-43_The Problem of Uniformity and Liberty.htm

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 of 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 WorldNature 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 a body and an articulate voice.   

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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 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 old circle of progression by retrogression 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.

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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 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 restrictive 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. 

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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They would be compelled 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 therefore 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.

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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 coexistent with an order already established into which it has 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.   

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Therefore we must suppose that even under the best circumstances 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 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.

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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 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 sociology; 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. Groupunits 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.

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But it does not follow that the nation need persist as the groupunit. 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 nationidea 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 and 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, economic, 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.

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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 killing out the regional languages as Latin killed out the languages of Gaul, Spain and Italy or as English has killed out 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.

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 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.² 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 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 startingpoint 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.

2 Even such apparent reactions as the now-defeated Fascist regime in Italy merely prepare or embody new possibilities of the principle of State control and direction which is the essence of Socialism.  

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