There are many other associations of thought-patterns, feeling-patterns and action-patterns which have seemed in their time inevitable and natural, but which at other times or in other places have not existed at all. Thus, art has sometimes been associated with religion (as in Europe during the Middle Ages or among the ancient Mayas); sometimes, on the other hand, it has not been associated with religion (as among certain tribes of American Indians and among Europeans during the last three centuries). Similarly commerce, agriculture, sex, eating have sometimes been associated with religion, sometimes not. There are some societies where almost all activities are associated with negative emotions, where it is socially correct and morally praiseworthy to feel chronically suspicious, envious and malevolent. There are others in which it is no less right to feel positive emotions. And so on, almost indefinitely.
Now, it may be that progressiveness and aggressiveness are associated in the same sort of arbitrary and fortuitous way as are the various pairs of thought-habits and action-habits mentioned above. It may be, on the other hand, that this association has its roots in the depth of human psychology and that it will prove very difficult or even impossible to separate these two conjoined tendencies. This is a matter about which one cannot dogmatize. All that one can say with certainty is that the association need not be quite so complete as it is at present.
Let us sum up and draw our conclusions. First, then, we see that ‘unchanging human nature’ is not unchanging, but can be, and very frequently has been, profoundly changed. Second, we see that many, perhaps most, of the observed associations of behaviour-patterns in human societies can be dissociated and their elements reassociated in other ways. Third, we see that large-scale manipulations of the social structure can bring about certain ‘changes in human nature,’ but that these changes are rarely fundamental. They do not abolish evil; they merely deflect it into other channels. But if the ends we all desire are to be achieved, there must be more than a mere deflection of evil; there must be suppression at the source, in the individual will. Hence it follows that large-scale political and economic reform is not enough. The attack upon our ideal objective must be made, not only on this front, but also and at the same time on all the others. Before considering what will have to be done on these other fronts, I must describe in some detail the strategy and tactics of attack upon the front of large-scale reform.
Chapter IV SOCIAL REFORM AND VIOLENCE
‘The more violence, the less revolution.’ This dictum of Barthélemy de Ligt’s is one on which it is profitable to meditate.[3]
To be regarded as successful, a revolution must be the achievement of something new. But violence and the effects of violence—counter-violence, suspicion and resentment on the part of the victims and the creation, among the perpetrators, of a tendency to use more violence—are things only too familiar, too hopelessly unrevolutionary. A violent revolution cannot achieve anything except the inevitable results of violence, which are as old as the hills.
Or let us put the matter in another way. No revolution can be regarded as successful if it does not lead to progress. Now, the only real progress, to quote Dr. Marett’s words once more, is progress in charity. Is it possible to achieve progress in charity by means that are essentially uncharitable? If we dispassionately consider our personal experience and the records of history, we must conclude that it is not possible. But so strong is our desire to believe that there is a short cut to Utopia, so deeply prejudiced are we in favour of people of similar opinions to our own, that we are rarely able to command the necessary dispassion. We insist that ends which we believe to be good can justify means which we know quite certainly to be abominable; we go on believing, against all the evidence, that these bad means can achieve the good ends we desire.
The extent to which even highly intelligent people can deceive themselves in this matter is well illustrated by the following words from Professor Laski’s little book on Communism. ‘It is patent,’ he writes, ‘that without the iron dictatorship of the Jacobins, the republic would have been destroyed.’ To anyone who candidly considers the facts it seems even more patent that it was precisely because of the iron dictatorship of the Jacobins that the republic was destroyed. Iron dictatorship led to foreign war and reaction at home. War and reaction between them resulted in the creation of a military dictatorship. Military dictatorship resulted in yet more wars. These wars served to intensify nationalistic sentiment throughout the whole of Europe. Nationalism became crystallized in a number of new idolatrous religions dividing the world.
(The Nazi creed, for example, is already implicit and even, to a great extent, fully explicit in the writings of Fichte.) To nationalism we owe military conscription at home and imperialism abroad. ‘Without the iron dictatorship of the Jacobins,’ says Professor Laski, ‘the republic would have been destroyed.’ A fine sentiment! Unfortunately there are also the facts. The first significant fact is that the republic was destroyed and that the iron dictatorship of the Jacobins was the prime cause of its destruction. Nor was this the only piece of mischief for which the Jacobin dictatorship was responsible. It led to the futile waste and slaughter of the Napoleonic wars; to the imposition in perpetuity of military slavery, or conscription, upon practically all the countries of Europe; and to the rise of those nationalistic idolatries which threaten the existence of our civilization. A fine record! And yet would-be revolutionaries persist in believing that, by methods essentially similar to those employed by the Jacobins, they will succeed in producing such totally dissimilar results as social justice and peace between nations.
Violence cannot lead to real progress unless, by way of compensation and reparation, it is followed by non-violence, by acts of justice and good will. In such cases, however, it is the compensatory behaviour that achieves the progress, not the violence which that behaviour was intended to compensate. For example, in so far as the Roman conquest of Gaul and the British conquest of India resulted in progress (and it is hard to say whether they did, and quite impossible to guess whether an equal advance might not have been achieved without those conquests), that progress was entirely due to the compensatory behaviour of Roman and British administrators after the violence was over. Where compensatory good behaviour does not follow the original act of violence, as was the case in the countries conquered by the Turks, no real progress is achieved. (In cases where violence is pushed to its limits and the victims are totally exterminated, the slate is wiped clean and the perpetrators of violence are free to begin afresh on their own account. This was the way in which, rejecting Penn’s humaner alternative, the English settlers in North America solved the Red Indian problem. Abominable in itself, this policy is practicable only in underpopulated countries.)
The longer violence has been used, the more difficult do the users find it to perform compensatory acts of non-violence. A tradition of violence is formed; men come to accept a scale of values according to which acts of violence are reckoned heroic and virtuous. When this happens, as it happened, for example, with the Vikings and the Tartars, as the dictators seem at present to be trying to make it happen with the Germans, Italians and Russians, there is small prospect that the effects of violence will be made good by subsequent acts of justice and kindness.
From what has gone before it follows that no reform is likely to achieve the results intended unless it is, not only well intentioned, but also opportune. To carry through a social reform which, in the given historical circumstances, will create so much opposition as to necessitate the use of violence is criminally rash. For the chances are that any reform which requires violence for its imposition will not only fail to produce the good results anticipated, but will actually make matters worse than they were before.
Violence, as we have seen, can produce only the effects of violence; these effects can be undone only by compensatory non-violence after the event; where violence has been used for a long period, a habit of violence is formed and it becomes exceedingly difficult for the perpetrators of violence to reverse their policy. Moreover, the results of violence are far-reaching beyond the wildest dreams of the often well-intentioned people who resort to it. The ‘iron dictatorship’ of the Jacobins resulted, as we have seen, in military tyranny, twenty years of war, conscription in perpetuity for the whole of Europe, the rise of nationalistic idolatry.
In our own time the long-drawn violence of Tsarist oppression and the acute, catastrophic violence of the world War produced the ‘iron dictatorship’ of the Bolsheviks. The threat of world-wide revolutionary violence begot Fascism; Fascism produced rearmament; rearmament has
