IN the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of the possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact.
It is not so that life should be lived.
Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence.In their private relations they are not pre-occupied with anxiety lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive: they are engaged in giving affection and respect freely, and the reward comes of itself without their seeking.In their work they are not haunted by jealousy of competitors, but concerned with the actual matter that has to be done.In politics, they do not spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their class or nation, but they aim at making the world as a whole happier, less cruel, less full of conflict between rival greeds, and more full of human beings whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by oppression.
A life lived in this spirit--the spirit that aims at creating rather than possessing--has a certain fundamental happiness, of which it cannot be wholly robbed by adverse circumstances.This is the way of life recommended in the Gospels, and by all the great teachers of the world.Those who have found it are freed from the tyranny of fear, since what they value most in their lives is not at the mercy of outside power.If all men could summon up the courage and the vision to live in this way in spite of obstacles and discouragement, there would be no need for the regeneration of the world to begin by political and economic reform: all that is needed in the way of reform would come automatically, without resistance, owing to the moral regeneration of individuals.But the teaching of Christ has been nominally accepted by the world for many centuries, and yet those who follow it are still persecuted as they werebefore the time of Constantine.Experience has proved that few are able to see through the apparent evils of an outcast's life to the inner joy that comes of faith and creative hope.If the domination of fear is to be overcome, it is not enough, as regards the mass of men, to preach courage and indifference to misfortune: it is necessary to remove the causes of fear, to make a good life no longer an unsuccessful one in a worldly sense, and to diminish the harm that can be inflicted upon those who are not wary in self- defense.
When we consider the evils in the lives we know of, we find that they may be roughly divided into three classes.There are, first, those due to physical nature: among these are death, pain and the difficulty of making the soil yield a subsistence.These we will call ``physical evils.'' Second, we may put those that spring from defects in the character or aptitudes of the sufferer: among these are ignorance, lack of will, and violent passions.These we will call ``evils of character.'' Third come those that depend upon the power of one individual or group over another: these comprise not only obvious tyranny, but all interference with free development, whether by force or by excessive mental influence such as may occur in education.These we will call ``evils of power.'' A social system may be judged by its bearing upon these three kinds of evils.
The distinction between the three kinds cannot be sharply drawn.Purely physical evil is a limit, which we can never be sure of having reached: we cannot abolish death, but we can often postpone it by science, and it may ultimately become possible to secure that the great majority shall live till old age; we cannot wholly prevent pain, but we can diminish it indefinitely by securing a healthy life for all; we cannot make the earth yield its fruits in any abundance without labor, but we can diminish the amount of the labor and improve its conditions until it ceases to be an evil.Evils of character are often the result of physical evil in the shape of illness, and still more often the result of evils of power, since tyranny degrades both those who exercise it and (as a rule) those who suffer it.Evils of power are intensified by evils of character in those who have power, and by fear of the physical evil which is apt to be the lot of those who have no power.For all these reasons, the three sorts of evil areintertwined.Nevertheless, speaking broadly, we may distinguish among our misfortunes those which have their proximate cause in the material world, those which are mainly due to defects in ourselves, and those which spring from our being subject to the control of others.
The main methods of combating these evils are: for physical evils, science; for evils of character, education (in the widest sense) and a free outlet for all impulses that do not involve domination; for evils of power, the reform of the political and economic organization of society in such a way as to reduce to the lowest possible point the interference of one man with the life of another.We will begin with the third of these kinds of evil, because it is evils of power specially that Socialism and Anarchism have sought to remedy.Their protest against Inequalities of wealth has rested mainly upon their sense of the evils arising from the power conferred by wealth.This point has been well stated by Mr.G.D.H.Cole:--What, I want to ask, is the fundamental evil in our modern Society which we should set out to abolish?
