II
It is not my intention to write another in the long list of Utopias with which man has amused himself, from Plato to H. G. Wells. Where the preceding volumes in this series have been frankly destructive, I would make this volume constructive, if only by suggestion. It is in no sense a programme, it is still less an effort at establishing an ideal. Let us call it “a way out,” for it is no more than this; not “the” way, nor yet a way to anything approaching a perfect State, still less a perfect condition of life, but rather a possible issue out of a present impasse for some of those who, as I have said, peremptorily reject both of the intolerable alternatives now offered them.
What I have to propose is based on acceptance, at least substantially, of the criticisms of modernism that appear in “The Nemesis of Mediocrity” and in “The Sins of the Fathers”; it also assumes the general accuracy of the interpretation of history attempted in “The Great Thousand Years,” and the estimate of certain historic religio-social forces therein described. To those who dissent from these opinions this volume will contain nothing and they will be well advised if they pursue it no further. Since it is written for those who have done me the honour to read these previous books, I shall not try to epitomize them here, assuming as I do a certain familiarity with their general argument. All that it is necessary to say is that the assumption is made that “modern civilization” was essentially an inferior product; that it could have had no other issue than precisely such a war as occurred; that its fundamental weaknesses were its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard; that the particular type of “democracy” for which the world was to be made safe was and is a menace to righteous society, since it had lowered and reversed all standards, established the reign of the venal, the incapable and the unfit, and had destroyed all competent leadership while preventing its generation, and that the only visible hope of recovery lay in a restoration of the unit of human scale, the passion for perfection, and a certain form of philosophy known as sacramentalism, with the precedents of the monastic method used as a basis of operation, and the whole put in process through the leadership of great captains of men such as always in the past have accomplished the building up of society after cataclysms similar to that which during five years has brought modernism to an end.
Society is no longer to be dealt with as an unit, nor even as a congeries of units; it is a chaos, both as a whole and in each moiety thereof. The evolutionary process, if it ever existed, is now inoperative, and something more nearly approaching devolution has taken its place. As under the earlier assault of the everlasting barbarian the great, imperial unity of Rome broke up into minute family fragments, and as the pseudo-unity of the Holy Roman Empire broke up into a myriad of heterogeneous states, so our own world, both political and social, is deliquescing into its elements, and no ingenious mechanism, however cleverly devised, can arrest the process for more than the briefest of periods. When the mechanism breaks down, whether it is a year or ten years hence, the interrupted process of disintegration will continue to its appointed end.
Man has always nursed the dream of corporate regeneration, of the finding or devising of some method or mechanism whereby society as a whole could be redeemed en bloc. The dream has engendered many revolutions but the results have been other than those anticipated, and even these unexpected happenings have proved evanescent, with a constant return to the old evils and abuses. Persistently the world as a whole refuses regeneration. Latterly the ingenious device has somewhat superseded the violent changing of things, and democracy with its miscellaneous spawn of doctrinaire inventions, industrialism with its facile subterfuges of political economy; evolution, education, socialism, each in turn has offered itself as the sovereign elixir. The war has quashed the major part, the following “peace” is dealing with the remainder. The last device of all, socialism, whether of the Marxian variety or of the Fabian sort, is now the most discredited of all, for Bolshevism on the one hand, state ownership, control, or management of industry on the other, have both proved, the one intolerable, the other a bloody synonym for social extinction.
Yet the way out must be found by those for whom the present scheme of existence is not good enough; for those who refuse to go back to the pre-war régime or on to the predicted era of anarchy. The way may be found, but it will reveal itself not through wide and democratic social processes but through group action in which the units are few in number. The process will be one of withdrawal, of segregation, at first even of isolation; but if this really proves to be the right way, the end may be, as so often in the past, a centrifugal action developing from one originally centripetal, with an ultimate leavening of the whole lump.
It may be remembered that in “The Great Thousand Years” I endeavoured to demonstrate the vibratory theory of history, whereby the life of society is conditioned by a rhythmical wave motion; curves rising and descending, inflexibly though with varying trajectories, the falling curve meeting at some point the rising curve of a future coming into being, the crossing points forming the nodes of history, and spacing themselves at five-century intervals either side the birth of Christ, or the year 1 A.D. In the same place I called attention to the correspondence in time (since the Christian era) between certain periodic manifestations of spiritual force, identical in nature though somewhat varied in fashion, and these nodal points; that is to say, the monastic idea as this showed itself in the first, sixth, eleventh and sixteenth centuries. This synchronism may be graphically explained thus, the thin line indicating the approximate curve of social development, the shaded line the monastic manifestation:
It would appear from this that now, while the next nodal point is possibly seventy-five years in the future, the next manifestations of monasticism should already be showing itself. The curve of modernism is now descending as precipitously as did that of Roman Imperialism, but already, to those who are willing to see, there are indisputable evidences of the rising of the following curve. Whether this is to emulate in lift and continuance the curves of Mediævalism and of modernism, or whether it is to be but a poor copy of the sag and the low, heavy lift of the Dark Ages, is the question that man is to determine for himself during the next two generations.
Now as a matter of fact the last thirty years have shown an altogether astonishing recrudescence of the monastic spirit, while already the war has added enormously to its force and expansion. Thus far it has been wholly along old-established lines, which was to be expected; but as we approach nearer and nearer to the next nodal point of the year 2000, we are bound to see a variant, a new expression of the indestructible idea. This has always been the case. At the beginning of the Christian era the impulse was personal, the individual was the unit, and the result was the anchorites and hermits, each isolating himself in a hidden mountain cave, a hut in the desert or, if his fancy took this eccentric, on the top of a lonely column, like St. Simon Stylites. With St. Benedict the group became the unit, a sort of artificial family either of men or of women, as the case might be. He himself began as a hermit in the cleft of a far mountain, but within his own lifetime his original impulse was overridden and the new communal or group life came into being, though each monastery or convent was quite autonomous and self-contained. Five centuries later (or four, to speak more exactly) began the Cluniac reform, which was followed by the Cistercian movement, and here, though the old Benedictine mode was followed at first, in a brief time came the differentiation, for now all the houses of one order were united under a centralizing and coördinating force. Here we have the State as the parallel of the new scheme. Latest of all, in another five centuries, came still a new model, the army, with the Society of Jesus as its perfect exponent. So we have at almost exact five-century intervals four models of monasticism: the individual, the family, the State and the army. A fifth is now due; what will be its form?
It will, I think, be one in which the human family is made the unit. It will not supersede the older modes but supplement them, for the monks, canons-regular and friars, of the old tradition and the old line, will be as necessary then as ever; instead it will be an amplification of the indestructible idea, fitted to, and developing from, the new conditions which confront society. In addition to the groups of either men or women, living in a community life apart, and vowed to poverty, celibacy and obedience, there will be groups of natural families, father, mother and children, entering into a communal but not by any means “communistic” life, within those Walled Towns they will create for themselves, in the midst of the world but not of it, where the conditions of life will be determined after such sort as will make possible that real and wholesome and joyful and simple and reasonable living that has long been forbidden by the conditions of modern civilization.
Let me explain at once that I have nothing in mind resembling in the least the communistic schemes of Fourier, Owen, George; of the Shakers, the Concord enthusiasts or their ilk. In these cases it was always the unnatural element of communism that was their undoing, and in the Walled Towns of the new era the preservation of individuality, of private property, of family integrity, would be of necessity a fundamental principle. Many evils and abuses have grown up around all these, but I cannot claim that I am one of those (in spite of its wide popularity and almost universal acceptance) who hold tenaciously to the belief that the only way to get rid of the dust is to burn down the house, or that the only way to correct a child’s faults is to kill it. Rather I incline to the somewhat outworn method of reform without destruction, and I lean to the opinion that there are enough others of like convictions to make possible the creation of a certain number of Walled Towns that the experiment may be put into effect, since manifestly it is no longer possible in society as a whole.
The method would be simple, the process carried out quietly, and preferably in several places at once. A certain community of interest must be presupposed, but this would hardly extend beyond substantial unity in religion, in philosophy and in a revolt against the industrial-democratic-imperialist scheme of society which has dominated Europe and America since the beginning of the nineteenth-century. There can be no sane and wholesome society in the future where there is not an universally accepted religion of perfectly definite form, a clear, logical and convincing philosophy of life, and a social system diametrically opposed to that which was current before the war and is now striving desperately for a restoration. As the unity of religion has been shattered since the sixteenth century, the creators of the Walled Towns may very well be divided into individual groups, so far as religion is concerned. I can imagine Roman Catholics forming the nucleus of one, Episcopalians another, and it may be there are among the Protestant denominations those who would be led along the same lines. The essential point is the fundamental necessity for a vital and common religion among those who go forward to the building of the new social units. The same is true of philosophy, for this and religion can never be separated except under pain of the results that have followed the severance in the fifteenth century, and the workings of a world void of any real philosophy ever since. If there is any philosophy except sacramentalism which is at the same time intellectually satisfying in a perfectly complete degree, consonant with the proved results of scientific investigation and thought, and sufficiently dynamic as a controlling force in life, I am not acquainted with it. If such a thing exists, it might serve its turn, but false philosophies such as materialism, evolutionism, Christian Science and pragmatism are not working substitutes for a real philosophy such as that of Hugh of St. Victor, Duns Scotus or St. Thomas Aquinas. As for the social vision, there must be not only the negative quality of revolt but the positive quality of construction. It is not sufficient to hate the tawdry and iniquitous fabrications of the camp-followers of democracy; the gross industrial-financial system of “big business” and competition, with the capital versus labour antithesis it has bred. It is not enough to curse imperialism and materialism and the quantitative standard. There must be some vision of the plausible substitute, and while this must determine itself slowly, through many failures, and will in the end appear as a by-product of the spiritual regeneration that must follow once the real religion and a right philosophy are achieved, there must be a starting somewhere.
Personally, I should say that for this starting point we might fix on Justice (whichever way the sword cuts) as the first consideration; Charity (or rather Caritas—the Latin is more exact) follows close after, or even goes side by side. So do the other Cardinal Virtues; but who has not invoked them in support of every reform, whether it was of God or the devil? They fall as lightly from the lips of Marat or Lenine as from those of Plato, Dante or Sir Thomas More; they may be assumed. There are, however, certain less abstract propositions which it seems to me must serve at least as a trial basis; these, for example:
Power is Divine in its origin, since it is an attribute of Divinity, and its exercise is by Divine permission. It follows, therefore, that, as was held during the Middle Ages, no man or group of men, neither king nor boss nor parliament nor soviet, has any authority to exercise power after a wrong fashion or to govern ill.
Society exists through coöperation, not through competition; the latter must therefore be abolished, though this does not imply the destruction of emulation, which is quite a different thing.
All men are equal before God and the Law but not otherwise. Privilege, in the sense of immunity or of special opportunity without corresponding obligations is abhorrent, but justice, self-interest and the common good demand that those who can do a thing well should do it, those who cannot should be debarred. This applies to government or legislation or the exercise of the electoral franchise, as well as to education, medicine or the arts.
In industry of all kinds, production should be for use, not profit. The paying of money for the use of money is questionable, both from the standpoint of morals and of expediency. It may prove that the Church was right during the Middle Ages in calling it all usury, and that John Calvin, when he declared in its favour, was guilty of a crime. In any case, the return on capital should be the fixed charge and small in amount; the margin of profit belongs to those who produce, whether they work with their brains or their hands. The holding of land for dwelling and cultivation is essential for every family in any wholesome society; this land should be sufficient to support the family at necessity. Land belongs to the community, but tenure thereof on the part of families or individuals is perpetual, and the land may be bequeathed or transferred so long as the rent or taxes are duly paid.
Every community is in duty bound to guard its own integrity by determining its own membership, but none once admitted can be expelled except by process of law.
No society can endure when a false standard of comparative values exists. At the present time about half the working male population in Europe and America is engaged in producing or marketing things which add nothing to the virtue, the real welfare, or the joy in life of man, and for the most part he would be better off without them. There are as many directly or indirectly engaged in getting rid of these essentially useless products as there are in their manufacture. None of these men produces anything, and they must be fed, housed and clothed by those who do. It costs as much to market the surplus product as it does to bring it into existence, and the consumer pays. The result is that “labour-saving” machines have vastly increased the burden of labour; the surplus product demands markets, and exploitation both of labour and of markets becomes the foundation of industrial civilization. The modern world has become a perfectly artificial fabric of complicated indebtedness, the magnitude and ramifications of which are so enormous that nothing preserves it but public confidence. Were this removed, or even shaken seriously, the whole fabric would collapse in universal bankruptcy, a situation even now indicated for all Europe, as may be seen in Mr. Vanderlip’s remarkable book “What has Happened to Europe.” It is to correct this silly artifice, to obliterate this preposterous, wrong-headed and insecure way of life, that sooner or later men, women and children will seek refuge in the Walled Towns they will build, as they have gone, time out of mind, into the monasteries and convents of religion which they built for their earlier refuge.