Part 2

Every great war exhibits at least two phenomena following on from its end: the falling back into an abyss of meanness, materialism and self-seeking, with the swift disappearance of the spiritual exaltation developed during the fight, and the emergence sooner or later of isolated personalities who have retained the ardour of spiritual regeneration, who seem indeed to epitomize it within themselves, and who struggle, sometimes with success, sometimes with failure, to bring the mass of people back to their lost ideals and embody these in a better type of society. Apparently success or failure depends on whether the particular war in question came on the rise or the fall of the rhythmical curve that conditions all history.

At the present moment the first of these two phenomena has shown itself. Whether it is in Russia or in the fragments of the despoiled Central Empires where the ominous horror of Bolshevism riots in a carnival of obscene destruction, or in the governments and “interests” and amongst the peoples of the Allies, there is now, corporately, no evidence of anything but a general break-down of ideals, and either an accelerating plunge into something a few degrees worse than barbarism, with the Dark Ages as its inevitable issue, or an equally fatal return to the altogether hopeless, indeed the pestilential, standards and methods of the fruition of modernism in the world-before-the-war. The new warfare is between these, the malignant old Two Alternatives; fear of one encompasses the other, and in each case all that is done is with the terror of Bolshevism conditioning all on the one hand, terror of reactionism on the other. Expediency, desperate self-preservation, is the controlling passion, and the principles of justice, right and reason are no longer operative.

As this is written there is no sure indication as to which of these alternatives is to prevail, but it is for the moment quite clearly indicated that it will be the one or the other,--either the tyranny of the degraded, Bolshevism, universal anarchy, with the modernist reversal of all values succeeded by the post-modernist destruction of all values, or the triumph of reaction, with a return to the world-before-the-war for a brief period of profligate excess along all materialistic, intellectual and scientific lines not unlike the Restoration period of Charles II, with the same ruin achieved in the end though after a certain interlude. And yet the third alternative is theoretically possible: escape from the Scylla and Charybdis of error through the opportune development of the second phenomenon, the reasonable certainty of which is indicated by history--the appearance of those leaders of vision and power who had been generated through the alchemy of war.

That in the end they will come we need not doubt, but in the meantime an errant world, leaderless and ungoverned, is urged swiftly on towards catastrophe of either one sort or another, nor will it wait the coming of the indispensable leaders. It is not from the men whose potential greatness was perfected and revealed by war, Cardinal Mercier, for example, or Marshal Foch, great leaders absolutely of the first class, that solution is to be sought, for in their age is sufficient inhibition. It is rather from those whose character has actually been made by war, youths perhaps, who have fought and found, either in the armies or the navies or in the air, or even in some of the non-combatant branches of the Service. Boys they are now, perhaps, in years, but into them has been poured the energizing power that leads to mastership; to them is given the first fire of progressive revelation. Somewhere, in the still active units, on the way back to their homes and to civil life, or already mingled in the activities from which they were called for their great testing, are those who sooner or later will find themselves the leaders of the quest for a new life for the world. The Divine finger-touch has been granted them, the spark of inspiration has lightened in their souls, but seldom is the generation swift; it may be years before it is effected, and meanwhile only the Two Alternatives remain.

For my own purpose in this book, perhaps indeed so far as society itself is concerned, it is a matter of indifference which is the victor in the fight for supremacy; the ultimate issue will be the same though the roads are various. Universal beastliness issuant of Russia, or universal materialism _redivivus_, the conditions of life will be intolerable, and in the end a new thing will be built up as different on the one hand to anarchy as on the other it is different to the industrial-democratic-materialist _régime_ of the immediate past. With the former we are assured some five hundred years not unlike those that followed the fall of Rome; with the latter we at least are given the respite of a brief Restoration, during which the war-bred potencies may mature, and at the end of the few gross years which would be allotted to this _status quo ante_-civilization, become operative to avert the horror of a recrudescent Bolshevism. At least so we may hope; on the other hand it may be doubted whether, after all, a revived and intensified materialism such as that which the reactionary element is attempting, would not afford an even less favourable and stimulating soil for fostering the possible war-potentialities than would red anarchy, for the suffocating qualities of gross luxuriance are sometimes more fatal than the desperate sensations of danger, adversity and shame. In any case, the immediate future is not one to be anticipated with enthusiasm or confidence and we shall do well to consider the course to be followed by those who reject the Two Alternatives and refuse to have any part in either.

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:

[Illustration: A THE CURVE OF CIVILIZATION B THE CURVE OF MONASTICISM]

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.