The Difficulty of
the Present Situation
"The
whole difficulty of the present situation turns upon the peculiar
and critical character of the age in which we are living. It is
a period of immense and rapid changes so swift that few of us
who live among them can hope to seize their whole burden or their
inmost meaning or to form any safe estimate of their probable
outcome. Great hopes are abroad, high and large ideals fill the
view, enormous forces are in the field. It is one of those vast
critical moments in the life of the race when all is pressing
towards change and reconstitution. The ideals of the future, especially
the ideals of freedom, equality, commonalty, unity, are demanding
to be brought out from their limited field in the spiritual life
or the idealism of the few and to be given some beginning of a
true soul of action and bodily shape in the life of the race.
But banded against any such fulfilment there are powerful obstacles,
and the greatest of them come not from outside but from within.
For they are the old continued impulsions and obstinate recalcitrance
of mankind's past nature, the almost total subjection of its normal
mind to egoistic, vital and material interests and ambitions which
make not for union but for strife and discord, the plausibilities
of the practical reason which looks at the possibilities of the
day and the morrow and shuts its eyes to the consequences of the
day after, the habits of pretence and fiction which impel men
and nations to pursue and forward their own interest under the
camouflage of a specious idealism, a habit made up only partly
of the diplomatic hypocrisy of politicians, but much more of a
general half-voluntary self-deception, and, finally, the inrush
of blinder unsatisfied forces and crude imperfect idealisms …
to take advantage of the unrest and dissatisfaction prevalent
in such times and lay hold for a while on the life of mankind.
It is these things which we see dominant around us and not in
the least degree any effort to be of the right spirit and evolve
from it the right method.
The one way out harped
on by the modern mind which has been as much blinded as enlightened
by the victories of physical science, is the approved western
device of salvation by machinery; get the right kind of machine
to work and everything can be done, this seems to be the modern
creed. But the destinies of mankind cannot be turned out to order
in a… factory. It is a subtler thing than that which is now
putting its momentous problem before us, and if the spirit of
the things we profess is absent or falsified, no method or machinery
can turn them out for us or deliver the promised goods. That is
the one truth which the scientific and industrialised modern mind
forgets always, because it looks at process and commodity and
production and ignores the spirit in man and the deeper inner
law of his being.
The Ideal of the
Elimination of War
The elimination of
war is one of the cherished ideals and expectations of the age.
But what lies at the root of this desire? A greater unity of heart,
sympathy, understanding between men and nations, a settled will
to get rid of national hatreds, greeds, ambitions, all the fertile
seeds of strife and war? If so, it is well with us and success
will surely crown our efforts. But of this deeper thing there
may be something in sentiment, but there is still very little
in action and dominant motive. For the masses of men the idea
is rather to labour and produce and amass at ease and in security
without the disturbance of war; for the statesmen and governing
classes the idea is to have peace and security for the maintenance
of past acquisitions and an untroubled domination and exploitation
of the world by the great highly organised imperial and industrial
nations without the perturbing appearance of new unsatisfied hungers
and the peril of violent unrests, revolts, revolutions.
War, it was hoped at
one time, would eliminate itself by becoming impossible, but that
delightfully easy solution no longer commands credit. But now
it is hoped to conjure or engineer it out of existence by the
machinery of a league of victorious nations admitting the rest,
some if they will, others whether they like it or not, as subordinate
partners or as protégés. In the magic of this just
and beautiful arrangement the intelligence and good will of closeted
statesmen and governments supported by the intelligence and good
will of the peoples is to combine and accommodate interests, to
settle or evade difficulties, to circumvent the natural results,
the inevitable Karma of national selfishness and passions and
to evolve out of the present chaos a fair and charmingly well-mechanised
cosmos of international order, security, peace and welfare. Get
the clockwork going, put your pennyworth of excellent professions
or passably good intentions in the slot and all will go well,
this seems to be the principle. But it is too often the floor
of Hell that is paved with these excellent professions and passable
intentions, and the cause is that while the better reason and
will of man may be one hopeful factor in Nature, they are not
the whole of nature and existence and not by any means the whole
of our human nature. There are other and very formidable things
in us and in the world and if we juggle with them or put on them,
in order to get them admitted, these masks of reason and sentiment,-as
unfortunately we have all the habit of doing and that is still
the greater part of the game of politics,-the results are a foregone
conclusion.
War
and violent revolution can be eliminated, if we will, though not
without immense difficulty, but on the condition that we get rid
of the inner causes of war and the constantly accumulating Karma
of successful injustice of which violent revolutions are the natural
reactions. Otherwise, there can be only at best a fallacious period
of artificial peace. What was in the past will be sown still in
the present and continue to return on us in the future.
*
The Illusion of
the Passing of War
Man's illusions are
of all sorts and kinds, some of them petty though not unimportant,-for
nothing in the world is unimportant,-others vast and grandiose.
The greatest of them all are those which cluster round the hope
of a perfected society, a perfected race, a terrestrial millennium.
Each new idea religious or social which takes possession of the
epoch and seizes on large masses of men, is in turn to be the
instrument of these high realisations; each in turn betrays the
hope which gave it its force to conquer. And the reason is plain
enough to whosoever chooses to see; it is that no change of ideas
or of the intellectual outlook upon life, no belief in God or
Avatar or prophet, no victorious science or liberating philosophy,
no social scheme or system, no sort of machinery internal or external
can really bring about the great desire implanted in the race,
true though that desire is in itself and the index of the goal
to which we are being led. Because man is himself not a machine
nor a device, but a being and a most complex one at that, therefore
he cannot be saved by machinery; only by an entire change which
shall affect all the members of his being can he be liberated
from his discords and imperfections.
Growth of Commerce
to stop War
One of the illusions
incidental to this great hope is the expectation of the passing
of war. This grand event in human progress is always being confidently
expected and since we are now all scientific minds and rational
beings, we no longer expect it by a divine intervention, but assign
sound physical and economic reasons for the faith that is in us.
The first form taken by this new gospel was the expectation and
the prophecy that the extension of commerce would be the extinction
of war. Commercialism was the natural enemy of militarism and
would drive it from the face of the earth. The growing and universal
lust of gold and the habit of comfort and the necessities of increased
production and intricate interchange would crush out the lust
of power and dominion and glory and battle. Gold-hunger or commodity-hunger
would drive out earth-hunger, the dharma of the Vaishya would
set its foot on the dharma of the Kshatriya and give it its painless
quietus. The ironic reply of the gods has not been long in coming.
Actually this very reign of commercialism, this increase of production
and interchange, this desire for commodities and markets and this
piling up of a huge burden of unnecessary necessities has been
the cause of half the wars that have since afflicted the human
race. And now we see militarism and commercialism united in a
loving clasp, coalescing into a sacred biune duality of national
life and patriotic aspiration and causing and driving by their
force the most irrational, the most monstrous and nearly cataclysmic,
the hugest war of modern and indeed of all historic times.
Growth of Democracy to stop War
Another illusion was
that the growth of democracy would mean the growth of pacifism
and the end of war. It was fondly thought that wars are in their
nature dynastic and aristocratic; greedy kings and martial nobles
driven by earth-hunger and battle-hunger, diplomatists playing
at chess with the lives of men and the fortunes of nations, these
were the guilty causes of war who drove the unfortunate peoples
to the battle-field like sheep to the shambles. These proletariates,
mere food for powder, who had no interest, no desire, no battle-hunger
driving them to armed conflict, had only to become instructed
and dominant to embrace each other and all the world in a free
and fraternal amity. Man refuses to learn from that history of
whose lessons the wise prate to us; otherwise the story of old
democracies ought to have been enough to prevent this particular
illusion. In any case the answer of the gods has been, here too,
sufficiently ironic. If kings and diplomatists are still often
the movers of war, none more ready than the modern democracy to
make itself their enthusiastic and noisy accomplice, and we see
even the modern spectacle of governments and diplomats hanging
back in affright or doubt from the yawning and clamorous abyss
while angry shouting peoples impel them to the verge. Bewildered
pacifists who still cling to their principles and illusions, find
themselves howled down by the people and, what is piquant enough,
by their own recent comrades and leaders. The socialist, the syndicalist,
the internationalist of yesterday stands forward as a banner-bearer
in the great mutual massacre and his voice is the loudest to cheer
on the dogs of war.
Courts of International
Arbitration and War
Another recent illusion
was the power of Courts of Arbitration and Concerts of Europe
to prevent war. There again the course that events immediately
took was sufficiently ironic; for the institution of the great
Court of international arbitration was followed up by a series
of little and great wars which led by an inexorable logical chain
to the long-dreaded European conflict and the monarch who had
first conceived the idea, was also the first to unsheathe his
sword in a conflict dictated on both sides by the most unrighteous
greed and aggression. In fact this series of wars, whether fought
in Northern or Southern Africa, in Manchuria or the Balkans, were
marked most prominently by the spirit which disregards cynically
that very idea of inherent and existing rights, that balance of
law and equity upon which alone arbitration can be founded. As
for the Concert of Europe, it seems far enough from us now, almost
antediluvian in its antiquity,-as it belongs indeed to the age
before the deluge; but we can remember well enough what an unmusical
and discordant concert it was, what a series of fumblings and
blunderings and how its diplomacy led us fatally to the inevitable
event against which it struggled. Now it is suggested by many
to substitute a United States of Europe for the defunct Concert
and for the poor helpless Hague tribunal an effective Court of
international law with force behind it to impose its decisions.
But so long as men go on believing in the sovereign power of machinery,
it is not likely that the gods either will cease from their studied
irony.
Growth of Science
and Technology and War
There have been other
speculations and reasonings; ingenious minds have searched for
a firmer and more rational ground of faith. The first of these
was propounded in a book by a Russian writer which had an enormous
success in its day but has now passed into the silence. Science
was to bring war to an end by making it physically impossible.
It was mathematically proved that with modern weapons two equal
armies would fight each other to a standstill, attack would become
impossible except by numbers thrice those of the defence and war
therefore would bring no military decision but only an infructuous
upheaval and disturbance of the organised life of the nations.
When the Russo-Japanese war almost immediately proved that attack
and victory were still possible and the battle-fury of man superior
to the fury of his death-dealing engines, another book was published,
called by a title which has turned into a jest upon the writer,
The Great Illusion, to prove that the idea of a commercial advantage
to be gained by war and conquest was an illusion and that as soon
as this was understood and the sole benefit of peaceful interchange
realised, the peoples would abandon a method of settlement now
chiefly undertaken from motives of commercial expansion, yet whose
disastrous result was only to disorganise fatally the commercial
prosperity it sought to serve. The present war came as the immediate
answer of the gods to this sober and rational proposition. It
has been fought for conquest and commercial expansion and it is
proposed, even when it has been fought out on the field, to follow
it up by a commercial struggle between the belligerent nations.
The men who wrote these
books were capable thinkers but they ignored the one thing that
matters, human nature. The present war has justified to a certain
extent the Russian writer though by developments he did not foresee;
scientific warfare has brought military movement to a standstill
and baffled the strategist and the tactician, it has rendered
decisive victory impossible except by overwhelming numbers or
an overwhelming weight of artillery. But this has not made war
impossible, it has only changed its character; it has at the most
replaced the war of military decisions by that of military and
financial exhaustion aided by the grim weapon of famine. The English
writer on the other hand erred by isolating the economic motive
as the one factor that weighed; he ignored the human lust of dominion
which, carried into the terms of commercialism, means the undisputed
control of markets and the exploitation of helpless populations.
Again, when we rely upon the disturbance of organised national
and international life as a preventive of war, we forget the boundless
power of self-adaptation which man possesses; that power has been
shown strikingly enough in the skill and ease with which the organisation
and finance of peace were replaced in the present crisis by the
organisation and finance of war. And when we rely upon Science
to make war impossible, we forget that the progress of Science
means a series of surprises and that it means also a constant
effort of human ingenuity to overcome impossibilities and find
fresh means of satisfying our ideas, desires and instincts. Science
may well make war of the present type with shot and shell and
mines and battleships an impossibility and yet develop and put
in their place simpler or more summary means which may bring back
an easier organisation of warfare.
Will War end War?
So
long as war does not become psychologically impossible, it will
remain or, if banished for a while, return. War itself,
it is hoped, will end war; the expense, the horror, the butchery,
the disturbance of tranquil life, the whole confused sanguinary
madness of the thing has reached or will reach such colossal proportions
that the human race will fling the monstrosity behind it in weariness
and disgust. But weariness and disgust, horror
and pity, even the opening of the eyes to reason by the practical
fact of the waste of human life and energy and the harm and extravagance
are not permanent factors; they last only while the lesson is
fresh. Afterwards, there is forgetfulness; human nature recuperates
itself and recovers the instincts that were temporarily dominated.
A long peace, even a certain organisation of peace may conceivably
result, but so long as the heart of man remains what it is, the
peace will come to an end, the organisation will break down under
the stress of human passions. War is no longer, perhaps, a biological
necessity, but it is still a psychological necessity; what is
within us, must manifest itself outside.
The Real Remedy
Meanwhile it is well
that every false hope and confident prediction should be answered
as soon as may well be by the irony of the gods; for only so can
we be driven to the perception of the real remedy. Only
when man has developed not merely a fellow-feeling with all men,
but a dominant sense of unity and commonalty, only when he is
aware of them not merely as brothers,-that is a fragile bond,-but
as parts of himself, only when he has learned to live not in his
separate personal and communal ego-sense, but in a larger universal
consciousness can the phenomenon of war, with whatever weapons,
pass out of his life without the possibility of return.
