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CHAPTER XX The End of the Curve of Reason
THE
rational collectivist idea of society has at first sight a powerful attraction.
There is behind it a great, that every society represents a collective being
and in it and it the individual lives and he owes to it all that he can give
it. More,
it is only by a certain relation to the society, a certain harmony with this
greater collective self that he can find the complete use for his many developed or
developing powers and activities. Since it is a collective being, it must, one
would naturally suppose, have a discoverable collective reason and will which should
find more and more its right expression and right working if it is given a
conscious and effective means of organised self-expression and execution. And
this collective will and intelligence, since it is according to the original
idea that of all in a perfect equality, might naturally be trusted to seek out
and work its own good where the ruling individual and class would always be
liable to misuse their power for quite other ends. The right organisation of
social life on a basis of equality and comradeship ought to give each man his
proper place in society, his full training and development for the common ends,
his due share of work, leisure
and reward, the right value of his life in relation to the collective being,
society. Moreover, it would be a place, share, value regulated by the
individual and collective good
and not an exaggerated or a depressed value brought to him fortuitously by
birth or fortune, purchased by wealth or won by painful and wasteful struggle.
And certainly the external efficiency of the community, the measured, ordered
and economical working of its life, its power for production and general well-
being must enormously increase, as even the quite imperfect development of
collective action in the recent past has shown, in a well-organised and
concentrated State. Page-195 pleteness the liberty of the individual will have to be
destroyed or reduced to an almost vanishing quantity, it might be answered that
the right of the individual to any kind of egoistic freedom as against the
State which represents the mind, the will, the good and interest of the whole
community, sarvam brahma, is a
dangerous fiction, a baneful myth. Individual liberty of life and action, - even if liberty of thought and speech is for
a time conceded, though this too can hardly remain unimpaired when once the
socialistic State has laid its grip firmly on the individual, - may well mean
in practice an undue freedom given to his infrarational parts of nature, and is
not that precisely the thing in him that has to be thoroughly controlled, if
not entirely suppressed, if he is to become
a reasonable being leading a reasonable life? This control can be most
wisely and effectively carried out by the collective reason and will of the State which is larger, better, more enlightened
than the individual's; for it profits, as the average individual cannot do, by
all the available wisdom and aspiration in
the society. Indeed, the enlightened individual may well come to regard
this collective reason and will as his own larger mind will and conscience and
find in a happy obedience to it a strong delivery from his own smaller and less
rational self and therefore a more real freedom than any now claimed by his
little separate ego. It used already to be argued that the disciplined German
obeying the least gesture of the policeman, the State official, the military
officer was really the freest, happiest and most moral individual in all Europe
and therefore in the whole world. The same reasoning in a heightened form might
perhaps be applied to the drilled felicities of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The State, educating and governing the individual, undertakes to intellectualise,
ethicise, practicalise and generally perfect him and to see to it that he
remains, whether he will or no, always and in all things - strictly on the lines approved by the State - intellectual,
ethical, practical and thoroughly perfect. Page-196 and its supreme need of freedom, of the control also of his lower members, no doubt, - for that is part of the total freedom towards which he is struggling, - but of a growing self-control, not a mechanical regulation by the mind and will of others. Obedience too is a part of its perfection, but a free and natural obedience to a true guiding power and not to a mechanised government and rule. The collective being is a fact; all mankind be regarded as a collective being: but this being is a soul and life not merely a mind or a body. Each society develops into a sort of sub-soul or group-soul of this humanity and develops also a general temperament, character, type of mind, evolves governing ideas and tendencies that shape its life and its institutions. But the society has no discoverable common reason and will belonging alike to all its members; for the group-soul rather works out its tendencies by a diversity of opinions, a diversity of S, a diversity of life, and the vitality of the group-life depends largely upon the working of this diversity, its continuity, its rich- it~. Since that is so, government by the organised State must Ian always government by a number of individuals, - whether that number be in theory the minority or the majority makes in the end little fundamental difference. For even when it is the majority that nominally governs, in fact it is always the reason and will of a comparatively few effective men - and not really - common reason and will of all - that rules and regulates things with the consent of the half-hypnotised mass.1 There is no on to suppose that the immediate socialisation of the State would at all alter, the mass of men not being yet thoroughly rationalised and developed minds, this practical necessity of state government. In the old infrarational societies, at least in their inception, what governed was not the State, but the group-soul itself evolving its life organised into customary institutions and self regulations to which all had to conform; for the rulers were only
1 This truth has come out with a startling force of self-demonstration in Communist Russia and National Socialist Germany, - not to speak of other countries. The vehement reassertion of humanity's need of a King crowned or uncrowned, - Dictator, Leader, Duce Of Fuhrer - and a ruling and administering oligarchy has been the last outcome of a century and a half of democracy as it has been too the first astonishing result of the supposed rise of the proletariate to power. Page-197 its executors and instruments. This entailed indeed a
great subjection of the individual to the society, but it was not felt, because-;
the individualistic idea was yet unborn and such diversities as j arose were
naturally provided for in one way or another, - in some cases by a remarkable latitude of social variation
which government by the State tends more and more to suppress. As State
government develops, we have a real suppression or oppression of the minority
by the majority or the majority by the minority, of the individual by the
collectivity, finally, of all by the
relentless mechanism - of
the State. Democratic liberty tried to minimise this suppression; it left a
free play for the individual and restricted as much as might be the role of the
State. Collectivism goes exactly to the opposite extreme; it will leave no
sufficient elbow-room to the individual free- will, and the more it
rationalises the individual by universal education of a highly developed kind,
the more this suppression will be felt, - unless indeed all freedom of thought
is negated and the minds of all are forced into a single standardised way of
thinking. Page-198 of the reason which the collectivist arrangement of
society will bring; but when its benefits become a matter of course and its
defects become more and more realised and prominent, dissatisfaction and revolt
are sure to set in in the clearest and most vigous minds of the society and
propagate themselves through- out the mass. This intellectual and vital
dissatisfaction may very take under such circumstances the form of anarchistic
thought, because that thought appeals precisely to this need of free variation
in the internal life and its outward expression rich will be the source of
revolt, and anarchistic thought must be necessarily subversive of the
socialistic order. The State can only combat it by an education adapted
to its fixed forms of life an education that will seek to drill the citizen in
a fixed set of ideas, aptitudes, propensities as was done in the old
infra-rational order of things and by the suppression of freedom of speech and
thinking so as to train and compel all to be of one mind, one sentiment, one
opinion, one feeling; but this remedy will be in a rational society
self-contradictory, ineffective, or if effective, then worse than the evil it
seeks to combat. On the other hand,
if from the first freedom of thought is denied, that means the end of the Age
of Reason and of the ideal of a rational society. Man the mental being disallowed
the use - except in a
narrow fixed groove - of
his mind and mental will, will stop short in his growth and be even as the
animal and as the insect stationary species. Page-199 true development of that kind would be difficult indeed
and has, the appearance of a chimera; for collectivism pretends to regulate
life not only in its few fundamental principles and its main lines, as every
organised society must tend to do, but in its, details, it aims at a thoroughgoing scientific regulation, and an agreement of the free reasoned will of
millions in all the lines and most of the details of life is a contradiction in
terms. Whatever the perfection of the organised State, the suppression or oppression of individual freedom by the
will of the majority or of a minority would still be there as a cardinal
defect vitiating its very principle. And there would be something infinitely
worse. For a thoroughgoing scientific regulation of life can only be brought
about by a thoroughgoing mechanisation of life. This tendency to mechanisation
is the inherent defect of the State idea and its practice. Already that is the
defect upon which both intellectual anarchistic thought and the insight of the
spiritual thinker have begun to lay stress, and it must immensely increase as
the State idea rounds itself into a greater complete- ness in practice. It is
indeed the inherent defect of reason when it turns to govern life and labours
by quelling its natural tendencies to put it into some kind of rational order. Page-200 with the ignorance of the Life-mind and the nescience of
Matter. This can only be done truly and satisfactorily when the soul discovers
itself in its highest and completest spiritual reality and effects a
progressive upward transformation of its life-values into those of the spirit;
for there they will all find their spiritual truth and in that truth their
standing-ground of mutual recognition and reconciliation. The spiritual is the
one truth of which all others, the veiled aspects, the brilliant disguises or
the dark disfigurements and in which they can find their own right form and
true relation to each other. This is a work the reason cannot do. The business
of the reason is intermediate: it is to observe and understand this life by the
intelligence and discover for it the direction in which it is going and the
laws of its self-development on the way. In order that it may do its office, it
is obliged to adopt temporarily fixed viewpoints none of which is more than
partially true and to create systems none of which can really stand as the
final expression of the integral truth of things. The integral truth of things
is truth not of the reason but of the spirit. Page-201 scient evolution
of infrarational societies and the confusedly mixed movement of semi-rational
societies, it can never arrive at perfection by its own methods, because reason
is neither the first principle of life, nor can be its last, supreme and
sufficient principle. Page-202 perfection. We need not attach much importance to the grosser vitalistic or violent anarchism which seeks forcibly to react against the social principle or claims the right of man to "live his life" in the egoistic or crudely vitalistic sense. But there is higher, an intellectual anarchistic thought which in its aim and formula recovers and carries to its furthest logical conclusions a y real truth of nature and of the divine in man. In its revolt against the opposite exaggeration of the social principle, we find it declaring that all government of man by man by the power of compulsion is an evil, at violation, a suppression or deformation of a natural principle of good which would otherwise grow and prevail for the perfection of the human race. Even the social principle in itself is questioned and held liable for a sort of fall in man from a natural to an unnatural and artificial principle of living. The exaggeration and inherent weakness of this exclusive idea are sufficiently evident. Man does not actually live as an isolated being, nor can he grow by an isolated freedom. He grows by his relations with others and his freedom must exercise itself in a progressive self-harmonising with the freedom of his fellow-beings. The social principle therefore, apart from the forms it has taken, would be perfectly justified, if by nothing else, than by the need of society as a field of relations which afford to the individual his occasion for growing towards a greater perfection. We have indeed the old dogma that man was originally innocent and perfect; the conception of first of the first ideal state of mankind as a harmonious felicity of free and natural living in which no social law or compulsion existed because none was needed, is as old as the Mahabharata. But even this theory has to recognize a downward lapse of man from his natural perfection. The fall was not brought about by the introduction of the social principle in the arrangement of his life, but rather the social principle and the governmental method of compulsion had to be introduced as a result of the fall. If, on the contrary, we regard the evolution of man not as a fall from the perfection but a gradual ascent, a growth out of the infrarational " status of his being, it is clear that only by a social compulsion on the vital and physical instincts of his infrarational egoism, a sub- Page-203 jection to the needs and laws of the social life, could
this growth have been brought about on a large scale. For in their first
crudeness the infrarational instincts do not correct themselves quite
voluntarily without the pressure of need and compulsion, but only by the
erection of a law other than their own which teaches them finally to erect a
yet greater law within for their own correction and purification. The principle
of social compulsion may not have been always or perhaps ever used quite
wisely, -it is a law of man's imperfection, imperfect in itself, and must
always be imperfect in its method and result; but in the earlier stages of his
evolution it was clearly inevitable, and until man has grown out of the causes
of its necessity, he cannot be really ready for the anarchistic principle of
living. Page-204 comrades, to the principle of fraternity, the third and most neglected term of the famous revolutionary formula. A free equality founded upon pontaneous co-operation, not on governmental force and social compulsion, is the highest anarchistic ideal. This would seem to lead us either towards a free co-operative communism, a unified life where the labour and property of all is there for the benefit of all, or else to what may better be called communalism, the free consent of the individual to live in a society where the just freedom of his individuality will be recognised, but the surplus of his labour and acquisitions will be used or given by him without demur for the common good under a natural co-operative impulse. The severest school of anarchism 'rejects all compromise with communism. It is difficult to see how a Stateless Communism which is supposed to be the final goal of the Russian ideal can operate on the large and complex scale necessitated by modern life. And indeed it is not clear how ten a free communalism could be established or maintained without some kind of governmental force and social compulsion or how it could fail to fall away in the end either on one side into a rigorous collectivism or on the other to struggle, anarchy and disruption. For the logical mind in building its social idea takes no dent account of the infrarational element in man, the vital egoism to which the most active and effective part of his nature is bound: that is his most constant motive and it defeats in the d all the calculations of the idealising reason, undoes its elaborate systems or accepts only the little that it can assimilate to own need and purpose. If that strong element, that ego-force in him, is too much overshadowed, cowed and depressed, too much rationalised, too much denied an outlet, then the life of man becomes artificial, top-heavy, poor in the sap of vitality, mechanical, uncreative. And on the other hand, if it is not suppressed, it tends in the end to assert itself and derange the plans the rational side of man, because it contains in itself powers whose right satisfaction or whose final way of transformation reason cannot discover. If reason were the secret, highest law of the universe or if man the mental being were limited by mentality, it might be possible for him by the power of the reason to evolve out of the dominance of infrarational Nature which he Page-205
inherits from
the animal. He could then live securely in his best human self as a
perfected rational and sympathetic being, balanced and well-ordered in all
parts, the sattwic man of Indian philosophy;
that would be his summit of possibility, his con- summation. But his nature is rather transitional; the
rational being is only a middle term of Nature's evolution. A rational
satisfaction cannot give him safety from the pull from below nor deliver him
from the attraction from above. If it were not so, the ideal of intellectual
Anarchism might be more feasible as well as acceptable as a theory of what
human life might be in its reasonable perfection; but, man being what he is, we
are compelled in the end to aim higher and go farther. Page – 206 can be met, baffled or deflected by opposite reasonings and other discordant instincts. Nor will it found itself in the natural heart of man where there are plenty of other passions to combat it is in the soul that it must find its roots; the love which is founded upon a deeper truth of our being, the brotherhood or, let us say, - for this is another feeling than any vital or mental sense brotherhood, a calmer more durable motive-force, - the spiritual comradeship which is the expression of an inner realisation of oneness. For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the unique godhead in each man found itself on true communism of the equal godhead in the race; for the spirit, the inmost Self, the universal Godhead in every being is Fat whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise the perfection of its individual life and nature in the existence of all, in the universal life and nature. This is a solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of a better human society to a far-off date in the future evolution of the race. For it means that no machinery invented by the reason can perfect either the individual or the collective man; an inner change is needed in human nature, hinge too difficult to be ever effected except by the few. This is not certain; but in any case, if this is not the solution, then there is no solution; if this is not the way, then there is no way the human kind. Then the terrestrial evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal and a greater race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change, a form of life must be born that is nearer to the divine. After all there is no logical necessity for the conclusion that the change cannot begin at all because its perfection is not immediately possible. A decisive turn of mankind to the spiritual ideal, the beginning of a constant ascent and guidance towards the heights may not be altogether impossible, even if the summits are attainable at first only by the pioneer few and far-off to the tread of the race. And that beginning .may mean the descent of an influence that will alter at once the whole life of mankind in its orientation and enlarge for ever, as did the development of his reason and more than any development of the reason, its potentialities land all its structure. Page – 207 |