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3. _Society and Social Problems._--It follows naturally that a change
must come upon our ways of regarding the relations of man to man. If
every man is indeed a temple of the divine, and therefore to be revered,
then much of our accepted estimates and standards of social judgment
will have to be abandoned. Society, as it exists, is founded on class
distinctions which largely consist in the exaltation of idleness and
wealth. Against this we have much eloquent protest. "Venerable to me is
the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning
virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable
too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude
intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living man like." How far away
we are from all this with our mammon-worship and our fantastic social
unrealities, every student of our times must know, or at least must have
often heard. He would not have heard it so often, however, had not
Thomas Carlyle cried it out with that harsh voice of his, in this and
many others of his books. It was his gunpowder, more than any other
explosive of the nineteenth century, that broke up the immense
complacency into which half England always tends to relapse.
He is not hopeless of the future of society. Society is the true
Phoenix, ever repeating the miracle of its resurrection from the ashes
of the former fire. There are indestructible elements in the race of
man--"organic filaments" he calls them--which bind society together, and
which ensure a future for the race after any past, however lamentable.
Those "organic filaments" are Carlyle's idea of Social Reality--the real
things which survive all revolution. There are four such realities which
ensure the future for society even when it seems extinct.
First, there is the fact of man's brotherhood to man--a fact quite
independent of man's willingness to acknowledge that brotherhood.
Second, there is the common bond of tradition, and all our debt to the
past, which is a fact equally independent of our willingness to
acknowledge it. Third, there is the natural and inevitable fact of man's
necessity for reverencing some one above him. Obedience and reverence
are forthcoming, whenever man is in the presence of what he _ought_ to
reverence, and so hero-worship is secure.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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