CHAPTER
XVI
The Problem of Uniformity and Liberty
THE
question with which we started has reached some kind of answer. After sounding
as thoroughly as our lights permit the possibility of a political and
administrative unification of mankind by political and economic motives and
through purely political and administrative means, it has been concluded that it
is not only possible, but that the thoughts and tendencies 9f mankind and the
result of current events and existing forces and necessities have turned
decisively in this direction. This is one of the dominant drifts which the
World-Nature has thrown up in the flow of human development and it is the
logical consequence of the past history of mankind and of our present
circumstances. At the same time nothing justifies us in predicting its painless
or rapid development or even its sure and eventual success. We have seen some of
the difficulties in the way; we have seen also what are the lines on which it
may practically
proceed to the overcoming of those difficulties. We have
concluded that the one line it is not likely to take
is the ideal, that which justice and the highest expediency and the best thought
of mankind demand, that which would ensure it the greatest possibility of an
enduring success. It is not likely to take perfectly, until a probably much
later period of our collective evolution, the form of a federation of free and
equal nations or adopt as its motive a perfect harmony between the contending
principles of nationalism and internationalism.
And now we
have to consider the second aspect of the problem, its effect on the springs of
human life and progress. The political and administrative unification of
mankind is not only possible but foreshadowed by our present evolution; the
collective national egoism which resists it may be overborne by an increasing
flood of the present unifying tendency to which the anguish of the European war
gave for a time a body and an arti-
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culate
voice. But the question remains whether, not in its first
loose formation, but as it
develops and becomes more .complete and even vigorous, a strictly unified order
will not necessarily involve a considerable overriding of the liberties of
mankind, individual and collective, and an oppressive mechanism by which the
free development of the soul-life of humanity will be for some
time at least seriously hindered or restricted or in
danger of an t, excessive repression. We have seen that a period of
loose formation is in such developments usually followed by a period of
restriction and constriction in which a more rigid unification will
be attempted so that firm moulds may be given to the new unity. And this has
meant in past unifications and is likely to mean
here
also a suppression of that principle of liberty in
human life which is the most precious
gain of humanity's past spiritual, political and social struggles. The circle
of progression is likely to work itself out again on this new line of advance.
Such a development would be not only
probable, but inevitable if the unification of mankind proceeded in accordance
with the Germanic gospel of the increasing domination of the world by the one
fit empire, nation, race. It would be equally inevitable if the means employed
by Destiny were the domination of humanity by two or three great imperial
nations; or if the effectuating force were a closely organised united Europe
which would, developing the scheme of a certain kind of political thinkers,
take in hand the rest of the world and hold the darker- coloured races of
mankind in tutelage for an indefinite period. The ostensible object and
justification of such a tutelage would be to civilise, that is to say, to
Europeanise the less developed races. Practically, we know that it would mean
their exploitation, since in the course of human nature the benevolent but
forceful guardian would feel himself justified in making the best profit out of
his advantageous situation, always of course in the interest at once of his own
development and that of the world in general. The regime would rest upon
superior force for its maintenance and oppose itself to the velleities of
freedom in the governed on the ground either that they were unfit or that the
aspiration was immature, two arguments that may well remain valid for ever,
since they can never be refuted to the
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satisfaction of those who advance them. At first this
regime might be so worked as to preserve the principle of individual liberty
for the governing races while enforcing a beneficial subjection upon the ruled;
but that could not endure. The experience of the past teaches us that the habit
of preferring the principle of authority to the principle of liberty is
engendered in an imperial people, reacts upon it at home and leads it first
insensibly and then by change of thought and the development of a fate in
circumstances to the sacrifice of its own inner freedom. There could be only
two outlets to such a situation, either the growth of the principle of liberty
among the peoples still subject or, let us say, administered by others for
their own benefit, or else its general decline in the world. Either the higher
state must envelop from above or the lower from below; they cannot subsist
perpetually together in the same human economy. But nine times out of ten, in
the absence of circumstances ending the connection, it is the unhappier
possibility that conquers.1
All these means of
unification would proceed practically by the use of force and compulsion and
any deliberately planned, prolonged and extended use of estrictive means tends to discourage the
respect for the principle of liberty in those who apply the compulsion as well
as the fact of liberty in those to whom it is applied. It favours the growth of
the opposite principle of dominating authority whose whole tendency is to
introduce rigidity, uniformity, a mechanised and therefore eventually an unprogressive system of life. This is a psychological relation of cause and
effect whose working cannot be avoided except by taking care to found all use
of authority on the widest possible basis of free consent. But by their very
nature and origin the regimes of unification thus introduced would be debarred
from the free employment of this corrective; for they would have to proceed by
compulsion of what might be very largely a reluctant material and the imposing
of their will for the elimination of all resisting forces and tendencies. They
would be compelled
1 These considerations have now become irrelevant to the actual condition
of things. Asia is now for the most part free or in the process of liberation,
the idea of a dominant West or a dominant Europe has no longer any force and
has indeed receded out of men's minds and practically out of existence.
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to repress, diminish, perhaps even abolish all forms of
liberty which their experience found to
be used for fostering the spirit of revolt or of resistance; that is to
say, all those larger liberties of free action and free self-expression which
make up the best, the most vigorous, the most stimulating part of human
freedom. They would be obliged to abolish, first by violence and then by ,legal
suppression and repression, all the elements of what we now call national
freedom; in the process individual liberty would be destroyed both in the parts
of humanity coerced and, by inevitable reaction and contagion, in the imperial
nation or nations. Relapse in this direction is always easy, because the
assertion of his human dignity and freedom is a virtue man has only acquired by
long evolution and painful endeavour; to respect the freedom of others he is
still less naturally prone, though without it his own liberty can never be really
secure; but to oppress and dominate where he can - often, be it noted, with
excellent motives - and otherwise to be half dupe and half
serf of those who can dominate, are his inborn animal propensities. Therefore
in fact all unnecessary restriction of the few common liberties man has been
able to organise for himself becomes a step backward, whatever immediate gain
it may bring; and every organisation of oppression or repression beyond what
the imperfect conditions of human nature and society render inevitable,
becomes, no matter where or by whom it is practised a blow to the progress of
the whole race.
If, on the other hand, the formal
unification of the race is effectuated by a combination of free nations and
empires and if these empires strive to become psychological realities and
there- fore free organisms, or if by that time the race has advanced so far
that the principle of free national or cultural grouping within a unified
mankind can be adopted, then the danger of retrogression will be greatly
diminished. Still, it will exist. For, as we have seen, the principle of order,
of uniformity is the natural tendency of a period of unification. The principle
of liberty offers a natural obstacle to the growth of uniformity and, although
perfectly reconcilable with a true order and easily co- existent with an order
already established into which it has
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been fitted, is not so easily reconciled as a matter of
practice with a new order which demands from it new sacrifices for which it is
not yet psychologically prepared. This in itself need not matter, for all
movement forward implies a certain amount of friction and difficulty of
adjustment; and if in the process liberty suffered a few shocks on one side,
and order a few shocks" on the other, they would still shake down easily
enough into a new adjustment after a certain amount of experience.
Unfortunately, it is the nature of every self-asserting tendency or principle
in the hour of its growth, when it finds circumstances favourable, to over-assert
itself and exaggerate its claim, to carry its impulses to a one-sided fruition,
to affirm its despotic rule and to depress and even to trample upon other
tendencies and principles and especially on those which it instinctively feels
to be the farthest removed from its own nature. And if it finds a resistance in
these opposite powers, then its impulse of self-assertion becomes angry,
violent, tyrannical; instead of the friction of adjustment we have an inimical
struggle stumbling through violent vicissitudes, action and reaction, evolution
and revolution till one side or the other prevails in the conflict.
This is what
has happened in the past development of mankind; the struggle of order and
uniformity against liberty has been the dominant fact of all great human
formations and developments - religious, social, political. There is as yet no
apparent ground for predicting a more reasonable principle of development in
the near future. Man seems indeed to be becoming more generally a reasoning
animal than in any known past period of his history, but he has not by that
become, except in one or two
directions, much more of a reasonable mind and a harmonious spirit; for he
still uses his reason much more commonly to justify strife and mutual
contradiction than to arrive at a wise agreement. And always his mind and
reason are very much at the mercy of his vital desires and passions. Therefore
we must suppose that even under the best circum- stances the old method of
development will assert itself and the old struggle be renewed in the attempt
at human unification. The principle of authority and order will attempt a
mechanical organisation; the principle of liberty will resist and claim
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a more flexible, free
and spacious system. The two ancient enemies will struggle for the
control of the human unity as they did in the past for the control of the
growing form of the nation. In the process, the circumstances being favourable
to the narrower power, both national and individual liberty are likely to go to
the wall - happy if they are not set against it before a firing platoon of laws
and restrictions to receive a military quietus.
This might not
happen if within the nations themselves the spirit of individual liberty still flourished in its old vigour; for
that would then demand, both from an
innate sympathy and for its own sake, respect for the liberties of all
the constituent nations. But, as far as all present appearances go to show, we
are entering into a period in which the ideal of individual liberty is destined
to an entire eclipse under the shadow of the State idea, if not to a sort of
temporary death or at least of long stupor, coma and hibernation. The
constriction and mechanisation of the unifying process is likely to coincide
with a simultaneous process of constriction and mechanisation within each
constituting unit. Where then in this double process will the spirit of liberty
find its safeguard or its alimentation? The old practical formulations of
freedom would disappear in the double process and the only hope of healthy
progress would lie in a new formulation of liberty produced by a new powerful
movement spiritual or intellectual of the human mind which will reconcile
individual liberty with the collective ideal of a communal life and the liberty
of the group-unit with the new-born necessity of a more united life for the
human race.
Meanwhile, we
have to consider how far it is either likely or possible to carry the principle
of unification in those more outward and mechanical aspects which the external,
that is to say, political and administrative method is prone to favour, and how
far they will in their more extreme formulations favour or retard the true
progress of the race to its perfection. We have to consider how far the principle
of nationality itself is likely to be affected, whether there is any chance of
its entire dissolution or, if it is preserved, what place the subordinated
nation- unit will take in the new united life. This involves the question
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of control, the
idea of the "Parliament of Man" and other ideas of political
organisation as applied to this new portentous problem in the science of
collective living. Thirdly, there is the question of uniformity and how far
uniformity is either healthful to the race or necessary to unity. It is evident
that we enter here upon problems which we shall have to treat in a much more
abstract fashion and with much less sense of actuality than those we have till
now been handling. For all this is in the dark future, and all the light we can
have is from past experience and the general principles of life and nature and
socio- logy; the present gives us only a dim light on the solution which
plunges a little further on in Time into a shadowy darkness full of
incalculable possibilities. We can foresee nothing; we can only speculate and
lay down principles.
We see that
there are always two extreme possibilities with a number of more or less
probable compromises. The nation is at present the firm group-unit of the human
aggregation to which all other units tend to subordinate themselves; even the
imperial has hitherto been only a development of the national and empires have
existed in recent times, not consciously for the sake of a wider aggregation as
did the imperial Roman world, but to serve the instinct of domination and
expansion, the land hunger, money hunger, commodity hunger, the vital,
intellectual, cultural aggressiveness of powerful and prosperous nations. This,
however, does not secure the nation-unit from eventual dissolution in a larger
principle of aggregation. Group- units there must always be in any human unity,
even the most entire, intolerant and uniform, for that is the very principle
not only of human nature, but of life and of every aggregation; we strike here
on a fundamental law of universal existence, on the fundamental mathematics and
physics of creation. But it does not follow that the nation need persist as the
group-unit. It may disappear altogether; even now the rejection of the nation-
idea has begun, the opposite idea of the sans-patrie, the citizen of the
world, has been born and was a growing force before the war; and though
temporarily overborne, silenced and discouraged, it is by no means slain, but
is likely to revive with an increased violence hereafter. On the other hand,
the nation-
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idea may persist in full vitality or may assert in the
event- after whatever struggle and apparent decline - its life, its freedom,
its vigorous particularism within the larger unity. Finally, it may persist,
but with a reduced and subjected vitality, or even without real vitality or any
living spirit of particularism or separatism, as a convenience, an
administrative rather than a psychological fact like a French department or an
English county. But still -it may preserve just sufficient mechanical
distinctness to form a starting-point for that subsequent dissolution of human
unity which will come about inevitably if the unification is more mechanical
than real, - if, that is to say,
it continues to be governed by the political and administrative motive,
supported by the experience of economic and social or merely cultural ease,
convenience and fails to serve as a material basis for the spiritual oneness of
mankind.
So also with
the ideal of uniformity; for with many minds, especially those of a rigid,
mechanical cast, those in which logic and intellectuality are stronger than the
imagination and the free vital instinct or those which are easily seduced by
the beauty of an idea and prone to forget its limitations, uniformity is an ideal, even sometimes the highest ideal
of which they can think. The uniformity of mankind is not an impossible
eventuality, even though impracticable in the present circumstances and in
certain directions hardly conceivable except in a far distant future. For
certainly there is or has been an immense drive
towards uniformity of life habits, uniformity of knowledge, uniformity
political, social, economical, educational, and all this, if followed out to
its final conclusion, will lead naturally to a uniformity of culture. If that
were realised, the one barrier left against a dead level of complete uniformity
would be the difference of language; for language creates and determines
thought even while it is created and determined by it, and so long as there is
difference of language there will always be a certain amount of free variation
of thought, of knowledge and of culture. But it is easily conceivable that the
general uniformity of culture and intimate association of life will give
irresistible force to the need already felt of a universal language, and a
universal language once created or once adopted may end by
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killing out the regional languages as Latin killed out the
languages of Gaul, Spain and Italy or as English has killed but Cornish,
Gaelic, Erse and has been encroaching on the Welsh tongue. On the other hand,
there is a revival nowadays, due to the growing subjectivism of the human mind,
of the principle of free variation and refusal of uniformity. If this tendency
triumphs, the unification of the race will have so to organise itself as to
respect the free culture, thought, life of its constituent units. But there is
also the third possibility of a dominant uniformity which will allow or even
encourage such minor variations as do not threaten the foundations of its rule.
And here again the variations may be within their limits vital, forceful, to a
certain extent particularist though not separatist, or they may be quite minor
tones and shades, yet sufficient to form a starting-point for the dissolution
of uniformity into a new cycle of various progress.
So again with
the governing organisation of the human race. It may be a rigid regimentation
under a central authority such as certain socialistic schemes envisage for the
nation, a regime suppressing all individual and regional liberty in the
interests of a close and uniform organisation of human training, economic life,
social habits, morals, knowledge, religion even, every department of human activity.
Such a development may seem impossible, as it would be indeed impracticable in
the near future, because of the immense masses it would have to embrace, the
difficulties it would have to surmount, the many problems that would have to be
solved before it could become possible. But this idea of impossibility leaves
out of consideration two important factors, the growth of Science with its
increasingly easy manipulation of huge masses - witness the present war - and of large-scale problems and the
rapid march of Socialism.1 () Supposing the
triumph of the socialistic idea or of its practice in whatever disguise, - in
all the continents,- it might naturally lead to an international socialisation
which would be rendered possible by the growth of science and scientific
1 Even such apparent reactions as the now-defeated Fascist regime in
Italy merely pre- pare or embody new possibilities of the principle of State
control and direction which is the essence of Socialism
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organisation and by the annihilation of space
difficulties and numerical difficulties. On the other hand, it is possible that
after a cycle of violent struggle between the ideal of regimentation and the
ideal of liberty the socialistic period of mankind might prove comparatively of
brief duration like that of monarchical absolutism in Europe and might be
followed by another more inspired by the principles of philosophic Anarchism,
that is to say, of unity based upon the completest individual freedom and
freedom also of natural unforced grouping.
A compromise might also be reached, a dominant regimentation with a
subordinate freedom more or less vital, but even if less vital, yet a starting-
point for the dissolution of the regime when humanity begins to feel that
regimentation is not its ultimate destiny and that a fresh cycle of search and
experiment has become again indispensable to its future.
It is
impossible here to consider these large questions with any thoroughness. To
throw out certain ideas which may guide us in our approach to the problem of
unification is all that we can attempt. The problem is vast and obscure and
even a ray of light upon it here and there may help to diminish its difficulty
and darkness.
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