THE
rational collectivist idea of society has at first sight a powerful attraction.
There is behind it a great, that every society represents a collective being
and in it and it the individual lives and he owes to it all that he can give
it. More,
it is only by a certain relation to the society, a certain harmony with this
greater collective self that he can find the complete use for his many developed or
developing powers and activities. Since it is a collective being, it must, one
would naturally suppose, have a discoverable collective reason and will which should
find more and more its right expression and right working if it is given a
conscious and effective means of organised self-expression and execution. And
this collective will and intelligence, since it is according to the original
idea that of all in a perfect equality, might naturally be trusted to seek out
and work its own good where the ruling individual and class would always be
liable to misuse their power for quite other ends. The right organisation of
social life on a basis of equality and comradeship ought to give each man his
proper place in society, his full training and development for the common ends,
his due share of work, leisure
and reward, the right value of his life in relation to the collective being,
society. Moreover, it would be a place, share, value regulated by the
individual and collective good
and not an exaggerated or a depressed value brought to him fortuitously by
birth or fortune, purchased by wealth or won by painful and wasteful struggle.
And certainly the external efficiency of the community, the measured, ordered
and economical working of its life, its power for production and general well-
being must enormously increase, as even the quite imperfect development of
collective action in the recent past has shown, in a well-organised and
concentrated State.
If it be objected that to bring
about this result in its com-
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pleteness the liberty of the individual will have to be
destroyed or reduced to an almost vanishing quantity, it might be answered that
the right of the individual to any kind of egoistic freedom as against the
State which represents the mind, the will, the good and interest of the whole
community, sarvam brahma, is a
dangerous fiction, a baneful myth. Individual liberty of life and action, - even if liberty of thought and speech is for
a time conceded, though this too can hardly remain unimpaired when once the
socialistic State has laid its grip firmly on the individual, - may well mean
in practice an undue freedom given to his infrarational parts of nature, and is
not that precisely the thing in him that has to be thoroughly controlled, if
not entirely suppressed, if he is to become
a reasonable being leading a reasonable life? This control can be most
wisely and effectively carried out by the collective reason and will of the State which is larger, better, more enlightened
than the individual's; for it profits, as the average individual cannot do, by
all the available wisdom and aspiration in
the society. Indeed, the enlightened individual may well come to regard
this collective reason and will as his own larger mind will and conscience and
find in a happy obedience to it a strong delivery from his own smaller and less
rational self and therefore a more real freedom than any now claimed by his
little separate ego. It used already to be argued that the disciplined German
obeying the least gesture of the policeman, the State official, the military
officer was really the freest, happiest and most moral individual in all Europe
and therefore in the whole world. The same reasoning in a heightened form might
perhaps be applied to the drilled felicities of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
The State, educating and governing the individual, undertakes to intellectualise,
ethicise, practicalise and generally perfect him and to see to it that he
remains, whether he will or no, always and in all things - strictly on the lines approved by the State - intellectual,
ethical, practical and thoroughly perfect.
The pity of it is that this
excellent theory, quite as much as the
individualist theory that ran before it, is sure to stumble over a
discrepancy between its set ideas and the actual facts of human nature; for it
ignores the complexity of man's being and all that that complexity means. And
especially it ignores the soul of man
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and its supreme need of freedom, of the control also of
his lower members, no doubt, -
for that is part of the total freedom towards which he is struggling, - but of
a growing self-control, not a mechanical regulation by the mind and will of
others. Obedience too is a part of its perfection, but a free and natural
obedience to a true guiding power and not to a mechanised government and rule.
The collective being is a fact; all mankind be regarded as a collective being:
but this being is a soul and life not merely a mind or a body. Each society
develops into a sort of sub-soul or group-soul of this humanity and develops
also a general temperament, character, type of mind, evolves governing ideas
and tendencies that shape its life and its institutions. But the society has no
discoverable common reason and will belonging alike to all its members; for the
group-soul rather works out its tendencies by a diversity of opinions, a diversity
of S, a diversity of life, and the vitality of the group-life depends largely
upon the working of this diversity, its continuity, its rich- it~. Since that
is so, government by the organised State must Ian always government by a number
of individuals, - whether that number
be in theory the minority or the majority makes in the end little fundamental
difference. For even when it is the majority that nominally governs, in fact it
is always the reason and will of a
comparatively few effective men -
and not really - common reason
and will of all - that rules and regulates things with the consent of the half-hypnotised mass.1
There is no on to suppose that the immediate socialisation of
the State would at all alter, the mass of men not being yet thoroughly
rationalised and developed minds, this practical necessity of state government.
In the old infrarational
societies, at least in their inception, what governed was not the State, but
the group-soul itself evolving its life organised into customary institutions
and self regulations to which all had to conform; for the rulers were only
1 This
truth has come out with a startling force of self-demonstration in Communist
Russia and National Socialist Germany, - not to speak of other countries. The
vehement reassertion of humanity's need of a King crowned or uncrowned, -
Dictator, Leader, Duce Of Fuhrer
- and a ruling and administering oligarchy has been the last outcome of a
century and a half of democracy as it has been too the first astonishing result
of the supposed rise of the proletariate to power.
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its executors and instruments. This entailed indeed a
great subjection of the individual to the society, but it was not felt, because-;
the individualistic idea was yet unborn and such diversities as j arose were
naturally provided for in one way or another, - in some cases by a remarkable latitude of social variation
which government by the State tends more and more to suppress. As State
government develops, we have a real suppression or oppression of the minority
by the majority or the majority by the minority, of the individual by the
collectivity, finally, of all by the
relentless mechanism - of
the State. Democratic liberty tried to minimise this suppression; it left a
free play for the individual and restricted as much as might be the role of the
State. Collectivism goes exactly to the opposite extreme; it will leave no
sufficient elbow-room to the individual free- will, and the more it
rationalises the individual by universal education of a highly developed kind,
the more this suppression will be felt, - unless indeed all freedom of thought
is negated and the minds of all are forced into a single standardised way of
thinking.
Man needs freedom of thought and
life and action in order that he may grow, otherwise he will remain fixed where
he was, a stunted and static being. If his individual mind and reason are
ill-developed, he may consent to grow, as does the infra- rational mind, in the
group-soul, in the herd, in the mass, with that subtle half -conscient general
evolution common to all in the lower process of Nature. As he develops-
individual reason and will, he needs
and society must give him room for an in- : creasing play of individual freedom
and variation, at least so far as that does not develop itself to the avoidable
harm of others and of society as a whole. Given a full development and free
play of the individual mind, the need of freedom will grow with the immense
variation which this development must bring with it, and if only a free play in
thought and reason is allowed, but the free play of the intelligent will in
life is inhibited by the excessive regulation of the life, then an intolerable
contradiction and falsity will be created. Men may bear it for a time in
consideration of the great and visible new benefits of order, economic
development, means of efficiency and the scientific satisfaction
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of the reason which the collectivist arrangement of
society will ,g; but when its benefits become a matter of course and its
defects become more and more realised and prominent, dissatisfaction and revolt
are sure to set in in the clearest and most vigous minds of the society and
propagate themselves through- out the mass. This intellectual and vital
dissatisfaction may very take under such circumstances the form of anarchistic
thought, because that thought appeals precisely to this need of free variation
in the internal life and its outward expression rich will be the source of
revolt, and anarchistic thought must be necessarily subversive of the
socialistic order. The State fn only combat it by an education adapted
to its fixed forms of life an education that will seek to drill the citizen in
a fixed set of ideas, aptitudes, propensities as was done in the old
infrarational order of things and by the suppression of freedom of speech and
thinking so as to train and compel all to be of one mind, one sentiment, one
opinion, one feeling; but this remedy will be in a rational society
self-contradictory, ineffective, or if effective, then worse than the evil it
seeks to combat. On the other hand,
if from the first freedom of thought is denied, that means the end of the Age
of Reason and of the ideal of a rational society. Man the mental being disallowed
the use - except in a
narrow fixed groove - of
his mind and mental will, will stop short in his growth and be even as the
animal and as the insect stationary species.
This is the central defect through
which a socialistic State is bound to be convicted of insufficiency and
condemned to pass away before the growth of a new ideal. Already the pressure
me of the State organisation on the life of the individual has reached a point
at which it is ceasing to be tolerable. If it continues to be what it is now, a
government of the life of the individual by the comparatively few and not, as
it pretends, by a common will and reason, if, that is to say, it becomes
patently undemocratic or remains pseudo-democratic, then it will be this
falsity through which anarchistic thought will attack its existence. But the
innermost difficulty would not disappear even if the Socialistic State became
really democratic, really the expression of the free reasoned will of the
majority in agreement. Any
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true development of that kind would be difficult indeed
and has, the appearance of a chimera; for collectivism pretends to regulate
life not only in its few fundamental principles and its main lines, as every
organised society must tend to do, but in its, details, it aims at a thoroughgoing scientific regulation, and an agreement of the free reasoned will of
millions in all the lines and most of the details of life is a contradiction in
terms. Whatever the perfection of the organised State, the suppression or oppression of individual freedom by the
will of the majority or of a minority would still be there as a cardinal
defect vitiating its very principle. And there would be something infinitely
worse. For a thoroughgoing scientific regulation of life can only be brought
about by a thoroughgoing mechanisation of life. This tendency to mechanisation
is the inherent defect of the State idea and its practice. Already that is the
defect upon which both intellectual anarchistic thought and the insight of the
spiritual thinker have begun to lay stress, and it must immensely increase as
the State idea rounds itself into a greater complete- ness in practice. It is
indeed the inherent defect of reason when it turns to govern life and labours
by quelling its natural tendencies to put it into some kind of rational order.
Life differs from the mechanical
order of the physical universe with which the reason has been able to deal
victoriously just because it is mechanical and runs immutably in the groove of
fixed cosmic habits. Life, on the contrary, is a mobile, progressive and
evolving force, - a force that is the increasing expression of an infinite soul
in creatures and, as it progresses, becomes more and more aware of its own
subtle variations, needs, diversities. The progress of Life involves the
development and interlocking of an immense number of things that are in
conflict with each other and seem often to be absolute oppositions and
contraries. To find amid these oppositions some principle or standing-ground of
unity, some workable lever of reconciliation which will make possible a larger
and better development on a basis of harmony and not of conflict and struggle,
must be increasingly the common aim of humanity in its active life-evolution,
if it at all means to rise out of life's more confused, painful and obscure
movement, out of the compromises made by Nature
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with the ignorance of the Life-mind and the nescience of
Matter. This can only be done truly and satisfactorily when the soul discovers
itself in its highest and completest spiritual reality and effects a
progressive upward transformation of its life-values into those of the spirit;
for there they will all find their spiritual truth and in that truth their
standing-ground of mutual recognition and reconciliation. The spiritual is the
one truth of which all others, the veiled aspects, the brilliant disguises or
the dark disfigurements and in which they can find their own right form and
true relation to each other. This is a work the reason cannot do. The business
of the reason is intermediate: it is to observe and understand this life by the
intelligence and discover for it the direction in which it is going and the
laws of its self-development on the way. In order that it may do its office, it
is obliged to adopt temporarily fixed viewpoints none of which is more than
partially true and to create systems none of which can really stand as the
final expression of the integral truth of things. The integral truth of things
is truth not of the reason but of the spirit.
In the realm of thought that does
not matter; for as there the reason does not drive at practice, it is able with
impunity to allow the most opposite viewpoints and systems to exist side by
side, to compare them, seek for reconciliations, synthetise in the lost various
ways, change constantly, enlarge, elevate; it is free to act without thinking
at every point of immediate practical consequences. But when the reason seeks
to govern life, it is obliged to fix its viewpoint, to crystallise its system;
every change becomes or at least seems a
thing doubtful, difficult and perilous, all the consequences of which cannot be
foreseen, while the conflict of viewpoints, principles, systems leads to strife
and revolution and not to basis of harmonious development. The reason
mechanises in order to arrive at fixity of conduct and practice amid the
fluidity of things; but while mechanism is a sufficient principle in dealing
with physical forces, because it is in harmony with the law or Dharma of
physical Nature, it can never truly succeed in dealing with conscious life,
because there it is contrary to the law of life, its highest Dharma. While,
then, the attempt at a rational ordering of society is an advance upon the comparative
immobility and slow subconscient or half-con-
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scient evolution
of infrarational societies and the confusedly mixed movement of semi-rational
societies, it can never arrive at perfection by its own methods, because reason
is neither the first principle of life, nor can be its last, supreme and
sufficient principle.
The question remains
whether anarchistic thought supervening upon the collectivistic can any more
successfully find a satisfying social principle. For if it gets rid of
mechanism, the one practical means of a rationalising organisation of life, on
what will it build and with what can it create? It may be contended as against
the anarchistic objection that the collectivist period is, if not the last and
best, at least a necessary stage in social progress. For the vice of
individualism is that in insisting upon the free development and
self-expression of the life and the mind or the life-soul in the individual, it
tends to exaggerate the egoism of the mental and vital being and prevent the
recognition of unity with others on which alone a complete self-development and
a harmless freedom can be founded. Collectivism at least insists upon that
unity by entirely subordinating the life of the isolated ego to the life of the greater group-ego, and its
office may be thus to stamp upon the mentality and life-habits of the
individual the necessity of unifying his life with the life of others.
Afterwards, when again the individual asserts his freedom, as some day he must,
he may have learned to do it on the basis of this unity and not on the basis of
his separate egoistic life. This may well be the intention of Nature in human
society in its movement towards a collectivist principle of social living.
Collectivism may itself in the end realise this aim if it can modify its own
dominant principle far enough to allow for a free individual development on the
basis of unity and a closely harmonised common existence. But to do that it
must first spiritualise itself and transform the very soul of its inspiring
principle: it cannot do it on the basis of the logical reason and a
mechanically scientific ordering of life.
Anarchistic thought, although it
has not yet found any sure form, cannot
but develop in proportion as the pressure of society on the individual
increases, since there. is something in that pressure which unduly oppresses a
necessary element of human
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perfection. We need not attach much importance to the
grosser vitalistic or violent anarchism which seeks forcibly to react against
the social principle or claims the right of man to "live his life" in
the egoistic or crudely vitalistic sense.
But there is higher, an intellectual anarchistic thought which in its aim
and formula recovers and carries to its furthest logical conclusions a y real
truth of nature and of the divine in man. In its revolt against the opposite
exaggeration of the social principle, we find it declaring that all government
of man by man by the power of compulsion is an evil, at violation, a suppression
or deformation of a natural principle of good which would otherwise grow and
prevail for the perfection of the human race. Even the social principle in
itself is questioned and held liable for a sort of fall in man from a natural
to an unnatural and artificial
principle of living.
The
exaggeration and inherent weakness of this exclusive idea are sufficiently
evident. Man does not actually live as an isolated being, nor can he grow by an
isolated freedom. He grows by his
relations with others and his freedom must exercise itself in a progressive
self-harmonising with the freedom of his fellow-beings. The social principle
therefore, apart from the forms it has taken, would be perfectly justified, if
by nothing else, than by the need of society as a field of relations which
afford to the individual his occasion for growing towards a greater perfection.
We have indeed the old dogma that man was originally innocent and perfect; the
conception of first of the first ideal state of mankind as a harmonious
felicity of free and natural living in which no social law or compulsion
existed because none was needed, is as old as the Mahabharata. But even this theory has to recognize a
downward lapse of man from his natural perfection. The fall was not brought
about by the introduction of the social principle in the arrangement of his
life, but rather the social principle and the governmental method of compulsion
had to be introduced as a result of the fall. If, on the contrary, we regard
the evolution of man not as a fall from the perfection but a gradual ascent, a
growth out of the infrarational " status of his being, it is clear that
only by a social compulsion on the vital and physical instincts of his
infrarational egoism, a sub-
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jection to the needs and laws of the social life, could
this growth have been brought about on a large scale. For in their first
crudeness the infrarational instincts do not correct themselves quite
voluntarily without the pressure of need and compulsion, but only by the
erection of a law other than their own which teaches them finally to erect a
yet greater law within for their own correction and purification. The principle
of social compulsion may not have been always or perhaps ever used quite
wisely, -it is a law of man's imperfection, imperfect in itself, and must
always be imperfect in its method and result; but in the earlier stages of his
evolution it was clearly inevitable, and until man has grown out of the causes
of its necessity, he cannot be really ready for the anarchistic principle of
living.
But it is at the same time clear
that the more the outer law is replaced by an inner law, the nearer man will
draw to his true and natural perfection. And the perfect social State must be
one in which governmental compulsion is abolished and man is able to live with
his fellowman by free agreement and co-operation. But by what means is he to be
made ready for this great and difficult consummation? Intellectual anarchism
relies on two powers in the human being of which the first is the enlightenment
of his reason; the mind of man, enlightened, will claim freedom for itself, but
will equally recognise the same right in others. A just equation will of itself
emerge on the ground of a true, self-found and unperverted human nature. This
might conceivably be sufficient, although hardly without a considerable change
and progress in man's mental powers, if the life of the individual could be
lived in a predominant isolation with only a small number of points of
necessary contact with the lives of others. Actually, our existence is closely
knit with the existences around us and there is a common life, a common work, a
common effort and aspiration without which humanity cannot grow to its full
height and wideness. To ensure co-ordination and prevent clash and conflict in
this constant contact another power is needed than the enlightened intellect.
Anarchistic thought finds this power in a natural human sympathy which, if it
is given free play under the; right conditions, can be relied upon to ensure
natural co-operation: the appeal is to what the American poet calls the love of
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comrades, to the
principle of fraternity, the third and most neglected term of the famous
revolutionary formula. A free equality founded upon pontaneous co-operation,
not on governmental force and social compulsion, is the highest anarchistic
ideal.
This would
seem to lead us either towards a free co-operative communism, a unified life
where the labour and property of all is there for the benefit of all, or else
to what may better be called communalism, the free consent of the individual to
live in a society where the just freedom of his individuality will be
recognised, but the surplus of his labour and acquisitions will be used or
given by him without demur for the common good under a natural co-operative
impulse. The severest school of anarchism 'rejects all compromise with
communism. It is difficult to see how a Stateless Communism which is supposed
to be the final goal of the Russian ideal can operate on the large and complex
scale necessitated by modern life. And indeed it is not clear how ten a free
communalism could be established or maintained without some kind of
governmental force and social compulsion or how it could fail to fall away in
the end either on one side into a rigorous
collectivism or on the other to struggle, anarchy and disruption. For the
logical mind in building its social idea takes no dent account of the
infrarational element in man, the vital egoism to which the most active and
effective part of his nature is bound: that is his most constant motive and it
defeats in the d all the calculations of the idealising reason, undoes its
elaborate systems or accepts only the little that it can assimilate to own need
and purpose. If that strong element, that ego-force in him, is too much
overshadowed, cowed and depressed, too much rationalised, too much denied an
outlet, then the life of man becomes artificial, top-heavy, poor in the sap of
vitality, mechanical, uncreative. And on the other hand, if it is not
suppressed, it tends in the end to assert itself and derange the plans the
rational side of man, because it contains in itself powers whose right
satisfaction or whose final way of transformation reason cannot discover. If
reason were the secret, highest law of the universe or if man the mental being
were limited by mentality, it might be possible for him by the power of the
reason to evolve out of the dominance of infrarational Nature which he
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inherits from
the animal. He could then live securely in his best human self as a
perfected rational and sympathetic being, balanced and well-ordered in all
parts, the sattwic man of Indian philosophy;
that would be his summit of possibility, his con- summation. But his nature is rather transitional; the
rational being is only a middle term of Nature's evolution. A rational
satisfaction cannot give him safety from the pull from below nor deliver him
from the attraction from above. If it were not so, the ideal of intellectual
Anarchism might be more feasible as well as acceptable as a theory of what
human life might be in its reasonable perfection; but, man being what he is, we
are compelled in the end to aim higher and go farther.
A spiritual or spiritualised
anarchism might appear to come nearer
to the real solution or at least touch something of it from afar. As it
expresses itself at the present day, there is much in it that is exaggerated and imperfect. Its seers
seem often to preach an impossible self-abnegation of the vital life and
an asceticism which instead of
purifying and transforming the vital being, seeks to suppress and even
kill it; life itself is impoverished or dried up by this severe austerity in
its very springs. Carried away by a high-reaching spirit of revolt, these
prophets denounce civilisation as a failure because of its vitalistic
exaggerations, but set up an opposite exaggeration which might well cure
civilisation of some of its crying faults and uglinesses, but would deprive us
also of many real and valuable gains. But apart from these excesses of a too logical thought and a
one-sided impulsion, apart from the inability of any "ism" to
express the truth of the spirit which exceeds all such compartments, we seem
here to be near to the real way out, to the discovery of the saving
motive-force. The solution lies not in the reason but in the soul of man, in
its spiritual tendencies. It is a spiritual, an inner freedom that can alone
create a perfect human order. It is a spiritual, a greater than the rational
enlightenment that can alone illumine the vital nature of man and impose
harmony on its self-seekings, antagonisms and discords. A deeper brotherhood, a
yet unfound law of love is the only sure foundation possible for a perfect
social evolution, no other can replace
it. But this brotherhood and love will not proceed by the vital
instincts or the reason where
they
Page – 206
can be met, baffled or deflected by opposite reasonings
and other discordant instincts. Nor will it found itself in the natural heart
of man where there are plenty of other passions to combat it is in the soul
that it must find its roots; the love which is founded upon a deeper truth of
our being, the brotherhood or, let us say, - for this is another feeling than any
vital or mental sense brotherhood, a calmer more durable motive-force, - the
spiritual comradeship which is the expression of an inner realisation of
oneness. For so only can egoism disappear and the true individualism of the
unique godhead in each man found itself on true communism of the equal godhead
in the race; for the spirit, the inmost Self, the universal Godhead in every
being is Fat whose very nature of diverse oneness it is to realise the perfection
of its individual life and nature in the existence of all, in the universal
life and nature.
This is a
solution to which it may be objected that it puts off the consummation of a
better human society to a far-off date in the future evolution of the race. For
it means that no machinery invented by the reason can perfect either the
individual or the collective man; an inner change is needed in human nature,
hinge too difficult to be ever effected except by the few. This is not certain;
but in any case, if this is not the solution, then there is no solution; if
this is not the way, then there is no way the human kind. Then the terrestrial
evolution must pass beyond man as it has passed beyond the animal and a greater
race must come that will be capable of the spiritual change, a form of life
must be born that is nearer to the divine. After all there is no logical
necessity for the conclusion that the change cannot begin at all because its
perfection is not immediately possible. A decisive turn of mankind to the
spiritual ideal, the beginning of a constant ascent and guidance towards the
heights may not be altogether impossible, even if the summits are attainable at
first only by the pioneer few and far-off to the tread of the race. And that
beginning .may mean the descent of an influence that will alter at once the
whole life of mankind in its orientation and enlarge for ever, as did the
development of his reason and more than any development of the reason, its
potentialities land all its structure.
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