THE OPEN CONSPIRACY
Chapter I
NECESSITY OF RELIGION TO HUMAN LIFE
Few people, if any, are always sustained by unselfish or religious motives, and few or none are altogether beyond their influence. The daily lives of the great majority of human beings are frankly irreligious; they seem to differ only in their scope, variety and intelligence from the lives of animals; they are determined by instinctive impulses, individual desires and personal ends; they pass from one satisfaction or disappointment to another; they are attracted and deflected by casual encounters; they forget more or less completely and they resume. Nevertheless, the conduct of most lives is restricted and defined by the prevalent conceptions of what is honourable and becoming, and right and wrong. Although the lives of the great run of people are neither moral essentially nor essentially religious, they respect current moral and religious forms and maxims, just as they conform to current usages and beaten tracks. It is the line of least resistance for them, and that suffices.
Communities have been held together in the past and are still held together by laws and moral codes systematised upon religious ideas, and this although few people have more than a superficial apprehension of such ideas. Religion in its completeness has always been the peculiarity of a minority; it has shaped and innervated communities but never pervaded them throughout. But its presence seems to have been necessary for collective life. Without it morality was baseless and law unjustifiable. The intermittent disposition of most human beings towards some sort of righteousness beyond self-seeking has been upheld, as some sprawling, weak-jointed climbing plant may be upheld on a trellis, by that more steadfast minority of sincere and devoted persons. It is these latter who have preserved disinterested standards, and who still preserve them; who have been and who continue to be the salt of the earth.
Religious ideas in the past have derived from the most diverse emotional and intellectual origins in the integrating mind of man. Speculative explanations, metaphors hardened by usage into quasi-factual statements, fantasies arising out of germinating and suppressed impulses, false analogies, parables begotten and lit by flashes of spiritual insight, traditions misconceived and distorted, dogmatic excesses in explicitness evoked by the irritation of contradictory criticism, the odd compromises of theological diplomatists, the craving for supernatural sanctions and vindications and the nightmare creations of fear, that haunting shadow of all conscious life, have mingled inextricably in every religious fabric. But the survival value of a religion to a community has lain always in the practical assistance it afforded in the subordination of self and the achievement of co-operative loyalties not otherwise obtainable. No community seems ever to have been held together in wholesome and vigorous collective life by “enlightened self-interest” alone. Enlightened self-interest in exceptional cases and under slight or moderate stresses may produce enough simulated disinterestedness to be practically undistinguishable from public virtue, and the great mass of lives in every community is no doubt kept at this or that moral level, and in this or that form of behaviour according to the quality and intensity of the beliefs that hold that community together with little or no co-operating force in the lives themselves. But somewhere and effectively in that community the sustaining beliefs of the community must be passionately and sincerely held and maintained. A community where binding beliefs have decayed altogether is like a building whose mortar has been changed to sand. It may stand for a time, but it stands precariously.
Now in the communities in which we are living to-day there has been a far-reaching weakening and change in religious beliefs. This has been due to an enormous growth of knowledge, to an enhanced vigour of criticism, to a relative enfeeblement of government and authority which released unprecedented freedom of speech and permitted the crystallisation of doubts into coherent and militant denials. At the same time there have been developments of the mechanical conditions of life that have enlarged the scale of possible human operations, made economical life increasingly international and brought once autonomous states and regions into a mutually disintegrative intimacy of reaction. The stresses upon our communities are greater than they have ever been and the blinding forces less. The outlook before our race seems therefore to be wider, more uncertain and much more dangerous than has ever appeared before.
In the past, in the history of every community there have been phases of moral and religious confusion. The beliefs and ideas of right conduct that have served hitherto begin, in the presence of new circumstances or new challenges, to lose authority or to fail in meeting current moral problems. An age of relaxation and a sort of experimental wickedness dawns. Scruples vanish. Treachery, cruelty, unrestrained self-indulgence, which have been kept under hatches, emerge conspicuously. Government becomes more adventurous, tyrannous and unjust, and the moral distinction between ruler and brigand fines away to the vanishing-point. There seems no longer any good faith nor any sweetness of soul in human life, except among the sacrificial simple. What will for a better life still manifests itself in the world is for a while quite unable to take hold of the disorder. Italy in the Machiavellian period and Germany after the intricate wars of the Reformation may be cited as typical instances of such “wicked” phases in social history. Yet it was not that the heart of man changed for the worse in those ages, not that there was a sudden generation of vipers, but that intellectual confusion had divided and enfeebled that graver-spirited minority which had, under more assured conditions, sustained the faith of most people and the moral disciplines of everyone. The quality of the ingredients of the human mixture remained the same, but the restraining and directive forces had in their interplay come upon a phase of mutual neutralisation and collective ineffectiveness.
There are many signs that to-day over large parts of the world there is a drift towards such another disintegrative and distressful phase. The brigand, the boss and the adventurer become portentously successful and immune. People who, in other times, would have been active and confident in their own lives and vigorously co-operative in the control of human affairs are uncertain in their hearts and unhappy in their interventions. The old faiths have become unconvincing, unsubstantial and insincere, and though there are clear intimations of a new faith in the world, it still awaits embodiment in formulæ and organisations that will bring it into effective reaction upon human affairs as a whole.
This present essay is an attempt to assemble these intimations in a form that will be available for the practical direction of the writer’s and the reader’s life.