Part 4 (1/2)
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 h.e.l.l in the _Inferno_, Canto III.]
VIII
Our description of the future order of society was tacitly based on the a.s.sumption that our mentality, our ethics, our spiritual outlook, would remain as they are at present.
This a.s.sumption 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 inst.i.tutions. Inst.i.tutions do not mean evolution. If inst.i.tutions 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, cla.s.ses, dogmas. The persons are done with for the present. The cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses. 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 compet.i.tion 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 s.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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-wors.h.i.+p to the pioneer-freedom of America, all the cultured peoples have brought this creative act to pa.s.s, although in formative epochs leading cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s--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 cla.s.ses; 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.