3.5. HATE AND LOVE.
Before I go on to point out the broad principles of action that flow
from this wide conception of Socialism, I may perhaps give a section to
elucidating that opposition of hate and love I made when I dealt with
the class war. I have already used the word love several times; it is an
ambiguous word and it may be well to spend a few words in making clear
the sense in which it is used here. I use it in a very broad sense to
convey all that complex of motives, impulses, sentiments, that incline
us to find our happiness and satisfactions in the happiness and sympathy
of others. Essentially it is a synthetic force in human affairs, the
merger tendency, a linking force, an expression in personal will and
feeling of the common element and interest. It insists upon resemblances
and shares and sympathies. And hate, I take it, is the emotional aspect
of antagonism, it is the expression in personal will and feeling of the
individual's separation from others. It is the competing and destructive
tendency. So long as we are individuals and members of a species, we
must needs both hate and love. But because I believe, as I have already
confessed, that the oneness of the species is a greater fact than
individuality, and that we individuals are temporary separations from a
collective purpose, and since hate eliminates itself by eliminating its
objects, whilst love multiplies itself by multiplying its objects, so
love must be a thing more comprehensive and enduring than hate.
Moreover, hate must be in its nature a good thing. We individuals exist
as such, I believe, for the purpose in things, and our separations and
antagonisms serve that purpose. We play against each other like hammer
and anvil. But the synthesis of a collective will in humanity, which is
I believe our human and terrestrial share in that purpose, is an idea
that carries with it a conception of a secular alteration in the scope
and method of both love and hate. Both widen and change with man's
widening and developing apprehension of the purpose he serves. The
savage man loves in gusts a fellow creature or so about him, and fears
and hates all other people. Every expansion of his scope and ideas
widens either circle. The common man of our civilized world loves not
only many of his friends and associates systematically and enduringly,
but dimly he loves also his city and his country, his creed and his
race; he loves it may be less intensely but over a far wider field and
much more steadily. But he hates also more widely if less passionately
and vehemently than a savage, and since love makes rather harmony and
peace and hate rather conflict and events, one may easily be led to
suppose that hate is the ruling motive in human affairs. Men band
themselves together in leagues and loyalties, in cults and organizations
and nationalities, and it is often hard to say whether the bond is one
of love for the association or hatred of those to whom the association
is antagonized. The two things pass insensibly into one another. London
people have recently seen an edifying instance of the transition, in the
Brown Dog statue riots. A number of people drawn together by their
common pity for animal suffering, by love indeed of the most
disinterested sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to erect a
monument with an inscription at once recklessly untruthful, spiteful in
spirit and particularly vexatious to one great medical school of London.
They have provoked riots and placarded London with taunts and irritating
misrepresentatin of the spirit of medical research, and they have
infected a whole fresh generation of London students with a bitter
partizan contempt for the humanitarian effort that has so lamentably
misconducted itself. Both sides vow they will never give in, and the
anti-vivisectionists are busy manufacturing small china copies of the
Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes of domestic
irritation. Here hate, the evil ugly brother of effort, has manifestly
slain love the initiator and taken the affair in hand. That is a little
model of human conflicts. So soon as we become militant and play against
one another, comes this danger of strain and this possible reversal of
motive. The fight begins. Into a pit of heat and hate fall right and
wrong together.
Now it seems to me that a religious faith such as I have set forth in
the second Book, and a clear sense of our community of blood with all
mankind, must necessarily affect both our loving and our hatred. It will
certainly not abolish hate, but it will subordinate it altogether to
love. We are individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to me, in order
that we may hate the things that have to go, ugliness, baseness,
insufficiency, unreality, that we may love and experiment and strive for
the things that collectively we seek--power and beauty. Before our
conversion we did this darkly and with our hate spreading to persons and
parties from the things for which they stood. But the believer will hate
lovingly and without fear. We are of one blood and substance with our
antagonists, even with those that we desire keenly may die and leave no
issue in flesh or persuasion. They all touch us and are part of one
necessary experience. They are all necessary to the synthesis, even if
they are necessary only as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is necessary
to my dinner.
So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit of class-war Socialism
with its doctrine of hate, its envious assault upon the leisure and
freedom of the wealthy. Without leisure and freedom and the experience
of life they gave, the ideas of Socialism could never have been born.
The true mission of Socialism is against darkness, vanity and cowardice,
that darkness which hides from the property owner the intense beauty,
the potentialities of interest, the splendid possibilities of life, that
vanity and cowardice that make him clutch his precious holdings and fear
and hate the shadow of change. It has to teach the collective
organization of society; and to that the class-consciousness and intense
class-prejudices of the worker need to bow quite as much as those of the
property owner. But when I say that Socialism's mission is to teach, I
do not mean that its mission is a merely verbal and mental one; it must
use all instruments and teach by example as well as precept. Socialism
by becoming charitable and merciful will not cease to be militant.
Socialism must, lovingly but resolutely, use law, use force, to
dispossess the owners of socially disadvantageous wealth, as one coerces
a lunatic brother or takes a wrongfully acquired toy from a spoilt and
obstinate child. It must intervene between all who would keep their
children from instruction in the business of citizenship and the lessons
of fraternity. It must build and guard what it builds with laws and with
that sword which is behind all laws. Non-resistance is for the
non-constructive man, for the hermit in the cave and the naked saint in
the dust; the builder and maker with the first stroke of his foundation
spade uses force and opens war against the anti-builder.
