Such, then, are the ideals for society and for the individual which were originally formulated nearly three thousand years ago in Asia, and which those who have not broken with the tradition of civilization still accept. In relation to these ideals, what are the relevant contemporary facts? They may be summed up very briefly. Instead of advancing towards the ideal goal, most of the peoples of the world are rapidly moving away from it.
‘Real progress,’ in the words of Dr. R. R. Marett, ‘is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.’ In the course of recorded history real progress has been made by fits and starts. Periods of advance in charity have alternated with periods of regression. The eighteenth century was an epoch of real progress. So was most of the nineteenth, in spite of the horrors of industrialism, or rather because of the energetic way in which its men of good will tried to put a stop to those horrors. The present age is still humanitarian in spots; but where major political issues are concerned, it has witnessed a definite regression in charity.
Thus, eighteenth-century thinkers were unanimous in condemning the use of torture by the State. Not only is torture freely used by the rulers of twentieth-century Europe; there are also theorists who are prepared to justify every form of State-organized atrocity, from flogging and branding to the wholesale massacre of minorities and general war. Another painfully significant symptom is the equanimity with which the twentieth-century public responds to written accounts and even to photographs and moving pictures of slaughter and atrocity. By way of excuse it may be urged that, during the last twenty years, people have supped so full of horrors, that horrors no longer excite either their pity for the victims or their indignation against the perpetrators. But the fact of indifference remains; and because nobody bothers about horrors, yet more horrors are perpetrated.
Closely associated with the regression in charity is the decline in men’s regard for truth. At no period of the world’s history has organized lying been practised so shamelessly or, thanks to modern technology, so efficiently or on so vast a scale as by the political and economic dictators of the present century. Most of this organized lying takes the form of propaganda, inculcating hatred and vanity, and preparing men’s minds for war. The principal aim of the liars is the eradication of charitable feelings and behaviour in the sphere of international politics.
Another point; charity cannot progress towards universality unless the prevailing cosmology is either monotheistic or pantheistic—unless there is a general belief that all men are ‘the sons of God’ or, in Indian phrase, that ‘thou art that.’ tat tvam asi. The last fifty years have witnessed a great retreat from monotheism towards idolatry. The worship of one God has been abandoned in favour of the worship of such local divinities as the nation, the class and even the deified individual.
Such is the world in which we find ourselves—a world which, judged by the only acceptable criterion of progress, is manifestly in regression. Technological advance is rapid. But without progress in charity, technological advance is useless. Indeed, it is worse than useless. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
How can the regression in charity through which we are living, and for which each one of us is in some measure responsible, be halted and reversed? How can existing society be transformed into the ideal society described by the prophets? How can the average sensual man and the exceptional (and more dangerous) ambitious man be transformed into those non-attached beings, who alone can create a society significantly better than our own? These are the questions which I shall try to answer in the present volume.
In the process of answering them, I shall be compelled to deal with a very great variety of subjects. Inevitably; for human activity is complex, human motivation exceedingly mixed. By many writers, this multifariousness of men’s thoughts, opinions, purposes and actions is insufficiently recognized. Over-simplifying the problem, they prescribe an over-simplified solution. Because of this I have thought it necessary to preface the main arguments of the book with a discussion of the nature of explanation. What do we mean when we say that we have ‘explained’ a complex situation? What do we mean when we talk of one event being the cause of another? Unless we know the answer to these questions, our speculations regarding the nature and cure of social disorders are likely to be incomplete and one-sided.
Our discussion of the nature of explanation brings us to the conclusion that causation in human affairs is multiple—in other words, that any given event has many causes. Hence it follows that there can be no single sovereign cure for the diseases of the body politic. The remedy for social disorder must be sought simultaneously in many different fields. Accordingly, in the succeeding chapters, I proceed to consider the most important of these fields of activity, beginning with the political and economic and proceeding to the fields of personal behaviour. In every case I suggest the kind of changes that must be made if men are to realize the ideal ends at which they all profess to be aiming. This involves us, incidentally, in a discussion of the relation of means to ends. Good ends, as I have frequently to point out, can be achieved only by the employment of appropriate means. The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
These chapters, from the second to the twelfth, constitute a kind of practical cookery book of reform. They contain political recipes, economic recipes, educational recipes, recipes for the organization of industry, of local communities, of groups of devoted individuals. They also contain, by way of warning, descriptions of the way things ought not to be done—recipes for not realizing the ends one professes to desire, recipes for stultifying idealism, recipes for paving hell with good intentions.
This cookery book of reform culminates in the last section of the book, in which I discuss the relation existing between the theories and the practices of reformers on the one hand and the nature of the universe on the other. What sort of world is this, in which men aspire to good and yet so frequently achieve evil? What is the sense and point of the whole affair? What is man’s place in it and how are his ideals, his systems of values, related to the universe at large? It is with such questions that I shall deal in the last three chapters. To the ‘practical man’ they may seem irrelevant.
But in fact they are not. It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong; and it is in the light of our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions. That is why it has seemed to me necessary to round off my cookery book of practical recipes with a discussion of first principles. The last three chapters are the most significant and, even from the purely practical point of view, the most important in the book.
Chapter II THE NATURE OF EXPLANATION
About the goal, I repeat, there has for long been agreement. We know what sort of society we should like to be members of and what sort of men and women we should like to be. But when it comes to deciding how to reach the goal, the babel of conflicting opinions breaks loose. Quot homines, tot sententiae. Where ultimate ends are concerned, the statement is false; in regard to means, it is nearly true. Every one has his own patent medicine, guaranteed to cure all the ills of humanity; and so passionate, in many cases, is belief in the efficacy of the panacea that men are prepared, on its behalf, to kill and to be killed.
That men should cling so tenaciously to the dogmas they have invented or accepted, and that they should hate so passionately the people who have invented or accepted other dogmas, are facts that can be accounted for only too easily. Certainty is profoundly comforting, and hatred pays a high dividend in emotional excitement. It is less easy, however, to understand why such exclusive doctrines should ever arise, why the intellect, even when unblinded by passion, should be ready and even eager to regard them as true. It is worth while, in this context, to devote a few lines to the nature of explanation. In what does the process of explaining consist? And, in any given explanation, what is the quality which we find intellectually satisfying? These questions have been treated with great acuteness and an enormous wealth of learning by the late Emile Meyerson, from whose writings I have, in the ensuing paragraphs, freely borrowed.[1]
The human mind has an invincible tendency to reduce the diverse to the identical. That which
