Each of our historical chapters, then, will be not so much a review as a preface and a progression. The aim will be neither history nor criticism, but a kind of construction by proxy. It is a method that has its defects: it will, for example, sacrifice thoroughness of scholarship to present applicability, and will necessitate some repetitious gathering of the threads when we come later to our more personal purpose. But as part requital for this, we shall save ourselves from considering the past except as it is really present, except as it is alive and nourishingly significant to-day. And from each study we shall perhaps make some advance towards our final endeavor,—the mutual elucidation of the social problem and philosophy.
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOCRATIC ETHIC
I
History as Rebarbarization
HISTORY is a process of rebarbarization. A people made vigorous by arduous physical conditions of life, and driven by the increasing exigencies of survival, leaves its native habitat, moves down upon a less vigorous people, conquers, displaces, or absorbs it. Habits of resolution and activity developed in a less merciful environment now rapidly produce an economic surplus; and part of the resources so accumulated serve as capital in a campaign of imperialist conquest. The growing surplus generates a leisure class, scornful of physical activity and adept in the arts of luxury. Leisure begets speculation; speculation dissolves dogma and corrodes custom, develops sensitivity of perception and destroys decision of action. Thought, adventuring in a labyrinth of analysis, discovers behind society the individual; divested of its normal social function it turns inward and discovers the self. The sense of common interest, of commonwealth, wanes; there are no citizens now, there are only individuals.
From afar another people, struggling against the forces of an obdurate environment, sees here the cleared forests, the liberating roads, the harvest of plenty, the luxury of leisure. It dreams, aspires, dares, unites, invades. The rest is as before.
Rebarbarization is rejuvenation. The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization.
II
Philosophy as Disintegrator
THE rise of philosophy, then, often heralds the decay of a civilization. Speculation begins with nature and begets naturalism; it passes to man—first as a psychological mystery and then as a member of society—and begets individualism. Philosophers do not always desire these results; but they achieve them. They feel themselves the unwilling enemies of the state: they think of men in terms of personality while the state thinks of men in terms of social mechanism. Some philosophers would gladly hold their peace, but there is that in them which will out; and when philosophers speak, gods and dynasties fall. Most states have had their roots in heaven, and have paid the penalty for it: the twilight of the gods is the afternoon of states.