The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

Although this work does not embody any system of speculation about the universe, any creed or ’ism or large and abstruse set of principles, it must begin with a careful study of the phenomenon of revolt. Never before was there such an age of general and feverish restlessness; never was there such quaking of the deepest foundations of old institutions, such tottering of thrones and altars. From every intellectual centre the disturbing waves radiate. Round London, Berlin, and New York the rumbling is habitual. Already they perceive it in Tokyo and Peking and Constantinople. Tomorrow it will break on the ear in Teheran and Lhasa. The same questions are asked all over the earth. I have discussed them with millionaires at the Ritz and with great ladies at Claridge’s: with students in their universities and miners in their cottages: with learned professors in Rome or New York, and with notorious anarchists in obscure corners of Paris: with working girls in Melbourne, with Maoris in Wellington, with Chinese and Hindus and alert, full-blooded Africans. I have been invited to discuss them with a Polynesian princess and to lecture on them in Fiji, and I have had letters on them from Japanese settlers in British Columbia and negro tailors in British Guiana. The same questions everywhere: religious doctrines and political forms, education and industry, marriage and woman—almost every ideal and institution we have inherited. And the persistent note that resounds from continent to continent is the note of rebellion.

Very different feelings are inspired by this characteristic fact of modern life. To some it seems that this melting of the rigid framework of traditions is a welcome sign of spring and growth: that a long winter, which had slowed the blood of the earth and retarded the development of civilisation, is over at last, and little, shapeless, promising shoots of new ideals are rising from the loosened soil. To others it seems as if the binding fabric of our civilisation were weakened and we were in danger of returning to barbarism. Surely those old traditions did hold together the structure of our civilisation? And surely it is impossible to replace in a few generations the links of a planet-wide human society? The shades of dead Memphis and Babylon and Nineveh, of Athens and Rome and Bagdad, of Venice and Genoa and Florence, pass before their anxious eyes. In each case, they remind us, this same moral, social, and intellectual restlessness preceded death.

The inevitable specialism of our age adds to the confusion. Life is a connected whole, yet neither research nor reform can now be other than sectional. We devote ourselves to a candid study of some particular reform, and we find it a thoroughly reasonable proposal, a deduction from principles that we are bound to admit. But we have not had leisure to discover the indisputable principles of other reforms; and, when we hear the demand of change and progress rising on one side after another—in the Church, the State, the Home, the School, and so on—we remark sententiously that rebellion is becoming a fashion, that our generation is getting feverish or neurotic, that we must insist on authority somewhere. We repeat plausible phrases about the decay of respect and the wisdom of the race. We fasten on symptoms of disorder—without inquiring very closely whether the disorder is new or has been recently aggravated—and we conclude that conservatism is a social duty: that, at all events, we will admit reform only by the inch. We fancy ourselves the guardians of the palladium.

Quite apart from purely selfish motives, some of the closest observers of our age do differ radically in diagnosis and prescription. The same movements are symptoms of health to one man, symptoms of disease to another. Take the enlargement of divorce, the decay of clerical authority, the industrial revolt, or the rebellion of women. There seems to be no common ground left on which the observers may meet with any hope of agreement. The old religious and political standards will now hopelessly divide any roomful of educated men and women. You propose, perhaps, to fall back on moral standards—the ground on which “all reasonable people” unite—and someone quotes against you half a dozen of the most brilliant writers of Europe and America. Hopes and lamentations, inspired by precisely the same facts of life, mingle confusedly in our literature, and men and women of large heart and little leisure seem to be condemned to a sterile perplexity or a selfish absorption in business and pleasure. What, at all events, is the meaning or purpose of life? And how is this spreading rebellion related to it?

First let us examine the grounds of the very distressing forecasts of the Conservative. In the vast majority of cases that are worth examining one will find that the pessimism has not very firm foundations. Your dismal prophet is usually a man with an ancient gospel which we are discarding, or a new gospel which does not attract us. The appeal to the modern world, he realises, must be utilitarian: he must show us that, without him, we perish. So he recklessly heaps up before our eyes statistics of crime and consumption and lunacy and alcohol: he makes weird and totally inaccurate statements about France or the United States or some other country: he marshals the shades of dead empires—which seem to have died of a wonderful complication of modern maladies—before us with appropriate rhetoric.

Now to this kind of conservatism, which says that we are decaying, I reply that, on every positive test of national health, we are more flourishing than we ever were before. Dark as the earth is, it was never brighter than it is to-day, or more full of promise for the morrow. The war is not inconsistent with this general statement, as I will show later. A failure to advance in one direction does not alter the fact that we have advanced in a hundred others; and the gross behaviour of one nation does not destroy the gain that half a dozen other nations were ready to behave with a new decency in warfare. As to that “lesson of history” which is stridently read to us by men and women whose command of history is not otherwise conspicuous, I would remind them that the civilisation of dead empires always reached its height just before, or at the time when, they began to decay. Does anyone suggest that we ought not further to develop our civilisation lest we also decay? However, I have sufficiently discussed elsewhere this nonsense about “laws of history”; and I will show later that these older empires decayed, not because of their high development of intellect and fine sentiment, which leads to revolt, but from the natural defect of those very institutions which our conservatives defend.

We are not decaying. England is, for every class of its citizens, an immeasurably finer place to live in than it was a hundred years ago. I speak on the strength of a rigorous comparison of the moral and social life of England a century ago with that of modern England, but I cannot give the facts here. Let it suffice to make plain that I have no sympathy with pessimists and preachers of penance and austerity, of any school. The world improves, and improves more rapidly than it ever did before. What stirs one’s impatience is the consciousness that we could, and do not, move with infinitely greater speed: that we tolerate abuses and shams which insult our intelligence and mock our professions of humanity.

What, then, are the grounds of the optimistic view of this widespread revolt? Let us admit that conservatism, in the sense of an attitude of caution, is a virtue. We would not try unknown drugs on the life of an individual, and we ought not to apply untried recipes to the life of forty million people. Yet it is precisely from this medical world that we gather valuable hints of progress. By two centuries of sober and heroic labour the physician has brought the greater part of our maladies under control. He would tell you, in private, that he has a hope of eventually being able to check all disease and prolong life. The laissez-faire attitude is unknown in medical science. It is unknown in our technical and commercial worlds. We have made stupendous progress, not by conserving, but by innovating: not asking if a machine or a system worked well, but if we could devise a better. In science—in all on which we pride ourselves in modern civilisation—we have followed the progressive principle: we have cultivated revolt. Since we began to do so, we have raised the level of our civilisation in each generation.

It is therefore not surprising that many are asking whether we ought not to extend the progressive principle to our religions, moralities, politics, economic systems, schools, domestic and civic and social traditions. It is, in other words, quite natural that there should be a demand for, not one reform only, but a hundred reforms, in modern life. We are justly, wisely proud of what is distinctive and superior in our civilisation: advance, better organisation, economy of waste, greater efficiency. The mystery is that so many would restrict this improvement to what they call the “lower” material departments of life, and keep a strict guard against the reformer at the frontiers of their spiritual or political world. The modern rebellion is a very logical effort to apply these very successful principles to as much of life as is susceptible of improvement.

This effort, further, coincides with the quite dominant and characteristic note of modern culture: evolution. We forget sometimes that until half a century ago Europe was oppressed by an entirely wrong view of the earth’s resources. Plato put a philosophic anathema on the earth. This material mass, he said, was a barren thing. Order, truth, beauty, love had to come to it, in fitful gleams, from a world beyond, over which man had no control. We know now that Plato was wrong. Order, truth, beauty, and love have developed on the earth—they are “sublunary” things—and man can control their sources and enlarge their proportions. They do not properly make men great: men make them great. They are as surely under our direction as are applied science and commerce and the franchise. We can cultivate them as we now cultivate pansies or sheep. It depends on us if lies and disorder and dishonour are to linger among us, or if truth and justice and beauty are to prevail.