Towards the Great Peace

by Ralph Adams Cram

Of course the result of this is that men are forced into unnatural associations, many of which are purely artificial and all of which are unsound. It is true that the trade union, the professional society, the club are natural and wholesome expressions of common and intimate interests, but they acquire a false value when they are not balanced and regulated by a prior and more compelling association which cuts, not vertically but horizontally through society, that is to say, the neighbourhood or community group. The harsh and perilous division into classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of "class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money, manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a human unit or an essential factor in a workable society.

It is hard to see just how we are to re-fashion this impossible society in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the greatest achievement of man. It is practically impossible for any one today to conceive of a world where great empires, populous cities, mills and factories and iron-works in their thousands, and employing their millions through their billions of capitalization, where the stock exchange and the great banking houses and the insurance companies and the department stores, the nation-wide trade unions and professional associations and educational foundations and religious corporations, do not play their predominant part. Nevertheless they are an aggregation of false values, their influence is anti-social, and their inherent weakness was so obviously revealed through the War and the Peace that it has generally escaped notice.

There seem but two ways in which the true scale of life can be restored; either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos, and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as we always can from the annals of monasticism, build our small communities of the right shape and scale in the very midst of the imperial states themselves, so becoming perhaps the leavening of the lump. This of course is what the monasteries of St. Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already begun.

The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is that they are infected with the very imperialism in scale that has produced the conditions they would redeem. Socialism is now as completely materialistic as the old capitalism, and as international in its scope and methods. Anarchy is becoming imperial and magnificent in its operations. Secular reformers must organize vast committees with intricate ramifications and elaborate systems supported by "drives" for money which must run into at least seven figures, and by vast and efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising. A good deal can be bought this way, but it will not "stay bought," for no reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it will be by the cumulative process.

I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for it vitiates every institution we have. Here, where I am dealing with society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations of every sort. It will reverse the whole system of specialization and the segregation and unification of industries and the division of labour. It will build upward from the primary unit of the family, through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying force which links together a federation of states. In general it will be a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent, and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common lands in England.

The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and towards the unit of human scale. In every case however, the introduction of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature. Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the elimination of private property and the negation of sacred individuality. Its institution implies an almost immediate descent into anarchy with a sequent dictatorship and autocracy, for it is the reversal of the foundation laws of life. Such reversals cannot last, nothing can last that is inimical to flourishing life; it may triumph for a day but life itself sloughs it off as a sound body rids itself of some foreign substance through the sore that festers, bursts and, the septic conditions done away with, heals itself and returns to normal.

Now the inhuman scale has produced one set of septic conditions in society while what is commonly called "democratization" has produced another. We have a bloated society, but also we have one in which a false theory has grown up and been put in practice, in accordance with which an uniformity of human kind has been assumed which never has existed and does not now, and in the effort to enforce this false theory the achievement of distinction has been impeded, leadership discouraged and leaders largely eliminated, the process of leveling downward carried to a very dangerous point, the sane and vital organization of society brought near to an end and a peculiarly vicious scale and standard of social values established. I have urged the return to human scale in human associations, but this does not imply any admixture of communism, which is its very antithesis, still less does it permit the retention of the theoretical uniformity and the unescapable leveling process of so-called democracy.

Before the law all men are equal, that is, they are entitled to even-handed justice. Before God all men are equal, that is, they are granted charity and mercy which transcends the law, also they possess immortal souls of equal value. Here their equality stops. In every other respect they vary in character, capacity, intelligence and potentiality for development along any or all these lines, almost beyond the limits of computation. A sane society will recognize this, it will organize itself accordingly, it will deny to one what it will concede to another, it will foster emulation and reward accomplishment, and it will add another category to those in which all men are equal, that is, the freest scope for advancement, and the greatest facility for passing from one social group into another, the sole test being demonstrated merit.

I am prepared at this point to use the word "aristocracy" for we have the thing even now, only in its worst possible form. The word itself means two things: a government by the best and most able citizens and, to quote a standard dictionary "Persons noted for superiority in any character or quality, taken collectively." There is no harm here, but the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the touchstones to recognition and acceptance. The latter are the antithesis of Christianity and common sense, the former is consonant with both and, paradoxical as it may seem, it is also the fulfilling of the ideals of a real democracy, since its honours and distinctions imply service, its relations with those in other estates are reciprocal, it is not a closed caste but the prize of meritorious achievement, and it is therefore equality of opportunity, utilization of ability and the abolition of privilege without responsibility.

Men are forever and gloriously struggling onward towards better things, but there is always the gravitational pull of original sin which scientists denominate "reversion to type." The saving grace in the individual is the divine gift of faith, hope and charity implanted in every soul. These every man must guard and cherish for they are the way of advancement in character. But society is man in association with men, in a sense a new and complex personality, and the same qualities are as necessary here as in the individual. Society, like man, may be said to possess body, soul and spirit, and it must function vitally along all these lines if it is to maintain a normal and wholesome existence. Somewhere there must be something that achieves high ideals of honour, chivalry, courtesy; that maintains right standards of comparative value, and that guards the social organism as a whole from the danger of surrender to false and debased standards, to plausible demagogues, and to mob-psychology.