Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
We do not deny that it may be better spiritual etiquette, more heroic
looking and may have a certain moral grace, so far as a man himself is
concerned, if the world makes him suffer for being honest. But after all
he is only one man, and whether he dislikes his suffering or likes it
and feels fine and spiritual over it, it is only one man's suffering.
But why is it that when the world makes a man suffer, everybody should
seem always to be thinking of the man? Why does not anybody think of the
world?
Is not the fact that a whole world, eternal and innumerable, is supposed
to be such a mean, dishonest sort of a world that it will make a man
suffer for being good a more important fact than the man's suffering is?
It seems to me to be taking not lower but higher ground when one insists
on believing in the race one belongs to and in believing that it is a
human race that can be believed in. After two thousand years of Christ,
it is a lazy, tired, anaemic slander on the world to believe that it does
not pay to be good in it. The man who believes it, and acts as if he
believed it, is to-day and has been from the beginning of time the
supreme enemy of us all. He is guilty before heaven and before us all
and in all nations of high treason to the human race. One of the next
most important things to do in modern religion is going to be to get all
these morally dressed-up, noble-looking people who enjoy feeling how
good they are because they have failed, to examine their hearts, stop
enjoying themselves and think.
For hundreds of years we have religiously run after martyrs and we have
learned in a way, most of us, to have a kind of cooped-up patriotism for
our own nation, but why are there not more people who are patriotic
toward the whole human race? One has been used to seeing it now for
centuries, good people all over the world hanging their harps on willow
trees, or snuggling down together by the cold sluggish stream of their
lives, and gossiping about how the world has abused them, when they
would be far better occupied, nine out of ten of them--in doing
something that would make it stop. There was a poet and soldier some
thousands of years ago who put more real religion (and put it too, into
his imprecatory psalms), than has been put, I believe, into all the
sweet whinings and the spiritual droopings of the world in three
thousand years. I do not deny that I would quarrel, as a matter of form,
with the lack of urbanity, with a certain ill-nature in the imprecatory
Psalms; but with the spirit in them, with the motive and mighty desire,
with the necessity in the man's heart that was poured into them, I have
the profoundest sympathy.
David had a manly, downright belief. His belief was that if sin is
allowed to get to the top in this world of ours, it is our fault. David
felt that it was partly his--and being a king--very much his, and as he
was trying to do something about it, he naturally wanted the world to
help.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account