Contemporary England is full of heroic ghost-smashers. Not all, of course, of our obstacles are phantasmal; the course of most individual lives is dotted even today with solid barriers. The smashing of them will provide large numbers of people with amusement for a considerable time to come. There are many others, however, who are already finding the flat racing a bore. (The statement is sweeping and unverifiable; one can only rely on one’s own observation and the evidence of contemporary fiction.) For most of these bored ones, it is true, habit has rendered a chronic ‘good time’ indispensably necessary. Confronted by an obstacle, whether external or internal, they suffer, genuinely. Which does not, however, prevent them from being bored when there is no obstacle and they are at liberty to run their race of gastronomic, sexual, and recreational indulgence unhindered and on the moral flat. ‘Il n’est pas bon d’être trop libre. Il n’est pas bon d’avoir toutes les nécessités.’ Pascal was a realistic psychologist.
Suicide and a nunnery were the winning-posts towards which Octave and Armance crawled and scrambled. Unsatisfactory goals; but the race itself—that was never dull. (Incidentally, such winning-posts were not the inevitable, or even the common conclusion of these bygone obstacle races. The suicide rate is far higher today than it was when Octave took his fatal dose of laudanum; madness and neurasthenia are much commoner.) The only complaint one could make against such a race as that which Stendhal describes is that it might prove to be too thrilling by half. For those who like a quiet life, its exaltations and agonies, its pains and raptures would be altogether too intense. But for those, and they are very many, who do not like a quiet life, how exceedingly satisfactory! Much more satisfactory, for example, than even the fastest flat racing.
The pleasurable excitements to be derived from outwardly and inwardly permitted self-indulgence are insipid compared with those which are to be got from laboriously advancing (or even on occasion not advancing) over psychological obstacles towards a desired goal. No reasonable hedonist can consent to be a flat racer. Abolishing obstacles, he abolishes half his pleasures. And at the same time he abolishes most of his dignity as a human being. For the dignity of man consists precisely in his ability to restrain himself from dashing away along the flat, in his capacity to raise obstacles in his own path.
In the past man constructed most of these obstacles out of materials furnished by religion; and even when the obstacles were essentially economic, he took care to drape them picturesquely in religious or religious-ethical tapestries. The economic obstacles still exist; but for most men they are slightly, and for some much, lower than in the past. At the same time most of the religious obstacles, together with many of the ethical obstacles which it was reasonable for believing Christians to place in their own path, have collapsed. Modern man finds himself in the position of those Israelites who were called upon to make bricks without straw; he may desire to bar his way with obstacles a little more elaborate and subtle than those which laws and the current conventions pile clumsily across his path—he may desire to do this, I repeat, but he finds at hand no convenient raw materials out of which to manufacture such obstacles: nothing, that is to say, but what he can draw out of his own being.
Yes, he must draw the materials for his obstacles entirely out of his own being, and he must find in the needs of his own being his sufficient reasons for setting up obstacles at all. He will take to obstacle racing, not because obstacle racing pleases God and flat racing does not, but because the having to climb over obstacles is in the last resort more pleasurable than trotting along on the flat, and because the turning back from self-erected obstacles is, in many cases, the most nobly and dignifiedly human thing a man can do. Henceforth the only acceptable ethic will be an ethic based upon a verifiable psychology; morals, it seems, are destined to become a branch of medicine. If there are to be obstacles (and more or less often, more or less clearly, we are all conscious of a desire for obstacles), it is for science to decide what they shall be like, how constructed, where placed.
And if the science is genuinely scientific, it will prescribe the setting up, here and there, of quite fantastic obstacles, it will deliberately queer the pitch of even the most legitimate and reasonable desires. ‘Here,’ it will say, ‘you must plant an irrational prohibition, here a preposterous taboo, here a whole series of frankly anti-biological impediments.’ Absurd; but then the human spirit is absurd, the whole process of living is utterly unreasonable. Absurdly enough, men like obstacles, cannot be spiritually healthy without them, feel bored and ill when they take to flat racing. A realistic science can only accept the fact and prescribe accordingly.
In the past, obstacles were often gratuitously high, numerous, and neck-breaking. Inevitably; for if you set up obstacles, not for your own sake, but with the idea of pleasing a deity, it is obvious that they will tend to assume the superhuman proportions of the being for whose sake they are created. Thought has a life of its own independent of its thinkers, and even, on occasion, hostile to it. A notion comes into existence and, obeying the laws of its notional being, proceeds to grow with all the irresistibleness and inevitability of a planted seed, or a crystal suspended in a saturated solution.
For a growing notion, human minds are simply receptacles of crystal-forming liquid, simply seed beds more or less well manured. In the end the grown thought often comes to dominate its thinkers, to impose upon them a way of life which it is not to their advantage to adopt. Sometimes the growing thought is susceptible of direct embodiment. The history of machinery is a case in point. The germinal notion of machines has grown in the minds, and been progressively embodied by the hands, of successive craftsmen-thinkers, until now machinery is our master and we are compelled to live, not as we would like to live, but as it commands. The history of the next few centuries will be, among other things, the history of men’s efforts to redomesticate the monster they have created, to reassert a human mastery over these bits of embodied thought at present so domineeringly rebellious.
The history of the notion of God is like that of the notion of machinery: once planted, it grew, it assumed an independent life of its own, and ended by imposing upon its cultivators (its ‘hosts,’ in the language of parasitology) a novel and at times disadvantageous mode of existence. But while the notion of machinery still goes on growing and embodying itself in ever new forms, the notion of God (of God, at any rate, as a personal being) has not only ceased to grow, but is even ceasing to live. The idea has been attacked at the root, with the result that all the vast superstructure of trunk, branches, and leaves has withered. One of the ramifications of this great religious tree was a morality of obstacles. God likes us to go in for obstacle racing and the more impossibly, the more superhumanly difficult the obstacles, the better pleased He is.
This was the religious theory. Its acceptance entailed, as I have said, a quite gratuitous trenching and barricading of the human race-course. It will be the business of science to discover a set of obstacles at least as excitingly and sportingly difficult as those which Octave and Armance had to surmount, but less dangerous to sanity and life, and, in spite of their absurdity, somehow compatible with an existence rationally organized for happiness and social progress. It remains to be seen how far, without the aid of a mythology, it will be successful.
The end
