VBEYOND EVERY LIMIT
Forcentury after century, our civilisation lay low in its Mediterranean lair. It knew but a small part of Europe, Asia, and Africa; and no pricks of curiosity impelled it to ascertain how far the world extended over land and sea beyond the vague bounds which marked the limit of its efforts. That small part of the world satisfied the ambitions of our ancestors, though they certainly were not shy and craven. Confined in that narrow corner of the earth and with only the scanty resources which it could provide, they created literatures, arts, philosophies, states, laws, and religions. Some of these creations are alive to this day, and help us distant descendants to shed a little beauty and to impose a little order on the modern world.
Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries there began a great change in the history of our civilisation. Impelled by the wish to reach India by way of the Atlantic, our forefathers began to explore the earth. Gradually geographical exploration became the preoccupation of governments, the passion of the public,and the business of a great number of persons who made almost a vocation of these daring voyages. And behold one fine day, one grand day, the most fortunate and daring of the navigators who were exploring the Atlantic in every direction discovered America. In mid-Atlantic there lay two connected continents, stretching from one hemisphere to the other, covering many latitudes and a great variety of clime, and much of this vast territory was still but sparsely inhabited. It was then that our forefathers realised how vast and rich was the earth, and how small and poor in comparison seemed that Mediterranean world in which for so many centuries they had lived. It was then that they began to pass beyond the limits within which they had been so long confined, to invade and to conquer the outside world.
The Pillars of Hercules, which had been the impassable geographical limit of the ancient Mediterranean world, were not, however, the only bounds which they passed; they transcended also the moral and intellectual limits which until then had circumscribed their thoughts and actions. All the time that the ancient Mediterranean civilisation, turned loose into the Atlantic, was striking root and expanding in America, an uninterrupted sequence of events and movements was taking place in Europe, destroying ancient laws, ancient traditions, and ancient discipline; upsetting, in other words, the bounds placed in the past to the thought, the sentiment, and the will of Man. The most importantof these events were: the Protestant Reformation, the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advances of science, the French Revolution and its wars, the birth and the development of the great industrial movement, and the all but universal triumph of democratic ideas.
Little by little, while the aspect of the globe changed, a great revolution was taking place in the spirit of the ancient Christian civilisation in Europe, which from being dictatorial and traditionalist became free and progressive. Religion, which for so many centuries had been a kind of severe moral discipline, a life of prohibitions, scruples, rules, precepts, ceremonies, and rites, changed into a kind of free contemplation of the Deity in which the individual conscience had full play. Everybody became his own high priest.
The ceremonial of social life, which at no time had been so complicated, serious, and exacting, gradually became so far simplified as no longer to encumber man in his every movement and activity. The State, which at one time, hand-in-hand with religion, watched over the customs and life of its citizens, accorded greater and greater liberty to them. To-day everybody, provided he contributes to society his daily sum of work, is free to live and think as he likes. Severe laws used once upon a time to regulate men’s luxuries and pleasures. Every class was forbidden to spend its money in any way other than that prescribed by these laws. There were times of the year in which men were forbidden toamuse themselves, and, when amusements were allowed, the laws took care that they should not degenerate into vice. Nowadays the whole year is one long festival and carnival for all who have money to spend; and together with freedom in pleasure men have acquired also a freedom in vice which would scandalise our friends the ancients, if they might come back to life again.
Every authority is losing power. The people discuss the government and the laws; children take the first opportunity of escaping from the authority of their parents. The younger generation is convinced that it knows more than the older, and values the latter’s experience at zero. Traditions are losing their force and academics their prestige. Everyone holds the opinion he likes in religious, artistic, political, and moral questions; just as he is free to regulate his own conduct, at his own risk and peril, as he pleases, with the sole obligation of respecting the limits imposed by the laws, which are for the most part neither numerous nor embarrassing.
What is the deep-lying cause of this duplex and contemporaneous movement? Why has the old Christian civilisation of Europe felt itself in the last four centuries unable any longer either to contain itself within the ancient material limits or within the ancient ideal limits? Why, at the same moment as it advances to the conquest of new continents, does it destroy within itself all the ancient disciplinary restrictions? Becausein these last centuries it has gradually discovered that the earth is much vaster and richer than it suspected; that it contains, in old Europe, as well as in young America, treasures in much greater abundance than it had ever pictured in its dreams; and that it can invent tools which bring these rapidly within its reach. Gradually, as man found that he could rob nature of her immense treasures, there arose and spread from generation to generation through all classes in Europe and America a craze for wealth and a mad ambition to win the mastery over nature, such as the world had never yet seen.
To satisfy this craze and this ambition, however, it was necessary to break many of the innumerable bonds—religious, moral, æsthetic, and political,—which limited the energy and initiative of our forefathers. How could so many millions of men have brought themselves to emigrate to America, if the spirit of tradition had not been weakened in Europe, and if everybody had continued to hold, as they did once upon a time, that the greatest good fortune a man could have was that of being buried in the church in which he had been baptised? Even to-day there are those who lament the diminution, in all the Christian churches during the last few centuries, of the number, complexity, and rigour of the rites and ceremonies, just as others lament that the ceremonial of social life and etiquette is dying out. But would not men who are obliged to work, travel, and rush about as we do nowadays findthemselves embarrassed beyond the point of endurance by a religion which made them spend too much time over rites, and by a complicated etiquette like that which still prevails in the states of the East, requiring a large part of the day to be spent in compliments and ceremonies? Europeans often laugh at the architecture of New York; and I must confess that I, too, found it distinctly bizarre. On the other hand, could that vast city have grown and renovated itself so rapidly in the last century, and have found accommodation for the countless multitudes which throng to it from all the corners of the world, if those who built it had troubled themselves to observe the rules formulated by the great architects of the sixteenth century, in the days when it took as much time to build a palace and a church as it now does to construct a city?
Modern society, if compared with the societies which preceded it, may seem in many of its aspects—and in fact it is—ugly, poor in artistic beauty, coarse, and brutal. It may even seem atheistic and irreverent, frivolous and superficial in matters of religion, and, in certain respects, morally lax or downright licentious. This kind of disorder, however, which is such a common subject of heart-burning, is only the necessary effect of the outburst of our energy over the world and nature on its path of conquest. A civilisation cannot produce, refine, or perfect arts or traditions of elegance and of social life, or a morality and a religion, if it does not adopt an attitude of reserve, if it does not limit itselfto some extent, if it does not sacrifice its other ambitions and aspirations to this object. A civilisation like ours, whose supreme aspiration it is to extend in the shortest possible time and as far as it can its empire over the world; to surpass all the limits which nature seeks to oppose to its restless ambitions and to the multiform energy of man, must needs sacrifice beauty, refinement, elegance, and moral delicacy to rapidity, energy, activity, and daring. The discovery and development of new countries, the marvellous progress of America, the discoveries of science, the perfection of machinery, the ideas of liberty which emerge triumphant from political revolutions and changes in customs, the weakening of the spirit of authority in every department of social life, the abolition of so many limits which once entangled the movements of man, are all phenomena which are mutually and indissolubly connected.
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“Yes,” many will say; “and they are phenomena which all go to make up the grandeur and glory of the modern world. We have power, wealth, knowledge, and liberty, the four blessings of which our forefathers had little, if any, knowledge. What cause have we then to grumble? And amongst all the blessings which modern times shower upon us, perhaps the most precious—more precious than wealth, power, and knowledge—is liberty. If we have no reason to regret the past, it is chiefly because our forefathers lived,imprisoned, and in suffering, within limits which we have overstepped. Is there any greater joy for a man than that of being able in thought, feeling, and action to follow the inner impulse of his own conscience, instead of making it bend to an external will, whether it be that of the law, or that of the public, or that of a tradition? Surely the modern world is the greatest as well as the most fortunate which has ever existed?”
That is what many people think, and thoughts like this breed the optimism which at the present day cheers so many minds. This thought is, moreover, partially true; but only partially. For in the intoxication of their triumph over nature, of the riches which they have conquered so easily and in such abundance, men seem not to recognise that this civilisation without limits is little by little allowing that same unbridled energy to hurry it into excesses which threaten to drive it back into that very state of barbarism from which it has made so many efforts to escape. The impetus which it has acquired, now that it has cast off so many of its ancient restraints, is great; but the danger is precisely that this impetus may carry it too far.
I have already said that amongst the limits abolished by modern civilisation are those which preceding civilisations had placed on luxury. How great a change has taken place in men’s ideas on this subject during two centuries! Simplicity and austerity were considered for centuries virtues proper to saints and heroes. Christianity had gone so far as to glorify poverty in somany words. Man, by increasing his needs, only increased the number of his masters and tyrants; only multiplied for himself occasions for sorrow. The more simply a man could live, the freer, stronger, and happier he was. In short, in ancient times, up to the French Revolution, religion, law, and tradition set limits on every side to man’s desire to possess and to enjoy; and these limits were so numerous and so close, that they entailed no little suffering on the generations constrained to live within them. That is why we have upset them all. And what is the result? That we no longer have any sure criterion by which to distinguish reasonable consumption from insensate waste, legitimate need from vice. We can no longer say what are the limits at which it is reasonable and wise for the peasant, the artisan, the small tradesman, the man of leisure, the millionaire, the multi-millionaire, the child, the woman, the old man, respectively, to cry a halt to their desires. All men and all classes arrogate to themselves the right to desire, to spend, even to waste as much as they can. No one has any clear idea of a standard by which to distinguish what he may desire and what he ought to deny himself. A kind of universal prodigality is becoming obligatory in every class; and modern civilisation is hurrying towards an unbridled, gross, and oppressive orgy. There is already a large number of men in Europe and America who eat, drink, and smoke to excess; who over-indulge in intoxicating and stimulating drinks; and who spend themselves inthat continual whirl of diversions and distractions which form so large a part of modern life. The number is fated, however, to grow yet larger, rapidly and indefinitely. Is not production increasing on every side? Is not progress for us first and foremost the continual increase of production? And what avails it to produce more, if the riches produced do not find consumers?
The modern world, in freeing men’s desires from all the ancient limits and restraints, has given a vigorous impulse to human industry. In order to satisfy the increased needs of the masses, man has invented machinery, and has put a premium on the new countries. But precisely because there is no longer limit or restraint to men’s desires, industry, which in the past was the handmaiden of human needs, is now becoming their tyrant. It is creating and multiplying our needs with a view to their subsequent satisfaction. In order that it may never be short of work, it is tempting men in a thousand ways to desire and to consume more. Therefore our civilisation has made of riches not the fitting means of satisfying reasonable and legitimate needs, but an end in themselves. We are obliged to produce them in order to consume them, and to consume them in order to produce them. Every moment which a man does not spend in producing riches, he must spend in consuming the riches produced by others; so that he can never stay still for one instant, but must jump from occupation to amusement, and from amusement back again to occupation. He must try to make the day aslong as possible, accustoming himself to do everything at full speed, and cutting down the hours of sleep as much as possible. Everybody knows that we moderns, especially in the great cities, are losing the habit of sleeping.
We have not yet mentioned, however, the most serious drawbacks of the present-day lack of any fixed limit to men’s desires. In the past ages, the efforts of religion were directed to educating men to self-introspection; to teaching them to explore their own consciences, to render account to themselves of their own sins and vices, and to try to amend them. One might even go so far as to say that from one point of view Christianity was principally a melancholy meditation on the perversity of human nature, and an effort to purify it through meditation, suffering, and the love of God. One has only to read the letters of Saint Catherine, or theDivine Comedy, or Pascal’sPenséesto realise to what an extent the moral refinement which is the fruit of these meditations preoccupied the loftiest minds, and, at second hand, the great ones of the earth in past centuries. A considerable part of the energies of every generation was consumed in this introspective effort, instead of in action; for centuries and centuries, saints, moralists, and preachers abounded in Europe, while men of action, fit to conquer the world and its riches, nature and her secrets, were scarce.
This searching of the inward parts was not always soothing by any manner of means. For the pastcentury and a half, numerous writers and philosophers have denounced it as one of the refinements of torture with which religion in the past made men’s lives a burden to them. Perhaps, however, they are wrong; for this effort, which religion made for so many centuries to habituate man to self-introspection, self-knowledge, and self-judgment, demands a less superficial explanation. However great be the force of the laws and the vigilance of public opinion, there can be no convenient order in a social system, if man does not help by exercising some sort of surveillance over himself, if he does not give ear to an inward voice, forbidding him to take advantage of every opportunity of doing evil with impunity which may offer itself. This necessity for self-restraint is particularly urgent in connection with three duties: the duty of speaking the truth, the duty of checking one’s own inclination to pleasure, especially in the relations between the sexes, and the duty of not using one’s own strength improperly at the expense of the weak. Many are the times when we could tell a lie with impunity, or even with advantage to ourselves, if we wished to do so; and yet it is necessary that we should speak the truth spontaneously, in order that justice may triumph. How easy it is for the man who has become the slave of vice to evade the eyes of his fellows and to satisfy in secret his most perverse passions! And what system of laws can be conceived which will be wise and perfect enough to bar all the countless ways in which the stronger can impose upon the weaker?
Every religion with more or less success—and none with more success than Christianity—in centuries past helped law and public opinion to regulate this most important part of morality. They all made a sacred thing of an oath, which is nothing but a covenant which every individual enters into with himself to speak the truth, even when he could lie with impunity or with advantage to himself. They all created a sexual morality to regulate love, marriage, and the family. They endeavoured in various ways to awaken in the consciences of the rich and powerful the recognition of certain duties of moderation and charity towards the weak and the poor. Nowadays, on the contrary, men no longer have time to examine their consciences, or to reflect on their own vices and defects, or on their own duties and rights. The whole atmosphere of our lives is exterior to ourselves; we are always moving about and always busy. We have become almost incapable of meditation and self-introspection. Our times no longer lay any store by this education of our inner feelings. The only discipline they impose on man is that of work. Everybody, whether of high degree or of low, is required, under penalty of losing his daily bread or of dropping in the social scale, to fill with exactness, precision, diligence, and correctness, the rôle, be it little or big, which has been allotted to him in the immense operations of our times. But, for the rest, everyone is to-day much more free than he was in the past to adjust his line of action to his own beliefs, andto make for himself his own standard and his own laws.
The result is that all the scruples and internal restraints with which religion endowed the conscience of man in the past are growing rusty from disuse. Our civilisation, rich and splendid as it is, threatens to be spoiled by fraud, by evil habits, and by oppression. There is no doubt about it; not even in these days is the discipline of work sufficient in itself to keep the State in good order. Man is not a living machine, destined only to produce riches. When he leaves his office and comes back into the world, the modern man there finds a family, sons, parents, friends, persons of the other sex who may attract him, men richer and more powerful than himself, others weaker and poorer, political institutions and public problems; in short, opportunities of doing good or evil, temptations dangerous but agreeable, and duties painful but necessary. And our times not only give him practically no moral assistance to conquer these temptations and to perform these duties, but rather in many ways incite him to yield to the temptations, and to exercise his cunning in evading the duties. Fraud in particular is becoming simply second nature to our civilisation. What is the great industrial movement of modern times but a continual deception for cloaking the deterioration which it is bringing about in the quality of things as the price of increasing the quantity of them? Every day sees an increase in the number of cleverly faked objects, which are not what they seem; and science—especially chemistry—is the highly paidaccomplice which furnishes industry with the means of imposing this colossal deception on an inexperienced and ingenuous public. In other words, commerce and industry, which play so large a part in modern life, are becoming more and more a colossal deception in which he succeeds best and makes most money who is cleverest at lying to the public and at foisting on them goods of inferior quality though superior in outward seeming. Now if we see in a social system, on the one hand, a weakening of all the internal restraints which keep a man from lying and cheating, and, on the other, a premium put on that same lying and cheating, must we not expect to find fraud permeating the whole system? And what will our customs be like, what will life be like, in the days when nobody any longer feels any remorse or scruple in cheating his neighbour, and when everybody becomes cheat and cheated turn and turn about, cheat in matters which he understands, cheated in those in which he has to rely on other people?
The growing depravity of customs, furthermore, threatens us with no less a danger. I do not wish to exaggerate the horrors of the modern Babylons, as Catholic priests and Protestant ministers are apt to do. Their grief at seeing the rising generation turn a deaf ear to their wise counsels makes them take too gloomy a view of the present state of affairs. Nevertheless, it is certain that the customs of modern civilisation are hurrying it towards a dangerous crisis. The internal restraints are being relaxed, and temptations and facilitiesare multiplying with the growth of riches and of cities, and with the increasing mobility of persons of both sexes, so many of whom it prompts to leave their native village or country. Especially in the big cities where everyone is unknown, can easily hide away, and is watched by nobody; where money has greater power over men’s minds because there is more of it and more of it is needed,—virtue runs serious and continual risks. Without being aware of it, we are undoing, little by little, Christianity’s great contribution to the chastening of our customs, by suppressing many of the limits which Christianity had established with such labour in the midst of the unbridled licence of the ancient world. We are travelling, therefore, step by step back towards paganism, with all its conveniences and all its perils. Already, in fact, we can see cropping up here and there in the richer and more highly civilised countries and classes that mortal sickness which killed the ancient civilisations: sterility. One of the reasons why all the most flourishing ancient civilisations have perished is that at the moment of their greatest glory the population suddenly began to dwindle; and this sterility which killed them was the effect to a large extent of the licence of their customs. Love remains fertile only so long as it restrains itself and limits itself. Christianity, by subjecting men’s customs to discipline—one of the noblest of its services to mankind—succeeded for centuries in maintaining in Europe and America an incessant fertility, which has proved to be one of themost potent causes of the increase of our power. But now we can see, with the return of the world to paganism, the beginning of a new era of sterility, especially in the big cities and in the most ancient and most wealthy states.
Lastly, I have referred to another danger which threatens this our social system, victim as it is of its limitless desires; I mean the increase in the opportunities for the strong to abuse their strength. This is certainly the least of the three evils; for thanks to the diffusion of culture and of liberty, the weak have learned and are able, to unite in their own defence. Some balance of justice is obtained and will continue to be obtained by opposing force to force. The balance, however, will be in external things rather than in men’s convictions. For in this unbridled and limitless chase after money and enjoyment, of which the world is the theatre, the spirit of charity is obscured; and men’s minds become accustomed to a hardness and brutality which may perhaps one day startle the world in a disagreeable and terrible way.
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It may seem to some of my readers that I take a delight in uttering gloomy prognostications of the future of modern civilisation. Such, however, is not my intention. Who would dare to deny that, notwithstanding its defects, the civilisation in which we have the good fortune to live is the most splendid and powerful on which the sun has ever shone? But its very grandeur,which is to so large an extent the fruit of our boldness in overthrowing most of the limits which preceding civilisations had placed to human energy, gives birth to a new and formidable problem which is already beginning to confront our speed-loving civilisation, and which is itself, too, a problem of limits, perhaps of the limitpar excellence. And that problem may be expressed in one question:Quousque tandem?Up to what point, in our desire to conquer the world and its treasures, to multiply riches, and to increase our power over nature, must we and can we sacrifice beauty, and the forms, ceremonies, and refinements of life, moral and æsthetic? Up to what point must we and can we make legitimate use of the liberty which the modern world has given us; and at what point does abuse of it begin?
This is the vital problem which I have posed and tried to dissect in the dialogue which my travels in America inspired me to write: the problem treated in the speeches and discussions of the many characters, European and American, who figure in that dialogue. It may seem strange, at first sight, that a discussion of the Old World and the New, in which the contending parties propose to prove which is superior to the other, should end in this second problem, apparently so unlike the first; whether it is necessary or not to place a limit on the unbridled activity and immoderate desires of our times. Anyone who has read the present series of essays, however, will be less likely to find this conclusion singular and obscure. I have repeatedly said, andtried to prove, that there is too great a tendency on both sides of the Atlantic to find an antagonism between Europe and America. If certain tendencies are stronger in one of the two continents, and weaker in the other, these are differences of quantity, not of quality. America is becoming Europeanised, and Europe Americanised. However little reflection and cool reasoning the European may bring to his abuse of America on the score of its excessive zeal in the production of riches, or the American to his abuse of Europe on account of the scanty remains of the spirit of tradition and conservatism in the Old World, each will recognise that he is at the same time inveighing against his own continent. In fact, Europe applies herself with no less zeal than America to the production of greater wealth; and America is no less anxious than Europe to enjoy the advantages which may even now accrue to the world from the spirit of tradition.
Consequently the discussion of the question whether America is superior to Europe or Europe to America is a futile enterprise and labour lost; because the balance between the differences is rapidly adjusting itself. Nevertheless, if any difference exists to-day between the two continents, it is undoubtedly this: that all the phenomena of social life in America are simpler and clearer, and less overlaid and obscured by traditions, institutions, and century-old ideas and sentiments than in Europe. For this reason, the careful observer will find in America a much more profitable field for thestudy of the dangerous tendencies and exaggerations of modern civilisation which are common to Europe and America. Of these dangerous tendencies, the one which has struck me most in the course of my travels in America, and has given me most food for thought, is precisely this, which I have treated in this my latest work and which forms, as it were, the crown to the whole discussion of the dialogue. Modern civilisation has accomplished miracles and marvels without number, since she left behind her the limits, material and ideal, within which the timid generations of old confined themselves,—since she outstepped and upset these limits on her way to conquer the earth, riches, and liberty. Now, however, precisely because she has crossed all the limits and no longer has any before her, she finds herself impelled on every side, in politics, customs, morals, art, and philosophy, to excesses which may one day prove very dangerous. Men are beginning to have a vague presentiment of this danger. They do not clearly see, however, the quarter from which it threatens. They disquiet themselves without thoroughly diagnosing the evil. And this disquietude may perhaps explain the pessimism which afflicts a civilisation so flourishing and fortunate in many respects as that of our own times.
For this reason, I thought that the great problem of the limits might grow little by little, on board a transatlantic liner, out of a discussion about America. An Italian, who has made money in America, and who, likeso many Europeans who have made their fortune thus, is an admirer of the New World, one evening launches out into a eulogy of young America at the expense of old Europe. He extols the civilisation of machinery, progress, and liberty, by contrast with what remains in Europe of the ancient civilisation whose efforts were directed to improving the quality of things rather than augmenting their quantity; which left the world poor while it created arts, religions, moralities, and rights. The discussion becomes heated, complicated, and diffuse until, under the guiding influence of an old savant who knows Europe and America too, it concentrates on this point: Granted that man was well-advised to exceed the ancient limits within which preceding civilisations had confined him, to hurl himself on the world and to conquer it; up to what point may man aspire to liberty in every department of life, without endangering in the long run the most precious fruits of his conquest?
The book does not pretend to solve this formidable problem. No philosopher, no writer, no book could solve it. It can only be solved by a radical revolution in the ideas, sentiments, and interests of the masses. But the book which I have written purports to throw light on some, at least, of the essential aspects of the problem. It endeavours to make it clear to the men of our time, by harping on a principle of great antiquity, great simplicity, and great modesty, which may be perhaps usefully recalled to the memory of present generations, in Europe as well as in America. Thatprinciple is, that man is a being of limits; and that he ought, therefore, to observe in his desires a certain mean. A civilisation must remember that it is the sum of the efforts of a great many individuals; that these individuals may be very numerous, but that each one is a small limited being; and that the sum of their efforts cannot be infinite. Consequently, a civilisation must not let its desires and wishes extend untrammelled in every direction. It must learn to confine itself within limits.