and the realities of peace
in regions of oppression. The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect
for nationality and there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious
or obstructive governments because they hold their own in this or that
patch of human territory. It lies within the power of the Atlantic
communities to impose peace upon the world and secure unimpeded
movement and free speech from end to end of the earth. This is a fact
on which the Open Conspiracy must insist. The English-speaking states,
France, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries and
Russia, given only a not very extravagant frankness of understanding
between them, and a common disposition towards the ideas of the Open
Conspiracy, could cease to arm against each other and still exert
enough strength to impose disarmament and a respect for human freedom
in every corner of the planet. It is fantastic pedantry to wait for all
the world to accede before all the world is pacified and policed.
The most inconsistent factor in the liberal and radical thought of
to-day is its prejudice against the interference of highly developed
modern states in the affairs of less stable and less advanced regions.
This is denounced as “imperialism,” and regarded as criminal. It
may have assumed grotesque and dangerous forms under the now dying
traditions of national competition, but as the merger of the Atlantic
states proceeds, the possibility and necessity of bringing areas of
misgovernment and disorder under world control increase. A great war
like the war of 1914-1918 may never happen again. The common-sense
of mankind may suffice to avert that. But there is still much actual
warfare before mankind, on the frontiers everywhere, against brigands,
against ancient loyalties and traditions which will become at last
no better than excuses for brigandage and obstructive exaction. All
the weight of the Open Conspiracy will be on the side of the world
order and against that sort of local independence which holds back its
subject people from the citizenship of the world.
But in this broad prospect of far-reaching political amalgamations
under the impulses of the Open Conspiracy lurk a thousand antagonisms
and adverse chances, like the unsuspected gulleys and ravines and
thickets in a wide and distant landscape. We know not what unexpected
chasms may presently be discovered. The Open Conspirator may realise
that he is one of an advancing and victorious force and still find
himself outnumbered and outfought in his own particular corner of the
battlefield. No one can yet estimate the possible strength of reaction
against world unification; no one can foresee the extent of the
divisions and confusions that may arise among ourselves. The ideas in
this book may be spread about without any serious resistance in most
civilised countries, but there are still governments under which the
persistent expression of such thoughts will be dealt with as crimes and
bring men and women to prison, torment and death. Nevertheless they
must be expressed.
While the Open Conspiracy is no more than a discussion it may spread
unopposed because it is disregarded. As a mainly passive resistance
to militarism it may still be tolerable. But as its knowledge and
experience accumulate and its organisation becomes more effective and
aggressive, as it begins to lay hands upon education, upon social
habits, upon business developments, as it proceeds to take over the
organisation of the community, it will marshal not only its own forces
but its enemies. A complex of interests will find themselves restrained
and threatened by it and it may easily evoke that most dangerous of
human mass feelings, fear. In ways quite unpredictable it may raise a
storm against itself beyond all our present imaginings. Our conception
of an almost bloodless domination of the Atlantic communities may be
merely the confident dream of a thinker whose thoughts have yet to be
squarely challenged.
We are not even sure of the common peace. Across the path of mankind
the storm of another Great War may break, bringing with it for a time
more brutal repressions and vaster injuries even than its predecessor.
The scaffoldings and work-sheds of the Open Conspiracy may fare
violently in that tornado. The restoration of progress may seem an
almost hopeless struggle.
It is no part of the modern religion to incur needless hardship or
go out of the way to seek martyrdom. If we can do our work easily
and happily, so it should be done. But the work is not to be shirked
because it cannot be done easily and happily. The vision of a world at
peace and liberated for an unending growth of knowledge and power is
worth every danger of the way. And since in this age of confusion we
must live imperfectly and anyhow die, we may as well suffer if need
be, and die for a great end as for none. Never has the translation of
vision into realities been easy since the beginning of human effort.
The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price--and
who can tell what that price may be?--in toil, suffering and blood.
_Chapter XVII_
THE WORLD COMMUNITY
The new life that the Open Conspiracy struggles to achieve through
us for our race is first a life of liberations. The oppression of
incessant toil can surely be lifted from everyone, and the miseries
due to a great multitude of infections and disorders of nutrition and
growth cease to be a part of human experience. Few people are perfectly
healthy nowadays except for brief periods of happiness, but the elation
of physical well-being will some day be the common lot of mankind.
And not only from natural evils will man be largely free. He will not
be left with his soul tangled, haunted by monstrous and irrational
fears and a prey to malicious impulse. From his birth he will breathe
sweetness and generosity and use his mind and hands cleanly and
exactly. He will feel better, will better, think better, see, taste and
hear better than men do now. All these things are plainly possible for
him. They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude and mock
him, because chance, confusion and squalor rule his life. All the gifts
of destiny are overlaid and lost to him. He must still suspect and fear.
Within the peace and freedom our Open Conspiracy will win, all these
good things that escape us now may be ensured. A graver humanity,
stronger, more lovely, longer lived, will learn and develop the
ever-enlarging possibilities of its destiny. For the first time, the
full beauty of this world will be revealed to its unhurried eyes.
Its thoughts will be to our thoughts as the thoughts of a man to the
troubled mental experimenting of a child. And all the best of us will
be living on in that ampler life, as the child and the things it tried
and learnt still live in the man. When we were children, we could not
think or feel as we think and feel to-day, but to-day we can peer back
and still recall something of the ignorances and guesses and wild hopes
of these nigh forgotten years. And so mankind, ourselves still living,
dispersed and reconstructed in the future, will recall with affection
and understanding the desperate wishes and troubled efforts of our
present state.
How can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and
adventures, the mighty employments, the ever-increasing knowledge and
power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling
paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings
of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations,
stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last,
less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from
a nightmare in the dawn. From any dream, however dismal and horrible,
one can escape by realising that it is a dream; by saying, “I will
awake.” The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind from a nightmare
of the struggle for existence and the inevitability of war. The light
of day thrusts between our eyelids and the multitudinous sounds of
morning clamour in our ears. A time will come when men will sit with
history before them or with some old newspaper before them, and ask
incredulously, “Was there ever such a world?”
NOTE ON THE MARGIN OF THESE BLUE PRINTS
Such is the truth of human possibility and our necessities as I
perceive it, and that is the way man must live if our species is to
survive and pass on to greater destinies. I set down the truth as it is
given me to see it; for me there can be no other truth. On every hand
about us all is the darkness of the unknown, but the light we have,
when we have used our eyes to their utmost, must be our guide. Because
of obtuseness and prepossessions, I may but run beside the realities
I imagine I express. Necessarily reality which goes on all over the
universe and for every instant of time, is infinitely more intricate
and wonderful than any statement, teeming with possibilities still
unsuspected. All the more do we need compass and map and plans to keep
our direction through the jungle of its manifest marvels and dangers.
That this presentation of the current phase of human life as the
occasion for an Open Conspiracy to establish a world commonweal will
seem to many an extreme simplification of our circumstances, should
not condemn it. The value of a map lies in the fact that it is not a
model nor a picture of reality but a reduced abstraction, sufficiently
clear and sufficiently true to essentials and sufficiently free from
irrelevancies to guide.
This scheme to thrust forward and establish a human control over
the destinies of life and liberate it from its present dangers,
uncertainties and miseries, is offered here as an altogether
practicable one, subject only to one qualification, that sufficient men
and women will be willing to serve it. That there is no foretelling.
It is clear that the whole growth is dependent upon the appearance of
those primary groups, sustaining and spreading its fundamental ideas.
Those ideas have to become the mental substratum of constructive
effort. If those ideas can find sufficient vigorous, able and devoted
people for their establishment, the rest will follow. There is need
of much leadership, not indeed the leadership of a single leader, for
the days of spiritual monarchies are over, nor for the leadership of
exaggerated figureheads, but for the energetic initiatives of many
co-operating personalities. I will not speculate where these leaders
are now, in universities, in laboratories, in studies, in factories, in
mines, in technical schools, but I have a firm belief that they will
come to the call of our mighty opportunities.
For my generation, the rôle of John the Baptist must be our extreme
ambition. We can proclaim and make evident the advent of a new phase
of human faith and effort. We can point out the path it has been
our lifework to discover. We have struggled through the thought and
bitter experiences of our time. We have hammered out our instinctive
individualism on the anvil of socialism; we have witnessed the
apocalypse of the Great War; we have been misled, we have stumbled
through depths of despair, we have learnt. “Here,” we say, “is what
we have made of it all. Here is the basis for a new world.” In the
few years remaining to us we can hope to do no more than that. It
is for you to say whether you will set your feet in this direction
and go along with us and go further. Upon you--individually and
multitudinously--the future rests. Here and there chance may correct
and supplement the efforts of our race and save us from the full
penalties of our mistakes and negligences, but saving the impact of
some unimagined disaster from outer space, the ultimate decision of the
fate of life upon this planet lies now in the will of man.
THE END
Transcriber’s Note:
Spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been retained as appears in
the original publication except as follows:
Page viii
of the miscroscope _changed to_
of the microscope
Page 79
in power and auhority warlike classes _changed to_
in power and authority warlike classes
Page 98
no discrimination at last between _changed to_
no discrimination at least between
Page 107
or how rapidy the knowledge _changed to_
or how rapidly the knowledge
Page 165
as defeat for the selecter _changed to_
as defeat for the selector
Page 200
mistakes and negligencies _changed to_
mistakes and negligences
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