The New Society | Page 6

own destinies.
The inner laws of the community harmonize with those of the
individuals who compose it. The fact that certain national traits of will
and character are conditioned or even enforced by poverty or wealth,
soil and climate, an inland or maritime position, tends to obscure the
fact that these external conditions are not really laid on the people but

have been willed by themselves. A people wills to have a nomadic life,
or wills to have a sea-coast, or wills agriculture, or war; and has the
power, if its will be strong enough, to obtain its desire, or failing that to
break up and perish. It is the same will and character which decides for
well-being and culture, or indolence and dependence, or labour and
spiritual development. The Venetians did not have architecture and
painting bestowed upon them because they happened to have become
rich, nor the English sea-power because they happened to live on an
island: no, the Venetians willed freedom, power and art, and the
Anglo-Saxons willed the sea.
There is a grain of truth in the popular political belief that war
embodies a judgment of God. At any rate character is judged by it; not
indeed in the sense of popular politics, that one can "hold out" in a
hopeless position, but because all the history that went before the war,
the capacity or incapacity of politics and leadership is a question of
character--and with us it was a question of indolence, of political
apathy, of class-rule, philistinish conceit and greed of gain. Nowhere
was this conception of the judgment of God so blasphemously
exaggerated as with us Germans, when the lord of our armed hosts, at
the demand of the barracks greedy for power, of the tavern-benches, the
state-bureaus and the debating societies was summoned, and charged
with the duty, forsooth, of chastising England--England, which they
only knew out of newspaper reports! To-day this exaggeration is being
paid for in humiliation, for God did not prove controllable, and His
naïve blasphemers must silently and with grinding teeth admit that their
foes are in the right when they, in their turn, appeal to the same
judgment to justify, without limit, everything they desire to do.
After these brief observations on the psycho-physical complex, Spirit
and Destiny, we hope we shall not be misunderstood when for the sake
of brevity we speak as if the spirit of the new order were determined by
its material construction, while in reality it incorporates itself therein.
The structure is the easier to survey, and we therefore make it the
starting-point of our discussion.

IV
All civilisations known to us have sprung from peoples which were
numerous, wealthy and divided into two social strata. They reached
their climax at the moment when the two strata began to melt into one.
It is not enough, therefore, that a people should be numerous and
wealthy; it must, with all its wealth and its power, contain a large
proportion of poor and even oppressed and enslaved subjects. If it has
not got these, it must master and make use of other foreign cultures as a
substitute. That is what Rome did; it is what America is doing.
It is terrible, but comprehensible. For up to this point the unconscious
processes of Nature, the law of mutual strife, has prevailed. So far,
collective organizations have been beasts of prey; only now are they
about to cross the boundaries of the human order.
Comprehensible and explicable. For all creations of culture hold
together; one cannot pursue the cheaper varieties while renouncing the
more costly. There is no cheap culture. In their totality they demand
outlay, the most tremendous outlay known to history, the only outlay
by which human toil is recompensed, over and above the supply of
absolute necessaries.
The creations of civilisation, like all things living and dead, follow on
each other--plants, men, beasts and utensils have their sequence
generation after generation. Men must paint and look at pictures for ten
thousand years before a new picture comes into existence. Our poetry
and our research are the fruit of thousands of years. This is no
disparagement to genius in work and thought, genius is at once new,
ancient and eternal, even as the blossom is a new thing on the old stem,
and belongs to an eternal type. When we hear that a native in Central
Africa or New Zealand has produced an oil-painting we know that
somehow or other he must have got to Paris. When a European artist
writes or paints in Tahiti, what he produces is not a work of Tahitian
culture. When civilisation has withered away on some sterilized soil, it
can only be revived by new soil and foreign seed.

The continuity of culture, even in civilized times, can only, however,
be