CHAPTER VII
Plato Looks at the Family
IN the two previous chapters we have
seen something of the modern Plato's attitude to British democracy, and of his
suggestions for its reform. Not content
to examine institutions or modes of government, he has tried to analyse the
social tradition which inspires them and to discover the principles according
to which its development should proceed.
His advice can be summed up quite briefly. Preserve at all costs your aristocratic
tradition, that ruling is the responsibility of the few; but purge it of the
corrupting influences, which the industrial revolution brought, by the
deliberate formation of a new aristocracy of intellect and character, which
will resolutely aim at political power and use it for the enforcement of reason
and justice.
This advice is
in effect a demand for revolutionary action; for it involves the exclusion from
political power of the property owner and of the mass of the people. But it is not revolution of the accepted
kind, since it is neither in the interest of the capitalists nor of the
proletariat. The Platonic statesman
would be equally opposed to the dictatorship of the 'haves' and to that of the
'have nots', seeing in both the domination of one
social group and the perpetuation of the class struggle. Finding his inspiration in the past, he would
try to restore the harmony of interests which he would claim existed before the
bourgeois revolution, and for this reason he can be
called a conservative revolutionary.
For his aim is at all costs to preserve the ethos of the British
tradition from the dangers of Liberalism and Fascism and Communism. This ethos, he believes, still lives
in the hearts of the people, but it has been strangled by the foreign
excrescences which the industrial revolution plastered over it. These he must tear off, in order that the
true spirit of the community can flourish again.
But political
and economic revolution is not enough.
After any such violent changes, it is only a matter of time before the
new Government begins to abuse its power.
There never has been and never will be a revolution which did not teem
with good intentions and inaugurate a new era of social justice. But once the transference of power has been
accomplished and a new class has occupied the seat of government, a change
occurs. The economic advantages of
political control become apparent to the new rulers, their good intentions are
forgotten, and the common man to whom freedom was promised finds himself
enslaved once more. Revolution therefore
is a waste of time and human life, unless it is accompanied by a change in the
men who make it, as well as in the institutions they control.
To change men is
far more difficult than to change institutions.
For the latter can be destroyed and rebuilt by the application of force,
the former cannot. Man cannot be forced
to be good: he can only be trained and persuaded and cajoled into seeing the
folly of his ways. A statesman can draft
a law and publish it: he can even compel men to obey it. But he himself is under no such compulsion,
and it is the maker of laws who must be just and honest if a constitution is to
work. On his morality depends the
happiness of the community, and unless he freely accepts the commands of
justice, he will be a tyrant, and not a true ruler.
But the moral
code is not purely a matter for the individual will, nor is the individual
entirely free to accept or to reject it.
He is himself a product of it, and conditioned by the institutions of
the society in which he lives. The human
soul is not a mysterious force with a life of its own, floating in a spiritual
ether outside the everyday world of action, every now and then darting down to
assert, 'This is right and that is wrong', but a member of that world,
conditioned by it and conditioning it too.
We are both creatures and creators of our environment, and freedom is
just the consciousness of this fact and the understanding of its
implications. I am not free to jump
thirty feet across a river: the laws of gravity and the structure of my body
limit my freedom. But I am free to study
the workings of nature and to build a bridge across which I can safely
walk. Again, I am not free to renounce
the morality of my home and country and civilization; I cannot do it because it
is part of my personality and a mainspring of my will. But I am free to study that morality, to
analyse its implications, and in the light of that knowledge to try to modify
it and redirect it in the direction which I think right.
This
understanding and redirection of current morality must be undertaken if any
political revolution is to achieve success.
The statesman must change not only the constitution and laws and
economic system, but also the moral and social institutions by which men live. For the former must ultimately conform to the
latter. If the ruling class behave
aggressively and self-assertively in their private lives, and their moral code
encourages such behaviour, then no political reform will permanently prevent
war; instead, social habits will modify the political institutions to suit
themselves. If the acquisitive instinct
is stimulated by religion or morality, then no Communist society will remain
Communist for long: property will make its appearance in some form or other.
The Platonic
statesman therefore, like the modern Communist, cannot admit that private life
and morality are the concern only of the individual. For him there is no distinction of
self-regarding and other-regarding actions.
The most intimate secrets of private life must be opened to him and he
must analyse and direct them in the proper way.
If we ask what are the most important elements in our private life, there
can be no real doubt of the correct answer.
Marriage and the family are the central institutions of all human
societies. They engage our attention for
more hours a day than anything, except perhaps our work: they are the cause of
more happiness and misery than any other single factor, and lastly, they are
the thread upon which the future race depends.
They are therefore the first institutions which we must analyse, trying
both to discover their raison d'être and to consider the part they must
play in the social order.
Plato's attitude
to them was as simple as it was revolutionary.
With the Greek city-state in mind, he proposed their total abolition for
all members of the ruling élite. No ruler in his State is allowed to be a
husband or a wife. The men and women
will live together in common barracks, without privacy and on perfectly equal
terms. Permanent relationships between
them will be forbidden as absolutely as free love. There will be neither promiscuity nor
marriage, because they will all be so intent on the work of government and the
discovery of truth that they cannot be allowed to waste time on personal
relations.
But children
will be needed for the State, and so regular religious festivals will be
arranged where those suitable and eugenically fit will be brought
together. On these occasions special
privileges will be granted to those who have distinguished themselves in battle
or in public service, and it will be ensured that the best citizens produce
most children. Women will be allowed to
mate between twenty and forty, men between twenty-five and forty-five, but no
permanent relations may be entered into.
They must meet once only in the sacred festival and then depart upon
their respective businesses.
When the child
is born it will be taken from its mother and brought up in a State
nursery. The mother may come to suckle
it, but the greatest care is taken to prevent her recognizing her own child,
for all the rulers are one family and the mother must regard all children
equally hers. So, too, with the
children: they must never know who their parents are, but treat all the elders
of the ruling class as fathers and mothers, all their contemporaries as
brothers and sisters. For they are to be
trained to be not private citizens with private interests, but public servants
caring only for the State.
That, in short,
is Plato's revolutionary plan for the ideal relationship of man to woman and of
parent to child. But he did not propose
it for the man in the street, and more than he proposed the abolition of
private property for him. The subject
classes were to be allowed everything a man could wish - except
self-government. Only the members of the
ruling class were to have no property, no wives or husbands and no families,
and Plato gave three reasons for this strange regulation of the rulers'
life. In the first place he argued that
if a man really cares about his job he will not want to be distracted by
marriage or by children. Love and
marriage are two of the most disturbing things in life. They take up a great deal of time and they
are an interruption to any profession or trade.
The more wrapped up he is in his job the more a man tends to neglect his
family, and Plato argued that if he is really interested in the work for its
own sake, then he will not want to be distracted by wife or children. In the case of civilians the distractions
will not matter so much, because they are under the absolute dictatorship of
the ruling class. The lovelorn farmer or
the banker who is too much of a family man can be kept up to scratch by
Government control. But
there is no-one to supervise the ruling élite,
and so they must be relieved of these distractions. The ruler must not be a bread-winner or a
family man: he must be interested in philosophy to the exclusion of everything
else; and if he is, then he will not want, and must not be allowed to have, a
wife and family.
When Plato
abolished marriage and the family he was not preaching a doctrine of free love
and easy morals. He was demanding a more
rigid self-control for his ruling class than the ordinary man can achieve. His ideal was not unlike that of the monk or
priest who takes vows of celibacy and tries to sublimate his earthly emotions
and his human love into love of God and service to the community. But the Platonic ruler differs from the monk
in two particulars. Firstly, he
considers the future: he sees that if no-one marries there will be no children;
and since the rulers are the pick of the population it is their duty to have as
many children as is consistent with their efficiency as rulers. So Plato advocated not celibacy for his
rulers, but eugenics, the breeding of children as carefully as horses or dogs
are bred today, and with as little personal interest in the woman or the child
as the expert horse breeder feels in his horses. The really responsible citizen, says Plato,
must not produce children just to satisfy a personal whim or to please someone
he or she is in love with. The children
must be produced for the State, and according to scientific principles of
breeding. They are not to be mere
products of love, or by-products of personal pleasures. Child-bearing is, in fact, a duty, like
soldiering or administering the State, and must be strictly regarded as
such. That is the first difference
between the morality of Plato's ruler and that of the monk or the Catholic
priest.
In the second
place, Plato did not believe that human love or physical passion were in
themselves wicked as some religious people are inclined to believe. No Greek could believe the body evil: the
Greeks knew more of its beauty than any other nation, and human love seemed to
them the most natural thing in the world, with its natural expression in
physical emotion. Plato was a moralist
but he was not a Puritan, and he saw no reason to forbid his rulers the
pleasures of physical intercourse any more than he forbade them the pleasures
of physical exercise or of food and drink.
Such pleasures, in his view, do no harm in their proper place; they are
not in themselves wicked: but they are wrong if they distract rulers from their
work. So love and physical emotion were
permissible in his view if they were kept strictly on a level with other
physical emotions, if, in fact, they were depersonalized and given no
continuity or permanence. Plato would
not have minded his rulers liking nice furniture or beautiful buildings: only they
must not want to possess them. So, too,
with human love: if it was treated as a passing pleasure, like a glass of good
wine, Plato would have found it wholesome: but if it meant falling in love with
someone, wanting to be with her always, missing her when she was away, worrying
whether she cared for you, and so on - then Plato would have said it had become
a distraction and must be forbidden to the man whose work was ruling.
For this reason,
if no other, Plato would have welcomed the invention of contraceptives and
encouraged their use among his élite. For the contraceptive emphasizes the
distinction between the two aspects of sex as an expression of love and as a
means of procreation. By decreasing
anxiety with regard to childbirth, it allows a more carefree pleasure in the
sexual act and enables man to plan the breeding of children
scientifically. Plato had admitted the
use of abortion to destroy children produced by women too old for perfect
childbearing and since he encouraged his rulers after a certain age to be free
in their sexual intercourse provided they did not lose interest in their work,
the contraceptive would have seemed to him an instrument by the use of which
reason can control matter and still further depersonalize the sexual act.
This brings us
to Plato's second reason for forbidding marriage and the family to his ruling
class. Falling in love, he argued, and
wanting a family are really expressions of the acquisitive instinct. He had forbidden his ruling class any form of
property whatsoever, and so he argued that marriage and the family, which are
really a sort of property, must be forbidden to them too. The love of man for woman is based on a
longing for ownership and pride of possession.
Each in their own way, husband and wife regard each other as a
possession to be jealously guarded. Each
of them usually dislikes it if the other shows too much interest in the
opposite sex. Why is this unless their
feelings are fundamentally possessive?
We tend to think of the lover as a romantic figure full of
self-sacrifice and devotion. Plato
thought he was far more concerned with getting hold of something he wanted,
enjoying it in private and enjoying the fact that no-one else could share his
enjoyment. Human love between man and
woman was in his view a sort of mutual ownership which built a wall round the
two people and cut them off from other people.
And the same, in
Plato's view, applies to the family. It
is an exclusive organization, a private world into which we try to escape, and
in the security of which we seek comfort and satisfaction. Even if we do make sacrifices for our
children's education and feel ourselves highly magnanimous in doing so, we do
it because they are our children and we are proud of our
productions. A man will sacrifice time
and money for his garden, to make it beautiful: a woman may expend hours on
improving her appearance. They would not
claim to be disinterested in doing either of these things. But is not their attitude to their children
very much the same? They want the
children to be successes, not really for the children's sake, but because the
children belong to them and they want their children to win the prizes of life
in competition against their neighbours'.
Plato thought
this exclusive sense of property was an inevitable accompaniment to marriage,
and that for this reason marriage was just as dangerous to the ruler as
property. It would corrupt his loyalty
to the State and give him a private interest which would distract him from his
job. For Plato was a revolutionary; he
wanted his pupils to be men who could work miracles and change the world: and
he thought that the only people that really change the world are the people who
have no feeling for private property as such, even wives and children. Four hundred and fifty years later Jesus was
to urge the same thing to His chosen apostles.
He, too, insisted that they should give up father and mother and family
- everything for His sake. But, like
Plato, He realized this vocation could only be for the few, and added
the text: 'He that is able to receive it, let him
receive it.' Everyone is not capable of
the supreme sacrifice. The real
revolutionary, the man or woman who is to transform the world, must put his
work first and his friends second. He
must renounce them, not grudgingly with a feeling of loss, but gladly, because
he cares for something infinitely more valuable. He cannot have friends or family in the usual
sense of the word because he is so intent upon achieving his ideal of human society
that he has no time or interest for individual human beings. In his personal relations he will probably
seem cold and inhuman, irresponsible and changeable, as if he did not care
about any human beings at all. He cares
too passionately for humanity to feel much love for human beings.
In the third
place Plato argued that marriage must involve an inferior status for
women. In the
It is one of the
ironies of history that the phrase 'Platonic love' should have come to mean a
spiritual relationship devoid of physical desire. Such love, in Plato's view, was fit only for
God, and he never advocated it between his citizens. He assumed that human beings will express the
love they feel for one another, and it was in an effort to raise the level of
that love from self-assertion to partnership that he abolished marriage. The inferior place of women in
Plato remained
at heart a Greek. The ideal for him was
the love of man for man, and his twofold aim was to purify homosexual
relationships of their physical brutalities and at the same time to raise the
relationship of man and woman to the homosexual level. Men were to treat women as they treated boys,
and to forget as far as possible that they bore children. His rulers should fall in love with one
another, disregarding their differences of sex, man with man or woman with
woman or man with woman. They should not
take these affairs too seriously or become wrapped up in the physical side, but
should regard the physical desires as minor pleasures, compared to the real
delights of companionship and cooperation and intellectual discussion.
For Plato was
convinced that love is the basis of true philosophy. A true friendship will start on the physical
plane and should not be thwarted on that plane.
But soon it will transcend the body and, as it matures, will become the
cooperation of equals in the achievement of a common purpose. The lovers will feel themselves rivals in
their life's work, encouraging and helping and competing with one another, and
finally they will find the consummation of desire in dialectic and discussion
and philosophizing which alone can attain truth. With this inspiration, the lovers cease to be
'in love', since their love is now centred on truth, and they will regard
sexual satisfaction as 'play' and relaxation from the enterprise which they
share. [See the speech of Diotima
in the SYMPOSIUM.]
Thus Plato was
forced to deny that sex differentiation is in any way fundamental, in order to
maintain that Reason, the immortal part of the soul, is shared by men and women
alike. If woman is not to be relegated
to the Mohammedan level, she must be held capable of
philosophy, and her sexual differences regarded as accidental to her true
nature. In that case, the distinction of
normal and perverse relations is unreal, since the friendship of two rational
beings is equally good, to whichever sex they belong. It is only when we descend to the utilitarian
level and consider the procreation of children, that sex difference becomes
important; but here love must cease, to be replaced by civic obligation and the
iron discipline of eugenic law.
The abolition of
marriage was a tremendous assertion of the rights of woman. It raised her to the level of man, and it
postulated her rational nature. But it
has never been kindly received by Plato's readers, who are often shocked by its
'immorality', its equanimity in the face of perversion, and its clear
separation of sexual pleasure from procreation.
Plato knew that this would happen.
Recognizing the strength of taboo and superstition, he put it forward in
a very tentative fashion, but there is no part of his writing which surpasses
this passage [See REPUBLIC Book V.] in its style, imagination, or philosophical clarity. In the fact of every instinct and prejudice,
he was clear-sighted enough to see that, if women were equals of men, and to be
treated as such, then sexual morality must be drastically altered and marriage
and the family, in the form in which he knew them, must be abolished.
But can you free
women from their bondage? Plato thought
it was only possible for a select few.
Most women are happiest uneducated and doing the work of the home, just
as most men are happiest in the security of subjection to dictatorship. But the women of the ruling class, if they
are to be worthy partners of the men and produce worthy children, must be free,
and to achieve this Plato saw no other way open than to abolish marriage and
the family. It was essential for man and
woman alike. Given marriage, he said,
man will always be the dominant partner, the possessor, woman the passive
recipient, the possessed. And she will
compensate for this inferior position by accentuating her sexual charms and
becoming the possessor in matters of physical emotion. She will spend time and money on making
herself beautiful and attractive, and she will long for the power over men
which those attractions afford. Plato
was a feminist not only in the sense that he wanted to free the best women from
the bondage of the family; he also wanted to free them from the ambitions which
that bondage imposed on them.
It is often said
that women are more influenced than men by consideration of persons. They think in terms of people, not of
programmes and ideas, and they accept ideas not because they are true, but
because those ideas are associated in their minds with male admirers. Plato would argue that this was due to their
inferior position. They never can get
away from personal relations because they are economically and mentally
dependent on men. And so their whole
ambitions are concentrated either on captivating men or on making their
children into successes. To free them
from these narrow ambitions, to get them to look beyond persons, to ideas, and
to give them real intellectual and moral independence, he was willing to
abolish the home, and he argued that most women would not like this at
all. They would not be willing to
surrender the power which physical charm gives them, or to be treated by men
exactly as though they were colleagues of slightly inferior ability. They would feel slighted and disappointed when
they could no longer rely on the chivalry and romantic love of the dominant
male. But women, in Plato's view, cannot
have it both ways: they cannot break up the home and demand perfect equality
and then use that equality merely to further their womanly ambitions. And for this reason only a woman who is
prepared to be treated as a colleague and fellow-worker would be allowed to be
a member of his ruling class. If the
woman wants to rely on her charms, then she must accept the inferior position
and the inferior responsibilities of home life.
She can enjoy either the chivalry of men or equality with men, but she
cannot have both.
It is not
sufficient to treat this theory with disgust and ridicule, or to assert that it
is the product of the perversions of a degenerate age and therefore has no
applicability today. Modern feminist
movements have nearly always urged the complete equalization of the sexes, and
advocated the opening of all professions to women. Claiming that women are 'as good' as men,
they have tried to break down all the ties which bind women to home and
husband, and have often advocated a free and voluntary partnership of the
sexes. Their propaganda has taken the
line that women should be allowed to behave as men behave, not that women
should be free to develop their special talents. And for this reason women's education and
sport have been definitely modelled on that of men, notwithstanding the fact
that on these lines women as a whole are usually inferior to men. We have only to examine the European
university to see that Plato's arguments are still the assumptions of feminism
and of advanced educational theory.
But modern
theory has not often seen as clearly as Plato the consequences of this
assumption. If the proper place of woman
in society is alongside man, if there is no distinction of civic function
between them, and the 'good life' is identical for both sexes, then the chief
justification of marriage as a permanent union disappears. Two men may be good friends and decide to live
together, but it would be fantastic for them to consummate a permanent union:
why, then, should the bond between a man and a woman, each devoted to his or
her professional work, be inviolable provided that, with the aid of scientific
technique, they produce no children, or alternatively that the State takes over
the education of the family? And
secondly, if woman, like man, is to put her profession first and her home
second, can it still be asserted that the home is the best place for the
upbringing of children at all? The
justification for the home as the educational centre disappears when woman
regards it as the place of relaxation from her daily work.
Whether we like
it or not, the equalization of the sexes must seek to approximate the life of
women to that of men, if for no other reason because men have dominated
society and male activity and education have been the model of feminist
agitation. There is no special function
for women in society, apart from the care of children and home, because there
never has been: and therefore feminism is the assertion by the inferior sex
that she can live a man's life nearly as well as men. By this assertion woman denies her
differences and special excellences, and is content to 'place second fiddle' to
the dominant male, as boys ape their adult idols. And so the attempt to demand 'equality of
status' confirms woman in an inferior position, making her the weaker
competitor in a race she must always lose.
The chivalry which men felt for a sex which, in spite of its physical
and theoretical inferiority, could do many things better than they, is replaced
by a kindly sympathy and encouragement for a weaker rival. And conversely the marriage partnership in which a man's capacities were increased by
his wife's personal help and encouragement, so that she, as a woman, actually
contributed something to his work which no man could give, is turned into an
unequal rivalry, with all the friction that rivalry must bring. The failure of many modern marriages must be
attributed to Platonic ideals: and the decrease in the birth-rate is due not so
much to the introduction of contraceptives, as to their use by women in order
to liberate themselves from the bondage of the family. Contraceptives have never stopped a mother
from having a family if she wanted to have one: to her they are only a
god-given method of protecting her family's best interests from the sexual
passion of the unruly male.
Plato faces us
with the full problem of 'feminism'.
Granted the initial assumption that woman to be free must adopt the life
of man, he shows (1) that in this case she is likely to be a weaker rival, (2)
that the care of children must be taken from her, and (3) that in a society of
free men and women sexual pleasure and child-bearing will be divorced from one
another. The former will become an
individual gratification of private desire, the latter a civic obligation whose
control can only be entrusted to the State.
But he also shows that this new form of society will only survive if it
can produce a new self-control and a new sexual morality. Men and women may declare themselves
'equal' and proclaim that the old era of male possession and female slavery is
closed. Such declarations will have no
effect against deep-seated habits so long as permanent marriage-unions are
retained. For sexual passion is
possessive and jealous. The lover, so
long as he is in love, wants some sort of 'permanent' union. If, therefore, woman claims equality of
opportunity in a society where the institution of marriage is still preserved,
the result will be not the depersonalization of sexual relations, but an
intensification of the romantic bond.
There will be more divorces - but while they last marriages will be more
passionate and more jealous than before.
Sex will become a dominant fact in social life, disturbing the
efficiency of the worker even more than before.
For, although the social utility of marriage will have been destroyed,
the institution will remain as a justification and an incentive to possessiveness
and jealous. to
equalize the sexes, while retaining the institutions of marriage and the
family, is in Plato's view to have the worst of two contrasted moral systems.
This would be
Plato's judgement on our age, and on our astonishing obsession with sexual
problems. He would not call us really
equal, since equality of the sexes, in his view, can only be achieved where
passion is depersonalized, and false romance
suppressed by the abolition of all permanent unions. The justification for permanent marriage was
the existence of the family. When this
is gone, sexual possessiveness and marriage have no social utility, and the
former becomes the jealous passion of a child shouting that no-one shall share
its toys. The idea that either man or
woman has the right to enjoy friendship as a private pleasure, where there is
no social justification for this privacy, would repel Plato, just as it would
repel him if a man claimed to exclude everyone from his property, when he was
not working on it or enriching the community with its produce. Marriage, like private ownership, when it
ceases to be socially beneficial, becomes a social disease.
And so we are
faced with a tragic dilemma. If woman is
to be free and gain the status of man, then sexual possessiveness - and
marriage with it - must be suppressed.
If, on the other hand, we value the institution of the family and doubt
our powers to change the deep-seated instincts of sexual life, then woman must
renounce the status of man and retain the marriage partnership as the chief
function of her life. There is only one
way out of this dilemma and Plato took it.
He suggested that some men and women are capable of a higher morality,
but most are not. If we follow Plato,
however, we must face the fresh problem which a differential morality brings,
and devise a legal system under which there is one code for the élite and another for the common people.
Plato would
suggest that we had almost reached this stage today without realizing it. We are divided into the emancipated and the
traditionally minded, but the emancipated are not aware of their
responsibilities. They are content to
use the scientific discoveries of birth-control for the gratification of
personal pleasure, and to pour an easy ridicule on the superstitious folly and
brutalities of the conservative majority.
They claim that they alone are free and reasonable: but although they
renounce the old morality, they are enslaved by their own obsessions and refuse
to subject themselves voluntarily to the sterner discipline which true equality
demands. They do not realize that the
common man may, in fact, be happier and contented to remain 'brutal' and
'uncivilized', because they forget that the social and economic conditions of
his life are vastly different from their own leisured and wealthy freedom. The instability and unhappiness of modern
life arise chiefly in Plato's view from this irresponsibility of the leisured
intelligentsia whose reason is employed, not on the constructive task of
discovering the new self-discipline which a changing world demands, but in
ridiculing an institution whose social utility they disregard.
Plato would have
cited the first phase of the Russian Revolution as an example of this false
Liberalism with regard to morality, a crude misapplication of his own theory to
modern life. Basing themselves on the
philosophy of Marx, the Communists urged that to reform society they must
reform private morality as well. They,
too, broke up the home because it made woman the bond-servant of man and
because children should be the possession not of the parents but of the
State. Encouraging women to work as the
equals of men, they made State crèches and nurseries where the children could
be left while the parents were at work, and they enabled men and women to get
divorced as easily as we allow them to get married. They did this not because they disbelieved in
morality and convention, but because they wanted to abolish private ownership
by one person of another person's life.
They argued that if you disapprove of the private ownership of the means
of production, because it puts the worker at the mercy of the employer, then
you must also disapprove of marriage because it makes women and children
dependent on the whims and fancies of the father. And so in the 1920s the Russian Revolution
was not only an experiment in economic planning, but also an experiment in a
new social morality and a new relationship of man to woman and of parents to
children.
But there was
one difference between this Communist attitude to the family and that which
Plato advocated. Just as Plato was
content to leave most people their private property, so he was content to leave
most people their family life. His
Communism was a Communism of the élite. There, as everywhere else, the Russians, to
start with, were more democratic. Their
Communism was for everyone, just as their education was for everyone, and so
they made their new social morality a universal code, and tried to free all the
women of
Long ago, in
1848, Karl Marx wrote a warning which Lenin left unheeded. He said that if we merely abolish the
restraints and restrictions of marriage we break down morality and level human
life down to the standard of the beast.
By given men and women absolute freedom in their sexual life we let lust
and greed run rampant, and women who were previously the private property of
men become the public property of all who care to use them. Their position is worse than before: for now
they are the common spoil of the whole community.
Something very
like this did happen in the early years of the Russian Revolution. An old morality was abolished and in its
place came a freedom which the ordinary man and woman were not strong enough to
enjoy. A few idealists in