The Inadequacy of the State Idea
WHAT, after all,
is this State idea, this idea of the organised community to which the
individual has to be immolated? Theoretically, it is the subordination of the
individual to the good of all that is demanded; practically, it is his
subordination to a
collective egoism, political, military,
economic,
which seeks to satisfy certain collective aims and ambitions shaped and imposed
on the great mass of the individuals by a smaller or larger number of ruling
persons who are supposed in some way to represent the community. It is
immaterial whether these belong to a governing class or emerge as in modem
States from the mass partly by force of character, but much more by force of
circumstances; nor does it make any essential difference that their aims and
ideals are imposed nowadays more by the hypnotism of verbal persuasion than by
overt and actual force. In either case there is no guarantee that this ruling
class or ruling body represents the best mind of the nation or its noblest aims
or its highest instincts.
Nothing of the kind can be asserted of
the modem politician in any part of the world; he does not represent the soul
of a people or its aspirations. What he does usually represent is all the
average pettiness, selfishness, egoism, self-deception that is about him and
these he represents well enough as well as a great deal of mental incompetence
and moral conventionality, timidity and pretence. Great issues often come to
him for decision, but he does not deal with them greatly; high words and noble
ideas are on his lips, but they become rapidly the claptrap of a party. The
disease and falsehood of modern political life is patent in every country of
the world and only the hypnotised acquiescence of all, even of the intellectual
classes, in the great organised sham, cloaks and prolongs the malady, the
acquiescence that men yield to everything that is habitual and makes the
present atmos-
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phere of their lives. Yet it is by such minds that the
good of all has to be decided, to such hands that it has to be entrusted, to
such an agency calling itself the State that the individual is being more and
more called upon to give up the government of his activities. As a matter of
fact, it is in no way the largest good of all that is thus secured, but a great
deal of organised blundering and evil with a certain. amount of good which
makes for real progress, because Nature moves forward always in the midst of
all stumblings and secures her aims in the end more often in spite of man's
imperfect mentality than by its means.
But even if the governing
instrument were better constituted and of a higher mental and moral character,
even if some way could be found to do what ancient civilisations by their
enforcement of certain high ideals and disciplines tried to do with their ruling
classes, still the State would not be what the State idea pretends that it is.
Theoretically, it is the collective wisdom and force of the community made
available and organised for the general good. Practically, what controls the
engine and drives the train is so much of the intellect and power available in
the community as the particular machinery of State organisation will allow to
come to the surface; but it is also caught in the machinery and hampered by it
and hampered as well by the large amount of folly and selfish weakness that
comes up in the emergence. Doubtless, this is the best that can be done under
the circumstances, and Nature, as always,
utilises it for the best. But things would be much worse if there were not a
field left for a less trammelled individual effort doing what the State cannot
do, deploying and using the sincerity, energy, idealism of the best individuals
to attempt that which the State has not the wisdom or courage to attempt,
getting that done which a collective conservatism and imbecility would either
leave undone or actively suppress and oppose. It is this energy of the
individual which is the really effective agent of collective progress. The
State sometimes comes in to aid it and then, if its aid does not mean undue
control, it serves a positively useful end. As often it stands in the way and
then serves either as a brake upon progress or sup- plies the necessary amount
of organised opposition and friction always needed to give greater energy and a
more complete shape
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to the new thing which is in process of formation. But
what we are now tending towards is such an increase of organised State power and
such a huge irresistible and complex State activity as will either eliminate
free individual effort altogether or leave it dwarfed and cowed into
helplessness. The necessary corrective to the defects, limitations and
inefficiency of the State machine will disappear.
The organised State is neither the best
mind of the nation nor is it even the sum of the communal energies. It leaves
out of its organised action and suppresses or unduly depresses the working
force and thinking mind of important minorities, often of those which represent
that which is best in the present and that which is developing for the future.
It is a collective egoism much inferior to the best of which the community is
capable. What that egoism is in its relation to other collective egoisms we
know, and its ugliness has recently been forced upon the vision and the
conscience of mankind. The individual has usually something at least like a
,soul, and, at any rate, he makes up for the deficiencies of the soul by a system of morality
and an ethical sense, and for the
deficiencies of these again by the fear of social opinion or, failing that, a
fear of the communal law which he has ordinarily either to obey or at least to
circumvent; and even the difficulty of circumventing is a check on all except
the most violent or the most skilful. But the State is an entity which, with
the greatest amount of power, is the least hampered by internal scruples or
external checks. It has no soul or only a rudimentary one. It is a military,
political and economic force; but it is only in a slight and undeveloped
degree, if at all, an intellectual and ethical being. And unfortunately the
chief use it makes of its undeveloped intellect is to blunt by fictions,
catchwords and recently by State philosophies, its ill-developed ethical
conscience. Man within the community is now at least a half-civilised creature,
but his international existence is still primitive. Until recently the
orgnaised nation in its relations with other nations was only a huge beast of prey
with appetites which sometimes slept when gorged or discouraged by events, but
were always its chief reason for existence. Self-protection and self-expansion
by the devouring of others were its dharma. At the present
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day
there is no essential improvement; there is only a greater difficulty in
devouring. A "sacred egoism" is still the Ideal of nations, and
therefore there is neither any true and enlightened
consciousness of human
opinion to restrain the predatory State
4
nor
any effective international law. There is only the fear of defeat
and the fear, recently, of a
disastrous economic disorganisation; but
experience after experience has shown that these checks are ineffective.
In its inner life this huge State egoism was
once little better than in its outer relations.1 Brutal, rapacious, cunning, opressive, intolerant of
free action, free speech and opinion, even of freedom of conscience in
religion, it preyed upon individuals and classes within as upon weaker nations
outside. Only the necessity of keeping alive and rich and strong in a rough
sort of way the community on which it lived made its action partially and
crudely beneficent. In modern times there has been much improvement in spite of
deterioration in certain directions. The State now feels the necessity of
justifying its existence by organising the general economic and animal
well-being of the community and even of all individuals. It is beginning to see
the necessity of assuring the intellectual and, indirectly, the moral development
of the whole community. This attempt of the State to grow into an intellectual
and moral being is one of the most interesting phenomena of modern
civilisation. Even the necessity of intellectualising and moralising it in its
external relations has been enforced upon the conscience of mankind by the
European catastrophe. But the claim of the State to absorb all free individual
activities, a claim which it increasingly makes as it grows more clearly
conscious of its new ideals and its possibilities, is, to say the least of it,
premature and, if satisfied, will surely end in a check to human progress, a
comfortably organised stagnancy such as overtook the Graeco-Roman world after
the establishment of the Roman Empire.
The call of
the State to the individual to immolate himself on its altar and to give up his
free activities into an organised
1
I am speaking of the intermediate age between
ancient and modem times. In ancient times the State had, in some countries at
least, ideals and a conscience with regard to the community, but very little in
its dealings with other States.
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collective activity is therefore something quite different
from the demand of our highest ideals. It amounts to the giving up of the
present form of individual egoism into another, a collective form, larger but
not superior, rather in many ways inferior to the best individual egoism. The
altruistic ideal, the discipline of self- sacrifice, the need of a growing
solidarity with our fellows and a growing collective soul in humanity are not
in dispute. But the loss of self in the State is not the thing that these high
ideals mean, nor is it the way to their fulfilment. Man must learn not to
suppress and mutilate, but to fulfil himself in the fulfilment of mankind, even
as he must learn not to mutilate or destroy, but to complete his ego by
expanding it out of its limitations and losing it in something greater which it
now tries to represent. But the deglutition of the free individual by a huge
State machine is quite another consummation. The State is a convenience, and a
rather clumsy convenience, for our common development; it ought never to be
made an end in itself.
The second claim of the State idea that
this supremacy and universal activity of the organised State machine is the
best means of human progress is also an exaggeration and a fiction. Man lives
by the community; he needs it to develop himself individually as well as
collectively. But is it true that a State-governed action is the most capable
of developing the individual perfectly as well as of serving the common ends of
the community? It is not true. What is true is that it is capable of providing
the co- operative action of the individuals in the community with all necessary
conveniences and of removing from it disabilities and obstacles which would
otherwise interfere with its working. Here the real utility of the State
ceases. The non-recognition of the possibilities of human co-operation was the
weakness of English individualism; the turning of a utility for co-operative
action into an excuse for rigid control by the State is the weakness of the
Teutonic idea of collectivism. When the State attempts to take up the control
of the co-operative action of the community, it condemns itself to create a
monstrous machinery which will end by crushing out the freedom, initiative and
serious growth of the human being.
The State is bound to act crudely and in
the mass; it is
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'capable
of that free, harmonious and
intelligently or, instinctively varied
action which is proper to organic growth. For the state is not an organism; it
is a machinery, and it works like a
chine, without tact, taste, delicacy or intuition. It tries to manufacture, but
what humanity is here to do is to grow and create. We see this flaw in
State-governed education. It is right and necessary that education should be
provided for all and in providing for it the State is eminently useful; but when
it controls the education, it turns it into a routine, a mechanical system
in which individual
initiative, individual growth and true development
as opposed to a routine instruction become impossible. The State tends always
to uniformity, because uniformity is
easy
to it
and natural variation is impossible to its essentially
mechanical nature; but uniformity is death, not life.
A national culture, a national religion, a national education may still be
useful things provided they do not interfere with the growth of human
solidarity on the one side and individual freedom of thought and conscience and
development on the other; for they give
form to the communal soul and help it to add its quota to
the sum of human advancement; but a State education, a
State religion, a State culture are unnatural violences. And the same "
rule holds good in different ways and to a different extent in other directions
of our communal life and its activities.
The business of the State, so long as it
continues to be a necessary element in human life and growth, is to provide all
possible facilities for co-operative action, to remove obstacles, to prevent
all really harmful waste and friction,
- a certain; amount of waste and
friction is necessary and useful to all natural action,
- and, removing avoidable
injustice, to secure for every individual
a just and equal chance of self-development and
satisfaction to the extent of his powers and
in the line of his nature. So far the aim in modem socialism is
right and good. But all unnecessary interference with the freedom of man's
growth is or can be harmful. Even co-operative action is injurious if, instead
of seeking the good of all compatibly with the necessities of individual
growth,
- and without individual
growth there can be no real and permanent good of all,
- it
immolates the individual to a communal egoism and
prevents so
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much free room and initiative as is necessary for the
flowering of a more perfectly developed humanity. So long as humanity is not
full-grown, so long as it needs to grow and is capable of a greater
perfectibility, there can be no static good of all independent of the growth of
the individuals composing the all. All collectivist ideals which seek unduly to
subordinate the individual, really envisage a static condition whether it be a
present status or one it soon hopes to establish, after which all attempt at
serious change would be regarded as an offence of impatient individualism
against the peace, just routine and security of the happily established
communal order. Always it is the individual who progresses and compels the rest
to progress; the instinct of the collectivity is to stand still in its
established order. Progress, growth, realisation of wider being, give his
greatest sense of happiness to the individual; status, secure ease, to the
collectivity. And so it must be as long as the latter is more a physical and
economic entity than a self-conscious collective soul.
It is therefore quite improbable that in
the present conditions of the race a healthy unity of mankind can be brought about
by State machinery, whether it be by a grouping of powerful and organised
States enjoying carefully regulated and legalised relations with each other or
by the substitution of a single World- State for the present half chaotic half
ordered comity of nations, -
be the form of that World-State a single Empire like
the Roman or a federated unity. Such an external or administrative unity may be
intended in the near future of mankind in order to accustom the race to the
idea of a common life, to its habit, to its possibility; but it cannot be
really healthy, durable or beneficial over all the true line of human destiny
unless some- thing be developed, more profound, internal and real. Other- wise
the experience of the ancient world will be repeated on a larger scale and in
other circumstances. The experiment will break down and give place to a new
reconstructive age of con- fusion and anarchy. Perhaps this experience also is
necessary for mankind; yet it ought to be possible for us now to avoid it by
subordinating mechanical means to our true development through a moralised and
even a spiritualised humanity united in its inner soul and not only in its
outward life and body.
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