Poor relief and medical aid were also supplied by the monasteries, and in most countries, almost up to the present day, there were no nurses except those who had been trained in a community of nuns. During the last two centuries most of the non-religious work performed by the religious communities has come to be done either by the state or by secular organizations in the way of ordinary business. Up till that time, however, neither the central authority nor the private business man was willing or able to undertake these jobs. We may risk a generalization and say that at any given moment of history it is the function of associations of devoted individuals to undertake tasks which clear-sighted people perceive to be necessary, but which nobody else is willing to perform.
In the light of this brief account of the salient characteristics of past communities we can see what future communities ought to be and do. We see that they should be composed of carefully selected individuals, united in a common belief and by fidelity to a shared ideal. We see that property and income should be held in common and that every member should assume unlimited liability for all other members. We see that disciplinary arrangements may be of various kinds, but that the most educative form of organization is the democratic. We see that it is advisable for communities to undertake practical work in addition to study, devotion and spiritual exercises, and that this practical work should be of a kind which other social agencies, public or private, are either unable or unwilling to perform.
Religious and philosophical beliefs and the methods by which the will can be trained and the mind enlightened will be dealt with in later chapters. Here I am concerned with the question of practical, mundane work.
All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed. Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made. Governments are not willing to undertake these tasks; indeed, in many countries they actively persecute those who even express the opinion that such tasks are worth performing. Private individuals are not prepared to undertake them in the ordinary way of business. If the work is to be done at all—and it is clear that, unless it is done, the state of the world is likely to become progressively worse—it must be done by associations of devoted individuals. To tend the sick, to relieve the poor, to teach without charge—these are all intrinsically excellent tasks. But for associations of devoted individuals to perform such tasks is now a work of supererogation and, in a certain sense, an anachronism. It was right that they should undertake them when nobody else was prepared to do so. If they undertake them now, when such tasks are being performed, very efficiently, by other agencies, they are wasting the energy of their devotion. They should use this energy to do what nobody else will do, to break the new ground that nobody else will break.
The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward. Let us consider the sort of things that would have to be done by associations of individuals devoted to the tasks of establishing peace and a new form of economic and social organization, in which the present obsession with money and power should not be given the opportunity of coming into existence.
The two tasks are, of course, closely related. Both capitalism and nationalism are fruits of the obsession with power, success, position. Economic competition and social domination are fundamentally militaristic. Within a society the various classes have their private imperialisms, just as the society as a whole has its own, essentially similar, public imperialism. And so on. Any association which tried to create a working model of a society unobsessed by the lust for power, and success would at the same time be creating a working model of a society living in peace and having no reasons for going to war. For the sake of convenience, I shall deal separately with the pacifistic and economic activities of our hypothetical association. In reality, however, the two classes of activity are closely related and complementary.
‘All men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace.’ The thing that makes for peace above all others is the systematic practice in all human relationships of non-violence. For full and recent discussions of the subject the reader is referred to Richard Gregg’s book, The Power of Non-Violence, and to works by Barthélemy de Ligt, notably Pour Vaincre sans Violence and La Paix Créatrice. In the paragraphs that follow I have tried to give a brief, but tolerably complete summary of the argument in favour of non-violence.
The inefficiency of violence has been discussed in an earlier chapter; but the subject is such an important one that I make no apology for repeating the substance of what was said in that place.
If violence is answered by violence, the result is a physical struggle. Now, a physical struggle inevitably arouses in the minds of those directly and even indirectly concerned in it emotions of hatred, fear, rage and resentment. In the heat of conflict all scruples are thrown to the winds, all the habits of forbearance and humaneness, slowly and laboriously formed during generations of civilized living, are forgotten. Nothing matters any more except victory. And when at last victory comes to one or other of the parties, this final outcome of physical struggle bears no necessary relation to the rights and wrongs of the case; nor, in most cases, does it provide any lasting settlement to the dispute.
The cases in which victory in war provides a more or less lasting settlement may be classified as follows:
(1) Victory results in a final settlement when the vanquished are completely or very nearly exterminated. This happened to the Red Men in North America and to the Protestant heretics in sixteenth-century Spain. That ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church’ is true only when a good many people survive martyrdom. If the number of martyrs is equal to the total number of the faithful (as it was in the case of the Japanese Christians during the seventeenth century), then no church will spring from their blood and the dispute between orthodox and heretic will have been settled once and for all. Modern wars are generally waged between densely populated countries. In such cases extermination is unlikely. One war tends therefore to beget another.
(2) Where the fighting forces are so small that the mass of the rival populations is left physically unharmed and psychologically unembittered by the conflict, the victory of one or other army may result in a permanent settlement. To-day entire populations are liable to be involved in their country’s battles. The relatively harmless wars waged according to an elaborate code of rules by small professional armies are things of the past.
(3) Victory may lead to a permanent peace, where the victors settle down among the vanquished as a ruling minority and are, in due course, absorbed by them. This does not apply to contemporary wars.
(4) Finally, victory may be followed by an act of reparation on the part of the victors. Reparation will disarm the resentment of the vanquished and lead to a permanent settlement. This was the policy pursued by the English after the Boer War. Such a policy is essentially an application of the principles of non-violence. The longer and more savage the conflict, the more difficult is it to make an act of reparation after victory. It was relatively easy for Campbell-Bannerman to be just after the Boer War; for the makers of the Versailles Treaty, magnanimity was psychologically all but impossible. In view of this obvious fact, common sense demands that the principles of non-violence should be applied, not after a war, when their application is supremely difficult, but before physical conflict has broken out and as a substitute for such a conflict. Non-violence is the practical consequence that follows from belief in the fundamental unity of all being. But, quite apart from the validity of its philosophical basis (which I shall discuss in a later chapter), non-violence can prove its value pragmatically—by working. That it can work in private life we have all had occasion to observe and experience. We have all seen how anger feeds upon answering anger, but is disarmed by gentleness and patience.
We have all known what it is to have our meannesses shamed by somebody else’s
