Conclusions

I

IT is not by thought that men live. Life begins in organisms so simple that one may reasonably doubt even their ability to feel, much less think, and animals cling to or fight for it with a determination which we might be inclined to call superhuman if we did not know that a will to live so thoughtless and so unconditional is the attribute of beings rather below than above the human level. All efforts to find a rational justification of life, to declare it worth the living for this reason or that, are, in themselves, a confession of weakness, since life at its strongest never feels the need of any such justification and since the most optimistic philosopher is less optimistic than that man or animal who, his belief that life is good being too immediate to require the interposition of thought, is no philosopher at all.

In view of this fact it is not surprising that the subtlest intellectual contortions of modern metaphysics should fail to establish the existence of satisfactory aims for life when, as a matter of fact, any effort to do so fails as soon as it begins and can only arise as the result of a weakening of that selfjustifying vitality which is the source of all life and of all optimism. As soon as thought begins to seek the ends or aims to which life is subservient, it has already confessed its inability to achieve that animal acceptance of life for life’s sake which is responsible for the most determined efforts to live, and, in one sense, we may say that even the firmest mediæval belief in a perfectly concrete salvation after death marks already the beginning of the completest despair, since that belief could not arise before thought had rendered primitive vitality no longer all-sufficient.

The decadent civilizations of the past were not saved by their philosophers, but by the influx of simpler peoples who had centuries yet to live before their minds should be ripe for despair. Neither Socrates nor Plato could teach his compatriots any wisdom from which they could draw the strength to compete with the crude energy of their Roman neighbors, and even their thought inevitably declined soon after it had exhausted their vital energy. Nor could these Romans, who flourished longer for the very reason, perhaps, that they had slower and less subtle intellects, live forever; they too were compelled to give way in their time to barbarians innocent alike both of philosophy and of any possible need to call upon it.

The subhuman will to live which is all-sufficient for the animal may be replaced by faith, faith may be replaced by philosophy, and philosophy may attenuate itself until it becomes, like modern metaphysics, a mere game; but each of these developments marks a stage in a progressive enfeeblement of that will to live for the gradual weakening of which it is the function of each to compensate. Vitality calls upon faith for aid, faith turns gradually to philosophy for support, and then philosophy, losing all confidence in its own conclusions, begins to babble of ‘beneficent fictions’ instead of talking about Truth; but each is less confident than what went before, and each is, by consequence, less easy to live by. Taken together they represent the successive and increasingly desperate expedients by means of which man, the ambitious animal, endeavors to postpone the inevitable realization that living is merely a physiological process with only a physiological meaning, and that it is most satisfactorily conducted by creatures who never feel the need to attempt to give it any other. But they are at best no more than expedients, and when the last has been exhausted there remains nothing except the possibility that the human species will be revitalized by some race or some class which is capable of beginning all over again.

Under the circumstances it is not strange that decadent civilizations are likely to think that the collapse of their culture is in reality the end of the human story. Perhaps some of the last of the old Roman intelligentsia realized that the future belonged to the barbarians from the north and that it belonged to them for the very reason that they were incapable of assimilating ancient thought; but even among the early Christian theologians there was a widespread belief that the end of Rome could mean nothing except the end of the world, and, for similar reasons, it is difficult for us to believe in the possibility of anything except either the continuation of modern culture or the extinction of human life. But a glance at history should make us hesitate before asserting that either one of these alternative possibilities is likely to become a reality. On the one hand, all cultures have ultimately collapsed, and human life has, on the other hand, always persisted — not because philosophers have arisen to solve its problems, but because naïver creatures incapable of understanding the problems, and hence not feeling the need to solve them, have appeared somewhere upon the face of the globe.

If modern civilization is decadent, then perhaps it will he rejuvenated, but not by the philosophers, whose subtlest thoughts are only symptoms of the disease which they are endeavoring to combat. If the future belongs to anyone it belongs to those to whom it has always belonged — to those, that is to say, too absorbed in living to feel the need for thought; and they will come, as the barbarians have always come, absorbed in the processes of life for their own sake, eating without asking if it. is worth while to eat, begetting children without asking why they should beget them, and conquering without asking for what purpose they conquer.

Doubtless even those among the last of the Romans who had some dim conception of the fact that the centuries immediately to follow would belong to the barbarians were not, for the most part, greatly interested in or cheered by the fact. Thoughtful people come inevitably to feel that if life has any value at all, then that value lies in thought, and to the Roman it probably seemed that it was hardly worth while to save the human animal if he could be saved only by the destruction of all that which his own ancestors had achieved, and by the forgetting of everything which he cared to remember. The annihilation of ancient culture was to him equivalent to the annihilation of humanity, and a modern who has come to think in a similar fashion can have only a languid interest in a possible animal rejuvenation which would inevitably involve a blunting of that delicate sensibility and that exquisite subtlety of intellect upon which he has come to set the very highest value.

But doubtless this ancient Roman speculated idly, and it is impossible for us not to do the same. Where will the barbarians (and we may use that word not as a term of contempt, but merely as a way of identifying these people animated by vitally simple thoughts) come? We are not surrounded as the Romans were by childlike savages, and we can hardly imagine the black tribes of Africa pushing in upon us. Have we, within the confines of our own cities, populations quite as little affected by modern thought as the Goths were affected by Greek philosophy, and hence quite capable either of carrying peaceably on as the aristocracy dies quietly off at the top or of arising sometime to overwhelm us? Has China, having died once, lain fallow long enough to have become once more primitive, or are the Russians indeed the new barbarians, even if they are such in a somewhat different sense than that implied in the sensational literature of anti-Communist propaganda?

II

These Russians are young in the only sense of the word which can have a meaning when applied to any part of the human family. If all men had a common ancestor, then all races are equally old in years, but those which have never passed through the successive and debilitating stages of culture retain that potentiality fur doing so which constitutes them racially young, and the Russians, who have always lived upon the frontiers of Europe, are in this sense a primitive race, since European culture has never been for them more than the exotic diversion of a small class. For the first time in history the mass of the people are in a position to employ their constructive faculties, and it so happens that their domain is one which offers an enormous field for the employment of such faculties.

Young races, like young individuals, need toys to play with. Before the advent of the machine, the Romans amused themselves with military and social organization, pushing the boundaries of their empire further and further back into unknown territory until their energy was exhausted and they were compelled to begin a gradual retraction; to-day the processes of industrial development are capable of absorbing much of the vitality which could formerly find an outlet only in conquest; but if modern people amuse themselves by building factories or digging mines they do so for exactly the same reason that the Romans annexed the British Isles — because, that is to say, there is little temptation to ask ultimate questions as long as there are many tangible things to do and plenty of energy to do them with. Russia has both, and for that very reason there is no other place in the world where one wall find to-day an optimism so simple and so terrible.

We — particularly we in America — have done all that. We have dug our mines, piped our oil, built our factories, and, having done so, we have begun to settle down in our comfortable houses to ask what comes next. But the Russians are at least a century away from such a condition. They begin at a point at least as far back as we began a century ago, and they are in the happy position of desiring certain things which they have good reason to believe ultimately achievable. Not only do they want to grow rich and to establish a form of society which will provide for an equitable distribution of their riches, but they find on every side some tangible task capable of being accomplished in such a way as to further their ambition. Perhaps when this ambition has been achieved, when all men are as materially comfortable as some few men are to-day, then the comfortable masses will discover what the comfortable few have discovered already — which is, of course, that comfort seems enough only when one happens not to have it. But that day is still long distant. Not only will the complete industrial development of the country occupy many years, but the problems of the new society are themselves so complicated that they are not likely to be solved for generations, and hence, in all probability, Russia will not grow ripe so rapidly as the United States did.

As a result of these conditions there has already developed in Russia a new philosophy of life which, in spite of the fact that it has taken a form influenced by modern industrial conditions, is easily recognizable as being essentially primitive in its simplicity. Sweeping aside the intellectual and emotional problems of Europe, refusing even in its art to concern itself with the psychology of the individual soul, Communism assumes that nothing is really important except those things upon which the welfare of the race depends, and in assuming that it is assuming exactly what a primitive society always assumes. Its drama and its poetry celebrate the machine exactly as the literature of a primitive people celebrates the processes of hunting or of agriculture, and they do so for exactly the same reason — for the reason, that is to say, that agriculture on the one hand and industry on the other are the two fundamental processes by which the life of the people is sustained.

Communistic utopianism is based upon the assumption that the only maladjustments from which mankind suffers are social in character, and hence it is sustained by the belief that in a perfect State all men would be perfectly happy. Fundamentally materialistic, it refuses to remember that physical well-being is no guaranty of felicity, and that, as a matter of fact, as soon as the individual finds himself in a perfectly satisfactory physical environment he begins to be aware of those more fundamental maladjustments that subsist, not between man and society, but between the human spirit and the natural universe. And though, for this reason, it must seem to the cultivated European essentially naïve, yet in that very naïveté lies its strength as a social philosophy. Thanks to the fact that the perfect Communist is not aware of the existence of any problems more subtle than those involved in the production and distribution of wealth, he can throw himself into the business of living with a firm faith in the value of what he is doing, and he can display an energy in practical affairs not to be equaled by anyone incapable of a similar belief in their ultimate importance.

All societies which have passed the first vigor of their youth reveal their loss of faith in life itself by the fact that they no longer consider such fundamental processes as other than means toward an end. Food, clothes, and warmth are considered merely as instruments, and the most eager attention is directed, not toward attaining them, but toward those activities which men are at liberty to pursue when such fundamental things arc granted. Productive labor is regarded as an evil, and when anything is said concerning the possibility of improving the condition of the masses such improvement is always thought of as consisting essentially in so shortening even their hours of labor as to make possible for them also certain hours of freedom. Primitive societies, on the other hand, have no desire to escape from such fundamental processes. They do not hunt in order to live, but they live in order to hunt, because for them the value of life lies in the activities necessary to carry it on; and the Communist philosophy of labor is based upon a similarly primitive outlook. Factories are considered, not as a means toward an end, but as ends in themselves. A full life is to consist, not in one spent in the pursuit of those thoughts or the cultivation of those emotions which are possible only when productive labor has been reduced to a minimum, but in one completely absorbed by such labor.

Hence it is that to the good Communist, as to the good tribesman, any question concerning the meaning of life is in itself completely meaningless, and he will live the complicated industrial life of to-day exactly as the tribesman lives the simple life of his tribe — not in thought, but in action. He has a sort of God, but his God is in reality what anthropologists call a culture-god; merely, that is to say, the spirit which presides over and infuses itself with the germination of the seed, the ripening of the fruit, or the whirring of the machine.

Such a philosophy comes nearer than any other to that unformulated one by which an animal lives. It does not ask any of the questions which a weary people inevitably ask, and it is, as a matter of fact, less a system of thought than a translation into simple words of the will to live and thrive. But it is, for all that, only the more impressive as an evidence of the vigorous youth of the Russian mind. The visitor to Moscow who sees how eagerly its inhabitants live under conditions which are still very difficult—how gladly they accept both labor and, when necessary, privation — cannot but realize that they are sustained by a fundamental optimism unknown anywhere else in the world. At the present moment the inhabitants of many European countries have much more, but they hope much less, and they are incapable of any acceptance of life so vital and so complete.

If the Communistic experiment is economically a failure, then these hopes may be soon disappointed; if it becomes economically a success, then they will doubtless still be disappointed in that more distant day when, the perfect State having been achieved, its inhabitants come to realize that the natural universe is as imperfectly adapted as ever to human needs. But man-the-animal lives in Time. A hope is a hope up to the instant when it is dashed, and the Russia of to-day is filled with a confidence hardly less elementary than that of the animal which, under the influence of the vital urge, acts as though the litter which it has just brought into the world were so tremendously worth saving that nothing else which had occurred since the dawn of the first day was of equal importance.

Perhaps, then, Europe has good reason to speak of the ‘Bolshevist menace,’ but if so the events which she fears are not quite the ones most likely to occur. If Russia or the Russian spirit conquers Europe, it will not be with the bomb of the anarchist but with the vitality of the young barbarian, who may destroy many things, but who destroys them only that he may begin over again. Such calamities are calamitous only from the point of view of a humanism which values the complexity of its feelings and the subtlety of its intellect far more than Nature does. To her they are merely the reassertion of her right to recapture her own world, merely the process by which she repeoples the earth with creatures simple enough to live joyously there.

III

To us, however, such speculations as these are doubly vain. In the first place the future may belong, not to the Russians, but to some class of people not yet thought, of in this connection, and in the second place none of these possible futures is one which can have anything to do with us or our traditions. Though the new barbarians may forget, we will remember that the paradox of humanism and the tragic fallacy are not to be altered by the establishment of new societies, and that the despair which was the fruit of both ancient and modern civilization must inevitably ripen again in the course of the development of any society which enters upon the pursuit of human values.

Some critics of Communism have, to be sure, maintained that its tendencies were fundamentally antihuman and that, should it ever become established, it would so arrest the development of the humanistic spirit as to fix mankind forever in some changelessly efficient routine like that of an ant hill. But even if this be true it does not alter the fact that its hopes are no hopes in which we can have any part, since we should be even more alien to such a society than to one which promised to recapitulate our own youth. The world may be rejuvenated in one way or another, but we will not. Skepticism has entered too deeply into our souls ever to be replaced by faith, and we can never forget the things which the new barbarians will never need to have known. This world in which an unresolvable discord is the fundamental fact is the world in which we must continue to live, and for us wisdom must consist, not in searching for a means of escape which does not exist, but in making such peace with it as we may.

Nor is there any reason why we should fail to realize the fact that the acceptance of such despair as must inevitably be ours does not, after all, involve a misery so acute as that which many have been compelled to endure. Terror can be blacker than that, and so can the extremes of physical want and pain. The most human human being has still more of the animal than of anything else, and no love of rhetoric should betray one into seeming to deny that he who has escaped animal pain has escaped much. Despair of the sort which has here been described is a luxury in the sense that it is possible only to those who have much that many people do without, and philosophical pessimism, dry as it may leave the soul, is more easily endured than hunger or cold.

Leaving the future to those who have faith in it, we may survey our world, and, if we bear in mind the facts just stated, we may permit ourselves to exclaim, a little rhetorically perhaps, —

If humanism and Nature are fundamentally antithetical, if the human virtues have a definite limit set to their development, and if they may be cultivated only by a process which renders us progressively unfit to fulfill our biological duties, then we may at least permit ourselves a certain defiant satisfaction when we realize that we have made our choice and that we are resolved to abide by the consequences. Some small part of the tragic fallacy may be said indeed to be still valid for us, for if we cannot feel ourselves great as Shakespeare did, if we no longer believe in either our infinite capacities or our importance to the universe, we know at least that we have discovered the trick which has been played upon us, and that, whatever else we may be, we are no longer dupes.

Rejuvenation may be offered to us at a certain price. Nature, issuing her last warning, may bid us to embrace some new illusion before it is too late, and to accord ourselves once more with her. But we prefer rather to fail in our own way than to succeed in hers. Our human world may have no existence outside of our own desires, but those are more imperious than anything else we know, and we will cling to our own lost cause, choosing always rather to know than to be. Doubtless fresh people have still a long way to go with Nature before they are compelled to realize that they too have come to the parting of the ways, but though we may wish them well we do not envy them. If death for us and our kind is the inevitable result of our stubbornness, then we can only say, ‘So be it.’ Ours is a lost cause, and there is no place for us in the natural universe, but we are not, for all that, sorry to be human. We would rather die as men than live as animals.