The Tyranny of Shams

by Joseph McCabe

Again therefore it is quite natural that we should hear a demand for a more extensive use of these powers of ours. The ships and ploughs and illuminants of a hundred years ago were made by the same men, or the same generations of men, as the religions and polities and moralities of the time. Why assume that the wisdom of the race was almost infallible in its spiritual and more difficult creations, but capable of enormous improvement on the material side? Conservatism, as anything more than an attitude of caution and prudence, has not a plausible air.

It is well also to regard the essential or characteristic line of human evolution. Apart from a few who are caught by a transient attempt to glorify instinct, we agree that the development of intelligence is one of the main sources of progress. Now this great and general awakening of intelligence in recent decades was bound to lead to a good deal of challenging of old traditions. That was precisely why the grandfathers of our bishops and peers opposed it. This higher intelligence of the race is now assisted in its decisions by a vastly greater and more accurate knowledge of man and the universe than our grandparents had; and the cheapening of literature dimly conveys this knowledge to millions who were left out of account when the traditional maps of life were drafted. The artisan discusses economics and theology. The Tonga Islander works out mathematical problems. I met a pure-blooded negro, with a European degree in philosophy, who told me that he had been forced to resign his chair in an African Mohammedan college because of his advanced ideas! Once I discussed with a group of miners industrial questions and religion from twelve to three in the morning, over pots of beer, in a little inn on the west coast of New Zealand, a hundred miles from anything like a town.

It is quite impossible for this spreading and better informed intelligence to bow humbly to the ideas of an earlier generation. It is going to think for itself, at all events. The old traditions must be revised throughout. Revision is not particularly dangerous except to errors. And already we have discovered that our political and religious and social oracles have been teaching a good deal of error. We begin to suspect that many things the divine right of kings and the eternal torment of the wicked may not be strictly accurate. We had better reconsider all our ways of living.

The second permanent strain of human evolution is the development of fine sentiment. The notion that the world is becoming more preponderantly intellectual, and that progress along our present lines means a limitation of sentiment, is inaccurate. We are working toward a healthy equilibrium. Sentimental people—those in whom a starving of intellect or disuse of muscle has surcharged the nervous system with morbid energy—will become more balanced, more intellectual. Ancient phrases and modern shibboleths will not be able to induce in them an instinctive warmth or agitation: they will have to pass the bar of reason before they reach what one might call the executive department of personality. But sentiment—deep and healthy feeling—has a precious use in life. The development of fine sentiment is as necessary as the cultivation of reason to the advance of man and of civilisation. We find this illustrated in all the older civilisations when they reach their highest point. We are picking up this strain of development to-day, and, since civilisation is now too widely diffused ever to perish again, we may assume that it will continue. Now this finer sentiment of our time demands the revision of our traditions and institutions no less imperiously than our higher intelligence does. We cannot leave behind the callousness and brutality of the Middle Ages and at the same time retain medieval practices. Intellectually and emotionally we are improving, and we must expect that, as our finer powers grow, there will be an increasing demand for revision and reconstruction. As Mr. Watson finely says:

“Guests of the ages, at tomorrow’s door Why shrink we? The long track behind us lies, The lamps gleam and the music throbs before, Bidding us enter; and I count him wise Who loves so well man’s noble memories He needs must love man’s nobler hopes yet more.”

This is, I think, a correct analysis of the innovating spirit of modern times. These general considerations to which it is due are quite beyond discussion. One feels that one is almost perpetrating platitudes in describing them. In fact, we would to-day find only a negligible number of people who oppose progress and innovation altogether. They usually oppose it in one or two departments of life, and quite warmly applaud it in others. A Socialist-Ritualist clergyman, for instance, fiercely demands advance in the economic field, yet fences his own department of life with the most rigorous warnings against innovating trespassers. A Rationalist-Individualist feels that the Church is the most obvious and urgent field for innovation, and at the same time guards his economic world against it with a flaming sword. A Suffragist pours fiery scorn on our obstinate conservatism in regard to the franchise, and then discovers an even more obstinate and entirely sacred conservatism when other women claim something more than political emancipation. It is this very general sectarianism which compels us to review the philosophy of revolt. These principles apply to the whole of life. All our institutions must be critically examined. The searchlight will not injure them if they are sound.

But how comes this sweetly reasonable philosophy to be converted into that passion for reform, that mordant and exasperating attack on institutions, which gives a special complexion to the literature of our time? For precisely the same reason as the invisible electric current leaps into incandescence when it passes through the sluggish particles of the filament of carbon or tungsten: resistance. The old faith is growing dim in our minds, and we have a suspicion that the thousands of men and women who, each night, terminate a life of pain or struggle or burden, wilt never see the sun rise again, on this or any other planet. We know that every decade in which we put off, with worn and hollow phrases, the abandonment of old errors, sees another generation pass away with just the same scars and traces of pain as those which scored the hearts of the dead two, and four, and six thousand years ago. We are vividly conscious that, quite apart from the myriads whose lives were embittered by poverty, or war, or a galling marriage-yoke, or the tyranny of some old tradition, there are further and vaster myriads who, whatever comfort they knew, might have been far happier, and now the sun has gone down on them for ever. There is real and very serious ground for impatience. The acreage of squalor and misery and grossness is still appalling, and on every land lies the crushing burden of militarism; and this fearful visitation of war reminds us of the incalculable periodic cost of our folly. The soil of the planet is wet with blood and tears, and a great part of this inhuman rain might be arrested. Much has been done: it is just that which stings. You cannot look back on the darkness from which the race has issued without perceiving that man has the power to transform the face of the earth: without entertaining a reasoned and coldly intellectual conviction that a day will yet dawn on this planet when laughter, as of children on May morning, will ring from pole to pole, and life, for all its work, will be a holiday. And when this reasoned and just belief encounters the sullen or selfish indifference of men and women to their creative power, their insensitiveness to the evils that they or their fellows endure, it glows and spits fire.

It is quite easy to apologise for strong language: much easier than to justify the general lack of it. And this impatience cannot be rebuked by reminding us that the remedy of some of our ills is very obscure; because the majority of people are indifferent to the very idea of reform. They shoulder burdens which they might at any moment lay aside for ever. Some of the greatest reforms that are pressed on us are not obscured by any serious controversy. Yet in every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and indifferent. Some even make a pretence of justifying their inertness. Why, they ask, should we stir at all? Is there such a thing as a duty to improve the earth? What is the meaning or purpose of life? Or has it a purpose?

One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece of controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness. People tell you that the conflict of science and religion—it would be better to say, the conflict of modern culture and ancient traditions—has robbed life of its plain significance. The men who, like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the modern outlook on life. Certainly modern culture—science, history, philosophy, and art—finds no purpose in life: that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man. A great chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine “a series of lucky accidents”—the chance blowing by the wind of certain chemicals into pools on the primitive earth—accounting for the first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.

But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us. If there is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose its own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not merely individual. In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a collective aim. I do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment—as genial and generous as possible—of individual variations for common good. Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste react on each individual. So we raise again, in the twentieth century, the old question of “the greatest good,” which men discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and the Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar Khayyám frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages and the opulent chambers of Cosmo de’ Medici.