CHAPTER XII

 

Epilogue

 

A FRIENDLY critic, who read the proofs of the following pages, complained that they were entirely negative in character.  'What you have done,' he said, 'is to expound Plato's case against Greek democracy and then to show that his own counter-proposals were completely ineffective.  After that you turned to the modern world and repeated the procedure.  You allowed Plato to criticize democracy and Fascism and Communism, and then you went on to pour cold water on all his positive philosophy.  So far, so good; but what conclusion is your reader meant to come to?  Where do you yourself stand?'  To these questions I shall try to give some answer in this chapter.

      In what I have so far written, I have tried to suppress my own views and to translate Plato's political philosophy into modern terms.  In so doing I have found myself in the position of an advocatus diaboli working out a case for dictatorship more convincing than that of most Fascist apologists whom I have read.  The result will, I fear, shock many readers of Plato.  They will be unwilling to accept the picture which I have presented, and will urge that it is a caricature, not a portrait, of the Plato whom they admire.  There are two comments to be made upon this criticism.  In the first place great philosophers have often been bad political and social critics.  The political influence of Hegel, for instance, was disastrous, and it is rare to find men like Aristotle and Hume who combined profound philosophical insight with an eye for practical affairs.  There is a danger that, out of respect for his eminence as a metaphysician, we should swallow Plato's political opinions too easily, and it was partly to meet this danger that Plato Today was written.  In the second place, I should not myself agree that the views I have attributed to the modern Plato are either negligible or absurd.  On the contrary, the criticisms which he has made of democracy and communism (the germs of which may all be found in the Republic) seem to me very difficult to controvert.  The reader may feel that Plato must be wrong; but he will not find it easy to build a case for democracy, either in the Liberal or in the Marxian sense of that word, which will withstand Plato's analysis.

      My answer then to my friendly critic is this: 'I am a democrat and a Socialist who sees Fascism rejected and democracy defended on quite inadequate grounds; and it is because I realize that our greatest danger today is not the easy acceptance but the easy rejection of Totalitarian philosophy, that I have tried to restate the Republic in modern terms.'

      It is a sound political principle not to underrate your opponent, and in this book I have tried to make him as formidable as possible, and to expose the weakness of much so-called democratic theory.  If the reader gets an uneasy feeling that he cannot controvert Plato's arguments, I shall be well content.  For in that case he will have begun to see that the real menace of Fascism is due to the scarcity of democrats with a practical and realistic creed.  Dictatorships do not arise merely owing to the folly of foreigners.  They are imposed firstly because democratic institutions become unmanageable and awkward for the ruling interests, and secondly because the common man does not find democracy worth defending.  The success of Fascism in the international field is due largely to the 'pacifism' of Great Britain.  This 'pacifism' in its turn is the result of a profound scepticism about the value of democracy and the League of Nations [this book, remember, pre-dates the United Nations - editor's note.].  The ordinary Englishman is not at the present moment prepared to die for anything really important, least of all for democracy.  And our statesmen seem to agree with him.  It is difficult to name one principle or obligation or imperial interest which they will not sacrifice to avoid war.

      Democracy, in fact, has lost belief in itself, and become an inert instead of a dynamic force in world affairs.  Fascism has the initiative; and we are content to sneer at its philosophy while we concede to its statesmen one vital interest after another.  This collapse of morale is partly due to our own self-ignorance.  Unlike our opponents, we are uncertain what the democracy is for which we stand.  Our paeans to freedom and justice and peace are empty formulae which hide a horrid doubt in our own minds, and our philosophy has become little better than an apology for concessions extorted from us by force of circumstance.  Whatever we do we dub 'democratic' and hope thereby to hide our dishonour from ourselves.  The sacrifice of Abyssinia [present-day Ethiopia] is excused on grounds of procedure, that of Spain on the score of preventing world-war.

      The trouble about most defenders of democracy is that their theory is so different from their practice.  They paint a picture of a country where the people is sovereign and where all men are equal before the law and then they equate this millennial vision with contemporary England.  Is it surprising that the man in the street begins to doubt the sincerity of politicians and publicists who constantly assure him that he is already in the Kingdom of Heaven?  Is it astonishing that he says, 'Well, if this is equality and liberty and justice, I don't think much of them'?  The League of Nations was killed by the enthusiasts who mistook a clumsy instrument of justice for justice itself.  Democracy is on the way to meeting the same fate.

      The first positive lesson, then, which Plato can teach us is that to defend democracy we must be as realistic as its opponents.  We must be able to see things as they are, and to distinguish ideal and fact; we must not only have fine ideals, but count up the cost of realizing them and recognize what changes they will undergo in the process of realization.  Above all we must not overestimate the nature of human beings, and learn from the Platos of this world just so much: that the ordinary man accepts comfort and security without worrying where they come from; that a Government's first job is to govern and only in the second place to govern well; that morality by itself can never outweigh interest; that justice is impossible unless there is power to enforce it; and lastly that political institutions are totally insignificant in comparison with social tradition and economic organization.

      To defend democracy, in fact, we must accept a great deal, both of Plato's criticism of democratic theory, and of his analysis of our present democratic institutions.  But this is not enough.  In the second place we must make up our minds precisely where his philosophy fails.  True democracy is un-Platonic, because it springs from the Christian notion of personality; and it is only if we believe in this notion that we can refute Plato and show that his philosophy has no sufficient message for the modern world.  If this is true, it should come as a shock to discover how well Plato's philosophy is adapted to our 'Christian' ways of thought - most of our Christian theory and practice is indistinguishable from it.  For this reason, as the true democrat must start with the assumption that the world has still to be made democratic, so the Christian must assume that it is still pagan, despite the existence of 'democratic' institutions and 'Christian' churches.  Only a revolutionary democracy and a revolutionary Christianity can hope to prevail today.  Institutionalism will kill them both, if it gets the chance, and turn them into 'noble lies' which modern Platonists can use to defend the status quo.

      For fundamentally both are the assertions of incredibles.  Against the realism of those who accept the existing order and seek to maintain it, they preach an impossibility and try to make it come true.  The true democrat and the true Christian admit the Platonic analysis of man as he is, but they know that they can change him by their faith in man as he ought to be.  It was this faith which Plato lacked, as I have tried to show in the concluding pages of the chapter on Communism.  He felt himself to be a member of a dying order in which the good was only a survival from a previous golden age; and so his philosophy and his political career were devoted to the defence of dying values against the corrosion of history.  Truth and justice in his view must be rescued by an élite.  The sphere of freedom must be contracted until it includes only those few elect spirits who are worthy of it.

      A real democratic philosophy will be resolutely opposed to such an outlook.  It cannot be content to defend a social order by the maintenance of an authoritarian tradition: on the contrary, it must be resolved to expand the sphere of freedom and, with this ideal in view, to take such practical measures as are necessary to enable every citizen to become a member of the élite.  Seeing the pettiness and spiritual poverty of the 'civilian' as clearly as Plato, it must ask 'what is the cause of this pettiness and spiritual poverty?  Are they intrinsic or are they resultants of a particular social and economic order?'  Admitting the plight of human nature, it will assert its infinite possibilities and will be prepared so to change the present order that these possibilities can become actualities.  For the democratic faith is not tied to any political or social system.  It regards all systems (including 'democracy') as instruments for the self-realization of human nature; and if representative institutions are shown to be no longer useful for that purpose then the democrat must look elsewhere for other instruments and better institutions.

      The modern democrat too often confounds parliamentary government with democracy, and assumes that every critic of the one must necessarily be an enemy of the other.  He forgets that parliaments were forged for specific purposes under specific historical conditions, and that the instruments of freedom can become, under changed conditions, the instruments of oligarchy.  And so he fails to realize that a defence of parliamentary government as such may, in certain circumstances, be completely undemocratic.  History is constantly putting new wine into old bottles.

      The faith of democracy, therefore, can never be expressed in the defence of anything.  You cannot defend democracy against Fascism, and if you try to, you will find yourself supporting your enemy unawares.  Democracy (because it is founded upon the infinite possibilities of human nature) must always be on the attack, always on the side of social change against the forces of 'law and order', always critical of established institutions and social codes.  It knows that, without the dynamic of its faith, human society will fall back into oligarchy and injustice.  Where faith in the impossible dies, Plato's estimate of human nature becomes correct.

      But democracy is not a mere ideal, mystically envisaged by a few dreamers; for the belief in the infinite value of human personality is also the belief in human reason, and at this point the ideal of Jesus is fused with that of Socrates.  I have tried to show how Plato, in his attempt to re-establish a Greek aristocratic order, departed further and further from the principles of his master, until he turned the Socratic belief in reason into a dogmatic and authoritarian code.  But democracy, just as it is tied to no particular institution, is tied to no eternal philosophy.  Democratic thought must always remain a searching for truth and the democrat can never cease to be the man who knows that he knows nothing.  He must regard all ready-made systems with suspicion: he must reject self-evident formulae and 'first principles' outright.  For he is aware of the all-inclusive nature of the historical process of which he is a part, and he knows that the dominant classes will and must build themselves rational structures with which to defend their economic and social supremacy.  Most men and all societies are naturally conservative: they try to deny change and to maintain ways of thought and action when they are no longer socially useful.  For this reason human intellect is chiefly used to justify inertia, and to extol as knowledge what is already prejudice.  The Socratic search for truth is the principle which seeks to undermine this dogmatism of inertia, to break down the rational defences of prejudice, and so to allow human personality to grow and to adapt itself to new conditions.  Denying that any system of theology or ethics or law or government can be eternally valid, it appeals against Reason to reason itself, against this system of justice to justice, against these laws to law.

      This appeal to the common sense and tot he critical faculty of the ordinary man against the formidable structures of established orthodoxy is the vital force of democratic philosophy.  On the one hand it displays a deep humility - for it admits its own inability to formulate an eternal truth.  On the other it profoundly challenges the infallibility of all the promulgators of Reason and denies that they are an élite endowed with superior powers.  Its innate humility is therefore the deadliest enemy of absolutism in all forms.  Its simple assertion that all men are equal in their ignorance of the final values is the dissolvent of vested interests in knowledge and in social power.

      The attack of democratic reason upon absolutism has taken different forms in different epochs.  Socrates was compelled by his creed to attack Athenian democracy, Jesus to expose the Pharisees.  In our own era the doctrines of natural right and social contract were in the first place weapons for the destruction of authoritarian Government and Churches.  Then in their turn they become the philosophical bulwarks of a new bourgeois social system, and Marxism took their place as the instrument of social criticism.  The democratic spirit, directly its ideals become accepted and established, is forced to escape from them and to find other and newer concepts with which to fulfil its task as the 'gadfly' of human lethargy.

      The crisis of the modern world is at bottom caused by the failure of this democratic spirit to find a new basis for its attack on dogma.  Our world is breaking up; but we remain supporters of one or other of the established forms - adherents of status, not of equality.  The Fascism which confronts us is the self-conscious refusal of the power-that-be to face the necessity of change; and it has drawn to itself a pseudo-revolutionary enthusiasm, merely because the democratic spirit, becoming institutionalized, has lost its forward drive.

      This fact is glaringly obvious if we examine the political Left in our own country.  Much of its organization and philosophy is well-nigh as conservative as that of its opponents.  Its early missionary zeal is gone; its thought has settled down into well-worn dogmatic channels.  Instead of uniting the discontented and the oppressed by the fervour of its message, it is too often content to defend what privileges its supporters possess, and to purge itself of heresies and of unorthodox zealots.  Left and Right today are alike social institutions, part and parcel of the existing order, living alongside one another and scratching each other occasionally according to the polite ceremonies of parliamentary procedure.  The same holds true of the trade unions and the Cooperative movement, and above all of the Churches.  They, too, have settled down to fulfil their appointed function in the status quo.

      This institutionalism is mirrored in the thought of many so-called Radicals.  For the most part Socialist analysis has become scholastic, a studious development of a received body of doctrine which grows ever more academic and more remote from the current problems of society.  The result of this loss of social dynamic is twofold.  On the one hand, the Conservative forces, robbed of the healthy impact of Radical criticism, are completely immobile, and on the other, the few men and women who still feel the spirit of democracy find no corporate body in which they can play their part.  Unable to cooperate in the work of social emancipation, isolated and bitter in their enforced inactivity, they become anarchic and egocentric prophets, or, retiring from the social struggle, relapse into aesthetic or mystical dilettantism.  Like Socrates, they find no ground where their seed can grow, and so their criticism, which should stimulate a healthy movement of change, only goes to accelerate the process of social disintegration.

      Such is the state of modern democracy in which Fascism is bound to grow.  It can be cured only if we become urgently aware of the imminence of the catastrophe, and if, holding fast to our denial of the infallibility of established dogma, and believing still in the infinite possibilities latent in human nature, we try to awaken once more the spirit of conscientious objection to prejudice and to Phariseeism of which Socrates was the first example.   Only when Western civilization has shaken off the shackles of the past and created a new social order worthy of the human dignity of the common man, will democracy and religion be once more realized in human society.  Till then both must remain faiths, filled with a prophetic anger at the sight of the nations and societies which use their name in vain, and, because they are grounded in the heart of the common man, powerful enough to remove mountains.

      It is Socrates, not Plato, whom we need.