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Title: The New Society
Author: Walther Rathenau
Translator: Arthur Windham
Release Date: March 29, 2007 [EBook #20936]
Language: English
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THE NEW SOCIETY
BY
WALTHER RATHENAU
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY
ARTHUR WINDHAM
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
1921
PREFACE
Walther Rathenau, author of _Die neue Gesellschaft_ and other studies
of economic and social conditions in modern Germany, was born in 1867.
His father, Emil Rathenau, was one of the most distinguished figures
in the great era of German industrial development, and his son was
brought up in the atmosphere of hard work, of enterprise, and of
public affairs. After his school days at a _Gymnasium_, or classical
school, he studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the
Universities of Berlin and of Strassburg, taking his degree at the age
of twenty-two. Certain discoveries made by him in chemistry and
electrolysis led to the establishment of independent manufacturing works,
which he controlled with success, and eventually to his connexion with
the world-famous A.E.G.--_Allgemeine Electrizitätsgesellschaft_--at
the head of which he now stands. During the war he scored a very
remarkable and exceptional success as controller of the organization
for the supply of raw materials. He is thus not merely a scholar and
thinker, but one who has lived and more than held his own in the thick
of commercial and industrial life, and who knows by actual experience
the subject-matter with which he deals.
The present study, with its wide outlook and its resolute
determination to see facts as they are, should have much value for all
students of latter-day politics and economics in Europe; for though
Rathenau is mainly concerned with conditions in his own land the same
conditions affect all countries to a greater or less degree, and he
deals with general principles of human psychology and of economic law
which prevail everywhere in the world. It is not too much to say that
"The New Society" constitutes a landmark in the history of economic
and social thought, and contains matter for discussion, for sifting,
for experiment and for propaganda which should occupy serious thinkers
and reformers for many a day to come. His suggestions and conclusions
may not be all accepted, or all acceptable, but few will deny that
they constitute a distinct advance in the effort to bring serious and
disinterested thought to the solution of our social problems, and in
this conviction we offer the present complete and authorized
translation to English readers.
THE NEW SOCIETY
I
Is there any sign or criterion by which we can tell that a human
society has been completely socialized?
There is one and one only: it is when no one can have an income
without working for it.
That is the sign of Socialism; but it is not the goal. In itself it is
not decisive. If every one had enough to live on, it would not matter
for what he received money or goods, or even whether he got them for
nothing. And relics of the system of income which is not worked for
will always remain--for instance, provision for old age.
The goal is not any kind of division of income or allotment of
property. Nor is it equality, reduction of toil, or increase of the
enjoyment of life. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition;
abolition of the lifelong hereditary serfage, the nameless hereditary
servitude, of one of the two peoples who are called by the same name;
the annulment of the hereditary twofold stratification of society, the
abolition of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother, of that
Western abuse which is the basis of our civilization as slavery was
of the antique, and which vitiates all our deeds, all our creations,
all our joys.
Nor is even this the final goal--no economy, no society can talk of a
final goal--the only full and final object of all endeavour upon earth
is the development of the human soul. A final goal, however, points
out the direction, though not the path, of politics.
The political object which I have described as the abolition of the
proletarian condition may, as I have shown in _Things that are to
Come_,[1] be closely approached by a suitable policy in regard to
property and education; above all, by a limitation of the right of
inheritance. Of socialization in the strict sense there is, for this
purpose, no need. Yet a far-reaching policy of socialization--and I do
not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of
production but to a radical economic and social resettlement--is
necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities,
and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing
classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the
hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which,
at present, stands helpless through sheer democracy. For only in the
hands of a political people does democracy mean the rule of the
people; in those of an untrained and unpolitical people it becomes
merely an affair of debating societies and philistine chatter at the
inn ordinary. The symbol of German bourgeois democracy is the tavern;
thence enlightenment is spread and there judgments are formed; it is
the meeting place of political associations, the forum of their
orators, the polling-booth for elections.
But the sign that this far-reaching socialization has been actually
carried out is the cessation of all income without work. I say the
sign, but not the sole postulate; for we must postulate a complete and
genuine democratization of the State and public economy, and a system
of education equally accessible to all: only then can we say that the
monopoly of class and culture has been smashed. But the cessation of
the workless income will show the downfall of the last of
class-monopolies, that of the Plutocracy.
It is not very easy to imagine what society will be like when these
objects have been realised, at least if we are thinking not of a brief
period like the present Russian régime, or a passing phase as in
Hungary, but an enduring and stationary condition. A dictatorial
oligarchy, like that of the Bolshevists, does not come into
consideration here, and the well-meaning Utopias of social romances
crumble to nothing. They rest, one and all, on the blissfully ignorant
assumption of a state of popular well-being exaggerated tenfold beyond
all possibility.
The knowledge of the sort of social condition towards which at present
we Germans, and then Europe, and finally the other nations are tending
in this vertical Migration of the Peoples, will not only decide for
each of us his attitude towards the great social question, but our
whole political position as well. It is quite in keeping with German
traditions that in fixing our aims and forming our resolves we should
be guided not by positive but by negative impulses--not by the effort
to get something but to get away from it. To this effort, which is
really a flight, we give the positive name of Socialism, without
troubling ourselves in the least how things will look--not in the
sense of popular watchwords but in actual fact--when we have got what
we are seeking.
This is not merely a case of lack of imagination; it is that we
Germans have, properly speaking, no understanding of political
tendencies. We are more or less educated in business, in science, in
thought, but in politics we are about on the same level as the East
Slavonic peasantry. At best we know--and even that not always--what
oppresses, vexes and tortures us; we know our grievances, and think we
have conceived an aim when we simply turn them upside down. Such
processes of thought as "the police are to blame, the war-conditions
are to blame, the Prussians are to blame, the Jews are to blame, the
English are to blame, the priests are to blame, the capitalists are to
blame"--all these we quite understand. Just as with the Slavs, if our
good-nature and two centuries of the love of order did not forbid it,
our primitive political instincts would find expression in a pogrom in
the shape of a peasant-war, of a religious war, of witch-trials, or
Jew-baiting. Our blatant patriotism bore the plainest signs of such a
temper; half nationalism, half aggression against some bugbear or
other; never a proud calm, an earnest self-dedication, a struggle for
a political ideal.
We have now a Republic in Germany: no one seriously desired it. We
have at last established Parliamentarianism: no one wanted it. We have
set up a kind of Socialism: no one believed in it. We used to say:
"The people will live and die for their princes; our last drop of
blood for the Hohenzollerns"--no one denied it. "The people mean to be
ruled by their hereditary lords; they will go through fire for their
officers; rather death than yield a foot of German soil to the foe."
Was all this a delusion? By no means; it was sincere enough, only it
did not go deep. It was the kind of sincerity which depends on not
knowing enough of the alternative possibilities.
When the alternatives revealed themselves as possible and actual, then
we all turned republican, even to the cottagers in Pomerania. When the
military strike had broken down discipline, the officers were
mishandled; when the war was lost, the fleet disgraced, and the
homeland defiled, then we began to play and dance.
But was this frivolity? Not at all; it was a childish want of
political imagination. The Poles, a people not remotely comparable to
the German in depth of soul and the capacity for training talent, have
for a century cherished no other thought than that of national unity,
while we passively resign our territories. No Englishman or Japanese
or American will ever understand us when we tell him that this
military discipline of ours, this war-lust, did not represent a
passion for dominion and aggression, but was merely the docility of a
childish people which wants nothing, and can imagine nothing, but that
things should go on as they happen, at the moment, to be.
We Germans know but little of the laws which govern the formation of
national character. The capacity of a people for profundity is not
profundity, either of the individual or of the community. It may
express itself in the masses as mere plasticity and softness of
spirit. The capacity for collective sagacity and strength of will
demands from the individual merely a dry intelligence in human
affairs, and egoism. It would be too much to say that our political
weakness may be merely the expression of spiritual power, for the
latter has not proved an obstacle to success in business. Indolence
and belief in authority have their share in it.
But have we not been the classic land of social democracy, and have we
not become that of Radicalism? Well, we have been, indeed, and are,
with our submissiveness to authority and our capacity for discipline,
the classic land of organized grumbling; and the classic land, too, of
anti-semitism which deprived us of the very forces we stood most in
need of--productive scepticism and the imagination for concrete
things. Organized grumbling is not the same thing as political
creation. A Socialism and Radicalism poorer in ideas than the
post-Marxian German Socialism has never existed. Half of it was merely
clerical work, and the other half was agitators' Utopianism of the
cheapest variety.
Nothing was more significant than the fact that the mighty event of
the German Revolution was not the result of affection but of
disaffection. It is not we who liberated ourselves, it was the enemy;
it was our destruction that set us free. On the day before we asked
for the armistice, perhaps even on the day before the flight of the
Kaiser, a plébiscite would have yielded an overwhelming majority for
the monarchy and against Socialism. What I so often said before the
war came true: "He who trains his children with the rod learns only
through the rod."
And to-day, when everything is seething and fermenting--no thanks to
Socialism for that--all intellectual work has to be done outside of
the ranks of social-democracy, which stumbles along on its two
crutches of "Socialization" and "Soviets."[2] Orthodox Socialism is
still a case of the "lesser evil," what the French call a _pis aller_.
"Things are so bad that any change must be for the better." What is to
make them better we are told in the socialist catechism; but _how_ it
is to do so, how and what anything is to become, this, the only
question that matters, is regarded as irrelevant. It is answered by
some halting and insincere stammer about "surplus value" which is to
make everybody well off--and which would yield all round, as I have
elsewhere shown, just twenty-five marks a head. Fifteen millions of
grown men are pressing forward into a Promised Land revealed through
the fog of political assemblies and in the thunder of parrot-phrases--a
land from which no one will ever bring back a bunch of grapes.
If one would interrogate not the agitators, but their hearers, and
find out what they instinctively conceive this land to look like, we
should get the answer, timid and naïve but at the same time the
deepest and shrewdest that it is possible to give--that it is a land
where there are no longer any rich.
A most true and truthful reply! And yet a profound error silently
lurks in it. You imagine, do you not, that in a land where there are
no more rich people there will also be no more poor? "Why, of course
not! How can there be poor people when there are no more rich?" And
yet there will be. In the land where there are no more rich there will
be _only_ poor, only very poor, people.
Whoever does not know this and is a Socialist, that man is merely one
of the herd or he is a dupe. He who knows it and conceals it is a
deceiver. He who knows it, and in spite of that, nay, on account of
that, is a Socialist, is a man of the future.
Though the crowd be satisfied with some dim feeling that this, anyhow,
is the tendency of the times and that with this stream one must swim;
though the more thoughtful contemplate the evils of the time and
decide to put up with the _pis aller_; the responsible thinker is
under the obligation of investigating the land into which the people
are being led. We must know what it looks like, where there are no
rich people and where no one can have an income without working for
it, we must understand what we call the "new society" so as to be able
to shape it aright.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Von Kommenden Dingen_, by Walther Rathenau. Berlin. S.
Fischer.]
[Footnote 2: Workers' and Soldiers' Councils.]
II
The question is not very urgent.
As surely as the hundred years' course of the social World-Revolution
cannot be arrested, so surely can we prophesy that the process cannot
maintain all along the line the rapid movement of its beginning. The
victorious and the defeated countries will have to work out to the end
the changes and interchanges of their various phases, for in the
historical developments which we witness to-day, we find mingled
together the phenomena of organic growth and of disease; already we
see that the Socialism of the healthy nations is different from that
of the sick ones. It is in vain that those who are sick with the
Bolshevist disease dream that they can infect the world.
The small daily and yearly movements in our realm of Central Europe
cannot be determined beforehand, because they depend upon small,
accidental, local, and external forces. The great and necessary issues
of events can be predicted, but it would be folly to discuss their
accidental flux and reflux. When an unguarded house is filled with
explosives from the cellar to the roof, then we know that it will one
day be blown up; but whether this will happen on a Sunday or a
Monday, in the morning or in the evening, or whether the left door
post will be left standing or no, it would be idle to inquire.
From the historical point of view it is of no consequence whether
Radicalism may make an inroad here and there, or whether here and
there the forces of reaction and restoration may collect themselves
for a transitory triumph. The great movement of history, as we always
find when a catastrophe has worked itself out, grows slower, and this
retardation in itself looks like reaction. We, who are not accustomed
to catastrophes, and who did not produce this first one, but rather
suffered it, we, who easily get sea-sick after every rapid
movement--think, for instance, of the former Reichstag--we shall
certainly experience, as the first deep wave of the Revolution sinks
into us, an aristocratic, dynastic, and plutocratic Romanticism, a
yearning for the colour and glitter of the time of glory, a revolt
against the spiritless, mechanical philanthrophy of unemployed orators
of about fourth-form standard intellectually; against the monotonous
and insincere tirades of paid agitators and their restless disciples;
against laziness; ignorance, greed, and exaggeration masquerading as
popular scientific economy; and against the brutal and extortionate
upthrust from below. And so we shall arrive at the reverse kind of
folly, an admiration and bad imitation of foreign pride and pomp, an
arrogant individualism and a hardening of our human feeling. The
intellectual war profiteers, who are all for radicalism to-day, will
soon be wearing cornflowers[3] in their button-holes.
For the third time we shall see an illustration of the naïve
shamelessness of the turn-coat. The spiritual process of conversion is
worth noticing; Paul was converted to be a converter. But the
scurrying of the intellectual speculator from the position which has
failed into the position which has won, with the full intention of
scurrying back again if necessary, and always with the claim to
instruct other people, is an expression of the alarming fact that life
has become not an affair of inward conviction, but of getting the
right tip.
The turn-coat movement began when a shortsighted crowd, incapable of
judgment, and with their minds clouded with a few cheap phrases,
expected from a quick and victorious war the strengthening of all the
elements of Force, and feared to be left stranded. Even the most
threadbare kind of liberalism appeared to be compromising, they
clamoured for "shining armour." The most wretched victims in soul and
body, who were obliged to flee forwards because they could not flee in
any other direction, were called heroes, and the manliest word in our
language, a word of which only the freest and the greatest are worthy,
was degraded. One who has experienced the hate and fury of the
turn-coats who poured contempt upon every word against the war and the
"great days," is unable to understand how a whole people can throw
its errors overboard without shame and sorrow--or he understands it
only too well. At this day we are being mocked and preached at by the
turn-coats of the second transformation, and to-morrow we shall be
smiled at by those of the third.
But it does not matter. The moving forces of our epoch do not come
from business offices nor from the street, the rostrum, the pulpit, or
the professorial chair. The noisy rush of yesterday, to-day and
to-morrow is only the furious motion of the outermost circle, the
centre moves upon its way, quietly as the stars.
We have in our survey to leap over several periods of forward and
backward movement and we shall earn the thanks of none of them. What
is too conservative for one will be too revolutionary for another, and
the æsthete will scornfully tell us that we have no fibre. When we
show that what awaits us is no fools' paradise, but the danger of a
temporary reverse of humanity and culture, then the facile Utopianist
will shout us down with his two parrot-phrases,[4] and when we, out of
a sense of duty, of harmony with the course of the world and
confidence in justice at the soul of things, tread the path of danger,
precipitous though it be, then we shall be scorned by all the
worshippers of Force and despisers of mankind.
But we for our part shall not pander either to the force-worshippers
or to the masses. We serve no powers that be. Our love goes out to the
People; but the People are not a crowd at a meeting, nor a sum-total
of interests, nor are they the newspapers or debating-clubs. The
People are the waking or sleeping, the leaking, frozen, choked, or
gushing well of the German spirit. It is with that spirit, in the
present and in the future, as it runs its course into the sea of
humanity, that we have here to do.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: The emblem of the Hohenzollerns.]
[Footnote 4: The reference, apparently, is to the argument that any
change must be for the better, and to the reliance on surplus value.
See pp. 13, 14.]
III
The criterion which we have indicated for the socialized society of
the future is a material one. But is the spiritual condition of an
epoch to be determined by material arrangements? Is this not a
confession of faith in materialism?
We are speaking of a criterion, not of a prime moving force. I have no
desire, however, to avoid going into the material, or rather we should
say mechanical, interpretation of history. I have done it more than
once in my larger works, and for the sake of coherence I may repeat it
in outline here.
The laws which determine individual destinies are reproduced in the
history of collective movements. A man's career is not prescribed by
his bodily form, his expression, or his environment; but there is in
these things a certain connexion and parallelism, for the same laws
which determine the course of his intellectual and spiritual life
reflect themselves in bodily and practical shape. Every instant of our
experience, all circumstances in which we find ourselves, every limb
that we grow, every accident that happens to us, is an expression or
product of our character. We are indeed subject to human limitations;
we are not at liberty to live under water or in another planet; but
within these wide boundaries each of us can shape his own life. To
observe a man, his work, his fate, his body and expression, his
connexions and his marriage, his belongings and his associations, is
to know the man.
From this point of view all social, economic and political schemes
become futile, for if man is so sovereign a being there is no need to
look after him. But these schemes re-acquire a relative importance
when we consider the average level of man's will-power, as we meet it
in human experience--a power which, as a rule, shows itself unable to
make head against a certain maximum of pressure from external
circumstances. And again, these schemes are really a part of the
expression of human will, for through them collective humanity battles
with its surroundings, its contemporary world, and freely shapes its
own destinies.
The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the
individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of
will and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or
wealth, soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to
obscure the fact that these external conditions are not really laid on
the people but have been willed by themselves. A people _wills_ to
have a nomadic life, or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills
agriculture, or war; and has the power, if its will be strong enough,
to obtain its desire, or failing that to break up and perish. It is
the same will and character which decides for well-being and culture,
or indolence and dependence, or labour and spiritual development. The
Venetians did not have architecture and painting bestowed upon them
because they happened to have become rich, nor the English sea-power
because they happened to live on an island: no, the Venetians willed
freedom, power and art, and the Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.
There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war
embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not
indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a
hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the
war, the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a
question of character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of
political apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of
gain. Nowhere was this conception of the judgment of God so
blasphemously exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our
armed hosts, at the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the
tavern-benches, the state-bureaus and the debating societies was
summoned, and charged with the duty, forsooth, of chastising
England--England, which they only knew out of newspaper reports!
To-day this exaggeration is being paid for in humiliation, for God did
not prove controllable, and His naïve blasphemers must silently and
with grinding teeth admit that their foes are in the right when they,
in their turn, appeal to the same judgment to justify, without limit,
everything they desire to do.
After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit
and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake
of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined
by its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself
therein. The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make
it the starting-point of our discussion.
IV
All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were
numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached
their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one.
It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and
wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large
proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has
not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures
as a substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing.
It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the
unconscious processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has
prevailed. So far, collective organizations have been beasts of prey;
only now are they about to cross the boundaries of the human order.
Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay
by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
absolute necessaries.
The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow
on each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for
ten thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our
poetry and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is
no disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old
stem, and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in
Central Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know
that somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European
artist writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of
Tahitian culture. When civilisation has withered away on some
sterilized soil, it can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.
The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
be maintained by constant outlay, just as in arid districts a
luxuriant vegetation needs continuous irrigation. The flood of
Oriental wealth had to pour itself into Italy in order to bring forth
the bloom of Renaissance art. Thousands of patricians, hundreds of
temporal and spiritual princes, had to found and to adorn temples and
palaces, gardens, monuments, pageants, games and household goods in
order that art and science, schooling, mastership, discipleship and
tradition might grow up. The worship of foreign culture which
characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth
centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop
of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only
so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the
opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the
thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the
poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. If
to-day the Republic of Guatemala or Honduras should want a
senate-house or a railway-station they will probably send to London or
Paris for an architect.
Even technique in handicraft and industry, that typical art of
civilization, cannot dispense with a great and continuous outlay on
training, commissioning and marketing in order to maintain itself.
Although it has not happened yet, there is no reason why a Serb or a
Slovak should not make some important discovery if he has been trained
at a European University and learnt the technical tradition. That will
not, however, give rise to an independent and enduring Serbian or
Slovakian technique, even though the costliest Universities and
laboratories should be established in the country and foreign teachers
called to teach in them. After all that, one must have a market in the
country itself; expert purchasers, manufacturers, middle-men, a
trained army of engineers, craftsmen, masters, workmen and a foreign
market as well--in short, the technical atmosphere--in order to keep
up the standard of manufacture and production.
A poor country cannot turn out products of high value for a rich one;
it has not had the education arising from demand. In products relating
to sport and to comfort, for instance, England was a model, but in
France these products were ridiculously misunderstood and imitated
with silly adornments, while on the other hand French products of
luxury and art-industry were sought for by all countries. German wares
were considered to be cheap and nasty, until the land grew rich, and
brought about the co-operation of its forces of science and technique,
production and marketing, auxiliary industries and remote profits,
finance and commerce, education and training, judgment and criticism,
habits of life and a sense of comparative values.
But human forces need the same nurture, the same outlay and the same
high training, as institutions and material products. Delicate work
demands sensitive hands and a sheltered way of life; discovery and
invention demand leisure and freedom; taste demands training and
tradition, scientific thinking and artistic conception demand an
environment with an unbroken continuity of cultivation, thought and
intelligence. A dying civilisation can live for a while on the
existing humus of culture, on the existing atmosphere of thought, but
to create anew these elements of life is beyond its powers.
Do not let us deceive ourselves, but look the facts in the face! All
these excellent Canadians, with or without an academic degree, who
innocently pride themselves on a proletarian absence of prejudice, are
adoptive children of a plutocratic and aristocratic cultivation. It is
all the same even if they lay aside their stiff collars and
eye-glasses; their every word and argument, their forms of thought,
their range of knowledge, their strongly emphasized intellectuality
and taste for art and science, their whole handiwork and industry, are
an inheritance from what they supposed they had cast off and a tribute
to what they pretend to despise. Genuine radicalism is only to be
respected when it understands the connexion of things and is not
afraid of consequences. It must understand--and I shall make it
clear--that its rapid advance will kill culture; and the proper
conclusion is that it ought to despise culture, not to sponge on it.
The early Christians abolished all the heathen rubbish and
abominations, the early Radicals would have hurried, in the first
instance, to pick out the plums.
Culture and civilization, as we see, demand a continuous and enormous
outlay; an outlay in leisure, an outlay in working power, an outlay in
wealth. They need patronage and a market, they need the school, they
need models, tradition, comparison, judgment, intelligence,
cultivation, disposition, the right kind of nursery--an atmosphere.
One who stands outside it can serve it, often more powerfully with
his virgin strength than one who is accustomed to it--but he must be
carried along and animated by the breath of the same atmosphere.
Culture and civilization require a rich soil.
But the richness of the soil is not sufficient; culture must be based
upon, and increased by, contrast. Wealth must have at its disposal
great numbers of men who are poor and dependent. How otherwise shall
the outlay of culture be met? One man must have many at his disposal;
but how can he, if they are all his equals? The outlay will be large,
but it must be feasible; how can it, if the labour of thousands is not
cheap? The few, the exalted, must develop power and splendour, they
must offer types for imitation: how can they do that without a
retinue, without spectators, without the herd? A land of well-being,
that is to say, of equally distributed well-being, remains petty and
provincial. When a State and its authorities, councils of solid and
thrifty members of societies for this or that, take over the office of
a Mæcenas or a Medici, with their proposals, their calculations, their
objections, their control, then we get things that look like
war-memorials, waiting-rooms, newspaper-kiosks and drinking-saloons.
It was not always so? No; but even in the most penurious times it was
kings who were the patrons.
But if culture is such a poison-flower, if it flourishes only in the
swamp of poverty and under the sun of riches, it must and ought to be
destroyed. Our sentiment will no longer endure the happiness and
brilliance of the few growing out of the misery of the many; the days
of the senses are over, and the day of conscience is beginning to
dawn.
And now a timid and troubled puritanism makes itself heard: Is there
no middle way? Will not half-measures suffice? No, it will not do; let
this be said once for all as plainly as possible, you champions of the
supply of "bare necessities" who talk about "daily bread" and want to
butter it with the "noblest pleasures of art." It will not do!
No, half-measures will not do, nor quarter-measures. They might, if
the whole world, the sick, the healthy and the bloated all together
were of the same mind as ourselves. In Moscow it is said that people
are expecting the world-revolution every hour, but the world declines
to oblige. Therefore, if culture and civilization are to remain what
they were, is there nothing for it but with one wrench to tear the
poisoned garment from our body? Or--is there then an "or"? Let us see.
We have a long way before us. First of all we must know how rich or
how poor we and the world are going to be, on the day when there will
be no income without working for it and no rich people any more.
If our economic system made us self-supporting we might arrange
matters on the model of the Boer Republic which had all it needed, and
now and then traded a load of ostrich feathers for coffee and hymn
books. But we, alas! in order to find nourishment for twenty
millions[5] have to export blood and brains. And if, in order to buy
phosphates, we offer cotton stockings and night-caps as the highest
products of our artistic energies, and declare that they are all the
soundest hand-work--for in our "daily bread" economy we shall have
long forgotten how to work such devil's tools as the modern
knitting-machine--then people will reply to us: in the first place we
don't want night-caps, and if we did we can supply them for one-tenth
of the cost; and our cotton goods will be sent back to us as
unsaleable.
A world-trade, even of modest dimensions, can only be carried on upon
the basis of high technical accomplishment, but this height of
accomplishment cannot be attained on the basis of any penny-wise
economy. Whoever wills the part must also will the whole, but to this
whole belongs not merely the conception of a technique, but of a
civilization, and indeed of a culture. One might as well demand of a
music-hall orchestra which plays ragtime all the year round that once
in the year, and once only, on Good Friday, it should pull itself
together to give an adequate performance of the Passion Music of Bach.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: By this figure the author seems to be referring to the
population of the impoverished Germany of the future if the course of
Socialism proceeds on wrong lines.]
V
For some decades Germany will be one of the poorest of countries. How
poor she will be does not depend on herself alone, but on the power
and the will for mischief of others--who hate us.
However, poverty and wealth are relative terms; Germans are still
richer on the average than their forefathers; richer than the Romans
or Greeks. The standard of well-being is set by the best-off of the
competitors, for he it is who determines the current standard of
technique and industry, the methods of production, the minimum of
labour and skill. We cannot, as we have already seen, keep aloof from
world-competition, for Germany needs cheap goods. We must therefore
try to keep step so far as we can.
Even if we shut our eyes and take no more account of our debt to
foreign lands than we do of the war-tribute, we must admit that the
average standard of well-being in America far surpasses the German.
Goods are not so dear as with us, and the wages of the skilled worker
amounts to between seven and ten dollars a day--more than 100 marks in
our money; and many artisans drive to their workshops in their own
automobiles.
If, now, we ask our Radicals how they envisage the problem of
competition with such a country, which in one generation will be
twenty-or thirty-fold as rich as we are, they will blurt out a few
sentences in which we shall catch the word "Soviet system," "surplus
value,"[6] "world revolution." But in truth the question will never
occur to them--it is not ventilated at public meetings.
Among themselves they talk, albeit without much conviction, about
"surplus value"--which has nothing whatever to do with the present
question, and in regard to which it has been proved to them often
enough that so far as it can be made use of at all, it only means
about a pound of butter extra per head of the population.
The economic superiority of the Western powers, however, goes on
growing, inasmuch as to all appearance they are getting to work
seriously to establish the new economy (which we have buried) in the
form of State Socialism. A healthy, or what is to-day the same thing,
a victorious economy, does not leap over any of its stages; it will
work gradually through the apparently longer, but constant, movement
from Capitalism to State Socialism and thence to full Socialism; while
we, it seems, want to take a shortcut, and to miss out the intervening
stage. And we lose so much time and energy in restless fluctuations
forward and backward, hither and thither, that this leap in advance
may fall short.
If anything could be more stupid and calamitous than the war itself it
was the time when it broke out. There was one thing which the big
capitalism of the world was formed to supply, which it was able to
supply, and, in fact, was supplying: the thing which not only
justified capitalism, but showed it to be an absolutely necessary
stage in the development of a denser population. This was the
enrichment of the peoples, the rapid, and even anticipatory
restoration of equilibrium between the growing population and the
indispensable increase in the means of production; in other words,
general well-being. The unbroken progress of America, and the almost
unbroken progress of England will demonstrate that in one, or at most
two, generations the power of work and the output of mechanism would
have risen to such a pitch that we could have done anything we liked
in the direction of lightening human labour and reconciling social
antagonisms.
Alas, it was in vain! The rapid advance to prosperity of the people of
Central Europe, who had been accustomed to thrift and economy, went to
their heads; they fell victims to the poison of capitalism and of
mechanism; they were unable, like America in its youthful strength, to
make their new circumstances deepen their sense of responsibility; in
their greedy desire to store as much as possible of the heavenly manna
in their private barns they abandoned their destinies to a
superannuated, outworn feudal class and to aspiring magnates of the
bourgeoisie; they would not be taught by political catastrophes, and
at last, in the catastrophe of the war, they lost at once their
imaginary hopes, their traditional power and the economic basis of
their existence.
Those who are now pursuing a policy of desperation are unconsciously
building their hopes on the breakdown which brought them to the top:
they are avowedly making the hoped-for revolution in the West the
central point of their system. If the West holds out, they will be
false prophets; but it will not only hold out, it will in the
beginning at all events, witness a great and passionate uprising of
imperialistic and capitalistic tendencies. If there is any one who did
not understand that a policy based on hopes of other peoples'
bankruptcy is the most flimsy and frivolous of all policies, he might
well have learned it from the war.
Germany must forge her own destinies for herself, without side-glances
at the good or ill fortune of others. Had time only been given us to
pass naturally from the stage of a prolonged and corrupted childhood
into that of a manly responsibility, our ultimate recovery would be
assured. But we have to accomplish in months what ought to be the
evolution of decades; our national training has left us without
convictions, we have no eye for the true boundaries of rights, claims
and responsibilities, and we hesitate as to how far we must or ought
to go. Unprepared, weakened, impoverished and sick, we are required,
at the most unlucky moment, to work out a new and unprecedented order
of life. Before even the educated classes are capable of forming a
judgment on the question, the most incapable masses of the rawest
youth, of the lowest classes of society, are let loose, and sit upon
the judgment-seat.
It is not only that we have been rich and have become very poor, but
we were always politically immature, and are so still. If the order of
Society is to be that of root-and-branch Socialism, it will mean the
proletarian condition for all of us, and for a long time to come.
There is no use in flattering ourselves and painting the future better
than it is; the truth must be spoken with all plainness. If we work
hard, and under capable guidance, each of us will at most have an
effective income of 500 marks in pre-war values, or, say, 2000 marks
for the family. This average will be higher if we proceed on the
principles of the New Economy,[7] but again will be reduced by the
necessity for allowing extra pay for work of higher value. If to-day
the average income available is markedly higher than the above, the
reason is that we are living on our capital; we are living on the
products of work which ought to be reserved for the maintenance and
renewal of the means of production; in other words we are exhausting
the soil and slaughtering our stock. We are also consuming what
foreign countries give us on credit; in other words, we are living on
borrowed money.
It is childish lying and deception to act on the tacit assumption that
thoroughgoing Socialism means something like a garden-city idyll, with
play-houses, open-air theatres, excursions, picturesque raiment and
fire-side art. This in itself quite decent ideal of the average
architect, art-craftsman and art-reformer if expressed in dry figures
would, "at the lowest estimate" as they say, demand about fivefold the
capacity for production attainable by the utmost exertions and with a
ten hours' day _before the war_--before the downfall of our economy
and our exploitation by the enemy.
To place one-third of our working-class in decent, freehold dwellings
would alone, if the material and means of production sufficed, require
the whole working-capacity of the country for two years. Even after
the last manufacturer's villa-residence, the last palace-hotel, have
long been turned into tenements, the solution of the most urgent part
of the housing-question will still be an affair of decades. For the
sake of the last remnant of our self-respect we must finally tear
asunder that web of economic falsehood, woven out of ignorance, mental
lethargy, concealment and illusion, which has taken the place of the
political. Let us see any one attempt to prove that Germany can carry
on, I do not say a well-off, but even a petty tradesman's kind of
existence, unless our means of production can by some stroke of magic
be multiplied tenfold--on paper it can be done with ease--or unless
the production value (not turnover), which an adult working-man can
with the utmost exertion bring into being in the course of a year does
not many times exceed the average value of 2000 marks.
No doubt the young folk of our big cities promise themselves a merry
time for six weeks when they have got power, the shops, the wardrobes
and the wine-cellars into their hands. For the leaders, it may last a
little longer than for the rank-and-file. And then, for those of the
former who have any sense of honesty, will come a question of
conscience, which may be delayed by printing paper-money, but cannot
be solved by any appeal to the people.
If Bolshevism were the contrary to what it is--if it were a success, a
thing not absolutely impossible in a peasant-State, we might
understand the self-assurance of those who, in opposition to our
forecast, expect everything from the will of the people, the Soviet
system and the inspirations of the future. We do understand it in the
case of the drawing-room communists, and the profiteer-extremists who
are out not for the cause, but for power, and perhaps only for
material objects.
I know that by these observations I am favouring the cause of those
sorry dignitaries of a day, the Majority Socialists, but I cannot help
that. The truth is not false because it favours one party, nor is
falsehood truth because it harms the other. The Socialism now in
power is doing the right thing, although it is doing it out of
ignorance and helplessness--it is waiting, and getting steam up. It is
better to do the right thing out of error than to do the wrong thing
out of wisdom. Out of error: for besides omitting to do what ought not
to be done it also omits the things it ought to do--among others, the
introduction of the New Economy.[8] It is like mankind before the
Fall; it does not know good from evil, what is useful and what is
noxious, what can be done and what cannot. Well--let it take its time;
it shall have time enough.
This time must be turned to good account. When we have come to the end
of these observations we shall understand what a huge task lies
between us and the realization of the new social order. In this case
the longest way round is the shortest way home. And even if Germany
should choose the mountain road with its broad loops and windings, we
shall stray often enough, and go backward now and then; while if, in
impatient revolt, we try to climb straight up, we shall slip down
lower than where we started. Let us never forget how mysteriously our
social and political immaturity seems to be bound up with our once
lofty and even now remarkable intellectuality and morality.[9] We have
not won our liberties, they have fallen into our laps; it was by the
general breakdown, by a strike, by a flight, that Germany and her
former rulers have parted company. These liberties, social and
political, are not rooted in the soil, they can hardly be said to be
prized among the treasures of life, it is not their ideal, but their
material side which attracts us. Those who used to shout Hurrah! now
cry "All power to the Soviets!" and the day will come when they will
again shout Hurrah! Then we shall witness a real sundering of our
different visions of the world, visions now buried under a mass of
interests and speculations.
In any case, whether the change is to be catastrophic or evolutionary,
the journey will be a long one, and every attempt to hurry it will
only prolong it further; it will throw us back for years, or it may be
decades. Above all things, we must know whither we are going. In order
to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it _may_
look like, what it _ought_ to look like, and what it _will_ look like.
We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly
Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will
be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a
deeply-endangered culture. The unproved, parrot-phrases of a cheap
Utopianism will grow dumb--those phrases which offer us entrance into
the usual Garden of Eden with its square-cut, machine-made culture and
gaudy, standardized enjoyments--phrases which assure us that when we
have introduced the six-hours' working day and abolished private
property, the cinema horrors will be replaced by classical concerts,
the gin-shops by popular reading-rooms, the gaming-hells by edifying
lectures, highway robberies by gymnastic exercises, detective novels
by Gottfried Keller, bazaar-trifles and comic vulgarities by works of
refined handicraft; and that out of boxing contests, racecourse
betting, bomb exercises, and profiteering in butter, we shall see the
rise of an era of humility and philanthropy.
In the Promised Land as we conceive it, the classes which are now the
bearers of German culture will lose almost everything, while the gain
of the proletariat will be scarcely visible. And yet for the sake of
this scarcely visible gain we must tread the stony path that lies
before us. Willingly and joyfully shall we tread it; for out of this,
at first, dubious conquest of equal rights for all men will grow the
might of justice, of human dignity, of human solidarity and unity.
That is truly work for a century, and yet for that very reason the
hard path will lead to its reward. We must learn to know it, and to
understand that it is a path of sacrifice. We must not accept the
invitation of fools to a Christmas party--fools who will make the
welkin ring with their outcries when they find out their
self-deception. Let us tread our path of suffering with a pride which
disdains to be consoled by illusions.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: By surplus-value (_Mehrwert_) the author means all that
is produced above and beyond the bare necessities of life.]
[Footnote 7: _Die Neue Wirtschaft_, by Walther Rathenau (S. Fischer).
In this brief study, Rathenau urges (1) the unification and
standardization of the whole of German industry and commerce in one
great Trust, working under a State charter, and armed with very
extensive powers; and (2) a great intensification of the application
of science and mechanism to production.]
[Footnote 8: See p. 37, _note_.]
[Footnote 9: Morality, _Sittlichkeit_, a word of broader meaning than
"morality," for it comprehends not only matters of ethical right and
wrong, but the general temper and habit of mind of a people as
expressed in social life.]
VI
In order to throw some light into the obscurity of that social
dreamland which no one seriously discusses because no one honestly
believes in it, let us, as it were, cut out and examine a section from
the fully socialized Germany of the future. Let us suppose that
certain economic and social conditions have lasted for a generation or
so, and have therefore become more or less stabilized. At a normal
rate of progress this state of things should be reached about the end
of this century.
To begin with, let us make two very optimistic assumptions--first,
that technical progress in Germany shall have developed to a point at
which we are no longer impossibly outclassed and distanced by foreign
nations, and, secondly, that by a timely and far-reaching reform of
education and culture (the lowest cost of which must be set down at
about three milliards of marks) the complete breakdown of civilisation
may be averted. This reform is one which must be taken in hand very
early, for _after_ the event its adoption is improbable. A third, less
optimistic but on that account more probable assumption may be added
to this--namely, that the Western countries shall have progressed
towards Socialism more steadily and therefore more slowly, and that
at the period of our comparison America shall find itself at the stage
of State-Socialism, not of full socialization. We know that in making
this assumption we are smoothing the way for attack to our
professional opponents, uncritical and self-interested, who with one
blast of the fanfare of world-revolution can scatter our further
observations to the winds.
Full Socialism is characterized, as we have seen, by the abolition of
all incomes that are not worked for, and the fact that there are no
more rich. But this criterion must be limited in its application, for
it can never be fully realized.
According to the theory and the laws every one must hold some
appointment and be paid for his work, or for not working. What he is
paid, however, he can at will utilize, or waste, or hoard up, or give,
or gamble away, or destroy. He cannot invest it, or get interest on it
or turn into capital, because these private undertakings or means of
production will no longer exist.
Now each of these assumptions is so shaky that not only must trifling
divergences and shortcomings be winked at, but the meshes of the
system are so wide that only a rough approximation to the ideal is
possible.
It is true that every one can be made to hold some appointment and be
paid for some minimum of work, but no one can be prevented from
devoting his leisure hours to some work of rare quality and turning it
into value for his own purposes. He can make himself useful by
subsidiary employment of an artistic, scientific or technical
character, by rendering services or assistance of various kinds, by
advising, or entertaining, or acting as a guide to strangers, or going
on employment abroad, and no law can prevent him from turning his
services into income even if he was merely paid in kind. Gaming and
betting will flourish and many will grow rich by them. A man who has
lost his money and who has exhausted his rights to an advance from the
public institutions for that object will have recourse to lenders who
will supply him with bread and meat and clothes, and who will make
money by it. Similarly with people who are tempted to make
acquisitions beyond their standard remuneration. On every side we
shall see private stores of goods of all kinds, which will take the
place of property as formerly understood.
There will be an enormous temptation to smuggling and profiteering
which will reach a height far surpassing all scandals of the war and
revolution periods. Foreigners and their agents, who look after the
export trade "from Government to Government," will help hoarders and
savers to turn their goods to account. Suppose citizens are attacked
because their senseless expenditure is a mockery of their legal
remuneration, they will say: I got this from friends--that I got by
exchange--this came from abroad--my relatives in America sent me that.
Law, control, terrorism, are effective just so long as there is not a
blade of grass in the land--once remove the fear of hunger and they
are useless. Great properties will arise, drawing interest both abroad
and at home, and they will grow by evasions and bribery. The
profiteer, the true child of the "great days," will not perish from
the land, on the contrary, he will grow tougher the more he is
persecuted, he will be the rich man of the future, and he will form a
constant political danger if he and his fellows combine.
So long as we have not acquired an entirely new mentality, one which
detaches men from possessions, which points them towards the Law,
which binds the passions, and sharpens the conscience, so long will
the principle of "No rich people and no workless income" have to be
contracted into the formula, "There ought to be none."
Without this profound alteration of mentality, even the legally
prescribed incomes will exhibit quite grotesque variations, and will
adapt themselves to the rarity-value of special gifts, to
indispensable qualities, to favouritism, with a crudity quite unknown
to-day. A scarcity of Ministers, a Professor's nourishment, and
soldiers' supplies, will then as now be met according to the law of
supply and demand. Consider what ten years' practice in the war for
wages and strike-management, with the public in it as partisans, will
bring with it in the way of favouritisms, celebrities, and
indispensabilities. Popular jockeys, successful surgeons, managers of
sports' clubs, tenors, demimondaines, farce-writers and champion
athletes could, even to-day, if they were class-conscious and joined
together to exploit their opportunities, demand any income they liked.
Even as a matter of practical political economy, the cinema-star (or
whatever may succeed her) will be able to prescribe to the Government
what amount of adornments, drawn from Nature or Art, are necessary for
her calling, and what standard of life she must maintain in order to
keep herself in the proper mood.
Organizers, popular leaders, authors and artists will announce and
enforce their demands to the full limit of their rarity-value. At a
considerable distance below these come the acquired and more or less
transferable powers and talents. The Russians for the first few months
believed in a three-fold order of allowances, rising within a limit of
about one to two. If the ideas now prevailing have not undergone a
radical change, then we may, in the society of the future, look for
divergences of income in the limit of one to a thousand.
Therefore the principle that there shall be no more rich people must
again be substantially limited. We must say, "There will be people
receiving extraordinary incomes in kind to which must be added the
claims to personal service which these favoured persons will lay down
as conditions of their work."
In its external, arithmetical structure, the fabric of life and its
requirements in the new order will resemble that of to-day far more
closely than most of us imagine--on the other hand, the inward and
personal constitution of man will be far more different. Already we
can observe the direction of the movement.
Extravagance and luxury will continue to exist, and those who practise
it will be, as they are to-day, and more than to-day, the profiteers,
the lucky ones, and the adventurers. Excessive wealth will be more
repulsive than it is now; whether it will be less valued depends upon
the state of public ethics, a topic which we shall have to consider
later. It is probable that in defiance of all legislation wealth will
turn itself into expenditure and enjoyment more rapidly and more
recklessly than to-day.
But the relics of middle-class well-being will by that time have been
consumed; the families which for generations have visibly incorporated
the German spirit will less than others contrive to secure special
advantages by profiteering and evading the laws; as soon as their
modest possessions are taxed away or consumed they will melt into the
general mass of needy people who will form the economic average of the
future.
The luxury which will exhibit itself in streets and houses will have a
dubious air; every one will know that there is something wrong with
it, people will spy and denounce, and find to their disgust that
nothing can be proved; the well-off will be partly despised, partly
envied; the question how to suppress evasions of the law will take up
a good half of all public discussions, just as that of capitalism does
now. The hateful sight of others' prosperity cannot, even at home,
not to mention foreign countries, be withdrawn from the eyes of the
needy masses; capitalism will have merely acquired another name and
other representatives.
The fact that the average of more or less cultivated and responsible
folk are plunged in poverty will not be accepted as the consequence of
an unalterable natural law, nor as a case of personal misfortune; it
will be set down to bad government, and the rising revolutionary
forces of the fifth, sixth and seventh classes will nourish the
prevailing discontent in favour of a new revolt. For the greater
uniformity of the average way of life and its general neediness will
not in itself abolish the division of classes. I have already often
enough pointed out that no mechanical arrangements can avail us here.
At first there will be three, or more probably four classes who, in
spite of poverty, will not dissolve in the masses, and who, through
their coherence and their intellectual heritage are by no means
without power. The Bolshevist plan of simply killing them out will not
be possible in Germany, they are relatively too numerous; persecution
will weld them closer together, and their traditional experiences,
habits of mind, and capacity, will make it necessary to have recourse
to them and employ them again and again.
The first of these classes is that of the feudal nobility. Their
ancient names cannot be rooted out of the history of Germany, and even
in their poverty the bearers of these names will be respected--all
the more if, as we may certainly assume, they maintain the effects of
their bodily discipline, and the visible tradition of certain forms of
life and thought. They will be strengthened by their mutual
association, their relationship with foreign nobility will give them
important functions in diplomacy; these are two elements which they
have in common with Catholicism and Judaism. They will retain their
inclination and aptitude for the calling of arms and for
administration; their reactionary sentiments will lead now to success,
now to failure, and by both the inner coherence of the class will be
fortified. Finally, the inevitable reversion to an appreciation of the
romantic values of life will make a connexion with names of ancient
lineage desirable to the leading classes, and especially to the
aristocracy of officialism.
This aristocracy of officialism forms the second of the new strata
which will come to light. The first office-bearers of the new era, be
their achievements great or small, are not to be forgotten. Their
descendants are respected as the bearers of well-known names; in their
families the practice of politics, the knowledge of persons and
connexions are perpetuated; fathers, in their lifetime, look after the
interests of sons and daughters and launch them on the same path. From
these, and from the first stratum, the representatives of Germany in
foreign lands are chosen, and in this way a certain familiarity with
international life and society will be maintained. They will have the
provision necessary for their position abroad, and will also find
ways and means to keep up a higher standard of life at home. Persons
in possession of irregular means of well-being will offer a great deal
to establish connexions with these circles, which control so many
levers in the machine of State.
The third group consists of the descendants of what was once the
leading class in culture and in economics. Here we find a spirit
similar to that of the refugees, _émigrés_ and Huguenots of the past.
The lower they sink in external power, the more tenaciously they hold
to their memories. Every family knows every other and cherishes the
lustre of its name, a lustre augmented by legendary recollections, all
the more when the achievements of their class are ostentatiously
ignored in the new social order. People spare and save to the last
extremity in order to preserve and hand down some heirloom--a musical
instrument, a library, a manuscript, a picture or two. A puritanical
thrift is exercised in order, as far as possible, to maintain
education, culture and intellectuality on the old level; to this class
culture, refinement of life as an end in itself, the practice of
religion, classical music, and artistic feeling will fly for refuge.
No other class understands this one; it holds itself aloof, it looks
different from the rest in its occupations, its habits, its garb and
its forms of life. It supplies the new order with its scholars, its
clergy, its higher teaching power, its representatives of the most
disinterested and intellectual callings. Like the monasteries of the
Middle Ages, it forms an island of the past. Its influence rises and
falls periodically, according to the current ideas of the time, but
its position is assured by its voluntary sacrifices, by its knowledge
and by the purity of its motives.
A fourth inexpugnable and influential stratum will in all probability
be formed by the middle-class landowners and the substantial peasants.
Even though the socialization of the land should be radically carried
through--which is not likely to be the case--it will remain on paper.
A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or
leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a
landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it
to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and
masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability
and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner
of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country
strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated as a
political force, and forming a counterpoise to the radical democracy
of the towns.
Everywhere we find a state of strain and of cleavage. The
single-stratum condition of society cannot be reached without a
profound inward change; politics are still stirred and shaken by
conflicts, and society by the strife of classes. A very different
picture from the promised Utopian Paradise of a common feeding-ground
for lions and sheep!
We are all aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we
are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its
opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the
State-machine. The _émigrés_ of culture find themselves looked askance
at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and they insist that the
country cannot get on without them. The agriculturalists are feared,
when they show a tendency to revolt against the towns. The ruling
class, that is to say the more or less educated masses of the
city-democracy, looks in impatient discontent for the state of general
well-being which refuses to be realized, lays the blame alternately on
the four powerful strata and on the profiteers, and fights now this
group now that, for better conditions of living.
But the conditions of living do not improve--they get worse. The level
of the nation's output has been sinking from the first day of the
Revolution onwards. The absolute productivity of work, the relative
efficacy and the quality of the product, have all deteriorated. With a
smaller turnover we have witnessed a falling-off in the excellence of
the goods, in research-work, and in finish. Industrial plant has been
worked to death and has not yet recovered. Auxiliary industries,
accessories and raw materials have fallen back. High-quality
workmanship has suffered from defective schooling, youthful
indiscipline and the loss of manual dexterity. The new social order
has lost a generation of leaders in technique, scholarship and
economics. Universities, with all institutions of research and
education, have suffered from this blank. Technical leadership is
gone, and the deterioration in quality has reacted detrimentally on
output. We can now turn out nothing except what is cheap and easy, and
what can be produced without traditional skill of hand, without
serious calculation and research. For all innovations, all work of
superior quality, Germany is dependent on the foreigner. The
atmosphere of technique has vanished, and the stamp of cheap hireling
labour is on the whole output of the country.
In the weeks of the Revolution street orators used to tell us that
five hundred Russian professors had signed a statement that the level
of culture had never been so high as under Bolshevism. And Berlin
believed them! To educate Russia it would take, to begin with, a
million elementary schools with a yearly budget of several dozen
milliards of roubles, and a corresponding number of higher schools and
universities: if every educated Russian for the next twenty years were
to become a teacher, there would not be enough of them--not to speak
of the requirements of transport, of raw materials and of agriculture.
The fabric of a civilization and a culture cannot be annihilated at
one blow, nor can it grow up save in decades and centuries. The
maintenance of the structure demands unceasing toil and unbroken
tradition; the breach that has been made in it in Germany can only be
healed by the application in manifold forms of work, intellect and
will; and this hope we cannot entertain.[10]
But we have not yet done with the question of social strata and inward
cleavage. Revolutionary threats are causing strife every day.
Revolution against revolution--how is this possible? We are not
speaking of a reactionary revolution but of the "activist."
In an earlier work I discussed the theory of continuous
revolution.[11] Behind every successful revolutionary movement there
stands another, representing one negation more than its predecessor.
Behind the revolt of the aristocracy stood that of the bourgeoisie,
behind that of the bourgeoisie stood Socialism. Behind the now ruling
fourth class[12] rises the fifth, and a sixth is coming into sight. If
a ninth should represent pure Anarchism, we may see an eleventh
proclaiming a dictatorship, and a twelfth standing for absolute
monarchy.
To-day the Majority Socialists are in power, that is to say the Right
section of the fourth class. This is composed of the older, trained
and work-willing Trade Unionists, who are amazed at the Revolution,
who do not regard it as quite legitimate, but who are determined to defend
the _status quo_ in so far as a certain degree of self-determination
and elbow-room in the material conditions of life still remain to them.
The Left section consists of youths and of persons disgusted with
militarism, ignorant of affairs but cherishing a certain independence
of judgment; still ready for work but equally so for politics. To
these, as a "forward" party, the doctrinaire theorists have allied
themselves. The designation of the party "The Independents" is
characteristic; its goal, "All power to the Soviets," is a catchword
from Russia.
A fifth class is now emerging--the work-shy. The others call them the
tramp-proletariat, the disgruntled, the declassed, who set their hopes
on disorder. Their goal is still undetermined--their favourite
expression is "bloodhound," when those in power, or Government troops,
are referred to.
Then comes the sixth class, still partly identified with the Left of
the fourth and embryonically attached to the fifth. These are the
indomitable loafers and shirkers, physically and mentally unsound,
aliens in the social order, excluded by their sufferings, their
punishments, their vices and passions; self-excluded, repudiators of
law and morality, born of the cruelty of the city, pitiable beings,
not so much cast out of society as cast up against it, as a living
reproach to its mechanical organization. If these ever come into the
light in politics, they will demand a kind of syndicalistic
communism.
That is as far as we can see at present into the as yet unopened germs
of continuous revolutionary movement. In these are contained the
infinite series of all principles that can conceivably be supported;
and it would be wholly false to see in this series merely so many
successive steps in moral degeneration, even though the earlier stages
should proceed on a flat denial of ethical principles. Later on will
come revivals and restorations, political, ethical and religious, and
each time we shall see the rising stratum attaching to itself strays
and converts, above all, the disappointed and ambitious, from those
that went before.
But the number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them,
and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed,
will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by
armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest
one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner
the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already
preparing its armed forces for the conflict.
It is therefore wholly vain to hope that an advanced social
organization implies stability, that a brotherhood mechanically
decreed will exclude further revolutions, and will establish eternally
an empire of righteousness and justice according to any preconceived
pattern.
The fiercest hatred will prevail amongst those who are most closely
associated--for instance, between handworkers and brainworkers,
between leaders and followers; and this hate will be all the more
inappeasable when it is open to every one to rise in the world, and
none can cherish the excuse that he is the victim of a social system
of overwhelming power. To-day this hatred is masked by the general
class-hatred--hatred of the monopolists of culture, of position and of
capital.
At the bottom of it, however, lies even to-day the more universal
hatred of the defeated for the victor, and when those three monopolies
have fallen, it will emerge in its original Cain-like form. It cannot
be appeased by any mechanical device. Human inequality can never be
abolished, human accomplishment and work will always vary, and the
human passion for success will always assert itself.
We have discussed the material foundation and the stratification of
the German people when full socialization has been realized. Let us
now forecast the manner of their existence.
The future community is poor; the individual is poor. The average
standard of well-being corresponds, at best, to what in peace-time one
would expect from an income of 3000 marks.[13] But the requirements of
the population are not mediævally simplified--they could not be, in
view of the density of the population and the complexity of industrial
and professional vocations. They are manifold and diverse, and they
are moreover intensified by the spectacle of extravagance offered by
the profiteering class and the licence of social life. The traditional
garden-city idyll of architects and art-craftsmen is a Utopia about as
much like reality as the pastoral Arcadianism of Marie Antoinette.
All things of common use are standardized into typical forms. It must
not be supposed, however, that they are based on pure designs and
models. The taste of the artist will clash with that of the crowd, and
since the former has no authority to back him he will have to
compromise. The compromise, however, consists in cheap imitation of
foreign models, for in foreign countries art-industry will exist, and
no legislation can prevent its products from finding their way (in
reproductions or actual examples) into Germany and being admired
there. Our half or wholly imitative products are turned out as cheaply
as possible, in substitute-materials, and are made as well or as ill
as the relics of our craftsmanship permit, or as our existing
machinery for the purpose is capable of. Cheapness and ease of
manufacture are the principles aimed at, for even with narrow means no
one will want to do without certain things; fashions still prevail,
and will have to be satisfied with things that do not last, but can be
constantly changed.
How far will a new system of education tend to simplify the needs of
men and women and to purify their taste? Probably very little, for
good models will be lacking, poverty is not fastidious, and the taste
of the populace is the sovereign arbiter. But on this taste it depends
whether vulgar ornaments and gewgaws, frivolities and bazaar-horrors,
are to satisfy the desires of the soul.
Objects of earlier art and industry have been alienated through need
of money or destroyed by negligence. Here and there one may find an
old cup or an engraving, as we do to-day in plundered territories, but
these things are disconnected specimens; all they can do is
occasionally to interest an artist. Whoever wants to procure some
object or to get something done which has not been standardized in the
common range of approved requirements must gain it by a tedious course
of pinching and saving. Personal possessions in the way of books,
musical instruments, works of art, as well as travel outside the
prescribed routes are rarities; a tree of one's own, a horse of one's
own are legendary things.
Thus luxury in its better aspect has gone to ruin quicker than in the
bad. All outlay devoted to culture, to beauty, to invigoration has
dried up; all that survives is what stimulates, what depraves and
befouls; frivolities, substitutes and swindles. What we have arrived
at is not the four-square simplicity of the peasant-homestead, but a
ramshackle city suburb. To some of us it is not easy, and to many it
is not agreeable to picture to themselves the aspect of a thoroughly
proletarianized country, and the difficulty lies in the fact that the
popular mind has, as it were by universal agreement, resolved to
conceive the future on a basis of domestic prosperity about tenfold as
great as it can possibly be. The leaders and office-holders of the
proletariat have an easy task in convincing themselves and others that
what they approve and are struggling for is the so-called middle-class
existence with all the refinement and claims of historic culture.
Tacitly, as a matter of course, they accept what plutocracy has to
give them, and imagine that the loans they take up from the
civilization and culture of the past can be redeemed from the social
gains of the future.
The stages at which a nation arrives year by year, can be estimated by
its building. In the new order, little is being built. Apart from
certain perfunctory garden-cities, which are being erected for the
principle of the thing, to meet the needs of a few thousand favoured
households, and which perhaps will never be finished, we will for
decades have to content ourselves with new subdivisions and
exploitation of the old buildings; old palaces packed to the roof with
families, will stand in the midst of vegetable gardens and will
alternate with empty warehouses in the midst of decayed cities. In the
streets of the suburbs the avenues of trees will be felled, and in the
cities grass will grow through the cracks of the pavement.
For a long time it used to be believed that the passion of the
landscape painters of the seventeenth century for introducing ruins
with hovels nestling among them arose from a feeling for romance.
This is not so--they only painted what they saw around them after the
ravages of the Thirty Years' War. It must not be supposed, however,
that the forecast in these pages is based on the consequences of the
war; these no doubt must darken our picture of the future; but the
shadows, which I have put in as sparingly as I could, are essentially
the expression of a greatly reduced economic efficiency, combined with
the uniformity produced by the general proletarianization of life with
the absence of any correcting factor in individual effort of a
rational character and of the influence of higher types.
A brighter trait in the material conditions of life will be formed by
effort of a collective character, such as even the most penurious
community may be able to undertake. The more severely the domestic
household has to pinch, and the more unattractive it thereby becomes,
the more completely will life be forced into publicity. Private claims
and aspirations, which cannot be satisfied, will be turned over to the
public. Men will gather in the streets and places of public resort,
and have more mutual intercourse than before, since every transaction
of life, even the most insignificant, will have to be a subject of
discussion, agreement and understanding. In all the arrangements of
social life, _e.g._ for news, communications, supplies, discussion and
entertainment, and demands will be made and complied with for greater
convenience and comprehensiveness, for popular æsthetics and popular
representation. In these arrangements and in these alone Art will
have to find its functions and its home. Public buildings, gardens,
sanatoriums, means of transit and exhibitions will be established at
great cost. All the demands of the spirit and of the senses will seek
their satisfaction in public. There will be no lack of popular
performances, excursions, tours and conducted visits to collections;
of clubs, libraries, athletic meetings and displays. The aspect of
this tendency from the point of view of culture and ethics we have
still to consider; in its social aspect (apart from the fact that it
causes a vacuum in the home and forces young people to the surface of
life, and in spite of its mechanical effect) it will act as a
comforting reminiscence of the civic commonalty and solidarity of
mediæval times.
In considering the spiritual and cultural life of a fully socialized
society, we have to start with the assumption that any one man's
opinion and decision are as good as another's. Authority, even in
matters of the highest intellectual or spiritual character, only
exists in so far as it is established, acknowledged and confirmed
either by direct action of the people's will, or indirectly through
their representatives. Every one's education and way of life are much
the same; there are no secrecies, no vague authority attaching to
special vocations; no one permits himself to feel impressed by any
person or thing. Every one votes, whether it be for an office, a
memorial, a law, or a drama, or does it through delegates or the
delegates of delegates. Every one is determined to know the how and
where and why of everything--just as to-day in America--and demands a
plausible reason for it. The reply, "This is a matter you don't
understand," is impossible.
Everything is referred to one's own conscience, one's own
intelligence, one's own taste, and no one admits any innate or
acquired superiority in others. In debate, the boundaries between the
ideal and the practicable are obliterated; for on the one hand every
one is too much preoccupied with material needs, and on the other, too
confident, too unaccustomed to submit himself to what in former days
was called a deeper insight, too loosely brought up to let himself be
taught. We never, therefore, hear such judgments as: This, although it
is difficult, is a book to be read; this drama ought to have been
produced although it is not sensational; I don't myself care for this
memorial, but it must remain because a great artist made it; this is a
necessary branch of study, although it has no practical application; I
will vote for this man on account of his character and ability,
although he has made no election-promises. On the other hand, the
following kind of argument will have weight: This historic building
must be demolished, for it interferes with traffic; this collection
must be sold, for we need money; we need no chair of philosophy, but
we do need one for cinema-technique; these ornamental grounds are the
very place for a merry-go-round; tragedies are depressing, they must
not be performed in the State theatres. Let us recall certain oversea
legislation--carried out, be it noted in countries still swayed by the
traditional influence of culture--and these examples will not seem
exaggerated.
Where there is no appeal to authority, where none need fear
disapproval or ridicule, where convenience is prized and thrift rules
supreme, there thought and decision will be short-breathed, and will
never look beyond the needs of the day. Who will then care for far-off
deductions, for wide arcs of thought? Calculation comes to the front,
everything unpractical is despised; opinions are formed by discussion,
everyday reading and propaganda. Men demand proofs, success, visible
returns. The fewer the aims, the stronger will be their attraction.
People are tolerant, for they are used to hearing the most varied
opinions, and all opinions have followers, from the water-cure to
Tâoism; but the only opinion of any influence is that whose followers
are many.
Public opinion settles everything. The champions of absolute values
have to accommodate themselves to the law of competition. Religious
teaching has to seek the favour of the times by the same methods as a
new system of physical culture. A work of art must compete for votes.
Only by popularity-hunting can anything come to life; there will be no
doing without much talking. As in the later days of Greece, rhetoric
and dialectic are the most powerful of the arts.
And since manual labour cherishes silently or openly a bitter grudge
against intellectual labour, the latter has to protect itself by a
pretence of sturdy simplicity; when two teachers are competing for the
head-mastership of a classical school each tries to prove that he has
the hornier hand.
Most things in this new order are decided by weight of numbers.
Advertisement and propaganda are banished from socialized industry and
commerce; instead, they compete in the service of personal and ideal
aims--in elections, theatres, systems of medicine, superstitions,
arts, appointments, professorships, churches.
Art has for the third time changed its master--after the princes,
Mæcenas, the middle-class market; after Mæcenas, the plebs, and export
trade. Whether by means of representation through gilds, by
compulsion, by patronage, or by favour, Art has become dependent; it
must explain, exhort, contend; it can no longer rest proudly on
itself. It must aim at getting a majority on its side, and this it can
only do by sensationalism. Like all other features of intellectual
life, it must march with the times. Like all technique, research,
learning and handicraft it suffers through the loss, for several
generations, of tradition and hereditary skill, but together with this
drop there is also a drop in the character of the demand; quality has
given way to actuality.[14]
Certain reactions based on practical experience are not excluded;
the constant comparison with the past and with foreign countries will
show the value of the cultivation of a science, of an art which has no
fixed prepossessions and serves no immediate aims. Measures are taken,
though without much conviction, by free Academies or the like, to win
back something of this; but the atmosphere is not favourable to such
attempts, and an artificial and sterile discipline is all that can
result.
The general tone is that of an excitable, loquacious generation, bent
on actualities and matters of practical calculation, fonder of debate
than of work, not impressed by any authority, prizing success,
watching all that goes on abroad, taking refuge in public from the
sordidness of private life, and passionately hostile to all
superiority. Through the constant secession of elements to which this
tone is antipathetic a kind of natural selection is constantly taking
place, and the political defencelessness of the transition period
favours disintegrating tendencies of foreign origin. The carving away
of ancient German territories works in the same direction. Apart from
the varying influence of the four strata already referred to, the
general tone will be set by the half-Slavonic lower classes of Middle
and North Germany, who have brought about and who control the existing
conditions, and by the other elements which have been assimilated to
these.
In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state
of things of which a foretaste already exists in parts of America and
of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage
through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and
mentality, has created its own form of civilization.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Rathenau means that it cannot be entertained except on
the hypothesis of the profound _inward_ change, which is to be
discussed later on.]
[Footnote 11: _Kritik der dreifachen Revolution._ S. Fischer.]
[Footnote 12: The classes referred to are (1) the old aristocracy, (2)
the aristocracy of officialism, (3) that of traditional middle-class
culture; (4) the mass of what is called Socialism.]
[Footnote 13: £150 in pre-war values. By thrift, by co-operation, and
by the cheapness of the public services generally, a surprisingly high
standard of life could be maintained on this kind of income in pre-war
Germany.]
[Footnote 14: Aktualität; as, for instance, reference to current
topics.]
VII
Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing
section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps
going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who
have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less
adapted to their circumstances.
A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be
daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement
on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for
which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin
to German culture remains to be seen.
Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who
of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all
who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The
statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the
professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and
their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the
divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great
industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour,
titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of
inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters,
freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was
scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions
which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And
all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the
war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the
land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were
driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the
helplessness of hours.
If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned
hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of
our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their
want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and
leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood
of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured
priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great
crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous
theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial
want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the
disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight
for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does,
too late.
What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to
imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate
capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything
that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo
to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future,
the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins
out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a
shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his
inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of
the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish;
life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young.
True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete,
pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or
read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to
the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic
dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this
very dreaming, this very life, owes its charm to the fact that we
are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want
to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and
self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the
difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the
density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants
that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is
ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to
say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to
the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our
forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people
like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a
house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you
thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go
yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that
your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to
nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as
that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not?
Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for
others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It
is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the
past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no
right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first
thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the
Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and
cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a
crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages
would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell
for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of
justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the
Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."[16]
But is it hell? That depends on ourselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 15: In 1913 all Germany was celebrating with great pomp and
warlike display the centenary of the liberation of the country from
Napoleon, and also paying a huge property tax for the coming war.]
[Footnote 16:
_Fecemi la divina Potestate
La somma Sapienza e il primo Amore._
This is part of the inscription over the gates of Hell in the
_Inferno_, Canto III.]
VIII
Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on
the assumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook,
would remain as they are at present.
This assumption is a probable one, but it is not irrevocably certain.
What we have endeavoured to demonstrate is simply the obvious
fact--the fact which our once so rigid but, since November, 1918,
uprooted and flaccid intellectualism has forgotten--that our salvation
is not to be found in any kind of mechanical apparatus or
institutions. Institutions do not mean evolution. If institutions run
too far ahead of evolution there will be reaction. When evolution runs
too far, there is revolution.
At this point both groups of our opponents will start up against us.
The Radicals cry: Ha! only give us food, give "all power to the
Soviets," let us have free-thought lectures, and mentality, insight,
experience and culture will come of themselves.
The Reactionaries smile: Ho! this man has never learned that there is
no such thing as evolution; that human character never changes.
I shall not answer either of these. They know, both of them, that they
are saying what is not true.
Something of unprecedented greatness can and must take place;
something that in the life of a people corresponds to the awakening of
manhood in the individual.
In every conscious existence there comes a moment when the living
being is no longer determined but begins to determine himself; when he
takes over responsibility from the surrounding Powers, in order to
shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that
guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely
chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he
will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the
divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment,
this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost.
We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited
influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from
us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the
present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle,
are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained:
mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can
never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through
police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a
blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a
kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of
the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths
will grow up of themselves.
We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain
life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be
so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it.
A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted
these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the
hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon
Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the
Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce,
plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on
Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a
mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and
some still believe them to be everlasting.
A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has
opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject
it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and
mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and
the competition of forces? Are we to recover ourselves, and enter into
the intellectual arena of the nations, to begin a new and enduring
life with no other guiding thought than that of self-preservation and
the division of property? In the harbour of the nations is our ship to
drift aimlessly while every other knows its course, whether to a near
or distant port? Is that penurious Paradise which we have described,
the goal of Germany's hopes and struggles?
Compared with us, the French movement of the eighteenth century had an
easy task. All it had to do was to deny and demolish. When it had
cleared away the wreckage of feudalism, at once a strong new class,
the bourgeoisie, sprang up from the soil, more vigorous than its
aristocratic forerunner, and it was able to take care of itself. And
the bourgeoisie was also a class of defined boundaries, and already
trained for its task; it had long ago taken over French culture, it
alone had for a century been the champion of French ideas, it had
acquired enthusiasm for the nation, for freedom, for militarism and
for money; the aspirations for equality and fraternity were not indeed
fulfilled, but the first mechanized and plutocratic state of the
Continent came into being.
Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are
stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the
surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the
masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an
ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No--we have to build
from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the
changing needs of the seasons, according to the casual balance of
forces, or according to an idea and a symbol--that is the question!
Our current Socialism has no qualms about bringing new nations to
birth with the aid of a few simple apparatus and radical eliminations;
it believes that the right spirit will soon enter in if only
institutions are provided for it. It would be too severe to describe
this way of thinking solely as contempt for or want of understanding
of a spiritual mission. Socialism in its prevailing form arises indeed
simply from material or so-called "scientific" conceptions (as if
there could be a science of ideal aims and values): but it has, though
only as a secondary object, annexed to itself the values of a
spiritual faith--the latter are, as the language of the market has it,
"thrown in." We have seen to what the material domination of
institutions and apparatus is leading us. To national dignity, or to
any mission for humanity, it does not lead.
What is unprecedented in our problem is not, as we have said, that a
people should beget out of itself its own idea and mission. From the
Jewish theocracy to the French rationalism, from the Chinese
ancestor-worship to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured
peoples have brought this creative act to pass, although in formative
epochs leading classes and leading men have born the responsibility
and made it easy for their countrymen to become aware of their own
unconscious spirit, and through this awareness and consciousness to
isolate and intensify it.
What is unprecedented is just this: that the process should take place
as a deliberate act of will, in democratic freedom, without pressure
and compulsion of authority, in the consciousness of its necessity, on
our own responsibility. Germany is not at present growing leaders and
prophets, we are not in a formative stage, all authority has been
scattered to the winds. It is true that we have one stratum of society
which is capable of understanding the meaning of the task, but it is
deeply cloven, the hatreds and interests of its parties make them more
each other's enemies than the people's.
And yet it is this very class--not as possessor of means but as
possessor of the tradition, which is capable, which is indispensable,
and which is summoned to take in hand the transformation of the German
spirit, to free it from the bonds of mechanism, of capitalism, of
militarism, and to lead it to its true destinies. It cannot do this
for itself alone, amid the blind bitterness of the war of classes; it
cannot do it as a sovran leader relying on its deeper insight, for its
and every other prestige has gone by the board; it can only do it by
the way of service and sacrifice--it can only do it if the service and
the sacrifice are approved and accepted.
The masses will not understand this sacrifice of service; but the more
responsible of their leaders will. Not to-day, indeed, nor to-morrow;
but on the day when experience has shown them that I am telling the
truth. At first they will do as in Russia; when want becomes acute,
they will seek to buy experience and tradition at a high price from
individuals. But mentality and spirit cannot be bought--only labour
and dexterity. Then gradually men will come to understand that the
highest things are not marketable commodities, they are only given
away. And at last the responsible leaders, those who rule in order to
serve, will separate themselves from those of the Cataline type, who
serve in order to rule.
So long has the narrow, parsonical, cynical contempt for the
understanding of the lower classes prevailed--through our fault--a
reversal to blind worship of the masses, of the immature and the
unsuccessful, is not inexcusable. We are here to love mankind--all
mankind, the outcast as well as the weak--every man and all men. But
the masses are not quite the same thing as mankind. The masses who
congregate in the streets and at public meetings are not communities
consisting of whole men, but assemblages in which each man takes a
part and is present, indeed, with his whole body, but by no means with
his whole being. The masses are absent-minded; and presence of mind
only comes to them when through the lips of some true prophet the
Spirit descends upon them. But when that happens, they take no
decisions; they do not get beside themselves; rather, they sink into
themselves. Before the distortions of a mob orator, with his
extravagant promises, the masses become merely a driven crowd eager
for gain, not human souls. They are the concave reflector of passions
and greeds that rage in the focal point of the speaker's rostrum; they
return in concentrated form the rays that dazzle them. He who puts the
masses in the judgment-seat, who looks for counsel and decision at
their hands, has neither reverence nor love for man. Sooner or later
the truth of this will be realized by all honourable men among their
leaders.
The day is also far when the upper classes will come to their senses.
They have never understood what the world is, nor what Germany is, nor
what has happened to themselves. They see houses and fields, streets
and trees very much as they were; they think, if they only play the
game a little craftily at the beginning, everything will remain as it
used to be, and they will come out all right in the end. It is just as
when some merchant goes bankrupt for a million; for the first
fortnight the servants wait at table as usual and the family eat off
silver plate; the ruin is still on paper. But in a year's time
everything is dispersed to the winds, and men have changed along with
their utensils. When one sees for what trivialities people are
fighting to-day one begins to understand how callously and shamelessly
they gave up a thousand times over that which they had sworn to defend
with the last drop of their blood; then none of them know what has
really happened. In a few years' time they will know; and then they
will fight no more for things that no longer exist; they will be
meditating a general sacrifice to save what can still be saved, and
what is worth saving.
IX
Germany is a land without power, without poise, with its prosperity
shattered, its authorities and its external aims annihilated, its
intellect and its ethics at a low ebb. In such a condition, if we wish
to understand the only kind of life-faculty which can save us from
intellectual and spiritual death, give us force and inspiration to
shape for ourselves and for the world the new social order of freedom,
spirituality[17] and justice, and in the true sense to "save" us, we
must look ourselves and the German character in the face--this
unknown, problematic character, which for a century in contradiction
to its own inmost being, has been flattering and lulling itself with
hackneyed and complacent phrases and unproved judgments. For we can
undertake nothing and claim nothing which has not its prototype in our
own soul and is not founded in our own past, our own traditions.
There is no people, not even the French, which in recent decades has
administered to itself and digested so much praise as we have. We
never discussed ourselves but at once the stereotyped toasts began.
The more German culture declined, the more disgusting became our
babble about it.
The persons through whose mouths we let ourselves be lauded were
school-teachers without comparative knowledge, professional
banquet-orators, nationalists who praised in the service of some
interested hatred, and scholars with appointments who were simply
commissioned to demonstrate that the Hohenzollern system was the last
word of creation. No one dreamed of distinguishing this glorification
of the German people from the apotheosis of the dynasties--to which we
had vowed our heart's blood--and the profound insincerity of these
declamations was shown by the indifference with which the dynasties,
the main feature in the programme, were afterwards got rid of, and the
affair of the heart's blood shelved.
We know the stereotyped phrases. German faith, French knavery. The
world is to find healing in the German soul. We are the heroes--the
others are hucksters.[18] To be German means to do a thing for its own
sake. We are a "race of thinkers and poets." We have Culture, the
others merely Civilization.[19] We alone are free--the others are
merely undisciplined (or, as the case may be, enslaved). All this we
owe to the favour of God and our education under the (here fill in
Prussian, Bavarian or Saxon) reigning House, which all the world
envies us. Clearly therefore we are destined for world-dominion; we
have only to fall-to.
In one of these phrases, about doing things for their own sake,[20]
there is truth. All the more was it for us in particular a vice and a
sign of degradation to let ourselves be dazzled by the shadowless
transparency-picture of glorification that was offered to us. There
were interests concealed in the game, and much lack of moral fibre,
all of which we passed over in silence; it was out of place in our
festal oratory.
It would be an equal or even a greater vice, only reversed, if we were
now to despair of ourselves. Moderation was what we needed then; what
we need now is vigorous and conscious self-possession. To-day it is no
easy and attractive business to bring our strong qualities to the
surface; it implies an amount of conviction which it is hard to
attain, and self-depreciation means a pitiful faint-heartedness. But
all sham goods offered by babblers, by selfish interests, prophets of
hate and commercial travellers must go overboard.
We have never been a "race of thinkers and poets," any more than the
Jews were a race of prophets, the French and Dutch a race of
painters, or Königsberg a city of Pure Reason.[21] The old German
upper classes have, in three well-defined epochs, had force enough to
throw up individuals of mighty endowments for music, poetry and
philosophy; the former lower-classes, whose blood runs in nine-tenths
of our present population, have scarcely contributed anything to these
glories. They have in recent years shown themselves thoroughly
industrious, plastic, apt for discipline, order-loving, intelligent,
practical, honourable, trustworthy, warm-hearted, prudent and helpful,
and adapted beyond all expectation to the mechanization of life and
industry; of their power to produce talent we know little, except
perhaps in the domain of research and technique, which are less a test
of creative energy than of applied knowledge and methodical assiduity.
The important question as to what relations exist between the number,
quality and greatness of individual endowments and genius on the one
side, and the character of a people on the other, is still unexplored
and very obscure, although we possess a science which calls itself by
the quite unjustified name of national psychology.
While on one side we have rarely made any serious study of national
characteristics, but have confused them with achievements of culture
and habits of life that mostly proceeded from a thin upper stratum
alone, on the other we have as a rule tacitly set down individual
endowment (with a strong emphasis on our own) as illustrations of
national character. In this respect, too, we showed that laxity in
proving what we wanted to prove which abounds everywhere from the
point where calculation with things weighable and measurable leaves
off, and judgment begins. We think it an established fact--in
accordance with just this arbitrary test of genius--that genius
belongs _par excellence_ to the so-called blonde blue-eyed races of
the earth. The fact that among the score or two of geniuses of all
ages who have been determining forces in the world it is hardly
possible to find a single example of this blue-blonde race, but they
can be proved to have been almost all dark, did not affect the
question. On the other hand the English, whose influence on culture
has been surpassed by none, had their genius-forming power, in which
they are actually deficient, seriously over-estimated. It was the
reverse with the Jews. The fact that in spite of their small numbers
they have produced more of world-moving genius than all other nations
put together, and that from them has proceeded the whole
transcendental ethics of the Western world, has not prevented their
being pronounced wholly incapable of creative endowment.
We shall put aside all this rubbish and for the present decline to go
into theoretic questions. Great individual endowments are related to
national character--to the character of the mind, not that of the
will, which must be considered apart--as the blossom to the plant or
the crystal to the mother-solution; to determine the one from the
other needs something more than a mechanical generalization. There is
no such thing as a "race of thinkers and poets." This, however, we can
say: that a people which begets great musicians, poets and
philosophers is one which devotes itself to moods and to visions,
while another, as for instance the Latin group, which creates forms
and standards, is one that at the cost of mood and vision, incarnates
its sense of will.
Devotion, receptivity, the feeling for Nature, comprehension, the
passion for truth, meditative depth, spiritual love, are the fairest
gifts that can be granted to any people, and to us they have been
granted. But they exclude other gifts, which stand to-day in high
repute, and which we affect in vain. They exclude the capacity for
shaping forms and standards, the aptitude for rule, if not even for
self-government; in any case the qualities which go to the creation of
nationalities and civilizations.
It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of
life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to
jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we
Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again,
there is scarcely one of these forms which we have not filled with a
richer and more living content than those who first discovered it.
For whoever bears the All within himself can be satisfied with no
form; he finds in himself at once vision and reality, thesis and
antithesis. He seeks for a synthesis, but all form is one-sided. He
conceives, chooses, comprehends, fulfils, breaks in pieces and throws
away. He remains a unity in constant change, like the year as it
proceeds day by day, hour by hour, and no two of them alike. He does
not force things--out of respect for creation.
But he who makes forms must use force. He makes himself the standard
and comprehends himself only. Everything else, everything that is
extra-normal, unconformable, unintelligible and not understood remains
for him something alien, trivial, inferior, or negligible. The maker
of forms can rule, even by compulsion, without being a tyrant, for he
is convinced of the value of what he brings and knows no doubts. He is
ruthless, yet only up to a certain limit, which is determined by his
sense of the inferiority of the other. The man who rejects forms,
however, cannot rule; the very penetration into the domain of another
seems to him a wrong to his own, the basis of which is recognition and
allowance. If he is forced to penetrate, he loses all balance, for in
wrong-doing he understands no gradations. Similarly he is incapable of
civilizing, for he cannot take forms seriously; he violates them
himself--how can he impose them upon others? In his inmost soul he is
naïve, for creation is seething in him; but in execution he is
conscious, critical, eclectic and methodical, in order that he may be
completely master of the one-sided element into which he has forced
himself. The man of forms, however, is, in his soul, rigid and
conscious, but in action naïve, because he does not know the meaning
of doubt.
Forms grow up like natural products in the course of centuries. They
assume the existence of uniformity in individuals, fathers reproduced
in sons with scarcely a variation. Egypt, Rome, and that modern land
of antiquity, France, are examples. For generations France has been
content with three architectural styles, which are really one and the
same style. The changes in the language are hardly perceptible. The
principal domestic utensils are almost the same as they were a hundred
years ago, fashion is merely a vibration. Foreign living languages are
little studied, their spirit is not understood, the pronunciation
remains French. Foreign countries are looked on as a kind of
menagerie; everything is measured by the native standard. Every one is
a judge of everything, for he holds fast to the norm. Within the norm
the French are keenly sensitive, their feeling for relations is very
sure; the slightest deviation is observed. To doubt the validity of
the norm is out of question; one might as well criticize the sun and
moon as the style of Louis Quatorze.
The final judgment of the British in the affairs of life is "this is
English," "that is not English." Foreign lands are a subject of
geographical and ethnological study. The whole mighty will of a
nation is here concentrated in the form of civilizing political
energy. Every private inclination is a fad, and even fads have their
fixed forms. An offence against table-manners is banned like an attack
on the Church. Nature is mastered with consideration and intelligence,
whether the problem is the breeding of sheep or the ruling of India.
The assurance, self-command and art of ruling which spring from forms
are lacking in Germany. Our strongest spirits are formless; they are
eclectic or titanic, whether they despise forms or choose forms or
burst forms. We have three homes between which we hover--Germany, the
earth, and heaven. We comprehend and honour everything--every land,
every man, every art and every language; and we are fertilized by what
is foreign; on the lower level we enjoy it and imitate it, on the
higher it spurs us to creation. We are docile, and do not hate what
rules and determines us, only what contracts us and makes us
one-sided; an autocratic government may be tolerated, even venerated,
if it knows how to be national and popular and does not interfere with
our elbow-room.
We have already touched on the volitional character[22] of the German
people, a character which has been gravely altered by the subsidence
of the ancient upper stratum of society, and by long privations and
miseries. The Germans of Tacitus were a freedom-loving and turbulent
people; of this not a trace is left. Any one who did not recognize
under the autocracy that we care little for self-determination and
self-responsibility may do so under the revolution, which merely
arises out of an alteration in external conditions. We are not even
yet a nation, but an association of interests and oppositions; a
German _Irredenta_, as it has been and unfortunately will be shown, is
an impossible conception. And since we are not a nation and represent
no national idea, but only an association of households, it follows
that our influence abroad can only be commercial, and not civilizing
or propagandist.
From this side we are able to understand the German history of the
past two centuries. Prussia, an extra-German Power, grown up in
colonized territory, organized itself into a bureaucratic, feudal and
military State. It succeeded in mastering half Germany and in loosely
linking up the remainder. By rigid organization, by its federated
Princes and by the strongest army in the world, it supplied the place
of the national character and will which were wanting. Mechanism was
pressed into the service, and bore the colossus into a period of
blooming prosperity. The system looked like a nation; in reality it
was an autocratic association of economic interests bristling with
arms. It was incapable of developing national forces and ideas, not
even in relation to its settlers in other lands; it was confined to
commercial competition; weak alliances were relied on to secure the
position externally; self-government was not granted, because the
military organization was the pivot of the whole system; the
drill-sergeant tone at home had its counterpart in the brusqueness of
our foreign policy; enmities grew and organized themselves, and the
catastrophe came.
For character of will we had substituted discipline. But discipline is
not nationality; it is an external instrument, and when it breaks it
leaves--nothing. Now since the Prussian system which called itself by
the mediæval title of the German Empire was, in spite of the
professors, no popular, national fabric, but a dynastic, military and
compulsory association, with a constitutional façade, the interested
nationalist elements took on the repulsive and dishonourable forms
that we all know. The most deeply interested parties, cool and
conscious of their strength, the Prussian representatives of the
military and official nobility, avoided all declamation and only
interfered when their interests were endangered. The greater
industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes
composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials
took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab
existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams
of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally
impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and
spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, stupid community of interested
persons, greedy for power, who gave themselves out as that Germany
whose very opposite they were; who, unable to point to any
achievements, any thought of their own, prided themselves on an
imaginary race-unity which their very appearance contradicted; who had
no ideas beyond rancour; the slaverings of league-oratory and
subordination, and who with these properties, which they were pleased
to call _Kultur_, undertook to bring blessing to the world.
It was no wonder; for our slavonicized association of interests, bent
on subordination and on gain, does not produce ideas; its possessions
were power, mechanism and money; whoever was impressed by these things
believed they must impress others too, and so the conclusion was
arrived at that all the great spirits of the past had lived only to
make this triple combination supreme. Wagner had formed the bridge
between the old Germany and the new--armoured cruisers and giant guns
appeared as a free development from Kant and Hegel, and the word
_Kultur_, a word which Germany ought to prohibit by law for thirty
years to come, masked the confusion of thought.
To discover now, after our downfall, that Germany ought never to have
carried on a continental let alone a world policy, would be a pitiful
example of _esprit d'escalier_. It is true that it was our right, and
even our duty, by our intellect, our ethics and our greatness, to
carry it on; but the weakness of our character on the side of Will was
the cause of its failure. Bismarck, a born realist in politics, grown
up in the Prussian tradition, trained in the diplomatic tradition by
Gortschakov, made the calamitous choice. He made us safe for certain
decades; but it was only an intuitive policy in the manner of
Stein[23] that could have saved us for centuries.
In the midst of self-administered and self-determining nations the
German people, from lack of self-consciousness, indolence of will and
innate servility remained under a patriarchal system of government, a
minor under tutelage of divinely-appointed dynasties and ruling
classes. In the childish movement of the educated bourgeoisie of 1848
Bismarck saw only the helpless and Utopian, but not the symbolic side,
which Marx might have shown him. His practical spirit judged with a
smile that a handful of peasantry and grenadiers would suffice to
bring to reason this dynastically-minded people. It was only too true;
although the bulk of this people had not for thirty years been formed
by the peasant class, and although he himself had learned how to make
use of the power of the modern industrial State in peasant disguise.
And so he refused to allow his countrymen to come of age; broke, with
the superiority of genius, and with the weapons of success and
authority, the incompetent forces that resisted him; created, by the
magical mechanism of his Constitution, the German Empire as a mere
continuation of the Prussian bureaucratic State reinforced, by the
self-glorifying dynasties, with the whole volume of the still existing
and justly appreciated habit of obedience; and annihilated for a
generation every aspiration for freedom by branding it with the stain
of moral and social depravity. Our political worthlessness and
immaturity came to its climax in the race of office-climbers in 1880,
which in 1900 gave place to the battle-fleet patriotism of the great
capitalists.
A self-administered and a self-determining nation--such as the nations
of the world, except ourselves, Austria and Russia, were, on the
whole, at the turn of the century--would have been able to carry on a
sound and steadfast policy in economics and public affairs, and to
enjoy the confidence of the world, as little begrudged as America. On
the other hand, a dangerous warship, armed upon an unexampled scale,
given to backward movements and commanded by an uncontrollable sovran
dilettante, could only expect sooner or later to be expelled from the
harbour of the nations. History is apt to overdo it, especially when
corruption has gone on too long; with every year that passed the doom
became more certain; instead of being expelled, we were annihilated.
That four years of hunger, a lost war and a military revolt at last
set us free, does not betoken any change of character; and when to-day
a servile and facile Press lauds our wretched and idealess
Constitution as the finest in the world, that gives us no assurance
of its power to endure. Understanding is no substitute for character,
but it is at any rate a step towards the goal; and if it is once
understood that other measures are possible, and if, out of this
period, certain writings and thoughts shall survive--and survive they
will--then at any rate we may still be weak, but we shall be no longer
blind.
It might be possible at the outset of our journey towards strength of
will that we should grope our way slowly--very slowly--back to the old
problems of power. It does not matter if we do. Before we get there,
the world will be changed, and will be pregnant with new thoughts. Let
us fulfil the duties for which Germany was made what it is. Let us go
in quest of the idea and the faculty that are laid upon us; let us do
this in order to live, to recover our health, to shape ourselves anew,
to remain a People, to become a Nation, to create a future and to
serve the world.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 17: Geistigkeit. This is a difficult word to translate. It
sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as
here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of
spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ye are of."]
[Footnote 18: Referring to Werner Sombart's war-book, _Händler und
Helden_.]
[Footnote 19: _Cf._ Thomas Mann's remarkable book on the real
significance of the war: _Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen_ (1918).]
[Footnote 20: Sachlichkeit. Rathenau seems to have in mind the German
feeling for disinterested study and research as illustrated, for
instance, by the fact that when the German Government heard of the
genius of Einstein they brought him to Berlin with a salary of nearly
£1000 a year and no duties except to think. Modern bigotry has
expelled him.]
[Footnote 21: Where Kant lived and taught, and published his _Kritik
der reinen Vernunft_.]
[Footnote 22: As opposed to the inward, intellectual and spiritual
character.]
[Footnote 23: Stein was the chief leader of Prussia from the
Frederician into the modern era. His ministry of reform by which a
peasant-proprietary was established, and municipal institutions
created, lasted only from September 1807 to November 1808.]
X
On balance it seems that the endowments of the German people work out
as follows:--
High qualities of intellect and heart. Ethics and mentality normal.
Originative will-power and independent activity, weak.
We give our devotion freely, and the heart rules in action. Our
feelings are genuine and powerful. We have courage and endurance. Led
by sentiment rather than by inspiration. We create no forms, are
self-forgetful, seek no responsibility, obey rather than rule. In
obedience we know no limit, and never question what is imposed upon
us.
Of its own accord the German people would never have adopted an ideal
of force. It was imposed on us by the idolaters of the great
war-machine and those who gained by it; even Bismarck did not share
it.
We are not competent to form an ideal of civilization, for the sense
of unity, will to leadership, and formative energy are lacking to us.
We have no political mission for the arrangement of other people's
affairs, for we cannot arrange our own; we do not lead a full life,
and are politically unripe.
We are endowed as no other people is for a mission of the spirit. Such
a mission was ours till a century ago; we renounced it, because
through political slackness of will-power we fell out of step; we did
not keep pace with the other nations in internal political
development, and, instead, devoted ourselves to the most far-reaching
developments of mechanism and to their counterpart in bids for power.
It was Faust, lured away from his true path, cast off by the
Earth-Spirit, astray among witches, brawlers and alchemists.
But the Faust-soul of Germany is not dead. Of all peoples on the earth
we alone have never ceased to struggle with ourselves. And not with
ourselves alone, but with our dæmon, our God. We still hear within
ourselves the All, we still expand in every breath of creation. We
understand the language of things, of men and of peoples. We measure
everything by itself, not by us; we do not seek our own will, but the
truth. We are all alike and yet all different; each of us is a
wanderer, a brooder, a seeker. Things of the spirit are taken
seriously with us; we do not make them serve our lives, we serve them
with ours.
"And you dare to say this, in the face of all the brutalizing and
bemiring that we experience--the profiteering and gormandizing, the
abject submissiveness, the shameless desertions, the apathy, the
insincerity, the heartlessness and mindlessness of our day?"
Yes, I dare to say it, for I believe it and I know it. The soul of the
German people lies still in the convulsions and hallucinations of its
slow recovery. It is recovery not alone from the war, but from
something worse, its hundred-years' alienation from itself. The
much-ridiculed choice of our old romantic unheraldic colours, black,
red and gold, instead of the bodiless and soulless colours under which
we waged the war,[24] was, among the whirling follies of the time, a
faint symbolic movement of our better mind. We must reunite ourselves
with the days before we ceased to be Germans and became Berliners.
What we need is Spirit. The whole world needs it, no more and no less
than we do, but will never create it. History knows why it decided for
Versailles and the Hall of Mirrors. Not mechanism alone, with its
retinue of nationalism and imperialism, is now again and for the last
time to be glorified; no, the whole Franco-British policy of
acquisition mounts up even to the throne of the Sun-king, and it is
seriously believed that it will govern the destinies of the world for
centuries to come. An inconceivable, and, in its monstrous irony,
unsurpassable drama, which is put forward as the introduction to the
great era. The bourgeois conscience of the West has no inkling of
what it means. To this conscience, the war was a huge violation of
decency, contrived by bandits; its victory is the final triumph of a
capitalist, rationalistic civilization; the torch lit in the East
means murder and incendiarism, and the upward migration of the people
from the depths is to it invisible.
No; it is not here that the spirit of the future is being formed. One
may discover further ingenious devices, lightning-conductors to
mitigate the stroke; but gently or violently a natural force will have
its way, and the new earth which it is preparing needs new seed.
That we have been given the faculty to shape a new spirit does not
imply that we are at liberty to choose whether we shall do it or not.
Even if it were not for our life's sake--even if it were against our
life--still we must obey. But it _is_ for our life's sake, as we have
seen, and as it is indeed obvious, for every organism can live only by
fulfilling the purpose of its being.
And now we have got to a very dangerous place--a place where the usual
moral peroration lies in wait for us--that German peroration which
announces universal redemption, and immediately, on that lofty note,
closes the discussion. Fatherland, Morality, Humanity, Labour,
Courage, Confidence--we all know how it goes, the writer has written
something fine, the reader has read something fine; emotion on both
sides, little conviction on either.
It appears, then, that I have just been writing something extremely
suspect. Has the reader followed me through five-and-thirty of these
difficult folios in order to arrive in the end at that very everyday
term, Spirit?[25] Is there any term in commoner use, and what are we
to think about it? Softly--there is worse to come! The next word is
still more dubious, philistinishly so, in fact--the word Culture.[26]
I cannot help it--we must pass on by way of these everyday
conceptions. We must get through the crowd, where hack-phrases elbow
us. Any journey you may take, though it were to Tibet, must begin at
the Berlin Central Railway Station. What is wrong with these popular
phrases is not that they start from an everyday conception, but that
they remain content with it, and do not think it out to the end.
Our task, therefore, stated in the most general terms, is to make
actually spiritual a people which is capable of spirituality. And
since spirituality cannot be propped up by any external thrust, by
sermons, newspaper articles, leagues, or propaganda, but must be
associated with life and developed out of life, so the organic process
and the condition of life to which it leads is called Culture.
It is only with deep reluctance and after long search that I have
written down this beautiful word, a word now worn almost beyond
recognition. Can we find our way back to its application and
significance? Even when it is not drawn out with a futile prefix[27]
one can hardly detect its pure meaning by reason of the many
overtones. The school, if possible the university, some French and
English, the rules about I and Me, visiting-cards, shirt-cuffs,
foreign phrases, top-hats, table-manners: these are some of the
overtones that make themselves heard when we talk of a cultured man,
or rather as they have it a cultured gentleman. A hundred years ago,
as the word implies, we understood by culture the unfolding and the
full possession of innate bodily, spiritual and moral forces. In this
sense Goethe showed us the two fraternal figures formed after his own
image: Faust the richer, and the poorer Wilhelm Meister, striving for
culture.
The ideal which hovers before us is not one of education, not even one
of knowledge, although both education and knowledge enter into it; it
is an ideal of the Will. It will not be easy to convey the breadth and
the boundless range which we are to attach to this conception. That it
is not an airy figment is clear from the fact that for centuries the
Greeks, with full consciousness, adopted as their highest law (though
directed to a somewhat different end) that impulse of the will which
they called _Kalokagathia_.[28]
From one who has introduced the conception of mechanism into German
thought, who has rescued the conception of the soul from the hands of
the psychologists and brought it back to its primal meaning, who has
written so much about soulless intellectualism, and has put forward
the empire of the soul as the goal of humanity, it is not to be
expected that he should preach any mechanical kind of culture, or
indeed any that it is possible to acquire by learning.
How culture is to be produced we shall see; the first thing necessary
is that it should be willed.
Willed it must be, in a sense and with a strength of purpose and a
force of appreciation of which we to-day, when the ages of faith, of
the Reformation, of the German classics, and the wars of liberation,
lie so far behind us, have no idea at all.
When the current conception of intellectual culture so much prized in
family, society and business life, and tricked out with criticisms of
style, with historical data and incidents of travel is justly
ridiculed, then the will to complete cultivation of the body, the
intellect and the soul of the people must be so strong that all
questions of convenience, of enjoyment, of prestige and of material
interests must sink far into the background. This word must sound so
that all who hear it can look in each other's eyes with a full mutual
understanding and without the slightest sense of ambiguity; just as
they do in Japan when the name of the common head of all families, the
Mikado, is named. There must be one thing in Germany and it must be
this thing, which is altogether out of reach of the yawning, blinking
and grinning scepticism of the coffee-house, and of the belching and
growling of the tavern. Any man who puts this thing aside in favour of
his class-ideas, or his speculations in lard, or his dividends, or the
demands of his Union, must understand that he is doing something as
offensive as if he went out in public without washing himself.
The conception of Culture as our true and unique faculty must be so
profoundly grasped that in public life and legislation it must have
the first word and the last. Though we become as poor as church-mice
we must stake our last penny on this, and tune up our education and
instruction, our models and outlook, our motives and claims, our
achievement and our atmosphere, to so high a point that any one coming
into Germany shall feel that he is entering into a new age.
Society must be penetrated by this conception. Those classes which
already possess something resembling it--such as training, education,
experience, tradition, outlook, good breeding--must pour out with both
hands what they have to dispense; not in the way of endowments,
conventicles, lectures and patronizing visits, but in quiet,
self-sacrificing, personal service.
All this, of course, cannot be done without the free response of the
other side. The devoted attempts which have been made, especially in
England, and for some years with us too, to win this response by long
and unselfish solicitation were destined to remain merely the mission
of individual lives, for they were not supported by the will of the
community as a whole; it rather ran counter to them. A Peace of God
must be proclaimed, not as between the Haves and the Have-nots, not
between the proletariat and the capitalists, not between the so-called
cultured classes and the uncultured, but between those who are ready
for a mutual exchange of experience, a give-and-take of their
tradition on both sides. Not an exchange on business principles, such
as propaganda in satisfaction of demands, or curiosity on one side for
a new pastime on the other, but a covenant. This, however, is only
practicable if the class-war, as an end in itself, is put a stop to.
The great change itself cannot be come by so cheaply; it demands other
assumptions, of which we shall have something to say later. But the
attitude and temper, the recognition of the task, could not be better
introduced than through the mutual service of the two social strata.
We have still at our disposal, handed on from the past, certain
organized methods of investigation and administration. We now need
chairs and institutes of research, not for the trivial business of
popular enlightenment and lectures, but for the study and
investigation of the needs of national culture, the idea which must
now take the place of national defence. We shall have need of central
authorities, not, like the late Ministries of Culture skimping the
scanty endowment of the Board Schools, but doing the work of German
education, progress, and interchange of labour.[29]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 24: Black, red and gold were originally the colours of a
students' Corps in Frankfort. They were adopted as the colours of the
abortive German Federation of 1848, apparently under a mistaken idea
that they represented the colours of the ancient Germanic Empire. The
colours of the Empire of 1870 were the Prussian black and white, with
the addition of red.]
[Footnote 25: Geist.]
[Footnote 26: Bildung. It is as difficult in English as it is in
German to render in one word exactly what the author is thinking of.
In its literal sense Bildung implies a shaping and formative action.]
[Footnote 27: Ausbildung.]
[Footnote 28: A harmony of character, compounded of beauty and
goodness.]
[Footnote 29: Arbeitsausgleich. The meaning of this will be apparent
later.]
XI
Some decades ago the conscience of middle-class society in England was
stirred. The result was Toynbee Hall and the Settlements-movement,
which afterwards found praiseworthy counterparts in Germany. Society
had begun to understand the wrong which it had done to its brothers,
the proletariat, whom it had robbed of mind, and offered them instead
soul-destroying, mechanical labour. Then choice spirits arose who
dedicated their whole lives to the service of their brothers. This
great and noble work did much to soften pain and hatred, and here and
there many a soul was saved by it; but it could not act as it was
intended to act, because it could not become what it imagined itself
to be.
It ought to have been, and believed itself to be, a simple and obvious
piece of love-service, a pure interchange of spiritual possessions
between class and class, no condescending pity or educative mission.
It was a noble and a splendid error; the movement retained the form of
sacrifice and benefaction. On both sides social feeling was
indifferent to it, or even hostile. What one hand gave, a thousand
others took back; what one hand received, a thousand others rejected.
The collective conscience of a class had never been stirred, it was
merely that the conscience of certain members of upper-class society
had sent out envoys; it had not moved as a body. Individuals were
ready to sacrifice themselves, but the conditions of labour remained
unchanged.
So long as a general wrong is allowed to stand, it gives the lie to
every individual effort. The wrong becomes even more bitter because it
loses its unconsciousness--men know it for wrong, and do not amend it.
For this reason a second movement of importance, that of the People's
High Schools, which has created in Denmark the most advanced
peasant-class in existence, can achieve no social reform in lands
cloven by proletarianism. If in addition to this the High School
movement should depart from its original conception, that of a
temporary community of life between the teachers and the taught, and
should, instead of this, resolve itself into a lecture-institution,
then the danger arises that what is offered will be disconnected
matter, intended for entertainment, and without any basis of real
knowledge, something commonly called half-culture which is worse than
unculture, and is more properly described as misculture.
No work of the charitable type can bring about the reconciliation of
classes or be a substitute for popular education. The reconciliation
of classes, however, even if it were attainable, is by no means our
goal, but rather the abolition of classes, and our ultimate object is
not popular education but popular culture. We do not intend to give
with one hand and take back with the other, we shall not condemn a
brother-people to dullness and quicken a few chosen individuals; no,
we mean to go to the root of the evil, to break down the monopoly of
culture, and to create a new people, united and cultured throughout.
But the root of the trouble lies in the conditions of labour. It is an
idle dream to imagine that out of that soulless subdivision of labour
which governs our mechanical methods of production, the old
handicrafts can ever be developed again. Short of some catastrophic
depopulation which shall restore the mediæval relation between the
area of the soil and the numbers that occupy it, the subdivision of
labour will have to stand, and so long as it stands no man will
complete his job from start to finish--he will only do a section of
it; at best, and assuming the highest mechanical development, it will
be a work of supervision. But mindless and soulless work no man can do
with any joy. The terrible fact about the mechanization of industry is
that productive work, the elementary condition of life, the very form
of existence, which fills more than half of each man's waking day, is
by it made hated and hateful. It degrades the industrious man,
thrilling with energy, into a work-shy slacker--for what else does it
mean that all social conflicts culminate in the demand for a
shortening of the hours of work? For the peasant, the research-worker,
the artist, the working day is never long enough; for the artisan, who
calls himself _par excellence_ a "worker," it can never be too short.
The advance of technical invention will make it possible in the end to
transform all mechanical work into supervision. But the process will
be long and partial, we cannot wait till it is completed, especially
as times will come when technical knowledge will stand still, or even,
it may be, go back. Any one who knows in his own flesh what mechanical
work is like, who knows the feeling of hanging with one's whole soul
on the creeping movement of the minute-hand, the horror that seizes
him when a glance at the watch shows that the eternity which has
passed has lasted only ten minutes, who has had to measure the day's
task by the sound of a bell, who kills his lifetime, hour after hour,
with the one longing that it might die more quickly--he knows how the
shortening of the working day, whatever may be put in its place, has
become for the factory artisan a goal of existence.
But he knows something else as well. He knows the deadliest of all
wearinesses--the weariness of the soul. Not the rest when one breathes
again after wholesome bodily exertion, not the need for relaxation and
distraction after a great effort of intellect, but an empty stupor of
exhaustion, like the revulsion after unnatural excess. It is the
shallowest kind of tea-table chatter to talk about good music,
edifying and instructive lectures, a cheerful walk in God's free
Nature, a quiet hour of reading by the lamp, and so on, as a remedy
for this. Drink, cards, agitation, the cinemas, and dissipation can
alone flog up the mishandled nerves and muscles, until they wilt again
under the next day's toil.
The worker has no means of comparison. He does not know what wholesome
labour feels like. He will never find his way back to work on the
land, for there he cannot get the counter-poisons which he thinks
indispensable, and he lacks the organic, ordering mind which
mechanical employment has destroyed. Even if some did get back, it
would be in vain, for though agriculture is hungering for thousands of
hands it cannot absorb millions. The worker has no means of
comparison; hence his bottomless contempt for intellectual work, the
results of which he recognizes, but which, in regard to the labour it
costs, he puts on a level with the idling of the folk whom he sees
strolling or driving about with their lapdogs in the fashionable
streets.
The middle-class conscience, and even that of the men of science,
turns away its face in shameful cowardice from the horror of
mechanized labour. Apart from the well-meaning æsthetes who live in
rural elegance surrounded by all the appliances which mechanism can
supply, who wrinkle their brows when the electric light goes out, and
who write pamphlets asking with pained surprise why people cannot
return to the old land-work and handicraft, most of us take
mechanical labour as an unalterable condition of life, and merely
congratulate ourselves that it is not we who have to do it.
The Utopianist agitators who knowingly or unknowingly suppress the
essential truth that their world of equality will be a world of the
bitterest poverty, treat the situation just as lightly. Before them,
in the future State, hovers the vision of some exceptional literary or
political appointment. The others may console themselves with the
thought that in spite of a still deeper degree of poverty, towards
which they are sinking by their own inactivity, the hell of mechanical
work, by no means abolished, will probably be a little reduced, so far
as regards the time they spend in it. The notion that mechanical work
will be made acceptable and reconciled with intellectual, if only it
is short enough and properly paid, has never been thought out; it is a
still-born child of mental lethargy, like all those visions of the
future that are being held up to our eyes. Try notions like this on
any other ill--toothache, for instance! All our rhetoric about
mechanical work being no ill at all, is ignorant or fraudulent, and if
nothing further be done than to reduce it to four hours, all our
social struggles will immediately be concentrated on bringing it down
to two. The goal of Socialism, so far as it relates to this _pons
asinorum_ of shortening hours, is simply the right to loaf.
Let us look facts in the face. Mechanical work is an evil in itself,
and it is one which we never can get rid of by any conceivable
economic or social transformation. Neither Karl Marx nor Lenin has
succeeded here, and on this reef will be wrecked every future State
that may be set up on the basis of current Socialistic ideas. In this
point lies the central problem of Socialism; undisturbed, as was till
lately that legendary conception of surplus-value, and bedded, like
that conception, in a rats'-nest of rhetorical phrases, repeated from
mouth to mouth and never tested by examination.
The bringing of Mind into the masses, the cultured State,[30] which is
the only possible foundation of a society worthy of humanity, must
remain unattainable until everything conceivable has been thought out
and done to alleviate the mischievous operation of this evil, which
dulls and stupefies the human spirit and which, in itself, is
ineradicable. No Soviet-policy, no socialization, no property-policy,
no popular education, nor any other of the catchwords which form _ad
nauseam_ the monotonous staple of our current discussion of affairs,
can go to the heart of the problem. Instead we must establish and put
into practice the principle which I have called that of the
Interchange of Labour, and which I must now, in broad outline,
endeavour to explain.
The object of this principle is to bring mind into labour. It
demands--since mind cannot be brought into mechanical work beyond a
certain degree fixed by technical conditions--that the day's work as
a whole shall have a share of it, by means of the exchange and
association of mental and mechanical employment. Until this principle
shall have been carried into effect, all true culture of the people
remains impossible. So long as there is no culture of the people, so
long must culture remain a monopoly of the classes, and of escapes
from the masses; so long must society be wanting in equilibrium, a
union open to breach from every side, and one which, however highly
its social institutions may be developed, holds down the people to
forced labour, and destroys culture.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 30: Bildungsstaat.]
XII
There is a way by which the day's work can be ennobled, and even have
mind brought into it,[31] on capitalistic lines. Before the War we
were just about to enter on this path--America is treading it now. Its
fundamental condition is a huge increase in general well-being.
The daily wages of the American working-man have risen, as we have
already remarked, to seven or even ten dollars, corresponding to a
purchasing power of over a hundred marks. This amounts to so radical a
removal of all restrictions in domestic economy that one can no longer
speak of the proletarian condition as existing in the United States. A
man who drives to his work in his own automobile can satisfy all his
reasonable needs in the way of recreation and of extending his
education, he looks at his sectional job (as has not seldom been the
case in America even in earlier days) with a critical eye, he forms
his own judgment of its place in the whole, he improves the processes,
and amuses himself by being both workman and engineer. (Consider in
the light of this fact the value of the prophecy that America is
standing on the brink of Bolshevism!)
In a country whose wealth at this moment--in consequence of
war-profits and depreciation of money--is almost equal to that of the
rest of the world put together, the process of abolishing
proletarianism can go forward on capitalistic lines. But we Germans,
since it is decreed that we shall be among the poorest of the peoples,
and must begin afresh, and live for the future--we shall renounce
without envy the broad path of the old way of thought, the way of
riches, in order to clear with hard work the new path on which, one
day, all will have to follow us. The way of Culture is the way to
which we are pointed, and we have described Interchange of Labour as
the fundamental condition which enables us to travel it. It is now
clear that the conception of popular culture is not, after all,
represented by any of the five-and-twenty idealizing catchwords with
which we are wont to console ourselves in our elegiac orations, but
that by it is meant a clearly defined political procedure.
By the principle of Interchange of Labour it is required that every
employee engaged in mechanical work can claim to do a portion of his
day's work in intellectual employment; and that every brainworker
shall be obliged to devote a portion of his day to physical labour.
There are, of course, fixed limits to the application of this
principle, on the one side in intellectual, on the other in bodily
incapacity, as well as in those rare cases where it is recognized that
the interrupted hours of intellectual work cannot be made good.
We would also establish a year of Labour-Service, to be devoted by the
whole youth of Germany, of both sexes, to bodily training and work.
The tests of capacity and of the claim to be reckoned as "cultured" is
not to consist in examinations but in proof of work. Any one who can
offer some show of claim can demand to be tested, and, if the result
is favourable, to receive further culture. Thus we shall be taking
seriously the question of the ascent to higher grades, which, so long
as it depends on a particular age, or on school certificates, must
remain on paper.
Let no one say that this testing system is a mere mechanical method,
that it degrades Culture from its intellectual dignity, and is
equivalent to the Chinese literary tests for office. True culture is
distinguished from mere sybaritic æstheticism in that in some sense or
other it makes for production. Where there is no talent for art or for
creative thought, then there remain to be developed the educational
forces of judgment, or a faculty for the conduct of life, which must
have their influence.
Different categories of Culture will arise of themselves; not ranks or
castes or classes, but grades of society, each of which may be
attained by any one. No one must be able to say that any monopoly of
culture has barred his way, or that training and testing have been
denied him. If the culture be genuine it will never look down in
intellectual arrogance on the stages below it; if it have duties
associated with it, then he who has rejected the path of ascent, or
has failed in it, cannot claim to fulfil those duties. Any one who has
no faculty but that of a glib tongue will find in the multiplicity of
callings some field for his activity; but the rule of the talker,
backed by force or not, will at any rate be spared us.
At this point we may hear a voice from the average heart of Socialism
exclaim: "How is this? Do you call that having no castes? We have just
begun to shake off the yoke of the capitalists and now are we expected
to put the cultured in command? This is pure reaction!"
Softly! If this is a case of misunderstanding, we shall clear it up.
If any scruples still remain, we shall consider them further.
Let us take the misunderstanding first. It is apparently forgotten
that capitalism ruled by hereditary power. Any one who belonged to
that circle ruled along with it, whether he were competent to rule or
not. But culture is not a heritable possession; no one can win it save
by virtue of a higher spirit and will. He who has this spirit and this
will, can and will win it. He who wins it is fit for higher
responsibilities. Is the voice from the average heart answered?
No. It replies: "Heritable or not, what do we care? We are out for
equality. Distinctions in culture are a kind of aristocracy."
Now, good heart, you have revealed yourself. What was the meaning of
your everlasting talk about the ladder for the rise of capacity? I
shall tell you. The capable man is to toil, and to rise just so far as
you permit him, namely, till you can possess yourselves of the fruits
of his labour: then he is to be thrust down, and the loudest mouth is
to rule. You are not pleased with this interpretation? Neither am I,
so we are quits.
For of the folly of imagining a society of equals I do not intend to
speak. The average man, who cannot understand equality of human
dignity, equality before God, thinks nothing of demanding equality in
externals, equality in responsibility and vocation. But this sham
equality is the enemy of the true, for it does not fit man's burden to
his strength, it creates overburdened, misused natures, driving the
one to scamped work and hypocrisy, and the other to cynicism. Every
accidental and inherited advantage must indeed be done away with. But
if there is any one who, among men equal in external conditions, in
duties and in claims, demands that they should also be equal in mind,
in will and in heart--let him begin by altering Nature!
In remuneration also, that is to say, in the apportionment of
conditions of work, a mechanical equality would be tantamount to an
unjust and intolerable inequality in the actual distribution or
remission of work. Work of the highest class, creative and
intellectual work--the most self-sacrificing that is known to man
because it draws to itself and swallows up a man's whole life,
including his hours of leisure and recreation--this work demands
extreme consideration, in the form of solitude, freedom from
disturbance, from trivial and distracting cares or occupations, and
contact with Nature. This kind of consideration is, from the economic
point of view, an outlay which mechanical work does not require. If
mechanical and intellectual work are to be placed under the same
specific conditions, under which the highest standard of output is to
be maintained and the producers are as far as possible to bear an
equal burden, then the scale of remuneration must be different.
Starting from a subsistence minimum it must for intellectual work be
graded two stages upward, one for the output,[32] and one for the
grade of culture implied.
Women will also be subject to this system of grading whether they
exercise any vocation outside their homes or not, for society has a
deep interest in the culture of its mothers, and in external
incentives to culture women must share equally with men.
An intimate sense of association will grow up within each grade of
culture. This, however, will not impair the general solidarity of the
people, since no hereditary family egoism can arise. This sense of
association, renewed with elements that vary from generation to
generation, and corresponding very much to the relations between
contemporary artists who spring from different classes or territories,
will dissolve the relics of the old hereditary sentiment and absorb
into itself whatever traditional values the latter may possess.
Between the separate grades there will not only be the connexion
afforded by the living possibilities of free ascent from one to the
other, but the system of ever-renewed co-operation in rank-and-file at
the same work will in itself promote culture, tradition, and the
consciousness of union. We need only recall the old gilds and military
associations in order to realize what a high degree of manly civic
consciousness can arise from the visible community of duty and
achievement. The mechanical worker will become the instructor of his
temporary comrade and guest, and the latter will in turn widen the
other's outlook, and emulate him in the development of the processes
of production. The manual worker will bring to the desk and the
board-room his freedom from prepossessions and the practical
experience of his calling; he will learn how to deal with abstractions
and general ideas; he will gain a respect for intellectual work, and
will feel the impulse to win new knowledge and faculty, or to make
good what he has neglected.
* * * * *
Two objections remain to be considered and confuted.
First: there are far more places to be filled in mechanical than in
intellectual employment. Is it possible so to organize the interchange
of work that every one who desires intellectual employment can find
it? The answer is: that, whether we like it or not, all work tends
more and more to take on an administrative character. Just as in
industry there is ever more talk and less production, so our economic
life is working itself out through thousands upon thousands of new
organizations. Industrial Councils, Councils of Workers,
Gild-Councils, are forming themselves in among the existing agencies
of administration; and the immediate consequence of this is a
tremendous drop in production, to be followed later by a more highly
articulated and more remunerative system of work. It is as if a marble
statue came to life, and then had to be internally equipped with
bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Or it resembles the transformation
of a shabby piece of suburban building-ground: it has to be dug up,
drained, paved, fenced; and until traffic has poured into it, it
remains a comfortless and dismal waste.
But the administrative side of our future economic and national life
demands the creation of so many posts of intellectual work that at
present there is not the trained _personnel_ to fill it. If the Year
of Labour-Service is introduced, there will be still more defections
and gaps to be filled. The rush for intellectual work is more likely
to be too small than too great.
Let us come to the second objection. Will not confusion be worse
confounded if there are many who have to fill two jobs, if, in these
jobs constant exchanges are taking place, if the periods of work are
brief and subject to untimely interruptions, if time and work are lost
through never-ending rearrangement?
Assuredly. And any one who starts with the idea of the old high-strung
work done, as it were, under military discipline, any one who
cherishes the remotest idea that this system can ever return, in spite
of the fact that its clamps and springs have been dashed to pieces,
may well lament these unsettlements. One who starts from the
fluctuating conditions of our present-day, make-believe labour will
take organic unsettlements as part of the price to be paid, if they
only lead in the end to systematic production. But one who weighs the
fact that the make-believe life of our present economy has not even
yet reached its final form, will discern in every new transition-form,
however tedious, the final redemption; in so far, at least, as any
equilibrium is capable of being restored at all.
The essence of the interchange of labour will, therefore, consist in
this, that while the distinction between physical and intellectual
work will still exist, there will be no distinction between a physical
and intellectual calling. Until advanced age may forbid, it will be
open to every man not merely to acquire some ornamental branches of
knowledge but seriously and with both feet to take his footing in the
opposite calling to his own.
The different callings will learn to know and respect each other, and
to understand their respective difficulties. This applies particularly
to those who call themselves the operative workers.
As soon as hereditary idleness has come to an end and loafing has been
trampled out, then many a one, who now thinks that mental work is mere
chattering, will learn through his novitiate at the desk, that
thinking hurts. If he does not feel himself equal to this kneading and
rummaging of the brain, he will go back with relief to his workshop;
he will neither envy nor despise those who are operative workers with
the brain, and will understand, or at least unconsciously feel, the
oppositions in human nature and the differences in conditions of life,
and will know them to be just. He cannot and must not keep himself
wholly aloof from the elements of mental training; his contact with
brainworkers will not cease; and thus his complete and passive
resignation to the domination of ignorant rhetoric will lose its
charm.
Any man will be respected who contents himself with the lowest
prescribed measure of culture, who modestly renounces further study,
and goes back to manual work. But there will be no excuse for those
who know nothing and can do nothing, but pretend to set everybody
right; for there will be no monopoly of culture to keep them down, and
all genuine faculty must come to the test of action.
* * * * *
To-day there are three classes of social swindlers. First, those who
live on the community without returning it any service. These are the
people who live idly on inherited money, and the loafers. Against
these social legislation must be framed. Secondly, those who
deliberately practise "ca' canny," and therefore live on the surplus
work of their fellows. These are the champions of the principle: Every
one according to his need, no one according to his deed; the
_saboteurs_ of labour. Against these the remedy lies in the spread of
intelligence and a just system of remuneration. Thirdly, there are
those who simulate thought and brain-work while they have nothing to
give but hack phrases uttered with a glib tongue. Against these worst
of all swindlers, these sinners against the Spirit, the remedy is
culture.
And this, in the new Order, is open to every one, young or old, who
can maintain his foothold in the exercise of intellect, when the
chance is offered him. He who in his test-exercise reaches a normal
standard of accomplishment can demand that he shall not be sent back
to manual work, but continue to be employed in the same occupation,
and be further cultivated in whatever direction he desires. At every
further stage of development a corresponding sphere of activity is to
be opened to him, up to the point at which the limits of his capacity
come into sight.
Let no one object that the rush for intellectual work will become
uncontrollable. Would that it might! For then the country would be so
highly developed and its methods of work so perfected that there would
be quite a new relation between the demand for head-work and for
hand-work. For a long time to come this rush will be far smaller than
we imagine; for the immediate future it will suffice if the rising
forces are set free, and the laggard are tranquillized.
But, the Radicals will cry, what an unsocial principle! Have we at
last, with difficulty, brought it to the point that the accursed
one-year examination[33] is abrogated, and now are we again to be
condemned according to this so-called standard of culture?
Stay! there is a fallacy here. In our transition period which is still
quite dominated by the monopoly of culture, I have nothing to say
against the abrogation of every educational test, even though in a few
years we shall feel the deeply depressing effects which will arise
from the domination of the uncultured.
But the transition period will come to an end. Then every one who
likes will be able to learn and to execute, and every one who is able
will wish to do so.
"But supposing one does not wish? May not he be the very one who is
most capable of achievement? We don't want model pupils."
Nor do I want model pupils. The boy who has learnt nothing may make
his trial as a man when culture is open to all. But if, as a man, he
does not care to rack his brains he will be thought none the less of;
he will merely be offered ordinary work according to his choice.
But those who wish to see responsibility and the destiny of the
country placed in the hands of men who do not care to rack their
brains, must not entrench themselves behind social principles, but
plainly admit that they want for all time to establish the rule of
demagogy and the vulgarization of intellect. It is not for such a one
to pass judgment on the mission of Germany.
The way to the German mission, to German culture, which is to be no
more a culture of the classes but of the people, stands open to all by
means of the Interchange of Labour. The whole land is as it were a
single ship's crew; the issues are the same for all. The manual worker
is no longer kept down by over-fatigue, and the brainworker is no
longer cut off from the rest of the people.
The manual worker no longer regards the territory of culture as a sort
of inaccessible island, but rather as a district which he can visit
every day and in which he is quite at home. Every one in future will
start even in school training, and the degree to which his further
culture may be carried will not be limited by want of money or of
time, or, above all, of opportunity. He will continually have
intercourse with men of culture, and in that intercourse he will at
once give and receive; the habits of thought, the methods and the
range of intellectual work which are now only the heritage of a few
will be his own; and the twofold language of the country, the language
of conceptions and the language of things, will for him be one.
There will be no permanent system of stratification; the energies of
the people, rising and falling, will be in constant movement and their
elements will never lose touch. There may be self-tormenting and
unhappily constituted natures who will hate their own dispositions and
the destiny they have shaped for themselves--these aberrations will
never cease so long as men are men--but there will be no more hatred
of class for class, any more than there is in any voluntary
association of artists or of athletes.
And since culture is to be at once the recognized social aim of the
country and the personal goal and standard of each individual, the
struggle for possessions and enjoyments, doubly restrained by public
opinion and by deeper insight, will sink into the background.
But the spirit of the land will not resemble any that we know at
present. As in the Middle Ages, a spiritual power will rule, but it
will not be imposed from without or above, it will be a creation from
within. The competition of all will be like that of the best in the
time of the Renaissance, but it will not be a competition for
conventional values but for the furthering of life. The country will
become, as it was in former days, a generous giver, not, however, from
the lofty eminence of a class set apart, but out of the whole strength
of the people.
Again, for the first time, the convinced and conscious will of a
people will be seen to direct itself to a common and recognized goal.
This is a fact of immeasurable significance, it implies the exercise
of forces which we only discern on the rare mountain-peaks of history,
and of which the last example was the French Revolution.
But those dangers of which we have spoken, that hell of a mechanical
socialism, of institutions and arrangements without sentiment or
spirit, are done away with, for production has ceased to be merely
material and formal, it has acquired absolute value and substance.
Spirit is the only end that sanctifies all means; and it sanctifies
not by justifying them but by purifying them.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 31: Vergeistigt werden. It is difficult to render this word
in the sense in which Rathenau uses it; 'intellectualized' does not
say enough, and 'spiritualized' says a little too much.]
[Footnote 32: Assuming that the highest output is reached in the
particular instance which of course will not be the case with every
worker whether in the mechanical or intellectual sphere. The author
appears to be referring to amount, not quality, of output, as the
latter would be covered by the second clause, relating to grade of
culture (Bildungsstufe).]
[Footnote 33: Referring to the shortening of military service which
used to be accorded to recruits of a certain educational standard.]
XIII
As the kinsfolk of a dying man comfort themselves in the death-chamber
with every little droop in the curve of temperature, although they
know in their hearts that the hour has come, so our critics flatter
themselves with the idea that in the end all will come right, if not
by itself at least with trifling exertion. But it is not so: except by
the greatest exertion nothing will come right. Our lake-city of
economics and social order is ripe for collapse, for the piles on
which it is built are decayed. It is true that it still stands, and
will be standing for an hour or so, and life goes on in it very much
as in the days when it was sound. We can choose either to leave it
alone, and await the downfall of the city, among whose ruins life will
never bloom again, or we can begin the underpinning of the tottering
edifice, a process which will last for decades, which will allow no
peace to any of us, which will be toilsome and dangerous, and will end
almost imperceptibly, when the ancient city has been transformed into
the new.
Let us have no doubt about it: something tremendous and unprecedented
has to be accomplished here. Does any thinking man believe that when
the social order of the world has collapsed, when a country of the
importance of Germany has lost the very basis of its existence, when
the development of centuries is broken off, its faculties and its
traditions emptied of value and repudiated--does any man really
believe that by means of certain clauses in a Constitution a few
confiscations, socializations and rises in wages, a nation of sixty
millions can be endowed with a new historical reason for existence?
Why is not the negro republic of Liberia ahead of all of us?
Our character is weak on the side of will, and our former lords say
that we are good for nothing except under strict discipline
administered by dynasts and hereditary nobles. If that is true, it is
all over with us; unless some dictator shall take pity on us and give
us a modest place among the nations with a great past and a small
future. If we are worthy of our name we must be born again of the
Spirit. Merely to conceive this is in itself an achievement for a
people; to carry it out, to embody the conception in a new order of
society, is at once a test and an achievement.
Our social ethics must take up a new position. Hitherto--stripping off
the usual rhetorical phrases--it has taken its stand on two effective
and really driving principles, those of Duty and of Success; two
side-views of Individualism. All else, including love of one's
neighbour, sense of solidarity, faith, spiritual cultivation, feeling
for Nature, was (apart from a few lofty spirits) merely subsidiary;
means to an end, convention or falsehood. There were few whose
careers were not influenced by these estimates; the majority of the
upper classes was wholly under their dominion.
The two goals of our wishes, to have something and to be something,
were expressed by the whole outward aspect of society. The great
object was not to be counted as a Tom, Dick or Harry, one who had
less, or was less, than others. There were grades of being, grades of
human being: it was possible to be something, to be much, to be
little, or to be nothing at all. From the white collar to the pearl
necklace, from the good nursery to the saloon car, from the
watch-ribbon to the sword-belt, from the place at the ordinary to the
title of Excellency, everything was a proof of what one had, or was,
or believed oneself to be. If one did not know a man one must not
speak to him; if one knew him, one might borrow a hundred marks from
him, but one must not ask him for a penny. Whoever had wealth
displayed it in order to be admired; whoever had a social position
displayed his unapproachability and the weight of his dignity, as, for
instance, when with an absent look and lost in the burden of his own
existence he entered a dining-hall. From inferiors one demanded a
degrading attitude and forms of speech, and presented to them a face
of stone; towards those in higher position one came to life and
displayed an attentive civility. It was--or shall we say
is?--permissible to lavish in an hour the monthly income of a poor
family. "One had it to spend" and "what business was it of theirs?" In
the lower ranks there was much of genuine revolt against these abuses
and also much envy and malice, much open imitation, and much of secret
admiration. Every silly craze was cheapened in hideous imitations, the
suburb and the village made a display which in quality, indeed, fell
below the model, but in quantity not at all.
It may be said that these were excrescences or city fashions; that one
must not generalize. These are empty phrases. To understand the spirit
of a society it is not hermits that one must study. And, moreover, let
any one ask himself whether this society was really based on the idea
of solidarity and human friendliness or upon unscrupulous personal
interests and exploitation, on shows and shams, on the demand for
service and the claim to command. If anything can explain the
eagerness with which we Germans flung ourselves into a war whose
origins we did not know and did not want to know, then besides the
conscious objects, advantage, rehabilitation, and renown, we must also
take into account the obscure impulse of the national conscience which
in the midst of evil individualism and of personal and class egoism
yearned for the sense of solidarity and fusion.
Is it objected that all this lies deeply rooted in human nature, that
it has been there from time immemorial, and it is impossible to alter
it at one stroke? Pedantic drivel! Many things lie deep in human
nature, and it depends on which of these the will chooses to develop.
And who talked of altering things at one stroke? Our judgment of
values is to be transformed, and if human nature never changed, much
that now flaunts itself in the sunshine would be creeping in the
shade. This transformation of judgment is a matter of recognizing
things for what they are. When pomp, extravagance, exclusiveness,
frivolity and fastness, greed, place-hunting and vulgar envy are
looked on with the same eyes as aberrations in other provinces of
life, then we shall not indeed have abolished all vice, but the
atmosphere will be purified. Look at our sturdy Socialists of the
November days[34] and proselytes of every description: you can see
that the acquisition of a new judgment of values may be the affair of
an hour! And for that reason one must not criticize them too
closely--unless they try to make a profit out of their conversion.
All social judgments presuppose a system of recognized values. The
values of Christian ethics have never penetrated deeply into the
collective judgment of mankind; even in the mediæval bloom of
Christian, or rather of ecclesiastical, culture the moral conceptions
of Christianity remained the possession of a few chosen spirits and
communities; society in general accepted the mythical element, did
homage to the hierarchy, and remained ethically pagan, the upper
classes being guided by a code of honour resting on the worship of
courage. The Churches never made any serious effort to shape an
ethical code; they were preoccupied with the teaching of dogmas of
faith which carried them ever farther and farther from the groundwork
of the Gospels, and they devoted whatever surplus energies they had to
politics, and to accommodations with the ruling powers of the world.
The cult of courage imposed on and exercised by the ruling classes,
and symbolically imaged in their code of honour, took an effective
shape in the banning of cowardice and of cowardly crime. So far as
positive values go, the ethics of nobility degenerated into smartness,
the claim for "satisfaction" and the exclusiveness of rank; a Prussian
and Kantian abstraction, the conception of duty, a conception at
bottom unproved and incapable of generating conviction, became a rule
of life, made effective by training and control. The ruling powers and
their controls have given way, and their dry brittleness is revealed.
We have not succeeded in finding a substitute for social ethics in an
idealized type of national character. The imagination of the Western
nations, like those of antiquity, has shaped ideal types which they
believe or would wish themselves to resemble; they know what they mean
by "esprit gaulois," or "English character," or "American Democracy,"
while, in accordance with the problematic character of our being, we
Germans, except for the statuesque heroes of legendary times, or
certain historic but inimitable figures, have conceived or poetically
created no character of which we can say that it embodies the
collective spirit of Germany.
The super-ethical doctrine of the being, the growth and the empire of
the soul has been laid down by us, but there are as yet few into whose
consciousness it has penetrated; the transformation of thought and
feeling which must proceed from it will not lay hold of the masses
directly, but will filter continually from one social stratum to
another.
The recognized values of social judgment! It sounds so abstract, so
remote from practice, that one might well believe we were landed again
in the cloudland of festal oratory and the emotions of the leading
article. The voluntary recognition of an invisible authority! And this
after we have shattered the visible, and are living in the midst of
intellectual anarchy and moral Nihilism! And yet moral valuations,
simple, binding, and on the level of social judgment, are near enough
to be within our grasp.
Are not all the four quarters of the world to-day talking about
Democracy? Have not we ourselves got tired of this word, forbidden
till a year ago--tired, even in circles where the modest word
"Liberal" was never pronounced without a frown? And what does
Democracy mean? Do we take it in the merely negative sense, that one
is no longer obliged to put up with things? Or in the meagre sense,
that responsibility goes by favour, and that the majority must decide?
Or the dubious sense, that we are yearning to make our way through a
sham Socialism to the Dollar Republic?
It is not the form of government, it is the form of society, that
determines the spirit of a land. There is no democratic form of
society, for democracy can be in league with capitalism, with
socialism, or even with the class of clubs and castes. The unspoken
fundamental conception which gives significance and stability both to
the forms of a democratic constitution and to those of an organic
society is called Solidarity--that is to say, cohesion and the sense
of community. Solidarity means that each man does not come first in
his own eyes, but before God and State and himself each man must stand
and be answerable for all, and all for each.
In this sense of solidarity the dominion of the majority over the
minority is not an object to be striven for but an evil to be avoided;
the true object of a solid democracy is the dominion of a people over
itself, not by reckoning up the relative strength of its various
interests, but by virtue of the spirit and of the will which it sets
free. In this sense of solidarity no society can be based on
hereditary monopolies either of capital or of cultivation; nor can it
be delivered over to the terrorism of vocations and unions which,
under the leaderships of shouters, claim the right whenever they
please, to strangle indispensable industries; nor can it be based on
demagogic flattery of excitable mobs. Every born man must from his
cradle onwards have the same right to existence; he must be sheltered
and fostered as he grows up, and be free to choose his lot. Every
occupation must be open to him, except that he must not encroach on
the sphere of another man's liberty. The standard of his activity is
not to be fixed by birth or privilege or force or cunning or the glib
tongue, but again, by spirit and by will.
To-day, while cultivation of the spirit is still a class-monopoly, it
cannot form any standard of creative capacity. And yet it has been
demonstrated that so powerful is the passion for culture in a spirit
which is in any degree qualified for it, that even to-day it is
capable, by self-education, of surmounting some of the artificial
barriers. There was not, to my knowledge, any illiterate among the
Prussian or German Ministers of the new era, and the one of them who
excused his deficiencies of language with the class-monopoly of
education was in the wrong, for any man of normal capacity might in
ten years' practice of popular oratory have learned the elements of
syntax.
When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a
common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign
at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of
capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and
the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the
productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment.
Society will not be divided by classes and castes, it will not be
graded according to pedigree or possessions, it will not be ruled by
separate interests; by ideas or by the masses; it will be an ordered
body--ordered by spirit, by will, by service and responsibility.
Any one who does not accept this self-created and self-renewing order,
and who at the same time rejects the old, is simply working for the
dominion of force and chance. A society can no more remain permanently
without order than the staff of a factory or the crew of a ship. Only
instead of an organic order we may have an accidental and arbitrary,
an order of the personal type, springing from the dexterity shown in
some favourable moment, maintaining itself by force, and seeking to
perpetuate itself in some form of hereditary oligarchy.
An order of the priestly and hierarchical type is no longer thinkable
to-day, nor can one of the peasant type come into question in a land
of urban industry. Whoever wishes to see an organic self-determining
and self-regenerating order of society, has therefore to choose
between the military order, resting upon disciplined bodily capacity,
or the mercantile and capitalist order which rests upon business-sense
and egoistic alertness, or the demagogic order which rests upon the
rhetorical domination of the masses, and does not last long as it soon
turns to violence and oligarchy, or finally the order of culture,
resting upon spirit, character, and education.
This last is not merely the only suitable one for us and the only one
which is worthy of our past; it will also in time become the general
order of society prevailing over all the world. In the vision of this
order we recognize the mission that Prussia neglected, though it lay
within its grasp for a hundred years; what it neglected and the rock
on which it foundered.
The greatness of Prussian policy since 1713 lay in its premonition and
appreciation of the principle of mechanism even before it became
common to all the world. Organization and improvement, the war machine
and money, science, practicality and conscientiousness--all this is
clearly mechanization seen from the political side.
The early application of these principles was a stroke of genius far
in advance of the then condition of the world. Seen from this
standpoint, all the rest of the continental world, not yet mechanized,
and burdened with the relics of mediævalism, Cæsarism and clericalism,
seemed torpid and lost in illusions: arbitrary, inaccurate and
slovenly. With short interruptions this Prusso-central point of view
was maintained until the middle of the World-War; and not quite
unjustly, for Prussia remained in every respect ahead of other powers
in the department of mechanization.
For a hundred years the Prussian principles had a monopoly of success;
elsewhere they were scarcely understood and much less imitated. Then
came Napoleon.
He took over the mechanistic principle and handled it as never a man
had done before; he became the mechanizer of the world. At the same
time he was something mightier than that: he was the heir of the
French idea of spiritual and popular liberty.
Prussia fell, and would have fallen, even if its mechanism had not
grown rusty. Its leaders learnt their lessons from France and England,
they set on foot a liberation of the people by departmental authority
and a liberation of the spirit by the people; they put new life into
the mechanism, and they conquered with the help of England as we have
lately seen France conquer with the help of America.
But here came a parting of the ways. It was possible to pursue either
the way of mechanization or that of the liberation of the spirit.
Prussia did neither; it stood still. In the place of the liberation of
the spirit came the reaction; in the place of mechanization came the
bureaucracy. On the rest of the Continent, too, the movement for
political mechanization was stifled, the force that stifled it being
the uprising economic movement.
Bismarck was aware of the untried forces that lay in the system of
political mechanization. The world, as we looked at it from our
Prussian window, seemed as loose and slovenly as ever, and it was so.
Once again, with a mighty effort, the Prussian mechanism was revived
and the movement of the bourgeoisie towards liberty and the life of
the spirit was repressed. This was called "realism" in politics, and
the estimate was a just one. There was no progress to be made with
professional Liberalism; but with Krupp and Roon one organized
victories. As in Frederick's time the slovenly Continent had to give
way, Prussia mounted to the climax of her fortunes, and won Germany.
And again there was a parting of the ways; but this time there was no
one to stand for civic and spiritual freedom. People believed they had
all they wanted of it; democracy was discredited and broken, the
professors were political realists, success followed the side of
mechanization, which was rightly supposed to be linked with the
dynasty, and mechanization in the economic sphere drew to its side the
hope of gain.
Bismarck died in the midst of anxieties, but to the end he had no
scruples. The two systems of mechanization were at their zenith, and
the other countries looked, in political affairs, as slovenly as ever.
One was wearing itself out in parliamentary conflicts, another had no
battle-cruisers, another was lacking in cannon, or in recruits, or in
railways, or in finances; the trains never came in up to time,
everywhere one found public opinion or the Press interfering in
process of law or in the administration, everywhere there were
scandals; in Prussian Germany alone was everything up to the mark.
Only one thing was overlooked. The mechanization of economics had
become a common possession for everybody. Starting from this and with
the methods and experiences attached to it, it was possible also for
other countries, if necessary, to mechanize their politics or, as we
say now, to militarize them. And this could be done with even more
life and vigour than in Prussia, whose organization was there
believed to be inimitable and where the principle of mechanism was, as
it were, stored up in tins and in some places was obviously getting
mouldy. In the matter of Freedom, however, the other peoples were
ahead of us, and to the political isolation of Prussia spiritual
isolation was now added.
In the encircling fog which prevailed on economic developments there
was not a single statesman who recognized that Prussian principles had
ceased to be a monopoly, or an advantage, not to mention a conception
of genius. This lack of perception was the political cause of the war.
Instead of renewing ourselves inwardly through freedom and the spirit,
and carrying on a defensive policy as quietly, discreetly, and
inconspicuously as possible, we took to arming and hurrahing. Worse
than any playing of false notes was the mistake we made in key and in
tempo: D major, _Allegro_, _Marcia_, _Fortissimo_, with cymbals and
trumpets!
To-day we have no longer a choice before us, only a decision. The
period of mechanical Prussianization is over for us, the period of the
mechanical policy of Force is over for all the world, although the
heliographs of Versailles seem to reflect it high above the horizon.
It is not a capitalistic Peace of God as imagined by the international
police which has now begun; it is the social epoch. In this epoch the
people will live and will range themselves according to the strength
of the ideas which they stand for.
It is not enough for us to become Germans instead of Prussians; not
even if, as it were to be desired, we should succeed in rescuing from
the collapse of Prussia her genuine virtues of practicality, order and
duty. It is not enough to brew some soulless mixture out of the
worn-out methods of the Western bourgeoisie and the unripe attempts of
Eastern revolutionaries. It is not enough--no, it will lead us to
destruction quicker than any one believes--to blunder along with the
disgusting bickerings of interests and the complacent narrowness of
officialism, talking one day of the rate of exchange, another of our
debts, and the next of the food question, plugging one hole with the
stopping of another and lying down at night with a sigh of relief:
Well, something's got done; all will come right.
No, unthinking creatures that you are; nothing will come right until
you drop your insincere chatter, your haggling, your agitating and
compromising, and begin to think. Here is a people that has lost the
basis of its existence, because, in its blind faith in authority, it
staked that existence on prosperity and power; and both are gone. Do
you want to stake _our_ existence, on ships, soldiers, mines,
trade-connexions, which we no longer possess, or upon the soil, of
which we have not enough, or upon our broken will to work? Are we to
be the labour-serfs and the serfage stud-farm of the world? Only on
Thoughts and Ideals can our existence be staked. Where is your
thought? Where is the thought of Germany?
We can and must live only by becoming what we were designed to be,
what we were about to be, what we failed to become: a people of the
Spirit, the Spirit among the peoples of mankind. That is the thought
of Germany.
This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and
the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground
in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.
This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak
in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and
understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and
individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration
have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things.
For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror,
not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it
is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to
represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of
the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and
poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a
thinking nation among the nations.
But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live?
With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?
No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution
is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly
developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All
around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little
work and little production. For the next decade the question will be,
not where is the demand but where is the supply?
The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years'
War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we
do not notice the decline.
Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a
highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellowship, is more
than valuable production or cheap production; it is something
exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production
itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the
schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.
It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did
not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once
with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic
and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like
obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leadership
and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had
been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national
egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.
The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us
which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we
cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will
further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for
a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had
in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and
democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in
their internationalism.
There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first
time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and
around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will
be something more than a bond of interest.
The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means
in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one.
In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the
lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself
but every one can redeem another. Class for class, man for man: thus
is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in
each there must be good-will.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 34: 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.]
THE END
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