The Salvaging Of Civilisation Part 3

In my opening argument I have shown the connexion between the present intense political troubles of the world and more particularly of Europe, and the advance in mechanical knowledge during the past hundred and fifty years. I have shown that without a very drastic readjustment of political ideas and habits, there opens before Europe and the world generally, a sure prospect of degenerative conflicts; that without such a readjustment, our civilization has pa.s.sed its zenith and must continue the process of collapse that has been in progress since August, 1914.

Now this readjustment means an immediate conflict with existing patriotism. We have embarked here upon a discussion in which emotion and pa.s.sion seem quite unavoidable, the discussion of nationality. At the very outset we b.u.mp violently against patriotism as any European understands that word. And it is, I hold, impossible not to b.u.mp against European patriotisms. We cannot temporize with patriotism, as one finds it in Europe, and get on towards a common human welfare. The two things are flatly opposed. One or other must be sacrificed. The political and social muddle of Europe at the present time is very largely due to the attempt to compromise between patriotism and the common good of Europe.

Do we want to get rid of patriotism altogether?

I do not think we want to get rid of patriotism, and I do not think we could, even if we wanted to do so. It seems to be necessary to his moral life, that a man should feel himself part of a community, belonging to it, and it belonging to him. And that this community should be a single and lovable reality, inspired by a common idea, with a common fashion and aim.

But a point I have been trying to bring out throughout all this argument so far is this--that when a European goes to the United States of America he finds a new sort of state, materially bigger and materially less enc.u.mbered than any European state. And he also finds an intensely patriotic people whose patriotism isn't really the equivalent of a European patriotism. It is historically and practically a synthesis of European patriotisms. It is numerically bigger. It is geographically ten times as big. That is very important indeed from the point of view of this discussion. And it is synthetic; it is a thing made out of something smaller. People, I believe, talk of 100 per cent. Americans.

There is no 100 per cent. American except the Red Indian. There isn't a white man in the United States from whose blood a large factor of European patriotism hasn't been washed out to make way for his American patriotism.

Upon this fact of American patriotism, as a larger different thing than European patriotism, I build. The thing can be done. If it can be done in the Europeans and their descendants who have come to America, it can conceivably be done in the Europeans who abide in Europe. And how can we set about doing it?

America, the silent, comprehensive continent of America, did the thing by taking all the various nationalities who have made up her population and obliging them to live together.

Unhappily we cannot take the rest of our European nations now and put them on to a great virgin continent to learn a wider political wisdom.

There are no more virgin continents. Europe must stay where she is....

Now I am told it sometimes helps scientific men to clear up their ideas about a process by imagining that process reversed and so getting a view of it from a different direction. Let us then, for a few moments, instead of talking of the expansion and synthesis of patriotism in Europe, imagine a development of narrow patriotism in America and consider how that case could be dealt with.

Suppose, for instance, there was a serious outbreak of local patriotism in Kentucky. Suppose you found the people of Kentucky starting a flag of their own and objecting to what they would probably call the "vague internationalism" of the stars and stripes. Suppose you found them wanting to set up tariff barriers to the trade of the states round about them. Suppose you found they were preparing to annex considerable parts of the state of Virginia by force, in order to secure a proper strategic frontier among the mountains to the east, and that they were also talking darkly of their need for an outlet to the sea of their very own.

What would an American citizen think of such an outbreak? He would probably think that Kentucky had gone mad. But this, which seems such fantastic behaviour when we imagine it occurring in Kentucky, is exactly what is happening in Europe in the case of little states that are hardly any larger than Kentucky. They have always been so. They have not gone mad; if this sort of thing is madness then they were born mad. And they have never been cured. A state of affairs that is regarded in Europe as normal would be regarded in the United States as a grave case of local mental trouble.

And what would the American community probably do in such a case? It would probably begin by inquiring where Kentucky had got these strange ideas. They would look for sources of infection. Somebody must have been preaching there or writing in the newspapers or teaching mischief in the school. And I suppose the people of the United States would set themselves very earnestly to see that sounder sense was talked and taught to the people of Kentucky about these things.

Now that is precisely what has to be done in the parallel European case.

Everywhere in Europe there goes on in the national schools, in the patriotic churches, in the national presses, in the highly nationalized literatures, a unity-destroying propaganda of patriotism. The schools of all the European countries at the present time with scarcely an exception, teach the most rancid patriotism; they are centres of an abominable political infection. The children of Europe grow up with an intensity of national egotism that makes them, for all practical international purposes, insane. They are not born with it, but they are infected with it as soon as they can read and write. The British learn nothing but the glories of Britain and the British Empire; the French are, if possible, still more insanely concentrated on France; the Germans are just recovering from the bitter consequences of forty years of intensive nationalist education. And so on. Every country in Europe is its own _Sinn Fein_, cultivating that ugly and silly obsession of "ourselves alone." "Ourselves alone" is the sure guide to conflict and disaster, to want, misery, violence, degradation and death for our children and our children's children--until our race is dead.

The first task before us in Europe is, at any cost, to release our children from this nationalist obsession, to teach the ma.s.s of European people a little truthful history in which each one will see the past and future of his own country in their proper proportions, and a little truthful ethnology in which each country will get over the delusion that its people are a distinct and individual race. The history teaching in the schools of Europe is at the very core of this business.

But that is only, so to speak, the point of application of great complex influences, the influences that mould us in childhood, the teachings of literature, of the various religious bodies, and the daily reiteration of the press. Before Europe can get on, there has to be a colossal turnover of these moral and intellectual forces in the direction of creating an international mind. If that can be effected then there is hope for Europe and the Old World. If it cannot be effected, then certainly Europe will go down--with its flags nailed to its masts. We are on a sinking ship that only one thing can save. We have to oust these European patriotisms by some greater idea or perish.

What is this greater idea to be?

Now I submit that this greater idea had best be the idea of the World State of All Mankind.

I will admit that so far I have made a case only for teaching the idea of a United States of Europe in Europe. I have concentrated our attention upon that region of maximum congestion and conflict. But as a matter of fact there are no real and effective barriers and boundaries in the Old World between Europe and Asia and Africa. The ordinary Russian talks of "Europe" as one who is outside it. The European political systems flow over and have always overflowed into the greater areas to the east and south. Remember the early empires of Macedonia and Rome. See how the Russian language runs to the Pacific, and how Islam radiates into all three continents. I will not elaborate this case.

When you bear such things in mind, I think you will agree with me that if we are to talk of a United States of Europe, it is just as easy and practicable to talk of a United States of the Old World. And are we to stop at a United States of the Old World?

No doubt the most evident synthetic forces in America at the present time point towards some sort of pan-American unification. That is the nearest thing. That may come first.

But are we to contemplate a sort of dual world--the New World against the Old?

I do not think that would be any very permanent or satisfactory stopping-place. Why make two bites at a planet? If we work for unity on the large scale we are contemplating, we may as well work for world unity.

Not only in distance but in a score of other matters are London and Rome nearer to New York than is Patagonia, and San Francisco is always likely to be more interesting to j.a.pan than Paris or Madrid. I cannot see any reason for supposing that the mechanical drawing together of the peoples of the world into one economic and political unity is likely to cease--unless our civilization ceases. I see no signs that our present facilities for transport and communication are the ultimate possible facilities. Once we break away from current nationalist limitations in our political ideas, then there is no reason and no advantage in contemplating any halfway house to a complete human unity.

Now after what I have been saying it is very easy to explain why I would have this idea of human unity put before people's minds in the form of a World State and not of a League of Nations.

Let me first admit the extraordinary educational value of the League of Nations propaganda, and of the attempt that has been made to create a League of Nations. It has brought before the general intelligence of the world the proposition of a world law and a world unity that could not perhaps have been broached in any other way.

But is it a league of nations that is wanted?

I submit to you that the word "nations" is just the word that should have been avoided--that it admits and tends to stereotype just those conceptions of division and difference that we must at any cost minimize and obliterate if our species is to continue. And the phrase has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple a.s.sociation to command? It has no unity--no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman's club instead of loving his wife.

For the idea of Man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous a.s.sembly that will not mix--even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula. It is weak and compromising just where it should be strong--in defining its antagonism to separate national sovereignty. For that is what it aims at, if it means business. If it means business it means at least a super-state overriding the autonomy of existing states, and if it does not mean business then we have no use for it whatever.

It may seem a much greater undertaking to attack nationality and nationalism instead of patching up a compromise with these things, but along the line of independent nationality lies no hope of unity and peace and continuing progress for mankind. We cannot suffer these old concentrations of loyalty because we want that very loyalty which now, concentrates upon them to cement and sustain the peace of all the world.

Just as in the past provincial patriotisms have given place to national patriotisms, so now we need to oust these still too narrow devotions by a new unity and a new reigning idea, the idea of one state and one flag in all the earth.

The idea of the World State stands to the idea of the League of Nations much as the idea of the one G.o.d of Earth and Heaven stands to a Divine Committee composed of Wodin and Baal and Jupiter and Amon Ra and Mumbo Jumbo and all the other national and tribal G.o.ds. There is no compromise possible in the one matter as in the other. There is no way round. The task before mankind is to subst.i.tute the one common idea of an overriding world commonweal for the mult.i.tudinous ideas of little commonweals that prevail everywhere to-day. We have already glanced at the near and current consequences of our failure to bring about that subst.i.tution.

Now this is an immense proposal. Is it a preposterous one? Let us not shirk the tremendous scale upon which the foundations of a world state of all mankind must be laid. But remember, however great that task before us may seem, however near it may come to the impossible, nevertheless, in the establishment of one world rule and one world law lies the only hope of escape from an increasing tangle of wars, from social overstrain, and at last a social dissolution so complete as to end for ever the tale of mankind as we understand mankind.

Personally I am appalled by the destruction already done in the world in the past seven years. I doubt if any untravelled American can realize how much of Europe is already broken up. I do not think many people realize how swiftly Europe is still sinking, how urgent it is to get European affairs put back upon a basis of the common good if civilization is to be saved.

And now, as to the immensity of this project of subst.i.tuting loyalty to a world commonweal for loyalty to a single egotistical belligerent nation. It is a project to invade hundreds of millions of minds, to attack certain ideas established in those minds and either to efface those ideas altogether or to supplement and correct them profoundly by this new idea of a human commonweal. We have to get not only into the at present intensely patriotic minds of Frenchmen, Germans, English, Irish and j.a.panese, but into the remote and difficult minds of Arabs and Indians and into the minds of the countless millions of China. Is there any precedent to justify us in hoping that such a change in world ideas is possible?

I think there is. I would suggest that the general tendency of thought about these things to-day is altogether too sceptical of what teaching and propaganda can do in these matters. In the past there have been very great changes in human thought. I need scarcely remind you of the spread of Christianity in Western Europe. In a few centuries the whole of Western Europe was changed from the wild confusion of warring tribes that succeeded the breakdown of the Roman Empire, into the unity of Christendom, into a community with such an idea of unity that it could be roused from end to end by the common idea of the Crusades.

Still more remarkable was the swift transformation in less than a century of all the nations and peoples to the south and west of the Mediterranean, from Spain to Central Asia, into the unity of Islam, a unity which has lasted to this day. In both these cases, what I may call the mental turnover was immense.

I think if you will consider the spread of these very complex and difficult religions, and compare the means at the disposal of their promoters with the means at the disposal of intelligent people to-day, you will find many reasons for believing that a recasting of people's ideas into the framework of a universal state is by no means an impossible project.

Those great teachings of the past were spread largely by word of mouth.

Their teachers had to travel slowly and dangerously. People were gathered together to hear with great difficulty, except in a few crowded towns. Books could be used only sparingly. Few people could read, fewer still could translate, and MSS. were copied with extreme slowness upon parchment. There was no printing, no paper, no post. And except for a very few people there were no schools. Both Christendom and Islam had to create their common schools in order to preserve even a minimum of their doctrine intact from generation to generation. All this was done in the teeth of much bitter opposition and persecution.

Now to-day we have means of putting ideas and arguments swiftly and effectively before people all over the world at the same time, such as no one could have dreamt of a hundred years ago. We have not only books and papers, but in the cinema we have a means of rapid, vivid presentation still hardly used. We have schools nearly everywhere. And here in the need for an overruling world state, and the idea of world service replacing combative patriotism, we have an urgent, a commanding human need. We have an invincible case for this world state and an unanswerable objection to the nationalisms and patriotisms that would oppose it.

Is it not almost inevitable that some of us should get together and begin a propaganda upon modern lines of this organized world peace, without which our race must perish? The world perishes for the want of a common political idea. It is still quite possible to give the world this common political idea, the idea of a federal world state. We cannot help but set about doing it.

So I put it to you that the most important work before men and women to-day is the preaching and teaching, the elaboration and then at last the realization of this Project of the World State. We have to create a vision of it, to make it seem first a possibility and then an approaching reality. This is a task that demands the work and thought of thousands of minds. We have to spread the idea of a Federal World State, as an approaching reality, throughout the world. We can do this nowadays through a hundred various channels. We can do it through the press, through all sorts of literary expression, in our schools, colleges, and universities, through political mouthpieces, by special organizations, and last, but not least, through the teaching of the churches. For remember that all the great religions of the world are in theory universalist; they may tolerate the divisions of men but they cannot sanction them. We propose no religious revolution, but at most a religious revival. We can spread ideas and suggestions now with a hundred times the utmost rapidity of a century ago.

This movement need not at once intervene in politics. It is a prospective movement, and its special concern will be with young and still growing minds. But as it spreads it will inevitably change politics. The nations, states, and kingdoms of to-day, which fight and scheme against each other as though they had to go on fighting and scheming for ever, will become more and more openly and manifestly merely guardian governments, governments playing a waiting part in the world, while the world state comes of age. For this World State, for which the world is waiting, must necessarily be a fusion of all governments, and heir to all the empires.

So far I have been occupied by establishing a case for the World State.

It has been, I fear, rather an abstract discussion. I have kept closely to the bare hard logic of the present human situation.

But now let me attempt very briefly, in the barest outline, some concrete realization of what a World State would mean. Let us try and conceive for ourselves the form a World State would take. I do not care to leave this discussion with nothing to it but a phrase which is really hardly more than a negative phrase until we put some body to it. As it stands World State means simply a politically undivided world. Let us try and carry that over to the idea of a unified organized state throughout the world.

Let us try to imagine what a World Government would be like. I find that when one speaks of a World State people think at once of some existing government and magnify it to world proportions. They ask, for example, where will the World Congress meet; and how will you elect your World President? Won't your World President, they say, be rather a tremendous personage? How are we to choose him? Or will there be a World King?

These are very natural questions, at the first onset. But are they sound questions? May they not be a little affected by false a.n.a.logies? The governing of the whole of the world may turn out to be _not_ a magnified version of governing a part of the world, but a different sort of job altogether. These a.n.a.logies that people draw so readily from national states may not really work in a world state.

And first with regard to this question of a king or president. Let us ask whether it is probable that the world state will have any single personal head at all?

Is the world state likely to be a monarchy--either an elective short term limited monarchy such as is the United States, or an inherited limited monarchy like the British Empire?