Читать книгу Conventional Lies of our Civilization - Max Simon Nordau - Страница 6

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The question here arises: Is this picture true of modern times alone? Does it not also represent the characteristics of all previous ages?

I am far from being an enthusiast on the subject of days that are past. I am no believer in any Golden Age. The life of man has always been more or less of a struggle; he has always known discontent and unhappiness. Pessimism has a physiological basis, and a certain measure of suffering is entailed upon us by the nature of our organism. It is by suffering that we first become conscious of our Ego. Our Ego is first brought to our consciousness by a perception of its limitations; and this perception of its limitations is never awakened save by its coming in contact, more or less rudely, with something outside of it.

As, in a dark room, a person has the fact of the existence of the walls brought to his mind, only by knocking his head against them. Man purchases his consciousness therefore with the sensation of pain, and he only learns by repeated discomfort the difference between the subject and the object. But if it is true that mankind has always suffered and complained, that it has experienced in all ages, the sad contrast between desire and possession, between the ideal and the real, it is none the less true that discontent was never so deep nor so universal, nor was it ever manifested in so many directions, nor did it ever present itself in such radical forms as at present.

As we turn the pages of history we find them filled with records of party struggles and revolutions. It often seems to a superficial observer as if the selfish ambition of some party leader, to which the multitudes were ​wholly indifferent, were the sole power that set some of these revolutions in motion. But I do not believe in the justice of thus identifying these movements with their leaders. Parties are formed and flock to their standards, because they fancy they recognize in their battle-cries the expression of their own indistinct aspirations; and even if the ambitious leader manipulates the passions of the masses, applying them to his own use, as the manufacturer compels the forces of wind, water and steam to do his bidding, he will not be successful in the end, unless he pretends to be working for the accomplishment of certain popular wishes. Party struggles are to a people, what change is to the hod-carrier, as he shifts his hod from one shoulder to the other, a temporary but not a genuine relief, and revolutions are freshets intended to equalize the ideals of the people and the actual conditions of life. They are never arbitrary, but obey certain physical laws, like the cyclone, which re-establishes the equilibrium of air, disturbed by violent changes in the temperature, or like the waterfall, which is constantly striving to bring two bodies of water to the same level. As often as there is found to be too great a difference between the wishes of the people and the actual reality of things, in obedience to the laws of nature a revolution takes place; it may be dammed up artificially by the organized powers for a while but not for long. Revolutions are consequently the only witnesses of history which allow us to draw conclusions from their extent and aims as to the degree and the causes of the preceding popular discontent.

Until the most recent times, revolutions were all of comparatively small extent, and directed against a limited number of abuses. The political contests among the republicans of ancient Rome were caused by the struggle between the patricians and the plebeians. What were ​the aspirations of the latter which assumed corporate form in Catiline and the Gracchi? They wanted a fair share in the public lands and they demanded a voice in the discussion of state affairs. In the ancient communities the individual citizen had a remarkably highly developed sense of respect and responsibility for the welfare of the commonwealth, and also for the duties and privileges arising from his connection with it. He seemed to think that taken alone, he was a contemptible fragment, but fitted into his proper place in the structure of the state, he became a complete and rounded whole. The Roman plebeian looked upon himself as the unjustly despised and disinherited son of a wealthy house, and merely demanded his seat at the paternal board, and his share in the family discussions—the thought of rebelling against the surrounding conditions of political and social life, never occurred to him. He was proud of them, and paid them willing and delighted homage. He looked up to the patrician on account of his rank and neither envied him his lineage, nor the outward symbols of his exalted position. He contentedly took that position on the scale of social rank which the accident of his birth had assigned to him, and although he glanced with reverential awe at the aristocratic and senatorial families above him, he could experience a sensation of self-esteem and satisfaction when he looked down upon the multitudes of slaves and freed-men beneath him.

Far deeper was the discontent of those slaves who rose in insurrection again and again, during that corrupt age when the republic was being merged into an empire, protesting with their life-blood against the existing arrangement of society, in battles whose tragic pathos is beyond description. In those nameless multitudes who form the living pedestal for the grand figure of Spartacus, ​we discover for the first time, traces of that burning doubt whether everything that is, must of necessity always remain so. This doubt never seems to have entered into the minds of the burden-bearing Egyptians, whom we see represented in such long, silent, dreary processions on the walls of ancient tombs and temples. Neither has it touched with its poisoned tip the two hundred millions of India, who in silent acquiescence bear the yoke of the English, as for centuries, they bore that of Caste. But the followers of Spartacus were neither radicals nor pessimists, according to our ideas. They attacked the goad, not him who wielded it. Their anger was not directed against the regulation of the world, but only against their position in it. Did they recognize the fact that reason refuses to sanction the degradation of men with will and judgment into mere property, like cattle and inanimate things? By no means. They accepted the institution of slavery without question, only they did not want to be slaves themselves. Their ideal was not the abolition of an unreasonable form of social life, but simply an exchange of roles. These insurgents would have been easily pacified. A victory would have transformed their despair into contentment, and converted the rebels into model pillars of society.

The uprisings of the Middle Ages possess a deeper mental significance. The iconoclastic movements, the Crusades, the fanaticism of the Albigenses and Waldenses, reveal a condition of deep mental uneasiness. The magic fascination of that mysterious land beneath the rising sun, would not have been felt by an uncultivated nature, unless it had already been experiencing an incoherent longing for change from its surroundings. The hundreds of thousands who flocked to Palestine from Europe, were not following so much the banner of the ​Cross, as a bright vision which floated on before them, visible only to their mental eyes, whose name was the Ideal. He who was thoroughly contented did not leave his happy fireside to trudge through unknown perils to the Holy Sepulchre; it was only the restless and uneasy mind that welcomed change and the possibility of improvement. Neither were those thousands contented with their lot who gave themselves up to torture and death for the sake of their religion; who, to maintain some doctrinal point, marched placidly to the stake, or, in their fanaticism, exterminated entire peoples. For to him who is exercised by such a feverish anxiety for the salvation of his soul and for the terms upon which he can secure future bliss, who spends this life in preparing himself for the next, by such incredible sacrifices, struggles and sufferings, to him this world can not have appealed with any convincing attractions.

Thus we see that mankind during the Middle Ages was also disturbed and discontented; what restrained it from any open revolt against the then existing conditions of life, was the fact that it found in its religious faith a comfort and peace which made it bear all earthly ills with ease and even delight. He who is confidently awaiting some great happiness close at hand accepts with facile resignation a passing discomfort and in fact is hardly conscious of it.

But mankind developed and the consolation of Religion began to wane. The moment arrived when religious faith ceased to be the reliable safety valve for the rebellious tendencies of the discontented. That moment was critical. A trifle more, and the skepticism and tearing loose from old traditions, which characterize the present age, would have broken out four hundred years ago. The people did not allow themselves however, to be robbed ​of their cherished illusions without resistance, and made great efforts to retain them. This struggle for a consoling ideal is called in history the Reformation. It had the effect of postponing for centuries the awakening of the world from its pleasant dream. But even then there appeared certain isolated symptoms of the evolution of a pessimism which the faith in a happy hereafter could no longer entirely stifle. The Peasants' war in Germany was the last resort of despairing men, to whom an eternal Paradise did not seem a sufficient indemnification for misery in this world. They wanted to force a payment on account, on the sum of happiness coming to them in the future.

It is not until as late as the French Revolution that we find a people to whom the existing state of affairs appeared so entirely unsatisfactory that they were willing to make any sacrifices, pay any price, to have it changed. For the first time in the history of mankind, we see an extensive, popular uprising not directed against single abuses, but against the general conditions of things, in their entirety. No poor people were clamoring for a share in the ager publicus, like the Roman plebeians—no disfranchised were struggling for their rights as human beings, like the slaves led by Spartacus—no special class was fighting for certain privileges, like the cities in the Middle Ages—nor was it an insurrection of visionaries, eager to bear arms in behalf of their religion, like the Waldenses, Albigenses, the Huguenots and the protestant reformers. All these elements, with a thousand others, combined to form the French Revolution. It was at the same time material and intellectual. It denied all faith in Religion, and questioned the established form of individual possession of property. It attempted to reconstruct state and society upon a new foundation and according to ​a new plan. It wished to create new and more favorable conditions of existence for body and mind. It was an explosion which took effect not only upon isolated weak points, but upon the whole surface exposed to it, and brought down in ruins the entire structure of society. It is true that the incongruity of the then existing circumstances must have been felt with fearful intensity by all, and have caused intense suffering, to have produced such an attempt at complete annihilation, yet we notice in this great Revolution, one trait which makes it impossible for us to look upon the mental attitude of man at that period as so wretched as at present. This trait is the prevailing, inexhaustible optimism. Indeed, the men of the great Revolution were entirely free from any taint of pessimism. They were filled with hope and assurance to overflowing. They were firmly convinced that they possessed unfailing means for ensuring absolute happiness to mankind; and with this conviction it is impossible to be unhappy. They were in the mood of spring-time and dawn, such as inspired Uhland when he exclaimed: "Die Welt wird schöner mit jedem Tag—Nun muss sich Alles, Alles wenden!" This youth fulness, even childishness, of hope and illusions, this delight in the outlook into the future, is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon connected with the great Revolution.

We learn from our rapid scanning of the past centuries, that the present tone of thought is without precedent. History contains the record of but one moment that reminds us of our own in this respect, and this is the period of the death agony of the ancient world. This resemblance has been shown repeatedly. The people had outgrown the old ideas, and new ones to replace them, had not yet been discovered. They believed no longer ​in the doctrines of paganism, nor in the teachings of the philosophers. The theories upon which their lives had hitherto been based were found to be erroneous, and consequently the latter had become illogical and without meaning. A weariness and hopeless dejection had consequently crept into the hearts of men; they could find no relief in their own resources nor in anything around them. They lost even the last vestige of faith in a possible improvement and committed suicide by thousands, unable to resist the ravages of the moral epidemic. That dismal time when the Roman Empire was tottering to its fall, and paganism in its death throes, is the only period in which we meet with the same depression, the same restless spirit of investigation and fault-finding, the same skepticism in superficial and pessimism in deep minds which characterize our own highly civilized age. But after all, there is a difference between the two periods; this hopeless despair of the future only attacked the aristocracy of mind, comparatively a few in ancient Rome, while the masses lived out their existence in stolid unconcern, looking upon the great tragedy of the age merely as an exterior, material misfortune. But in our time this pessimism lowers like a dense, black cloud over the vast majority of cultivated human beings. The difference therefore is more in extent than in kind—but extent is the very point that distinguishes an epidemic from a disease.