What Are We To Do With Our Lives

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m<OU 168446 m

FIRST PUBLISHED 19 J I

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

AT THE WINDMILL PRESS

KINGSWOOD, SURREY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Present Crisis in Human Affairs i

II The Idea of the Open Conspiracy 9

III We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our

Minds 14

IV The Revolution in Education 23
V Religion in the New World 2 5

VI Modern Religion is Objective 34

VII What Mankind Has to Do 39

VIII Broad Characteristics of a Scientific

World Commonweal 45

IX No Stable Utopia Is Now Conceivable 60

X The Open Conspiracy Is Not to Be
Thought of as a Single Organization;
It Is a Conception of Life ottt of
which Efforts, Organizations, and
new Orientations Will Arise 61

XI Forces and Resistances in the Great
Modern Communities Now Preva-
lent, which Are Antagonistic to the
Open Conspiracy. The War with
Tradition 69

XII The Resistances of the Less Industrial-
ized Peoples to the Drive of the Open
Conspiracy 86

C ONTENTS
CHAPTER PAO1

XIII Resistances and Antagonistic Forces in

Our Conscious and Unconscious
Selves 97

XIV The Open Conspiracy Begins as a

Movement of Discussion, Explana-
tion, and Propaganda 106

XV Early Constructive Work of the Open

Conspiracy 114

XVI Existing and Developing Movements
which Are Contributory to the Open
Conspiracy and which Must Develop
a Common Consciousness. The Par-
able of Provinder Island 127

XVII The Creative Home, Social Group, and
School: the Present Waste of Ideal-
istic Will 136

XVIII Progressive Development of the Activi-
ties of the Open Conspiracy into a
World Control and Commonweal:
The Hazards of the Attempt 140

XIX Human Life in the Coming World

Community 146

WHAT ARE WE TO DO
WITH OUR LIVES?

The Present Crisis in Human Affairs

THE world is undergoing immense changes. Never be-
fore have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and
enormously as they have changed for mankind in the
last fifty years. We have been carried along with no
means of measuring the increasing swiftness in the suc-
cession of events. We are only now beginning to realize
the force and strength of the storm of change that has
come upon us.

These changes have not come upon our world from
without. No huge meteorite from outer space has struck
our planet; there have been no overwhelming outbreaks
of volcanic violence or strange epidemic diseases; the
sun has not flared up to excessive heat or suddenly
shrunken to plunge us into Arctic winter. The changes
have come through men themselves. Quite a small num-
ber of people, heedless of the ultimate consequences of
what they did, one man here and a group there, have
made discoveries and produced and adopted inventions
that /have changed all the conditions of social life.

We are now just beginning to realize the nature of
these changes, to find words and phrases for them and
put them down. First they began to happen, and then
we began to see that they were happening. And now
we are beginning to see how these changes are con-
nected together and to get the measure of their conse-
quences. We are getting our minds so clear about4Eem

What are we to do with our Lives?

that soon we shall be able to demonstrate them and
explain them to our children in our schools. We do not
do so at present. We do not give our children a chance
of discovering that they live in a world of universal
change.

What are the broad lines upon which these alterations
of condition are proceeding?

It will be most convenient to deal with them in the
order in which they came to be realized and seen clearly,
rather than by the order in which they came about or
by their logical order. They are more or less inter-
dependent changes; they overlap and interact.

It was only in the beginning of the twentieth century
that people began to realize the real significance of that
aspect of our changing conditions to which the phrase
"the abolition of distance" has been applied. For a
whole century before that there had been a continual
increase in the speed and safety of travel and transport
and the ease and swiftness with which messages could
be transmitted, but this increase had not seemed to be
a matter of primary importance. Various results of
railway, steamship, and telegraph became manifest;
towns grew larger, spreading into the countryside, once
inaccessible lands became areas of rapid settlement and
cultivation, industrial centres began to live on imported
food, news from remote parts lost its time-lag and
tended to become contemporary, but no one hailed
these things as being more than "improvements" in
existing conditions. They are not observed to be the
beginnings of a profound revolution in the life of man-
kind. The attention of young people was not drawn to
them; no attempt was made, or considered necessary, to
adapt political and social institutions to this creeping
t of scale.

The Present Crisis in Human Affairs

Until the closing years of the nineteenth century
there was no recognition of the real state of affairs.
Then a few observant people began, in a rather tenta-
tive, commentary sort of way, to call attention to what
was happening. They did not seem to be moved by the
idea that something had to be done about it; they
merely remarked, brightly and intelligently, that it was
going on. And then they went on to the realization that
this "abolition of distance'' was only one aspect of much
more far-reaching advances.

Men were travelling about so much faster and flash-
ing their communications instantly about the world
because a progressive conquest of force and substance
was going on. Improved transport was only one of a
number of portentous consequences of that conquest;
the first to be conspicuous and set men thinking; but
not perhaps the first in importance. It dawned upon
them that in the last hundred years there had been a
stupendous progress in obtaining and utilizing mechani-
cal power, a vast increase in the efficiency of mechanism,
and associated with that an enormous increase in the
substances available for man's purposes, from vulcan-
ized rubber to the modern steels, and from petroleum
and margarine to tungsten and aluminium. At first the
general intelligence was disposed to regard these things
as lucky "finds," happy chance discoveries. It was not
apprehended that the shower of finds was systematic
and continuous. Popular writers told about these things
but they told of them at first as "Wonders" "Won-
ders" like the Pyramids, the Colossus of Rhodes, and
the Great Wall of China. Few realized how much
more they were than any "Wonders." The "Seven
Wonders of the World" left men free to go on
toiling, marrying, and dying as they had been

What are we to do with our Lives?

tomed to for immemorial ages. If the "Seven Wonders"
had vanished or been multiplied three score it would not
have changed the lives of any large proportion of human
beings. But these new powers and substances were
modifying and transforming unobtrusively, surely,
and relentlessly every particular of the normal life of
mankind.

They increased the amount of production and the
methods of production. They made possible "Big-Busi-
ness," to drive the small producer and the small dis-
tributor out of the market. They swept away factories
and evoked new ones. They changed the face of the
fields. They brought into the normal life, thing by
thing and day by day, electric light and heating, bright
cities at night, better aeration, new types of clothing, a
fresh cleanliness. They changed a world where there
had never been enough into a world of potential plenty,
into a world of excessive plenty. It dawned upon their
minds after their realization of the "abolition of dis-
tance" that shortage of supplies had also been abolished
and that irksome toil was no longer necessary to pro-
duce everything material that man might require. It is
only in the last dozen years that this broader and pro-
founder fact has come through to the intelligence of
any considerable number of people. Most of them have
still to carry their realization a step farther and see how
complete is the revolution in the character of the daily
life these things involve.

But there are still other changes outside this vast
advance in the pace and power of material life. The
biological sciences have undergone a corresponding ex-
tension. Medical art has attained a new level of effi-
ciency, so that in all the modernizing societies of the
waifld the average life is prolonged, and there is, in spite

The Present Crisis in Human Affairs

of a great fall in the birth rate, a steady, alarming in-
crease in the world's population. The proportion of
adults alive is greater than it has ever been before.
Fewer and fewer human beings die young. This has
changed the social atmosphere about us. The tragedy
of lives cut short and ended prematurely is passing out
of general experience. Health becomes prevalent. The
continual toothaches, headaches, rheumatism, neural-
gias, coughs, colds, indigestions that made up so large a
part of the briefer lives of our grandfathers and grand-
mothers fade out of experience. We may all live now,
we discover, without any great burthen of toil or fear,
wholesomely and abundantly, for as long as the desire
to live is in us.

But we do not do so. All this possible freedom of
movement, this power and abundance, remains for most
of us no more than possibility. There is a sense of pro-
found instability about these achievements of our race.
Even those who enjoy, enjoy without security, and for
the great multitude of mankind there is neither ease,
plenty, nor freedom. Hard tasks, insufficiency, and un-
ending money worries are still the ordinary stuff of life.
Over everything human hangs the threat of such war
as man has never known before, war armed and rein-
forced by all the powers and discoveries of modern
science.

When we demand why the achievement of power
turns to distress and danger in our hands, we get some
very unsatisfactory replies. The favourite platitude of
the politician, excusing himself for the futilities of his
business, is that "moral progress has not kept pace with
material advance." That seems to satisfy him com-
pletely, but it can satisfy no other intelligent person.
He says "moral." He leaves that word unexplained.

What are we to do with our Lives?

Apparently he wants to shift the responsibility to our
religious teachers. At the most he has made but the
vaguest gesture towards a reply. And yet, when we
consider it, charitably and sympathetically, there does
seem to be a germ of reality in that phrase of his.

What does moral mean? Mores means manners and
customs. Morality is the conduct of life. It is what we
do with our social lives. It is how we deal with our-
selves in relation to our fellow creatures. And there
does seem to be a much greater discord now than there
was (say) a couple of hundred years ago between the
prevailing ideas of how to carry on life and the oppor-
tunities and dangers of the time. We are coming to see
more and more plainly that certain established tradi-
tions which have made up the frame of human relation-
ships for ages are not merely no longer as convenient as
they were, but are positively injurious and dangerous.
And yet at present we do not know how to shake off
these traditions, these habits of social behaviour which
rule us. Still less are we able to state, and still less bring
into operation, the new conceptions of conduct and obli-
gation that must replace them.

For example, the general government of human affairs
has hitherto been distributed among a number of
sovereign states there are about seventy of them now
and until recently that was a quite tolerable system
of frameworks into which a general way of living could
be fitted. The standard of living may not have been as
high as our present standards, but the social stability
and assurance were greater. The young were trained
to be loyal, law-regarding, patriotic, and a defined
system of crimes and misdemeanours with properly
associated pains, penalties, and repressions, kept the
social body together. Everyone was taught a history

6

The Present Crisis in Human Affairs

glorifying his own state, and patriotism was chief
among the virtues. Now, with great rapidity, there has
been that "abolition of distance," and everyone has
become next-door neighbour to everyone else. States
once separate, social and economic systems formerly
remote from one another, now jostle each other exas-
peratingly. Commerce under the new conditions is per-
petually breaking nationalist bounds and making
militant raids upon the economic life of other countries.
This exacerbates patriotism in which we have all been
trained and with which we are all, with scarcely an
exception, saturated. And meanwhile war, which was
once a comparative slow bickering upon a front, has
become war in three dimensions; it gets at the "non-
combatant" almost as searchingly as at the combatant,
and has acquired weapons of a stupendous cruelty and
destructiveness. At present there exists no solution to
this paradoxical situation. We are continually being
urged by our training and traditions to antagonisms and
conflicts that will impoverish, starve, and destroy both
our antagonists and ourselves. We are all trained to
distrust and hate foreigners, salute our flag, stiffen up
in a wooden obedient way at our national anthem, and
prepare to follow the little fellows in spurs and feathers
who pose as the heads of our states into the most hor-
rible common destruction. Our political and economic
ideas of living are out of date, and we find great diffi-
culty in adjusting them and reconstructing them to
meet the huge and strenuous demands of the new times.
That is really what our gramophone politicians have in
mind in the vague way in which they have anything
in mind when they put on that well-worn record about
moral progress not having kept pace with material in-
ventions.

What are we to do with our Lives?

Socially and politically we want a revised system of
ideas about conduct, a view of social and political life
brought up to date. We are not doing the effective thing
with our lives, we are drifting, we are being hoodwinked
and bamboozled and misled by those who trade upon
the old traditions. It is preposterous that we should
still be followed about and pestered by war, taxed for
war preparations, and threatened bodily and in our
liberties by this unnecessary and exaggerated and dis-
torted survival of the disunited world of the pre-scien-
tific era. And it is not simply that our political way of
living is now no better than an inherited defect and
malformation, but that our everyday life, our eating and
drinking and clothing and housing and going about, is
also cramped, thwarted, and impoverished, because we
do not know how to set about shaking off the old ways
and fitting the general life to our new opportunities.
The strain takes the form of increased unemployment
and a dislocation of spending power. We do not know
whether to spend or save. Great swarms of us find our-
selves unaccountably thrown out of work. Unjustly,
irrationally. Colossal business reconstructions are made
to increase production and accumulate profits, and
meanwhile the customers with purchasing power
dwindle in numbers and fade away. The economic
machine creaks and makes every sign of stopping and
its stopping means universal want and starvation. It
must not stop. There must be a reconstruction, a
change-over. But what sort of a change-over?

Though none of us are yet clear as to the precise way
in which this great change-over is to be effected, there is
a world-wide feeling now that change-over or a vast
catastrophe is before us. Increasing multitudes parti-
cipate in that uneasy sense of insecure transition. In

8

The Present Crisis in Human Affairs

the course of one lifetime mankind has passed from a
state of affairs that seems to us now to have been slow,
dull, ill-provided, and limited, but at least picturesque
and tranquil-minded, to a new phase of excitement,
provocation, menace, urgency, and actual or potential
distresses. Our lives are part of one another. We cannot
get away from it. We are items in a social mass. What
are we to do with our lives?

II

The Idea oj the Open Conspiracy

I AM a writer upon social and political matters. Essen-
tially I am a very ordinary, undistinguished person. I
have a mediocre brain, a very average brain, and the
way in which my mind reacts to these problems is there-
fore very much the way in which most brains will react
to them. But because it is my business to write and
think about these questions, because on that account I
am^ble to give more time and attention to them than
most people, I am able to get rather ahead of my
equals and to write articles and books just a little before
the ideas I experience become plain to scores of thou-
sands, and then to hundreds of thousands, and at last
to millions of other people. And so it happened that a
few years ago (round about 1927) I became very
anxious to clear up and give form to a knot of sugges-
tions that seemed to me to have in them the solution of
this riddle of adapting our lives to the immense new
possibilities and the immense new dangers that confront
mankind.

It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent
people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity
of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by
a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments,
traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms
of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people
must constitute first a protest and then a creative re-

10

The Idea of the Open Conspiracy

sistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening
us. These people I imagined would say first, "We are
drifting; we are doing nothing worth while with our
lives. Our lives are dull and stupid and not good
enough."

Then they would say, "What are we to do with our
lives?"

And then, "Let us get together with other people of
our sort and make over the world into a great world-
civilization that will enable us to realize the promises
and avoid the dangers of this new time."

It seemed to me that as, onej-fter^another, we woke
up, that is what we should be saying. It amounted to a
protest, first mental and then practical, it amounted to
a sort of unpremeditated and unorganized conspiracy,
against the fragmentary and insufficient governments
and the wide-spread greed, appropriation, clumsiness,
and waste that are now going on. But unlike conspira-
cies in general this widening protest and conspiracy
against established things would, by its very nature, go
on in the daylight, and it would be willing to accept
participation and help from every quarter. It would,
in fact, become an "Open Conspiracy," a necessary,
naturally evolved conspiracy, to adjust our dislocated
world.

I have thought and written a lot about this Open
Conspiracy since first it dawned upon me as being some-
thing that was bound to happen in people's minds
and wills. I introduced it in a novel called The World
of William Clissold, in 1927. I published a little book
called The Open Conspiracy in 1928, into which I put
what I had in my mind at that time. It was an unsatis-
factory little book even when I published it, not quite
plain enough and not quite confident enough, and evi-

ii

What are we to do with our Lives?

dently unsure of its readers. It already looks old-
fashioned to me now. Yet I could not find out how to
do it better at the time, and it seemed in its way to say
something of living and current interest, and so I pub-
lished it but I arranged things so that I could with-
draw it in a year or so. That I have now done, and this
present book is to replace it. Since that first publica-
tion we have all got forward surprisingly. Events have
hustled thought along and have been hustled along by
thought. The idea of reorganizing the affairs of the
world on quite a big scale, which was "Utopian," and
so forth, in 1926 and 1927, and still "bold" in 1928, has
now spread about the world until nearly everybody has
it. It has broken out all over the place, thanks largely
to the mental stimulation of the Russian Five Year
Plan. Hundreds of thousands of people everywhere are
now thinking upon the lines foreshadowed by my Open
Conspiracy, not because they had ever heard of the
book or phrase, but because that was the way thought
was going.

The Open Conspiracy conveyed the general idea
of a world reconstructed, but it was very vague
about the particular way in which this or that indi-
vidual life could be lived in relation to that general
idea. It gave a general answer to the question,
"What are we to do with our lives?" It said,
"Help to make over the New World amidst the
confusions of the Old." But when the question was
asked, "What am / to do with my life?" the reply
was much less satisfactory.

The intervening years of thought and experience
make it possible, now, to bring this general idea of a
reconstructive effort, an attempt to build up a new
world within the dangers and disharmonies of our

12

The Idea of the Open Conspiracy

present state, into a much closer and more explicit rela-
tion to the individual "Open Conspirator." We can
present the thing in a better light and handle it with a
surer touch.

Ill

We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds

Now, one thing is fairly plain to most of us who are
waking up to the need of living our lives in a new way
and of making over the state, which is the framework
of our lives, to meet the new demands upon it, and that
is, that we have to put our own minds in order. Why
have we only awakened now to the crisis in human
affairs. The changes in progress have been going on
with a steady acceleration for a couple of centuries.
Clearly we must all have been very unobservant, .oi|r
knowledge as it came to us must have been veryjiadly
arrahged^n ouT"minds7^5gn^F"wa^ro^dealing withjt

should
^

swelyaavc^ agooej|iimenseecgs

Cities that now challengeus/Aiidrirthat is so, if it has
takln^ecaHe^ToTouSe^usTthen quite probably we are
not yet completely awake. Even now we may not have
realized the job before us in its completeness. We may
still have much to get plain in our minds, and we cer-
tainly have much more to learn. One primary and per-
manent duty therefore is to go on with our thinking and
to think as well as we can about the way in which we
think and about the ways in which we get and use
knowledge! ~ "~~ --- " ~" ~~"
^l^unHafnentally the Open Conspiracy must be an in-
tellect rebirth.
Human thought is still very much confused by the

14

We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds

imperfection of the words and other symbols it employs
and the consequences of this confused thinking are
much more serious and extensive than is commonly
realized. We still see the world through a mist of words;
it is only the things immediately about us that are plain
fact. Through symbols, and especially through words,
man has raised himself above the level of the ape and
come to a considerable mastery over his universe. But
every step in his mental ascent has involved entangle-
ment with these symbols and words he was using; they
were at once helpful and very dangerous and mislead-
ing. A great part of our affairs, social, political, intel-
lectual, is in a perplexing and dangerous state to-day
because of our loose, uncritical, slovenly use of words.
All through the later Middle Ages there were great
disputes among the schoolmen about the use of words
and symbols. There is a queer disposition in the human
mind to think that symbols and words and logical de-
ductions are truer than actual experiences, and these
great controversies were due to the struggle of the
human intelligence against that disposition. On the one
side were the Realists, who were so called because they
believed, in effect, that names were more real than facts,
and on the other side were the Nominalists, who from
the first were pervaded by a suspicion about names and
words generally; who thought there might be some sort
of catch in verbal processes, and who gradually worked
their way towards verification by experiment which is
the fundamental thing about experimental science ex-
perimental science which has given our human world
all these immense powers and possibilities that tempt
and threaten it to-day. These controversies of the
schoolmen were of the utmost importance to mankind.
The modern world could not begin to come into exist-

15

What are we to do with our Lives?

ence until the human mind had broken away from the
narrow-minded verbalist way of thinking which the
Realists followed.

But all through my education I never had this matter
explained to me. The University of London intimated
that I was a soundly educated ybung man by giving me
a degree (in first-class honours) and an elegant gown
and hood, and the London College of Preceptors gave
me and the world its highest assurances that I was fit to
educate and train the minds of my fellow creatures, and
yet I had still to discover that a Realist was not a novel-
ist who put rather too highly flavoured sex appeal into
his books, and a Nominalist, nothing in particular. But
it had crept into my mind as I learnt about individuality
in my biological work and about logic and psychology
in my preparation as the perfect preceptor, that some-
thing very important and essential was being left out
and that I wasn't at all as well equipped as my dip-
lomas presently said I was, and in the next few years I
found the time to clean up this matter pretty thor-
oughly. I made no marvellous discoveries, everything
I found out was known already; nevertheless, I had to
find out some of this stuff for myself quite over again,
as though it had never been done; so inaccessible was
any complete account of human thinking to an ordinary
man who wanted to get his mind into proper working
condition. And this was not that I had missed some
recondite, precious refinements of philosophy; it was
that my fundamental thinking, at the very root of my
political and social conduct, was wrong. I was in a
human community, and that community, and I with it,
was thinking of phantoms and fantasies as though they
were real and living things, was in a reverie of unreali-
ties, was blind, slovenly, hypnotized, base and ineffec-

16

We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds

live, blundering about in an extremely beautiful and an
extremely dangerous world.

I set myself to re-educate myself, and after the prac-
tice of writers wrote it in various trial pamphlets, essays,
and books. There is no need to refer to these books
here. The gist of the matter is set out in three com-
pilations, to which I shall refer again almost imme-
diately. They are The Outline of History (Ch. XXI,
6, and Ch. XXXIII, 6), The Science of Life (Book
VIII, on Thought and Behaviour) and The Work,
Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind (Ch. II, 1-4).
In the last, it is shown quite plainly how man has had to
struggle for the mastery of his mind, has discovered only
after great controversies the proper and effective use of
his intellectual tools, and has had to learn to avoid
certain widespread traps and pitfalls before he could
achieve his present mastery over matter. Thinking
clearly and effectively does not come by nature. Hunt-
ing the truth is an art. We blunder naturally into a
thousand misleading generalizations and false pro-
cesses. Yet there is hardly any intelligent mental train-
ing done in the schools of the world to-day. We have
to learn this art, if we are to practise it at all. Oar
schoolteachers have had no proper training themselves,
they miseducate by example and precept, and so it is
that our press and current discussions are more like an
impromptu riot of cripples and deaf and blind minds
than an intelligent interchange of ideas. What bosh
one reads! What rash and impudent assumptions! What
imbecile inferences!

But re-educating oneself, getting one's mind into
health and exercising it and training it to think pro-
perly, is only the beginning of the task before tbe awak-
ening Open Conspirator. He has not only to think

17

What are we to do with our Lives?

clearly, but he has to see that his mind is equipped with
the proper general ideas to form a true framework for
his everyday judgments and decisions.

It was the Great War first brought home to me how
ignorant I was, and how ill-finished and untidy my
mind, about the most important things of life. That
disastrous waste of life, material and happiness, since it
was practically world wide, was manifestly the outcome
of the processes that constitute the bulk of history, and
yet I found I did not know and nobody else seemed to
know history in such a fashion as to be able to explain
how the Great War came about or what ought to come
out of it. "Versailles," we all seem to be agreed nowa-
days, was silly, but how could Versailles be anything
else than what it was in view of the imperfect, lopsided,
historical knowledge and the consequent suspicion,
emotion, and prejudice of those who assembled there.
They did not know any better than the rest of us what
the war was, and so how could they know what the
peace ought to be? I perceived that I was in the same
case with everyone else, and I set myself first of all for
my own guidance to make a summary of all history and
get some sort of map to more serviceable conclusions
about the political state of mankind. This summary I
made was The Outline of History, a shameless compila-
tion and arrangement of the main facts of the world
story, written without a touch of art or elegance, written
indeed in a considerable hurry and excitement, and its
sale, which is now in the third million, showed how
much I had in common with a great dispersed crowd of
ordinary people, all wanting to know, all disgusted with
the patriotic, litigious twaddling gossipy stuff given them
as history by their schoolmasters and schoolmistresses
which had led them into the disaster of the war.

18

We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds

The Outline oj History is not a whole history of life.
Its main theme is the growth of human intercommuni-
cation and human communities and their rulers and
conflicts, the story of how and why the myriads of little
tribal systems of ten thousand years ago have fought
and coalesced into the sixty- or seventy-odd govern-
ments of to-day and are now straining and labouring in
the grip of forces that must presently accomplish their
final unison. And even as I completed The Outline, I
realized that there remained outside its scope wider and
more fundamental, and closer, more immediate fields
of knowledge which I still had to get in order for my
own practical ends and the ends of like-minded people
who wanted to use their lives effectively, if my exist-
ence was to escape futility.

I realized that I did not know enough about the life
in my body and its relations to the world of life and
matter outside it to come to proper decisions about a
number of urgent matters from race conflicts, birth
control, and my private life, to the public control of
health and the conservation of natural resources. And
also, I found, I was astonishingly ignorant about the
everyday business of life, the how and why of the miner
who provided the coal to cook my dinner, and the
banker who took my money in return for a cheque-book,
and the shopkeeper from whom I bought things, and
the policeman who kept the streets in order for me.
Yet I was voting for laws affecting my relations with
these people, paying them directly or indirectly, airing
my ignorant opinions about them, and generally con-
tributing by my behaviour to sustain and affect their
lives.

So with the aid and direction of two very competent
biologists I set to work to get out as plain and clear a

19

What are we to do with our Lives?

statement as possible of what was known about the
sources and nature of life and the relation of species to
individuals and to other species, and the processes of
consciousness and thought. This I published as The
Science of Life. And while this was going on I set
myself to the task of making a review of all human
activities in relation to each other, the work of people
and the needs of people, cultivation, manufacture, trade,
direction, government, and all. This was the most diffi-
cult part of this attempt to get a rational account of the
modern world, and it called for the help and counsel of
a great variety of people. I had to ask and find some
general answer to the question, "What are the nineteen
hundred-odd million human beings who are alive to-day
doing, and how and why are they doing it?" It was, in
fact, an outline of economic, social, and political science,
but since, after The Outline of History, the word "out-
line" has been a good deal cheapened by various enter-
prising publishers, I have called it, The Work, Wealth,
and Happiness of Mankind.

Now, I find, by getting these three correlated com-
pilations into existence, I have at last, in however rough
a fashion, brought together a complete system of ideas
upon which an Open Conspirator can go. Before any-
one could hope to get on to anything like a practical
working directive answer to "What are we to do with
our lives?" it was necessary to know what our lives were
The Science of Life; what had led up to their present
pattern The Outline of History; and this third book,
to tell what we were actually doing and supposed to be
doing with our working lives, day by day, at the present
time. By the time I was through with these books I
felt I had really something sound and comprehensive to
go upon, an "ideology," as people say, on which it was

20

We Have to Clear and Clean Up Our Minds

possible to think of building a new world without funda-
mental surprises, and, moreover, that I had got my
mind stripped down and cleaned of many illusions and
bad habits, so that it could handle life with an assur-
ance it had never known before.

Now, there is nothing very marvellous about these
three compilations of mine. I am not offering a mental
panacea. Any steady writer of average intelligence with
the same will and the same resources, who could devote
about nine or ten years to the task and get the proper
sort of help, could have made them. It can be done, it
is no doubt being done, all over again by other people,
for themselves and perhaps for others, much more beau-
tifully and adequately. But to get that amount of
vision and knowledge, to achieve that general arrange-
ment and understanding, was a necessary condition
that had to be satisfied before any answer to the ques-
tion, "What are we to do with our lives?" could even be
attempted, and before one could become in any effective
way an Open Conspirator. There is nothing indispens-
able, even now, about these three books. Much of what
they contain can be extracted from any good encyclo-
paedia.

Many people have made their own outlines of history
for themselves, read widely, grasped the leading prin-
ciples of biology and grappled with the current litera-
ture of business science. And so far as the history and
biology are concerned there are parallel books, that
may be as good and serviceable. But even for highly-
educated people these summaries are still useful in
bringing things known with different degrees of thor-
oughness, into a general scheme. They correlate, and
they fill up gaps. Between them they cover the ground;
and that ground has to be covered before the mind of a

21

What are we to do with our Lives?

modern citizen is prepared to tackle the problems that
confront it. Otherwise he is an incapable citizen, and if
he is rich or influential he may be a very dangerous
citizen. Presently there will be better compilations to
meet this need, or perhaps the gist of all the three divi-
sions of knowledge, concentrated and made more lucid
and attractive, may be available as the intellectual
frame of modern education throughout the world, as a
"General Account of Life" that should be given to
everyone. People cannot possibly set about living pro-
perly and satisfactorily unless they know what they
are, where they are, and how they stand to the people
and things about them.

22

IV

The Revolution in Education

SOME sort of reckoning therefore between people awak-
ened to the new world that dawns about us and the
schools, colleges, and machinery of formal education
is overdue. As a body the educated are getting nothing
like that AccounFof Life^whTch is needed to direct our
lives in this modern worldA

" Itls TEe^cro^rninglLBsuf3ity in the world to-day that
these institutions should go through a solemn parade of
preparing the new generation for life and that then,
afterwards, a minority of their victims, finding this pre-
paration has left them almost totally unprepared, should
have of their own accord to struggle out of our world
heap of starved and distorted minds to some sort of real
education. The world cannot be run by such a minority
of escaped and re-educated minds alone, with all the
rest of the heap against them. Our necessities demand
the intelligence and services of everyone who can be
trained to give them. The new world demands new
schools, therefore, to give evgryone^ sound and
thorouglygiental training and equigjveryone with^clear
fifeas about history, about life, and aboutjgpliticaland
Scpii^^ rubbishy heaS

content at pr^nFprwalenM I1ie"oId-wbrldrfeSfc1icls
and scfiooIsRave to be reformed or replaced. A vigorous
educational reform movement arises as a natural and
necessary expression of the awakening Open Con-

23 c

What are we to do with our Lives?

spirator. A revolution in education is the most impera-
tive and fundamental part of the adaptation ]o_fTife to
itsjiew conditions.

These various compedia of knowledge constituting a
Modern Account of Life, on which we have laid stress
in the previous section, these supplements to teaching,
which are now produced and read outside the estab-
lished formal educational world and in the teeth of its
manifest hostility, arise because of the backwardness
of that world, and as that world yields slowly but surely
to the pressure of the new spirit, so they will permeate
and replace its text-books and disappear as a separate
class of book. The education these new dangerous times
in which we are now living demands, must start right,
from the beginning and there must be nothing to re-
place and nothing to relearn in it. Before we can talk
politics^finance, business, or moralsT^eTnusF^eeTEat
we havegofBiFn^

aatiotttJTre^z be

done witH ourirves"unfil weTiavFseeiTto that.

Religion in the New World

"YES," objects a reader, "but does not our religion tell
us what we are to do with our lives?"

We have to bring religion, as a fundamental matter,
into this discussion. From our present point of view
religion is that central essential part of education which
determines conduct. Religion certainly should tell us
what to do with our lives. But in the vast stir and occa-
sions of modern life, so much of what we call religion
remains irrelevant or dumb. Religion does not seem to
"join on" to the main parts of the general problem of
living. It has lost touch.

Let us try and bring this problem of the Open Con-
spiracy to meet and make the new world, into relation
with the traditions of religion. The clear-minded Open
Conspirator who has got his modern ideology, his
lucidly arranged account of the universe in order, is
obliged to believe that only by giving his life to the
great processes of social reconstruction, and shaping his
conduct with reference to that, can he do well with his
life. But that merely launches him into the most subtle
and unending of struggles, the struggle against the in-
cessant gravitation of our interests to ourselves. He has
to live the broad life and escape from the close narrow
life. We all try to attain the dignity and happiness of
magnanimity and escape from the tormenting urgencies
of personal desire. In the past that struggle has gener-

25

What are we to do with our Lives?

ally assumed the form of a religious struggle. Religion
is the antagonist of self.

In their completeness, in the life that was profes-
sionally religious, religions have always demanded great
subordinations of self. Therein lay their creative force.
They demanded devotion and gave reasons for that
demand. They disentangled the will from the egotis-
tical preoccupations often very completely. 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 com-
munity. 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 com-
munity 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 re-
ference 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 the finer sort of mind this aspect of religion seems

26

Religion in the New World

always to have been its primary attraction. One has to
remember that there is a real will for religion scattered
throughout mankind a real desire to get away from
self. 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.

But hitherto religion has never been presented simply
as a devotion to a universal cause. The devotion has
always been in it, but it has been complicated by other
considerations. The leaders in every great religious
movement have considered it necessary that it should
explain itself in the form of history and a cosmogony.
It has been felt necessary to say Why? and To what
end? Every religion therefore has had 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 be-
yond the store of scientific knowledge of its time. In
this lurked the seeds of the ultimate decay and super-
session of every successive religion.

But as the idea of continual change, going farther and
farther from existing realities and never returning to
them, is a new one, as nobody until very recently has
grasped the fact that the knowledge of to-day is the
ignorance of to-morrow, each fresh development of re-
ligion in the world so far has been proclaimed in perfect
good faith as the culminating and final truth.

This finality of statement has considerable immediate
practical value. The suggestion of the possibility of
further restatement is an unsettling suggestion; it

27

What are we to do with our Lives?

undermines conviction and breaks the ranks of the
believers, because there are enormous variations in the
capacities of men to recognize the same spirit under a
changing shape. Those variations cause endless diffi-
culties to-day. While some intelligences can recognize
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 now in terms of biological and psychological
necessity, while to others any variation whatever in the
phrasing of the faith seems to be nothing less than
atheistical misrepresentations of the most damnable
kind. For these latter God, a God still anthropomorphic
enough to have a will and purpose, to display prefer-
ences 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 com-
mitments they have undertaken, and because of con-
cessions 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 wide discredit of
organized 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

28

Religion in the New World

is too old-fashioned and too irrelevant to admit of that
thoroughness of belief which is necessary for the devo-
tion of intelligent people.

Great ingenuity has been shown by modern writers
and thinkers in the adaptation of venerated religious
expressions to new ideas. Peccavi. Have I not written
of the creative will in humanity as "God the Invisible
King" and presented it in the figure of a youthful and
adventurous finite god?

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. Respect for Him de-
mands that He should have no limitations. He is pushed
farther and farther from actuality, therefore, and His
definition becomes increasingly a bundle of negations,
until at last, in His role 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 per-
suasion 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

29

What are we to do with our Lives?

minds a desire amounting almost to a necessity for an
object of devotion so individualized 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 drama-
tize 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 with-
out them. Great intellectual tolerance is necessary,
therefore a cultivated disposition to translate and re-
translate from one metaphysical or emotional idiom to
another if there is not to be a deplorable wastage of
moral force in our world. Just now I wrote Peccavi
because I had written God the Invisible King, but after
all I do not think it was so much a sin to use that phrase,
God the Invisible King, as an error in expression. If
there is no sympathetic personal leader outside us, there
is at least in us the attitude we should adopt towards a
sympathetic personal leader.

Three profound differences between the new mental
dispositions of the present time and those of preceding
ages have to be realized if current developments of the
religious impulse are to be seen in their correct relation-
ship 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

30

Religion in the .New World

of human thought and feeling. Following upon the bio-
logical advances that have made us recognize 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 ex-
alted, under the stress of social progress, into intricate
human motives. Our conception of sin and our treat-
ment of sin have been profoundly modified by this
analysis. Our former sins are seen as ignorances, inade-
quacies and bad habits, and the moral conflict is robbed
of three-fourths of its ego-centred melodramatic qual-
ity. We are no longer moved to be less wicked; we are
moved to organize our conditioned reflexes and lead a
life less fragmentary and silly.

Secondly, the conception of individuality has been in-
fluenced 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 realize 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 our 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. (All this the reader will find worked out in
considerable detail in The Science of Life.)

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

What are we to do with our Lives?

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
realize, 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-analyzing turn of mind; it must
divest itself of its sacred histories, its gross preoccupa-
tions, its posthumous prolongation of personal ends.
The desire for service, for subordination, for permanent
effect, for an escape from the distressful pettiness and
mortality 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

32

Religion in the New World

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 sen-
tence in the modern creed must be, not "I believe/' but
"I give myself."

To what? And how? To these questions we will now
address ourselves.

33

VI

Modern Religion Is Objective

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 re-
ligion 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 in-
volved 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 ex-
ample, in these early stages, before the hermit life gave
place to organized monastic life, did not to any extent
direct itself to service except the spiritual service of
other human beings. But as Christianity became a de-
finite social organizing force, it took on a great series of
healing, comforting, helping, and educational activities.
The modern tendency has been and is all in the direc-
tion of minimizing what one might call self-centred
devotion and self-subjugation, and of expanding and
developing external service. The idea of inner perfect-
ibility dwindles with the diminishing importance at-
tached to individuality. We cease to think of mortifying
or exalting or perfecting ourselves and seek to lose our-
selves in a greater life. We think less and less of "con-
quering" self and more and more of escaping from self.
If we attempt to perfect ourselves in any respect it is

34

Modern Religion is Objective

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, dis-
abuse our minds of many limitations set to the imagi-
nations of our predecessors. Much that they saw as
fixed and determinate, we see as transitory and con-
trollable. 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. Unpre-
cedented possibilities, mighty problems, we realize, con-
front mankind to-day. They frame our existences. The
practical aspect, the material form, the embodiment of
the modernized religious impulse is the direction of the
whole life to the solution of these problems and the real-
ization of their possibilities. The alternative before man
now is either magnificence of spirit and magnificence of
achievement, or disaster.

The modern religious life, like all forms or 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 inquiry, which is con-
cerned entirely with the outward shape, the direction,
and the organization of modern religious effort, with the
question of what, given religious devotion, we have to
do and how that has to be done.

Now, in the new and greater universe to which we are
awakening, its immense possibilities furnish an entirely
new frame and setting for the moral life. In the fixed
and limited outlook of the past, practical good works

35

What are we to do with our Lives?

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. Other-worldliness was its ready
refuge from the invincible evil and confusion of the
existing scheme of things.

But 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 realize that such an order is a material possibility.
And with the realization that this is a material possi-
bility, we can no longer be content with a field of "good
deeds" and right action restricted to palliative and con-
solatory 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 realization
of that conceivable better order in human affairs, be-
comes the new criterion of conduct. Other-worldliness
has become unnecessary.

The realization of this possible better order brings us
at once to certain definite lines of conduct. We have to
make an end to war, and to make an end to war we
must be cosmopolitan in our politics. 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 economic operations or due to conflicting standards
and traditions of life, are disposed of.

36

Modern Religion is Objective

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. On the political side
it is plain that our lives must be given to the advance-
ment of that union.

Such a forward stride in human life, the first stride in
a mighty continuing advance, an advance to which no
limit appears, is now not simply materially possible.
It is urgent. The opportunity is plain before mankind.
It is the alternative to social decay. 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 organization of
will and energy to take it as this world has never seen
before.

These are the new imperatives that unfold themselves
before the more alert minds of our generation. They
will presently become the general mental background,
as the modern interpretations of the history of life and
of the material and mental possibilities about us estab-
lish 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

37

What are we to do with our Lives?

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. If it
does not do that, then it is no more than a drug for
easing discomfort, "the opium of the peoples."

Can religion, or can it not, synthesize 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 the religious spirit, in the
light of modern knowledge, can do this thing, and our
subject now is to enquire what are the necessary open-
ing stages in the synthesis of that effort. We write,
from this point onward, for those who believe that it
can, and who do already grasp the implications of
world history and contemporary scientific achievement.

VII

What Mankind Has to Do

BEFORE we can consider the forms and methods of
attacking this inevitable task of reconstruction it will
be well to draw the main lines and to attempt some
measure of the magnitude of that task. What are the
new forms that it is thus proposed 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 we set our faces
and seek to direct our lives. Many there are at present
who apprehend it as a possibility but do not dare, it
seems, to desire it, because of the enormous difficulties
that intervene, and because they see as yet no intima-
tions of a way through or round these difficulties. They
do not see a way of escape from the patchwork of
governments that grips them and divides mankind. 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;

39

What are we to do with our Lives?

they accept current reality as ultimate reality. As the
saying goes, 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 com-
monweal, preventing war and controlling those moral,
biological, and economic forces and wastages that
would otherwise lead to wars. And controlling them in
the sense that science and man's realization and control
of his powers and possibilities continually increase.

Let us make clear what sort of government we are
trying to substitute for the patchwork of to-day. It will
be a new sort of direction with a new psychology. The
method of direction of such a world commonweal is not
likely to imitate the methods of existing sovereign
states. It will be something new and altogether dif-
ferent.

This point is not yet generally realized. It is too often
assumed that the world commonweal will be, as it were,
just the one heir and survivor of existing states, and
that it will be a sort of megatherium of the same form
and anatomy as its predecessors.

But a little reflection will show that this is a mistake.
Existing states are primarily militant states, and a
world state cannot be militant. 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 or any sort of council
that meets and talks is an inconceivable instrument of
government. The voice will cease to be a suitable
vehicle. World government, like scientific process, will
be conducted by statement, criticism, and publication
that will be capable of efficient translation.

40

What Mankind Has to Do

The fundamental organization of contemporary
states is plainly still military, and that is exactly what
a world organization 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 de-
velopment the Open Conspiracy will supersede. We
have to get clear of that clutter. 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 super-
sede without haste or delay whatever is weakening or
unsatisfactory in the general direction.

A number of readers will be disposed to say that this
is a very vague, undefined, and complicated conception
of world government. But indeed it is a simplification.
Not only are the present governments of the world a
fragmentary competitive confusion, but none of them
is as simple as it appears. They seem to be simple be-
cause they have formal heads and definite forms, coun-
cils, voting assemblies, and so forth, for arriving at
decisions. But the formal heads, the kings, presidents,
and so forth, are really not the directive heads. They
are merely the figure heads. They do not decide. They
merely make gestures of potent and dignified acquies-
cence when decisions are put to them. They are com-
plicating shams. Nor do the councils and assemblies
really decide. They record, often very imperfectly and
exasperatingly, the accumulating purpose of outer
forces. These outer really directive forces are no doubt
very intricate in their operation; they depend finally on

41

What are we to do with our Lives?

religious and educational forms and upon waves of gre-
garious feeling, but it does not in the least simplify the
process of collective human activity to pretend that it
is simple and to set up symbols and dummies in the
guise of rulers and dictators to embody that pretence.
To recognize the incurable intricacy of collective action
is a mental simplification; to remain satisfied with the
pretensions of existing governmental institutions, and
to bring in all the problems of their procedure and in-
teraction is to complicate the question.

The present rudimentary development of collective
psychology obliges us to be vague and provisional about
the way in which the collective mind may best define its
will for the purpose of administrative action. We may
know that a thing is possible and still be unable to do
it as yet, just as we knew that aviation was possible in
1900. Some method of decision there must certainly be
and a definite administrative machinery. But it may
turn out to be a much slighter, less elaborate organiza-
tion than a consideration of existing methods might
lead us to imagine. It may never become one single
interlocking administrative system. We may have sys-
tems of world control rather than a single world state.
The practical regulations, enforcements, and officials
needed to keep the world in good health, for example,
may be only very loosely related to the system of con-
trols that will maintain its communications in a state
of efficiency. Enforcement and legal decisions, as we
know them now, may be found to be enormously and
needlessly cumbrous by our descendants. As the reason-
ableness of a thing is made plain, the need for its en-
forcement is diminished, and the necessity for litigation
disappears.

The Open Conspiracy, the world movement for the

42

What Mankind Has to Do

supercession or enlargement or fusion of existing poli-
tical, economic, and social institutions must necessarily,
as it grows, draw closer and closer to questions of prac-
tical 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 masses of intelligent workers. As its activities
spread it will work out a whole system of special
methods of co-operation. As it grows, and by growing,
it will learn the business of general direction and how
to develop its critical function. A lucid, dispassionate,
and immanent criticism is the primary necessity, the
living spirit of a world civilization. The Open Con-
spiracy is essentially such a criticism, and the carrying
out of such a criticism into working reality is the task
of the Open Conspiracy. It will by its very nature be
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 evoke, step by
step, as experience is gained and power and responsi-
bility acquired, forms of administration and research
and correlation.

The differences in nature and function between the
world controls of the future and the state governments
of the present age which we have just pointed out
favours a hope that the Open Conspiracy may come to
its own in many cases rather by the fading out of these
state governments through the inhibition and paralysis
of their destructive militant and competitive activities
than by a direct conflict to overthrow them. As new
world controls develop, it becomes the supreme busi-
ness of the Open Conspiracy to keep them world wide
and impartial, to save them by an incessant critical
educational and propagandist activity from entangle-

43

What are we to do with our Lives?

ment with the old traditional rivalries and feuds of
states and nations. It is quite possible that such world
controls should be able to develop independently, but
it is highly probable, on the other hand, that they will
continue to be entangled as they are to-day, and that
they will need to be disengaged with a struggle. We
repeat, the new directive organizations of men's affairs
will not be of the same nature as old-fashioned govern-
ments. They will be in their nature biological, financial,
and generally economic, and the old governments were
primarily nothing of the sort. Their directive force will
be (i) an effective criticism having the quality of
science, and (2) the growing will in men to have things
right. The directive force of the older governments was
the uncriticized fantasies and wilfulness of an indi-
vidual, a class, a tribe, or a majority.

The modernization of the religious impulse leads us
straight to this effort for the establishment of the world
state as a duty, and the close consideration of the
necessary organization 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 develop-
ing into a world directorate, and by the digestion and
assimilation of superseded factors into an entire modern
world community, or admit from the outset the futility,
the spare-time amateurishness, of its gestures.

44

VIII

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific 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 compre-
hensive 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 Caesar is hardly better from the progressive view-
point than world chaos; the unity we seek must mean a
world-wide liberation of thought, experiment and crea-
tive effort.

A successful Open Conspiracy merely to seize gov-
ernments 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 from 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 direc-
tion, not simply for the sake of unity, but as a means of
release to happiness and power, that it is necessary, at
any cost in delay, in loss of effective force, in strategic
or tactical disadvantage that the light of free, abun-
dant criticism should play upon that direction and upon
the movements and unifying organizations leading to
the establishment of that unifying direction.

45

What are we to do with our Lives?

Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trust-
worthy 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 trust ourselves and
are glad to have our activities checked and guarded by
a sense of helpful inspection. It is for this reason that
a movement to realize 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 pro-
cedure.

The Open Conspiracy against the traditional and now
cramping and dangerous 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 with the
understanding sympathy of as many people as possible,
or the sort of unity that will be won will be found to be
scarcely worth the winning. The essential task would
have to be recommenced again within the mere frame
of unity thus attained.

This candid attempt to take possession of the whole
world, this Open Conspiracy of ours, must be made in
the name of and for the sake of science and creative
activity. Its aim is to release science and creative
activity. Its aim is to release science and creative
ability, and every stage in the struggle must be watched
and criticized, 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

46

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

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 organize
political and social activities entirely on economic
grounds is to forget the objectives of life's campaign in
a preoccupation with supply.

It is true that man, like the animal world in general
from which he has risen, 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 un-
defined 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 organized 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 multitudi-

47

What are we to do with our Lives?

nous 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 tranquillized, if need be, without the pro-
duction 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 dis-
couragement to affect the general birth rate or the birth
rate 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 competi-
tion for subsistence. Social and political processes
change entirely in their character when we recognize
the possibility and practicability of this fundamental
revolution in human biology.

In a world so relieved, the production of staple neces-
sities presents a series of problems altogether less dis-
tressful than those of the present scramble for posses-
sions 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 prac-
tical 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 what-
ever surplus of production it could grasp, from con-
sumption in mere proletarian breeding. In the past and
at present, what is called the capitalist system, that is

48

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

to say the unsystematic exploitation of production by
private owners under the protection of the law, has, on
the whole, in spite of much waste and conflict, worked
beneficially by checking that gravitation to a universal
low-grade consumption which would have been the in-
evitable outcome of a 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 psycho-
logical, 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 funda-
mentals, and, with a stupid pose of sound practical
wisdom, insist on opening up their case with an un-
critical acceptance of the common antagonism of em-
ployers 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

49

What are we to do with our Lives?

in the place of judgments, condemn all others as "Uto-
pian" 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 per-
suade themselves that an idea or a statement is "Uto-
pian" or "Bourgeois," it does not seem to matter in the
least to them whether it is right or wrong. It is dis-
posed of. Just as in genteeler circles anything is dis-
posed of that can be labelled "atheistical," "subver-
sive" 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, motorcars, steam-
ships, and aeroplanes, and, with a fine sense of extra-
vagance rebuked, set themselves to long neuralgic dis-
sertations, disputations, and treatises upon highroads
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 pedestrian-
ariat. There would have been a rapid and easy differ-
entiation 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 mini-
mized 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. AH with the pro-
foundest gravity and dignity. These things, footpaths
and roads and canals with their traffic, were "real," and

So

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

"Utopian" projects for getting along at thirty or forty
miles an hour or more uphill and against wind and tide,
let alone the still more incredible suggestion of air trans-
port, 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.

The psychology of economic co-operation is still only
dawning, and so the economists and the doctrinaire
socialists have had the freest range for pedantry and
authoritative pomp. For a hundred years they have
argued and argued about "rent," about "surplus value,"
and so on, and have produced a literature ten thousand
times as bulky, dreary, and foolish as the worst out-
pourings of the mediaeval schoolmen.

But as soon as this time-honoured preoccupation
with the allotment of the shares of originators, organ-
izers, 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 preoccupation 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 pro-
ductive 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 satisfac-
tion, we shift our treatment of economic questions to-
wards standards by which all current methods of ex-
ploitation, employment, and finance can be judged
rather than wrangled over. We can dismiss the ques-
tion of the claims of this sort of participant or that, for

Si

What are we to do with our Lives?

later and, subordinate consideration, and view eacb
variety of human assistance in the general effort en-
tirely from the standpoint of what makes that assist-
ance least onerous and most effective.

The germs of such really scientific economics exist
already in the study of industrial organization and in-
dustrial psychology. As the science of industrial psy-
chology 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 pro-
perty, 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
Qf 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 con-
trol distribution. The topographical and geological
surveys of modern civilized communities, their govern-
ment maps, their periodic issue of agricultural and in-
dustrial statistics, are the first crude and unco-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 In-
stitute of Agriculture in Rome, there were the begin-
nings of an impartial review month by month and year
by year of world production, world needs and world
transport. Such a great central organization of economic
science would necessarily produce direction; it would

52

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

indicate what had best be done here, there, and every*
where, solve general tangles, examine, approve and
initiate fresh methods, and arrange the transitional
process from old to new. It would not be an organiza-
tion of will, imposing its will upon a reluctant or recal-
citrant 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. 77 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 right-minded
people in that community. The organization and pre-
servation of that power of will is the primary under-
taking, therefore, of a world revolution aiming at uni-
versal peace, welfare and happy activity. And through
that will it will produce as the central organ the brain
of the modern community, a great encyclopaedic or-
ganization, kept constantly up to date and giving
approximate estimates and directions for all the mate-
rial activities of mankind.

The older and still prevalent conception of govern-
ment 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 pro-
cess 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 innately
virtuous; but compulsion and restraint are the friction

S3

What are we to do with our Lives?

of the social machine and, other things being equal, the
less compulsive social arrangements are, the more will-
ingly, naturally, and easily they are accepted, the less
wasteful of moral effort and the happier that com-
munity 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 arranging the economic, biological, and
mental organization 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 abund-
ance out of all comparison greater than the existing
supply of things necessary for human well-being, free-
dom, and activity, with not merely not more, but in-
finitely 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
realize that there is anything to be learnt in that matter.
He wastes will and human possibility extravagantly in
his current economic methods.

We know nowadays that the nineteenth century ex-
pended a great wealth of intelligence upon a barren
controversy between Individualism and Socialism. They
were treated as mutually exclusive alternatives, instead

54

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

of being questions of degree. Human society has been,
is, and always must be an intricate system of adjust-
ments 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 standardization
or restraint increasing there. Personal property never
can be socially guaranteed and yet remain unlimited in
action and extent as the extremer individualists desired,
nor can it be "abolished" as the extremer socialists pro-
posed. Property is not robbery, as Proudhon asserted;
it is the protection of things against promiscuous and
mainly wasteful use. Property is not necessarily per-
sonal. In some cases property 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, which is a liquidated generalized
form of property; it is a ticket for individual liberty of
movement and individual choice of reward.

The economic history of mankind is a history of the
operation of the idea of property; it relates the conflict
of the unlimited acquisitiveness of egoistic individuals
against the resentment of the disinherited and unsuc-
cessful and the far less effective consciousness of a
general welfare. Money grew out of a system of ab-
stracting conventions and has been subjected to a great
variety of restrictions, monopolizations, and regula-
tions. It has never been an altogether logical device,
and it has permitted the most extensive and complex
developments of credit, debt, and dispossession. All

55

What are we to do with our Lives?

these developments have brought with them character-
istic forms of misuse and corruption. The story is in-
tricate, and the tangle of relationships, of dependence,
of pressure, of interception, of misdirected services,
crippling embarrassments, and crushing obligations in
which we live to-day admits of no such simple and
general solutions as many exponents of socialism, for
example, seem to consider possible.

But the thought and investigations of the past cen-
tury or so have made it clear that a classification of
property, according to the nature of the rights exercis-
able and according to the range of ownership involved,
must be the basis of any system of social justice in the
future.

Certain things, the ocean, the air, rare wild animals,
must be the collective property of all mankind and
cannot be altogether safe until they are so regarded,
and until some concrete body exists to exercise these
proprietary rights. Whatever collective control exists
must protect these universal properties, the sea from
derelicts, the strange shy things of the wild from exter-
mination by the hunter and the foolish collector. The
extinction of many beautiful creatures is one of the
penalties our world is paying for its sluggishness in
developing a collective common rule. And there are
many staple things and general needs that now also
demand a unified control in the common interest. The
raw material of the earth should be for all, not to be
monopolized by any acquisitive individual or acquisi-
tive sovereign state, and not to be withheld from ex-
ploitation for the general benefit of any chance claims
to ^territorial priority of this or that backward or bar-
gaining person or tribe.

In the past, most of these universal concerns have

56

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

had to be left to the competitive enterprise of profit-
seeking individuals because there were as yet no collec-
tivities organized to the pitch of ability needed to
develop and control these concerns, but surely nobody
in his senses believes that the supply and distribution of
staple commodities about the earth by irresponsible
persons and companies working entirely for monetary
gain is the best possible method from the point of view
of the race as a whole. The land of the earth, all
utilizable natural products, have fallen very largely
under the rules and usages of personal property be-
cause in the past that was the only recognized and
practicable form of administrative proprietorship. The
development both of extensive proprietary companies
and of government departments with economic func-
tions has been a matter of the last few centuries, the
development, that is to say, of communal, more or less
impersonal ownership, and it is only through these de-
velopments that the idea of organized collectivity of
proprietorship has become credible.

Even in quite modern state enterprises there is a
tendency to recall the role of the vigilant, jealous, and
primitive personal proprietor in the fiction of ownership
by His Majesty the King. In Great Britain, for ex-
ample, Georgius Rex is still dimly supposed to hover
over the Postmaster General of his Post Office, approve,
disapprove, and call him to account. But the Postal
Union of the world which steers a registered letter from
Chile to Norway or from Ireland to Pekin is almost
completely divorced from the convention of an indi-
vidual owner. It works; it is criticized without awe or
malice. Except for the stealing and steaming of letters
practised by the political police of various countries, it
works fairly well. And the only force behind it to keep

57

What are we to do with our Lives?

it working well is the conscious common sense of man-
kind.

But when we have stipulated for the replacement of
individual private ownership by more highly organized
forms of collective ownership, subject to free criticism
and responsible to the whole republic of mankind, in
the general control of sea and land, in the getting, pre-
paration, and distribution of staple products and in
transport, we have really named all the possible
generalizations of concrete ownership that the most
socialistic of contemporaries will be disposed to de-
mand. And if we add to that the necessary maintenance
of a money system by a central world authority upon a
basis that will make money keep faith with the worker
who earns it, and represent from first to last for him
the value in staple commodities he was given to under-
stand it was to have, and if we conceive credit ade-
quately controlled in the general interest by a socialized
world banking organization, we shall have defined the
entire realm from which individual property and un-
restricted individual enterprise have been excluded.
Beyond that, the science of social psychology will pro-
bably assure us that the best work will be done for the
world by individuals free to exploit their abilities as
they wish. If the individual landowner or mineral-
owner disappears altogether from the world, he will
probably be replaced over large areas by tenants with
considerable security of tenure, by householders and by
licensees under collective proprietors. It will be the
practice, the recognized best course, to allow the culti-
vator to profit as fully as possible by his own individual
productivity and to leave the householder to fashion his
house and garden after his own desire.

Such in the very broadest terms is the character of

58

Broad Characteristics of a Scientific World Commonweal

the world commonweal towards which the modern
imagination is moving, so far as its direction and eco-
nomic life are concerned. The organization of collective
bodies capable of exercising these wider proprietor-
ships, which cannot be properly used in the common
interest by uncorrelated individual owners, is the posi-
tive practical problem before the intelligent portion of
mankind to-day. The nature of such collective bodies
is still a series of open questions, even upon such points
as whether they will be elected bodies or groups deriv-
ing their authority from other sanctions. Their scope
and methods of operation, their relations to one another
and to the central bureau of intelligence, remain also to
be defined. But before we conclude this essay we may
be able to find precisions for at least the beginning of
such definition.

Nineteenth-century socialism in its various forms, in-
cluding the highly indurated formulae of communism,
has been a series of projects for the establishment of
such collective controls, for the most part very sketchy
projects from which the necessary factor of a sound
psychological analysis was almost completely wanting.
Primarily movements of protest and revolt against the
blazing injustices arising out of the selfishly individual-
istic exploitation of the new and more productive tech-
nical and financial methods of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, they have been apt to go beyond the
limits of reasonable socialization in their demands and
to minimize absurdly the difficulties and dangers of
collective control. Indignation and impatience were
their ruling moods, and if they constructed little they
exposed much. We are better able to measure the mag-
nitude of the task before us because of the clearances
and lessons achieved by these pioneer movements.

59

IX

No Stable Utopia Is Now Conceivable

THIS unified world towards which the Open Con-
spiracy would direct its activities cannot be pictured for
the reader as any static and stereotyped spectacle of
happiness. Indeed, one may doubt if such a thing as
happiness is possible without steadily changing condi-
tions involving continually enlarging and exhilarating
opportunities. Mankind, released from the pressure of
population, the waste of warfare and the private mono-
polization of the sources of wealth, will face the uni-
verse with a great and increasing surplus of will and
energy. Change and novelty will be the order of life;
each day will differ from its predecessor in its great
amplitude of interest. Life which was once routine,
endurance, and mischance will become adventure and
discovery. It will no longer be "the old, old story."

We have still barely emerged from among the
animals in their struggle for existence. We live only in
the early dawn of human self-consciousness and in the
first awakening of the spirit of mastery. We believe that
the persistent exploration of our outward and inward
worlds by scientific and artistic endeavour will lead to
developments of power and activity upon which at
present we can set no limits nor give any certain form.

Our antagonists are confusion of mind, want of
courage, want of curiosity and want of imagination, in-
dolence, and spendthrift egotism. These are the enemies
against which the Open Conspiracy arrays itself; these
are the jailers of human freedom and achievement.

60

X

The Open Conspiracy Is Not to Be Thought of as a

Single Organization; It Is a Conception of Life out of

which Efforts, Organizations, and New Orientations

Will Arise

THIS open and declared intention of establishing a
world order out of the present patchwork of particu-
larist governments, of effacing the militarist concep-
tions that have hitherto given governments their typical
form, and of removing credit and the broad funda-
mental processes of economic life out of reach of private
profit-seeking and individual monopolization, which is
the substance of this Open Conspiracy to which the
modern religious mind must necessarily address its
practical activities, cannot fail to arouse enormous
opposition. It is not a creative effort in a clear field;
it is a creative effort that can hardly stir without
attacking established things. It is the repudiation of
drift, of "leaving things alone.' 7 It criticizes every-
thing in human life from the top to the bottom
and finds everything not good enough. It strikes at
the universal human desire to feel that things are "all
right."

One might conclude, and it would be a hasty, un-
sound conclusion, that the only people to whom we
could look for sympathy and any passionate energy in
forwarding the revolutionary change would be the un-
happy, the discontented, the dispossessed, and the de-
feated in life's struggle. This idea lies at the root of
the class-war dogmas of the Marxists, and it rests on

61

What are we to do with our Lives?

an entirely crude conception of human nature. The
successful minority is supposed to have no effective
motive but a desire to retain and intensify its advan-
tages. A quite imaginary solidarity to that end is attri-
buted to it, a preposterous, base class activity. On the
other hand, the unsuccessful mass "proletariat" is
supposed to be capable of a clear apprehension of its
disadvantages, and the more it is impoverished and
embittered, the clearer-minded it becomes, and the
nearer draws its uprising, its constructive "dictator-
ship," and the Millenium.

No doubt a considerable amount of truth is to be
found in this theory of the Marxist revolution. Human
beings, like other animals, are disposed to remain where
their circumstances are tolerable and to want change
when they are uncomfortable, and so a great proportion
of the people who are "well off" want little or no change
in present conditions, particularly those who are too
dull to be bored by an unprogressive life, while a great
proportion of those who actually feel the inconveni-
ences of straitened means and population pressure, do.
But much vaster masses of the rank and file of
humanity are accustomed to inferiority and disposses-
sion, they do not feel these things to the extent even of
desiring change, or even if they do feel their disadvan-
tages, they still fear change more than they dislike their
disadvantages. Moreover, those who are sufficiently
distressed to realize that "something ought to be done
about it" are much more disposed to childish and threat-
ening demands upon heaven and the government for
redress and vindictive and punitive action against the
envied fortunate with whom they happen to be in imme-
diate contact, than to any reaction towards such com-
plex, tentative, disciplined constructive work as alone

62

The Open Conspiracy A Conception of Life

can better the lot of mankind. In practice Marxism is
found to work out in a ready resort to malignantly de-
structive activities, and to be so uncreative as to be
practically impotent in the face of material difficulties.
In Russia, where in and about the urban centres, at
least Marxism has been put to the test, the doctrine
of the Workers 7 Republic remains as a unifying cant, a
test of orthodoxy of as little practical significance there
as the communism of Jesus and communion with Christ
in Christendom, while beneath this creed a small oli-
garchy which has attained power by its profession does
its obstinate best, much hampered by the suspicion and
hostility of the Western financiers and politicians, to
carry on a series of interesting and varyingly successful
experiments in the socialization of economic life. Here
we have no scope to discuss the N. E. P. and the Five
Year Plan. They are dealt with in The Work, Wealth,
and Happiness of Mankind. Neither was properly
Communist. The Five Year Plan is carried out as an
autocratic state capitalism. Each year shows more and
more clearly that Marxism and Communism are diva-
gations from the path of human progress and that
the line of advance must follow a course more in-
tricate and less flattering to the common impulses of
our nature.

The one main strand of truth in the theory of social
development woven by Marx and Engels is that success-
ful, comfortable people are disposed to dislike, obstruct
and even resist actively any substantial changes in the
current patchwork of arrangements, however great the
ultimate dangers of that patchwork may be or the
privations and sufferings of other people involved in it.
The one main strand of error in that theory is the facile
assumption that the people at a disadvantage will be

63

What are we to do with our Lives?

stirred to anything more than chaotic and destructive
expressions of resentment. If now we reject the error
and accept the truth, we lose the delusive comfort of
belief in that magic giant, the Proletariat, who will
dictate, arrange, restore, and create, but we clear the
way for the recognition of an elite of intelligent, crea-
tive-minded people scattered through the whole com-
munity, and for a study of the method of making this
creative element effective in human affairs against the
massive oppositions of selfishness and unimaginative
self-protective conservatism.

Now, certain classes of people such as thugs and
burglars seem to be harmful to society without a re-
deeming point about them, and others, such as race-
course bookmakers, seem to provide the minimum of
distraction and entertainment with a maximum of
mischief. Wilful idlers are a mere burthen on the com-
munity. Other social classes again, professional soldiers,
for example, have a certain traditional honourableness
which disguises the essentially parasitic relationship of
their services to the developing modern community.
Armies and armaments are cancers produced by the
malignant development of the patriotic virus under
modern conditions of exaggeration and mass suggestion.
But since there are armies prepared to act coercively
in the world to-day, it is necessary that the Open Con-
spiracy should develop within itself the competence to
resist military coercion and combat and destroy armies
that stand in the way of its emergence. Possibly the
first two types here instanced may be condemned as
classes and excluded as classes from any participation
in the organized effort to recast the world, but quite
obviously the soldier cannot. The world commonweal
will need its own scientific methods of protection so

64

The Open Conspiracy A Conception of Life

long as there are people running about the planet
with flags and uniforms and weapons, offering violence
to their fellow men and interfering with the free
movements of commodities in the name of national
sovereignty.

And when we come to the general functioning classes,
landowners, industrial organizers, bankers, and so
forth, who control the present system, such as it is, it
should be still plainer that it is very largely from the
ranks of these classes, and from their stores of experi-
ence and traditions of method, that the directive forces
of the new order must emerge. The Open Conspiracy
can have nothing to do with the heresy that the path of
human progress lies through an extensive class war.

Let us consider, for example, how the Open Con-
spiracy stands to such a complex of activities, usages,
accumulations, advantages as constitutes the banking
world. There are no doubt many bankers and many
practices in banking which make for personal or group
advantage to the general detriment. They forestall,
monopolize, constrain, and extort, and so increase their
riches. And another large part of that banking world
follows routine and established usage; it is carrying on
and keeping things going, and it is neither inimical nor
conducive to the development of a progressive world
organization of finance. But there remains a residuum
of original and intelligent people in banking or asso-
ciated with banking or mentally interested in banking,
who do realize that banking plays a very important
and interesting part in the world's affairs, who are
curious about their own intricate function and disposed
towards a scientific investigation of its origins, condi-
tions, and future possibilities. Such types move natur-
ally towards the Open Conspiracy. Their enquiries

65

What are we to do with our Lives?

carry them inevitably outside the bankers' habitual field
to an examination of the nature, drift, and destiny of
the entire economic process.

Now the theme of the preceding paragraph might be
repeated with variations through a score of paragraphs
in which appropriate modifications would adapt it to
the industrial organizer, the merchant and organizer of
transport, the advertiser, the retail distributor, the
agriculturalist, the engineer, the builder, the economic
chemist, and a number of other types functional in the
contemporary community. In all we should distinguish
firstly, a base and harmful section, then a mediocre
section following established usage, and lastly, an
active, progressive section to whom we turn naturally
for developments leading towards the progressive world
commonweal of our desires. And our analysis might
penetrate further than separation into types of indi-
viduals. In nearly every individual instance we should
find a mixed composition, a human being of fluctuating
moods and confused purposes, sometimes base, some-
times drifting with the tide and sometimes alert and
intellectually and morally quickened. The Open Con-
spiracy must be content to take a fraction of a man, as
it appeals to fractions of many classes, if it cannot get
him altogether.

This idea of drawing together a proportion of all or
nearly all the functional classes in contemporary com-
munities in order to weave the beginnings of a world
community out of their selection is a fairly obvious one
and yet it has still to win practical recognition. Man
is a morbidly gregarious and partisan creature; he is
deep in his immediate struggles and stands by his own
kind because in so doing he defends himself; the in-
dustrialist is best equipped to criticize his fellow indus-

66

The Open Conspiracy A Conception of Life

trialist, but he finds the root of all evil in the banker;
the wages worker shifts the blame for all social wrongs
on the "employing class." There is an element of exas-
peration in most economic and social reactions, and
there is hardly a reforming or revolutionary movement
in history which is not essentially an indiscriminate
attack of one functioning class or type upon another,
on the assumption that the attacked class is entirely to
blame for the clash and that the attacking class is self-
sufficient in the commonweal and can dispense with its
annoying collaborator. A considerable element of
justice usually enters into such recriminations. But the
Open Conspiracy cannot avail itself of these class
animosities for its driving force. It can have, therefore,
no uniform method of approach. For each class it has a
conception of modification and development, and each
class it approaches therefore at a distinctive angle.
Some classes, no doubt, it would supersede altogether;
others the scientific investigator, for example it must
regard as almost wholly good and seek only to multiply
and empower, but it can no more adopt the prejudices
and extravagances of any particular class as its basis
than it can adopt the claims of any existing state or
empire.

When it is clearly understood that the binding links
of the Open Conspiracy we have in mind are certain
broad general ideas, and that except perhaps in the
case of scientific workers we have no current set of
attitudes of mind and habits of activity which we can
turn over directly and unmodified to the service of the
conspiracy, we are in a position to realize that the move-
ment we contemplate must from the outset be diversi-
fied in its traditions and elements and various in its
methods. It must fight upon several fronts and with

67

What are we to do with our Lives?

many sorts of equipment. It will have a common spirit,
but it is quite conceivable that between many of its
contributory factors there may be very wide gaps in
understanding and sympathy. It is no sort of simple
organization.

6S

XI

Forces and Resistances in the Great Modern Com-
munities Now Prevalent, which Are Antagonistic to the
Open Conspiracy. The War with Tradition.

WE have now stated broadly but plainly the idea of the
world commonweal which is the objective of the Open
Conspiracy, and we have made a preliminary examina-
tion of the composition of that movement, showing that
it must be necessarily not a class development, but a
convergence of many different sorts of people upon a
common idea. Its opening task must be the elaboration,
exposition, and propaganda of this common idea, a
steady campaign to revolutionize education and estab-
lish a modern ideology in men's minds and, arising out
of this, the incomparably vaster task of the realization
of its ideas.

These are tasks not to be done in vacuo; they have
to be done in a dense world of crowding, incessant,
passionate, unco-ordinated activities, the world of
market and newspaper, seed-time and harvest, births,
deaths, jails, hospitals, riots, barracks and army man-
oeuvres, false prophets and royal processions, games and
shows, fire, storm, pestilence, earthquake, war. Every
day and every hour things will be happening to help or
thwart, stimulate or undermine, obstruct or defeat the
creative effort to set up the world commonweal.

Before we go on to discuss the selection and organiza-
tion of these heterogeneous and mainly religious
impulses upon which we rest our hopes of a greater life

69

What are we to do with our Lives?

for mankind, before we plan how these impulses may
be got together into a system of co-ordinated activities,
it will be well to review the main antagonistic forces
with which, from its very inception, the Open Con-
spiracy will be is now in conflict.

To begin with, we will consider these forces as they
present themselves in the highly developed Western
European States of to-day and in their American deri-
vatives, derivatives which, in spite of the fact that in
most cases they have far outgrown their lands of origin,
still owe a large part of their social habits and political
conceptions to Europe. All these States touch upon the
Atlantic or its contributory seas; they have all grown
to their present form since the discovery of America;
they have a common tradition rooting in the ideas of
Christendom and a generic resemblance of method.
Economically and socially they present what is known
in current parlance as the Capitalist system, but it will
relieve us of a considerable load of disputatious matter
if we call them here simply the "Atlantic" civilizations
and communities.

The consideration of these Atlantic civilizations in
relation to the coming world civilization will suffice for
the present chapter. Afterwards we will consider the
modification of the forces antagonistic to the Open
Conspiracy as they display themselves beyond the
formal confines of these now dominant states in the
world's affairs, in the social systems weakened and in-
jured by their expansion, and among such less highly
organized communities as still survive from man's
savage and barbaric past.

The Open Conspiracy is not necessarily antagonistic
to any existing government. The Open Conspiracy is
a creative, organizing movement and not an anarchistic

70

The War with Tradition

one. It does not want to destroy existing controls and
forms of human association, but either to supersede or
amalgamate them into a common world directorate. If
constitutions, parliaments, and kings can be dealt with
as provisional institutions, trustees for the coming of
age of the world commonweal, and in so far as they are
conducted in that spirit, the Open Conspiracy makes
no attack upon them.

But most governments will not set about their
business as in any way provisional; they and their
supporters insist upon a reverence and obedience which
repudiate any possibility of supersession. What should
be an instrument becomes a divinity. In nearly every
country of the world there is, in deference to the pre-
tended necessities of a possible war, a vast degrading
and dangerous cultivation of loyalty and mechanical
subservience to flags, uniforms, presidents, and kings.
A president or king who does his appointed work well
and righteously is entitled to as much subservience as a
bricklayer who does his work well and righteously and
to no more, but instead there is a sustained endeavour
to give him the privileges of an idol above criticism or
reproach, and the organized worship of flags has be-
come with changed conditions of intercourse and war-
fare an entirely evil misdirection of the gregarious
impulses of our race. Emotion and sentimentality are
evoked in the cause of disciplines and co-operations
that could quite easily be sustained and that are better
sustained by rational conviction.

The Open Conspiracy is necessarily opposed to all
such implacable loyalties, and still more so to the
aggressive assertion and propaganda of such loyalties.
When these things take the form of suppressing reason-
able criticism and forbidding even the suggestion of

Whtt are we to do with our Lives?

other forms of government, they become plainly
antagonists to any comprehensive project for human
welfare. They become manifestly, from the wider point
of view, seditious, and loyalty to "king and country"
passes into plain treason to mankind. Almost every-
where, at present, educational institutions organize
barriers in the path of progress, and there are only the
feeblest attempts at any counter education that will
break up these barriers. There is little or no effort to
restrain the aggressive nationalist when he waves his
flag against the welfare of our race, or to protect the
children of the world from the infection of his enthu-
siasms. And this last is as true now of the American
system as it is of any European State.

In the great mass of the modern community there is
little more than a favourable acquiescence in patriotic
ideas and in the worship of patriotic symbols, and that
is based largely on such training. These things are not
necessary things for the generality of to-day. A change
of mental direction would be possible for the majority
of people now without any violent disorganization of
their intimate lives or any serious social or economic
readjustments for them. Mental infection in such cases
could be countered by mental sanitation. A majority of
people in Europe, and a still larger majority in the
United States and the other American Republics, could
become citizens of the world without any serious
hindrance to their present occupations, and with an
incalculably vast increase of their present security.

But there remains a net of special classes in every
community, from kings to custom-house officers, far
more deeply involved in patriotism because it is their
trade and their source of honour, and prepared in con-
sequence with an instinctive resistance to any reorien-

72

The War with Tradition

tation of ideas towards a broader outlook. In the case
of such people no mental sanitation is possible without
dangerous and alarming changes in their way of living.
For the majority of these patriots by metier, the Open
Conspiracy unlocks the gates leading from a fussy
paradise of eminence, respect, and privilege, and
motions them towards an austere wilderness which does
not present even the faintest promise of a congenial,
distinguished life for them. Nearly everything in human
nature will dispose them to turn, away from these gates
which open towards the world peace, to bang-to and
lock them again if they can, and to grow thickets as
speedily as possible to conceal them and get them for-
gotten. The suggestion of being trustees in a transition
will seem to most of such people only the camouflage of
an ultimate degradation.

From such classes of patriots by metier, it is mani-
fest that the Open Conspiracy can expect only opposi-
tion. It may detach individuals from them, but only by
depriving them of their essential class loyalties and
characteristics. The class as a class will remain none
the less antagonistic. About royal courts and presi-
dential residences, in diplomatic, consular, military, and
naval circles, and wherever people wear titles and
uniforms and enjoy pride and precedences based on
existing political institutions, there will be the com-
pletest general inability to grasp the need for the Open
Conspiracy. These people and their womankind, their
friends and connections, their servants and dependents,
are fortified by time-honoured traditions of social
usage, of sentiment and romantic prestige. They will
insist that they are reality and Cosmopolis a dream.
Only individuals of exceptional liveliness, rare intel-
lectual power, and innate moral force can be expected

73

What are we to do with our Lives?

to break away from the anti-progressive habits such
class conditions impose upon them.

This tangle of traditions and loyalties, of interested
trades and professions, of privileged classes and official
patriots, this complex of human beings embodying very
easy and natural and time-honoured ideas of eternal
national separation and unending international and
class conflict, is the main objective of the Open Con-
spiracy in its opening phase. This tangle must be dis-
entangled as the Open Conspiracy advances, and until
it is largely disentangled and cleared up that Open
Conspiracy cannot become anything very much more
than a desire and a project.

This tangle of "necessary patriots," as one may call
them, is different in its nature, less intricate and ex-
tensive proportionally in the United States and the
States of Latin America, than it is in the old European
communities, but it is none the less virulent in its
action on that account. It is only recently that military
and naval services have become important factors in
American social life, and the really vitalizing contact
of the interested patriot and the State has hitherto
centred mainly upon the custom house and the con-
cession. Instead of a mellow and romantic loyalty to
"king and country" the American thinks simply of
America and his flag.

The American exaggeration of patriotism began as a
resistance to exploitation from overseas. Even when
political and fiscal freedom were won, there was a long
phase of industrial and financial dependence. The
American's habits of mind, in spite of his recent reali-
zation of the enormous power and relative prosperity
of the United States and of the expanding possibilities
of their Spanish and Portuguese-speaking neighbours,

74

The War with Tradition

are still largely self-protective against a now imaginary
European peril. For the first three quarters of the nine-
teenth century the people of the American continent,
and particularly the people of the United States, felt
the industrial and financial ascendancy of Great Britain
and had a reasonable fear of European attacks upon
their continent. A growing tide of immigrants of un-
certain sympathy threatened their dearest habits. Flag
worship was imposed primarily as a repudiation of
Europe. Europe no longer looms over America with
overpowering intimations, American industries no
longer have any practical justification for protection,
American finance would be happier without it, but the
patriotic interests are so established now that they go
on and will go on. No American statesman who ven-
tures to be cosmopolitan in his utterance and outlook is
likely to escape altogether from the raucous attentions
of the patriotic journalist.

We have said that the complex of classes in any
country interested in the current method of govern-
ment is sustained by traditions and impelled by its
nature and conditions to protect itself against explor-
atory criticism. It is therefore unable to escape from
the forms of competitive and militant nationalism in
which it was evolved. It cannot, without grave danger
of enfeeblement, change any such innate form So that
while parallel complexes of patriotic classes are found
in greater or less intricacy grouped about the flags and
governments of most existing states, these complexes
are by their nature obliged to remain separate, nation-
alist, and mutually antagonistic. You cannot expect a
world union of soldiers or diplomatists. Their exist-
ence and nature depend upon the idea that national
separation is real and incurable, and that war, in the

75

What are we to do with our Lives?

long run, is unavoidable. Their conceptions of loyalty
involve an antagonism to all foreigners, even to
foreigners of exactly the same types as themselves, and
make for a continual campaign of annoyances, sus-
picions, and precautions together with a general
propaganda, affecting all other classes, of the necessity
of an international antagonism that creeps persist-
ently towards war.

But while the methods of provoking war employed
by the patriotic classes are traditional, modern science
has made a new and enormously more powerful thing
of warfare and, as the Great War showed, even the
most conservative generals on both sides are unable
to prevent the gigantic interventions of the mechanician
and the chemist. So that a situation is brought about in
"which the militarist element is unable to fight without
the support of the modern industrial organization and
the acquiescence of the great mass of people. We are
confronted therefore at the present time with the para-
doxical situation that a patriotic tradition sustains in
power and authority warlike classes who are quite in-
capable of carrying on war. The other classes to which
they must go for support when the disaster of war is
actually achieved are classes developed under peace
conditions, which not only have no positive advantage
in war, but must, as a whole, suffer great dislocation,
discomfort, destruction, and distress from war. It is
of primary importance therefore, to the formally
dominant classes that these new social masses and
powers should remain under the sway of the old social,
sentimental, and romantic traditions, and equally im-
portant is it to the Open Conspiracy that they should
be released.

Here we bring into consideration another great com-

76

The War with Tradition

plex of persons, interests, traditions the world of
education, the various religious organizations, and,
beyond these, the ramifying, indeterminate world of
newspapers and other periodicals, books, the drama,
art, and all the instruments of presentation and sugges-
tion that mould opinion and direct action. The sum
of the operations of this complex will be either to sus-
tain or to demolish the old nationalist militant ascend-
ancy. Its easiest immediate course is to accept it.
Educational organizations on that account are now
largely a conservative force in the community; they
are in most cases directly controlled by authority and
bound officially as well as practically to respect current
fears and prejudices. It evokes fewer difficulties for
them if they limit and mould rather than release the
young. The schoolmaster tends, therefore, to accept
and standardize and stereotype, even in the living,
progressive fields of science and philosophy. Even
there he is a brake on the forward movement. It is
clear that the Open Conspiracy must either continually
disturb and revivify him or else frankly antagonize
him. Universities also struggle between the honourable
past on which their prestige rests, and the need of
adaptation to a world of enquiry, experiment, and
change. It is an open question whether these particular
organizations of intellectual prestige are of any real
value in the living world. A modern world planned de
novo would probably produce nothing like a contem-
porary university. Modern research, one may argue,
would be stimulated rather than injured by complete
detachment from the lingering medievalism of such in-
stitutions, their entanglement with adolescent educa-
tion, and their ancient and contagious conceptions of
precedence and honour.

77

What are we to do with our Lives?

Ordinary religious organizations, again, exist for
self-preservation and are prone to follow rather than
direct the currents of popular thought. They are kept
alive, indeed, by revivalism and new departures which
at the outset they are apt to resist, as the Catholic
Church, for instance, resisted the Franciscan awaken-
ing, but their formal disposition is conservative. They
say to religious development, thus far and no farther.

Her, in school, college, and church, are activities of
thought and instruction which, generally speaking,
drag upon the wheels of progress, but which need not
necessarily do so. A schoolmaster may be original,
stimulating, and creative, and if he is fortunate and a
good fighter he may even achieve considerable worldly
success; university teachers and investigators may
strike out upon new lines and yet escape destruction
by the older dons. Universities compete against other
universities at home and abroad and cannot altogether
yield to the forces of dullness and subservience. They
must maintain a certain difference from vulgar opinion
and a certain repute of intellectual virility.

As we pass from the more organized to the less
organized intellectual activities, we find conservative
influence declining in importance, and a freer play for
the creative drive. Freshness is a primary condition of
journalistic, literary, and artistic success, and ortho-
doxy has nothing new to say or do. But the desire for
freshness may be satisfied all too readily by merely
extravagant, superficial, and incoherent inventions.

The influence of this old traditional nationalist social
and political hierarchy which blocks the way to the new
world is not, however, exerted exclusively through its
control over schools and universities. Nor is that in-
deed its more powerful activity. Would that it were!

78

The War with Tradition

There is also a direct, less defined contact of the old
order with the nascent powers, that plays a far more
effective part in delaying the development of the
modern world commonweal. Necessarily the old order
has determined the established way of life, which is, at
its best, large, comfortable, amusing, respected. It
possesses all the entrances and exits and all the con-
trols of the established daily round. It is able to exact,
and it does exact, almost without design, many con-
formities. There can be no very ample social life,
therefore, for those who are conspicuously dissentient.
Again the old order has a complete provision for the
growth, welfare, and advancement of its children. It
controls the founts of honour and self-respect; it pro-
vides a mapped-out world of behaviour. The new
initiatives make their appearance here and there in the
form of isolated individuals, here an inventor, there a
bold organizer or a vigorous thinker. Apart from his
specific work the innovating type finds that he must
fall in with established things or his womenfolk will be
ostracized, and he will be distressed by a sense of isola-
tion even in the midst of successful activities. The
more intensely he innovates in particular, the more
likely is he to be too busy to seek out kindred souls
and organize a new social life in general. The new
things and ideas, even when they arise abundantly,
arise scattered and unorganized, and the old order
takes them in its net. America for example both on
its Latin and on its English-speaking side is in many
ways a triumph of the old order over the new.

Men like Winwood Reade thought that the New
World would be indeed a new world. They idealized
its apparent emancipations. But as the more success-
ful of the toiling farmers and traders of republican

79

What are we to do with our Lives?

America rose one by one to affluence, leisure, and free-
dom, it was far more easy for them to adopt the
polished and prepared social patterns and usages of
Europe than to work out a new civilization in accord-
ance with their equalitarian professions. Yet there
remains a gap in their adapted "Society." Henry
James, that acute observer of subtle social flavours, has
pointed out the peculiar headlessness of social life in
America because of the absence of court functions to
"go on" to and justify the assembling and dressing.
The social life has imitated the preparation for the
Court without any political justification. In Europe
the assimilation of the wealthy European industrialist
and financier by the old order has been parallel and
naturally more logically complete. He really has found
a court to "go on" to. His social scheme was still un-
decapitated until kingdoms began to change into re-
publics after 1917.

In this way the complex of classes vitally involved
in the old militant nationalist order is mightily rein-
forced by much larger masses of imitative and annexed
and more or less assimilated rich and active people.
The great industrialist has married the daughter of the
marquis and has a couple of sons in the Guards and a
daughter who is a princess. The money of the American
Leeds, fleeing from the social futility of its land of
origin, helped bolster up a mischievous monarchy in
Greece. The functional and private lives of the new
men are thus at war with one another. The real
interests of the great industrialist or financier lie in
cosmopolitan organization and the material develop-
ment of the world commonweal, but his womenfolk pin
flags all over him, and his sons are prepared to sacrifice
themselves and all his business creations for the sake

80

The War with Tradition

of trite splendours and Ruritanian romance.

But just so far as the great business organizer is
capable and creative, so far is he likely to realize and
resent the price in frustration that the old order obliges
him to pay for amusement, social interest, and domestic
peace and comfort. The Open Conspiracy threatens
him with no effacement; it may even appear with an
air of release. If he had women who were interested
in his business affairs instead of women who had to be
amused, and if he realized in time the practical, in-
tellectual, and moral kidnapping of his sons and
daughters by the old order that goes on, he might pass
quite easily from acquiescence to antagonism. But in
this respect he cannot act single-handed. This is a
social and not an individual operation. The Open Con-
spiracy, it is clear, must include in its activities a great
fight for the souls of economically-functional people.
It must carve out a Society of its own from Society.
Only by the creation of a new and better social life can
it resist the many advantages and attractions of the old.

This constant gravitation back to traditional uses
on the part of what might become new social types
applies not merely to big people but to such small people
as are really functional in the modern economic scheme.
They have no social life adapted to their new economic
relationships, and they are forced back upon the
methods of behaviour established for what were roughly
their analogues in the old order of things. The various
sorts of managers and foreman in big modern concerns,
for example, carry on ways of living they have taken
ready-made from the stewards, tradesmen, tenantry,
and upper servants of an aristocratic territorial system.
They release themselves and are released almost in
spite of themselves, slowly, generation by generation,

81

What are we to do with our Lives?

from habits of social subservience that are no longer
necessary nor convenient in the social process, acquire
an official pride in themselves and take on new con-
ceptions of responsible loyalty to a scheme. And they
find themselves under suggestions of class aloofness
and superiority to the general mass of less cardinal
workers, that are often unjustifiable under new con-
ditions. Machinery and scientific organization have
been and still are revolutionizing productive activity
by the progressive elimination of the unskilled worker,
the hack, the mere toiler. But the social organization
of the modern community and the mutual deportment
of the associated workers left over after this elimina-
tion are still haunted by the tradition of the lord, the
middle-class tenant, and the servile hind. The develop-
ment of self-respect and mutual respect among the mass
of modern functional workers is clearly an intimate
concern of the Open Conspiracy.

A vast amount of moral force has been wasted in the
past hundred years by the antagonism of "Labour" to
"Capital," as though this were the primary issue in
human affairs. But this never was the primary issue,
and it is steadily receding from its former importance.
The ancient civilizations did actually rest upon a broad
basis of slavery and serfdom. Human muscle was a
main source of energy ranking with sun, wind, and
flood. But invention and discovery have so changed
the conditions under which power is directed and util-
ized that muscle becomes economically secondary and
inessential. We no longer want hewers of wood and
drawers of water, carriers and pick and spade men.
We no longer want that breeding swarm of hefty
sweaty bodies without which the former civilizations
could not have endured. We want watchful and under-

82

The War with Tradition

standing guardians and drivers of complex delicate
machines, which can be mishandled and brutalized and
spoilt all too easily. The less disposed these masters
of our machines are to inordinate multiplication, the
more room and food in the world for their ampler lives.
Even to the lowest level of a fully-mechanicalized
civilization it is required that the human element
should be select. In the modern world, crowds are a
survival, and they will presently be an anachronism,
and crowd psychology therefore cannot supply the
basis of a new order.

It is just because labour is becoming more intelligent,
responsible, and individually efficient that it is becom-
ing more audible and impatient in social affairs. It is
just because it is no longer mere gang labour, and is
becoming more and more intelligent co-operation in
detail, that it now resents being treated as a serf,
housed like a serf, fed like a serf, and herded like a
serf, and its pride and thoughts and feelings disre-
garded. Labour is in revolt because as a matter of fact
it is, in the ancient and exact sense of the word, ceasing
to be labour at all.

The more progressive elements of the directive
classes recognize this, but, as we have shown, there are
formidable forces still tending to maintain the old
social attitudes when arrogance became the ruler and
the common man accepted his servile status. A con-
tinual resistance is offered by large sections of the pros-
perous and advantaged to the larger claims of the
modernized worker, and in response the rising and
differentiating workers develop an angry antagonism
to these directive classes which allow themselves to be
controlled by their conservative and reactionary ele-
ments. Moreover, the increasing relative intelligence of

83

What are we to do with our Lives?

the labour masses, the unprecedented imaginative stim-
ulation they experience, the continually more wide-
spread realization of the available freedoms and
comforts and indulgences that might be and are not
shared by all in a modern state, develop a recalcitrance
where once there was little but fatalistic acquiescence.
An objection to direction and obligation, always mutely
present in the toiling multitude since the economic life
of man began, becomes articulate and active. It is the
taste of freedom that makes labour desire to be free.
This series of frictions is a quite inevitable aspect of
social reorganization, but it does not constitute a
primary antagonism in the process.

The class war was invented by the classes; it is a
natural tradition of the upper strata of the old order.
It was so universally understood that there was no
need to state it. It is implicit in nearly all the literature
of the world before the nineteenth century except the
Bible, the Koran, and other sequelae. The "class war"
of the Marxist is merely a poor snobbish imitation, a tu
quoque, a pathetic, stupid, indignant reversal of and
retort to the old arrogance, a pathetic upward arro-
gance.

These conflicts cut across rather than oppose or help
the progressive development to which the Open Con-
spiracy devotes itself. Labour, awakened, enquiring,
and indignant, is not necessarily progressive; if the
ordinary undistinguished worker is no longer to be
driven as a beast of burthen, he has which also goes
against the grain to be educated to as high a level of
co-operative efficiency as possible. He has to work
better, even if he works for much shorter hours and
under better conditions, and his work must be subor-
dinated work still; he cannot become en masse sole

84

The War with Tradition

owner and master of a scheme of things he did not
make and is incapable of directing. Yet this is the am-
bition implicit in an exclusively "Labour" movement.
Either the Labour revolutionary hopes to cadge the
services of exceptional people without acknowledgment
or return on sentimental grounds, or he really believes
that anyone is as capable as anyone else if not more
so. The worker at a low level may be flattered by
dreams of "class-conscious" mass dominion from which
all sense of inferiority is banished, but they will remain
dreams. The deep instinctive jealousy of the common-
place individual for outstanding quality and novel
initiative may be organized and turned to sabotage and
destruction, masquerading as and aspiring to be a new
social order, but that will be a blind alley and not the
road of progress. Our hope for the human future does
not lie in crowd psychology and the indiscriminating
rule of universal democracy.

The Open Conspiracy can have little use for mere
resentments as a driving force towards its ends; it
starts with a proposal not to exalt the labour class but
to abolish it, its sustaining purpose is to throw drudges
out of employment and eliminate the inept and it is
far more likely to incur suspicion and distrust in the
lower ranks of the developing industrial order of to-day
than to win support there. There, just as everywhere
else in the changing social complexes of our time, it
can appeal only to the exceptionally understanding in-
dividual who can without personal humiliation consider
his present activities and relationships as provisional
and who can, without taking offence, endure a search-
ing criticism of his present quality and mode of living.

XII

The Resistances of the Less Industrialized Peoples
to the Drive of the Open Conspiracy

So far, in our accounting of the powers, institutions,
dispositions, types, and classes which will be naturally
opposed to the Open Conspiracy, we have surveyed
only such territory in the domain of the future world
commonweal as is represented by the complex, pro-
gressive, highly-industrialized commuunities, based on
a preceding landlord-soldier, tenant, town-merchant,
and tradesman system, of the Atlantic type. These
communities have developed farthest in the direction
of mechanicalization, and they are so much more
efficient and powerful that they now dominate the rest
of the world. India, China, Russia, Africa present
melanges of social systems, thrown together, outpaced,
overstrained, shattered, invaded, exploited, and more
or less subjugated by the finance, machinery, and
political aggressions of the Atlantic, Baltic, and Medi-
terranean civilization. In many ways they have an air
of assimilating themselves to that civilization, evolving
modern types and classes, and abandoning much of
their distinctive traditions. But what they take from
the West is mainly the new developments, the material
achievements, rather than the social and political
achievements, that, empowered by modern inventions,
have won their way to world predominance. They may
imitate European nationalism to a certain extent; for

86

Resistances of the Less Industrialized Peoples

them it becomes a convenient form of self-assertion
against the pressure of a realized practical social and
political inferiority; but the degree to which they will
or can take over the social assumptions and habits of
the long-established European-American hierarchy is
probably very restricted. Their nationalism will remain
largely indigenous; the social traditions to which they
will try to make the new material forces subservient
will be traditions of an Oriental life widely different
from the original life of Europe. They will have their
own resistances to the Open Conspiracy, therefore, but
they will be different resistances from those we have
hitherto considered. The automobile and the wireless
set, the harvester and steel construction building, will
come to the jungle rajah and the head hunter, the Brah-
min and the Indian peasant, with a parallel and yet
dissimilar message to the one they brought the British
landowner or the corn and cattle farmers of the Argen-
tine and the Middle West. Also they may be expected
to evoke dissimilar reactions.

To a number of the finer, more energetic minds of
these overshadowed communities which have lagged
more or less in the material advances to which this
present ascendancy of western Europe and America is
due, the Open Conspiracy may come with an effect of
immense invitation. At one step they may go from the
sinking vessel of their antiquated order, across their
present conquerors, into a brotherhood of world rulers.
They may turn to the problem of saving and adapting
all that is rich and distinctive of their inheritance to
the common ends of the race. But to the less vigorous
intelligences of this outer world, the new project of the
Open Conspiracy will seem no better than a new form
of Western envelopment, and they will fight a mighty

87

What are we to do with our Lives?

liberation as though it were a further enslavement to
the European tradition. They will watch the Open
Conspiracy for any signs of conscious superiority and
racial disregard. Necessarily they will recognize it as
a product of Western mentality and they may well be
tempted to regard it as an elaboration and organization
of current dispositions rather than the evolution of a
new phase which will make no discrimination at last
between the effete traditions of either East or West.
Their suspicions will be sustained and developed by the
clumsy and muddle-headed political and economic
aggressions of the contemporary political and business
systems, such as they are, of the West, now in progress.
Behind that cloud of aggression Western thought has
necessarily advanced upon them. It could have got to
their attention in no other way.

Partly these resistances and criticisms of the deca-
dent communities outside the Atlantic capitalist
systems will be aimed, not at the developing methods
of the coming world community, but at the European
traditions and restrictions that have imposed them-
selves upon these methods, and so far the clash of the
East and West may be found to subserve the aims of
the Open Conspiracy. In the conflict of old traditions
and in the consequent deadlocks lies much hope for the
direct acceptance of the groups of ideas centring upon
the Open Conspiracy. One of the most interesting
areas of humanity in this respect is the great system of
communities under the sway or influence of Soviet
Russia. Russia has never been completely incorporated
with the European system; she became a just passable
imitation of a western European monarchy in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and talked at last of
constitutions and parliaments but the reality of that

88

Resistances of the Less Industrialized Peoples

vast empire remained an Asiatic despotism, and the
European mask was altogether smashed by the suc-
cessive revolutions of 1917. The ensuing system is a
government presiding over an enormous extent of
peasants and herdsmen, by a disciplined association pro-
fessing the faith and dogmas of Marx, as interpreted
and qualified by Lenin and Stalin.

In many ways this government is a novelty of ex-
traordinary interest. It labours against enormous diffi-
culties within itself and without. Flung amazingly into
a position of tremendous power, its intellectual flex-
ibility is greatly restricted by the urgent militant
necessity for mental unanimity and a consequent
repression of criticism. It finds itself separated, in-
tellectually and morally, by an enormous gap from
the illiterate millions over which it rules. More open
perhaps to scientific and creative conceptions than any
other government, and certainly more willing to ex-
periment and innovate, its enterprise is starved by the
economic depletion of the country in the Great War
and by the technical and industrial backwardness of
the population upon which it must draw for its per-
sonnel. Moreover, it struggles within itself between
concepts of a modern scientific social organization and
a vague anarchistic dream in which the "State" is to
disappear, and an emancipated proletariat, breeding
and expectorating freely, fills the vistas of time for-
evermore. The tradition of long years of hopeless
opposition has tainted the world policy of the Marxist
cult with a mischievous and irritating quality that
focuses upon it the animosity of every government in
the dominant Atlantic system. Marxism never had
any but the vaguest fancies about the relation of one
nation to another, and the new Russian government,

89

What are we to do with our Lives?

for all its cosmopolitan phrases, is more and more
plainly the heir to the obsessions of Tsarist imperial-
ism, using the Communist party, as other countries
have used Christian missionaries, to maintain a propa-
gandist government to forward its schemes. Neverthe-
less, the Soviet government has maintained itself for
more than twelve years, and it seems far more likely
to evolve than to perish. It is quite possible that it
will evolve towards the conceptions of the Open Con-
spiracy, and in that case Russia may witness once again
a conflict between new ideas and Old Believers. So
far the Communist party in Moscow has maintained a
considerable propaganda of ideas in the rest of the
world and especially across its western frontier. Many
of these ideas are now trite and stale. The time may
be not far distant when the tide of propaganda will
flow in the reverse direction. It has pleased the vanity
of the Communist party to imagine itself conducting a
propaganda of world revolution. Its fate may be to
develop upon lines that will make its more intelligent
elements easily assimilable to the Open Conspiracy for
a world revolution. The Open Conspiracy as it spreads
and grows may find a less encumbered field for trying
out the economic developments implicit in its concep-
tions in Russia and Siberia than anywhere else in the
world.

However severely the guiding themes and practical
methods of the present Soviet government in Russia
may be criticized, the fact remains that it has cleared
out of its way many of the main obstructive elements
that we find still vigorous in the more highly-organized
communities in the West. It has liberated vast areas
from the kindred superstitions of monarchy and the
need for a private proprietary control of great econ-

90

Resistances of the Less Industrialized Peoples

omic interests. And it has presented both China and
India with the exciting spectacle of a social and political
system capable of throwing off many of the most char-
acteristic features of triumphant Westernism, and yet
holding its own. In the days when Japan faced up to
modern necessities there were no models for imitation
that were not communities of the Atlantic type per-
vaded by the methods of private capitalism, and in con-
sequence the Japanese reconstituted their affairs on a
distinctly European plan, adopting a Parliament and
bringing their monarchy, social hierarchy, and business
and financial methods into a general conformity with
that model. It is extremely doubtful whether any other
Asiatic community will now set itself to a parallel
imitation, and it will be thanks largely to the Russian
revolution that this breakaway from Europeanization
has occurred.

But it does not follow that such a breakaway will
necessarily lead more directly to the Open Conspiracy.
It we have to face a less highly organized system of
interests and prejudices in Russia and China, we have
to deal with a vastly wider ignorance and a vastly
more formidable animalism. Russia is a land of tens
of millions of peasants ruled over by a little band of
the intelligentsia who can be counted only by tens of
thousands. It is only these few score thousands who
are accessible to ideas of world construction, and the
only hope of bringing the Russian system into active
participation in the world conspiracy is through that
small minority and through its educational repercus-
sion on the myriads below. As we go eastward from
European Russia the proportion of soundly prepared
intelligence to which we can appeal for understanding
and participation diminishes to an even more dismay-

What are we to do with our Lives?

ing fraction. Eliminate that fraction, and one is left
face to face with inchoate barbarism incapable of social
and political organization above the level of the war
boss and the brigand leader. Russia itself is still by no
means secure against a degenerative process in that
direction, and the hope of China struggling out of it
without some forcible directive interventions is a hope
to which constructive liberalism clings with very little
assurance.

We turn back therefore from Russia, China and the
communities of Central Asia to the Atlantic world. It
is in that world alone that sufficient range and ampli-
tude of thought and discussion are possible for the
adequate development of the Open Conspiracy. In
these communities it must begin and for a long time its
main activities will need to be sustained from these
necessary centres of diffusion. It will develop amidst
incessant mental strife, and through that strife it will
remain alive. It is no small part of the practical weak-
ness of present-day communism that it attempts to
centre its intellectual life and its directive activities in
Moscow and so cuts itself off from the free and open
discussions of the Western world. Marxism lost the
world when it went to Moscow and took over the tradi-
tions of Tsarism, as Christianity lost the world when it
went to Rome and took over the traditions of Caesar.
Entrenched in Moscow from searching criticism, the
Marxist ideology may become more and more dog-
matic and unprogressive, repeating its sacred credo
and issuing its disregarded orders to the proletariat of
the world, and so stay ineffectively crystallized until
the rising tide of the Open Conspiracy submerges, dis-
solves it afresh, and incorporates whatever it finds
assimilable.

92

Resistances of the Less Industrialized Peoples

India, like Japan, is cut off from the main body of
Asiatic affairs. But while Japan has become a formally
Westernized nationality in the comity of such nations,
Indian remains a world in itself. In that one peninsula
nearly every type of community is to be found, from
the tribe of jungle savages, through a great diversity
of barbaric and mediaeval principalities, to the child-
and women-sweating factories and the vigorous modern
commercialism of Bombay. Over it all the British im-
perialism prevails, a constraining and restraining in-
fluence, keeping the peace, checking epidemics, increas-
ing the food supply by irrigation and the like, and
making little or no effort to evoke responses to modern
ideas. Britain in India is no propagandist of modern
ferments: all those are left the other side of Suez. In
India the Briton is a ruler as firm and self-assured and
uncreative as the Roman. The old religious and social
traditions, the complex customs, castes, tabus, and ex-
clusions of a strangely-mixed but unamalgamated com-
munity, though a little discredited by this foreign
predominance, still hold men's minds. They have been,
so to speak, pickled in the preservative of the British
raj.

The Open Conspiracy has to invade the Indian com-
plex in conflict with the prejudices of both ruler and
governed. It has to hope for individual breaches in the
dull Romanism of the administration: here a genuine
educationist, here a creative civil servant, here an
official touched by the distant stir of the living home-
land; and it has to try to bring these types into a co-
operative relationship with a fine native scholar here
or an active-minded prince or landowner or indus-
trialist there. As the old methods of passenger trans-
port are superseded by flying, it will be more and more

93

What are we to do with our Lives?

difficult to keep the stir of the living homeland out of
either the consciousness of the official hierarchy or the
knowledge of the recalcitrant "native."

Very similar to Indian conditions is the state of
affairs in the foreign possessions of France, the same
administrative obstacles to the Open Conspiracy above,
and below the same resentful subordination, cut off
from the mental invigoration of responsibility. Within
these areas of restraint, India and its lesser, simpler
parallels in North Africa, Syria and the Far East, there
goes on a rapid increase of low-grade population,
undersized physically and mentally, and retarding the
mechanical development of civilization by its standing
offer of cheap labour to the unscrupulous entrepreneur,
and possible feeble insurrectionary material to the un-
scrupulous political adventure. It is impossible to
estimate how slowly or how rapidly the knowledge and
ideas that have checked the rate of increase of all the
Atlantic populations may be diffused through these less
alert communities.

We must complete our survey of the resistances
against which the Open Conspiracy has to work by
a few words about the Negro world and the regions of
forest and jungle in which barbaric and even savage
human life still escapes the infection of civilization. It
seems inevitable that the development of modern means
of communication and the conquest of tropical diseases
should end in giving access everywhere to modern
administration and to economic methods, and every-
where the incorporation of the former wilderness in
the modern economic process means the destruction of
the material basis, the free hunting, the free access to
the soil, of such barbaric and savage communities as
still precariously survive. The dusky peoples, who

94

Resistances of the Less Industrialized Peoples

were formerly the lords of these still imperfectly assim-
ilated areas, are becoming exploited workers, slaves,
serfs, hut-tax payers, or labourers to a caste of white
immigrants. The spirit of the plantation broods over
all these lands. The Negro in America differs only from
his subjugated brother in South Africa or Kenya
Colony in the fact that he also, like his white master,
is an immigrant. The situation in Africa and America
adjusts itself therefore towards parallel conditions, the
chief variation being in the relative proportions of the
two races and the details of the methods by which
black labour is made to serve white ends.

In these black and white communities which are
establishing themselves in all those parts of the earth
where once the black was native, or in which a sub-
tropical climate is favourable to his existence at a low
level of social development, there is and there is
bound to be for many years to come much racial
tension. The steady advance of birth-control may
mitigate the biological factors of this tension later on,
and a general amelioration of manners and conduct
may efface that disposition to persecute dissimilar
types, which man shares with many other gregarious
animals. But meanwhile this tension increases and a
vast multitude of lives is strained to tragic issues.

To exaggerate the dangers and evils of miscegena-
tion is a weakness of our time. Man interbreeds with
all his varieties and yet deludes himself that there are
races of outstanding purity, the "Nordic," the "Sem-
itic," and so forth. These are phantoms of the imagina-
tion. The reality is more intricate, less dramatic, and
grips less easily upon the mind; the phantoms grip only
too well and incite to terrible suppressions. Changes in
the number of half-breeds and in the proportion of

95

What are we to do with our Lives?

white and coloured are changes of a temporary nature
that may become controllable and rectifiable in a few
generations. But until this level of civilization is
reached, until the colour of a man's skin or the kinks
in a woman's hair cease to have the value of shibboleths
that involve educational, professional, and social ex-
tinction or survival, a black and white community is
bound to be continually preoccupied by a standing feud
too intimate and persuasive to permit of any long views
of the world's destiny.

We come to the conclusion therefore that it is from
the more vigorous, varied, and less severely obsessed
centres of the Atlantic civilizations in the temperate
zone, with their abundant facilities for publication and
discussion, their traditions of mental liberty and their
immense variety of interacting free types, that the main
beginnings of the Open Conspiracy must develop. For
the rest of the world, its propaganda, finding but poor
nourishment in the local conditions, may retain a
missionary quality for many years.

96

XIII

Resistances and Antagonistic Forces in Our Conscious
and Unconscious Selves

WE have dealt in the preceding two chapters with great
classes and assemblages of human beings as, in the
mass, likely to be more or less antagonistic to the Open
Conspiracy, and it has been difficult in those chapters
to avoid the implication that "we," some sort of circle
round the writer, were aloof from these obstructive and
hostile multitudes, and ourselves entirely identified with
the Open Conspiracy. But neither are these multitudes
so definitely against, nor those who are with us so en-
tirely for, the Open Conspiracy to establish a world
community as the writer, in his desire for clearness and
contrast and with an all too human disposition perhaps
towards plain ego-centred combative issues, has been
led to represent. There is no "we," and there can be no
"we," in possession of the Open Conspiracy.

The Open Conspiracy is in partial possession of us,
and we attempt to serve it. But the Open Conspiracy
is a natural and necessary development of contempor-
ary thought arising here, there, and everywhere. There
are doubts and sympathies that weigh on the side of
the Open Conspiracy in nearly everyone, and not one
of us but retains many impulses, habits, and ideas in
conflict with our general devotion, checking and limit-
ing our service.

Let us therefore in this chapter cease to discuss

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What are we to do with our Lives?

classes and types and consider general mental tenden-
cies and reactions which move through all humanity.

In our opening chapters we pointed out that religion
is not universally distributed throughout human
society. And of no one does it seem to have complete
possession. It seizes upon some of us and exalts us for
one hour now and then, for a day now and then; it
may leave its afterglow upon our conduct for some
time; it may establish restraints and habitual disposi-
tions; sometimes it dominates us with but brief inter-
missions through long spells, and then we can be saints
and martyrs. In all our religious phases there appears
a desire to hold the phase, to subdue the rest of our life
to the standards and exigencies of that phase. Our
quickened intelligence sets itself to a general analysis
of our conduct and to the problem of establishing con-
trols over our unilluminated intervals.

And when the religious elements in the mind set
themselves to such self-analysis, and attempt to order
and unify the whole being upon this basis of the service
and advancement of the race, they discover first a great
series of indifferent moods, wherein the resistance to
thought and word for the Open Conspiracy is merely
passive and in the nature of inertia. There is a whole
class of states of mind which may be brought together
under the head of "everydayism." The dinner bell and
the playing fields, the cinema and the newspaper, the
week-end visit and the factory siren, a host of such
expectant things calls to a vast majority of people in
our modern world to stop thinking and get busy with
the interest in hand, and so on to the next, without a
thought for the general frame and drama in which
these momentary and personal incidents are set. We
are driven along these marked and established routes

98

Resistances and Antagonistic Forces

and turned this way or that by the accidents of up-
bringing, of rivalries and loves, of chance encounters
and vivid experiences, and it is rarely for many of us,
and never for some, that the phases of broad reflection
and self-questioning arise. For many people the reli-
gious life now, as in the past, has been a quite desperate
effort to withdraw sufficient attention and energy from
the flood of events to get some sort of grasp, and keep
whatever grip is won, upon the relations of the self to
the whole. Far more recoil in terror from such a possi-
bility and would struggle strenuously against solitude
in the desert, solitude under the stars, solitude in a
silent room or indeed any occasion for comprehensive
thought.

But the instinct and purpose of the religious type is
to keep hold upon the comprehensive drama, and at the
heart of all the great religions of the world we find a
parallel disposition to escape in some manner from the
aimless drive and compulsion of accident and every-
day. Escape is attempted either by withdrawal from
the presence of crowding circumstance into a mystical
contemplation and austere retirement, or what is
more difficult and desperate and reasonable by im-
posing the mighty standards of enduring issues upon
the whole mass of transitory problems which constitute
the actual business of life. We have already noted how
the modern mind turns from retreat as a recognizable
method of religion, and faces squarely up to the second
alternative. The tumult of life has to be met and con-
quered. Aim must prevail over the aimless. Remaining
in normal life we must yet keep our wills and thoughts
aloof from normal life and fixed upon creative pro-
cesses. However busied we may be, however chal-
lenged, we must yet save something of our best mental

99

What are we to do with our Lives?

activity for self-examination and keep ourselves alert
against the endless treacheries within that would trip
us back into everdayism and disconnected responses to
the stimuli of life.

Religions in the past, though they have been apt to
give a preference to the renunciation of things mun-
dane, have sought by a considerable variety of expe-
dients to preserve the faith of those whom chance or
duty still kept in normal contact with the world. It
would provide material for an interesting study to
enquire how its organizations to do this have worked
in the past and how far they may be imitated and
paralleled in the progressive life of the future. All the
wide-reaching religions which came into existence in
the five centuries before and the five centuries after
Christ have made great use of periodic meetings for
mutual reassurance, of sacred books, creeds, funda-
mental heart-sear chings, of confession, prayer, sacra-
ments, seasons of withdrawal, meditation, fasting, and
prayer. Do these methods mark a phase in the world's
development, or are they still to be considered avail-
able?

This points to a very difficult tangle of psychological
problems. The writer in his earlier draft of this book
wrote that the modern religious individual leads,
spiritually speaking, a life of extreme wasteful and
dangerous isolation. He still feels that is true, but he
realizes that the invention of corrective devices is not
within his range. He cannot picture a secular Mass nor
congregations singing hymns about the Open Con-
spiracy. Perhaps the modern soul in trouble will resort
to the psychoanalysts instead of the confessional; in
which case we need to pray for better psychoanalysts.

Can the modern mind work in societies? May the

100

Resistances and Antagonistic Forces

daily paper be slowly usurping the functions of morn-
ing prayer, a daily mental reminder of large things,
with more vividness and, at present, lower standards?
One of the most distressful facts of the spread of
education in the nineteenth century was the unscru-
pulous exploitation of the new reading public by a
group of trash-dealers who grew rich and mighty in
the process. Is the popular publisher and newspaper
proprietor always to remain a trash-dealer? Or are we
to see, in the future, publications taking at times some
or all of the influence of revivalist movements, and
particular newspapers rising to the task of sustaining
a common faith in a gathering section of the public?

The modern temple in which we shall go to meditate
may be a museum; the modern religious house and its
religious life may be a research organization. The Open
Conspirator must see to it that the museums show their
meaning plain. There may be not only literature pre-
sently, but even plays, shows, and music, to subserve
new ideas instead of trading upon tradition.

It is plain that to read and be moved by great ideas
and to form good resolutions with no subsequent re-
minders and moral stocktaking is not enough to keep
people in the way of the Open Conspiracy. The relapse
to everydayism is too easy. The contemporary Open
Conspirator may forget, and he has nothing to remind
him; he may relapse, and he will hear no reproach to
warn him of his relapse. Nowhere has he recorded a
vow. "Everyday" has endless ways of justifying the
return of the believer to sceptical casualness. It is easy
to persuade oneself that one is taking life or oneself
"too seriously." The mind is very self-protective; it
has a disposition to abandon too great or too far-reach-
ing an effort and return to things indisputably within

101

What are we to do with our Lives?

its scope. We have an instinctive preference for think-
ing things are "all right 77 ; we economize anxiety; we
defend the delusions that we can work with, even
though we half realize they are no more than delu-
sions. We resent the warning voice, the critical ques-
tion that robs our activities of assurance. Our everyday
moods are not only the antagonists of our religious
moods, but they resent all outward appeals to our
religious moods, and they welcome every help against
religious appeals. We pass very readily from the merely
defensive to the defensive-aggressive, and from refus-
ing to hear the word that might stir our consciences to
a vigorous effort to suppress its utterance.

Churches, religious organizations, try to keep the
revivifying phase and usage where it may strike upon
the waning or slumbering faith of the convert, but
modern religion as yet has no such organized rebinders.
They cannot be improvised. Crude attempts to supply
the needed corrective of conduct may do less good
than harm. Each one of us for himself must do what
he can to keep his high resolve in mind and protect
himself from the snare of his own moods of fatigue or
inadvertency.

But these passive and active defences of current
things which operate in and through ourselves, and
find such ready sympathy and assistance in the world
about us, these massive resistance systems, are only
the beginning of our tale of the forces antagonistic to
the Open Conspiracy that lurk in our complexities.

Men are creatures with other faults quite beyond
and outside our common disposition to be stupid, in-
dolent, habitual, and defensive. Not only have we
active creative impulses, but also acutely destructive
ones. Man is a jealous animal. In youth and adoles-

102

Resistances and Antagonistic Forces

cence egotism is extravagant. It is natural for it to be
extravagant, then, and there is no help for it. A great
number of us at that stage would rather not see a
beautiful or wonderful thing come into existence than
have it come into existence disregarding us. Something
of that jealous malice, that self-assertive ruthlessness,
remains in all of us throughout life. At his worst man
can be an exceedingly combative, malignant, mis-
chievous and cruel animal. None of us are altogether
above the possibility of such phases. When we con-
sider the oppositions to the Open Conspiracy that
operate in the normal personality, we appreciate the
soundness of the catechism which instructs us to re-
nounce not only the trivial world and the heavy flesh,
but the active and militant devil.

To make is a long and wearisome business, with
many arrests and disappointments, but to break gives
an instant thrill. We all know something of the delight
of the bang. It is well for the Open Conspirator to ask
himself at times how far he is in love with the dream
of a world in order, and how far he is driven by hatred
of institutions that bore or humiliate him. He may be
no more than a revengeful incendiary in the mask of
a constructive worker. How safe is he, then, from the
reaction to some fresh humiliation? The Open Con-
spiracy which is now his refuge and vindication may
presently fail to give him the compensation he has
sought, may offer him no better than a minor role, may
display irritating and incomprehensible preferences.
And for a great number of things in overt antagonism
to the great aim of the Open Conspiracy, he will still
find within himself not simply acquiescence but sym-
pathy and a genuine if inconsistent admiration. There
they are, waiting for his phase of disappointment.

103 H

What are we to do with our Lives?

Back he may go to the old loves with a new animus
against the greater scheme. He may be glad to be quit
of prigs and humbugs, and back among the good fellow-
ship of nothing in particular.

Man has pranced a soldier in reality and fancy for
so many generations that few of us can altogether re-
lease our imaginations from the brilliant pretensions
of flags, empire, patriotism, and aggression. Business
men, especially in America, seem to feel a sort of glory
in calling even the underselling and overadvertising of
rival enterprises "fighting." Pill vendors and public
departments can have their "wars," their heroisms,
their desperate mischiefs, and so get that Napoleonic
feeling. The world and our reveries are full of the senti-
mentalities, the false glories and loyalties of the old
combative traditions, trailing after them, as they do,
so much worth and virtue in a dulled and stupefied
condition. It is difficult to resist the fine gravity, the
high self-respect, the examples of honour and good
style in small things, that the military and naval ser-
vices can present to us, for all that they are now no
more than noxious parasites upon the nascent world
commonweal. In France not a word may be said
against the army; in England, against the navy.
There will be many Open Conspirators at first who
will scarcely dare to say that word even to themselves.

But all these obsolete values and attitudes with
which our minds are cumbered must be cleared out if
the new faith is to have free play. We have to clear
them out not only from our own minds but from the
minds of others who are to become our associates. The
finer and more picturesque these obsolescent loyalties,
obsolescent standards of honour, obsolescent religious
associations, may seem to us, the more thoroughly

104

Resistances and Antagonistic Forces

must we seek to release our minds and the minds of
those about us from them and cut off all thoughts of a
return.

We cannot compromise with these vestiges of the
ancient order and be faithful servants of the new.
Whatever we retain of them will come back to life and
grow again. It is no good to operate for cancer unless
the whole growth is removed. Leave a crown about and
presently you will find it being worn by someone re-
solved to be a king. Keep the name and image of a god
without a distinct museum label and sooner or later
you will discover a worshipper on his knees to it and
be lucky not to find a human sacrifice upon the altar.
Wave a flag and it will wrap about you. Of yourself
even more than of the community is this true; there
can be no half measures. You have not yet completed
your escape to the Open Conspiracy from the cities
of the plain while it is still possible for you to take a
single backward glance.

105

XIV

The Open Conspiracy Begins as a Movement of Dis-
cussion, Explanation, and Propaganda

A NEW and happier world, a world community, is
awakening, within the body of the old order, to the
possibility of its emergence. Our phrase "the Open
Conspiracy" is merely a name for that awakening. To
begin with, the Open Conspiracy is necessarily a group
of ideas.

It is a system of modern ideas which has been grow-
ing together in the last quarter of the century, and
particularly since the war. It is the reaction of a
rapidly progressing biological conception of life and
of enlarged historical realizations upon the needs and
urgencies of the times. In this book we are attempting
to define this system and to give it this provisional
name. Essentially at first it is a dissemination of this
new ideology that must occur. The statement must be
tried over and spread before a widening circle of
people.

Since the idea of the Open Conspiracy rests upon and
arises out of a synthesis of historical, biological, and
sociological realizations, we may look for these realiza-
tions already in the case of people with sound know-
ledge in these fields; such people will be prepared for
acquiescence without any explanatory work; there is
nothing to set out to them beyond the suggestion that
it is time they became actively conscious of where they

106

The Open Conspiracy as a Movement of Discussion

stand. They constitute already the Open Conspiracy in
an unorganized solution, and they will not so much
adhere as admit to themselves and others their state
of mind. They will say, "We knew all that." Directly
we pass beyond that comparatively restricted world,
however, we find that we have to deal with partial
knowledge, with distorted views, or with blank ignor-
ance, and that a revision and extension of historical and
biological ideas and a considerable elucidation of eco-
nomic misconceptions have to be undertaken. Such
people have to be brought up to date with their in-
formation.

I have told already how I have schemed out a group
of writings to embody the necessary ideas of the new
time in a form adapted to the current reading public;
I have made a sort of provisional "Bible," so to speak,
for some factors at least in the Open Conspiracy. It
is an early sketch. As the current reading public
changes, all this work will become obsolescent so far
as its present form and method go. But not so far as
its substantial method goes. That I believe will remain.

Ultimately this developing mass of biological, his-
torical, and economic information and suggestion must
be incorporated in general education if the Open Con-
spiracy is to come to its own. At present this propa-
ganda has to go on among adolescents and adults
because of the backwardness and political conserva-
tism of existing educational organizations. Most real
modern education now is done in spite of the schools
and to correct the misconceptions established by the
schools. But what will begin as adult propaganda must
pass into a kultur-kampj to win our educational
machinery from reaction and the conservation of out-
worn ideas and attitudes to the cause of world recon-

107

What are we to do with our Lives?

struction. The Open Conspiracy itself can never be
imprisoned and fixed in the form of an organization,
but everywhere Open Conspirators should be organiz-
ing themselves for educational reform.

And also within the influence of this comprehensive
project there will be all sorts of groupings for study
and progressive activity. One can presuppose the
formation of groups of friends, of family groups, of
students and employees or other sorts of people, meet-
ing and conversing frequently in the course of their
normal occupations, who will exchange views and find
themselves in agreement upon this idea of a construc-
tive change of the world as the guiding form of human
activities.

Fundamentally important issues upon which unan-
imity must be achieved from the outset are:

Firstly, the entirely provisional nature of all exist-
ing governments, and the entirely provisional nature,
therefore, of all loyalties associated therewith;

Secondly, the supreme importance of population
control in human biology and the possibility it affords
us of a release from the pressure of the struggle for
existence on ourselves; and

Thirdly, the urgent necessity of protective resistance
against the present traditional drift towards war.

People who do not grasp the vital significance of these
test issues do not really begin to understand the Open
Conspiracy. Groups coming into agreement upon these
matters, and upon their general interpretation of
history, will be in a position to seek adherents, enlarge
themselves, and attempt to establish communication
and co-operation with kindred groups for common

108

The Open Conspiracy as a Movement of Discussion

ends. They can take up a variety of activities to
develop a sense and habit of combined action and feel
their way to greater enterprises.

We have seen already that the Open Conspiracy
must be heterogeneous in origin. Its initial groupings
and associations will be of no uniform pattern. They
will be of a very different size, average age, social
experience, and influence. Their particular activities
will be determined by these things. Their diverse
qualities and influences will express themselves by
diverse attempts at organization, each effective in its
own sphere. A group or movement of students may
find itself capable of little more than self-education
and personal propaganda; a handful of middle-class
people in a small town may find its small resources fully
engaged at first in such things as, for example, seeing
that desirable literature is available for sale or in the
local public library, protecting books and news vendors
from suppression, or influencing local teachers. Most
parents of school children can press for the teaching
of universal history and sound biology and protest
against the inculcation of aggressive patriotism. There
is much scope for the single individual in this direction.
On the other hand, a group of ampler experience and
resources may undertake the printing, publication, and
distribution of literature, and exercise considerable
influence upon public opinion in turning education in
the right direction. The League of Nations movement,
the Birth Control movement, and most radical and
socialist societies, are fields into which Open Con-
spirators may go to find adherents more than half pre-
pared for their wider outlook. The Open Conspiracy
is a fuller and ampler movement into which these in-
complete activities must necessarily merge as its idea

109

What are we to do with our Lives?

takes possession of men's imaginations.

From the outset, the Open Conspiracy will set its
face against militarism. There is a plain present need
for the organization now, before war comes again, of
an open and explicit refusal to serve in any war or at
most to serve in war, directly or indirectly, only after
the issue has been fully and fairly submitted to arbitra-
tion. The time for a conscientious objection to war
service is manifestly before and not after the onset of
war. People who have by their silence acquiesced in a
belligerent foreign policy right up to the onset of war,
have little to complain of if they are then compelled to
serve. And a refusal to participate with one's country
in warfare is a preposterously incomplete gesture
unless it is rounded off by the deliberate advocacy of
a world pax, a world economic control, and a restrained
population, such as the idea of the Open Conspiracy
embodies.

The putting upon record of its members' reservation
of themselves from any or all of the military obliga-
tions that may be thrust upon the country by military
and diplomatic effort, might very conceivably be the
first considerable overt act of many Open Conspiracy
groups. It would supply the practical incentive to
bring many of them together in the first place. It would
necessitate the creation of regional or national ad hoc
committees for the establishment of a collective legal
and political defensive for this dissent from current
militant nationalism. It would bring the Open Con-
spiracy very early out of the province of discussion into
the field of practical conflict. It would from the outset
invest it with a very necessary quality of present appli-
cability.

The anticipatory repudiation of military service, so

no

The Open Conspiracy as a Movement of Discussion

far as this last may be imposed by existing govern-
ments in their factitious international rivalries, need
not necessarily involve a denial of the need of military
action on behalf of the world commonweal for the sup-
pression of nationalist brigandage, nor need it prevent
the military training of Open Conspirators. It is simply
the practical form of assertion that the normal militant
diplomacy and warfare of the present time are offences
against civilization, processes in the nature of brigand-
age, sedition, and civil war, and that serious men cannot
be expected to play anything but a role of disapproval,
non-participation, or active prevention towards them.
Our loyalty to our current government, we would inti-
mate, is subject to its sane and adult behaviour.

These educational and propagandist groups drawing
together into an organized resistance to militarism and
to the excessive control of individuals by the makeshift
governments of to-day, constitute at most only the
earliest and more elementary grade of the Open Con-
spiracy, and we will presently go on to consider the
more specialized and constructive forms its effort must
evoke. Before doing so, however, we may say a little
more about the structure and method of these possible
initiatory groupings.

Since they are bound to be different and miscella-
neous in form, size, quality, and ability, any early
attempts to organize them into common general action
or even into regular common gatherings are to be de-
precated. There should be many types of groups.
Collective action had better for a time perhaps for a
long time be undertaken not through the merging of
groups but through the formation of ad hoc associa-
tions for definitely specialized ends, all making for the
new world civilization. Open Conspirators will come into

in

What are we to do with our Lives?

these associations to make a contribution very much as
people come into limited liability companies, that is to
say with a subscription and not with their whole
capital. A comprehensive organization attempting from
the first to cover all activities would necessarily rest
upon and promote one prevalent pattern of activity and
hamper or estrange the more original and interesting
forms. It would develop a premature orthodoxy, it
would cease almost at once to be creative, and it would
begin to form a crust of tradition. It would become
anchylosed. With the dreadful examples of Christianity
and Communism before us, we must insist that the idea
of the Open Conspiracy ever becoming a single organ-
ization must be dismissed from the mind. It is a
movement, yes, a system of purposes, but its end is a
free and living, if unified, world.

At the utmost seven broad principles may be stated
as defining the Open Conspiracy and holding it to-
gether. And it is possible even of these, one, the seventh,
may be, if not too restrictive, at least unnecessary. To
the writer it seems unavoidable because it is so inti-
mately associated with that continual expiration of
tradition upon which our hopes for an unencumbered
and expanding human future rest.

(1) The complete assertion, practical as well as
theoretical, of the provisional nature of existing gov-
ernments and of our acquiescence in them;

(2) The resolve to minimize by all available means
the conflicts of these governments, their militant use of
individuals and property, and their interferences with
the establishment of a world economic system;

(3) The determination to replace private, local or
national ownership of at least credit, transport, and

112

The Open Conspiracy as a Movement of Discussion

staple production by a responsible world directorate
serving the common ends of the race;

(4) The practical recognition of the necessity for
world biological controls, for example, of population
and disease;

(5) The support of a minimum standard of indi-
vidual freedom and welfare in the world; and

(6) The supreme duty of subordinating the personal
career to the creation of a world directorate capable of
these tasks and to the general advancement of human
knowledge, capacity, and power;

(7) The admission therewith that our immortality
is conditional and lies in the race and not in our indi-
vidual selves.

XV

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

IN such terms we may sketch the practicable and
possible opening phase of the Open Conspiracy.

We do not present it as a movement initiated by any
individual or radiating from any particular centre. In
this book we are not starting something; we are de-
scribing and participating in something which has
started. It arises naturally and necessarily from the
present increase of knowledge and the broadening out-
look of many minds throughout the world, and gradu-
ally it becomes conscious of itself. It is reasonable
therefore to anticipate its appearance all over the world
in sporadic mutually independent groupings and move-
ments, and to recognize not only that they will be
extremely various, but that many of them will trail
with them racial and regional habits and characteristics
which will only be shaken off as its cosmopolitan char-
acter becomes imperatively evident.

The passage from the partial anticipations of the
Open Conspiracy that already abound everywhere to
its complete and completely self-conscious statement
may be made by almost imperceptible degrees. To-day
it may seem no more than a visionary idea; to-morrow
it may be realized as a world-wide force of opinion and
will. People will pass with no great inconsistency from
saying that the Open Conspiracy is impossible to
saying that it has always been plain and clear to them,

114

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

that to this fashion they have shaped their lives as long
as they can remember.

In its opening phase, in the day of small things, quite
minor accidents may help or delay the clear definition
and popularization of its main ideas. The changing
pattern of public events may disperse or concentrate
attention upon it, or it may win the early adherence of
men of exceptional resources, energy, or ability. It is
impossible to foretell the speed of its advance. Its
development may be slower or faster, direct or devious,
but the logic of accumulating realizations thrusts it
forward, will persist in thrusting it on, and sooner or
later it will be discovered, conscious and potent, the
working religion of most sane and energetic people.

Meanwhile our supreme virtues must be faith and
persistence.

So far we have considered only two of the main
activities of the Open Conspiracy, the one being its
propaganda of confidence in the possible world com-
monweal, and the other its immediate practical attempt
to systematize resistance to militant and competitive
imperialism and nationalism. But such things are
merely its groundwork undertakings; they do no more
than clear the site and make the atmosphere possible
for its organized constructive efforts.

Directly we turn to that, we turn to questions of
special knowledge, special effort, and special organiza-
tion.

Let us consider first the general advancement of
science, the protection and support of scientific re-
search, and the diffusion of scientific knowledge. These
things fall within the normal scheme of duty for the
members of the Open Conspiracy. The world of science
and experiment is the region of origin of nearly all the

What are we to do with our Lives?

great initiatives that characterize our times; the Open
Conspiracy owes its inspiration, its existence, its form
and direction entirely to the changes of condition these
initiatives have brought about, and yet a large number
of scientific workers live outside the sphere of sym-
pathy in which we may expect the Open Conspiracy to
materialize, and collectively their political and social
influence upon the community is extraordinarily small.
Having regard to the immensity of its contributions
and the incalculable value of its promise to the modern
community, science research, that is, and the diffusion
of scientific knowledge is extraordinarily neglected,
starved, and threatened by hostile interference. This
is largely because scientific work has no strong unify-
ing organization and cannot in itself develop such an
organization.

Science is a hard mistress, and the first condition of
successful scientific work is that the scientific man
should stick to his research. The world of science is
therefore in itself, at its core, a miscellany of specialists,
often very ungracious specialists, and, rather than offer
him help and co-operation, it calls for understanding,
tolerance, and service from the man of more general
intelligence and wider purpose. The company of scien-
tific men is less like a host of guiding angels than like
a swarm of marvellous bees endowed with stings
which must be hived and cherished and multiplied by
the Open Conspiracy.

But so soon as we have the Open Conspiracy at work,
putting its case plainly and offering its developing ideas
and activities to those most preciously preoccupied men,
then reasonably, when it involves no special trouble for
them, when it is the line of least resistance for them,
they may be expected to fall in with its convenient and

116

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

helpful aims and find in it what they have hitherto
lacked, a common system of political and social con-
cepts to hold them together.

When that stage is reached, we shall be saved such
spectacles of intellectual prostitution as the last Great
War offered, when men of science were herded blinking
from their laboratories to curse one another upon
nationalist lines, and when after the war stupid and
wicked barriers were set up to the free communication
of knowledge by the exclusion of scientific men of this or
that nationality from international scientific gatherings.
The Open Conspiracy must help the man of science to
realize, what at present he fails most astonishingly to
realize, that he belongs to a greater comity than any
king or president represents to-day, and so prepare him
for better behaviour in the next season of trial.

The formation of groups in, and not only in, but
about and in relation to, the scientific world, which will
add to those first main activities of the Open Con-
spiracy, propaganda and pacificism, a special attention
to the needs of scientific work, may be enlarged upon
with advantage here, because it will illustrate quite
typically the idea of a special work carried on in rela-
tion to a general activity, which is the subject of this
section.

The Open Conspiracy extends its invitation to all
sorts and conditions of men, but the service of scientific
progress is for those only who are specially equipped
or who are sufficiently interested to equip themselves.
For scientific work there is first of all a great need of
endowment and the setting up of laboratories, observa-
tories, experimental stations, and the like, in all parts
of the world. Numbers of men and women capable of
scientific work never achieve it for want of the stimulus

117

What are we to do with our Lives?

of opportunity afforded by endowment. Few contrive
to create their own opportunities. The essential man of
science is very rarely an able collector or administrator
of money, and anyhow, the detailed work of organiza-
tion is a grave call upon his special mental energy. But
many men capable of a broad and intelligent appreci-
ation of scientific work, but not capable of the peculiar
intensities of research, have the gift of extracting money
from private and public sources, and it is for them to
use that gift modestly and generously in providing the
framework for those more especially endowed.

And there is already a steadily increasing need for
the proper storage and indexing of scientific results, and
every fresh worker enhances it. Quite a considerable
amount of scientific work goes fruitless or is needlessly
repeated because of the growing volume of publication,
and men make discoveries in the field of reality only to
lose them again in the lumber room of record. Here is
a second line of activity to which the Open Conspirator
with a scientific bias may direct his attention.

A third line is the liaison work between the man of
science and the common intelligent man; the promotion
of publications which will either state the substance,
implications, and consequences of new work in the
vulgar tongue, or, if that is impossible, train the general
run of people to the new idioms and technicalities which
need to be incorporated with the vulgar tongue if it
is still to serve its ends as a means of intellectual inter-
course.

Through special ad hoc organizations, societies for
the promotion of Research, for Research Defence, for
World Indexing, for the translation of Scientific Papers,
for the Diffusion of New Knowledge, the surplus
energies of a great number of Open Conspirators can

118

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

be directed to entirely creative ends and a new world
system of scientific work built up, within which such
dear old institutions as the Royal Society of London,
the various European Academies of Science and the
like, now overgrown and inadequate, can maintain their
venerable pride in themselves, their mellowing prestige,
and their distinguished exclusiveness, without their
present privilege of inflicting cramping slights and re-
strictions upon the more abundant scientific activities
of to-day.

So in relation to science and here the word is being
used in its narrower accepted meaning for what is often
spoken of as pure science, the search for physical and
biological realities, uncomplicated by moral, social, and
"practical" considerations we evoke a conception of
the Open Conspiracy as producing groups of socially
associated individuals, who engage primarily in the
general basic activities of the Conspiracy and adhere to
and promote the seven broad principles summarized at
the end of Chapter Twelve, but who work also with the
larger part of their energies, through international and
cosmopolitan societies and in a multitude of special
ways, for the establishment of an enduring and pro-
gressive world organization of pure research. They will
have come to this special work because their distinctive
gifts, their inclinations, their positions and opportunities
have indicated it as theirs.

Now a very parallel system of Open Conspiracy
groups is conceivable, in relation to business and indus-
trial life. It would necessarily be a vastly bulkier and
more heterogeneous system of groups, but otherwise the
analogy is complete. Here we imagine those people
whose gifts, inclinations, positions and opportunities as
directors, workers, or associates give them an excep-

119 r

wnat are we to do with our Lives?

tional insight into and influence in the processes of pro-
ducing and distributing commodities, can also be drawn
together into groups within the Open Conspiracy. But
these groups will be concerned with the huge and more
complicated problems of the processes by which even
now the small isolated individual adventures in produc-
tion and trading that constituted the economic life of
former civilizations, are giving place to larger, better
instructed, better planned industrial organizations,
whose operations and combinations become at last
world wide.

The amalgamations and combinations, the substitu-
tion of large-scale business for multitudes of small-scale
businesses, which are going on now, go on with all the
cruelty and disregards of a natural process. If a man is
to profit and survive, these unconscious blunderings
which now stagger towards but which may never attain
world organization must be watched, controlled,
mastered, and directed. As uncertainty diminishes, the
quality of adventure and the amount of waste diminish
also, and large speculative profits are no longer possible
or justifiable. The transition from speculative adven-
ture to organized foresight in the common interest, in
the whole world of economic life, is the substantial task
of the Open Conspiracy. And it is these specially inter-
ested and equipped groups, and not the movement as a
whole, which may best begin the attack upon these
fundamental readjustments.

The various Socialist movements of the nineteenth
and earlier twentieth centuries had this in common, that
they sought to replace the "private owner" in most or
all economic interests by some vaguely apprehended
"public owner." This, following the democratic disposi-
tion of the times, was commonly conceived of as an

120

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

elected body, a municipality, the parliamentary state or
what not. There were municipal socialists, "nationaliz-
ing" socialists, imperial socialists. In the mystic teach-
ings of the Marxist, the collective owner was to be "the
dictatorship of the proletariat." Production for profit
was denounced. The contemporary mind realizes the
evils of production for profit and of the indiscriminate
scrambling of private ownership more fully than ever
before, but it has a completer realization and a certain
accumulation of experience in the difficulties of organiz-
ing that larger ownership we desire. Private ownership
may not be altogether evil as a provisional stage, even
if it has no more in its favour than the ability to trans-
cend political boundaries.

Moreover and here again the democratic preposses-
sions of the nineteenth century come in the Socialist
movements sought to make every single adherent a re-
former and a propagandist of economic methods. In
order to do so, it was necessary to simplify economic
processes to the crudity of nursery toys, and the intri-
cate interplay of will and desire in enterprise, normal
employment, and direction, in questions of ownership,
wages, credit, #nd money, was reduced to a childish
fable of surplus value wickedly appropriated. The
Open Conspiracy is not so much a socialism as a more
comprehensive offspring which has eaten and assimi-
lated whatever was digestible of its socialist forbears.
It turns to biology for guidance towards the regulation
of quantity and a controlled distribution of the human
population of the world, and it judges all the subsidiary
aspects of property and pay by the criterion of most
efficient production and distribution in relation to the
indications thus obtained.

These economic groups, then, of the Open Conspiracy,
121

What are we to do with our Lives?

which may come indeed to be a large part of the Open
Conspiracy, will be working in that vast task of eco-
nomic reconstruction which from the point of view
of the older socialism was the sole task before mankind.
They will be conducting experiments and observing pro-
cesses according to their opportunities. Through ad hoc
societies and journals they will be comparing and ex-
amining their methods and preparing reports and clear
information for the movement at large. The whole
question of money and monetary methods in our modern
communities, so extraordinarily disregarded in socialist
literature, will be examined under the assumption that
money is the token of the community's obligation, direct
or indirect, to an individual, and credit its permission
to deal freely with material.

The whole psychology of industry and industrial re-
lationship needs to be revised and restated in terms of
the collective efficiency and welfare of mankind. And
just as far as can be contrived, the counsel and the
confidences of those who now direct great industrial
and financial operations will be invoked. The first
special task of a banker, or a bank clerk for that matter,
who joins the Open Conspiracy, will be to answer the
questions: "What is a bank?" "What are you going to
do about it?" "What have we to do about it?" The
first questions to a manufacturer will be: "What are
you making and why?" and "What are you and we to
do about it?" Instead of the crude proposals to "expro-
priate" and "take over by the State" of the primitive
socialism, the Open Conspiracy will build up an encyclo-
paedic conception of the modern economic complex as a
labyrinthine pseudo-system progressively eliminating
waste and working its way along multitudinous channels
towards unity, towards clarity of purpose and method,

122

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

towards abundant productivity and efficient social
service.

Let us come back now for a paragraph or so to the
ordinary adherent to the Open Conspiracy, the adherent
considered not in relation to his special aptitudes and
services, but in relation to the movement as a whole
and to those special constructive organizations outside
his own field. It will be his duty to keep his mind in
touch with the progressing concepts of the scientific
work so far as he is able and with the larger issues of
the economic reconstruction that is afoot, to take his
cues from the special groups and organizations engaged
upon that work, and to help where he finds his oppor-
tunity and when there is a call upon him. But no
adherent of the Open Conspiracy can remain merely
and completely an ordinary adherent. There can be no
pawns in the game of the Open Conspiracy, no "cannon
fodder" in its war. A special activity, quite as much
as a general understanding, is demanded from every-
one who looks creatively towards the future of man-
kind.

We have instanced first the fine and distinctive world
organization of pure science, and then the huge massive
movement towards co-operating unity of aim in the
economic life, until at last the production and distribu-
tion of staple necessities is apprehended as one world
business, and we have suggested that this latter move-
ment may gradually pervade and incorporate a very
great bulk of human activities. But besides this fine
current and this great torrent of evolving activities and
relationships there are also a very considerable variety
of other great functions in the community towards
which Open Conspiracy groups must direct their or-
ganizing enquiries and suggestions in their common

123

What are we to do with our Lives?

intention of ultimately assimilating all the confused
processes of to-day into a world community.

For example, there must be a series of groups in close
touch at one end with biological science and at the other
with the complex of economic activity, who will be con-
cerned specially with the practical administration of the
biological interests of the race, from food plants and in-
dustrial products to pestilences and population. And
another series of groups will gather together attention
and energy to focus them upon the educational process.
We have already pointed out that there is a strong dis-
position towards conservatism in normal educational
institutions. They preserve traditions rather than de-
velop them. They are likely to set up a considerable
resistance to the reconstruction of the world outlook
upon the threefold basis defined in Chapter Twelve.
This resistance must be attacked by special societies, by
the establishment of competing schools, by help and
promotion for enlightened teachers, and, wherever the
attack is incompletely successful, it must be supple-
mented by the energetic diffusion of educational litera-
ture for adults, upon modern lines. The forces of the
entire movement may be mobilized in a variety of ways
to bring pressure upon reactionary schools and insti-
tutions.

A set of activities correlated with most of the directly
creative ones will lie through existing political and ad-
ministrative bodies. The political work of the Open
Conspiracy must be conducted upon two levels and by
entirely different methods. Its main political idea, its
political strategy, is to weaken, efface, incorporate, or
supersede existing governments. But there is also a
tactical diversion of administrative powers and re-
sources to economic and educational arrangements of a

124

Early Constructive Work of the Open Conspiracy

modern type. Because a country or a district is incon-
venient as a division and destined to ultimate absorp-
tion in some more comprehensive and economical sys-
tem of government, that is no reason why its adminis-
tration should not be brought meanwhile into working
co-operation with the development of the Open Con-
spiracy. Free Trade nationalism in power is better than
high tariff nationalism, and pacificist party liberalism
better than aggressive party patriotism.

This evokes the anticipation of another series of
groups, a group in every possible political division,
whose task it will be to organize the whole strength of
the Open Conspiracy in that division as an effective
voting or agitating force. In many divisions this might
soon become a sufficiently considerable block to affect
the attitudes and pledges of the national politicians.
The organization of these political groups into pro-
vincial or national conferences and systems would follow
hard upon their appearance. In their programmes they
would be guided by meetings and discussions with the
specifically economic, educational, biological, scientific
and central groups, but they would also form their own
special research bodies to work out the incessant pro-
blems of transition between the old type of locally
centred administrations and a developing world system
of political controls.

In the preceding chapter we sketched the first prac-
ticable first phase of the Open Conspiracy as the pro-
paganda of a group of interlocking ideas, a propaganda
associated with pacificist action. In the present chapter
we have given a scheme of branching and amplifying
development. In this scheme, this scheme of the second
phase, we conceive of the Open Conspiracy as consisting
of a great multitude and variety of overlapping groups,

125

What are we to do with our Lives?

but now all organized for collective political, social, and
educational as well as propagandist action. They will
recognize each other much more clearly than they did
at first, and they will have acquired a common name.

The groups, however, almost all of them, will still
have specific work also. Some will be organizing a
sounder setting for scientific progress, some exploring
new social and educational possibilities, many concen-
trated upon this or that phase in the reorganization of
the world's economic life, and so forth. The individual
Open Conspirator may belong to one or more groups
and in addition to the ad hoc societies and organizations
which the movement will sustain, often in co-operation
with partially sympathetic people still outside its ranks.

The character of the Open Conspiracy will now be
plainly displayed. It will have become a great world
movement as wide-spread and evident as socialism or
communism. It will have taken the place of these move-
ments very largely. It will be more than they were, it
will be frankly a world religion. This large, loose assimi-
latory mass of movements, groups, and societies will be
definitely and obviously attempting to swallow up the
entire population of the world and become the new
human community.

126

XVI

Existing and Developing Movements which Are Con-
tributory to the Open Conspiracy and which Must
Develop a Common Consciousness. The Parable of
Provinder Island

A SUGGESTION has already been made in an earlier
chapter of this essay which may perhaps be expanded
here a little more. It is that there already exist in the
world a considerable number of movements in industry,
in political life, in social matters, in education, which
point in the same direction as the Open Conspiracy and
are inspired by the same spirit. It will be interesting to
discuss how far some of these movements may not
become confluent with others and by a mere process of
logical completion identify themselves consciously with
the Open Conspiracy in its entirety.

Consider, for example, the movement for a scientific
study and control of population pressure, known popu-
larly as the Birth Control movement. By itself, assum-
ing existing political and economic conditions, this
movement lays itself open to the charge of being no
better than a scheme of "race suicide." If a population
in some area of high civilization attempts to restrict
increase, organize its economic life upon methods of
maximum individual productivity, and impose order
and beauty upon its entire territory, that region will
become irresistibly attractive to any adjacent festering
mass of low-grade, highly reproductive population. The

127

What are we to do with our Lives?

cheap humanity of the one community will make a con-
stant attack upon the other, affording facile servility,
prostitutes, toilers, hand labour. Tariffs against sweated
products, restriction of immigration, tensions leading at
last to a war of defensive massacre are inevitable. The
conquest of an illiterate, hungry, and incontinent multi-
tude may be almost as disastrous as defeat for the
selecter race. Indeed, one finds that in discussion the
propagandists of Birth Control admit that their project
must be universal or dysgenic. But yet quite a number
of them do not follow 4 up these admissions to their
logical consequences, produce the lines and continue
the curves until the complete form of the Open Con-
spiracy appears. It will be the business of the early
Open Conspiracy propagandists to make them do so,
and to install groups and representatives at every pos-
sible point of vantage in this movement.

And similarly the now very numerous associations
for world peace halt in alarm on the edge of their own
implications. World Peace remains a vast aspiration
until there is some substitute for the present competi-
tion of states for markets and raw material, and some
restraint upon population pressure. League of Nations
Societies and all forms of pacificist organization are
either futile or insincere until they come into line with
the complementary propositions of the Open Con-
spiracy.

The various Socialist movements again are partial
projects professing at present to be self-sufficient
schemes. Most of them involve a pretence that national
and political forces are intangible phantoms, and that
the primary issue of population pressure can be ignored.
They produce one woolly scheme after another for
transferring the property in this, that, or the other eco-

128

Existing and Developing Movements

nomic plant and interest from bodies of shareholders
and company promoters to gangs of politicians or syn-
dicates of workers to be steered to efficiency, it would
seem, by pillars of cloud by day and pillars of fire by
night. The communist party has trained a whole genera-
tion of disciples to believe that the overthrow of a
vaguely apprehended "Capitalism" is the simple solu-
tion of all human difficulties. No movement ever suc-
ceeded so completely in substituting phrases for
thought. In Moscow communism has trampled "Capi-
talism" underfoot for ten eventful years, and still finds
all the problems of social and political construction
before it.

But as soon as the Socialist or Communist can be got
to realize that his repudiation of private monopolization
is not a complete programme but just a preliminary
principle, he is ripe for the ampler concepts of the
modern outlook. The Open Conspiracy is the natural
inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasms; it
may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of
New York.

The Open Conspiracy may achieve the more or less
complete amalgamation of all the radical impulses in
the Atlantic community of to-day. But its scope is not
confined to the variety of sympathetic movements which
are brought to mind by that loose word radical. In the
past fifty years or so, while Socialists and Communists
have been denouncing the current processes of economic
life in the same invariable phrases and with the same
undiscriminating animosity, these processes have been
undergoing the profoundest and most interesting
changes. While socialist thought has recited its phrases,
with witty rather than substantial variations, a thou-
sand times as many clever people have been busy upon

129

What are we to do with our Lives?

industrial, mercantile and financial processes. The
Socialist still reiterates that this greater body of intelli-
gence has been merely seeking private gain, which has
just as much truth in it as is necessary to make it an
intoxicating lie. Everywhere competitive businesses
have been giving way to amalgamated enterprises,
marching towards monopoly, and personally owned
businesses to organizations so large as to acquire more
and more the character of publicly responsible bodies.
In theory in Great Britain, banks are privately owned,
and railway transport is privately owned, and they are
run entirely for profit in practice their profit making
is austerely restrained and their proceedings are all the
more sensitive to public welfare because they are out-
side the direct control of party politicians.

Now this transformation of business, trading, and
finance has been so multitudinous and so rapid as to be
still largely unconscious of itself. Intelligent men have
gone from combination to combination and extended
their range, year by year, without realizing how their
activities were enlarging them to conspicuousness and
responsibility. Economic organization is even now only
discovering itself for what it is. It has accepted incom-
patible existing institutions to its own great injury. It
has been patriotic and broken its shins against the tariff
walls its patriotism has raised to hamper its own move-
ments; it has been imperial and found itself taxed to
the limits of its endurance, "controlled" by antiquated
military and naval experts, and crippled altogether. The
younger, more vigorous intelligences in the great busi-
ness directorates of to-day are beginning to realize the
uncompleted implications of their enterprise. A day will
come when the gentlemen who are trying to control the
oil supplies of the world without reference to anything

130

Existing and Developing Movements

else except as a subsidiary factor in their game will be
considered to be quaint characters. The ends of Big
Business must carry Big Business into the Open Con-
spiracy just as surely as every other creative and
broadly organizing movement is carried.

Now I know that to all this urging towards a unifica-
tion of constructive effort, a great number of people
will be disposed to a reply which will, I hope, be less
popular in the future than it is at the present time. They
will assume first an expression of great sagacity, an
elderly air. Then, smiling gently, they will ask whether
there is not something preposterously ambitious in look-
ing at the problem of life as one whole. Is it not wiser
to concentrate our forces on more practicable things, to
attempt one thing at a time, not to antagonize the whole
order of established things against our poor desires, to
begin tentatively, to refrain from putting too great a
strain upon people, to trust to the growing common
sense of the world to adjust this or that line of progress
to the general scheme of things. Far better accomplish
something definite here and there than challenge a
general failure. That is, they declare, how reformers
and creative things have gone on in the past; that is
how they are going on now; muddling forward in a mild
and confused and partially successful way. Why not
trust them to go on like that? Let each man do his bit
with a complete disregard of the logical interlocking of
progressive effort to which I have been drawing atten-
tion.

Now I must confess that, popular as this style of
argument is, it gives me so tedious a feeling that rather
than argue against it in general terms I will resort to a
parable. I will relate the story of the pig on Provinder
Island.

What are we to do with our Lives?

There was, you must understand, only one pig on
Provinder Island, and Heaven knows how it got there,
whether it escaped and swam ashore or was put ashore
from some vessel suddenly converted to vegetarianism,
I cannot imagine. At first it was the only mammal there.
But later on three sailors and a very small but observant
cabin boy were wrecked there, and after subsisting for
a time on shell fish and roots they became aware of this
pig. And simultaneously they became aware of a nearly
intolerable craving for bacon. The eldest of the three
sailors began to think of a ham he had met in his boy-
hood, a beautiful ham for which his father had had the
carving knife specially sharpened; the second of the
three sailors dreamed repeatedly of a roast loin of pork
he had eaten at his sister's wedding, and the third's
mind ran on chitterlings I know not why. They sat
about their meagre fire and conferred and expatiated
upon these things until their mouths watered and the
shell fish turned to water within them. What dreams
came to the cabin boy are unknown, for it was their
custom to discourage his confidences. But he sat apart
brooding and was at last moved to speech. "Let us hunt
that old pig," he said, "and kill it."

Now it may have been because it was the habit of
these sailors to discourage the cabin boy and keep him
in his place, but anyhow, for whatever reason it was, all
three sailors set themselves with one accord to oppose
that proposal.

"Who spoke of killing the pig?" said the eldest sailor
loudly, looking round to see if by any chance the pig
was within hearing. "Who spoke of killing the pig?
You're the sort of silly young devil who jumps at ideas
and hasn't no sense of difficulties. What I said was
AM. All I want is just a Am to go with my roots and

132

Existing and Developing Movements

sea salt. One Am. The Left Am. I don't want the right
one, and I don't propose to get it. I've got a sense of
proportion and a proper share of humour, and I know
my limitations. I'm a sound, clear-headed, practical
man. Am is what I'm after, and if I can get that, I'm
prepared to say Quits and let the rest of the pig alone.
Who's for joining me in a Left Am Unt a simple
reasonable Left Am Unt just to get One Left Am?"

Nobody answered him directly, but when his voice
died away, the next sailor in order of seniority took up
the tale. "That Boy," he said, "will die of Swelled Ed,
and I pity him. My idea is to follow up the pig and get
hold of a loin chop. Just simply a loin chop. A loin
chop is good enough for me. It's feasible. Much
more feasible than a great Am. Here we are, we've
got no gun, we've got no wood of a sort to make bows
and arrows, we've got nothing but our clasp knives,
and that pig can run like Ell. It's ridiculous to think
of killing that pig. But if one didn't trouble him, if one
kind of got into his confidence and crept near him and
just quietly and insidiously went for his loin just sort
of as if one was tickling him one might get a loin chop
almost before he knew of it."

The third sailor sat crumpled up and downcast with
his lean fingers tangled in his shock of hair. "Chitter-
lings," he murmured, "chitterlings. I don't even want
to think of the pig."

And the cabin boy pursued his own ideas in silence,
for he deemed it unwise to provoke his elders further.

On these lines it was the three sailors set about the
gratifying of their taste for pork, each in his own way,
separately and sanely and modestly. And each had his
reward. The first sailor, after weeks of patience, got
within arm's length of the pig and smacked that coveted

What are we to do with our Lives?

left ham loud and good, and felt success was near. The
other two heard the smack and the grunt of dismay
half a mile away. But the pig, in a state of astonish-
ment, carried the ham off out of reach, there and then,
and that was as close as the first sailor ever got to his
objective. The roast loin hunter did no better. He
came upon the pig asleep under a rock one day, and
jumped upon the very loin he desired, but the pig bit
him deeply and septically, and displayed so much re-
sentment that the question of a chop was dropped forth-
with and never again broached between them. And
thereafter the arm of the second sailor was bandaged
and swelled up and went from bad to worse. And as for
the third sailor, it is doubtful whether he even got wind
of a chitterling from the start to the finish of this
parable. The cabin boy, pursuing notions of his own,
made a pitfall for the whole pig, but as the others did
not help him, and as he was an excessively small
though shrewd cabin boy, it was a feeble and insuffi-
cient pitfall, and all it caught was the hunter of chitter-
lings, who was wandering distraught. After which the
hunter of chitterlings became a hunter of cabin boys,
and the cabin boy's life, for all his shrewdness, was pre-
carious and unpleasant. He slept only in snatches and
learned the full bitterness of insight misunderstood.

When at last a ship came to Provinder Island and
took off the three men and the cabin boy, the pig was
still bacon intact and quite gay and cheerful, and all
four castaways were in a very emaciated condition be-
cause at that season of the year shell fish were rare, and
edible roots were hard to find, and the pig was very
much cleverer than they were in finding them and dig-
ging them up let alone digesting them.

From which parable it may be gathered that a partial

134

Existing and Developing Movements

enterprise is not always wiser or more hopeful than a
comprehensive one.

And in the same manner, with myself in the role of
that minute but observant cabin boy, I would sustain
the proposition that none of these movements of partial
reconstruction has the sound common sense quality its
supporters suppose. All these movements are worth
while if they can be taken into the world-wide move-
ment; all in isolation are futile. They will be overlaid
and lost in the general drift. The policy of the whole
hog is the best one, the sanest one, the easiest, and the
most hopeful. If sufficient men and women of intelli-
gence can realize that simple truth and give up their
lives to it, mankind may yet achieve a civilization and
power and fullness of life beyond our present dreams.
If they do not, frustration will triumph, and war,
violence, and a drivelling waste of time and strength
and desire, more disgusting even than war, will be the
lot of our race down through the ages to its emaciated
and miserable end.

For this little planet of ours is quite off the course of
any rescue ships, if the will in our species fails.

135

XVII

The Creative Home, Social Group, and School: the
Present Waste of Idealistic Will

HUMAN society began with the family. The natural
history of gregariousness is a history of the establish-
ment of mutual toleration among human animals, so
that a litter or a herd keeps together instead of break-
ing up. It is in the family group that the restraints, dis-
ciplines, and self-sacrifices which make human society
possible were worked out and our fundamental preju-
dices established, and it is in the family group, enlarged
perhaps in many respects, and more and more responsive
to collective social influences, that our social life must
be relearnt, generation after generation.

Now in each generation the Open Conspiracy, until
it can develop its own reproductive methods, must re-
main a minority movement of intelligent converts. A
unified progressive world community demands its own
type of home and training. It needs to have its funda-
mental concepts firmly established in as many minds as
possible and to guard its children from the infection of
the old racial and national hatreds and jealousies, old
superstitions and bad mental habits, and base interpre-
tations of life. From its outset the Open Conspiracy
will be setting itself to influence the existing educa-
tional machinery, but for a long time it will find itself
confronted in school and college by powerful religious
and political authorities determined to set back the
children at the point or even behind the point from
which their parents made their escape. At best, the

136

The Creative Home, Social Group and School

liberalism of the state-controlled schools will be a com-
promise. Originally schools and colleges were transmit-
ters of tradition and conservative forces. So they re-
main in essence to this day.

Organized teaching has always aimed, and will
always tend to guide, train, and direct, the mind. The
problem of reconstructing education so as to make it a
releasing instead of a binding process has still to be
solved. During the early phases of its struggle, there-
fore, the Open Conspiracy will be obliged to adopt a
certain sectarianism of domestic and social life in the
interests of its children, to experiment in novel educa-
tional methods and educational atmospheres, and it may
even in many cases have to consider the grouping of its
families and the establishment of its own schools. In
many modern communities, the English-speaking states,
for example, there is still liberty to establish educational
companies, running schools of a special type. In every
country where that right does not exist it has to be
fought for.

There lies a great work for various groups of the
Open Conspiracy. Successful schools would become
laboratories of educational methods and patterns for
new state schools. Necessarily for a time, but we may
hope unconsciously, the Open Conspiracy children will
become a social elite; from their first conscious moments
they will begin to think and talk among clear-headed
people speaking distinctly and behaving frankly, and
it will be a waste and loss to put them back for the
scholastic stage among their mentally indistinct and
morally muddled contemporaries. A phase when there
will be a special educational system for the Open Con-
spiracy seems, therefore, to be indicated. Its children
will learn to speak, draw, think, compute lucidly and

137

What are we to do with our Lives?

subtly, and into their vigorous minds they will take the
broad concepts of history, biology, and mechanical pro-
gress, the basis of the new world, naturally and easily.
Meanwhile, those who grow up outside the advancing
educational frontier of the Open Conspiracy will never
come under the full influence of its ideas, or they will
get hold of them only after a severe struggle against a
mass of misrepresentations and elaborately instilled
prejudices. An adolescent and adult educational cam-
paign, to undo the fixations and suggestions of the
normal conservative and reactionary schools and
colleges, is and will long remain an important part of
the work of the Open Conspiracy.

Always, as long as I can remember, there have been a
dispute and invidious comparisons between the old and
the young. The young find the old prey upon and re-
strain them, and the old find the young shallow, dis-
appointing, and aimless in vivid contrast to their revised
memories of their own early days. The present time is
one in which these perennial accusations flower with
exceptional vigour. But there does seem to be some
truth in the statement that the facilities to live frivo-
lously are greater now than they have ever been for old
and young alike. For example, in the great modern
communities that emerge now from Christendom, there
is a widespread disposition to regard Sunday as merely
a holiday. But that was certainly not the original in-
tention of Sunday. As we have noted already in an
earlier chapter, it was a day dedicated to the greater
issues of life. Now great multitudes of people do not
even pretend to set aside any time at all to the greater
issues of life. The greater issues are neglected alto-
gether. The churches are neglected, and nothing of a
unifying or exalting sort takes their place.

138

The Creative Home, Social Group and School

What the contemporary senior tells his junior to-day
is perfectly correct. In his own youth, no serious im-
pulse of his went to waste. He was not distracted by a
thousand gay but petty temptations, and the local re-
ligious powers, whatever they happened to be, seemed
to believe in themselves more and made a more com-
prehensive attack upon his conscience and imagination.
Now the old faiths are damaged and discredited, and
the new and greater one, which is the Open Conspiracy,
takes shape only gradually. A decade or so ago, social-
ism preached its confident hopes, and patriotism and
imperial pride shared its attraction for the ever grave
and passionate will of emergent youth. Now socialism
and democracy are "under revision" and the flags that
once waved so bravely reek of poison gas, are stiff with
blood and mud and shameful with exposed dishonesties.
Youth is what youth has always been, eager for fine
interpretations of life, capable of splendid resolves. It
has no natural disposition towards the shallow and cori-
fused life. Its demand as ever is, "What am I to do
with myself?" But it comes up out of its childhood
to-day into a world of ruthless exposures and cynical
pretensions. We are all a little ashamed of "earnest-
ness." The past ten years have seen the shy and power-
ful idealism of youth at a loss and dismayed and
ashamed as perhaps it has never been before. It is in
the world still, but masked, hiding even from itself in
a whirl of small excitements and futile, defiant de-
pravities.

The old flags and faiths have lost their magic for the
intelligence of the young; they can command it no
more; it is in the mighty revolution to which the Open
Conspiracy directs itself that the youth of mankind
must find its soul, if ever it is to find its soul again.

139

XVIII

Progressive Development of the Activities of the Open

Conspiracy into a World Control and Commonweal:

the Hazards of the Attempt

WE have now sketched out in these Blue Prints the
methods by which the confused radicalism and con-
structive forces of the present time may, can, and
probably will be drawn together about a core of
modernized religious feeling into one great and multi-
farious creative effort. A way has been shown by which
this effort may be developed from a mere propagandist
campaign and a merely resistant protest against con-
temporary militarism into an organized fore-shadowing
in research, publicity, and experiment in educational,
economic, and political reconstructions, of that Pax
Mundi which has become already the tantalized desire
of great multitudes throughout the world. These fore-
shadowings and reconstructions will ignore and trans-
cend the political boundaries of to-day. They will con-
tinually become more substantial as project passes into
attempt and performance. In phase after phase and at
point after point, therefore, the Open Conspiracy will
come to grips with the powers that sustain these boun-
daries.

And it will not be merely topographical boundaries
that will be passed. The Open Conspiracy will also be
dissolving and repudiating many existing restrictions
upon conduct and many social prejudices. The Open

140

Progressive Development into a World Control

Conspiracy proposes to end and shows how an end may
be put to that huge substratum of underdeveloped,
undereducated, subjugated, exploited, and frustrated
lives upon which such civilization as the world has
known hitherto has rested, and upon which most of our
social systems still rest.

Whenever possible, the Open Conspiracy will advance
by illumination and persuasion. But it has to advance,
and even from the outset, where it is not allowed to
illuminate and persuade, it must fight. Its first fights
will probably be for the right to spread its system of
ideas plainly and clearly throughout the world.

There is, I suppose, a flavour of treason about the
assumption that any established government is pro-
visional, and a quality of immorality in any criticism of
accepted moral standards. Still more is the proposal,
made even in times of peace, to resist war levies and
conscription an offence against absolute conceptions of
loyalty. But the ampler wisdom of the modern Atlantic
communities, already touched by premonitions of
change and futurity, has continually enlarged the
common liberties of thought for some generations, and
it is doubtful if there will be any serious resistance to
the dissemination of these views and the early organiza-
tion of the Open Conspiracy in any of the English-
speaking communities or throughout the British Empire,
in the Scandinavian countries, or in such liberal-minded
countries as Holland, Switzerland, republican Germany
or France. France, in the hasty years after the war,
submitted to some repressive legislation against the dis-
cussion of birth control or hostile criticism of the mili-
tarist attitude; but such a check upon mental freedom
is altogether contrary to the clear and open quality of
the French mind; in practice it has already been effec-

141

What are we to do with our Lives?

lively repudiated by such writers as Victor Margueritte,
and it is unlikely that there will be any effective sup-
pression of the opening phases of the Open Conspiracy
in France.

This gives us a large portion of the existing civilized
world in which men's minds may be readjusted to the
idea that their existing governments are in the position
of trustees for the greater government of the coming
age. Throughout these communities it is conceivable
that the structural lines of the world community may
be materialized and established with only minor
struggles, local boycotts, vigorous public controversies,
normal legislative obstruction, social pressure, and
overt political activities. Police, jail, expulsions, and
so forth, let alone outlawry and warfare, may scarcely
be brought into this struggle upon the high civilized
level of the Atlantic communities. But where they are
brought in, the Open Conspiracy, to the best of its
ability and the full extent of its resources, must become
a fighting force and organize itself upon resistant lines.

Non-resistance, the restriction of activities to moral
suasion is no part of the programme of the Open Con-
spiracy. In the face of unscrupulous opposition creative
ideas must become aggressive, must define their enemies
and attack them. By its own organizations or through
the police and military strength of governments amen-
able to its ideas, the movement is bound to find itself
fighting for open roads, open frontiers, freedom of
speech, and the realities of peace in regions of oppres-
sion. The Open Conspiracy rests upon a disrespect for
nationality, and there is no reason why it should tolerate
noxious or obstructive governments because they hold
their own in this or that patch of human territory. It
lies within the power of the Atlantic communities to

142

Progressive Development into a World Control

impose peace upon the world and secure unimpeded
movement and free speech from end to end of the earth.
This is a fact on which the Open Conspiracy must insist.
The English-speaking states, France, Germany, Holland,
Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, and Russia,
given only a not very extravagant frankness of under-
standing between them, and a common disposition
towards the ideas of the Open Conspiracy, could cease
to arm against each other and still exert enough strength
to impose disarmament and a respect for human free-
dom in every corner of the planet. It is fantastic
pedantry to wait for all the world to accede before all
the world is pacified and policed.

The most inconsistent factor in the liberal and radical
thought of to-day is its prejudice against the interfer-
ence of highly developed modern states in the affairs of
less stable and less advanced regions. This is denounced
as "imperialism," and regarded as criminal. It may
have assumed grotesque and dangerous forms under the
now decaying traditions of national competition, but as
the merger of the Atlantic states proceeds, the possi-
bility and necessity of bringing areas of misgovernment
and disorder under world control increase. A great war
like the war of 1914-1918 may never happen again.
The common sense of mankind may suffice to avert that.
But there is still much actual warfare before mankind,
on the frontiers everywhere, against brigands, against
ancient loyalties and traditions which will become at
last no better than excuses for brigandage and obstruc-
tive exaction. All the weight of the Open Conspiracy
will be on the side of the world order and against that
sort of local independence which holds back its subject
people from the citizenship of the world.

But in this broad prospect of far-reaching political

143

What are we to do with our Lives?

amalgamations under the impulses of the Open Con-
spiracy lurk a thousand antagonisms and adverse
chances, like the unsuspected gulleys and ravines and
thickets in a wide and distant landscape. We know not
what unexpected chasms may presently be discovered.
The Open Conspirator may realize that he is one of an
advancing and victorious force and still find himself
outnumbered and outfought in his own particular corner
of the battlefield. No one can yet estimate the possible
strength of reaction against world unification; no one
can foresee the extent of the divisions and confusions
that may arise among ourselves. The ideas in this book
may spread about without any serious resistance in most
civilized countries, but there are still governments under
which the persistent expression of such thoughts will be
dealt with as crimes and bring men and women to
prison, torment, and death. Nevertheless, they must be
expressed.

While the Open Conspiracy is no more than a dis-
cussion it may spread unopposed because it is disre-
garded. As a mainly passive resistance to militarism it
may still be tolerable. But as its knowledge and experi-
ence accumulate and its organization becomes more
effective and aggressive, as it begins to lay hands upon
education, upon social habits, upon business develop-
ments, as it proceeds to take over the organization of
the community, it will marshal not only its own forces
but its enemies. A complex of interests will find them-
selves restrained and threatened by it, and it may easily
evoke that most dangerous of human mass feelings, fear.
In ways quite unpredictable it may raise a storm against
itself beyond all our present imaginings. Our conception
of an almost bloodless domination of the Atlantic com-
munities may be merely the confident dream of a

144

Progressive Development into a World Control

thinker whose thoughts have yet to be squarely chal-
lenged.

We are not even sure of the common peace. Across
the path of mankind the storm of another Great War
may break, bringing with it for a time more brutal
repressions and vaster injuries even than its predecessor.
The scaffoldings and work sheds of the Open Con-
spiracy may fare violently in that tornado. The re-
storation of progress may seem an almost hopeless
struggle.

It is no part of modern religion to incur needless hard-
ship or go out of the way to seek martyrdom. If we can
do our work easily and happily, so it should be done.
But the work is not to be shirked because it cannot be
done easily and happily. The vision of a world at peace
and liberated for an unending growth of knowledge and
power is worth every danger of the way. And since in
this age of confusion we must live imperfectly and
anyhow die, we may as well suffer, if need be, and die
for a great end as for none. Never has the translation
of vision into realities been easy since the beginning of
human effort. The establishment of the world com-
munity will surely exact a price and who can tell what
that price may be? in toil, suffering, and blood.

XIX

Human Life in the Coming World Community

THE new life that the Open Conspiracy struggles to
achieve through us for our race is first a life of libera-
tions.

The oppression of incessant toil can surely be lifted
from everyone, and the miseries due to a great multi-
tude of infections and disorders of nutrition and growth
cease to be a part of human experience. Few people are
perfectly healthy nowadays except for brief periods of
happiness, but the elation of physical well-being will
some day be the common lot of mankind.

And not only from natural evils will man be largely
free. He will not be left with his soul tangled, haunted
by monstrous and irrational fears and a prey to mali-
cious impulse. From his birth he will breathe sweetness
and generosity and use his mind and hands cleanly and
exactly. He will feel better, will better, think better,
see, taste, and hear better than men do now. His under-
soul will no longer be a mutinous cavern of ill-treated
suppressions and of impulses repressed without under-
standing. All these releases are plainly possible for him.
They pass out of his tormented desire now, they elude
and mock him, because chance, confusion, and squalor
rule his life. All the gifts of destiny are overlaid and
lost to him. He must still suspect and fear. Not one of
us is yet as clear and free and happy within himself as
most men will some day be. Before mankind lies the

146

Human Life in the Coming World Community

prospect not only of health but of magnanimity.

Within the peace and freedom that the Open Con-
spiracy is winning for us, all these good things that
escape us now may be ensured. A graver humanity,
stronger, more lovely, longer lived, will learn and de-
velop the ever enlarging possibilities of its destiny. For
the first time, the full beauty of this world will be
revealed to its unhurried eyes. Its thoughts will be to
our thoughts as the thoughts of a man to the troubled
mental experimenting of a child. And all the best of
us will be living on in that ampler life, as the child and
the things it tried and learnt still live in the man. When
we were children, we could not think or feel as we think
and feel to-day, but to-day we can peer back and still
recall something of the ignorances and guesses and wild
hopes of these nigh forgotten years.

And so mankind, ourselves still living, but dispersed
and reconstructed again in the future, will recall with
affection and understanding the desperate wishes and
troubled efforts of our present state.

How far can we anticipate the habitations and ways,
the usages and adventures, the mighty employments,
the ever increasing knowledge and power of the days
to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper
and its box of bricks can picture or model the under-
takings of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties
and frustrations, stupid, heavy, and hateful things from
which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquer-
ing a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare
in the dawn. From any dream, however dismal and
horrible, one can escape by realizing that it is a dream;
by saying, "I will awake/'

The Open Conspiracy is the awaking of mankind
from a nightmare, an infantile nightmare, of the struggle

147

What are we to do with our Lives?

for existence and the inevitability of war. The light of
day thrusts between our eyelids, and the multitudinous
sounds of morning clamour in our ears. A time will
come when men will sit with history before them or with
some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,
"Was there ever such a world?"

148

A book that e^ery thinking man
haJ?e to read

THE

WORK
WEALTH

AND

HAPPINESS
OF MANKIND

By
H. G. WELLS

A picture of all mankind to-day, work-
ing and spending, making and destroying.
A survey of all current human activities
and a review of the world's economic life.

9o pages. 32 pages of illustrations. ios.6d.