The World in Chains Part 1

The World in Chains.

by John Mavrogordato.

CHAPTER I

[Greek: moros de thneton ostis ekporthon poleis naous de tumbous th, iera ton kekmekton, eremiadous autos oleth usteron.]

Euripides: Tro. 95.

--1

The Ma.s.sacre of Colleagues

The existence of war in the modern world is primarily a question for the moral philosopher. It may be of interest to the anthropologist to consider war as a gallant survival with an impressive ritual and a code of honour curiously detached from the social environment, like the Hindu suttee; or with a procedure euphemistically disguised, like some chthonic liturgy of ancient Athens. But it is a problem too broad for the anthropologist when we consider that we have reached a stage of civilisation which regards murder as the most detestable of crimes and deprives the murderer of all civil rights and often even of the natural right to live: while in the same community the organised ma.s.sacre of our colleagues in civilisation is not only tolerated but a.s.sumed to be necessary by the princ.i.p.al expositors of law and religion, is the scientific occupation of the most honoured profession in the State, and const.i.tutes the real sanction of all international intercourse.

--2

The Widening Sphere of Morality

The existence of war stimulates the astonished watcher in the tower of ivory to examine the development, if any, of human morality; and to formulate some law of the process whereby political man has been differentiated from the savage.

Morality being a relation between two or more contracting parties, he will notice that the history of mankind is marked by a consistent tendency to extend this relation, to include in the system of relationships more numerous and more distant objects, so that the moral agent is surrounded by a continually widening sphere of obligations.

This system of relationship, which may be called the moral sphere, has grown up under a variety of influences, expediency, custom, religious emotion and political action; but the moral agents included in it at any given time are always bound to each other by a theoretical contract involving both rights and duties, and leading each to expect and to apply in all his dealings with the others a certain standard of conduct which is approximately fixed by the enlightened opinion of the majority for the benefit of the totality.

The moral sphere then is a contractual unit of two or more persons who agree to moderate their individual conduct for their common good: and the State itself is only a stage in the growth of this moral unit from its emergence out of primitive savagery to its superannuation in ultimate anarchy, commonly called the Millennium. The State indeed is a moral sphere, a moral unit, which has long been outgrown by enlightened opinion; and the trouble is that we are now in a transition stage in which the boundaries of the State survive as a limitation instead of setting an ideal of moral conduct.[1]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This conception of the gradually extending and still to be extended sphere of morality, or from another aspect of law, was implied, I think, by Lord Haldane in his Address on Higher Nationality. (_The Conduct of Life, and Other Addresses_, p. 99.)

In this address Lord Haldane distinguished in the State three sanctions of conduct.

1. Law.

2. The Moral Sanction, Kant's Categorical Imperative "that rules the private and individual conscience, but that alone."

3. The force of social habit or _sittlichkeit_, "less than legal and more than merely moral, and sufficient in the vast majority of the events of daily life, to secure observance of general standards of conduct without any question of resort to force." The Lord Chancellor adds, "If this is so within a nation, can it be so as between nations?"

But although Lord Haldane distinguishes three sanctions of conduct, the resultant line of conduct is one. And it seems to me unimportant to a.n.a.lyse the sanctions if we can only estimate the sum of their obligations. It is this totality of obligations, the whole systematisation of conduct in human life, that in my adumbrated a.n.a.lysis I call the moral sphere.

Curiously enough Lord Haldane was hounded from the Government on the paradoxical ground that he knew too much about the enemy against whom we are fighting. It is certainly true that he has a better understanding than any other statesman of the Prussian perversion of aristocracy and of the true function of science in the State. But it is too much to hope that philosophers should remain Ministers of a State in which journalists are become dictators.]

--3

The Receding G.o.d

I don't know that it is necessary to drag G.o.d into the argument. But if you like to regard G.o.d as the sanction and source of morality, or if you like to call the moral drift in human affairs G.o.d, it is possible to consider this "Sphere of Morality" from His point of view. His "point of view" is precisely what, in an instructive fable, we may present as the determining factor in morality. When He walked in the garden or lurked hardly distinguishable among the sticks and stones of the forest, morality was just an understanding between a man and his neighbour, a temporary agreement entered on by any two hunting savages whom He might happen to espy between the tree-trunks. When He dwelt among the peaks of Sinai or Olympus, the sphere of morality had extended to the whole tribe that occupied the subjacent valley. It came to include the nation, all the subjects of each sovereign state, by the time He had receded to some heavenly throne above the dark blue sky. And it is to be hoped that He may yet take a broader view, so that His survey will embrace the whole of mankind, if only we can banish Him to a remoter alt.i.tude in the frozen depths of s.p.a.ce, whence He can contemplate human affairs without being near enough to interfere.

The moral of this little myth of the Receding G.o.d may be that the Sphere of Morality is extended in inverse proportion to the intensity of theological interference. Not that theology necessarily or always deliberately limits the domain of morality: but because the extension of moral relations and the relegation of anthropomorphic theology are co-ordinate steps in human advancement.

-- 4

The Philosopher looks at Society

The philosopher is apt to explain the growth and interrelation of ideas by tabulating them in an historical form, which may not be narrowly, chronologically, or "historically" true. The notion of the Social Contract may be philosophically true, though we are not to imagine the citizens of Rousseau's State coming together on a certain day to vote by show of hands, like the members of the Bognor Urban District Council. So we may ill.u.s.trate a theory of moral or social evolution by a sort of historical pageant, which will not be journalistically exact, but will give a true picture of an ideal development, every scene of which can be paralleled by some actually known or inferred form of human life.

-- 5

h.o.m.o Homini Lupus

Our imagination, working subconsciously on a number of laboriously acc.u.mulated hints, a roomful of chipped or polished stones, the sifted debris of Swiss palafittes, a few pithecoid jawbones, some painted rocks from Salamanca, produces a fairly definite picture of the earliest essentially human being on earth: and we recognise a man not unlike one of ourselves; with a similar industry interrupted from time to time by the arbitrary stirrings of a similar artistic impulse; so close to us indeed that some of his habits still survive among us. Some of us at least have made a recreation of his necessity, and still go hunting wild or hypothetically wild animals for food. But when this primeval hunter emerged from his lair in the forest or his valley-cave, he was prepared to attack at sight any man he happened to meet: and he thought himself a fine fellow if he succeeded in cracking the skull of a possible rival in love or venery. This was the age of preventive aggression with a vengeance. We still feel a certain satisfaction in a prompt and crushing blow, and in the simplicity of violence. But we no longer attack our neighbour in the street, as dogs fight over a bone or over nothing at all: though some of us reserve the right to snarl.

-- 6

Tribe against Tribe

But this fighter's paradise was too exciting to last long; and indeed it is hard to visualise steadily the feral solitary man who lived without any social organisation at all.[2] Consideration like an angel came and did not indeed drive the offending devil out of him but taught him to guide it into more profitable channels, by co-operating with his neighbour. When a man first made peace with the hunter in the next cave in order to go out with him against the bear at the head of the valley, or even to have his a.s.sistance in carrying off a couple of women from the family down by the lake, on that day the social and moral unit was const.i.tuted, the sphere of morality, destined, who knows how soon, to include the whole of mankind in one beneficent alliance, began with what Professor McDougal has called "the replacement of individual by collective pugnacity." The first clear stage in this progress is the tribe or clan, the smallest organised community, sometimes no larger than the self-contained village or camp, which can still be found in the wild parts of the earth. Tribe against tribe is the formula of this order of civilisation. Within the limits of the community man inhibits his natural impulses and settles his personal disputes according to the rules laid down by the headman or chief. But once outside the stockade he can kill and plunder at will, though owing to the similarly strong organisation of the next village he will usually reserve his predatory exploits for the official and collective raids of village against village and tribe against tribe.

Of course the family is a step leading up to the tribal stage of morality, and it may be that the idea of incest marks the social stage in which the moral sphere was conterminous with the family, corresponding to the inst.i.tution of exogamy in the moral system of the tribe.

It may be added that even in the modern family the feeling which unites the members often consists less, very much less, of affection than of a sort of obligation to hang together for mutual defence.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Cf. Plato's myth of Protagoras (_Prot_. 322 B ff.).]

-- 7

The City State

The City State, self-contained, self-supporting, truly democratic, is marked by a similar pugnacity. Only full citizenship conferred full moral rights, and any ferocity could be justified in war against another city. Athens wore herself out in the long struggle with Sparta, and Greece was lured to destruction by the devil of Imperialism, whose stock argument is to suggest that a State can extend its rights without extending its obligations. But the limitation of the moral sphere by the boundaries of the city is less apparent in the Greek States, because in the historical period at least they were already in transition to a larger view, and enlightened opinion certainly believed in a moral system which should include all Greek States, to the exclusion of course of all "barbarians": but this larger view was even more definitely limited, and the demarcation of those within from those outside the moral sphere was never more sharply conceived, than in the difference commonly held to exist between Greeks and Barbarians. Yet even so Greece can maintain her pre-eminence in thought; for Plato and Euripides at least glimpsed the conception, by which we do not yet consent to be guided, of the moral equality of all mankind.[3]

For all these reasons the City State as a limited moral sphere is better seen perhaps in Mediaeval Italy, where, I imagine, a Florentine might kill a native of Pisa whenever he liked; whereas if he killed a fellow Florentine he risked at least the necessity of putting himself outside the moral sphere, of having that is to leave Florence and stay in Pisa till the incident was forgotten.[4]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Even Aristotle probably had some suspicion of it; so in his anxiety to justify the inst.i.tution of slavery he had to make out that slaves were not men at all but only machines.]