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It seems hopeless. Anarchists are tempted to preach a violent and
implacable resistance to all law as the only remedy; and the result of that speedily is
that people welcome any tyranny that will rescue them from chaos. But there is really no
need to choose between anarchy and tyranny. A quite reasonable state of things is
practicable if we proceed on human assumptions and not on academic ones. If adults will
frankly give up their claim to know better than children what the purposes of the Life
Force are, and treat the child as an experiment like themselves, and possibly a more
successful one, and at the same time relinquish their monstrous parental claims to
personal private property in children, the rest must be left to common sense. It is our
attitude, our religion, that is wrong. A good beginning might be made by enacting that any
person dictating a piece of conduct to a child or to anyone else as the will of God, or as
absolutely right, should be dealt with as a blasphemer: as, indeed, guilty of the
unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. If the penalty were death, it would rid us at
once of that scourge of humanity, the amateur Pope. As an Irish Protestant, I raise the
cry of No Popery with hereditary zest. We are overrun with Popes. From curates and
governesses, who may claim a sort of professional standing, to parents and uncles and
nurserymaids and school teachers and wiseacres generally, there are scores of thousands of
human insects groping through our darkness by the feeble phosphorescence of their own
tails, yet ready at a moment's notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject;
to explain how and why the universe was made (in my youth they added the exact date) and
the circumstances under which it will cease to exist; to lay down precise rules of right
and wrong conduct; to discriminate infallibly between virtuous and vicious character; and
all this with such certainty that they are prepared to visit all the rigors of the law,
and all the ruinous penalties of social ostracism on people, however harmless their
actions maybe who venture to laugh at their monstrous conceit or to pay their assumptions
the extravagant compliment of criticizing them. As to children, who shall say what canings
and birchings and terrifyings and threats of hell fire and impositions and humiliations
and petty imprisonings and sendings to bed and standing in corners and the like they have
suffered because their parents and guardians and teachers knew everything so much better
than Socrates or Solon?
It is this ignorant uppishness that does the mischief. A stranger
on the planet might expect that its grotesque absurdity would provoke enough ridicule to
cure it; but unfortunately quite the contrary happens. Just as our ill health delivers us
into the hands of medical quacks and creates a passionate demand for impudent pretences
that doctors can cure the diseases they themselves die of daily, so our ignorance and
helplessness set us clamoring for spiritual and moral quacks who pretend that they can
save our souls from their own damnation. If a doctor were to say to his patients, "I
am familiar with your symptoms, because I have seen other people in your condition; and I
will bring the very little knowledge we have to your treatment; but except in that very
shallow sense I dont know what is the matter with you; and I cant undertake to cure
you," he would be a lost man professionally; and if a clergyman, on being called on
to award a prize for good conduct in the village school, were to say, "I am afraid I
cannot say who is the best-behaved child, because I really do not know what good conduct
is; but I will gladly take the teacher's word as to which child has caused least
inconvenience," he would probably be unfrocked, if not excommunicated. And yet no
honest and intellectually capable doctor or parson can say more. Clearly it would not be
wise of the doctor to say it, because optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value
that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession. And a
clergyman who is not prepared to lay down the law dogmatically will not be of much use in
a village school, though it behoves him all the more to be very careful what law he lays
down. But unless both the clergyman and the doctor are in the attitude expressed by these
speeches they are not fit for their work. The man who believes that he has more than a
provisional hypothesis to go upon is a born fool. He may have to act vigorously on it. The
world has no use for the Agnostic who wont believe anything because anything might be
false, and wont deny anything because anything might be true. But there is a wide
difference between saying, "I believe this; and I am going to act on it," or,
"I dont believe it; and I wont act on it," and saying, "It is true; and it
is my duty and yours to act on it," or, "It is false; and it is my duty and
yours to refuse to act on it." The difference is as great as that between the
Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed. When you repeat the Apostles' Creed you affirm
that you believe certain things. There you are clearly within your rights. When you repeat
the Athanasian Creed, you affirm that certain things are so, and that anybody who doubts
that they are so cannot be saved. And this is simply a piece of impudence on your part, as
you know nothing about it except that as good men as you have never heard of your creed.
The apostolic attitude is a desire to convert others to our beliefs for the sake of
sympathy and light: the Athanasian attitude is a desire to murder people who dont agree
with us. I am sufficient of an Athanasian to advocate a law for the speedy execution of
all Athanasians, because they violate the fundamental proposition of my creed, which is, I
repeat, that all living creatures are experiments. The precise formula for the Superman,
_ci-devant_ The Just Man Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every
birth is an experiment in the Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to
discover that formula |
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