Part 2

The third of the main contrasts between modern and former thought which have rendered the general shapes of established religion old-fashioned and unserviceable, is a reorientation of current ideas about time. The powerful disposition of the human mind to explain everything as the inevitable unfolding of a past event which, so to speak, sweeps the future helplessly before it, has been checked by a mass of subtle criticisms. The conception of progress as a broadening and increasing purpose, a conception which is taking hold of the human imagination more and more firmly, turns religious life towards the future. We think no longer of submission to the irrevocable decrees of absolute dominion, but of participation in an adventure on behalf of a power that gains strength and establishes itself. The history of our world, which has been unfolded to us by science, runs counter to all the histories on which religions have been based. There was no Creation in the past, we begin to realise, but eternally there is creation; there was no Fall to account for the conflict of good and evil, but a stormy ascent. Life as we know it is a mere beginning.

It seems unavoidable that if religion is to develop unifying and directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analysing turn of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories, its gross preoccupations, its posthumous prolongation of personal ends. The desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an escape from the distressful pettiness and morality of the individual life, is the undying element in every religious system. The time has come to strip religion right down to that, to strip it for greater tasks than it has ever faced before. The histories and symbols that served our fathers encumber and divide us. Sacraments and rituals harbour disputes and waste our scanty emotions. The explanation of why things are is an unnecessary effort in religion. The essential fact in religion is the desire for religion and not how it came about. If you do not want religion, no persuasions, no convictions about your place in the universe can give it to you. The first sentence in the modern creed must be, not “I believe” but “I give myself.”

To what? And how? To these questions we must next address ourselves.

_Chapter IV_

OBJECTIVE EXPRESSION OF MODERN RELIGION

To give oneself religiously is a continuing operation expressed in a series of acts. It can be nothing else. You cannot dedicate yourself and then go away to live just as you have lived before. It is a poor travesty of religion that does not produce an essential change in the life which embraces it. But in the established and older religions of our race, this change of conduct has involved much self-abasement merely to the God or Gods, or much self-mortification merely with a view to the moral perfecting of self. Christian devotion, for example, in these early stages, before the hermit life gave place to organised monastic life, did not to any extent direct itself to service except the spiritual service of other human beings. But as Christianity became a definite social organising force, it took on a great series of healing, comforting, helping, manufacturing and educational activities. The modern tendency has been and is all in the direction of minimising what one might call self-centred devotion and self-subjugation, and of expanding and developing external service. The idea of inner perfectibility dwindles with the diminishing importance attached to individuality. We cease to think of mortifying or exalting or perfecting ourselves and seek to lose ourselves in a greater life. We think less and less of “conquering” self and more and more of escaping from self. It we attempt to perfect ourselves in any respect it is only as a soldier sharpens and polishes an essential weapon.

Our quickened apprehension of continuing change, our broader and fuller vision of the history of life, disabuse our minds of many limitations set to the imaginations of our predecessors. Much that they saw as fixed and determinate, we see as transitory and controllable. They saw life fixed in its species and subjected to irrevocable laws. We see life struggling insecurely but with a gathering successfulness for freedom and power against restriction and death. We see life coming at last to our tragic and hopeful human level. Certain great possibilities, certain mighty problems, we realise, confront mankind to-day. They frame our existences. The practical aspect, the material form, the embodiment, of the modernised religious impulse is the direction of the whole life to the solution of these problems and the realisation of their possibilities.

The modern religious life like all forms of religious life must needs have its own subtle and deep inner activities, its meditations, its self-confrontations, its phases of stress and search and appeal, its serene and prayerful moods, but these inward aspects do not come into the scope of this present enquiry, which is concerned entirely with the outward shape, the direction and the organisation of modern religious effort, with the question of what, given religious devotion, we have to do and how that has to be done.

Now as the modern vision of life has grown clear, certain vast possibilities and certain great dangers have become plain. They challenge mankind. They furnish an entirely new frame and setting for the moral life. In the fixed and limited outlook of the past, practical good works took the form mainly of palliative measures against evils that were conceived of as incurable; the religious community nursed the sick, fed the hungry, provided sanctuary for the fugitive, pleaded with the powerful for mercy. It did not dream of preventing sickness, famine or tyranny. Otherworldliness was its ready refuge from the invincible evil and confusion of the existing scheme of things. It is possible now to imagine an order in human affairs from which these evils have been largely or entirely eliminated. More and more people are coming to realise that such an order is a material possibility. And with the realisation that this is a material possibility, we can no longer be content with a field of good deeds and right action restricted to palliative and consolatory activities. Such things are merely “first-aid.” The religious mind grows bolder than it has ever been before. It pushes through the curtain it once imagined was a barrier. It apprehends its larger obligations. The way in which our activities conduce to the realisation of that conceivable better order in human affairs, becomes the new criterion of conduct.

The realisation of this conceivable better order involves certain necessary achievements. It is impossible for any clear-headed person to suppose that the ever more destructive stupidities of war can be eliminated from human affairs until some common political control dominates the earth, and unless certain pressures due to the growth of population, due to the enlarging scope of human operations or due to conflicting standards and traditions of life, are disposed of. To avoid the positive evils of war and to attain the new levels of prosperity and power that now come into view, an effective world control, not merely of armed force but of the production and main movements of staple commodities and the drift and expansion of population, is required. It is absurd to dream of peace and world-wide progress without that much control. These things assured, the abilities and energies of a greatly increased proportion of human beings could be diverted to the happy activities of scientific research and creative work with an ever-increasing release and enlargement of human possibility. Such a forward stride in human life, the first stride in a mighty continuing advance, an advance to which no limit appears, is now materially possible. The opportunity is offered to mankind. But there is no certainty, no material necessity, that it should ever be taken. It will not be taken by mankind inadvertently. It can only be taken through such an organisation of will and energy to take it as this world has never seen before.

These are the new conditions that unfold themselves before the more alert minds of our generation and which will presently become the general mental background, as the modern interpretations of the history of life and of material and mental possibilities establish themselves. Evil political, social and economic usages and arrangements may seem obdurate and huge, but they are neither permanent nor uncontrollable. They can be controlled, however, only by an effort more powerful and determined than the instincts and inertias that sustain them. Religion, modern and disillusioned, has for its outward task to set itself to the control and direction of political, social and economic life, or admit itself a mere drug for easing discomfort. Can it or can it not synthesise the needed effort to lift mankind out of our present disorders, dangers, baseness, frustrations and futilities, to a phase of relative security, accumulating knowledge, systematic and continuing growth in power and the widespread deep happiness of hopeful and increasing life?

Our answer here is that it can, and our subject now is to enquire what are the necessary opening stages in the synthesis of that effort. We write here for those who believe that it can, and who do already grasp the implications of world history and contemporary scientific achievement.

_Chapter V_

THE FRAME OF THE TASK BEFORE MANKIND:

THE WORLD COMMONWEAL

Before we can consider the forms and methods of attacking their inevitable task that the serious minority of human beings must adopt, it will be well to draw the main lines and attempt some measure of the magnitude of that task. What are the new forms that it is sought to impose upon human life and how are they to be evolved from or imposed upon the current forms? And against what passive and active resistances has this to be done?

There can be no pause for replacement in the affairs of life. Day must follow day and the common activities continue. The new world as a going concern must arise out of the old as a going concern.

Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically unified. Within that frame fall all the other ideas of our progressive ambition. To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives. Still more at present apprehend it as a possibility but do not _dare_ to desire it, because of the enormous difficulties that intervene and because they see as yet no intimations of a way through or round these difficulties. The great majority of human beings have still to see the human adventure as one whole; they are obsessed by the air of permanence and finality in established things; they accept current reality as ultimate reality. They take the world as they find it. But here we are writing for the modern-minded, and for them it is impossible to think of the world as secure and satisfactory until there exists a single world commonweal, preventing war and controlling those moral, biological and economic forces that would otherwise lead to wars.

The method of direction of such a world commonweal is not likely to imitate the methods of existing sovereign states. It will be a new sort of direction with a new psychology. There will be little need for President or King to lead the marshalled hosts of humanity, for where there is no war there is no need of any leader to lead hosts anywhere, and in a polyglot world a parliament of mankind is an inconceivable instrument of government. The fundamental organisation of contemporary states is still plainly military and that is exactly what a world organisation cannot be. Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare and bluster of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase of development we would supersede. The reasonable desire of all of us is that we should have the collective affairs of the world managed by suitably equipped groups of the most interested, intelligent and devoted people and that their activities should be subjected to a free, open, watchful criticism, restrained from making spasmodic interruptions but powerful enough to modify or supersede without haste or delay whatever is weakening or unsatisfactory in the general direction.

A world movement for the supersession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic and social institutions, must necessarily, as it grows, draw closer and closer to questions of practical control. It is likely in its growth to incorporate many active public servants, and many industrial and financial leaders and directors. It may also assimilate great numbers of intelligent workers. As its activities spread it will work out a whole system of special methods of co-operation. It will learn as it grows and by growing the business of general direction and how to develop its critical function. So that the movement we contemplate will by its very nature be one aiming, not so much to set up a world direction as to become itself a world direction, and the educational and militant forms of its opening phase will, as experience is gained and power and responsibility acquired, evoke step by step forms of administration and research and correction.

The modernisation of the religious impulse leads us straight to the effort for the establishment of the world state as a duty, and the close consideration of the necessary organisation of that effort will bring the reader to the conclusion that a movement aiming at the establishment of a world-directorate, however restricted that movement may be at first in numbers and power, must either contemplate the prospect of itself developing in part or as a whole into a world-directorate, and by assimilation, as a whole into a modern world community, or admit from the outset the futility, the spare-time amateurishness, of its gestures.

_Chapter VI_

BROAD CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORLD COMMONWEAL

Continuing our examination of the practical task before the modern mind, we may next note the main lines of contemporary aspiration within this comprehensive outline of a world commonweal. Any sort of unification of human affairs will not serve the ends we seek, we aim at a particular sort of unification; a world Cæsar is hardly better from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean the liberation of human thought, experiment and creative effort. A successful conspiracy merely to seize governments and wield and retain world power would be at best only the empty frame of success, it might be the exact reverse of success. Release from the threat of war and the waste of international economic conflicts is a poor release if it demands as its price the loss of all other liberties.

It is because we desire a unification of human direction, not simply for the sake of unity, but as a means to certain definite ends, that it is necessary, at any cost--in delay, in loss of effective force, in strategic or tactical disadvantage--that the light of free, abundant criticism should play upon that unified direction and upon the movements and organisations leading to the establishment of that unified direction.

Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark. Neither morally nor intellectually is he safe from lapses. Most of us who are past our first youth know how little we can even trust ourselves, and are glad to have our activities checked and guarded by a sense of inspection. It is for this reason that a movement to realise the conceivable better state of the world, must deny itself the advantages of secret methods or tactical insincerities. It must leave that to its adversaries. We must declare our end plainly from the outset and risk no misunderstandings of our procedure.

The conspiracy of modern religion against the established institutions of the world must be an open conspiracy and cannot remain righteous otherwise. It is lost if it goes underground. Every step to world unity must be taken in the daylight, or the sort of unity that will be won will be found to be scarcely worth the winning. The essential task will have to be recommenced within the mere frame of unity attained.

This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made in the name and for the sake of science and creative activity. It is to release science and creative ability, and every stage in the struggle must be watched and criticised, lest there be any sacrifice of these ends to the exigencies of conflict.

The security of creative progress and creative activity implies a competent regulation of the economic life in the collective interest. There must be food, shelter and leisure for all. The fundamental needs of the animal life must be assured before human life can have free play. Man does not live by bread alone; he eats that he may learn and adventure creatively, but unless he eats he cannot adventure. His life is primarily economic, as a house is primarily a foundation, and economic justice and efficiency must underlie all other activities, but to judge human society and organise political and social activities entirely on economic grounds is to forget the objectives of life’s campaign in a pre-occupation with supply.

It is true that man, like the animal world in general from which he has arisen, is the creature of a struggle for sustenance, but unlike the animals, man can resort to methods of escape from that competitive pressure upon the means of subsistence, which has been the lot of every other animal species. He can restrain the increase in his numbers and he seems capable of still quite undefined expansions of his productivity per head of population. He can escape therefore from the struggle for subsistence altogether with a surplus of energy such as no other kind of animal species has ever possessed. Intelligent control of population is a possibility which puts man outside the competitive processes that have hitherto ruled the modification of species, and he can be released from these processes in no other way.

There is a clear hope that later, directed breeding will come within his scope, but that goes beyond his present range of practical achievement, and we need not discuss it further here. Suffice it for us here that the world community of our desires, the organised world community conducting and ensuring its own progress, requires a deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition.

There is no strong instinctive desire for multitudinous offspring as such, in the feminine make-up. The reproductive impulses operate indirectly. Nature ensures a pressure of population through passions and instincts that, given sufficient knowledge, intelligence and freedom on the part of women, can be satisfactorily gratified and tranquillised if need be, without the production of numerous children. Very slight adjustments in social and economic arrangements will, in a world of clear available knowledge and straightforward practice in these matters, supply sufficient inducement or discouragement to affect the general birthrate or the birthrate of specific types as the directive sense of the community may consider desirable. So long as the majority of human beings are begotten involuntarily in lust and ignorance, so long does man remain like any other animal under the moulding pressure of competition for subsistence. Social and political processes change entirely in their character when we recognise the possibility of practicability of this fundamental revolution in human biology.

In a world so relieved, the production of staple necessities presents a series of problems altogether less distressful than those of the present scramble for possessions and self-indulgence on the part of the successful and for work and a bare living on the part of the masses. With the increase of population unrestrained there was, as the end of the economic process, no practical alternative to a multitudinous equality at the level of bare subsistence, except through such an inequality of economic arrangements as allowed a minority to maintain a higher standard of life by withholding whatever surplus of production it could grasp, from consumption in mere proletarian increase. In the past and at present, what is called the capitalist system, that is to say the unsystematic exploitation of production by private owners under the protection of the law, has, on the whole, in spite of much haste and conflict, worked beneficially, by checking the gravitation to a universal low-grade consumption which would have been the inevitable outcome of socialism oblivious of biological processes. With effective restraint upon the increase of population, however, entirely new possibilities open out before mankind.

The besetting vice of economic science, orthodox and unorthodox alike, has been the vice of beginning in the air, with current practice and current convictions, with questions of wages, prices, values and possession, when the profounder issues of human association are really not to be found at all on these levels. The primary issues of human association are biological and psychological, and the essentials of economics are problems in applied physics and chemistry. The first thing we should examine is what we want to do with natural resources, and the next, how to get men to do what has to be done as pleasurably and effectively as possible. Then we should have a standard by which to judge the methods of to-day.

But the academic economists and still more so Marx and his followers, refuse to deal with these fundamentals, and with a stupid air of sound practical wisdom, insist on opening up their case with an uncritical acceptance of the common antagonism of employers and employed and a long rigmarole about profits and wages. Ownership and expropriated labour are only one set of many possible sets of economic method.

The economists, however, will attend seriously only to the current set, the rest they ignore, and the Marxists with their uncontrollable disposition to use nicknames in the place of judgments, condemn all others as “Utopian”--a word as final in its dismissal from the minds of the elect as that other pet counter in the Communist substitute for thought, “Bourgeois.” If they can persuade themselves that an idea or a statement is “Utopian” or “Bourgeois,” it does not seem to matter in the least to them whether it is right or wrong. It is disposed of. Just as in genteeler circles anything is disposed of that can be labelled “atheistical,” “subversive” or “disloyal.”