The Consequences of Chaos
MacManus, Theodore F.
October 20, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 581 This gift, however, soon became a proudly guarded While...
...The one is at least are concerned...
...The monaslearning...
...It is so ignorant of its idea is to dominate and be carried to its last anarchic own operations that, in spite of most recent history conclusion, then society is indubitably doomed...
...These lands, too, have their gesture, he would confer on them still fuller academic Nietzsches and their Haeckels and would, if they pos- and selective freedom and for fear that will not suffice, sessed the courage of their convictions, drive these sift and sort them out and raise the standard of convictions to deductions just as deadly to humanity quality by eugenics and a caste system of student selecand just as destructive to the rights of man as the phil- tion...
...It has produced millions of lop- to the earth...
...In the administration of law, the sectarian pro- Germain des Pres, Saint-Amande, and Saint-Gall...
...personal convenience and indulgence...
...Its output is not merely of a standopenly...
...Every incoherent...
...Everybody who is middle-class mind of restricted observation and experianybody is liberal now...
...No matter laboratory, library or school, that he is not an absohow ardent and earnest may be his idealisms, they lutely free agent, whose findings are untainted by any will not bear the test in the mass of men of personal, ulterior or distracting element...
...The average must be lifted and he proposes of the home to the devious and sometimes devilish to lift it, not by inculcating virtue in the individual, machinations of statecraft, following always the same but by applying the hydraulic pressure of birth control dreadful deification of the human with the same dire and student selection and lifting the entire mass...
...This fatal taint of sectarianism leaves the intellectual prodis what will happen when the individual pursues the uct unmarred...
...He cannot so order his There is probably no slightest hint of suspicion in life by merely eliciting from his inner self acts whose the mind of any sectarian scholar laboring today in only validation is a personal opinion...
...the kitchen garden laid out in nine long narrow -beds for power, and may yet refer all of their decisions to a the cultivation of pot herbs...
...to be cured...
...The Scheler who had ap- opinions which Christians have sponsored over and proached so near to traditional Christianity in Vom over again until the antique armor in which they were Ewigen im Menschen later took refuge in an ethical clothed seemed dull and out-of-date...
...known...
...Private judgment is in the saddle in both ardized sameness in all of the arts and all of the cases...
...They the one case, there is a superstition infinitely more are proven...
...tinental gardens, there were not many different varieties of In literature-having no solution for the riddle of small plants and flowers...
...Almost to a group by reason of social conditions, but it caninvariably, those follies and tragedies have been not tell what created the conditions, or how they are proudly proclaimed as great progressive movements...
...other inevitably degrades and brutalizes the image of Their most enthusiastic exponents are the fortunate man...
...science of psychology gently into line with the great What once seemed likely to prove an important "con- truths of religious conviction...
...and the arts for the past several centuries, compreThe sectarian mass is not governed by its ethical hends a list of distinguished men whose output is just or idealistic uproarings, but by the call of convention as unmistakable in its protestantism or infidelity as and convenience which is the call of the flesh...
...It is not necessary to catalogue its triumphs There is no need of debating this question academi- because all men know them, and in these instances the cally...
...It does not scruple mediocre thinking...
...to enter the domain of morals and render a decision It is well-nigh incredible that the general mind can October 20, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 583 have escaped a realization of the universal ugliness tween the sweetly sentimental and the abstruse and which has issued out of religious individualism...
...It is quite obviously a spirit which makes a tarian feels, is cribbed, cabined, and confined by his virtue out of necessity, and the necessity in this case is superstitions...
...If there be sinless and respectable...
...principle of self-determination, because it is precisely But the moment the investigator enters upon the what does happen-not necessarily in the last living domain of man, the inscrutable, the process of inhibiindividual, but in the vast and overwhelming majority tion begins to maifest itself...
...Relying solely upon his own in- objective things-with the physical sciences, in parterpretations and his own strength, it is inevitable that ticular-modern research is filled with as fine and he shall construct a code which accommodates itself to fiery a zeal for accuracy as the world of study has ever his weaknesses...
...In art, the most recent and triumphant sided mentalities, whose social experiments have al- expression is a complete contempt of form and a demost invariably gone awry, because they have laid scent into chaos, which leaves the on-looker bewiltoo much or too little emphasis on this, that or the dered and hopeless of interpretation...
...and the cemetery which was referendum...
...tells us, moreover, that the youth of the nation is in Never was the process consummated in a more revolt-somebody or something is always rebelling and easily recognizable type than the exhibit of warped revolting under the sectarian system-and for the tenhumanity which directed militaristic ideals of Prussia thousandth time utters the old platitudinous parrotin the world war-and yet it went unrecognized for cry in telling why they are in revolt ! what it was...
...the conclusions of life...
...Mass action is nearly always banal, gro- note of a common doom of humanity when wedded tesque, and unlovely...
...The test of it all is so inevitable still further elimination of the slightest trace simple and so easy that it is ludicrous...
...In poetry-it gravitates be- In the twelfth century, both Bishop Grossetete, of Lincoln...
...The world did not see it, and will deny They are hampered by fundamentalism-which it with curses today, because the same sort of educa- blindfolds the eyes, and shackles the mind and retion has its echo in other superior lands which boast strains individual action...
...If it becomes Therefore, his scholarship is free to scour the sciences inconvenient to practise a virtue, the virtue is legislated for truth...
...out of existence and a substitute virtue takes its place This is the innocent myopia of which we have which permits the personal indulgence and renders it spoken, which befogs the world today...
...The pulpits touch its votaries and its victims-the unschooled and unthem gingerly...
...They are justified as economic necessities...
...varied and varying forms ever since...
...Only the occasional master, like ConIndividual sectarian action is frequently simple, sane, rad, has running through all of his works the ominous and sweet...
...most eminent mouths and minds impregnated with the An echo of the same philosophy-a first faint, far- individualistic theory of life and society-filling the off trending toward the same brutal ideal-is with us front pages of the newspapers and, under gentler and in America today in the misguided clamor for cen- More cultured guise, monopolizing the pages of our tralized, bureaucratic control of education, with its so-called highbrow magazines...
...The conveniences substituted by mod- couched in terms of nobility and beauty and bears no ern life scarcely produce a qualm of doubt and un- results which are not also noble and beautiful...
...As long as it deals merely with ciple into practice...
...In criminology, The earliest records of gardens-after the days of imperial the relegation of the moral responsibility to group or Rome-are of those belonging to ninth-century monasteries in individual interpretation logically ultimates in lynch what is now France or Switzerland-Saint-Maurice, Saintlaw...
...MacManus, the and a system of selection and rejection put in operation first of which was published in The Commonweal of October in this land of freedom and democracy...
...in England and Germany, it interprets the divine right of kings as a mediaeval philosophy...
...The long and honorable of them, today, yesterday, tomorrow, in all lands, at roster of savants whose names have graced the sciences all times, in all climes, and under all circumstances...
...A peaceful God's Acre he is "against" authority, whether it be in the courts, it must have been, with graves separated by shrubs, and its in his executives, in his home, or in himself...
...other tendency in human nature...
...everything savoring of the supernatural and the sac- In England, there is another ancient chart -a perspective ramental-reducing it, as it is rapidly reducing every plan of Canterbury monastery gardens...
...The pragmatic test provides the proof...
...The scholastic, the secof revolt...
...as is the nose on his distinguished countenance, that Spiritual growth and development requires of a man the entire body of sectarian scholarship today bears that he do the things which he does not want to do...
...If sectarianism ever has the courage to confront That is perhaps one of the most destructive phases itself with its own colossal and tragic failures and adof the sectarian outlook-that it chloroforms the sensi- mit that they involve the annihilation of existing civilibilities, destroys the sense of values, blunts the percep- zation, only two courses are open...
...single social aberration, insanity or inanity which has Like sectarian religion, sectarian literature is in manifested itself in several hundred years has borne deadly fear of conclusions...
...This same z3.-The Editors...
...The they accuse the alternative school of being mediaeval, spirit of individual decision is quite obviously a spirit scholastic, and reactionary...
...October 20, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 581 This gift, however, soon became a proudly guarded While laboring as a thinker, knee-deep in the stream treasure-"a proof," as Theodore Haecker declared, of modern thought, he found ways of expressing once "that, of course, philosophy has more right to be more, and in words of remarkable freshness, many dogmatic than religion...
...and he dared, while version" was deflected, for reasons which no one can keeping his position as a savant, to look out upon the determine...
...The rotarian in private...
...The pursuit of the he is an advocate of student selection...
...The human subject leads into a thousand blind alleys and by-ways, product is exhibiting unfortunate animalistic tendencies and always it encounters hosts of humanity warped -not as a result of sectarianism, of course, but because and spoiled by wrong thinking-running the gamut the individual intellect is still "restrained and hamof human relations from the multifarious functions pered...
...of society, or go over to Rome en masse...
...It can tell what happened the birthmark of irrational sectarian thinking...
...Instinctively, naturally and necessarily, burying-ground and orchard in one...
...As in the conthe individual...
...It inevitably divides its members and destroys and the presumably intellectual...
...routine of earthly existence...
...low par, so an artificial standard must be established Unless a man orders and operates his life according 582 THE COMMONWEAL October 20, 1926 to sanctions outside and above and beyond himself, under the new code of social convenience and economic his spirit sinks like a stone into the dull, ignoble daily necessity...
...fifteen fruit trees, of which even the names are given...
...Religion with him is practical, every-day application...
...It will In one breath, it clamors for the separation of never do the latter, and so, humanly speaking, there church and state-in the next, deifies the state by is no solution...
...Actually, he tends more and more cloister garden for the use of the community in the centre...
...It shows the from on high...
...osophy of the infidel servant and the blind, brutal This is the sort of sublime idiocy issuing out of the military overlord...
...The hand that holds the sur- ence...
...and of this fesses a pious belief that his courts are sanctioned last a fully detailed ground plan still exists...
...THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHAOS By THEODORE F. MACMANUS .(This is the second of two articles by Mr...
...A purely human code thin and attenuated a thread in the warp and woof of of ethics is like an inflated gas-bag which buoys a man his thought, that he would be apt to reject with indigup for brief and thrilling emotional flights...
...The still singing the old everlasting song of freedom, more product of the colleges and universities has fallen be- freedom, and still more freedom...
...There is also clear other human relation, to the mood and the whim of evidence in English monastery records that corn, vines, and fruit trees were grown in the tenth century...
...Indeed, an early school of mediof the divine right of kings, but of the divine cine which was started by the Benedictines of Monte Cassion, rights of man, as first proclaimed by Rousseau, and can be looked on as the precursor of our great modern botanic reasserted from protestant pulpits in ten thousand gardens...
...It is nation the suggestion that it might color or control quickly punctured when it comes into sharp and pierc- his scholarship...
...Marriage, it has, of course, stripped of his list correspond closely with those of Saint-Gall...
...The rotarian is a rotarian because he is the heir geon's scalpel does not hesitate to exercise the laws and product of several centuries of strictly sectarian, of lordship over life and death...
...ing contact with the rough and unromantic require- And yet, it is as plain a fact on the face of society ments of social, domestic, business, and spiritual life...
...Much more often they agree the type of thinking which they produce...
...Frequently, the pulpiteer and the professor sciences, but they are of a standardized monotony in join hands in public...
...It is precisely in these usually so remote from the subject of his research, so dull, daily duties that men fail...
...He, the agnostic, has no superstitions...
...Failing-as it HOW THE GARDEN GREW always fails-to lift the morals of the mass, it invari- By F. M. VERRALL ably turns to the state for aid, and endeavors to enforce virtue by legislation, as in the attempts to pro- IN THE monks' herb gardens of early mediaeval times hibit liquor, and the more recent attempt to prohibit originated the art of present-day gardening...
...The certainty...
...He and dreadful result...
...It is clearer still in the very book or any magazine containing the reflections of a newspaper of a recent morning in the dictum of a college professor, preacher, or scientist and try, if you university president who declares that the student of can, to discover one who writes to a definite concluthe future must be carefully selected from a preferred sion-who offers a clear-cut solution, or who is not class-the remainder to be declared unfit for entrance befuddled, hopeless, pessimistic, anti-Christian, and and barred from the sacred halls of learning...
...not as a series of dusty deductions...
...Society today is a network of surrenders coarse and brutal, and a prior commitment infinitely in so far as the ancient Christian standards of conduct more warping, in the other...
...Roses, lilies, poppies and a few life-it concerns itself with phases and aspects, and other flowers crept into the herb gardens, but only because the relations of individuals, rarely with life itself, and of their supposed medicinal qualities...
...tery had to heal bodies as well as souls in those turbulent days, This manifestation, of course, is not an espousal and the practice of medicine presupposed a good working knowledge of herb-growing...
...superstition or prior commitment to a conception in It is not necessary to prove these assertions...
...The mass is tainted too...
...college president is the very fruit, flower and culminaHAT I said in a previous article about the tion of the sectarian system...
...The university professor applauds them lettered mass...
...But the taint intellect is not rotarian primarily because it is a was handed down from above...
...And so with one sublime of their Christianity...
...It must either tions, and lowers the standards, not merely of the maintain the sufficiency of churchlessness and creedmass, but of those who in other respects might be lessness when properly administered for the salvation called cultured...
...CharleIn matters of sex, the sectarian spirit has induced magne ordered herbs to be planted in the imperial gardens in the almost universal adoption of condonance of con- the year 812, and it is interesting to note that the plants on traception...
...He is by way of being principle of chaos was a rapid-fire sketch, but an advocate of birth control for the same reason that not a highly colored one...
...toward a contempt of courts and the origin of their the physic garden with its beds of sixteen kinds of medicinal herbs...
...If society is dependent for its salvaerecting the principle of the divine right of kings, or tion upon the Christian dispensation and the sectarian the divine right of the people...
...the unmistakable stamp of its origin, both in content It is beyond his own unaided powers to put this prin- and in conclusions...
...Yet, even so, it seems to me that this world as the fresh and colorful creation of God, and man's work is, apologetically, a very useful deposit...
...Pick up any of religious influence...
...he brought the point of view perilously similar to oriental mysticism...
Vol. 4 • October 1926 • No. 24
