The ‘heads’ of pointlessness has as its ‘tails’ idolatrous nationalism and communism. Our world oscillates from a neurasthenia that welcomes war as a relief from boredom to a mania that results in war being made. The cure for both these fearful maladies is the same—the inculcation of a cosmology more nearly corresponding to reality than either mechanomorphism or the grotesque philosophies underlying the nationalistic and communistic idolatries. This cosmology and the ethical consequences of its acceptance will be discussed in detail in a later chapter. My next task is to deal with the part that can and must be played by private individuals in the carrying through of desirable changes.
Chapter X INDIVIDUAL WORK FOR REFORM
We have seen that the only effective methods for carrying out large-scale social reforms are non-violent methods. Violence produces only the results of violence and the attempt to impose reforms by violent methods is therefore foredoomed to failure. The only cases in which violent methods succeed are those where initial violence is rapidly followed by compensatory acts of justice, humaneness, sympathetic understanding and the like. This being so, mere common sense demands that we shall begin with non-violence and not run the risk of stultifying the whole process of reform by using violence, even as an initial measure.
Non-violent methods of reform are likely to succeed only where a majority of the population is either actively in favour of the reform in question, or at least not prepared actively to oppose it. Where the majority is not either favourable or passively neutral to the reform, violent attempts to impose it are certain to lead to failure.
In communities ruled by hereditary monarchs it has sometimes happened that an exceptionally enlightened king has tried to make reforms which, though intrinsically desirable, did not happen to be desired by the mass of his people. Akhnaton’s is a case in point. Such efforts at reform made by rulers too far advanced to be understood by their subjects are likely to meet with partial or complete failure.
In countries where rulers are chosen by popular vote there is no likelihood that startlingly novel and unacceptable reforms will be initiated by the central authority. In such countries the movement for reform must always start at the periphery and move towards the centre. Private individuals, either alone or in groups, must formulate the idea of reform and must popularize it among the masses. When it has become sufficiently popular, it can be incorporated into the legislation of the community.
In the modern world, as we have seen, the great obstacle to all desirable change is war. The cardinal, the indispensable reform is therefore a reform in the present policy of national communities in regard to one another. To-day all nations conduct their foreign policy on militaristic principles. Some are more explicitly, more noisily and vulgarly militaristic than others; but all, even those that call themselves democratic and pacific, consistently act upon the principles of militarism.
It is hardly conceivable that any desirable reform in this direction should be initiated by those who now hold political power. The movement of reform must therefore come from private individuals. It is the business of these private individuals to persuade the majority of their fellows that the policy of pacifism is preferable to that of militarism. When and only when they have succeeded, it will become possible to change those militaristic national policies which make the outbreak of another war all but inevitable and which, by doing this, hold up the whole process of desirable change.
It may be objected that the majority of men and women all over the world ardently desire peace and that therefore there is no need for private individuals to make propaganda in favour of peace. In reply to this I may quote a profoundly significant phrase from The Imitation, ‘All men desire peace, but very few desire those things which make for peace.’ The truth is, of course, that one can never have something for nothing. The voters in every country desire peace.
But hardly any of them are prepared to pay the price of peace. In the modern world the ‘things that make for peace’ are disarmament, unilateral if necessary; renunciation of exclusive empires; abandonment of the policy of economic nationalism; determination in all circumstances to use the methods of non-violence; systematic training in such methods. How many of the so-called peace-lovers of the world love these indispensable conditions of peace? Few indeed. The business of private individuals is to persuade their fellows that the things that make for peace are not merely useful as means to certain political ends, but are also valuable as methods for training individuals in the supreme art of non-attachment.
Individuals can work either alone or in association with other like-minded individuals. The work of the solitary individual is mainly preliminary to the work of the individuals in association. The solitary individual can undertake one or both of two important tasks: the task of intellectual clarification; the task of dissemination. He can be a theorist, a sifter of ideas, a builder of systems; or he can be a propagandist either of his own or others’ ideas. To put it crudely, he can be either a writer or a public speaker. Both these tasks are useful and even indispensable, but both, I repeat, are preliminary to the greater and more difficult task which must be accomplished by individuals in association.
Their task is to act upon the ideas of the solitary writer or speaker, to make practical applications of what were merely theories, to construct here and now small working models of the better society imagined by the prophets; to educate themselves here and now into specimens of those ideal individuals described by the founders of religions. Success in such a venture is doubly valuable. If the success is on a large scale, the existing social and economic order will have undergone a perceptible modification for the better. At the same time the demonstration that the new theories may be made to produce desirable results in practice will act as the best possible form of propaganda on their behalf. Most people find example more convincing than argument. The fact that a theory has actually worked is a better recommendation for its soundness than any amount of ingenious dialectics.
At almost every period and in almost every country private individuals have associated for the purpose of initiating desirable change and of working out for themselves a way of life superior to that of their contemporaries. In the preservation and development of civilization these groups of devoted individuals have played a very important part and are destined, I believe, to play a part no less important in the future. Let us briefly consider the lessons to be drawn from their history.
The first condition of success is that all the members of such associations should accept the same philosophy of life and should be whole-heartedly determined to take their full share in the work for whose accomplishment the association was founded. This condition was fulfilled, on many occasions and for considerable stretches of time, in the history of Christian and Buddhist monasticism. It was not fulfilled in the case of many of the political and religious communities founded in America during the nineteenth century. The experiment of New Harmony, for example, was foredoomed to failure, because the founder of the community, Robert Owen, made no attempt to exclude unsuitable collaborators. New Harmony was colonized by people of the most diverse opinions, a large proportion of whom were either failures, cranks or swindlers. Its life was consequently short and squalid; its conclusion ignominious. John Humphrey Noyes, on the other hand, was always careful to admit into his fold only those who had successfully undergone a long period of probation. That was one of the reasons why the Oneida Community prospered, materially and spiritually.
The next essential is that such associations should be founded for the pursuit of noble ends and in the name of a high ideal. The fact that a community demands considerable sacrifices from its members, imposes a strict discipline and exacts unremitting effort is not a disadvantage. On the contrary, if the goal is felt to be worth achieving, men and women are glad to make sacrifices. The Trappist rule attracted the greatest number of postulants at the time when, under the abbacy of Dom Augustine de Lestrange, its observances had been made unprecedentedly strict. For those who accepted the Christian cosmology, the practice of such austerities as were imposed by the Trappist Rule was logical enough. For those with a different conception of ultimate reality, it would make no sense whatever. La Trappe is not cited here as an example to be imitated, but merely to show that even unnecessary and supererogatory hardships may be cheerfully accepted for God’s sake. And not for God’s sake only. In the contemporary world every political cause, from Communism to Nazism, has attracted its army of devotees—men and women who were ready to accept poverty and discomfort, incessant labour and the risk of imprisonment and sometimes even death. By those who are convinced that their cause is good, suffering is
