Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays

by Edward Carpenter

THE NEW MORALITY

The tendency of the Evolution Theory, as it penetrates human thought, is to rub out lines—the old lines of formal classification. We no longer now put in a class apart those animals which have horns or cloven hooves, because we find that continuous descent and close kinship weave relations which are not bounded by horns or hooves. And, for a not dissimilar reason, modern thought, based on the theory of evolution, is tending to rub out the hard and fast lines between moral Right and Wrong—the old formal classifications of actions as some in their nature good, and some in their nature bad.

The Eastern, or at least Indian, thought and religion rubbed out these lines long ago. Its philosophy indeed was founded on a theory of Evolution—the continuous evolution or emanation of the Many from the One. It could not therefore regard any class of beings or creatures as essentially bad, or any class of actions as essentially wrong, since all sprang from a common Root. The only essential evil was ignorance (avidya)—that is, the fact of the being or creature not knowing or perceiving its emanation from, or kinship with, the One—and of course any action done under this condition of avidya, however outwardly correct, was essentially wrong; while on the other hand all actions done by beings fully realising and conscious of their union with the One were necessarily right.

Of this attitude towards Right and Wrong there are abundant instances in the Upanishads. The choice of the path does not lie between Good and Bad, as in the Pilgrim's Progress, but it lies above and in a region transcending them both. "By the serenity of his thoughts a man blots out all actions, whether good or bad."[42] "He does not distress himself with the thought, Why did I not do what is good? Why did I do what is bad?"[43] All religions indeed, by the very fact of their being religions, have indicated a sphere above morality, to which their followers shall and must aspire. What else is St. Paul's reiterated charge to escape from the dominion of sin and law, into the glorious liberty of the children of God? And in all ages the great mystics—those who stand near the fountain-sources of evolution and emanation—have seen and said the same. Says Spinoza:—"With regard to good and evil, these terms indicate nothing positive in things considered in themselves, nor are they anything else than modes of thought, or notions which we form from the comparison of one thing with another. For one and the same thing may at the same time be both good and evil, or indifferent."[44]

Here indeed, in these pregnant words, we come upon the very root of the matter. A thing, an action, may be called good or bad in respect to a certain purpose or object; but in itself, No. Wine may be good for the encouragement of sociability, but may be bad for the liver. The Sabbath-day may be pronounced a beneficial institution from some points of view, but not from others. A scrupulous respect for private property may certainly be a help to settled social life; but the practice of thieving—as recommended by Plato—may be very useful to check the lust of private riches. To speak of wine as in its nature good or bad is manifestly absurd; and the same of a pious respect for private property or the Sabbath-day. These things are good under certain conditions or for certain purposes, and bad under other conditions or for other purposes. But of course it belongs and goes with the brute externalising tendency of the mind, to stereotype the actual material thing—which should be only the vehicle of the spirit—and give it a character and a cult as good or bad. The Sabbath ceases to be made for man, and man is made for the Sabbath. Law, Custom, Pharisaism, and Self-righteousness spring up and usurp the sphere of morality, and all the histories of savage and civilised nations, with their endless fetishes and taboos and superstitions and ceremonies, and caste-marks and phylacteries, and petty regulations and proprieties,—including bitter scorn and persecution of those who do not fulfil them,—are but illustrations of this process.

All the prophets and saviours of the world have been for the Spirit as against the letter—and the teachings of all religions have in their turn become literalised and fossilised! Perhaps there has been no greater anti-literal than Jesus of Nazareth, and yet perhaps no religion has become more a thing of forms and dogmas than that which passes under his name. Even his counsels of Gentleness and Love—which one would indeed have thought might escape this process—have been corrupted into mere prescriptions of morality, such as those of Non-resistance, and of philanthropic Altruism.

It seems strange indeed that so great a man as Tolstoy should have lent himself to this process—to the pinning down of the excellent spirit of Christ (who by the way was man enough to drive the money-changers out of the Temple) to a mere formula, as one might pin a dragon-fly to a labelled card—Thou shalt not use Violence: thou shalt not Resist! And all the while to cleave to a formula only means to admit the evil in some other shape which the formula does not meet—to forswear the stick only means to resort to rebuke and sarcasm in self-defence, which may inflict more pain and a deeper scar, and in some cases more injury, than the stick; or if self-defence in any shape is quite forsworn then that only means to resign and abandon one's place in the world completely.

And the same of the somewhat spooney Altruism, which was at one time much recommended as the maxim of conduct. For all the while it is notorious that the specially altruistic people are as a rule painfully dull and uninteresting, and afford far less life and charm to those around them than many who are frankly egotistic; and so by following a formula of Altruism it seems they wreck the very work they set before themselves to do—namely, that of making the world brighter!

Against these weaknesses of Christianity Nietzsche was a healthy reaction. It was he insisted on the terms "good" and "bad" being restored to their proper use, as terms of relation—"good" for what? "bad" for what? But his reaction against maudlin altruism and non-resistance led him towards a pitfall in the opposite direction, towards the erection of the worship of Force almost into a formula, Thou shalt use Violence, thou shalt Resist. His contempt for the feeble and the spooney and the knock-kneed and the humbug is very delightful and entertaining, and, as I say, healthy in the sense of reaction; but one does not get a very clear idea what the strength which Nietzsche glorifies is for, or whither it is going to lead. His blonde beasts and his laughing lions may represent the Will to Power; but Nietzsche seems to have felt, himself, that this latter alone would not suffice, and so he passed on to his discovery or invention of the Beyond-man,—i.e. of a childlike being who, without argument, affirms and creates, and before whom institutions and conventions dissolve, as it were of their own accord.[45] This was a stroke of genius; but even so it leaves doubtful what the relation of such Beyond-men to each other may be, and whether, if they have no common source of life, their actions will not utterly cancel and destroy each other.

The truth is that Nietzsche never really penetrated to the realisation of that farther state of consciousness in which the deep underlying unity of man with Nature and his fellows is perceived and felt. He saw apparently that there is a life and an inspiration of life beyond all technical good and evil. But for some reason—partly because of the natural difficulty of the subject, partly perhaps because the Eastern outlook was uncongenial to his mind—he never found the solution which he needed; and his outline of the Superman remains cloudy and uncertain, vague and variously interpreted by followers and critics.