The Conditions of Minority
Belloc, Hilaire
THE CONDITIONS OF MINORITY By HILAIRE BELLOC THE conditions affecting a religious minority are of the highest importance to Catholics in the English-speaking countries outside Ireland, and of...
...The chief examples of that today will be found in the conflict between the Catholic habit of mind and certain social codes...
...If it does not, it is piling up debt as usury against itself...
...When Jones knows why Smith acted, and what Smith's ultimate philosophy is, his instruction will have one or two effects...
...But I do say that the postponing of it is like the postponing of a debt...
...The duty of instruction involves the duty of denying agreement when agreement does not exist...
...I don't say this makes for peace, for I don't think it does-or at any rate, not for peace without previous combat...
...To be sincere in your dislike of a thing which is really good will have evil results, but your sincerity is a good thing...
...I only give my ideas for what they are worth...
...So did the highest of High Anglicans...
...but certainly without an understanding we should never approach a solution...
...In the first case the occasions of future quarrels will be less...
...It is our business to make known to the majority what really is this minority to which we belong...
...By this I mean, they will not be concerned openly upon the roots of the difference...
...And if you try to shirk the hardships which that involves, you will only get yourself into worse trouble, because you will lose your own self-respect, and that of others as well...
...The last point is, in my view (please murmur "For what it is worth") the point of instruction...
...I use the word "minority" in a wider and more practical sense, I mean a body which is, as well as less numerous, less wealthy than, less in control than, and professing ideas opposed at many essential points to the rest of the community...
...I have called these qualities "good," and so they are, although their effects are not good when they are directed against a good philosophy...
...To live in one's own home and breathe one's own air is eminently good, making for repose, and balance, and sanity...
...The next thing which we must note in the conditions of a religious minority is that the points of friction between itself and the majority will be accidental...
...It involves the duty of repudiating allegiance to ideals which are not ours, and above all the attempt to reconcile irreconcilable things...
...Now in connection with this point of instruction there is one corollary which always haunts my mind, and I would like to end with it...
...Nevertheless, instruction must be undertaken...
...but you are something of a stranger and something of an exile...
...to illustrate it would lead me far, and I perhaps ought to be grateful that I have now no further space in which to pursue it...
...But I beg you to meditate upon it...
...The next thing to recognize and it is much harder because it involves a considerable exercise of the imagination is that the majority which regards us as alien has three good qualities attached to it...
...A small number of highly cultured people still continue the habit, but the mass of men nowadays has ceased to think thus clearly, and the points of friction which are always a focus of irritation, and may be the starting point of a consuming fire, come from the conflict, not of expressed doctrines or philosophies, but of their more or less remote consequence in conduct...
...The actual numbers of the practising and confessed adherents of a particular system of thought may be a numerical minority, and even a small numerical minority, and yet mold the tone of the community...
...Even an understanding of them though it be fairly just, may not solve our problems...
...Nothing could make the Catholic regard duty to his nation as superior to his duty to God...
...Nothing can make the Catholic think the ideal of a gentleman more important than the ideal of a saint...
...The matter has been considered in all its aspects by wiser men than I, and men of far greater experience...
...still more in the conflict between the Catholic habit of mind and nationalism...
...And examples of the second case will usually be more numerous than examples of the first...
...I do not use the word "minority" in a merely mathematical sense...
...After the practice and maintenance of the Faith within our own body by personal endeavor, an understanding of these conditions is, indeed, the most important thing we have to attempt...
...The principle is clear...
...it is sincere, it has the average of human intelligence, it lives in its own home...
...My point is that one must not judge this surrounding hostile world, uncharitably in the real and awful sense of the word "charity," which does not mean a silly feeling of general kindness, but justice in action...
...or, to change the metaphor, it is damming up the water higher and higher, so that the burst when it comes will be the more violent...
...I use the word "religion" to mean that philosophy which is explicitly or implicitly held by men in any particular society and necessarily informs the whole of their lives...
...In the second, more and very intense...
...It is like the irritation we feel on barking our shins in the dark...
...The minority must make itself known...
...You may not be a foreigner by definition of international lawyers...
...I must begin by saying that anything written here is purely personal opinion, and I might even call it personal "grouping...
...The minority, alien in philosophy, is hated when individuals among it act either in opposition to or with insufficient respect toward habits around them...
...Jones, of the majority, after years of friendship with Smith is badly put out by something that Smith does as a member of the minority...
...In our fathers' time it was different, and I think much better...
...Again, when I use the word "religion" I do not mean, as many of our contemporaries mean by it, a private opinion on the great problems which most men outside the Catholic body have today given up as insoluble...
...It seems to me that the first thing we have to recognize is that since religion is at the basis of all corporate conduct and of the whole state of mind in a society, a religious minority is and must be separate and in the real sense of the word alien...
...but if that air is tainted, much of the effect of living comfortably in it is evil...
...A sincere freethinker argued the fundamentals of belief, with a Catholic...
...To be intelligent is good, though its goodness in effect depends on instruction (of which more in a moment...
...Therefore in practice, even when both men are least thinking of first principles on the subject, the Catholic may violently offend the social code (or religion) of the non-Catholic...
...The irritation is accidental and mechanical...
...either he will begin to veer toward Smith's point of view, or he will react from it intensely...
...THE CONDITIONS OF MINORITY By HILAIRE BELLOC THE conditions affecting a religious minority are of the highest importance to Catholics in the English-speaking countries outside Ireland, and of especial importance in Britain and the United States...
...Hence conflict on the ground of nationalism...
...Well, then, I say, the first thing to recognize, not to run away from but on the contrary to underline and erect and keep continually before one is, that if you belong to a religious minority, in this sense of the words "religion" and "minority," you belong to something necessarily alien in the full sense of that term "alien...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 22
