Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

Society, that is to say, the association in life of men, women and children, is the fundamental fact of life, and this is so whether the association is of the family, the school, the community, industry or government. Everything else is simply a series of forms, arrangements and devices by which society works, either for good or ill. Man makes or mars himself in and through society. He is responsible for his own soul, but if he sees only this and works directly for his soul's salvation, disregarding the society of which he is a part, he may lose it, whereas, if he is faithful to society and honourably plays his part as a social animal with a soul, he will very probably save it, even though he may for the time have quite ignored its existence. Man is a member of a family, a pupil under education, a worker and a citizen. In all these relationships he is a part of a social group; he is also a component part of the human race and linked in some measure to every other member thereof whether living or dead. Into every organization or institution in which he is involved during his lifetime—family, school, art or craft, trade union, state, church—enters the social equation. If society is ill organized either in theory or in practice, in any or all of its manifestations, then the engines or devices by which it operates will be impotent for good. Defective society cannot produce either a good fundamental law, a good philosophy, a good art, or any other thing. Conversely, these, when brought forth under an wholesome society, will decay and perish when society degenerates.

In its large estate, that is, comprehending all the minor groups, as a nation, a people or an era, society is always in a state of unstable equilibrium, tending either toward better or worse. It may indeed be of the very essence of human life, but it is a plant of tender growth and needs delicate nurture and jealous care; a small thing may work it irreparable injury. It may reach very great heights of perfection and spread over a continent, as during the European Middle Ages; it may sink to low depths with an equal dominion, as in the second dark ages of the nineteenth century. Sometimes little enclaves of high value hide themselves in the midst of degradation, as Venice and Ireland in the Dark Ages. Always, by the grace of God, the primary social unit, the family may, and frequently does, achieve and maintain both purity and beauty when the world without riots in ruin and profligacy.

I have taken the problem of the organization of society as the first to be considered, for it is fundamental. If society is of the wrong shape it does not matter in the least how intelligent and admirable may be the devices we construct for the operation of government or industry or education; they may be masterly products of human intelligence but they will not work, whereas on the other hand a sane, wholesome and decent society can so interpret and administer clumsy and defective instruments that they will function to admiration. A perfect society would need no such engines at all, but a perfect society implies perfect individuals, and I think we are now persuaded that a society of this nature is a purely academic proposition both now and in the calculable future. What we have to do is to take mankind as it is; made up of infinitely varied personalities ranging from the idiot to the "super-man"; cruel and compassionate, covetous and self-sacrificing, silly and erudite, cynical and emotional, vulgar and cultured, brutal and fastidious, shameful in their degradation and splendid in their honour and chivalry, and by the franchise of liberty and the binding of law, facilitate in every way the process whereby they themselves work out their own salvation. You cannot impose morality by statute or guarantee either character or intelligence by the perfection of the machine. Every institution, good or bad, is the result of growth from many human impulses, not the creation of autocratic fiat. But growth may be impeded, hastened, or suspended, and the most that can be done is to offer incentives to action, remove the obstacles to development, and establish conditions and influences that make more easy the finding of the right way.

Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours. In questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose, attacking precisely the two institutions which are today—or at all events have been until very recently—held in most conspicuous honour by the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature, and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.

The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited catastrophe. In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others of his kind.

The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God. There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man, perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale, though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the jackal and the python come again into their heritage.

Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more ignominious fall.

I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed 1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance, capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches "run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity agents."

Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local trade or craft guild and to his parish church: the essence of wholesome association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he knows personally—and preferably so well that he calls them all by their first names.

As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps, except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.