Civilisation and Barbarism
ONCE we have
determined that this rule of perfect individuality and perfect reciprocity is
the ideal law for the individual, the community and the race and that a perfect
union and even oneness in a free diversity is its goal, we have to try to see
more clearly what we mean when we say that self-realisation is the sense,
secret or overt, of individual and of social development. As yet we have not to
deal with the race, with mankind as a unity; the nation is still our largest
compact and living unit. And it is best to begin with the individual, both
because of his nature we have a completer and nearer knowledge and experience
than of the aggregate soul and life and because the society or nation is, even
in its greater complexity, a larger, a composite individual, the collective
Man. What we find valid of the former is therefore likely to be valid in its
general principle of the larger entity. Moreover, the development of the free
individual is, we have said, the first condition for the development of the
perfect society. From the individual, therefore, we have to start; he is our
index and our foundation.
The Self of
man is a thing hidden and occult; it is not his body, it is not his life, it is
not, - even though he is in the scale of evolution the mental being, the Manu, - his mind. Therefore neither the fullness of
his physical, nor of his vital, nor of his mental nature can be either the last
term or the true standard of his self-realisation; they are means of
manifestation, subordinate indications, foundations of his self-finding,
values, practical currency of his self, what you will, but not the thing itself
which he secretly is and is obscurely groping or trying overtly and self-
consciously to become. Man has not possessed as a race this truth about
himself, does not now possess it except in the vision and self-experience of
the few in whose footsteps the race is un- able to follow, though it may adore
them as Avatars, seers, saints
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or prophets. For the Oversoul who is the master of our
evolution, has his own large steps of Time, his own great eras, tracts of slow
and courses of rapid expansion, which the strong, semi-divine individual may
overleap, but not the still half-animal race. The course of evolution
proceeding from the vegetable to the animal, from the animal to the man, starts
in the latter from the subhuman; he has to take up into him the animal and even
the mineral and vegetable: they constitute his physical nature, they dominate
his vitality, they have their hold upon his mentality. His proneness to many
kinds of inertia, his readiness to vegetate, his attachment to the soil and
clinging to his roots, to safe anchorages of all kinds, and on the other hand
his nomadic and predatory impulses, his blind servility to custom and the rule
of the pack, his mob-movements and openness to subconscious suggestions from
the group-soul, his subjection to the yoke of rage and fear, his need of
punishment and reliance on punishment, his inability to think and act for
himself, his incapacity for true freedom, his distrust of novelty, his slowness
to seize intelligently and assimilate, his downward propensity and earthward
gaze, his vital and physical subjection to his heredity, all these and more are
his heritage from the subhuman origins of his life and body and physical mind.
It is because of this heritage that he finds self-exceeding the most difficult
of lessons and the most painful of endeavours. Yet it is by the exceeding of
the lower self that Nature accomplishes the great strides of her evolutionary
process. To learn by what he has been, but also to know and increase to what he
can be, is the task that is set for the mental being.
The time is
passing away, permanently - let us hope – for this cycle of civilisation, when the
entire identification of the self with the body and the physical life was
possible for the general consciousness of the race. That is the primary
characteristic of complete barbarism. To take the body and the physical life as
the one thing important, to judge manhood by the physical strength, development
and prowess, to be at the mercy of the instincts which rise out of the physical
inconscient, to despise knowledge as a weakness and inferiority or look on it
as a peculiarity and no necessary part of the conception of manhood, this is
the mentality of the barbarian. It tends to reappear in the
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human being in the atavistic period of boyhood,
- when, be it noted, the development of the body is of the greatest
importance, - but to the adult man in
civilised humanity it is ceasing to be possible. For, in the first place, by
the stress of modern life even the vital attitude of the race is changing. Man
is ceasing to be so much of a physical and becoming much more of a vital and
economic animal. Not that he excludes or is intended to exclude the body and
its development or the right maintenance of and respect for the animal being
and its excellences from his idea of life; the excellence of the body, its
health, its soundness, its vigour and harmonious development are necessary to a
perfect manhood and are occupying attention in a better and more intelligent
way than before. But the first rank in importance can no longer be given to the
body, much less that entire predominance assigned to it in the mentality of the
barbarian.
Moreover,
although man has not yet really heard and understood the message of the sages,
"know thyself", he has accepted the message of the thinker,
"educate thyself", and, what is more, he has understood that the
possession of education imposes on him the duty of imparting his knowledge to
others. The idea of the necessity of general education means the recognition by
the race that the mind and not the life and the body are the man and that
without the development of the mind he does not possess his true manhood. The
idea of education is still primarily that of intelligence and mental capacity
and knowledge of the world and things, but secondarily also of moral training
and, though as yet very imperfectly, of the development of the aesthetic
faculties. The intelligent thinking being, moralised, con- trolling his
instincts and emotions by his will and his reason, acquainted with all that he
should know of the world and his past, capable of organising intelligently by
that knowledge his social and economic life, ordering rightly his bodily habits
and physical being, this is the conception that now governs civilised humanity.
It is, in essence, a return to and a larger development of the old Hellenic
ideal, with a greater stress on capacity and utility and a very diminished
stress on beauty and refinement. We may suppose, however, that this is only a
passing phase; the lost elements are bound to recover their importance as soon
as
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the commercial period of modern progress has been
overpassed, and with that recovery, not yet in sight but inevitable, we shall
have all the proper elements for the development of man as a mental being.
The old
Hellenic or Graeco- Roman civilisation perished, among other reasons, because
it only imperfectly generalised culture in its own society and was surrounded
by huge masses of humanity who were still possessed by the barbarian habit of
mind. Civilisation can never be safe so long as, confining the cultured
mentality to a small minority, it nourishes in its bosom a tremendous mass of
ignorance, a multitude, a proletariate. Either knowledge must enlarge itself
from above or be always in danger of submergence by the ignorant night from
below. Still more must it be unsafe, if it allows enormous numbers of men to
exist outside its pale uninformed by its light, full of the natural vigour of
the barbarian, who may at any moment seize upon the physical weapons of the
civilised without undergoing an intellectual transformation by their culture.
The Graeco-Roman culture perished from within and from without, from without by
the floods of Teutonic barbarism, from within by the loss of its vitality. It
gave the proletariate some measure of comfort and amusement, but did not raise
it into the light. When light came to the masses, it was from outside in the
form of the Christian religion which arrived as an enemy of the old culture.
Appealing to the poor, the oppressed and the ignorant, it sought to capture the
soul and the ethical being, but cared little or not at all for the thinking
mind, content that that should remain in darkness if the heart could be brought
to feel religious truth. When the barbarians captured the Western world, it was
in the same way content to Christianise them, but made it no part of its
function to intellectualise. Distrustful even of the free play of intelligence,
Christian ecclesiasticism and monasticism became anti-intellectual and it was
left to the Arabs to reintroduce the beginnings of scientific and philosophical
knowledge into a semi-barbarous Christendom and to the half pagan spirit of the
Renaissance and a long struggle between religion and science to complete the
return of a free intellectual culture in the re-emerging mind of Europe.
Knowledge must be aggressive, if it wishes to survive
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and perpetuate
itself; to leave an extensive ignorance either below or around it, is to expose
humanity to the perpetual danger of a barbaric relapse.
The modern world does not leave
room for a repetition of the danger in the old form or on the old scale.
Science is there to prevent it. It has equipped culture with the means of self-
perpetuation. It has armed the civilised races with weapons of organisation and
aggression and self-defence which cannot be successfully utilised by any
barbarous people, unless it ceases to be uncivilised and acquires the knowledge
which Science alone can give. It has learned too that ignorance is an 'enemy it
cannot afford to despise and has set out to remove it wherever it is found. The
ideal of general education, at least to the extent of some information of the
mind and the training of capacity, owes to it, if not its birth, at least much
of its practical possibility. It has propagated itself everywhere with an
irresistible force and driven the desire for increasing knowledge into the
mentality of three continents. It has made general education the indispensable
condition of national strength and efficiency and therefore imposed the desire
of it not only on every free people, but on every nation that desires to be
free and to survive, so that the universalisation of knowledge and intellectual
activity in the human race is now only a question of Time; for it is only
certain political and economic obstacles that stand in its way and these the
thought and tendencies of the age are already labouring to overcome. And, in
sum, Science has already enlarged for good the intellectual horizons of the
race and raised, sharpened and intensified powerfully the general intellectual
capacity of man- kind.
It is true
that the first tendencies of Science have been , materialistic and its indubitable triumphs have been confined to the knowledge of the physical universe and
the body and the physical life. But this materialism is a very different thing
from the old identification of the- self with the body. Whatever its apparent
tendencies, it has been really an assertion of man the mental being and of the
supremacy of intelligence. Science in its very nature is knowledge, is
intellectuality, and its whole work has been that of the Mind turning its gaze
upon its vital
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and physical
frame and environment to know and conquer and dominate Life and Matter. The
scientist is Man the thinker mastering the forces of material Nature by knowing
them. Life and Matter are after all our standing-ground, our lower basis and to
know their processes and their own proper possibilities and the opportunities
they give to the human being is part of the knowledge necessary for
transcending them. Life and the body have to be exceeded, but they have also to
be utilised and perfected. Neither the laws nor the possibilities of physical
Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of
supraphysical Nature; therefore the development of new and the recovery of old
mental and psychic sciences have to follow upon the perfection of our physical
knowledge, and that new era is already beginning to open upon us. But the
perfection of the physical sciences was a prior necessity and had to be the
first field for the training of the mind of man in his new endeavour to know
Nature and possess his world.
Even in its
negative work the materialism of Science had a task to perform which will be
useful in the end to the human mind in its exceeding of materialism. But
Science in its heyday of triumphant Materialism despised and cast aside
Philosophy; its predominance discouraged by its positive and pragmatic turn the
spirit of poetry and art and pushed them from their position of leadership in
the front of culture; poetry entered into an era of decline and decadence,
adopted the form and rhythm of a versified prose and lost its appeal and the
support of all but a very limited audience, painting followed the curve of
Cubist extravagance and espoused monstrosities of shape and suggestion; the
ideal receded and visible matter of fact was enthroned in its place and
encouraged an ugly realism and utilitarianism; in its war against religious
obscurantism Science almost succeeded in slaying religion and the religious
spirit. But philosophy had become too much a thing of abstractions, a seeking
for abs- tract truths in a world of ideas and words rather than what it should
be, a discovery of the real reality of things by which human existence can
learn its law and aim and the principle of its perfection. Poetry and art had
become too much cultured pursuits to be ranked among the elegances and
ornaments of
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life, concerned with beauty of words and forms and
imaginations, rather than a concrete seeing and significant presentation of
truth and beauty and of the living idea and the secret divinity in things
concealed by the sensible appearances of the universe. Religion itself had
become fixed in dogmas and ceremonies, sects and churches and had lost for the
most part, except for a few individuals, direct contact with the living founts
of spirituality. A period of negation was necessary. They had to be driven back
and in upon themselves, nearer to their own eternal sources. Now that the
stress of negation is past and they are raising their heads, we see them
seeking for their own truth, reviving by virtue of a return upon themselves and
a new self-discovery. They have learned or are learning from the example of
Science that Truth is the secret of life and power and that by finding the
truth proper to themselves they must become the ministers of human existence.
But if
Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in
spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the
return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has
encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its
discoveries another kind of barbarism, -
for it can be called by no other name, - that
of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to
its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of
the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its
satisfaction as the first aim of life. The characteristic of Life is desire and
the instinct of possession. Just as the physical barbarian makes the excellence
of the body and the development of physical force, health and prowess his
standard and aim, so the vitalistic or economic barbarian makes the
satisfaction of wants and desires and the accumulation of possessions his
standard and aim. His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or
moral or religious, but the successful man. To arrive, to succeed, to produce,
to accumulate, to possess is his existence. The accumulation of wealth and more
wealth, the adding of possessions to possessions, opulence, show, pleasure, a
cumbrous inartistic luxury, a plethora of conveniences, life devoid of beauty
and nobility, religion vulgarised or coldly formalised, politics and
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government turned into a trade and profession, enjoyment
itself, made a business, this is commercialism. To the natural unredeemed
economic man beauty is a thing otiose or a nuisance, art and poetry a frivolity
or an ostentation and a means of advertisement. His idea of civilisation is
comfort, his idea of morals social respectability, his idea of politics the
encouragement of industry, the opening of markets, exploitation and trade
following the flag, his idea of religion at best a pietistic formalism or the
satisfaction of certain vitalistic emotions. He values education for its
utility in fitting a man for success in a competitive or, it may be, a
socialised industrial existence, science for the useful inventions and
knowledge, the comforts, conveniences, machinery of production with which it
arms him, its power for organisation, regulation, stimulus to production. The
opulent plutocrat and the successful mammoth capitalist and organiser of
industry are the supermen of the commercial age and the true, if often occult
rulers of its society.
The
essential barbarism of all this is its pursuit of vital success, satisfaction,
productiveness, accumulation, possession, enjoyment, comfort, convenience for
their own sake. The vital part of the being is an element in the integral human
existence as much as the physical part; it has its place but must not exceed
its place. A full and well-appointed life is desirable for man living in
society, but on condition that it is also a true and beautiful life. Neither
the life nor the body exist for their own sake, but as vehicle and instrument
of a good higher than. their own. They must be subordinated to the superior
needs of the mental being, chastened and purified by a greater law of truth,
good and beauty before they can take their proper place in the integrality of
human perfection. Therefore in a commercial age with its ideal, vulgar and
barbarous, of success, vitalistic satisfaction, productiveness and possession
the soul of man may linger a while for certain gains and experiences, but
cannot permanently rest. If it persisted too long, Life would become clogged
and perish of its own plethora or burst in its straining to a gross expansion.
Like the too massive Titan it will collapse by its own mass, mole ruet sua.
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