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is no need even to go back to Jesus or the Jewish prophets.
Karl Marx is as much a part of the past as King John Sobieski;
and the Russian Revolution is as past as the Roman Empire.
The book is full of violent affirmations of this sort,
entirely unsupported by arguments ot any sort.
Nevertheless, there is an argument running through the book;
and a very curious and interesting one it is.
The writer starts, as he starts with so many unexplained things,
with the very dangerous word, "disinterested." It is dangerous
because a mere touch will make it mean "uninterested"; in the sense
of the Buddhist and the pessimist. We all know it has a sane sense,
as meaning sincerely unselfish, self-sacrificing for a faith, and so on.
But Mr. Murry does not mean merely giving up our pleasures for the sake
of our ideals. In some places, he really seems to mean giving up
our ideals, or some of our ideals, for a sort of super-ideal which has
sometimes precious little to say for itself, except that it is Destiny.
There really is a wild cry from Asia in his classic speech;
an altruism that is almost nihilism; a sacrifice that is nearly suicide.
We are to give up liberty; we are to give up everything.
This passionate paradox is undoubtedly sincere; and yet it conceals
another paradox which it will be well to watch and suspect.
Morally, it is all very heroic; but intellectually, it actually
contains too much caution; it is more cautious than wise.
It has behind its position two alternative lines of retreat.
For the logical reader will at once perceive that, by thus rising
into wild renunciation, the controversialist really has it both ways.
Wherever Communism can be made attractive, he will make it attractive.
Wherever Communism is quite obviously repulsive, he will say it proves
the selfless hardihood of Communists who embrace so repulsive a thing.
When it is human, it is in sympathy with all humanity; when it is inhuman,
it calls for a superhuman sympathy. When it is good it is good;
and when it is bad, they are very good to swallow it. This form
of Necessity might be found in that proverb from the mouldering past:
"Heads I win, tails you lose."
What Mr. Middleton Murry wants, of course, is real religion;
and in parts of this book he seems to be growing desperate,
or almost going mad, under the limitations of his unreal religion.
He has got authority in the wrong place and asceticism
in the wrong place. He is more limited by the idea
of Destiny than we are by the idea of Deity. And he wants
man to sacrifice civilisation as monks sacrifice luxury.
He seems almost satisfied with it as a giant gesture of renunciation;
there is really uncommonly little in this book about what will
be the practical advantages of Communism when established.
Reading between the lines, we almost find the meaning to be
merely this: that he and the rest of us have come to breaking point;
and this is the obvious point at which to break. There are
other aspects of the book, with many of which I warmly agree,
but I will conclude by saying that my fundamental objection to
his Communism is that it consents to be the heir of Capitalism.
His unfortunate necessitarianism narrows the possibilities
of politics; and is content to say that industrialism has
turned the world into One Man, who is aching in all his limbs.
No doubt; and so would you and I, if we were all unnaturally tied
to each other neck and heels, that we might make up together
the monstrous and tottering figure of a pantomime ogre.
But I do not want the ogre; I only want to cut him up.
I am more revolutionary than Mr. Middleton Murry.
I do not believe the unnatural monster will ache any the less,
because he calls himself a Communist. I am more sceptical than
Mr. Middleton Murry. I deny the pantomime myth of the One Man;
and I should like to break him up again into men.
-/-
THE ASCETIC AT LARGE
MY note on the Communism of Mr. Middleton Murry reads to me
as rather too hasty and hostile; because I had no space
to mention some strong and substantial parts of the book;
notably those expressing contempt for the respectable
sort of Socialist who will not call himself a Communist.
The study of 'parasitic' Parliamentary Labour is masterly,
and my own sympathies would be all with a man like Mr. Maxton
as compared with a man like Mr. Thomas. But the sequel
is still puzzling; for in the last short note there is no
practical programme except a Minimum Wage for all, which is said
to obviate the need of expropriation of land and property.
I suppose this means that employers would be taxed till they
were too poor to employ; and then the State would employ.
But what State--and, my God, what statesmen! Why, presumably
(if nothing is needed but a new wage raised by a new tax)
just the jolly statesmen the world produces at present,
the parasitic Parliamentarians turned into omnipotent bureaucrats.
I should refuse it, of course; first, because it preserves
the wage-system; second because the worst wage-system is one
with only one employer, who may be an omnipresent enemy;
and third because, in the purely practical statement,
there is no provision for any change in the type of tyrant.
But this is unfair to the unpractical part; which of course
is the better part. Mr. Murry does demand a terrific
change of heart, though his scheme hardly ensures it.
We may well struggle on as Distributists, when Communism seems
so steep even to Communists; and they must endure the same
abnormal austerity in order to be abnormal, that we endure
to be normal.
In theory, or this part of his theory at least, Mr. Middleton Murry is
an ascetic who wishes to transfer asceticism from the individual life,
where it may be noble and beautiful, to the whole social and historical
life, where it becomes simply vandalism or barbaric destruction.
In this he is undoubtedly at one with the Puritan or the Prohibitionist
or the more mechanical sort of Pacifist; in short he is entirely
at one with that sort of modern world which he most justly detests.
Broadly considered, the fact that bulks biggest in the modern industrial
world is this: that its moral movements are much more utterly and
ruthlessly repressive than the past forms of mysticism or fanaticism that
commonly affected only the few. Mediaeval men endured frightful fasts;
but none of them would have dreamed of seriously proposing that
nobody anywhere should ever have wine any more. And Prohibition,
which was accepted by a huge modern industrial civilisation,
did seriously propose that nobody should ever have wine any more.
Cranks who dislike tobacco would utterly destroy all tobacco;
I doubt whether they would even allow it medically as a sedative.
Some Pagan sages and some Christian saints have been vegetarians,
but nobody in the ancient world would ever have prophesied that flocks
and herds would utterly vanish from the earth. But in the Utopia of
the true vegetarian, I suppose they would utterly vanish from the earth.
The more pedantic Pacifist has the same view of fighting,
even for justice, and disarmament is as universal as conscription.
For both conscription and disarmament are very modern notions.
And modern notions of the sort are not only negative but nihilist;
they always demand the absolute annihilation or "total prohibition"
of something.
Now I am as adamant against Mr. Murry in this notion of
mutilating our whole culture in a frenzy of moral renunciation.
I admit that a saint may cut off his hand and enter heaven,
and have a higher place there than the rest of us.
But a plea for the amputation of the hands of all human beings,
the vision of a Handless Humanity as the next evolutionary stage
after that of the tailless ape, leaves me cold, however much
it is commended as a splendid corporate self-sacrifice.
These things are an allegory, in more ways than one. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]