The place of anarchism in socialistic evolution : $b an address delivered in ParisKropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Philosophy
The place of anarchism in socialistic evolution : $b an address delivered in Paris
Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kniaz
Anarchism -- History; Anarchists
A child is drowning, and four men who stand upon the bank see it
struggling in the water. One of them does not stir, he is a partisan of
"Each one for himself," the maxim of the commercial middle-class; this
one is a brute and we need not speak of him further. The next one
reasons thus: "If I save the child, a good report of my action will be
made to the ruler of heaven, and the Creator will reward me by
increasing my flocks and my serfs," and thereupon he plunges into the
water. Is he therefore a moral man? Clearly not! He is a shrewd
calculator, that is all. The third, who is an utilitarian, reflects thus
(or at least utilitarian philosophers represent him as so reasoning):
"Pleasures can be classed in two categories, inferior pleasures and
higher ones. To save the life of anyone is a superior pleasure
infinitely more intense and more durable than others; therefore I will
save the child." Admitting that any man ever reasoned thus, would he not
be a terrible egotist? and, moreover, could we ever be sure that his
sophistical brain would not at some given moment cause his will to
incline toward an inferior pleasure, that is to say, towards refraining
from troubling himself? There remains the fourth individual. This man
has been brought up from his childhood to feel himself _one_ with the
rest of humanity: from his childhood he has always regarded men as
possessing interests in common: he has accustomed himself to suffer when
his neighbours suffer, and to feel happy when everyone around him is
happy. Directly he hears the heart-rending cry of the mother, he leaps
into the water, not through reflection but by instinct, and when she
thanks him for saving her child, he says, "What have I done to deserve
thanks, my good woman? I am happy to see you happy; I have acted from
natural impulse and could not do otherwise!"
You recognise in this case the truly moral man, and feel that the others
are only egotists in comparison with him. The whole anarchist morality
is represented in this example. It is the morality of a people which
does not look for the sun at midnight--a morality without compulsion or
authority, a morality of habit. Let us create circumstances in which man
shall not be led to deceive nor exploit others, and then by the very
force of things the moral level of humanity will rise to a height
hitherto unknown. Men are certainly not to be moralised by teaching them
a moral catechism: tribunals and prisons do not diminish vice; they pour
it over society in floods. Men are to be moralised only by placing them
in a position which shall contribute to develop in them those habits
which are social, and to weaken those which are not so. A morality which
has become instinctive is the true morality, the only morality which
endures while religions and systems of philosophy pass away.
Let us now combine the three preceding elements, and we shall have
Anarchy and its place in Socialistic Evolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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