What I
Believe — E M Forster
(1938)
I do not believe in belief. But
this is an age of faith, where one is surrounded by so many militant creeds that
in self-defense, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. Tolerance, good
temper, and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious
and racial persecution, in a world were ignorance rules, and science, who ought
to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy
— well, they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse
they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they don’t seem
enough, their action is no longer stronger than a flower, battered beneath a
military jackboot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought
to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in
it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not
Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian
Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is “Lord, I disbelieve —
help thou my unbelief.”
I have, however, to live in an age of Faith — the sort of thing I used to hear
praised and recommended when I was a boy. It is damned unpleasant, really. It is
bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do
I start?
With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world
full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid... We don’t know what other
people are like. How then can we put any trust in personal relationships, or
cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we can’t. But in
practice we can and do. Though A is unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there
can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of loving one has
to assume that the personality is solid, and the “self” is an entity, and to
ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the
characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal
relationships.
Starting from them, I get a little order into the contemporary chaos. One must
be fond of people and trust them if one isn’t to make a mess of life, and it is
therefore essential that they shouldn’t let one down. They often do. The moral
of which is that I must myself be as reliable as possible. And this I try to be.
But reliability isn’t a matter of contract... It is a matter for the heart. In
other words, reliability is impossible unless there is a natural warmth. Most
men possess this warmth, though they often have bad luck and get chilled. Most
of them, even when they are politicians, want to keep faith. And one can, at all
events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame,
with the knowledge that it’s not only the only light that is shining in the
darkness, and not the only one which the darkness doesn’t comprehend. Personal
relations are despised today. They are regarded as bourgeois luxuries, as
products of a time of fair weather which has now passed, and we are urged to get
rid of them, and to dedicate ourselves to some movement or cause instead. I hate
the idea of dying for a cause, and if I had to choose between betraying my
country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my
country. Such a choice may scandalise the ... reader... It wouldn’t have shocked
Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circles of Hell
because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their
country Rome. Probably one won’t be asked to make such an agonizing choice.
Still there lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for
which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer, and there is even a
terror and hardness in this creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild
though it sounds. Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the
claims of the state. When they do — down with the state, say I, which means that
the state will down me.
This brings me along to Democracy,
"Even love, the beloved Republic, that feeds upon freedom and lives". Democracy
is not
a beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other
contemporary forms of government, and to that
extent it deserves our support. It does start from the assumption that the
individual is important, and that all types are needed to make a civilization.
It does not divide its citizens into the bossers and the bossed - as an
efficiency-regime tends to do. The people I admire most are those who are
sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see
life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy
than elsewhere. They found religions, great or small, or they produce literature
and art, or they do disinterested scientific research, or they may be what is
called "ordinary people", who are creative in their private lives, bring up
their children decently, for instance, or help their neighbours. All these
people need to express themselves; they cannot do so unless society allows them
liberty to do so, and the society which allows them most liberty is a democracy.
Democracy has another merit. It
allows criticism, and if there is not public criticism there are bound to be
hushed-up scandals.
That is why I believe in the press, despite all its lies and vulgarity, and why
I believe in Parliament. Parliament is often sneered at
because it is a Talking Shop. I believe in it because it is a talking
shop. I believe in the Private Member who makes himself a
nuisance. He gets snubbed and is told that he is cranky or ill-informed, but he
does expose abuses which would otherwise
never have been mentioned, and very often an abuse gets put right just by being
mentioned. Occasionally, too, a well-meaning
public official starts losing his head in the cause of efficiency, and thinks
himself God Almighty. Such officials are particularly
frequent in the Home Office. Well, there will be questions about them in
Parliament sooner or later, and then they will have to
mind their steps. Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an
efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it
criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported. So two
cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety
and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no
occasion to give three. Only Love the
Beloved Republic deserves that. What about Force, though? While we are trying to
be sensitive and advanced and affectionate and tolerant, an unpleasant question
pops up: does not all society rest upon force? If a government cannot count upon
the police and the army, how can it hope to rule? And if an individual gets
knocked on the head or sent to a labour camp, of what significance are his
opinions?
This dilemma does not worry me as much as it does some. I realize that all
society rests upon force. But all the great creative
actions, all the decent human relations, occur during the intervals when force
has not managed to come to the front. These
intervals are what matter. I want them to be as frequent and as lengthy as
possible, and I call them "civilization ". Some people
idealize force and pull it into the foreground and worship it, instead of
keeping it in the background as long as possible. I
think they make a mistake, and I think that their opposites, the mystics, err
even more when they declare that force does not
exist. I believe that it exists, and that one of our jobs is to prevent it from
getting out of its box. It gets out sooner or later, and then
it destroys us and all the lovely things which we have made. But it is not out
all the time, for the fortunate reason that the strong
are so stupid. Consider their conduct for a moment in The Nibelung's Ring.
The giants there have the guns, or in other words
the gold; but they do nothing with it, they do not realize that they are
all-powerful, with the result that the catastrophe is delayed and the castle of
Valhalla, insecure but glorious, fronts the storms. Fafnir, coiled round his
hoard, grumbles and grunts; we can hear him under Europe today; the leaves of
the wood already tremble, and the Bird calls its warnings uselessly. Fafnir will
destroy us, but by a blessed dispensation he is stupid and slow, and creation
goes on just outside the poisonous blast of his breath.
The Nietzschean would hurry the monster up, the mystic would say he did not
exist, but Wotan, wiser than either, hastens to
create warriors before doom declares itself. The Valkyries are symbols not only
of courage but of intelligence; they represent the
human spirit snatching its opportunity while the going is good, and one of them
even finds time to love. Bruennhilde's last song
hymns the recurrence of love, and since it is the privilege of art to exaggerate
she goes even further, and proclaims the love which is
eternally triumphant, and feeds upon freedom and lives.
So that is what I feel about force
and violence. It is, alas ! the ultimate reality on this earth, but it does not
always get to
the front. Some people call its absences "decadence"; I call them "civilization"
and find in such interludes the chief justification for the human experiment. I
look the other way until fate strikes me. Whether this is due to courage or to
cowardice in my own case I cannot be sure. But I know that, if men had not
looked the other way in the past, nothing of any value would survive. The people
I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to
go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing-holes
for the human spirit. No millennium seems likely to descend upon humanity; no
better and stronger League of Nations will be instituted; no form of
Christianity and no alternative to Christianity will bring peace to the world or
integrity to the individual; no "change of heart" will occur. And yet we need
not despair, indeed, we cannot despair; the evidence of history shows us that
men have always insisted on behaving creatively under the shadow of the sword;
that they have done their artistic and scientific and domestic stuff for the
sake of doing it, and that we had better follow their example under the shadow
of the aeroplanes.
Others, with more vision or courage than myself, see the salvation of humanity
ahead, and will dismiss my conception of civilization as paltry, a sort of
tip-and-run game. Certainly it is presumptuous to say that we cannot
improve, and that Man, who has only been in power for a few thousand years, will
never learn to make use of his power. All I mean is that, if people continue to
kill one another as they do, the world cannot get better than it is, and that,
since there are more people than formerly, and their means for destroying one
another superior, the world may well get worse. What is good in people - and
consequently in the world - is their insistence on creation, their belief in
friendship and loyalty for their own sakes; and, though violence remains and is,
indeed, the major partner in this muddled establishment, I believe that
creativeness remains too, and will always assume direction when violence sleeps.
So, though I am not an optimist, I cannot agree with Sophocles that it were
better never to have been born. And although, like Horace, I see no evidence
that each batch of births is superior to the last, I leave the field open for
the more complacent view. This is such a difficult moment to live in, one cannot
help getting gloomy and also a bit rattled, and perhaps short-sighted.
In search of a refuge, we may
perhaps turn to hero-worship. But here we shall get no help, in my opinion.
Hero-worship is a
dangerous vice, and one of the minor merits of a democracy is that it does not
encourage it, or produce that unmanageable type
of citizen known as the Great Man. It produces instead different kinds of small
men - a much finer achievement. But people who
cannot get interested in the variety of life, and cannot make up their own
minds, get discontented over this, and they long for a
hero to bow down before and to follow blindly. It is significant that a hero is
an integral part of the authoritarian stock-in-trade
today. An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to
carry off the dullness - much as plums have to
be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable. One hero at the top and a
smaller one each side of him is a favourite arrangement,
and the timid and the bored are comforted by the trinity, and, bowing down, feel
exalted and strengthened.
No, I distrust Great Men. They
produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I
always feel a
little man's pleasure when they come a cropper. Every now and then one reads in
the newspapers some such statement as: "The
coup d'etat appears to have failed, and Admiral Toma's where-abouts is at
present unknown." Admiral Toma had probably
every qualification for being a Great Man - an iron will, personal magnetism,
dash, flair, sexlessness - but fate was against him, so
he retires to unknown whereabouts instead of parading history with his peers. He
fails with a completeness which no artist and
no lover can experience, because with them the process of creation is itself an
achievement, whereas with him the only possible achievement is success.
I believe in aristocracy, though -
if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of
power, based upon
rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the
plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through
the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They
represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race
over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great
names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are
considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to
endure, and they can take a joke. I give no examples - it is risky to do that -
but the reader may as well consider whether this is the type of person he would
like to meet and to be, and whether (going further with me) he would prefer that
this type should not be an ascetic one. I am against asceticism myself. I am
with the old Scotsman who wanted less chastity and more delicacy. I do not feel
that my aristocrats are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since
bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world. Still,
I do not insist. This is not a major point. It is clearly possible to be
sensitive, considerate and plucky and yet be an ascetic too, and if anyone
possesses the first three qualities I will let him in! On they go - an
invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the
chosen,
the Best People - all the words that describe them are false, and all attempts
to organize them fail. Again and again Authority,
seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian
Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese
Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip
through the net and are gone; when the door
is shut, they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked,
is the holiness of the Heart's affections, and their
kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.
With this type of person knocking
about, and constantly crossing one's path if one has eyes to see or hands to
feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure. But it
may well be hailed as a tragedy, the tragedy being that no device has been found
by which these private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs. As soon
as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because the
possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays.
For instance, the man who is selling newspapers outside the Houses of Parliament
can safely leave his papers to go for a drink, and his cap beside them: anyone
who takes a paper is sure to drop a copper into the cap. But the men who are
inside the Houses of Parliament - they cannot trust one another like that, still
less can the Government they compose trust other governments. No caps upon the
pavement here, but suspicion, treachery and armaments. The more highly public
life is organized the lower does its morality sink ; the nations of today behave
to each other worse than they ever did in the past, they cheat, rob, bully and
bluff, make war without notice, and kill as many women and children as possible;
whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos. It is a
humiliating outlook - though the greater the darkness, the brighter shine the
little lights, reassuring one another, signalling: "Well, at all events, I 'm
still here. I don't like it very much, but how are you?" Unquenchable lights
of my aristocracy! Signals of the invincible army ! "Come along - anyway, let's
have a good time while we can." I think they signal that too.
The Saviour of the future - if ever
he comes - will not preach a new Gospel. He will merely utilize my aristocracy,
he will make
effective the goodwill and the good temper which are already existing. In other
words, he will introduce a new technique. In
economics, we are told that if there was a new technique of distribution there
need be no poverty, and people would not
starve in one place while crops were being ploughed under in another. A similar
change is needed in the sphere of morals and
politics. The desire for it is by no means new; it was expressed, for example,
in theological terms by Jacopone da Todi over six
hundred years ago. "Ordena questo amore, tu che m'ami, "he said ; "O thou who
lovest me set this love in order." His
prayer was not granted, and I do not myself believe that it ever will be, but
here, and not through a change of heart, is our
probable route. Not by becoming better, but by ordering and distributing his
native goodness, will Man shut up Force into its
box, and so gain time to explore the universe and to set his mark upon it
worthily. At present he only explores it at odd moments,
when Force is looking the other way, and his divine creativeness appears as a
trivial by-product, to be scrapped as soon as the
drums beat and the bombers hum.
Such a change, claim the orthodox,
can only be made by Christianity, and will be made by it in God's good time: man
always has failed and always will fail to organize his own goodness, and it is
presumptuous of him to try. This claim - solemn
as it is - leaves me cold. I cannot believe that Christianity will ever cope
with the present world-wide mess, and I think that such
influence as it retains in modern society is due to the money behind it, rather
than to its spiritual appeal. It was a spiritual
force once, but the indwelling spirit will have to be restated if it is to calm
the waters again, and probably restated in a non-
Christian form. Naturally a lot of people, and people who are not only good but
able and intelligent, will disagree here; they
will vehemently deny that Christianity has failed, or they will argue that its
failure proceeds from the wickedness of men, and
really proves its ultimate success. They have Faith, with a large F. My faith
has a very small one, and I only intrude it because
these are strenuous and serious days, and one likes to say what one thinks while
speech is comparatively free; it may not be free
much longer.
The above are the reflections of an
individualist and a liberal who has found liberalism crumbling beneath him and
at first felt
ashamed. Then, looking around, he decided there was no special reason for shame,
since other people, whatever they felt, were
equally insecure. And as for individualism - there seems no way of getting off
this, even if one wanted to. The dictator-hero can
grind down his citizens till they are all alike, but he cannot melt them into a
single man. That is beyond his power. He can order
them to merge, he can incite them to mass-antics, but they are obliged to be
born separately, and to die separately, and, owing
to these unavoidable termini, will always be running off the totalitarian rails.
The memory of birth and the expectation of
death always lurk within the human being, making him separate from his fellows
and consequently capable of intercourse with
them. Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good
thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked
under my shirt, whatever its colour.
This passage is from Forster’s 1938 essay titled ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’
E. M. Forster
(1879-1970)
was a noted English author and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury group.
Edward Morgan Forster was born in London on January 1, 1871 as the son of an
architect, who died before his only child was two years old. Forster's childhood
and much of his adult life was dominated by his mother and his aunts. Forster's
years at Tonbridge School as a teenager were difficult - he suffered from the
cruelty of his classmates. Forster attended King's College, Cambridge
(1897-1901), where he met members of the later formed Bloomsbury group. After
graduating he travelled in Italy and Greece with his mother, and on his return
began to write essays and short stories for the liberal Independent Review.
In 1905 Foster spent several months in Germany as tutor to the children of the
Countess von Armin.
His first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread appeared in 1905. In the
following year he lectured on Italian art and history for the Cambridge Local
Lectures Board. The Longest Journey appeared in 1907 followed by A
Room With A View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays
in Italy with his mother. Forster also wrote during the pre-war years a number
of short stories, which were collected in The Celestial Omnibus (1914).
Most of them were symbolic fantasies or fables.
Howards End (1910) was a story that centered on an English country house
and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and
literature, the other only in business. The book brought together the themes of
money, business and culture. Forster then embarked upon a new novel with a
homosexual theme, Maurice which was revised several times during his
life, and finally published posthumously in 1971.
Between the years 1912 and 1913 Forster travelled in India. From 1914 to 1915 he
worked for the National Gallery in London. Following the outbreak of World War
I, Forster joined the Red Cross and served in Alexandria, Egypt. In 1921 Forster
returned to India, working as a private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas.
India was the scene of his masterwork A Passage To India (1924), an
account of the country under British rule. It was Forster's last novel - and for
the remaining 46 years of his life he devoted himself to other activities.
Forster wrote two biographies Goldsworthy Lowes Dickenson (1934) and
Marianne Thornton (1956). The essay collections Abinger Harvest and
Two Cheers for Democracy appeared in 1936 and 1951. The Hill of Devi
a portrait of India with commentary appeared in 1953. Another posthumous
publication was the collection of short stories The Life to Come (1972).
Forster contributed reviews and essays to numerous journals, most notably the
Listener and he was an active member of PEN. In 1934 he became the first
president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and after his mother's
death in 1945, he was elected an honorary fellow of King's and lived there for
the remainder of his life. In 1949 Forster refused a knighthood. He was made a
Companion of Honour in 1953 and in 1969 he accepted an Order of Merit. Forster
died on June 7, 1970.
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