there's a lake of stew and of whiskey too

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is the childlike spirit, but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else.

While the ideological struggle had formal opponents, entire nations and societies, at least theoretically, were able to select their subject of choice—whether that be class, racism or statism, or individualism. The victory of liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind. This is when the phenomenon of globalization entered the stage, the model of a post-industrial society made itself known, and the postmodern era began. From now on, the individual subject is no longer the result of choice but is a kind of mandatory given. Man is freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity. The ideology of ‘human rights’ becomes widely accepted, at least in theory, and is practically compulsory. Humanity under liberalism, comprised entirely of individuals, is naturally drawn toward universality and seeks to become global and unified. Thus, the projects of ‘world government’ or globalism are born.

A new level of technological development makes it possible to achieve independence from the class structuralization of industrial societies, in other words, post-industrialism. The values of rationalism, scientism, and positivism are recognized as ‘veiled forms of repressive, totalitarian policies,’ or the grand narrative, and are criticized. At the same time, this is accompanied by the glorification of total freedom and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, morality, identity (social, ethnic, or even gender), discipline, and so on. This is the condition of postmodernity.

At last, we have come to ‘the end of history’ and globalization. The end of history is the logical conclusion of universalism. The end of history is the abolition of the future. History proceeds and reaches its terminal state. There is no more space to go on. By abolishing the future, the entire structure of time, such as the past and the present, is also abolished. How can this be possible? We could compare it to the simultaneous playing of all existing notes, sounds, and melodies of a musical piece, resulting in a cacophony, the gnashing and grinding of teeth. At the same time, it will provoke absolute silence, deafness, and sourness. Hence, there will be no space for the temporalization of the inner tension of transcendental subjectivity; the short circuit would grow exponentially without the possibility of being dissipated. That means the igniting of a conflagration, the same fire that usually goes hand-in-hand with the sword.

In order to prevent the blaze and the clashing of swords that would result from closing the temporal and logical relief valve, the world will strive to trap consciousness in networks and virtuality, where it can run away from the inner pressure of self-awareness without issue. If it succeeds, the new world of the machine kingdom will be created. The global networks and cyberspace are suitable only for the existence of post-humans, post-society, and post-culture. Instead of fire, we will get lightning and electricity. Some people believe Fukuyama is already a robot.

Globalization is equivalent to the end of history. Both go hand-in-hand. They are semantically linked. Different societies have different histories. That means different futures. If we are going to make a ‘tomorrow’ common to all societies existing on the planet, if we are going to propose a global future, then we need first to destroy the history of those other societies, to delete their pasts, to annihilate the continuous moment of the present, virtualizing the realities that are constructed by the content of historical time. A ‘common future’ means the deletion of particular histories. But this means that no histories at all, including their futures, will exist. The common future is no future. Globalization is the death of time. Globalization cancels out the transcendental subjectivity of Husserl or the Dasein of Heidegger. There would be neither any more time, nor being.

The Huaxia (proto-Chinese) of the Spring and Autumns and Warring States eras seem to have fallen into this latter group: while deer had made up a part of the diet of the early Chinese, this dropped off with sedentarisation, and by the mid first millennium BC the spread of cultivated land had left them sufficiently rare that kings were obliged to maintain dedicated hunting preserves. The inspiration for the Han dynasty drummer depicted above had probably encountered more deer in ritual contexts than in gastronomic ones.

Of course, the explanation could simply be that a person wishing to mark himself out as exceptional has won half the battle if he can get his hands on an impressive hat. However, there may be an alternative possibility. The branching structure of both antlers and feathers is reminiscent of the kind of entoptic phenomena associated with the trance state. These are visual effects produced by the physical qualities of the eye itself – floaters (shadow images of particles floating in the liquid behind the retina) are an example encountered by almost everyone. These visuals can be accentuated under various circumstances: during migraines, trances, or while taking psychotropic drugs, notably.

Of particular interest among these phenomena is the Purkinje Tree – an image of the blood vessels inside the eye.

It is possible that the adoption of headdresses made of naturally branching structures – antlers and feathers – began as an attempt on the part of the shamans themselves to represent the trance state. One sees something similar in (self-) portraits drawn under the influence of psychedelics today, which frequently show wavy and/or branching lines emerging from the head of the subject:

This would help to explain the association of deer – not an animal usually noted for its aquatic or politic qualities – with water and government in ancient China. The early wu (巫) shamans served as government advisors, with a particular interest in water matters – in the event of a prolonged drought, for instance, it was customary to burn a wu alive, presumably pour encourager les autres.

Thus, the story of Duke Zhuang becomes a lot more comprehensible if we see it not as description of a cryptid assisting in government, but rather of an official shaman in his regalia answering a question that mundane methods had failed to resolve. It is common in animist cultures to see a person taking on the disguise of particular animal as becoming that animal to a greater or lesser degree, thus the officials of the time would likely have seen nothing unusual in recording that “the zhi” settled the case, rather than whichever of their colleagues happened to be under the headdress.

It is this lack of atmosphere that always embarrasses me when my friends come and tell me about the movement of Indian Nationalism. I do not doubt for a moment that the young idealists who ask for Indian independence are very fine fellows; most young idealists are fine fellows. I do not doubt for an instant that many of our Imperial officials are stupid and oppressive; most Imperial officials are stupid and oppressive. But when I am confronted with the actual papers and statements of the Indian Nationalists I feel much more dubious, and, to tell the truth, a little bored. The principal weakness of Indian Nationalism seems to be that it is not very Indian and not very national. It is all about Herbert Spencer and Heaven knows what. What is the good of the Indian national spirit if it cannot protect its people from Herbert Spencer? I am not fond of the philosophy of Buddhism; but it is not so shallow as Spencer's philosophy; it has real ideas of its own. One of the papers, I understand, is called the Indian Sociologist. What are the young men of India doing that they allow such an animal as a sociologist to pollute their ancient villages and poison their kindly homes?

When all is said, there is a rational distinction between a people asking for its own ancient life and a people asking for things that have been wholly invented by somebody else. There is a difference between a conquered people demanding its own institutions and the same people demanding the institutions of the conqueror. Suppose an Indian said: “I heartily wish India had always been free from white men and all their works. Every system has its sins: and we prefer our own. There would have been dynastic wars; but I prefer dying in battle to dying in hospital. There would have been despotism; but I prefer one king whom I hardly ever see to a hundred kings regulating my diet and my children. There would have been pestilence; but I would sooner die of the plague than die of toil and vexation in order to avoid the plague. There would have been religious differences dangerous to public peace; but I think religion more important than peace. Life is very short; a man must live somehow and die somewhere; the amount of bodily comfort a peasant gets under your best Republic is not so much more than mine. If you do not like our sort of spiritual comfort, we never asked you to. Go, and leave us with it.” Suppose an Indian said that, I should call him an Indian Nationalist, or, at least, an authentic Indian, and I think it would be very hard to answer him. But the Indian Nationalists whose works I have read simply say with ever-increasing excitability, “Give me a ballot-box. Provide me with a Ministerial dispatch-box. Hand me over the Lord Chancellor’s wig. I have a natural right to be Prime Minister. I have a heaven-born claim to introduce a Budget. My soul is starved if I am excluded from the Editorship of the Daily Mail,” or words to that effect.

Now this, I think, is not so difficult to answer. The most sympathetic person is tempted to cry plaintively, “But, hang it all, my excellent Oriental (may your shadow never grow less), we invented all these things. If they are so very good as you make out, you owe it to us that you have ever heard of them. If they are indeed natural rights, you would never even have thought of your natural rights but for us. If voting is so very absolute and divine (which I am inclined rather to doubt myself), then certainly we have some of the authority that belongs to the founders of a true religion, the bringers of salvation.” When the Hindu takes this very haughty tone and demands a vote on the spot as a sacred necessity of man, I can only express my feelings by supposing the situation reversed. It seems to me very much as if I were to go into Tibet and find the Grand Lama or some great spiritual authority, and were to demand to be treated as a Mahatma or something of that kind. The Grand Lama would very reasonably reply: “Our religion is either true or false; it is either worth having or not worth having. If you know better than we do, you do not want our religion. But if you do want our religion, please remember that it is our religion; we discovered it, we studied it, and we know whether a man is a Mahatma or not. If you want one of our peculiar privileges, you must accept our peculiar discipline and pass our peculiar standards, to get it.”

Perhaps you think I am opposing Indian Nationalism. That is just where you make a mistake; I am letting my mind play round the subject. This is especially desirable when we are dealing with the deep conflict between two complete civilisations. Nor do I deny the existence of natural rights. The right of a people to express itself, to be itself in arts and action, seems to me a genuine right. If there is such a thing as India, it has a right to be Indian. But Herbert Spencer is not Indian; “Sociology” is not Indian; all this pedantic clatter about culture and science is not Indian. I often wish it were not English either. But this is our first abstract difficulty, that we cannot feel certain that the Indian Nationalist is national.

This mistake is so commonly made that it is worthy of some attention. There is, to be sure, a relationship between being good and being religious, but it is not the relationship of identity. It is the relationship of producer and produced, of antecedent and consequent, of cause and effect. It would be foolish to say that a dynamo and an electric light are the same thing; that green apples is a term synonymous with indigestion; that an architect’s plans are the same thing as a completed building; or that sex-attraction is but another name for the social institution called the family. In the same way it is an evidence of muddled thinking to maintain that being good is the same thing as being religious.

No matter what religion you take up, you will find that it is not, in essence, a system of ethics. It is, rather, an agency for strengthening people by means of contacts, real or fancied, with supernatural power, that they may have the courage and the power to fulfill a system of ethics. In other words, the essential thing about religion is its mysticism, the fruit of which is the nerving of men and women up to a system of morality. The purpose of religions, in their origins, will invariably be found to be the imparting to people of supernatural sanctions for, and supernatural power to fulfill, the ethical system deemed necessary by the culture of the worshipers. This, which is true of all religions, can be seen to be true of Christianity in particular if one will examine either the methods of its Founder or the expression which it took upon that Founder’s removal from it of his material Presence.

It is a matter that has often been remarked by disparagers of Jesus of Nazareth that there is nothing new in his ethical teachings, no original contribution to ethical thought. The Golden Rule was not his invention. The principle of universal fraternity was a part of much of Jewish Messianism in the century or two before He came. One can comb the ethical teachings of the Nazarene carefully and find not one whit of moral instruction that had not been uttered elsewhere before He came. He laid little stress upon moral instruction. The Sermon on the Mount is very largely a collection of ancient wise saws commented upon in such a way that the hearers might see their real significance. Indeed, He spoke truth when He said that his function was to fulfill, to round out to completion, the utterances of the Law and of the ancient prophets or preachers of his people.

And when he deals with erring individuals there is no attempt to instruct them in a new system of being good. The Magdalen is taught no new code of sex-morality. The unadorned command to ‘Go and sin no more’ implies that she already knew what she ought to have been. Apparently Levi and Zaccheus were not attracted from their ‘grafting’ habits by lectures on political science or the ethics of government. They felt somehow in Jesus a power sufficient to make them do what they already knew they ought to do. The centurion at the Cross exclaimed, ‘This was the Son of God,’ after hearing but seven brief cries, only the first of which had any connection with ethics, and that an indirect one. The thing about Jesus which attracted people was not especially the newness or beauty of his moral science. It was rather that men and women felt a power flowing from Him which they unhesitatingly deemed the power of God Himself — filling them with a force sufficient to make them deny the world, the flesh, and the selfish Devil, and aspire toward living up to a morality which they already perceived, but which theretofore they had deemed beyond their power of achievement.

In which habituation to Obedience, truly, it was beyond measure safer to err by excess than by defect. Obedience is our universal duty and destiny; wherein whoso will not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world of ours, is as mere zero to Should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly Discretion, nay of Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my upbringing. It was rigorous, too frugal, compressively secluded, every way unscientific: yet in that very strictness and domestic solitude might there not lie the root of deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow? Above all, how unskillful soever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest; whereby every deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I must ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and habitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas too attended Church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in the other world expected pay with arrears,—as, I trust, he has received; but my Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The highest whom I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of Fear. Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely, there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only knew there were two-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?

THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS

There fared a mother driven forth Out of an inn to roam; In the place where she was homeless All men are at home. The crazy stable close at hand, With shaking timber and shifting sand, Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes, And strangers under the sun, And they lay their heads in a foreign land Whenever the day is done. Here we have battle and blazing eyes, And chance and honour and high surprise, Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable, Where the beasts feed and foam; Only where He was homeless Are you and I at home; We have hands that fashion and heads that But our hearts we lost—how long ago! In a place no chart nor ship can show Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale, And strange the plain things are, The earth is enough and the air is enough For our wonder and our war; But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings And our peace is put in impossible things Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening Home shall men come, To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star, To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless And all men are at home.

And the greatest of all these dreams and ideals which the world has lost, the thing which has been at the back of every good war since time began, is love. If you ask nine out of ten people to define love to-day, they will say it is the absence of hate. This is the definition of a man intellectually and morally standing on his head. Love is no negation. Love is no pale, sentimental mist. Love is a great, burning fire which flames so fiercely in the breast that one rushes, like what the world would call a madman, to throw one’s life away for what one loves, to defend it, to slay its enemies, to champion it, to let one’s death for it bear witness to one’s passion.

How completely extravagant such a definition sounds to us who have emasculated love until it is but the negation of hate! How absurd it seems to us of the very practical, and very drab, twentieth century! We love our wives and husbands so mildly that we let them divorce us rather than fight with and for them. We love our country by politely putting a flag up on the Fourth of July and by insisting on her protecting us in our personal affairs. We love our Church so mildly that we cannot bear to see her enter upon social and industrial battles, into which she may drag us. We love God, goodhumoredly patronizing Him by not opposing Him. And we think we are in charity with all men because we do not quarrel with them even when they take the high-road to Hell. We think we love people because we have stopped fighting them.

If we really loved them, we should have to fight them often, for their good. And if we really loved God we should have to fight for his truth. The fact that men quarrel no more about religion is a sign that their religion has become formal and perfunctory. The fact that men have ceased to war for their ideals is a sure sign that they have not any ideals worth fighting for. If a man really has a dream before him, a dream not yet realized upon the earth, he will have to fight, — shed blood, kill, and die if necessary, —to embody that dream.

To determine the morality of any struggle one must discover the motive of that struggle. A fight conducted for some one’s else benefit is a good fight. A fight for one’s own selfish benefit is an evil fight. Wars for territory or markets or that sort of thing, these are evil. Wars for religions, wars for theories, wars for mad dreams, these are right. What if in them men are killed and injured, wives left widows, children made fatherless? These things are not always unmixed disasters. Is not the heritage left a child by him who has lost his life for a noble cause of more value than either the caresses or the material wealth that the father might otherwise have given it? Is not the widow of a martyred hero made rich in the knowledge that she helped to make that hero? Was it not Calvary which really made the Virgin blessed among women ? There are things worse than death and better than life, and in our hearts, if not in our minds, we know it.

The records of Christ show that He knew all this, despite all the emasculating criticism of the Tolstoyans and near-Tolstoyans. He said, indeed, that the ultimate purpose of his coming was to establish peace. His hearers, with their usual denseness, supposed that He meant that all wars should forthwith cease. Wherefore He was careful to say these words: ‘Think not that I came to send peace upon the earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughterin-law against the mother-in-law, and a man’s foes shall be those of his own household. ... He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.’

Would it not be just as well for Christians to stop singing indiscriminately the praises of that pale negation which moderns falsely call peace? Would it not be just as well to cease shouting unmixed anathemas at war? Would it not be just as well to admit that often toleration and a desire for peace are but other names for spiritual bankruptcy? It is perfectly possible to damn mightily those who would use war and fighting for their own selfish ends,—personal, party, or national, — and at the same time to continue to honor with all devotion those who have laid down, are laying down, or shall lay down their lives battling for the fraternity of men and the love of God. Professor James has said that what we need to-day is a ‘moral equivalent of war.’ The records of the ages have shown us that there is only one moral equivalent of war, and that one is war itself.

In religion, however, we are, apparently, for the most part afraid to permit in ourselves this development from tolerance into bigotry. The very same man who is a healthy bigot, on sex-relationship, politics, economics, and what not else, imagines that in religion he is bound, if he would be in accord with the Zeitgeist, to be tolerant of all kinds and shades of religious belief or disbelief. Of course, part of this attitude is due to the impression, not now so prevalent as once it was, that certain truth is truth demonstrable physically, and that religion, which is incapable of such demonstration, is a thing in which uncertainty is inevitable. (Of course such an assumption is quite unscientific.) The main reason for it, however, is the unthinking or superficially thinking assumption that mankind has developed religiously from intolerance into tolerance, and that tolerance, complete, unquestioned, is the highest point yet reached in the development of religion. Students of the history of religion know that this is not so. They know that there have always been successive waves of tolerance and intolerance in religion, as in every other realm of human thought, and that religion has evolved out of tolerance into intolerance just as often, and as rightly, as the other way about. Most of us, however, know nothing of this. The result of this mistake of ours is that the return or progression toward constructive intolerance manifested in every other line of thought to-day is almost entirely absent from modern religious thinking.

One can see this in the very popular campaigns on foot making for what is called ’Church Unity.' Everywhere in Christendom one hears nowadays such cries as this: ‘Let us all get together. Let us forget the things which divide us, and think only of that which unites us.’ What it is that unites us, one notices, is never defined. ‘Let the Baptists and the Methodists and the Episcopalians and the Lutherans and the Roman Catholics and the Unitarians and all the others simply agree to love one another, and forget their differences.' We see many sorts of ministers, in their desire to promote what they believe to be the unity desired by their Master, Christ, exchanging pulpits with one another and passing genial compliments about one another’s superlative worth. There is a tremendous deal of good feeling and every one is very happy; and behold, the millennial unity of all men, for which Christ prayed on the night of his betrayal, is at hand!

Is it? If this was the sort of thing Christ wanted, why did He not practice this modern, tolerant method when He was on earth? Why did He not seek to conciliate, on a basis of mutual toleration, the Sadducees and Pharisees, for instance, instead of denouncing them both for differing from his own conception of religion? Why did He preach things so definite as to alienate most of the people whom He came to earth to save? Why did He die? Apparently it was because He uttered such definite and positive teaching as to force, by his very intolerance, the reflex intolerance of those opposed to that teaching. It is apparent to anyone who reads the Gospels, that Christ stood for definiteness in religion, that He himself died rather than tolerate the religious ideas of most of his contemporaries, and that He earnestly urged his followers to imitate the steadfastness of his example. He prayed, it is true, that all the world might become united; but He must have meant united on the positive and definite platform on which He himself stood. Any other interpretation would stultify, not merely his words, but his whole life.

One hears constantly that people are not interested to-day in systems of religion which are not all-inclusive, which are in any way divisive. If that be true, it is a sad period for religion or for thought in general, that lies before us. To prohibit men from attempting to lift themselves up toward the realities of eternity, to compel them to abandon the mighty gropings which have ever characterized the seers, — intolerant because they were seers and not politicians, — and to substitute for these a unified ‘religion’ consisting of platitudes about being good to one’s grandmother and similar banalities, — to do this would be a dire calamity to the generation and to the race. Ah, no; better the bitter intolerance of those who believe too much and too strongly than the easy complaisance of those who believe too little and hold that little too lightly. Better the Inquisition and the rack than the drugging of those who else might seek for God. Better that we live and die slaves to a half-truth, or a millionth-truth, than that we refuse to look for truth at all. Better even that in religion a man should live and die believing with all his soul in a lie, than that he should merely exist, believing in nothing.

I reminded him that all his friendships were sacramental things. They had an outward sign and an inward spirit. When he shook hands with his shipmate, when they left camp for different ships, there was the grip of material flesh on material flesh. Behind his shipmate's hand was his shipmate's invisible soul. Behind his hand was his invisible soul. It was only in the material handclasp that the souls made known to one another their abiding friendship. I reminded him that when he kissed his girl goodbye, there was the touch of lips on lips, a material contact. Back of her lips was the invisible soul of her that loved him. Back of his lips was the invisible soul of him that loved her. The kiss was a sacrament. I reminded him that in marriage the mating is physical, true; but that the physical marriage is but the sign and seal of a great, spiritual comradeship, and that so many marriages fail only because the sign is there without the thing signified. I showed him that all comradeship of person with person in this world is sacramental, that always there is the physical touch to make the spiritual touch perceptible. I reminded him that from the day of his conception he had never met another person, felt another soul, save sacramentally. No disembodied spirit had ever touched him, to his knowledge. I showed him that even spiritualists, in endeavors to communicate with the unknown world, never thought of doing it save through some sort of materialization,—a tipping table, a ghostly wraith, a ouija board. So universal is the sacramental law of friendship. Sacramentalism in personal relationships is as integral a part of the law of human existence as birth, as death.