Chapter I: Part 1

THE OPEN CONSPIRACY

MR. WELLS HAS ALSO WRITTEN THE FOLLOWING BOOKS ON SOCIAL, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL QUESTIONS

Anticipations (1900)
A Modern Utopia
The Future in America
New Worlds for Old
First and Last Things
God the Invisible King
The Outline of History
Russia in the Shadows
The Salvaging of Civilisation
Washington and the Hope of Peace
A Short History of the World
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster
A Year of Prophesying
Democracy Under Revision
History
Mr. Belloc Objects to the Outline of History
The Way the World Is Going

H. G. WELLS

THE OPEN CONSPIRACY BLUE PRINTS FOR A WORLD REVOLUTION

GARDEN CITY
NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
AND COMPANY, INC.
1928

COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN
& COMPANY, INC. ALL EIGHTS RESERVED.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE
COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

To
DANIEL GERBAULT
who asked me to
write this book

PREFACE

This book states as plainly and clearly as possible the essential ideas of my life, the perspective of my world. Everything else that I have been or done seems to me to have been contributory to or illustrative of these ideas and suggestions. My other writings, with hardly an exception, explore, try over, illuminate, comment upon or flower out of the essential matter that I here attempt at last to strip bare to its foundations and state unmistakably. This is my religion. Here are my directive aims and the criteria of all I do.

Since the subject of this book is the whole destiny of man, and the whole duty of man, it will certainly be called a pretentious book. That will be a charge too obvious to miss and we can consider it made. But it is no more pretentious to work upon the whole of life than upon parts and aspects of life; it is a question of scale and method; the intellectual effort needed, the quality of the work required for making the map of a continent may be less than and inferior to that demanded by the chemical examination of a muscle fibre or the investigation of atomic structure. A man is not pretentious because he works with the theodolite instead of the microscope. Some men work upon the bulkier common issues; some upon finer and subtler questions. To every man his task. There is no hierarchy in human thought.

Here, given tentatively, with many evident faults and gaps, is a scheme for all human conduct. It discusses what should man be doing and what should men be doing. It states a general form and direction for the crowding rush of modern ideas and impulsions. I believe that upon such lines as I have drawn, the creative forces in our species can be organised and may be organised, in a comprehensive fight against individual and collective frustration and death. I believe also that there is no other direction but this direction along which mankind can escape from the insecurity of an animal which has been evolved and which may presently be degraded or extinguished in the play of material things. The accident of a great opportunity, I hold, has happened to our kind. It is opportunity and not destiny we face.

So I bear my witness and argue my design. This is, I declare, the truth and the way of salvation. If I could, I would put this book before every mind in the world. I would say, tell me where this is wrong, or tell me why you do not live after these principles.

I pray the reader for a patient reading. This is, I submit, matter of very great moment to him. My phrasing, my idiom of thought may not be his. Will he forgive that for the sake of the substance I am putting before him? It is astir already in many intelligences and it is an amplifying group of ideas. I am merely the observer who notes his own adhesion and draws attention, eagerly and earnestly, to what is going on and to the quality of our present occasion. Will the reader at least try to understand before he refutes? I am discussing here the possibility of an immense and hopeful revolution in human affairs and of an enlivening and ennobling change in our lives. I am discussing whether our species, he and I with it and part of it, is to live or die.

CONTENTS

Preface _p._ vii

Ch. I. Necessity of Religion to Human Life 1

II. Subordination of Self the Essence of Religion 8

III. Need for a Restatement of Religion 11

IV. Objective Expression of Modern Religion 20

V. The Frame of the Task before Mankind:
The World Commonweal 27

VI. Broad Characteristics of the World Commonweal 32

VII. No Stable Utopia Is Contemplated 55

VIII. The Open Conspiracy Must Be Heterogeneous 57

IX. Forces and Resistances in the Great Modern
Communities Now Prevalent, Which Will Be
Antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy 68

X. The Open Conspiracy and the Resistances of
the Less Industrialised Peoples 95

XI. Resistances and Antagonistic Forces in Ourselves 112

XII. The Open Conspiracy Must begin as a Movement
of Explanation and Propaganda 126

XIII. Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy 144

XIV. Existing and Developing Movements with Which
the Open Conspiracy May Hope to Coalesce 164

XV. The Creative Home, Social Group and School: The
Present Waste of Youthful Seriousness 178

XVI. Progressive Development of the Activities of
the Open Conspiracy into a World Control and
Commonweal: The Hazards of the Conflict 185

XVII. The World Community 194

Marginal Note 197

THE OPEN CONSPIRACY

_Chapter I_

NECESSITY OF RELIGION TO HUMAN LIFE

Few people, if any, are always sustained by unselfish or religious motives, and few or none are altogether beyond their influence. The daily lives of the great majority of human beings are frankly irreligious; they seem to differ only in their scope, variety and intelligence from the lives of animals; they are determined by instinctive impulses, individual desires and personal ends; they pass from one satisfaction or disappointment to another; they are attracted and deflected by casual encounters; they forget more or less completely and they resume. Nevertheless, the conduct of most lives is restricted and defined by the prevalent conceptions of what is honourable and becoming, and right and wrong. Although the lives of the great run of people are neither moral essentially nor essentially religious, they respect current moral and religious forms and maxims, just as they conform to current usages and beaten tracks. It is the line of least resistance for them, and that suffices.

Communities have been held together in the past and are still held together by laws and moral codes systematised upon religious ideas, and this although few people have more than a superficial apprehension of such ideas. Religion in its completeness has always been the peculiarity of a minority; it has shaped and innervated communities but never pervaded them throughout. But its presence seems to have been necessary for collective life. Without it morality was baseless and law unjustifiable. The intermittent disposition of most human beings towards some sort of righteousness beyond self-seeking has been upheld, as some sprawling, weak-jointed climbing plant may be upheld on a trellis, by that more steadfast minority of sincere and devoted persons. It is these latter who have preserved disinterested standards, and who still preserve them; who have been and who continue to be the salt of the earth.

Religious ideas in the past have derived from the most diverse emotional and intellectual origins in the integrating mind of man. Speculative explanations, metaphors hardened by usage into quasi-factual statements, fantasies arising out of germinating and suppressed impulses, false analogies, parables begotten and lit by flashes of spiritual insight, traditions misconceived and distorted, dogmatic excesses in explicitness evoked by the irritation of contradictory criticism, the odd compromises of theological diplomatists, the craving for supernatural sanctions and vindications and the nightmare creations of fear, that haunting shadow of all conscious life, have mingled inextricably in every religious fabric. But the survival value of a religion to a community has lain always in the practical assistance it afforded in the subordination of self and the achievement of co-operative loyalties not otherwise obtainable. No community seems ever to have been held together in wholesome and vigorous collective life by “enlightened self-interest” alone. Enlightened self-interest in exceptional cases and under slight or moderate stresses may produce enough simulated disinterestedness to be practically undistinguishable from public virtue, and the great mass of lives in every community is no doubt kept at this or that moral level, and in this or that form of behaviour according to the quality and intensity of the beliefs that hold that community together with little or no co-operating force in the lives themselves. But somewhere and effectively in that community the sustaining beliefs of the community must be passionately and sincerely held and maintained. A community where binding beliefs have decayed altogether is like a building whose mortar has been changed to sand. It may stand for a time, but it stands precariously.

Now in the communities in which we are living to-day there has been a far-reaching weakening and change in religious beliefs. This has been due to an enormous growth of knowledge, to an enhanced vigour of criticism, to a relative enfeeblement of government and authority which released unprecedented freedom of speech and permitted the crystallisation of doubts into coherent and militant denials. At the same time there have been developments of the mechanical conditions of life that have enlarged the scale of possible human operations, made economical life increasingly international and brought once autonomous states and regions into a mutually disintegrative intimacy of reaction. The stresses upon our communities are greater than they have ever been and the blinding forces less. The outlook before our race seems therefore to be wider, more uncertain and much more dangerous than has ever appeared before.

In the past, in the history of every community there have been phases of moral and religious confusion. The beliefs and ideas of right conduct that have served hitherto begin, in the presence of new circumstances or new challenges, to lose authority or to fail in meeting current moral problems. An age of relaxation and a sort of experimental wickedness dawns. Scruples vanish. Treachery, cruelty, unrestrained self-indulgence, which have been kept under hatches, emerge conspicuously. Government becomes more adventurous, tyrannous and unjust, and the moral distinction between ruler and brigand fines away to the vanishing-point. There seems no longer any good faith nor any sweetness of soul in human life, except among the sacrificial simple. What will for a better life still manifests itself in the world is for a while quite unable to take hold of the disorder. Italy in the Machiavellian period and Germany after the intricate wars of the Reformation may be cited as typical instances of such “wicked” phases in social history. Yet it was not that the heart of man changed for the worse in those ages, not that there was a sudden generation of vipers, but that intellectual confusion had divided and enfeebled that graver-spirited minority which had, under more assured conditions, sustained the faith of most people and the moral disciplines of everyone. The quality of the ingredients of the human mixture remained the same, but the restraining and directive forces had in their interplay come upon a phase of mutual neutralisation and collective ineffectiveness.

There are many signs that to-day over large parts of the world there is a drift towards such another disintegrative and distressful phase. The brigand, the boss and the adventurer become portentously successful and immune. People who, in other times, would have been active and confident in their own lives and vigorously co-operative in the control of human affairs are uncertain in their hearts and unhappy in their interventions. The old faiths have become unconvincing, unsubstantial and insincere, and though there are clear intimations of a new faith in the world, it still awaits embodiment in formulæ and organisations that will bring it into effective reaction upon human affairs as a whole.

This present essay is an attempt to assemble these intimations in a form that will be available for the practical direction of the writer’s and the reader’s life.

_Chapter II_

SUBORDINATION OF SELF THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION

The religions that hitherto have served over wide regions and for considerable periods of time to sustain men in more or less orderly, honest, decent and progressive societies, have been presented to the generality and accepted by the generality in extremely attenuated forms. In their beginnings they were all intense and uncompromising. Christianity, for example, began with the completest communism, Buddhism with an entire renunciation of earthly desire, Islam with the passionate and forcible dedication of the whole world to Allah. Sooner or later, however, the propagandist came to terms with human weakness and struck a bargain for a cheaper form of common proselyte.

But though the creed and practice might need lightening and fitting to customary humanity before they could be universally accepted, there appeared no essential conflict in the process between the intense and the superficial form. The common man assented to everything in the doctrine, and merely asked to have the more difficult and onerous terms deferred or mitigated. His plea for his personal insufficiency was weakness and not dissent.

In their completeness, in their esoteric forms, in the life that was professionally _religious_, religions have always demanded great subordinations of self. Therein lay their creative usefulness. There is no such thing as a self-contained religion, a private religious solo. Certain forms of Protestantism and some mystical types come near to making religion a secluded duet between the individual and his divinity, but here that may be regarded as a perversion of the religious impulse. Just as the normal sexual complex excites and stirs the individual out of his egotism to serve the ends of the race, so the normal religious process takes the individual out of his egotism for the service of the community. It is not a bargain, a “social contract,” between the individual and the community; it is a subordination of both the existing individual and the existing community in relation to something, a divinity, a divine order, a standard, a righteousness, more important than either. What is called in the phraseology of certain religions “conviction of sin” and “the flight from the City of Destruction” are familiar instances of this reference of the self-centred individual and the current social life to something far better than either the one or the other.

This is the third element in the religious relationship, a hope, a promise, an objective which turns the convert not only from himself but from the “world” as it is, towards better things. First comes self-disregard, then service, and then this reconstructive creative urgency.

For that minority of minds which I have already spoken of as the salt of the earth, this aspect of religion seems to have been its primary attraction. One has to remember that there is a will for religion scattered throughout mankind. Religion has never pursued its distinctive votaries; they have come to meet it. The desire to give oneself to greater ends than the everyday life affords, and to give oneself freely, is clearly dominant in that minority and traceable in an incalculable proportion of the majority.

_Chapter III_

NEED FOR A RESTATEMENT OF RELIGION

Every great religion has explained itself in the form of a history and a cosmogony. It has been felt necessary to say _Why_ and _To what end_. Every religion has had necessarily to adopt the physical conceptions and usually also to assume many of the moral and social values current at the time of its foundation. It could not transcend the philosophical phrases and attitudes that seemed then to supply the natural frame for a faith, nor draw upon anything beyond the store of scientific knowledge of its time. In these conditions lurked the seeds of an ultimate decay and supersession of every religion.

But as the idea of continual change going farther and farther from existing realities and never returning to them is a new one, each fresh development of religion in the world so far has been proclaimed in perfect good faith as the culminating and final truth. The suggestion of the possibility of further restatement is an unsettling suggestion; it seems to undermine conviction and it breaks the ranks of the believers because there are enormous variations in the capacities of men to recognise the same spirit under a changing shape. While some intelligences can recognise the same God under a variety of names and symbols without any severe strain, others cannot even detect the most contrasted Gods one from the other, provided they wear the same mask and title. It appears a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to many minds to restate religion in terms of biological and psychological necessity, while to others any variation in the phrasing of the faith seems to be nothing less than atheistical misrepresentations of the most damnable kind. For them God, a God still anthropomorphic enough to have a will and purpose, to display preferences and reciprocate emotions, to be indeed a person, must be retained until the end of time. For others, God can be thought of as a Great First Cause, as impersonal and inhuman as atomic structure.

It is because of the historical and philosophical commitments they have undertaken, and because of concessions made to common human weaknesses in regard to such once apparently minor but now vital moral issues as property, mental activity and public veracity--rather than of any inadequacy in their adaptation to psychological needs--that the present discredit of recognised religions has come about. They no longer seem even roughly truthful upon issues of fact, and they give no imperatives over large fields of conduct in which perplexity is prevalent. People will say: “I could be perfectly happy leading the life of a Catholic devotee if only I could believe.” But most of the framework of religious explanation upon which that life is sustained is too old-fashioned and too irrelevant to admit of that thoroughness of belief which is necessary for the devotion of intelligent people.

Great ingenuity has been shown by modern writers and thinkers in the adaptation of venerated religious expressions to new ideas. _Peccavi._ The word “God” is in most minds so associated with the concept of religion that it is abandoned only with the greatest reluctance. The word remains though the idea is continually attenuated. He is pushed farther and farther from actuality and His definition becomes increasingly a bundle of negations, until at last, in His rôle of The Absolute, He becomes an entirely negative expression. While we can speak of good, say some, we can speak of God. God is the possibility of goodness, the good side of things. If phrases in which the name of God is used are to be abandoned, they argue, religion will be left speechless before many occasions.

Certainly there is something beyond the individual that is and the world that is; on that we have already insisted as a characteristic of all religions; that persuasion is the essence of faith and the key to courage. But whether that is to be considered, even after the most strenuous exercises in personification, as a greater person or a comprehensive person is another matter. Personality is the last vestige of anthropomorphism. The modern urge to a precise veracity is against such concessions to traditional expression. On the other hand there is in many fine religious minds a desire amounting almost to a necessity for an object of devotion so individualised as to be capable at least of a receptive consciousness even if no definite response is conceded. One type of mind can accept a reality in itself which another must project and dramatise before it can comprehend it and react to it. The human soul is an intricate thing which will not endure elucidation when that passes beyond a certain degree of harshness and roughness. The human spirit has learnt love, devotion, obedience and humility in relation to other personalities, and with difficulty it takes the final step to a transcendent subordination, from which the last shred of personality has been stripped. In matters not immediately material, language has to work by metaphors, and though every metaphor carries its own peculiar risks of confusion we cannot do without them. Great intellectual tolerance is necessary, therefore--a cultivated disposition to translate and retranslate from one metaphysical or emotional idiom to another--if there is not to be a deplorable wastage of moral force in our world.

Three profound differences between the mental dispositions of the present time and those of preceding ages have to be realised if current developments of the religious impulse are to be seen in their correct relationship to the religious life of the past. There has been a great advance in the analysis of psychic processes and the courage with which men have probed into the origins of human thought and feeling. Following upon the biological advances that have made us recognise fish and amphibian in the bodily structure of man, have come these parallel developments in which we see elemental fear and lust and self-love moulded, modified and exalted, under the stress of social progress, into intricate human motives. Our conception of sin and our treatment of sin have been profoundly modified by this analysis. Our former sins are seen as ignorances, inadequacies and bad habits, and the moral conflict is robbed of three-fourths of its ego-centred melodramatic quality. We are no longer moved to be less wicked; we are moved to organise our conditioned reflexes and lead a life less fragmentary and silly.

Secondly, the conception of individuality has been influenced and relaxed by biological thought, so that we do not think so readily of the individual _contra mundum_ as our fathers did. We begin to realise that we are egotists by misapprehension. Nature cheats the self to serve the purposes of the species by filling it with wants that war against its private interests. As gut eyes are opened to these things, we see ourselves as beings greater or less than the definitive self. Man’s soul is no longer his own. It is, he discovers, part of a greater being which lived before he was born and will survive him. The idea of a survival of the definite individual with all the accidents and idiosyncrasies of his temporal nature upon him, dissolves to nothing in this new view of immortality.

The third of the main contrasts between modern and former thought which have rendered the general shapes of established religion old-fashioned and unserviceable, is a reorientation of current ideas about time. The powerful disposition of the human mind to explain everything as the inevitable unfolding of a past event which, so to speak, sweeps the future helplessly before it, has been checked by a mass of subtle criticisms. The conception of progress as a broadening and increasing purpose, a conception which is taking hold of the human imagination more and more firmly, turns religious life towards the future. We think no longer of submission to the irrevocable decrees of absolute dominion, but of participation in an adventure on behalf of a power that gains strength and establishes itself. The history of our world, which has been unfolded to us by science, runs counter to all the histories on which religions have been based. There was no Creation in the past, we begin to realise, but eternally there is creation; there was no Fall to account for the conflict of good and evil, but a stormy ascent. Life as we know it is a mere beginning.

It seems unavoidable that if religion is to develop unifying and directive power in the present confusion of human affairs it must adapt itself to this forward-looking, individuality-analysing turn of mind; it must divest itself of its sacred histories, its gross preoccupations, its posthumous prolongation of personal ends. The desire for service, for subordination, for permanent effect, for an escape from the distressful pettiness and morality of the individual life, is the undying element in every religious system. The time has come to strip religion right down to that, to strip it for greater tasks than it has ever faced before. The histories and symbols that served our fathers encumber and divide us. Sacraments and rituals harbour disputes and waste our scanty emotions. The explanation of why things are is an unnecessary effort in religion. The essential fact in religion is the desire for religion and not how it came about. If you do not want religion, no persuasions, no convictions about your place in the universe can give it to you. The first sentence in the modern creed must be, not “I believe” but “I give myself.”

To what? And how? To these questions we must next address ourselves.

_Chapter IV_

OBJECTIVE EXPRESSION OF MODERN RELIGION

To give oneself religiously is a continuing operation expressed in a series of acts. It can be nothing else. You cannot dedicate yourself and then go away to live just as you have lived before. It is a poor travesty of religion that does not produce an essential change in the life which embraces it. But in the established and older religions of our race, this change of conduct has involved much self-abasement merely to the God or Gods, or much self-mortification merely with a view to the moral perfecting of self. Christian devotion, for example, in these early stages, before the hermit life gave place to organised monastic life, did not to any extent direct itself to service except the spiritual service of other human beings. But as Christianity became a definite social organising force, it took on a great series of healing, comforting, helping, manufacturing and educational activities. The modern tendency has been and is all in the direction of minimising what one might call self-centred devotion and self-subjugation, and of expanding and developing external service. The idea of inner perfectibility dwindles with the diminishing importance attached to individuality. We cease to think of mortifying or exalting or perfecting ourselves and seek to lose ourselves in a greater life. We think less and less of “conquering” self and more and more of escaping from self. It we attempt to perfect ourselves in any respect it is only as a soldier sharpens and polishes an essential weapon.

Our quickened apprehension of continuing change, our broader and fuller vision of the history of life, disabuse our minds of many limitations set to the imaginations of our predecessors. Much that they saw as fixed and determinate, we see as transitory and controllable. They saw life fixed in its species and subjected to irrevocable laws. We see life struggling insecurely but with a gathering successfulness for freedom and power against restriction and death. We see life coming at last to our tragic and hopeful human level. Certain great possibilities, certain mighty problems, we realise, confront mankind to-day. They frame our existences. The practical aspect, the material form, the embodiment, of the modernised religious impulse is the direction of the whole life to the solution of these problems and the realisation of their possibilities.

The modern religious life like all forms of religious life must needs have its own subtle and deep inner activities, its meditations, its self-confrontations, its phases of stress and search and appeal, its serene and prayerful moods, but these inward aspects do not come into the scope of this present enquiry, which is concerned entirely with the outward shape, the direction and the organisation of modern religious effort, with the question of what, given religious devotion, we have to do and how that has to be done.

Now as the modern vision of life has grown clear, certain vast possibilities and certain great dangers have become plain. They challenge mankind. They furnish an entirely new frame and setting for the moral life. In the fixed and limited outlook of the past, practical good works took the form mainly of palliative measures against evils that were conceived of as incurable; the religious community nursed the sick, fed the hungry, provided sanctuary for the fugitive, pleaded with the powerful for mercy. It did not dream of preventing sickness, famine or tyranny. Otherworldliness was its ready refuge from the invincible evil and confusion of the existing scheme of things. It is possible now to imagine an order in human affairs from which these evils have been largely or entirely eliminated. More and more people are coming to realise that such an order is a material possibility. And with the realisation that this is a material possibility, we can no longer be content with a field of good deeds and right action restricted to palliative and consolatory activities. Such things are merely “first-aid.” The religious mind grows bolder than it has ever been before. It pushes through the curtain it once imagined was a barrier. It apprehends its larger obligations. The way in which our activities conduce to the realisation of that conceivable better order in human affairs, becomes the new criterion of conduct.

The realisation of this conceivable better order involves certain necessary achievements. It is impossible for any clear-headed person to suppose that the ever more destructive stupidities of war can be eliminated from human affairs until some common political control dominates the earth, and unless certain pressures due to the growth of population, due to the enlarging scope of human operations or due to conflicting standards and traditions of life, are disposed of. To avoid the positive evils of war and to attain the new levels of prosperity and power that now come into view, an effective world control, not merely of armed force but of the production and main movements of staple commodities and the drift and expansion of population, is required. It is absurd to dream of peace and world-wide progress without that much control. These things assured, the abilities and energies of a greatly increased proportion of human beings could be diverted to the happy activities of scientific research and creative work with an ever-increasing release and enlargement of human possibility. Such a forward stride in human life, the first stride in a mighty continuing advance, an advance to which no limit appears, is now materially possible. The opportunity is offered to mankind. But there is no certainty, no material necessity, that it should ever be taken. It will not be taken by mankind inadvertently. It can only be taken through such an organisation of will and energy to take it as this world has never seen before.

These are the new conditions that unfold themselves before the more alert minds of our generation and which will presently become the general mental background, as the modern interpretations of the history of life and of material and mental possibilities establish themselves. Evil political, social and economic usages and arrangements may seem obdurate and huge, but they are neither permanent nor uncontrollable. They can be controlled, however, only by an effort more powerful and determined than the instincts and inertias that sustain them. Religion, modern and disillusioned, has for its outward task to set itself to the control and direction of political, social and economic life, or admit itself a mere drug for easing discomfort. Can it or can it not synthesise the needed effort to lift mankind out of our present disorders, dangers, baseness, frustrations and futilities, to a phase of relative security, accumulating knowledge, systematic and continuing growth in power and the widespread deep happiness of hopeful and increasing life?

Our answer here is that it can, and our subject now is to enquire what are the necessary opening stages in the synthesis of that effort. We write here for those who believe that it can, and who do already grasp the implications of world history and contemporary scientific achievement.

_Chapter V_

THE FRAME OF THE TASK BEFORE MANKIND:

THE WORLD COMMONWEAL

Before we can consider the forms and methods of attacking their inevitable task that the serious minority of human beings must adopt, it will be well to draw the main lines and attempt some measure of the magnitude of that task. What are the new forms that it is sought to impose upon human life and how are they to be evolved from or imposed upon the current forms? And against what passive and active resistances has this to be done?

There can be no pause for replacement in the affairs of life. Day must follow day and the common activities continue. The new world as a going concern must arise out of the old as a going concern.

Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically unified. Within that frame fall all the other ideas of our progressive ambition. To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives. Still more at present apprehend it as a possibility but do not _dare_ to desire it, because of the enormous difficulties that intervene and because they see as yet no intimations of a way through or round these difficulties. The great majority of human beings have still to see the human adventure as one whole; they are obsessed by the air of permanence and finality in established things; they accept current reality as ultimate reality. They take the world as they find it. But here we are writing for the modern-minded, and for them it is impossible to think of the world as secure and satisfactory until there exists a single world commonweal, preventing war and controlling those moral, biological and economic forces that would otherwise lead to wars.

The method of direction of such a world commonweal is not likely to imitate the methods of existing sovereign states. It will be a new sort of direction with a new psychology. There will be little need for President or King to lead the marshalled hosts of humanity, for where there is no war there is no need of any leader to lead hosts anywhere, and in a polyglot world a parliament of mankind is an inconceivable instrument of government. The fundamental organisation of contemporary states is still plainly military and that is exactly what a world organisation cannot be. Flags, uniforms, national anthems, patriotism sedulously cultivated in church and school, the brag, blare and bluster of our competing sovereignties, belong to the phase of development we would supersede. The reasonable desire of all of us is that we should have the collective affairs of the world managed by suitably equipped groups of the most interested, intelligent and devoted people and that their activities should be subjected to a free, open, watchful criticism, restrained from making spasmodic interruptions but powerful enough to modify or supersede without haste or delay whatever is weakening or unsatisfactory in the general direction.

A world movement for the supersession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic and social institutions, must necessarily, as it grows, draw closer and closer to questions of practical control. It is likely in its growth to incorporate many active public servants, and many industrial and financial leaders and directors. It may also assimilate great numbers of intelligent workers. As its activities spread it will work out a whole system of special methods of co-operation. It will learn as it grows and by growing the business of general direction and how to develop its critical function. So that the movement we contemplate will by its very nature be one aiming, not so much to set up a world direction as to become itself a world direction, and the educational and militant forms of its opening phase will, as experience is gained and power and responsibility acquired, evoke step by step forms of administration and research and correction.

The modernisation of the religious impulse leads us straight to the effort for the establishment of the world state as a duty, and the close consideration of the necessary organisation of that effort will bring the reader to the conclusion that a movement aiming at the establishment of a world-directorate, however restricted that movement may be at first in numbers and power, must either contemplate the prospect of itself developing in part or as a whole into a world-directorate, and by assimilation, as a whole into a modern world community, or admit from the outset the futility, the spare-time amateurishness, of its gestures.

_Chapter VI_

BROAD CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORLD COMMONWEAL

Continuing our examination of the practical task before the modern mind, we may next note the main lines of contemporary aspiration within this comprehensive outline of a world commonweal. Any sort of unification of human affairs will not serve the ends we seek, we aim at a particular sort of unification; a world Cæsar is hardly better from the progressive viewpoint than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean the liberation of human thought, experiment and creative effort. A successful conspiracy merely to seize governments and wield and retain world power would be at best only the empty frame of success, it might be the exact reverse of success. Release from the threat of war and the waste of international economic conflicts is a poor release if it demands as its price the loss of all other liberties.

It is because we desire a unification of human direction, not simply for the sake of unity, but as a means to certain definite ends, that it is necessary, at any cost--in delay, in loss of effective force, in strategic or tactical disadvantage--that the light of free, abundant criticism should play upon that unified direction and upon the movements and organisations leading to the establishment of that unified direction.

Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark. Neither morally nor intellectually is he safe from lapses. Most of us who are past our first youth know how little we can even trust ourselves, and are glad to have our activities checked and guarded by a sense of inspection. It is for this reason that a movement to realise the conceivable better state of the world, must deny itself the advantages of secret methods or tactical insincerities. It must leave that to its adversaries. We must declare our end plainly from the outset and risk no misunderstandings of our procedure.

The conspiracy of modern religion against the established institutions of the world must be an open conspiracy and cannot remain righteous otherwise. It is lost if it goes underground. Every step to world unity must be taken in the daylight, or the sort of unity that will be won will be found to be scarcely worth the winning. The essential task will have to be recommenced within the mere frame of unity attained.

This candid attempt to take possession of the whole world must be made in the name and for the sake of science and creative activity. It is to release science and creative ability, and every stage in the struggle must be watched and criticised, lest there be any sacrifice of these ends to the exigencies of conflict.

The security of creative progress and creative activity implies a competent regulation of the economic life in the collective interest. There must be food, shelter and leisure for all. The fundamental needs of the animal life must be assured before human life can have free play. Man does not live by bread alone; he eats that he may learn and adventure creatively, but unless he eats he cannot adventure. His life is primarily economic, as a house is primarily a foundation, and economic justice and efficiency must underlie all other activities, but to judge human society and organise political and social activities entirely on economic grounds is to forget the objectives of life’s campaign in a pre-occupation with supply.

It is true that man, like the animal world in general from which he has arisen, is the creature of a struggle for sustenance, but unlike the animals, man can resort to methods of escape from that competitive pressure upon the means of subsistence, which has been the lot of every other animal species. He can restrain the increase in his numbers and he seems capable of still quite undefined expansions of his productivity per head of population. He can escape therefore from the struggle for subsistence altogether with a surplus of energy such as no other kind of animal species has ever possessed. Intelligent control of population is a possibility which puts man outside the competitive processes that have hitherto ruled the modification of species, and he can be released from these processes in no other way.

There is a clear hope that later, directed breeding will come within his scope, but that goes beyond his present range of practical achievement, and we need not discuss it further here. Suffice it for us here that the world community of our desires, the organised world community conducting and ensuring its own progress, requires a deliberate collective control of population as a primary condition.

There is no strong instinctive desire for multitudinous offspring as such, in the feminine make-up. The reproductive impulses operate indirectly. Nature ensures a pressure of population through passions and instincts that, given sufficient knowledge, intelligence and freedom on the part of women, can be satisfactorily gratified and tranquillised if need be, without the production of numerous children. Very slight adjustments in social and economic arrangements will, in a world of clear available knowledge and straightforward practice in these matters, supply sufficient inducement or discouragement to affect the general birthrate or the birthrate of specific types as the directive sense of the community may consider desirable. So long as the majority of human beings are begotten involuntarily in lust and ignorance, so long does man remain like any other animal under the moulding pressure of competition for subsistence. Social and political processes change entirely in their character when we recognise the possibility of practicability of this fundamental revolution in human biology.

In a world so relieved, the production of staple necessities presents a series of problems altogether less distressful than those of the present scramble for possessions and self-indulgence on the part of the successful and for work and a bare living on the part of the masses. With the increase of population unrestrained there was, as the end of the economic process, no practical alternative to a multitudinous equality at the level of bare subsistence, except through such an inequality of economic arrangements as allowed a minority to maintain a higher standard of life by withholding whatever surplus of production it could grasp, from consumption in mere proletarian increase. In the past and at present, what is called the capitalist system, that is to say the unsystematic exploitation of production by private owners under the protection of the law, has, on the whole, in spite of much haste and conflict, worked beneficially, by checking the gravitation to a universal low-grade consumption which would have been the inevitable outcome of socialism oblivious of biological processes. With effective restraint upon the increase of population, however, entirely new possibilities open out before mankind.

The besetting vice of economic science, orthodox and unorthodox alike, has been the vice of beginning in the air, with current practice and current convictions, with questions of wages, prices, values and possession, when the profounder issues of human association are really not to be found at all on these levels. The primary issues of human association are biological and psychological, and the essentials of economics are problems in applied physics and chemistry. The first thing we should examine is what we want to do with natural resources, and the next, how to get men to do what has to be done as pleasurably and effectively as possible. Then we should have a standard by which to judge the methods of to-day.

But the academic economists and still more so Marx and his followers, refuse to deal with these fundamentals, and with a stupid air of sound practical wisdom, insist on opening up their case with an uncritical acceptance of the common antagonism of employers and employed and a long rigmarole about profits and wages. Ownership and expropriated labour are only one set of many possible sets of economic method.

The economists, however, will attend seriously only to the current set, the rest they ignore, and the Marxists with their uncontrollable disposition to use nicknames in the place of judgments, condemn all others as “Utopian”--a word as final in its dismissal from the minds of the elect as that other pet counter in the Communist substitute for thought, “Bourgeois.” If they can persuade themselves that an idea or a statement is “Utopian” or “Bourgeois,” it does not seem to matter in the least to them whether it is right or wrong. It is disposed of. Just as in genteeler circles anything is disposed of that can be labelled “atheistical,” “subversive” or “disloyal.”

If a century and a half ago the world had submitted its problems of transport to the economists they would have put aside, with as little wasted breath and ink as possible, all talk about railways, motor-cars, steamships and aeroplanes, and, with a fine sense of extravagance rebuked, set themselves to long neuralgic dissertations, disputations and treatises upon high-roads and the methods of connecting them, turnpike gates, canals, the influence of lock-fees on bargemen, tidal landing places, anchorages, surplus carrying capacity, carriers, caravans, hand-barrows and the pedestrianariat. There would have been a rapid and easy differentiation in feeling and requirements between the horse-owning minority and the walking majority; the wrongs of the latter would have tortured the mind of every philosopher who could not ride and been minimised by every philosopher who could, and there would have been a broad rift between the narrow footpath school, the no footpath school and the school which would look forward to a time when every horse would have to be led along one universal footpath under the dictatorship of the pedestrianariat. All with the profoundest gravity and dignity. These things, footpaths and roads and canals with their traffic, were “real,” and “Utopian” projects for getting along at thirty or forty miles an hour or more up hill and against wind and tide, let alone the still more incredible suggestion of air transport, would have been smiled and sneered out of court. Life went about on its legs, with a certain assistance from wheels, or floated, rowed and was blown about on water; so it had been--and so it would always be.

But as soon as this time-honoured pre-occupation with the allotment of the shares of originators, organisers, workers, owners of material, credit dealers and tax collectors in the total product, ceases to be dealt with as the primary question in economics, as soon as we liberate our minds from a pre-occupation which from the outset necessarily makes that science a squabble rather than a science, and begin our attack upon the subject with a survey of the machinery and other productive material required in order that the staple needs of mankind should be satisfied, if we go on from that to consider the way in which all this material and machinery can be worked and the product distributed with the least labour and the greatest possible satisfaction, we shift our treatment of economic questions towards standards by which all current methods of exploitation, employment and finance can be judged rather than wrangle over. We can dismiss the question of the claims of this sort of participant or that for later and subordinate consideration, and view each variety of human assistance in the general effort entirely from the standpoint of what makes that assistance least onerous and most effective.

The germs of such really scientific economics exist already in the study of industrial organisation and industrial psychology. As the science of industrial psychology in particular develops, we shall find all this discussion of ownership, profit, wages, finance and accumulation, which has been treated hitherto as the primary issues of economics, falling into place under the larger enquiry of what conventions in these matters, what system of money and what conceptions of property, yield the greatest stimulus and the least friction in that world-wide system of co-operation which must constitute the general economic basis to the activities of a unified mankind.

Manifestly the supreme direction of the complex of human economic activities in such a world must centre upon a bureau of information and advice, which will take account of all the resources of the planet, estimate current needs, apportion productive activities and control distribution. The topographical and geological surveys of modern civilised communities, their government maps, their periodic issue of agricultural and industrial statistics, are the first crude and inco-ordinated beginnings of such an economic world-intelligence. In the propaganda work of David Lubin, a pioneer whom mankind must not forget, and in his International Institute of Agriculture in Rome, there were the beginnings of an impartial review month by month and year by year of world production, world needs and world transport. Such a great central organisation of economic science would necessarily produce direction; it would indicate what had best be done here, there and everywhere, solve general tangles, examine, approve and initiate fresh methods and arrange the transitional process from old to new. It would not be an organisation of will, imposing its will upon a reluctant or recalcitrant race; it would be a direction, just as a map is a direction. A map imposes no will on anyone, breaks no one in to its “policy.” And yet we obey our maps.

The will to have the map, full, accurate and up-to-date and the determination to have its indications respected, would have to pervade the whole community. To nourish and sustain that will must be the task not of any particular social or economic division of the community but of the whole body of religious-minded people in that community. The organisation and preservation of that power of will is the primary undertaking, therefore, of a world revolution aiming at universal peace, welfare and happy activity.

The older and still prevalent conception of government is bullying, is the breaking-in and subjugation of the “subject,” to the God, or King, or Lords of the community. Will-bending, the overcoming of the recalcitrant junior and inferior, was an essential process in the establishment of primitive societies, and its tradition still rules our education and law. No doubt there must be a necessary accommodation of the normal human will to every form of society; no man is immaculately virtuous; but compulsion and restraint are the friction of the social machine and, other things being equal, the less compulsive social arrangements are, the more willingly, naturally and easily they are accepted, the less wasteful of moral effort and the happier that community will be. The ideal state, other things being equal, is the state with the fewest possible number of will fights and will suppressions. This must be a primary consideration in determining the economic, biological and mental organisation of the world community at which we aim.

We have advanced the opinion that the control of population pressure is practicable without any violent conflict with “human nature,” that given a proper atmosphere of knowledge and intention, there need be far less suppression of will in relation to production than prevails to-day. In the same way, it is possible that the general economic life of mankind may be made universally satisfactory, that there may be an abundance out of all comparison greater than the existing supply of things necessary for human well being, freedom and activity, with not merely not more but infinitely less subjugation and enslavement than now occurs. Man is still but half born out of the blind struggle for existence and his nature still partakes of the infinite wastefulness of his mother Nature. He has still to learn how to price the commodities he covets in terms of human life. He is indeed only beginning to realise that as something to be learnt. He wastes will and human possibility extravagantly in his current economic methods.

We know nowadays that the nineteenth century expended a great wealth of intelligence upon a barren controversy between Individualism and Socialism. They were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives instead of being questions of degree. Human society has been, is and always must be, an intricate system of adjustments between unconditional liberty and the disciplines and subordinations of co-operative enterprise. Affairs do not move simply from a more individualist to a more socialist state or vice versa; there may be a release of individual initiative going on here and standardisation or restraint increasing there. Personal property never can be socially guaranteed and yet unlimited in action and extent as the extremer individualists desired, nor can it be “abolished” as the extremer socialists proposed. Property is not robbery, as Proudhon asserted; it is the protection of things against promiscuous and mainly wasteful use. In some cases it may restrict or forbid a use of things that would be generally advantageous, and it may be and is frequently unfair in its assignment of initiative, but the remedy for that is not an abolition but a revision of property. In the concrete it is a form necessary for liberty of action upon material, while abstracted as money, that liquidated generalised form of property, it is a ticket for individual liberty of movement and individual choice of reward.