Part 6

‘In the persons of Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, you praise men who made their fellow citizens good cheer, by serving them with everything they desired without caring to teach them what is good and right in food. They have enlarged the State, cry the Athenians, but they do not see that this enlargement is nothing but a swelling, a tumour filled with corruption. This is all that has been achieved by these former politicians by filling the city with ports, arsenals, walls, tributes, and the like follies, and by not adding Temperance and Justice.’

Up to our own times, in theory at least (but it is with theories I am dealing here) the supremacy of the spiritual proclaimed in those words has been adopted by all those who, explicitly or otherwise, have proposed a scale of values to the world, whether through the Church, or the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century. One can guess the derisive laughter of a Barrès or any Italian moralist (to speak only of the Latin races) at this disdain of power for the benefit of justice, and their severity for the manner in which this son of Athens judges those who made his city materially powerful. For Socrates, in this respect the perfect model of the ‘clerk’ who is faithful to his essential function, ports, arsenals, walls are ‘follies’, and the serious things are justice and temperance. Those who to-day should perform the duties of a Socrates consider that it is justice which is a folly--‘a cloud’--and the serious things are the arsenals, the walls. To-day the ‘clerk’ has made himself Minister of War. Moreover, one of the most revered modern moralists definitely approves of the judges who condemned Socrates, as good guardians of worldly interests.[85] And that is something which has not been seen among the educators of the human soul since the evening when Crito closed his master’s eyelids.

I say that the modern ‘clerks’ have _preached_ that the State should be strong and care nothing about being just; and in fact the ‘clerks’ do give this assertion the characteristic of preaching, of moral teaching. I cannot insist too often that in this lies their great originality. When Machiavelli advises the Prince to carry out the Machiavellian scheme of action, he invests those actions with no sort of morality or beauty. For him morality remains what it is for everyone else, and does not cease to remain so because he observes (not without melancholy) that it is incompatible with politics. ‘The Prince,’ says Machiavelli, ‘must have an understanding always ready to do good, but he must be able to enter into evil when he is forced to do so’; thereby showing that for him evil, even if it aids politics, still remains evil. The modern realists are the _moralists_ of realism. For them, the act which makes the State strong is invested with a moral character by the fact that it does so, and this whatever the act may be. The evil which serves politics ceases to be evil and becomes good. This position is evident in Hegel, in the Pangermanists and in Barrès; it is no less evident among realists like M. Maurras and his disciples, in spite of their insistence in declaring that they profess no morality. Perhaps these teachers do not profess any morality, at least expressly, in what concerns private life, but they very clearly profess a morality in the political order of things, if by morality is meant everything which puts forward a scale of good and evil. For them as for Hegel, the practical in politics _is the moral_, and if what the rest of the world calls moral is in opposition to the practical, then _it is the immoral_. Such precisely is the perfectly moralist meaning of the famous campaign of ‘false patriotism’. It seems as if we might say that for M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and that his ‘atheism’ consists less in denying God than in shifting Him to man and his political work. I think I can describe the work of this writer accurately by saying that it is the _divinizing of politics_.[86] This displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement of the modern ‘clerks’, and the most deserving of the historian’s attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labours to relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the example of Germany a decade ago.[87]

The extent to which the modern ‘clerks’ have made innovations may be judged by the fact that up till our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato’s, and it said: ‘Morality decides politics’; the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said: ‘Politics have nothing to do with morality.’ To-day they receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: ‘Politics decide morality.’[88] However, the real departure is not that this doctrine should be put before them, but that they should accept it. Callicles asserted that force is the only morality; but the thinking world despised him. Let me also mention that Machiavelli was covered with insults by most of the moralists of his time, at least in France.

The modern world also hearkens to other moralists of realism, who are not lacking in influence as such; I mean the statesmen. Here I shall point to the same sort of change as above. Formerly, leaders of States practised realism, but did not honour it; Louis XI, Charles the Fifth of Spain, Richelieu, Louis XIV, did not claim that their actions were moral. They saw morality where the Gospel had showed it to them, and they did not attempt to displace it because they did not apply it.[89] With them morality was violated, but moral notions remain intact; _and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization_. Signor Mussolini proclaims the morality of his politics of force and the immorality of everything which opposes it. Like the writer, the man of government, who formerly was merely a realist, is now the _apostle_ of realism; and the majesty of his function--if not of his person--gives weight to his apostleship.

The modern governor, owing to the fact that he addresses crowds, is compelled to be a moralist, and to present his acts as bound up with a system of morality, a metaphysics, a mysticism. Richelieu, who need account only to his King, is able to talk only of the practical, and leaves visions of the eternal to others. Mussolini, Bethmann-Hollweg, Herriot, are condemned to these heights.[90] Moreover, this shows how great to-day is the number of those whom I can call ‘clerks’, since by that word I mean all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner. Consequently, I have a right to demand that they give an account of their acts _as ‘clerks’_.

The preachers of political realism often claim to base themselves on the teaching of the Church, and call her a hypocrite when she condemns their theses. This claim has little foundation as regards the teaching of the Church before the nineteenth century, but has much more foundation if we consider the present age. I doubt whether one could now find from the pen of a modern theologian any passage so brutally denunciatory of a war of aggression as the following:--

‘Glaringly unjust is the war of him who declares war only from ambition and from the desire to extend his dominions beyond their legitimate boundaries, from the desire to possess a more commodious country in which to establish himself, from the fear of the great power of a neighbouring prince with whom he is at peace, or from the desire to despoil a rival solely because he is thought unworthy of the possessions or States he holds or of a right which legitimately belongs to him, because a ruler is inconvenienced by him and wants to get rid of this inconvenience by force of arms.’[91] On the other hand, there are an immense number of works to-day which need only a little twisting to make them justify every attempt at conquest. For instance, the view that a war is just ‘if it can invoke the necessity of safeguarding the common good and public tranquillity, the recapture of things unjustly carried off, the repression of rebels, the defence of the innocent’.[92] And the view which asserts that ‘war is just when it is necessary to a nation either to defend itself against invasion, or _to overthrow the obstacles thwarting the exercise of its rights_.’[93] At the beginning of the last century the Church still taught that war could only be just for one of the two belligerents.[94] It is heavy with consequences that she has now abandoned this position and to-day asserts that war may be just on both sides at once, ‘from the moment when each of the two adversaries, without being certain of its right, considers it as simply probable after having taken the opinion of its counsellors’.[95] Here is another serious thing: In the past, war would only be declared just when it was against an adversary who had committed an injury _accompanied by a moral intention_, whereas to-day it may be declared just if it is directed against a material injury caused without any malice,[96] for instance, an accidental violation of frontier. It is certain that to-day Napoleon and Bismarck could find in the teaching of the Church more justification than ever for their incursions.[97]

The modern ‘clerks’ have preached this realism to the classes as well as to the nations. They say to the working class as well as to the bourgeois class: ‘Organize yourselves, become the stronger, seize on power or exert yourself to retain it if you already possess it; laugh at all efforts to bring more charity, more justice or any other “rot”[98] into your relations with the other class, you have been cheated long enough by that sort of thing.’ And here again they do not say: ‘Become so, because necessity demands it,’ they say, and that is the novelty of it: ‘Become so, because morality, aesthetics demand it; to wish to be powerful is the sign of an elevated soul, to wish to be just the sign of a base soul.’ This is the teaching of Nietzsche,[99] of Sorel, applauded by a whole thinking (so-called) Europe; this is the enthusiasm of Europe, when it is attracted by Socialism, for the doctrines of Marx, its scorn for the doctrines of Proudhon.[100] The ‘clerks’ have said the same thing to the parties contending within the same nation. ‘Make yourself the stronger,’ they say to one or other, according to their own passion, ‘and do away with everything which obstructs you; free yourself from the foolish prejudice which exhorts you to make allowances for your adversary, to establish with him a system of justice and harmony.’ We all know the admiration professed by a whole army of ‘thinkers’ in all countries for the Italian government, which simply outlaws all citizens who do not approve of it. Until our own times the educators of the human soul, disciples of Aristotle, urged mankind to denounce as infamous any State which was an organized faction. The pupils of Signor Mussolini and M. Maurras learn to reverence such a State.[101]

This extolling of the ‘strong State’ by the modern ‘clerks’ appears also in certain teachings which, it may be asserted, would greatly have amazed their ancestors, at least the great ones:--

(_a_) _The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past_ (to the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force) in opposition to the rights of reason. I say the affirmation of the _rights_ of custom. The modern traditionalists do not simply teach, like Descartes or Malebranche, that custom is upon the whole quite a good thing, and that there is more wisdom in submitting to it than opposing it. They teach that custom has a right, _the_ right, and consequently that custom should be respected not only from the point of view of interest, but of justice. The arguments in favour of the ‘historical right’ of Germany to Alsace, the ‘historical right’ of the French monarchy, are not purely political positions, they are moral positions. They claim to be accepted in the name of ‘true justice’, of which (they say) their adversaries have a false conception.[102] To determine what is just by the ‘accomplished fact’ is certainly a new sort of teaching, especially among the peoples who for twenty centuries derived their conception of what is just from the companions of Socrates. Here again, the soul of Greece has given place to the soul of Prussia among the educators of mankind. The spirit which speaks here--and from all the teachers of Europe, Mediterranean as well as Germanic--is the spirit of Hegel: ‘The history of the world is the justice of the world.’ (_Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht._)

(_b_) The extolling of _policy founded on experience_--by which is meant that a society should be governed on principles which have proved that they can make it strong, and by ‘illusions’ which would tend to make it just. It is in this narrowly practical sense that the cult of experimental politics is a new thing among the ‘clerks’. For if we mean by the phrase the respect for principles which have showed that they are fitted to make a society not only strong but just, the recommendation of such a policy in opposition to a purely rational policy appeared in the thinking world long before the disciples of Taine or Auguste Comte.[103] Long before our ‘organizing empiricists’ Spinoza wanted political science to be an experimental science, and desired that the conditions under which States endure should be sought from observation at least as much as from reason. (See his attack on the Utopians, _Treatise_, I, i.) But he believed he learned from observation that these conditions do not solely consist in States possessing good armies and obedient peoples, but in their respecting the rights of citizens and even of neighbouring peoples.[104] The cult of experimental politics to-day is accompanied in those who adopt it by a posture which they evidently mean to be striking, and which in fact is so. We all know with what fatalistic visages, what scornful inflexibility, what dark certainty of grasping the absolute, they declare that in matters of politics ‘they consider only the facts’. Here, especially among the French thinkers, is a new kind of Romanticism, which I shall call the _Romanticism of Positivism_, the chief representatives of which will rise up in the imagination of my readers without its being necessary for me to name them. Moreover, this cult brings out a silliness of mind which to me seems wholly an acquisition of the nineteenth century,[105] i.e. the belief that the teachings to be drawn from the past (supposing that they exist) will come straight out of an examination of the _facts_, viz. desires which have been realized. As if the desires which have not been realized were not as important, and perhaps more important, if you reflect that they may quite well come to fill the world’s stage now.[106] Let me add that this cult of fact also claims to be the sole discoverer of ‘the meaning of history’ and ‘the philosophy of history’, which there again shows a weakness of mind from which the preceding ages seem to have been free. When Bossuet and Hegel built up philosophies of history they were certainly no more metaphysicians than Taine or Comte or any of their noisy disciples, but at least they knew that they were so, that they could not be otherwise, and were not so naïve as to think themselves ‘pure scientists’.

(_c_) The assertion that political forms should be adapted to ‘man as he is and always will be’ (viz. unsocial and bloody, therefore eternally needing systems of coercion and military institutions). This effort of so many modern teachers to assert the imperfectability of human nature appears as one of their strangest attitudes, if you realize that it tends towards nothing less than asserting the complete uselessness of their function, and proving that they have completely ceased to realize its very essence. When we see moralists, educators, professional providers of spiritual guidance, assert at the spectacle of human barbarism that ‘man is thus’, that ‘he must be taken thus’, that ‘you will never change him’, we are tempted to ask them what is their reason for existing. And when we hear them reply that ‘they are positive minds and not Utopians’, ‘that they are concerned with what is, not with what might be’, we are staggered to see that they do not know that the moralist is essentially a Utopian, and that the nature of moral action is precisely that it creates its object by affirming it. But we recover when we notice that they are in no wise ignorant of this, and know perfectly well that by affirming it they will create that eternity of barbarism necessary to the maintenance of the institutions which are dear to them.[107]

The dogma of the incurable wickedness of man has another root among some who profess it. This is a Romantic pleasure in picturing the human race as walled in by an inevitable and eternal woe. From this point of view we may say that there has grown up among certain political writers of our time a real _Romanticism of Pessimism_, as false in its absoluteness as the Optimism of Rousseau and Michelet, in hatred of whom it has arisen, while its haughty and so-called scientific attitude is most impressive to simple souls.[108] This doctrine has undoubtedly borne fruits outside the world of literature, and at its voice there has arisen a humanity which believes in nothing but its egotisms and merely laughs at the naïve persons who still think that it might become better. The modern ‘clerk’ has accomplished a truly new work--he has taught man to deny his divinity. The import of such a work is obvious. The Stoics claimed that pain is abolished if it is denied; the thing is disputable in the matter of pain, but it is absolutely true in the matter of moral perfectability.

I shall point out two more teachings inspired in the modern ‘clerks’, by their preaching of the ‘strong State’, and it will not be necessary to add that they are new in the ministers of the spiritual:--

The first is the teaching whereby they declare to Man that he is great to the extent that he strives to act and to think as his ancestors, his race, his environment thought, and ignores ‘individualism’. Thirty years ago many of the French teachers hurled anathemas against the man who ‘claimed to seek truth for himself’, to arrive at his own opinion, instead of adopting the opinion of his nation which had been told what it ought to think by its vigilant leaders. Our age has seen priests of the mind teaching that the gregarious is the praiseworthy form of thought, and that independent thought is contemptible. It is moreover certain that a group which desires to be strong has no use for the man who claims to think for himself.[109]

The second is the teaching whereby they declare to men that the fact that a group is numerous constitutes a right. This is the morality which the over-populated nations hear from many of their thinkers, while the other nations hear from many of theirs that if their low birth-rate continues they will become the objects of a ‘legitimate’ extermination. The rights of numerousness admitted by men who claim to belong to the life of the mind--that is what modern humanity sees. But it is certain that if a nation is to be strong, it must be numerous.

This cult of the strong State and the moral methods which ensure it have been preached to mankind by the ‘clerks’ far beyond the domain of politics, and on a wholly general plane. This is the preaching of _Pragmatism_ whose teaching during the past fifty years by nearly all the influential moralists of Europe is one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will ‘to power’, that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its ‘will to live’ wherein it is most ‘hostile to all reason’, that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.[110]

I should like to point out certain particularly remarkable aspects of this preaching, which are probably not sufficiently realized.

I said that the modern ‘clerks’ teach man that his desires are moral insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the expense of the surrounding world.[111] In other words, the old morality told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent that he is in opposition to it. The former exhorted him not to set himself in Nature ‘like an empire within an empire’; the latter exhorts him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, ‘We desire now to feel conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.’ The former, like the master of the _Contemplations_, said: ‘Believe, but not in ourselves’; the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: ‘Believe, and believe in ourselves, only ourselves.’

Nevertheless, the real originality of Pragmatism is not in that. Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes: Pragmatism exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; to-day he is divine because he has been able to create an equipment which makes him the master of matter. (See the glorifications of the _homo faber_ by Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson.)

Moreover, the modern ‘clerks’ extol Christianity insofar as it is supposed to have been pre-eminently a school of practical, creative virtues, adjusted to the support of the great human institutions. This amazing deformation of a doctrine which in its precepts is so obviously devoted to the love of the spiritual alone, is not only taught by laymen, who are quite within their rights in trying to place their practical desires under the patronage of the highest moral authorities; it is also professed by the ministers of Jesus themselves. Pragmatist Christianity, as I mean it here, is preached to-day from all Christian pulpits.[112]