Part 6
We turn back therefore from Russia, China and the communities of Central Asia to the Atlantic world. It is in that world alone that sufficient range and amplitude of thought and discussion is possible for the adequate development of the Open Conspiracy. In these communities it must begin and for a long time its main activities will need to be sustained from these necessary centres of diffusion. It will develop amidst incessant mental strife and through that strife it will remain alive. It is no small part of the practical weakness of present day communism that it attempts to centre its intellectual life and its directive activities in Moscow and so cuts itself off from the free and open discussions of the Western world. Marxism lost the world when it went to Moscow and took over the traditions of Tzarism, as Christianity lost the world when it went to Rome and took over the traditions of Cæsar. Entrenched in Moscow from searching criticism, the Marxist ideology may become more and more dogmatic and unprogressive, repeating its sacred _credo_ and issuing its disregarded orders to the proletariat of the world, and so stay ineffectively crystallised until the rising tide of the Open Conspiracy submerges, dissolves it afresh and incorporates whatever it finds assimilable.
India like Japan is cut off from the main body of Asiatic affairs. But while Japan has become a formally Westernised nationality in the comity of such nations, India remains a world in itself. In that one peninsula nearly every type of community is to be found, from the tribe of jungle savages through a great diversity of barbaric and mediæval principalities to the child and women sweating factories and the vigorous modern commercialism of Bombay. Over it all the British imperialism prevails, a constraining and restraining influence, keeping the peace, checking epidemics, increasing the food supply by irrigation and the like (so that population increases horribly), and making little or no effort to evoke responses to modern ideas. Britain in India is no propagandist of modern ferments: all those are left the other side of Suez. In India the Briton is a ruler as firm and self-assured and uncreative as the Roman. The old religious and social traditions, the complex customs, castes, tabus and exclusions of a strangely mixed but unamalgamated community, though a little discredited by this foreign predominance, still hold men’s minds. They have been, so to speak, pickled in the preservative of the British raj.
The Open Conspiracy has to invade the Indian complex in conflict with the prejudices of both ruler and governed. It has to hope for individual breaches in the dull Romanism of the administration; here a genuine educationist, here a creative civil servant, here an official touched by the distant stir of the living homeland--and it has to try to bring these types into a corporated relationship with a fine native scholar here or an active-minded prince or land-owner or industrialist there. As the old methods of passenger transport are superseded by flying, it will be more and more difficult to keep the stir of the living homeland out of either the consciousness of the official hierarchy or the knowledge of the recalcitrant “native.”
Very similar to Indian conditions is the state of affairs in the foreign possessions of France, the same administrative obstacles to the Open Conspiracy above, and below the same resentful subordination, cut off from the mental invigoration of responsibility. Within these areas of restraint, India and its lesser, simpler parallels in North Africa, Syria and the Far East, there goes on a rapid increase of low-grade population, undersized physically and mentally, and retarding the mechanical development of civilisation by its standing offer of cheap labour to the unscrupulous entrepreneur, and possible feeble insurrectionary material to the unscrupulous political adventurer. It is impossible to estimate how slowly or how rapidly the knowledge and ideas that have checked the rate of increase of all the Atlantic populations may be diffused through these less alert communities.
We must complete our survey of the resistances against which the Open Conspiracy has to work by a few words about the negro world and the regions of forest and jungle in which barbaric and even savage human life still escapes the infection of civilisation. It seems inevitable that the development of modern means of communication and the conquest of tropical diseases should end in giving access everywhere to modern administration and to economic methods, and everywhere the incorporation of the former wilderness in the modern economic process means the destruction of the material basis, the free hunting, the free access to the soil, of such barbaric and savage communities as still precariously survive. The dusky peoples, who were formerly the lords of these still imperfectly assimilated areas, are becoming exploited workers, slaves, serfs, hut-tax payers or labourers to a caste of white immigrants. The spirit of the plantation broods over all these lands. The negro in America differs only from his subjugated brother in South Africa or Kenya Colony in the fact that he also, like his white master, is an immigrant. The situation in Africa and America adjusts itself therefore towards parallel conditions, the chief variation being in the relative proportions of the two races and the details of the methods by which black labour is made to serve white ends.
In these black and white communities which are establishing themselves in all those parts of the earth where once the black was native, or in which a sub-tropical climate is favourable to his existence at a low level of social development, there is--and there is bound to be for many years to come--much racial tension. The steady advance of birth control may mitigate the biological factors of this tension later on, and a general amelioration of manners and conduct may efface that disposition to persecute dissimilar types, which man shares with many other gregarious animals. But meanwhile this tension increases and a vast multitude of lives is strained to tragic issues.
To exaggerate the dangers and evils of miscegenation is a weakness of our time. Man interbreeds with all his varieties and yet deludes himself that there are races of outstanding purity, the “Nordic,” the “Semitic” and so forth. These are phantoms of the imagination. The reality is more intricate, less dramatic and grips less easily upon the mind; the phantoms grip only too well and incite to terrible suppressions. Changes in the number of half-breeds and in the proportion of white and coloured are changes of a temporary nature that many become controllable and rectifiable in a few generations. But until this level of civilisation is reached, until the colour of a man’s skin or the kinks in a woman’s hair cease to have the value of Shibboleths that involve educational, professional and social extinction or survival, a black and white community is bound to be continually preoccupied by a standing feud too intimate and pervasive to permit of any long views of the world’s destiny.
We come to the conclusion therefore that it is from the more vigorous, varied and less severely obsessed centres of the Atlantic civilisations in the temperate zone, with their abundant facilities for publication and discussion, their traditions of mental liberty and their immense variety of interacting free modern types, that the main beginnings of the Open Conspiracy must develop. For the rest of the world, its propaganda, finding but poor nourishment in the local conditions, may retain a missionary quality for many years.
_Chapter XI_
RESISTANCES AND ANTAGONISTIC FORCES IN OURSELVES
We have dealt in the preceding two chapters with great classes and assemblages of human beings as, in the mass, likely to be more or less antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy, and it has been difficult in those chapters to avoid the implication that “we,” some sort of circle round the writer, were aloof from these obstructive and hostile multitudes, and ourselves entirely identified with the Open Conspiracy. But neither are these multitudes so definitely against, nor those who are with us so entirely for, the Open Conspiracy to establish a world community as the writer in his desire for clearness and contrast and with an all too human disposition perhaps towards plain ego-centred combative issues, has been led to represent. There is no “we” and there can be no “we” in possession of the Open Conspiracy.
The Open Conspiracy is in partial possession of us and we attempt to serve it. But the Open Conspiracy is a natural and necessary development of contemporary thought arising here and there and everywhere. There are doubts and sympathies that weigh on the side of the Open Conspiracy in nearly everyone, and not one of us but retains many impulses, habits and ideas in conflict with our general devotion, checking and limiting our service.
Let us therefore in this chapter cease to discuss classes and types and consider general mental tendencies and reactions which move through all humanity.
In our opening chapters we pointed out that religion is not universally distributed throughout human society. And of no one does it seem to have complete possession. It seizes upon some of us and exalts us for one hour now and then, for a day now and then; it may leave its afterglow upon our conduct for some time; it may establish restraints and habitual dispositions; sometimes it dominates us with but brief intermissions through long spells and then we can be saints and martyrs. In all our religious phases there appears a desire to hold the phase, to subdue the rest of our life to the standards and exigencies of that phase. Our quickened intelligence sets itself to a general analysis of our conduct and to the problem of establishing controls over our unilluminated intervals.
And when the religious elements in the mind set themselves to such self-analysis and attempts to order and unify the whole being upon this basis of the service and advancement of the race, they discover first a great series of indifferent moods, wherein the resistance to thought and work for the Open Conspiracy is merely passive and in the nature of inertia. There is a whole class of states of mind which may be brought together under the head of “everydayism.” The dinner-bell and the playing-fields, the cinema and the newspaper, the week-end visit and the factory siren, a host of such expectant universal things, call to a vast majority of people in our modern world to stop thinking and get busy with the interest in hand, and so on to the next, without a thought for the general frame and drama in which these momentary and personal incidents are set. We are driven along these marked and established routes and turned this way or that by the accidents of upbringing, of rivalries and loves, of chance encounters and vivid experiences, and it is rare for many of us, and never for some, that the phases of broad reflection and self-questioning arise. For many people the religious life now, as in the past, has been a quite desperate effort to withdraw sufficient attention and energy from the flood of events to get some sort of grasp, and keep whatever grip is won, upon the relations of the self to the whole. Far more recoil in terror from such a possibility and would struggle strenuously against solitude in the desert, solitude under the stars, solitude in a silent room or indeed any occasion for comprehensive thought.
But the instinct and purpose of the religious type is to keep hold upon the comprehensive drama, and at the heart of all the great religions of the world we find a parallel disposition to escape in some manner from the aimless drive and compulsion of accident and everyday. Escape is attempted either by withdrawal from the presence of crowding circumstance into a mystical contemplation and austere retirement, or--what is more difficult and desperate and reasonable--by imposing the mighty standards of enduring issues upon the whole mass of transitory problems which constitute the actual business of life. We have already noted how the modern mind turns from retreat as a recognisable method of religion, and faces squarely up to the second alternative. The tumult of life has to be met and conquered. Aim must prevail over the aimless. Remaining in normal life we must yet keep our wills and thoughts aloof from normal life and fixed upon creative processes. However busied we may be, however challenged, we must yet save something of our best mental activity for self-examination and keep ourselves alert against the endless treacheries within that would trip us back into everydayism and disconnected responses to the stimuli of life.
Religions in the past, though they have been apt to give a preference to the renunciation of things mundane, have sought by a considerable variety of expedients to preserve the faith of those whom chance or duty still kept in normal contact with the world. Modern religion, which has no alternative to constant normal contact with the world, cannot lightly forgo the experiments of the old religions in such expedients. Meetings for mutual reassurance, confession and prayer, self-dedication, sacraments and seasons of fast and meditation need to be modernised or replaced by modern equivalents if the religious vitality of the Open Conspiracy is to be sustained. At present, except in the case of a few friends and lovers, the modern religious individual leads a life of extreme, wasteful and dangerous spiritual isolation. He may forget and he has nothing to remind him; he may relapse and he will hear no reproach to warn him of his relapse.
“Everyday” has many ways of justifying the return of the believer to its sceptical casualness. It is easy to persuade oneself that one is taking life or oneself “too seriously.” The mind is very self-protective; it has a disposition to abandon too great or too far-reaching an effort and return to things indisputably within its scope. We have an instinctive preference for thinking things are “all right”; we economise anxiety; we defend the delusions that we can work with, even though we half realise they are no more than delusions. We resent the warning voice, the critical question that robs our activities of assurance. Our everyday moods are not only the antagonists of our religious moods, but they resent all outward appeals to our religious moods and they welcome every help against religious appeals. We pass very readily from the merely defensive to the defensive-aggressive, and from refusing to hear the word that might stir our consciences to a vigorous effort to suppress its utterance.
Churches, religious organisations, try to keep the revivifying phase and usage, where it may strike upon the waning or slumbering faith of the convert, but modern religion as yet has no such organised reminders. They cannot be improvised. Crude attempts to supply the needed corrective of conduct may do less good than harm. Each one of us for himself must do what he can to keep his high resolve in mind and protect himself from the snare of his own moods of fatigue or inadvertency.
But these passive and active defences of current things which operate in and through ourselves, and find such ready sympathy and assistance in the world about us, these massive resistance systems, are only the beginning of our tale of the forces antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy that lurk in our complexities.
Men are creatures with other faults quite beyond and outside our common disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive. Not only have we active creative impulses but also acute destructive ones. Man is a jealous animal. In our youth and adolescence our egotism is extravagant. A great number of us at that stage would rather not see a beautiful or wonderful thing come into existence than have it come into existence disregarding us. Something of that jealous malice, self-assertive ruthlessness, there is in all of us. At his worst man can be an exceedingly combative, malignant, mischievous and cruel animal. And few of us--none of us--are altogether above the possibility of such phases. When we consider the oppositions to the Open Conspiracy that operate in the normal personality, we appreciate the soundness of the catechism which instructs us to renounce not only the trivial world and the heavy flesh, but the active and militant devil.
To make is a long and wearisome business, with many arrests and disappointments, but to break gives an instant thrill. We all know something of the delight of the bang. It is well for the Open Conspirator to ask himself at times how far he is in love with the dream of a world in order, and how far he is driven by hatred of institutions that bore or humiliate him. He may be no more than a revengeful incendiary in the mask of a constructive worker. How safe is he then from the reaction to some fresh humiliation? The Open Conspiracy which is now his refuge and vindication may presently fail to give him the compensation he has sought, may offer him no better than a minor rôle, may display irritating and incomprehensible preferences. And for a great number of things in overt antagonism to the great aim of the Open Conspiracy, he will still find within himself not simply acquiescence but sympathy and a genuine if inconsistent admiration. There they are, waiting for his phase of disappointment. Back he may go to the old loves with a new animus against the greater scheme.
Man has pranced a soldier in reality and fancy for so many generations that few of us can altogether release ourselves from the brilliant pretensions of flags, empire, patriotism and aggression. Business men, especially in America, seem to feel a sort of glory in calling even the underselling and overadvertising of rival enterprises “fighting.” Pill vendors and public departments can have their “wars,” their heroisms, their desperate mischiefs, and so get the Napoleonic feeling. The world and our imaginations are full of the sentimentalities, the false glories and loyalties of such refurbishing of the old combative traditions, trailing after them, as they do, so much worth and virtue in a dulled and stupefied condition. It is difficult to resist the fine gravity, the high self-respect, examples of honour and good style in small things, of the military and naval services, for all that they are now no more than noxious parasites upon the nascent world commonweal. In France not a word may be said against the army; in England, against the navy. There will be many Open Conspirators at first who will scarcely dare to say that word even to themselves.
But all these obsolete values and attitudes with which our minds are cumbered must be cleared out if the new faith is to have free play. We have to clear them out not only from our own minds but from the minds of others who may be or become our associates. The finer and more picturesque false loyalties, false standards of honour, false religious associations, may seem to us, the more thoroughly must we seek to release our minds and the minds of those about us from them and cut off all thoughts of a return.
We cannot compromise with these vestiges of the ancient order. Whatever we retain of them will come back to life and grow again. It is no good to operate for cancer unless the whole growth is removed. Leave a crown about and presently you will find it being worn by someone resolved to be a king. Keep the name and image of a god without a distinct museum label and sooner or later you will discover a worshipper on his knees to it and be lucky not to find a human sacrifice upon the altar. Wave a flag and it will wrap about you. Of yourself even more than of the community is this true; there can be no half measures. You have not yet completed your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities of the plain while it is still possible for you to take a single backward glance.
And at last when we conceive that we have given ourselves altogether to the Open Conspiracy frustration may overtake us. Then it is, when we are assured that we are possessed by the Open Conspiracy, that we shall be most disposed to think and act as though we possessed the Open Conspiracy. And if we have made sacrifices, if we are conscious of substantial success, then still more shall we be in danger. One of the most disagreeable features of Christian hagiology is the value set by the blessed saints upon their special privileges. The poor souls loved to think they had caught the peculiar attention of God by their sores and mortifications. This “weakness of the eminent claim” pervades all religions. Most of those who will serve the Open Conspiracy will be tempted to think they have deserved well and to compare their merits and their share of influence and recognition in the movement with those of others.
The Open Conspiracy will be no more free from rivalries, heartburnings, distrust, touchy suspicions, mutual interference and disingenuous negligences, than any other great human co-operation. The disciplines, the trainings and methods of organisation that must be evolved as the movement grows may be effective in restricting the mischief of such humanities; they will certainly not suppress them altogether. Many a good and serviceable man may die embittered by the preoccupation of his fellow workers in this huge campaign. But the Open Conspiracy will grow as science grows, greater at last than all its outer antagonisms, than ancient tradition or instinctive resistance, greater than the conscious or unconscious disloyalties of its adherents, greater than all the present vices of mankind.
* * * * *
Beware of malice in this movement. Remember that man is a malicious animal and you are human. Do not fall foul of your allies and associates because some of them affect your richer nature as prigs or pedants; do not be too scrupulous about the motives of others; your own also may be misconceived; do not interpret enthusiastic service either as conceited self-assertion or calculated self-advancement, nor give way to excessive chagrin when some honourable task you had promised yourself is seized upon by someone else. Avoid the belittlement of useful work upon our side because it is not perfect. Do not let differences of accent and idiom annoy you. Many great movements have been crippled, many great opportunities lost, by the minor spites of the elect. Vindictive self-assertion is an invariable characteristic of the hopelessly damned. Watch yourself for the minutest first specks of this leprosy.
The Open Conspiracy may learn a useful lesson if it bears in mind the early phases of Christianity and Islam and guards itself against such sordid dissensions as sprung and enfeebled those mighty initiatives before even the first generation of disciples had passed away.
_Chapter XII_
THE OPEN CONSPIRACY MUST BEGIN AS A MOVEMENT OF EXPLANATION AND PROPAGANDA
And now, having taken the measure of the array of current things against which the Open Conspiracy must pit itself, we may go on to consider the germination and development of the Open Conspiracy.
It is fairly obvious that the primary and earliest task is to express, develop and propagate the idea of the Open Conspiracy, to make its external form clear, convincing, attractive and commanding to as many people as possible. The primary organisation must be a propagandist organisation.