Monotheism saw man through the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman empire; but today the benevolent scepticism of humanism seems better suited to our situation. What is evident is that it is ridiculous to regard this opposition as a struggle or battle, in which one side must be defeated and the other victorious; instead it should be regarded as the nature of the human polity, the sine qua non of being in society and in evolution.
49 A Christian says: ‘If all were good, all would be happy’. A socialist says: ‘If all were happy, all would be good’. A fascist says: ‘If all obeyed the state, all would be both happy and good’. A lama says: ‘If all were like me, happiness and goodness would not matter’. A humanist says: ‘Happiness and goodness need more analysis’. This last is the least deniable view.
SOCIALISM
50 Napoleon once said: ‘Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion’. He was not of course speaking as a theorist of history, but justifying his Concordat with the Vatican; however, this Machiavellian statement suggests admirably both the aims and the difficulties of socialism.
51 Socialism-Communism is an attempt to readjust and to reinterpret Christianity. But among the features of Christianity it sent to the guillotine was the essential one: mystery. Christianity rots because it attempts to preserve a false mystery; socialism will rot because it attempts to abolish a true one.
52 Like Christianity, it has retained the launching mechanism too long after the launching. In order to achieve a greater social justice, the early socialists disseminated various striking but crude theories of equality, of materialism, of history; they idolized the proletariat and blackened all that was not the proletariat. They turned socialism into a bludgeon, a vast explosion. What we need now is not a vast explosion. We need less force, and more thought; less doctrine, and more assessment.
53 For all its hostility to earlier religions, socialism is a religion itself; and this is nowhere more apparent than in its hatred of heresy, of any criticism that does not take certain articles of dogma as incontrovertible statements about reality. Acceptance of dogma becomes a chief proof of one’s faith in the creed. This leads at once to petrifaction.
54 The great problem at the heart of socialism is this: in order to bring social justice to the many, the leaders of socialism were obliged to give them power. But the proletariat are far more skilled at discovering what they want than what they need; so giving them power constituted giving them power to say what they want, not giving them objectivity to see what they need! What the many need above all else is education; they need to be led, not to be leaders. It is this delicate balance that socialist leaders have to keep – on one hand to stay in power they must placate the desires of the many for consumer goods, for the tawdry trivia of life, sufficiently to ensure that they shall not be outbid by the right wing (and even in the most Communist countries there is a right wing), and on the other hand they have to persuade the many that there are nobler things in life than unrestrained free enterprise and the pursuit of cream cake and television circuses. They need the power, the might of the people, and then the consent of the people to the proposition that might is not right; that a universal and ill-educated electorate needs guidance as well as obedience from its elected representatives and governors.
55 Socialism has its afterlife myth, not in a hypothetical other world, but in a hypothetical future of this world. Marxism and Leninism both proclaim, use and abuse the notion of perfectibility; justifying bad means by good ends.
56 Socialism has other myths, such as that of the intrinsic nobility of labour.
57 The welfare state provides material welfare and psychological illfare. Too much social security and equality breed individual restlessness and frustration: hazard starvation and variety starvation. The nightmare of the welfare state is boredom.
58 Full employment, a planned economy, state ownership of primary industries, national insurance and free medical treatment are admirable things in a society. But such provisions require other provisions. We fortify one flank, and trust the enemy not to attack the other. But evolution knows no chivalry. The higher the standard of living, the greater the need for variety. The greater the leisure, the greater the lack of tension. And the price of salt rises.
59 The welfare state as at present envisaged annihilates factors that evolution values highly: hazard and mystery. This is not an argument against the general principle of the welfare state, but against the inadequacy of present notions of the welfare state, and of what constitutes equality. We need less
60 Social stagnation is most likely to occur in extreme societies – extremely just or extremely unjust – and must lead to one of three things: war, decay, or revolution.
61 We need a science that studies the amount of variety, of excitement, of change, of risk of all kinds that the average individual and the average society needs; and why they should need them.
62 Socialism is bedevilled by the spirit of endless and unconsidered yearning towards an impossible equality, conservatism by the pig belief that the fortunate must at all costs ensure their good fortune. Christianity and socialism have both partly failed. In the no-man’s-land between the two stagnant armies there is only one philosophy: the conservative one of self.
63 Yet both Christianity and socialism gain adherents, simply because they are both fighting against a worse creed; and because they appear to be the best public utilizers of right private belief. But they are like armaments manufacturers. Their health is dependent on the continuance of the battle in which they are engaged, and therefore, paradoxically, on the very aims they profess publicly to oppose. Where there is poverty and social injustice, both Christianity and Communism may flourish.
64 Communism and socialism strengthen capitalism and Christianity, and vice versa. Both sides dream of the total extermination of the other; but in the now they need each other, and counter-support each other.
65 In a world in which many societies and racial blocs are on the verge of growing so large that they will have to exterminate one another to survive, and in which the means rapidly to effect such an extermination are at hand, conservatism, the philosophy of unrestricted free enterprise, of self, of preserving the status quo, is obviously the wrong and dangerous one. If conservatism, the right wing, has so much power and influence in the so-called ‘free’ world today it is because autocratic doctrinaire socialism of the Communist kind seems a worse alternative. If humans have to choose between an unfair free society and a fair unfree one, they will always swing to the first alternative, because freedom is man’s magnetic north. There is thus more hope for mankind in parliamentary socialism of the kind evolved in Western Europe than in any other political tendency; and this is in spite of the doctrinaire and other weaknesses I have suggested earlier.
66 Above all, socialism enshrines the vital concept that there is too much inequality in the world; and that this inequality can be remedied. The best socialism wishes to achieve a maximum of freedom with a minimum of social suffering. The intention is right, however wrong the means may sometimes be.
67 The task before parliamentary socialism is that of articulating and advocating its policies to an ill- educated electorate in a society where there is freedom to choose one’s representatives; in short, where there is always the danger that the electorate will choose self rather than society. Where for electoral reasons its policies imitate conservatism, where it insists on measures for doctrinaire reasons, I reject socialism; and where its policies attack the fundamental freedom of choice of the electorate, as in Communism, I reject it. But when it expresses the desire of people freely able to choose other more self-advantageous policies to choose the inauguration of a juster world, I accept it. And how can men of good will support any other political creed?
FASCISM
68 Fascism maintains that it is the duty of the powerful and intelligent to gain control of the state so that the Many may be organized and controlled. At its Platonic best it is the most realistic of political philosophies. But it always breaks on the same rock: the individual.
