3.12. CONCERNING NEW STARTS AND NEW RELIGIONS.
When one is discussing this possible formation of cults and
brotherhoods, it may be well to consider a few of the conditions that
rule such human re-groupings. We live in the world as it is and not in
the world as we want it to be, that is the practical rule by which we
steer, and in directing our lives we must constantly consider the forces
and practicabilities of the social medium in which we move.
In contemporary life the existing ties are so various and so imperative
that the detachment necessary as a preliminary condition to such new
groupings is rarely found. This is not a period in which large numbers
of people break away easily and completely from old connexions. Things
change less catastrophically than once they did. More particularly is
there less driving out into the wilderness. There is less heresy
hunting; persecution is frequently reluctant and can be evaded by slight
concessions. The world as a whole is less harsh and emphatic than it
was. Customs and customary attitudes change nowadays not so much by
open, defiant and revolutionary breaches as by the attrition of partial
negligences and new glosses. Innovating people do conform to current
usage, albeit they conform unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a
constant breaking down and building up of usage, and as a consequence a
lessened need of wholesale substitutions. Human methods have become
viviparous; the New nowadays lives for a time in the form of the Old.
The friend I quote in Chapter 2.10 writes of a possible sect with a
"religious edifice" and ritual of its own, a new religious edifice and a
new ritual. In practice I doubt whether "real" people, people who
matter, people who are getting things done and who have already
developed complex associations, can afford the extensive re-adjustment
implied in such a new grouping. It would mean too much loss of time, too
much loss of energy and attention, too much sacrifice of existing
co-operations.
New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting upon
their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful
wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where
movement is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae
unyielding and unadaptable because they are unthinking. In England, for
example, in the last century, where social conditions have been
comparatively stable, discussion good and abundant and internal
migration small, there have been far fewer such developments than in the
United States of America. In England toleration has become an
institution, and where Tory and Socialist, Bishop and Infidel, can all
meet at the same dinner-table and spend an agreeable week-end together,
there is no need for defensive segregations. In such an atmosphere
opinion and usage change and change continually, not dramatically as the
results of separations and pitched battles but continuously and fluently
as the outcome of innumerable personal reactions. America, on the other
hand, because of its material preoccupations, because of the dispersal
of its thinking classes over great areas, because of the cruder
understanding of its more heterogeneous population (which constantly
renders hard and explicit statement necessary), MEANS its creeds much
more literally and is at once more experimental and less compromising
and tolerant. It is there if anywhere that new brotherhoods and new
creeds will continue to appear. But even in America I think the trend of
things is away from separations and segregations and new starts, and
towards more comprehensive and graduated methods of development.
New religions, I think, appear and are possible and necessary in phases
of social disorganization, in phases when considerable numbers of people
are detached from old systems of direction and unsettled and distressed.
So, at any rate, it was Christianity appeared, in a strained and
disturbed community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental thought, and for
a long time it was confined to the drifting population of seaports and
great cities and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching the most
settled and most adjusted class, the pagani, last of all and in its most
adaptable forms. It was the greatest new beginning in the world's
history, and the wealth of political and literary and social and
artistic traditions it abandoned had subsequently to be revived and
assimilated to it fragment by fragment from the past it had submerged.
Now, I do not see that the world to-day presents any fair parallelism to
that sere age of stresses in whose recasting Christianity played the
part of a flux. Ours is on the whole an organizing and synthetic rather
than a disintegrating phase throughout the world. Old institutions are
neither hard nor obstinate to-day, and the immense and various
constructive forces at work are saturated now with the conception of
evolution, of secular progressive development, as opposed to the
revolutionary idea. Only a very vast and terrible war explosion can, I
think, change this state of affairs.
This conveys in general terms, at least, my interpretation of the
present time, and it is in accordance with this view that the world is
moving forward as a whole and with much dispersed and discrepant
rightness, that I do not want to go apart from the world as a whole into
any smaller community, with all the implication of an exclusive
possession of right which such a going apart involves. Put to the test
by my own Samurai for example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic
discipline, I found I did not in the least want to be one of that
organization, that it only expressed one side of a much more complex
self than its disciplines permitted. And still less do I want to hamper
the play of my thoughts and motives by going apart into the
particularism of a new religion. Such refuges are well enough when the
times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about the present age, so far
as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to
overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of
thinking instead of assimilating mine.
